As part of the celebrations of the life and work of Nobel Laureate Sir V.S. Naipaul, a series of open lectures have been delivered by persons who have dedicated a great deal of their time to studying Sir Naipaul’s work. Professor Edward Baugh,Emeritus Professor of English, delivered one such presentation which focused on the ‘making and self-making of Naipaul’. His eloquent delivery punctuated with just the right amount of humour left the audience enlightened and very appreciative of the controversial Naipaul. The following are excerpts from Prof Baugh’s presentation.

Possibly, too, this mode of feeling went deeper and was an ancestral inheritance, something that went with the history that had made me ….(V.S. Naipaul, The Enigma of Arrival )

And since no one can really see himself, I am sure that we would have been surprised and perhaps even wounded … by what the others saw. (Willie Chandran, in Half a Life, by V.S. Naipaul )

I saw him as a very early colonial, someone with a feeling of incompleteness … someone who … had to reinvent himself. I saw in him some of my own early promptings (and the promptings of other people I knew). (V.S. Naipaul, A Way in the World )

My title and the epigraphs are intended to signal two aspects of V.S. Naipaul’s literary personality that I should like to speak about. By literary personality I mean the personality that is embodied in the art of his books. One aspect is his acknowledgement, an analytical acknowledgement, of that personality as the product of historical circumstances, including, crucially, the time and place of his birth and early life. The other is the idea that the process of self-realisation, of the recognition of one’s self as the product of one’s origins and circumstances, is also, with Naipaul as with the rest of us, a process of self-invention. Further, these two aspects are integrally related in the matter of the recognition and construction of identity. And in the identity-performance feature we may also read a made-in-Trinidad stamp.

Naipaul’s derogatory view of the West Indies is only too familiar a talking point, as is the outrage with which many West Indians have responded to that view. He would seem to have relished the role of goad to West Indian conscience and ego, and in this he is applauded by some critics, largely from the First World West, who see the outraged response simply as what is to be expected from insecure people afraid to look squarely at themselves. But the popular construct of an absolute opposition of extremes is an over-simplification. There is some truth on both sides. Naipaul’s apparent rejection of Trinidad and the West Indies is not so unqualified as it may at first appear.

His bleak report on the West Indies, whether, say, in The Middle Passage (1962) or The Mimic Men (1967) or in statements made to interviewers over the years, would seem totally dismissive, working to distance him from the region and to deny any debt to it. He has explicitly rejected the label “West Indian writer” for himself. In a 1958 article, he argued, “The only way out [of a too-limited audience and reputation] is to cease being a regional writer.” Later he would be more cutting: “’West Indian’ is a political word. It’s all the things I reject. It’s not me.” We may ask, “Why is ‘West Indian’ a political word, as against, say, ‘British,’ ‘Russian’ or ‘Japanese’? But that’s for another time.

So Naipaul, fifty years ago, in the first flush of success for his very Trinidadian “social comedies” (to use his term) was preparing to aim for wider horizons of subject matter, to cease being “regional.” He had by 1958 published The Mystic Masseur (1957) and The Suffrage of Elvira (1958), and Miguel Street (1959) was imminent. Curiously enough, though, his next novel, his next book, which did not appear until 1961, and which was to be considered by many his greatest work and a classic of world literature, was the very Trinidadian A House for Mr Biswas. It was only after he had published his West Indian travel book, A Middle Passage (1962), which started the “tracing match” between him and the region, that he seemed to make a clean break and produced his “English” novel, Mr Stone and the Knights Companion (1963).

There has been a certain touchiness about West Indian umbrage at Naipaul’s derogatory remarks on the region, a touchiness which may be a sign of the sense of insecurity inherited by the ex-colonised. By contrast, Naipaul’s sneering comments on contemporary English society or the Tony Blair government or Oxford University have raised no more than a ripple of amusement, perhaps a patronizing ripple, in the British. There is no evidence that they feel threatened. One unfortunate result of all this is that some West Indians, in reaction to Naipaul’s harsh, dismissive representations of the West Indies, his apparent dissociation of himself from the place, have for their part denied him any relevance to the region and dismissed him virtually unread.

But there have been West Indians over the years who have continued to read Naipaul seriously and discriminatingly, recognizing bias and limitation where they see it, while benefiting from his shrewd and challenging insights into our world, and delighting in his artistry. Running through this continuing attention is the conviction that Naipaul has not lost, cannot lose his West Indian connection.

