'It was as if he had seen a ghost'In the 1970s, aware that his reputation as a novelist was rising and that he had been nominated for the Nobel prize, V S Naipaul deposited his manuscripts in a London warehouse. When he came to retrieve them a few years later they were gone, incinerated accidentally because of an administrative error. Anything not already in print had disappeared for ever. Although this destruction may not match the burning of the library at Alexandria in its importance, it was a substantial literary loss. Naipaul, who eventually won the Nobel in 2001, is widely regarded as Britain’s best living writer. His books, such as A Bend in the River, Guerrillas and The Enigma of Arrival, have shaped our understanding of the modern world.
Born in Trinidad to an Indian family in 1932, Vidia Naipaul won a colonial government scholarship to Oxford University in 1950. His first novel, The Mystic Masseur, was published when he was only 24; one reviewer described it as “the deftest and gayest satire I have read in years”. When I began to research the authorised, though independent biography of Naipaul, I was struck by the sophistication of his early writing. There was no sign of the embarrassing juvenilia that often marks the start of a literary career, and can provide an insight into the themes and building blocks of the later work.
From Naipaul’s correspondence with his family while he was at Oxford (published in 1999 as Letters Between a Father and Son), I knew that as an undergraduate he had been writing fiction for Caribbean Voices, a radio programme on the BBC Colonial Service. His father Seepersad, a journalist and aspiring writer, was also a contributor. Given that the BBC, like the Stasi, was good at record-keeping, I wondered whether it might be possible to reconstruct some of Naipaul’s early efforts. Using the reference numbers on the booking forms in his file in the BBC archives in Caversham, I managed to locate his “lost” oeuvre. Preserved on grainy microfilm are four short stories, a radio play and the only poem he is ever known to have written, broadcast from London to the West Indies just after his 18th birthday. The poem, Two Thirty A M, for which he was paid one guinea, is a solemn, adolescent cry of pain:
“Darkness piling up in the corners
defying the soulless moon . . .
it is neither today’s tomorrow
nor is it tonight’s last night
but now
and forever
and you are scared
for this is forever
and this is death
and nothing
and mourning”.
When I showed these lines to Naipaul a couple of months ago, it was as if he had seen a ghost. Visibly moved, he said to me that Two Thirty A M had been written at a time of childhood despair, and commented, “I never wrote another poem.”
In the aftermath of the second world war, his extended family was living in a small house in the Trinidadian capital, Port of Spain. One of his cousins told me that the local street-sweepers used to laugh at the hordes of Indian children who had to sleep lined up in rows, using rice bags as blankets. Vidia, bright and ambitious, was afraid this might be all life had to offer him.
Luckily, he forsook poetry for prose, and his first short story was broadcast in the summer of 1951. It was based on a childhood memory of an uncle who, needing a roof over his head, built a rural shack out of unseasoned wood to house his family. In the fictionalised version, This is Home, a young married couple move their belongings into a similar building. The woman is pregnant, the man nervous of his new responsibility. “It was the idea of fitting into a primeval universal pattern of living to mate, and mating to create that filled him with dread . . . Man the author, man the worker. Woman the anvil for man’s passion.” “This is home,” he tells his wife as they settle in. “I am not ashamed any more, he was telling himself. And yet he could feel that he was lying.” Like the poem, the story is ponderous and laden with uneasy symbolism. Yet it contains key themes — dislocation, poverty, homelessness and the relationship between men and women — that Naipaul would take up a decade later in his famous novel A House for Mr Biswas.
A year after This is Home was broadcast, his style had lightened considerably. Despite his new experiences in 1950s Britain, he preferred to set his fiction in the familiar world of the colonial West Indies. Aged all of 19, he wrote Potatoes, the story of an Indian widow, Mrs Gobin, who attempts to gain independence from her family by going into the retail business. The story uses similar comic techniques to his early novels, which would soon be praised by the likes of Evelyn Waugh and Kingsley Amis. Spotting a gap in the vegetable market, Mrs Gobin visits a merchant who sells her 200lb of potatoes at an inflated price. “An obsolete cash register was operated by a venerable-looking man with a beard, who could pass for a religious prophet, but who was, in fact, merely a Hindu of mediocre caste.” When the potatoes are eventually delivered, she sets up a stall, manned by her son Krishna, who “sat blackening in the sun, and selling nothing”. The local jeweller buys 5lb of potatoes, but the rest go bad in the heat (see extract).
