Naipaul’s Letters Between a Father and Son (and Mother and Sister)

Abstract

IN October 1953, when the TWENTY-ONE-YEAR-OLD Vidia Naipaul heard his father died, he sent a telegram to his family in Trinidad saying everything I owe to him.1 That is the exaggeration of grief, but only a slight exaggeration. And although Vidia soon outgrew the intellectual influence of Seepersad, the example of his father's devotion to writing, of his almost desperate anxiety about being a writer, has motivated and also haunted the prodigious throughout his long career.Naipaul's relationship with his father has its supreme literary monument in his novel A House for Mr Biswas. But its chief biographical record is the sequence of family correspondence collected in Letters Between a Father and Son, a book with a complicated and revealing history, involving two editions (published a decade apart in 1999 and 2009, the latter ultimately withdrawn), two editors, two rival literary agents, a biographer, the tangled relations of a large and farflung family, and the even more tangled negotiations of publishing-world politics. The intricacies of this history are unknown to - one may even say concealed from - most readers of the published correspondence. But it may perhaps serve as a telling case study in the opportunities and dangers, the politics and personalities involved, in making a literary archive public by turning it into a book.Letters exist because of geography: because of the distances people. In the case of the Naipaul family correspondence, they exist because in August 1950 the elder Vidia left Trinidad to take up a scholarship at University College, Oxford - but also because, as fewer people know, Vidia's sister Kamla, the eldest of the Naipaul siblings, preceded him by a year. She left Trinidad in 1949, also on scholarship, to study in India, at Benares Hindu University. So the earliest letters between a father and son are actually a sister and brother: Kamla writing to Vidia from almost the other side of the world, and Vidia replying with bits of family gossip, suggested reading lists, and criticisms of her handwriting, or confessing an adolescent crush. Once Vidia himself was safely off the island, the correspondence became a three-way affair, Oxford, Benares, and Nepaul Street in St James, the neighbourhood in west Port of Spain that was home to the Naipauls. The core of the book, as its title implies, is the series of letters Seepersad and Vidia, but it is crucial to remember that, in both the published selection and the complete sequence preserved in the archive, this is a broader family correspondence, continuing after Seepersad's death and through the decade of the 1950s, with many letters written by and addressed to Seepersad's wife (and Vidia's mother) Droapatie, Kamla, the other Naipaul sisters, in particular Sati, and even the occasional scribble from Vidia's brother Shiva, still a young boy at this time.The original letters - which now repose in the Naipaul Archive at the Uni-versity ofTulsa's McFarlin Library - survive because they were kept separate from V.S. Naipaul's other literary papers, a substantial number of which were destroyed in the kind of accident archivists have nightmares about. In his authorised biography The World Is What It Is, Patrick French describes how Naipaul spent a lifetime meticulously recording himself. Always conscious of his own projected destiny, French writes, Naipaul had preserved everything:2 manuscripts; notebooks; correspondence; BBC scripts; newspaper clippings; and much else. A large portion of these papers, covering Naipaul's early career in the 1950s and 60s, been entrusted to Ely's, a storage company in Wimbledon, for supposed safekeeping. But in 1992, thinking to have his archive valued for sale, Naipaul discovered instead and to his horror that, thanks to a clerical error, Ely's mistakenly incinerated the box files that contained a third of his papers.3French notes succinctly the significance to a biographer of the loss of Naipaul's Oxford diaries, the manuscript of his unpublished first novel The Shadow'd Livery, and the journals recording his travels in the Caribbean (the subject of The Middle Passage) and India. …