The argument for Naipaul’s indelible connection with his native place takes various turns. For example, Gloria Escoffery quotes from The Mimic Men two paragraphs in which the narrator-protagonist describes himself as a schoolboy in Trinidad being transported through rain by his father on his bicycle. Then she asks:

How can a writer who can give the essence of an emotional experience between father and son in such a translucent, simple, deeply perceptive way be accused of being unsympathetic in his attitude to the people with whom he grew up? The same merits … appear in that masterpiece of humanity, A House for Mr Biswas.

Taking a cue from Escoffery, one may find all sorts of other examples to support the same question; to select just two: Naipaul’s review of C.L.R. James’s Beyond A Boundary and his short story “Tell Me Who To Kill,” remarkable not only for its masterful use of Trinidadian creole, but also for its intense compassion for the individual victim of society.

Mervyn Morris, commenting on one of Naipaul’s more notorious pronouncements – “Africa has no future” – says:

We know he doesn’t literally mean what he has said, but we may bristle at what sounds like gratuitous rudeness … Some of these moments may perhaps be seen … as delightfully Trinidadian – Naipaul giving rein to verbal playfulness, outrageously following where the straight-man questioner has led.

In other words, even at some moments when Naipaul may intend to be absolutely serious, we may read him as engaging in a kind of picong. There have been moments when, strange as it may seem, reading Lovelace and Naipaul, I have been struck by what seems to me a delightfully Trinidadian consanguinity between the two, notwithstanding important differences in their overall projects. At these times I sense an expressiveness characteristic of the land of “mas,” and a flair for the moment when performance turns into pappyshow.

A leading idea in John Hearne’s long-ago review of The Middle Passage is that Naipaul is never more West Indian than in his embarrassment at the West Indies and in his readiness to put down the region. The idea is there, for instance, in Hearne’s conceding that “Naipaul is a great deal more than just another West Indian scholarship winner, bitterly ashamed of his origins.” What perhaps stands out most from this statement is not the qualifier but the basic assertion, that Naipual is “another West Indian scholarship winner, bitterly ashamed of his origins.” Naipaul, Hearne posits, “is too intelligent not to recognize [that] he shares with his fellow West Indians” “many of [the] limitations he finds in them.”

Still, Hearne began his review by conceding Naipaul’s sharp eye for “all that is pathetic, and so often contemptible, in our society,” suggesting in effect that West Indians need to pay attention to Naipaul, nothwithstanding any shortcomings and biases in his way of seeing. Raoul Pantin is strong on this need to pay attention. He observed, cynically:

Naipaul’s painful misfortune may not only be his having looked Trinidad and Tobago and half the Third World straight in the eye and described what he’s seen: the havoc colonialism leaves in its wake, all those “half-made people and half-made societies,” so frail, so insecure, so full of mimicry, so mired in confused values.

The set of nerves that is Naipaul makes a virtual fetish of wholeness and purity. It expresses itself in a horror of any violation of self, of hybridity, of damage or taint to pristine or wished-for completeness. It is deeply disturbed by anything “half-and-half.” In labeling the life of Willie Chandran Half a Life, Naipaul was retrospectively labeling all the metamorphoses of the protagonist of all his books (and note “protagonist,” singular). And they all relate to Naipaul. In The Enigma of Arrival, in quest of himself, reflecting on the fact that Jack, his English neighbour, “lived among ruins, among superseded things,” he had written: “That idea of ruin and dereliction, of out-of-placeness, was something I felt about myself, attached to myself, a man from another hemisphere, another background, coming to rest in middle life in the cottage of a half-neglected estate ….” In Enigma too, recalling his first journey away from Trinidad, he recalls how “close [he was] to the village ways of his Asian-Indian community,” despite the fact that, “unhappy in his extended family, he was distrustful of larger, communal groupings.” “But that half-Indian world, that world removed in time and space from India, and mysterious to the man, its language not even half understood, its religion and religious rites not grasped, that half-Indian world was the social world the man knew.” Incidentally, the tactic of referring to himself in the third person, as “the man,” dramatizes the notion of autobiography as fiction, as self-construction.

Willie Chandran, a half-caste man with a half-and-half name and a half-Portuguese, half-African wife, finds, in the Portuguese African colony, that “the world [he] had entered was only a half-and-half world, [where] many of the people … considered themselves, deep down, people of the second rank. They were not fully Portuguese and that was where their own ambition lay.” So, for instance, Jacinto Correia, who “had told his children, who were studying in Lisbon, that they were on no account to use public transport in Lisbon. … People must never think of them as colonial nobodies.” There were in the colony “Portuguese and Africans and people of the half-and-half world.” It is the last named, his immediate circle, who are the focus of Willie’s scrutiny. They are a fairly well-off clique of “estate people,” but insecure in their half-and-half status, an insecurity deepened by the imminent collapse of such colonial order as exists.

