topics: |  fiction | trinidad | caribbean

light comic sketches of life around his childhood street in Trinidad. vivid characters like Hat, Bogart, Popo come to life through a few deft strokes.

When did Naipaul turn third-world hater?

At the end of the book, the narrator is at the airport preparing to leave his island for faraway England. He asks his mother "So this mean I was never going to come back here, eh?"

The stories reveals a strong attachment and fond association with the diasporic culture and the individuals populating its pages. The author makes an occasional appearance, as a boy growing up in this complex multi-cultural melange where deep-seated cultural traditions inherited and north-indian hindu practices meet the easygoing culture of trinidad, under the distant shadow of world war 2.

the author appears on the periphery of of these stories; his participation is largely as an observer, though occasionally (e.g. B. Wordsworth), he is more deeply enmeshed in the plot. his family reveals itself in glimpses - his mother's concern for his studies; the uncle who turns from being an auto-mechanic to a hindu priest, the coach who helps kids pass the board exams and get the much-prized scholarships to England (Titus Hoyt), the failed poet who gives him solace...

The inferior culture

at the same time, the culture of diaspora reveals itself as the inferior partner in this interaction. the largest ambitions of the kids growing up is to become a garbage-truck driver:

    if you asked any boy what he would like to be, he would say, ‘I going be a
    cart-driver.’  

    There was certainly a glamour to driving the blue carts. The men were
    aristocrats. They worked early in the morning and had the rest of the day
    free. And then they were always going on strike.

the power and desirability of the
dollar-drenched american soldier serves as a distant background to the
stories.   with war breaking out, everyone in Trinidad is working for the
Americans.  The text is enlivened with many fragments of song: 

	Father, mother, and daughter
	Working for the Yankee dollar!
	Money in the land!
	The Yankee dollar, oh

The desire to do well in exams is also tied to the dream of escape from
this inferior existence.  The Cambridge School Certificate is
the dream of every student.  But the locals find it hard: 

    Elias sat down on the pavement.  ‘Is the English and litritcher that does
    beat me.’

The erstwhile painter Edward, surrenders "completely to the Americans. He
began wearing clothes in the American style, he began chewing gum, and he
tried to talk with an American accent."  

He throws parties for his American friends, and at these times he pretends
not to know his friends from Miguel Street... "  In the end he sells his
house and leaves Trinidad for Aruba or Curaçao.

The narrator manages to clear the exam, and goes to meet a politican about
getting a scholarship to England.  When asked what subject he wants to
study, he says: ‘I don’t want to study anything really. I just want to go
away, that’s all.’

In a sense, Naipaul has done exactly that.  He has gone away, with an
astounding ferocity.  These days he hobnobs with his wetern friends,
denigrating his origins.  

But this light-hearted book is well before that
turn, and it remains one of the classics of non-western cultures.

Excerpts

1 Bogart

"What happening there, Bogart?" Hat shouts across every morning.  Bogart
would return a soft indeterminate grumble, "What happening there, Hat?"

[Bogart] was the most bored man I ever knew.  1
      [VSN is aware of how good a line this is.  he repeats it while
	 describing Laura, of the "maternal instinct"]

He made a pretence of making a living by tailoring...  He even bought a
sweing machine and some blue and white and brown chalk. 2
[the narrator is a painter of signs, and paints him a sign.  also in
house for mr biswas].

[Bogart had come to the street four years back.  he inquired about rooms from
Hat, but didn't speak much.  he installed himself in the "servant's room"
forr $8 / mo, and immediately
   ... brought out a pack of cards, and began playing patience.
   This impressed Hat.  4

a long Madrassi shot of rum. 4

[Bogart disappears suddenly.  no one knows where he has been.  and four
months later, he re-appears.  this happens several times. eventually, it
turns out he has two wives in two places, and is arrested for bigamy. ]

2 The Thing without a name

[Popo is a carpenter who is forever busy, but never quite makes anything.]

    "What you making, Mr. Popo?" I asked.
    "Ha, boy! That's the question. I making the thing without a name."

[Mr. Popo makes an egg-stand for the boy.  he gifts it to Ma.  She uses it
for eggs for a week, then she forgets and gives the eggs on plates and bowls
as she used to earlier. ]

Popo's wife goes to work.
Popo: Women and them like work.  Man not make for work. 10

[Popo is not too popular with the "gang".  But after his wife runs away, they
all become pals.]
Hat said, "We was wrong about Popo.  He is a man, like any of we." 11

[Mr Popo is jailed for stealing furniture.  After he came back]
   ... he had changed.  And the change made me sad.
   For Popo began working.
   He began making morris chairs and tables and wardrobes for people.
   And when I asked him, "Mr. Popo, when you going ztart making the thing
without a name again? " he growled. at me.
   "You too troublesome," he said.  "Go away quick, before I lay my hand on
you."  14

3 George and the Pink House

[George is a wife-beater.  he also beats his son George and daughter Dolly.
after his wife dies, a bevy of women appear in his pink house, and american
soldiers start visiting the street.  but after he marries his daughter to a
sharp moustached man called Razor, the women leave, and he dies a broken
man. ]

[After his wife died] George sold all his cows to Hat.
   "God will say is robbery." Hat laughed.  "I say is a bargain." 19

4 His chosen calling

[Boys on Miguel Street dream of becoming a driver of the street-cleaning
cart.]

about 2 in the night, came the sweepers and then just before dawn, you heard
the scavenging carts.

