Naipaul's Strangers

3. Stories of Other Lives: Novels

3 Stories of Other Lives: Novels In A House for Mr Biswas (1961) Naipaul drew on his memories of the world he had left behind and his father’s stories about it—writings that were crucially important to the success of the book because they refreshed the already receding sounds and shapes of that world. The recently published correspondence with his family while he was at Oxford makes very clear the con®ict between the need to be connected, “please keep me alive with letters,” and the need to break away, “Trinidad, as you know, has nothing to offer me.” To his father, who since his heart attack in early 1953 had been increasingly anxious about the survival of the family, Naipaul wrote on 8 October 1953: “I know and can understand your wish for me to settle in Trinidad. But let me explain why, if I did so, I shall die from intellectual starvation” and “Never before have I felt so urgently that I must write.” His father would never read that letter; Naipaul cabled two days later: “He was the best man I knew. Everything I owe to him be brave my loves trust me=Vido.”1 They had to be brave, and they could of course not trust his promises to take care of them. The father, speaking for the family, had asked him shortly before his death not to get married but to concentrate on helping his younger siblings.2 Later Naipaul would ask his older sister, now the only supporter of the family and unable to realize her own marriage plans, for two more years in England, the only place where he could write. Promising that he would then relieve her, he admits that he has kept news about his marriage from them, fearing their resentment. He is working hard, “not having it easy,” worrying about his responsibilities, feeling “ashamed”; everything will change when his book is accepted. Two months later a cable announces “novel accepted,” then months of silence while he is hectically working on the next book. He is not coming home; he is not settling down to a job; writing is his profession.3 It is the familiar story of the talented individual’s assertion of his “calling”: the ¤rst book is published, others will follow; ¤nally there will be the Nobel Prize in literature. But Naipaul’s dedication to the writer’s profession has been complete to the point of complete self-absorption—notwithstanding the fact that his writing has been outward-bound in its fascination with the observed and recorded lives of many others.4 At the end of his introduction, the editor of the letters ironically expressed his gratitude to Naipaul “for his understandably disengaged approval of the project. It entertains me to re®ect that this is a book he will never read.” Interviewed for the Lehrer Newshour on PBS (3 March 2000), Naipaul con¤rmed that he had nothing to do with the edition, did not wish to write an introduction, had not read the letters again. It would have been “too painful” because the voices from the past would have spoken to him directly , without the writer’s selecting and shaping, his mitigating mediation. Repeatedly, over many decades, Naipaul has tried to explain the complications of not “really” belonging to the world he was born into by accident and yet feeling he had to write about because it was all he had—as a writer. The life he reconstructed in his early novels could not be the “true nature” of his life because, growing up in that world, he had not felt it was his.5 But it was his father’s, his extended family’s, and this was how he recorded it.Conciliatory and intimate, the third-person narration of A House for Mr Biswas does not, as one critic sees it, balance the “sympathetic ‘inside’ and evaluative ‘outside’ views of the main character” and resolve “provisionally” the tension between Naipaul’s Trinidad past and his London present.6 On one level the novel is driven by the son’s fear of what would have happened to him had he not managed to leave: the father’s (Biswas’s) un¤nished manuscript “Escape” signi¤es not only his own unrealized desire to become a writer but also the son’s anxiety about this achievement. Writing out of the experience of not belonging in order to deal with it applies equally to father and son. The...