In the summer of 1954, Naipaul graduated from Oxford and began to look for a job. He was desperately short of money and unable to find accommodation, and spent six months out of work before he secured a temporary position at the BBC as a presenter and editor. He discussed new novels with scripted informality, read out poems of varying quality, contributed to a series on Contemporary Negro Poetry, reviewed the film Sea Wife (being reimbursed 8/6 for “cost of a seat at the cinema”) and reported on literary teas at Harrods.
One of the most moving aspects of the BBC archive is the way it re-creates a world of struggling freelance writers, actors, hustlers and critics from the West Indies trying to gain a foothold at the centre of the fading British empire. Caribbean Voices launched many distinctive new talents, and helped to establish names such as Derek Walcott, George Lamming, Samuel Selvon and Edgar Mittelholzer. The programme was a place of opportunity, but it was also a racial ghetto: when Naipaul tried to get a traineeship in another part of the BBC, he was told that he would be unsuitable. Up before an interview panel, he remembers, “They were sniggering as I entered. I said I wanted to do some features, and they roared with laughter as though I had said I wanted to write the Bible.”
The two short stories that he wrote after Potatoes are disturbing, although executed with a light touch. Old Man concerns a Chinese family, admirers of Mao, who get stuck in wartime Trinidad. A Family Reunion, broadcast in March 1954, a few months after the death of Naipaul’s own father, tells the story of a powerful Indian grandmother. Her servant, “called, graphically, Miss Blackie (her real name was Geraldine Green)”, and daughter are making preparations for Christmas.
“It never struck them as strange that, although they were Hindus, they celebrated Christmas. In Trinidad, Christmas and Easter are celebrated by everyone, just as everyone celebrates the Muslim festival of Hosein.” After initial harmony, the family degenerates into cliques and feuds. The old woman, ill in bed, shouts abuse at her noisy grandchildren. “But her obscenities were harmless: she spoke Hindi, and the children spoke only English.” Nobody is sure how she intends to divide up her property, until her two sons write a cheque for $500 to each of their sisters; the rest will be theirs.
The most entertaining lost manuscript is a radio play called B Wordsworth, which tells the story of a Trinidad chancer and poet, Black Wordsworth (“White Wordsworth was my brother. We share one heart”) and his relationship with a young boy and his mother. It was adapted from a chapter in Naipaul’s then unpublished novel Miguel Street, and the parts were taken by Gordon Woolford, Errol John and Andrew Salkey, prominent figures in London’s West Indian literary scene, while Vidia Naipaul himself played the role of the narrator. Half a century on, B Wordsworth is ripe for a fresh broadcast.
It is baffling that nobody has found this material before. Naipaul’s early work for the BBC is well known, and he has had a global reputation as a novelist for decades. Countless academic books and impenetrable doctoral theses have been written about him. Universities teach courses which deconstruct his position in the pantheon of postcolonial literature. Yet no academic has thought to spare a day to search for his early fiction in the bowels of the BBC. Although these stories lack the technical skill of Naipaul’s early novels, they offer a crucial bridge in our understanding of his development as a writer. It is possible to see how the Port of Spain schoolboy who wrote of “darkness piling up in the corners, defying the soulless moon”, could become, only five years later, an accomplished comic novelist.
He realised faster than most of his contemporaries that a reputation as a Caribbean writer was a burden as well as a blessing. Unlike today, when a complex ethnic heritage can be an advantage for an aspiring writer, 1950s literary London regarded novelists from the colonies as interesting but quaint curiosities. Naipaul’s ambitions were substantial: he wanted to be a world-famous writer, not to be defined by the island of his birth. He had repeated squabbles with the BBC over payments, and moved on to writing reviews for newspapers and magazines.
By the early 1960s, things were running in his favour. Aged 30, he had won several prizes and published five books, including A House for Mr Biswas (which uses the story of Potatoes in its prologue). Now the BBC came to him. Would “Mr V S Naipaul, the novelist and critic” be prepared to write a script about India? They offered the sum of 80 guineas, 10 times what he was paid for the early short stories. A letter came back from his agent, Curtis Brown, stating that Mr Naipaul “considers this offer an insult”, with a PS: “Sorry about this!” A BBC memo concluded that “in view of his outside reputation” the price should be raised to 120 guineas. He accepted, and with his renown both as a writer and as a tricky customer well established, V S Naipaul was on his way.
© Patrick French