To feel that one is a colonial nobody, a half-and-half person, to have one’s individuality violated, one’s wholeness tainted, or to suffer what Willie calls “racial diminution,” is about the gravest degradation that the Naipaulian persona can experience. Here again the roots of this feature may be found in Naipaul’s childhood experience, as he himself relates it:

I have always been fighting a hysteria that plagued me as a child. … The old fear of being reduced to nothing, of feeling crushed. It’s partly the old colonial anxiety of having one’s individuality destroyed. And it also goes back to the family I grew up in – a typically Indian extended family.

This near-pathological horror at feeling that one has been thus tainted may occur in a variety of situations. In an interview with Margaria Fichtner, Naipaul once told of having been sent by someone a review he had written of one of Naipaul’s books:

It was meant to be very kind, but it was trivial, and I was so appalled at this kind of schoolboy attitude to this work that I felt, you know … sullied … I felt really violated … and for one day I was cast down with a kind of gloom of feeling sullied.

This feeling has something in common with young Biswas’ feeling ashamed of his place of domicile at Pagotes.

The nerves, the precariousness, the intimations of ruin, the dread of violation, taint, damage to the self – these are features of the self that Naipaul writes as he moves between autobiography, reportage and fiction. The travels and dislocations of the Naipaul persona at one and the same time represent the quest for self-knowledge as well as the self that is discovered or constructed.

The idea that people fashion identities for themselves has run through Naipaul’s work from the beginning. This self-making has involved theatricality, performance. This feature has manifested itself at different levels. At first it was largely comic and satirical, an escape, for the characters, from the pressures of circumstance into play-acting and fantasy. But it has also and increasingly been presented as an inevitable mode of the assertion of individuality. One performs one’s idea of one’s best self. Alternatively, one may collude in the violation of one’s self by performing the degraded self which others more powerful impose on one. This collusion is painfully illustrated in the documentary opening and closing narratives of In A Free State: “Prologue, from a Journal: The Tramp at Piraeus” and “Epilogue, from a Journal: The Circus at Luxor.”

In the former, Naipaul is enraged by the mocking cruelty meted out by his fellow passengers to the tramp; in the latter by the waiter with the camel-whip, for the pleasure of the tourists, to the boys groveling for apples and bits of sandwiches tossed to them in sport. But Naipaul is also enraged at how, in both episodes, the victims seem so self-degradingly to accept the role of abject inferior and victim. The same principle is at work thirty years later in Half a Life, most strikingly in the brief episode of the “big, light-eyed mulatto” tiler “abused and shouted at by the Portuguese owner” of the restaurant on which the tiler is working. Willie Chandran’s (and Naipaul’s) sense of outrage is heightened by the tiler’s compliance: “He never replied to the shouts of the owner, whom he could so easily have knocked down. He just kept on working.” And Willie asks, “Who will rescue that man? Who will avenge him?”

In A Bend in the River, role playing, as both idea and image, is essential. When the protagonist, Salim, visits London and falls in love with Kareisha, she shows what seems like a natural affection towards him, and he remarks: “I luxuriated in this affection of Kareisha’s, and acted out my man’s role a little. It was wonderfully soothing. Acted – there was a lot of that about me at this time.” Here we see a major aspect of Salim’s view of human behaviour – the idea that people, out of chronic need or weakness, are always prone to play-acting their lives.

When he says that “there was a lot of that about me at this time,” he no doubt means that his behavior at this time involved much role-playing. However, there is also a lot of acting about him all the time, in the sense that he is always noticing that people around him are putting on an act. Besides, it is not only on this occasion that he finds himself play-acting. One may even argue that the ultimate irony is that Salim’s projection of himself as the painstakingly honest lifter of masks, exposer of the truth, is the novel’s most elaborate instance of role-playing.

As is made explicit at the end of “Prologue to an Autobiography,” the purpose of that narrative is to show how, by working back into his Trinidad history -- into the family from which he emerged, and particularly into the stressful life of his father and his struggle to assert his individuality in the face of humiliating circumstances – he became V.S. Naipaul the writer, whom he was destined or willed himself to be. The process is in effect one of producing an identity by excavating and interpreting the history by which one sees oneself as having been made. The process of identity quest, of developing the idea of oneself, is reenacted, extended, subtilized in The Enigma of Arrival and A Way in the World.