No boy in the street wished to be a sweeper.  But if you asked any boy what
he would like to be, he would say, "I going be a cart-driver" 23

[The cart-drivers were forever on strike].  They struck for things like a
cent more a day.  They struck if someone was laid off.  They struck when
India got independence.  They struck when Gandhi died. 23

[Elias, George's son, works hard at getting his Cambridge School Certificate.
After repeated attempts, he fails to pass and eventually becomes a
scavenging-cart driver. ]

   [after his name is not on the list in the papers.]
   Boyee said, "What else you expect?  Who correct the papers?  English man,
not so?  You expect them to give Elias a pass?" 26

   "Is the English and litricher that does beat me."
   In Elias's mouth litricher was the most beautiful word I heard.  It
sounded like something to eat, something rich like chocolate.
   Hat said, "You mean you have to read a lot of poultry and thing?"
   Elias nodded.  We felt it wasn't fair, making a boy like Elias do
litricher and poultry.  27

5 Man-man

[Man-man is the local madman.  he spends the whole day spelling words like
"school" - with a lot of 'o's going all around the block.  he has a dog. ]
Man-man appeared to exercise a great control over the movements of his dog's
bowels.

[excrement appears on clothes hung out to dry.  soon after, when Man-man
comes around asking for clothes, they are given to him.  it turns out that
Man-man used to sell the clothes.

[Man-man has an English accent. He becomes a preacher.  Eventually, he
becomes the Messiah, and has a cross erected and has himself tied to the
cross.  He then asks himself to be stoned, repeatedly.  But when some men
start throwing real stones, he shouts, "What the hell is this?  What the hell
you people think you doing? Get me down from this thing quick!"

he is taken away by the police who have gathered.  he is then put away for
good. ]

6 B. Wordsworth

[B. Wordsworth is Black Wordsworth, a poet]

"White Wordsworth was my brother.  We share one heart.  I can watch a small
flower like the morning glory and cry." 40

[he becomes friends with the narrator, who visits him often at his house and
goes on long walks with him.

One day the narrator is beaten by his mother for being absent too long.  He
retuns straightaway to B. Wordsworth's.  They walk to the race course and lie
down on the grass, looking at the stars.  He shows him many stars, including
Orion, which he remembers even now.]
    Then a light was flashed into our faces, and we saw a policeman.
    The policeman said, "What you doing here?"
    BW said, "I have been asking myself the same question for twenty years." 42

[For the narrator,]
The world became a most exciting place. 44

[He is writing the greatest poem in the world.  He writes a line a month.  ]
    "But I make sure it is a good line."
    I asked, "What was last month's good line?
    He looked up at the sky, and said, "The past is deep." 44

7 The coward

Big Foot was really big and really black.

[he shows great fear one night facing strange noises which turns out to be a
dog, and only the narrator knows this streak.  eventually becomes a boxer,
and beats up a lot of locals.  but after a defeat, sobs in the ring. ]

8 The pyrotechnicist

[a stranger driving through Miguel Street would just see a "slum". ]
But we, who lived there, saw our street as a world, where everybody was quite
different from everybody else.  Man-man was mad; George was stupid; Big Foot
was a bully; Hat was an adventurer; Popp was a philosopher, and Morgan was
our comedian. 57

[Morgan was more like a bird than a man. ]
When he spoke it was in a pecking sort of way, as though he was not throwing
out words, but picking up corn.
He walked with a quick, tripping step, looking back over his shoulder at
somebody following who wasn't there. 60

[Morgan is caught sleeping with another woman by his wife.  The next day his
house catches fire and the fireworks he makes but cannot sell set off a huge
spectacle.]

9 Titus Hoyt, I.A.

Mr. Titus Hoyt, M.A. - coaches students to pass exams, with mixed
results.  But the narrator is encouraged in his attempts to leave the
island for Britain.

10 The maternal instinct

[Laura has eight babies.  From seven fathers. ]
And the leavening process would begin again in a few months.

She would to it and say, "This thing happening again, but you get use to it
after the first three four times. Is a damn nuisance, though."

She loved all her children, though you wouldn’t have believed it from the
language she used when she spoke to them.
Hat said once, ‘Man, she like Shakespeare when it come to using words.

Laura used to shout, ‘Alwyn, you broad-mouth brute, come here.’
And, ‘Gavin, if you don’t come here this minute, I make you fart fire, you
hear.’ 
And, ‘Lorna, you black bow-leg bitch, why you can’t look what you doing?