“Few of us,” says Naipaul, “are without the feeling that we are incomplete.” So we must, as it were, invent complete selves in order to make some purposeful way in the world. Indeed, in order to live we must construct our worlds – to each person, each generation, each culture, each civilization its own: “We all inhabit ‘constructs’ of a world. Ancient people had their own. Our grandparents had their own; we cannot absolutely enter into their constructs. Every culture has its own: men are infinitely malleable.”

Ultimately, in the journey that is his writing, a writing that repeatedly returns to his past as he moves forward in the present, Naipaul seeks to construct a complete, inviolable self which can report with authority and dispassion on the fragmented, uneasy selves that he sees through his writer’s eye. As Michael Gowra remarked:

Virtually all his work since the 1994 “Prologue to an Autobiography” has burnished the shield of his own myth, revisiting the scenes of his earlier travels, recapitulating the story of how he stepped from colonized Trinidad into the history of English literature.

Or again, this from John Bayley:

Naipaul thoroughly understands the romance of himself – what the novelist John Cowper Powys called his life illusion – the inner saga of himself and his destiny which each person secretly carries alongside the physical circumstances of his existence.

This self-in-performance, this “life illusion,” which is not really all that secret, is built, one might say simplified, around a few key characteristics.

To try to draw together the different threads that go to make the discovered or constructed self is to see how Naipaul’s books play off against, speak to and with one another. It is to understand all the better his own summary of himself, i.e. the self realized in the writing: “I will say I am the sum of my books. Each book, intuitively sensed and, in the case of the fiction, intuitively worked out, stands on what has gone before, and grows out of it.” So, for instance, as James Woods remarks, “Many of the elements in [Naipaul’s] memoir Finding the Centre are repeated in the novel Half a Life,” and in the latter “Naipaul seems to be writing a very dark variation on his own circumstances.” Similarly, A House for Mr Biswas is subsumed in The Enigma of Arrival, and the two are mutually illuminating. A House for Mr Naipaul would have been a not-inappropriate title for the latter.

In 1993, when V.S. Naipaul became the first recipient of the David Cohen Prize, Britain’s then newest and biggest literary prize, I wrote a small piece for The Jamaica Observer to mark the achievement. In it I said, among other things:

Naipaul is quoted as having remarked, on hearing of his latest award, “It is the British Literature Prize and I like that, because this writing career of mine has been conducted here.” This sounds like a perfectly decent and reasonable gesture of thanks, but it is also the sort of Naipaul statement that is likely to set some of us off again, on the tedious argument about whether Naipaul has betrayed the West Indies, let the side down, gone over to the colonizer.

That was eight years before Naipaul won the Nobel Prize, and we all remember how true to form he was in his first public statement on being told that he had won, and the shock, disappointment, hurt, and even outrage with which his failure to acknowledge Trinidad was greeted. At this point I have to insert an aside, citing a new item that appeared in the Daily Express on Tuesday (17 April 2007) under the heading “I’m to blame, not my husband.” But even this story burnishes the Naipaul myth. Here is the first part of the sentence that begins Lady Naipaul’s explanation: “When he got the Nobel, we were completely taken aback and my husband went to sleep …. “ Who else, having heard that they had won the Nobel Prize, would have been so completely taken aback they went to sleep?

Anyway, one relic of that moment in 2001 is a letter to the editor of The Trinidad Guardian, October 31, 2001. The letter, by M.F. Rahman of Woodbrook, reads like a letter which a character in a Naipaul novel may well have written. I quote most of it:

Despite his disavowal of the land of his birth, the world knows the fatherland of Sir Vidia is Trinidad and Tobago. T & T, therefore, has no need to rush to embrace a churlish son who spurns the land of his formative and impressionable youth whence flowed all of his insights that conceived his literary works. / The loss is Sir Vidia’s … by his own hand he is orphaned from his land. / We bestowed upon him, in proper time, our highest honour before his latest crowning prize, and at that time he yet retained some filial gratitude now vanished with the years. / It ill becomes our land to slight this son, ungrateful though he may be, for we cannot disown him in return. Yet we also should not rush unseemingly to grasp a share of his recent glory and seek to bask grinningly in his selfish fame. A fatherland deserves more seemly consideration. / So honour him we must, for generations will forget his ego and wonder how we could have been so shallow as to deny him some sort of name. / Yet we must make it plain to all that sons of our soil should better comport themselves on the global stage or face paternal censure.

There we have life, Trinidad and Tobago life, imitating Naipaul.

I like to think that there is a nice irony in the theme of this symposium, since the phrase “created in the West Indies” occurs in Naipaul’s notorious statement that “nothing was created in the West Indies.” So set beside that the conference theme: “V.S. Naipaul: Created in the West Indies.”