[Laura to her lover]
"Yes, Nathaniel, is you I talking to, you with your bottom like two stale
bread in your pants."

12 love, love love alone

	 Is love, love love alone
	 That cause King Edward to leave the throne. 103

[henry Christiani is a rich, successful doctor.  his wife suddenly leaves him
for the vagabond sailor Toni, who beats her up everyday.  She says of Henry:]

Eddoes: Doctor fellow.  Know him good-good. 107
	[reduplication from Hindi?]

I never met a man who liked doing good works so much as Henry. He was all for
good works and sanitation. 109

[why is it that do-gooders are not so interesting as lovers? ]

13 the mechanical genius

[Bhacku is his uncle, and is forever tinkering with cars, taking them open
but unable to put them back together again. ]

My Uncle Bhakcu was very nearly a mechanical genius. 113

  In the end Bhakcu had to beat his wife.
  This wasn’t as easy as it sounds. [Mrs Bhakcu is shaped like a pear
... she ] had so much flesh, in fact, that when she held her arms at her
sides they looked like marks of parenthesis.

  For a long time I think Bhakcu experimented with rods for beating
his wife, and I wouldn’t swear that it wasn’t Hat who suggested a
cricket bat. But whoever suggested it, a second-hand cricket bat was
bought from one of the groundsmen at the Queen's Park Oval, and iled,
and used on Mrs Bhakcu.
  Hat said, ‘Is the only thing she really could feel, I think.’
  The strangest thing about this was that Mrs Bhakcu her self kept the
bat clean and well-oiled. Boyee tried many times to borrow the bat, but
Mrs Bhakcu never lent it. p.117

[Bhacku goes mad and slams the bedford against the concrete fence and knocks
it down.]

    He was in a great temper, and while his wife remained outside crying he
went to his little room, stripped to his pants, flung himself belly down on
the bed, and began reading the Ramayana.  122

[Mrs. Bhacku], like my mother, thought that she was born to be a clever
handler of money, born to make money sprout from nothing at all.

Bhacku becomes a hindu pandit

   My mother said, ‘Well, he have to do something. People don’t pay to see a man
crawling under a motor-car or singing Ramayana?’
   Mrs Bhakcu nodded and looked sad.
   My mother said, ‘But what I saying at all? You sure Bhakcu know the
Ramayana?’
   ‘I sure sure.’
   My mother said, ‘Well, it easy easy. He is a Brahmin, he know the
Ramayana, and he have a car. Is easy for him to become a pundit, a real
proper pundit.’
   Mrs Bhakcu clapped her hands. ‘Is a first-class idea. Hindu pundits
making a lot of money these days.’
   So Bhakcu became a pundit.
...
I was haunted by thoughts of the dhoti-clad Pundit Bhakcu, crawling under a
car, attending to a crankshaft, while poor Hindus waited for him to attend to
their souls

Naipaul on Miguel Street

From 'Prologoue to an Autobiography'

     It is now nearly thirty years since, in a BBC room in London, on an old
     BBC typewriter, and on smooth, "non-rustle" BBC script paper, I wrote
     the first sentence of my first publishable book.

     It was in that Victorian-Edwardian gloom, and at one of those
     typewriters, that late one afternoon, without having any idea where I
     was going, and not perhaps intending to type to the end of the page, I
     wrote: Every morning when he got up Hat would sit on the banister of his
     back verandah and shout across, "What happening there, Bogart?"

     That was a Port of Spain memory. It seemed to come from far back, but it
     was only eleven or twelve years old. It came from the time when we -
     various branches of my mother's family - were living in Port of Spain,
     in a house that belonged to my mother's mother. We were country people,
     Indians, culturally still Hindus, and this move to Port of Spain was in
     the nature of a migration: from the Hindu and Indian countryside to the
     white-negro-mulatto town. (At that time in Trinidad black, used by a
     non-black, was a word of insult, negro was - and remains - a polite
     word.)

     Hat was our neighbor on the street. He wasn't negro or mulatto. But we
     thought of him as halfway there. He was a Port of Spain Indian. The Port
     of Spain Indians - there were pockets of them - had no country roots,
     were individuals, hardly a community, and were separate from us for an
     additional reason: many of them were Madrassis, descendants of South
     Indians, not Hindi-speaking, and not people of caste. ...

     That shout of "Bogart!" was in more than one way a shout from the
     street. And, to add to the incongruity, it was addressed to someone in
     our yard: a young man, very quiet, yet another person connected in some
     way with my mother's family. He had come not long before from the
     country and was living in the separate one-room building at the back of
     our yard.

     ...
     That was Bogart's story, as I knew it. And - after all our migrations
     within Trinidad, after my own trip to England and my time at Oxford -
     that was all the story I had in mind when - after two failed attempts at
     novels - I sat at the typewriter in the freelancers' room in the Langham
     Hotel, to try once more to be a writer. And luck was with me that
     afternoon. Every morning when he got up Hat would sit on the banister of
     his back verandah and shout across, "What happening there, Bogart?" Luck
     was with me, because that first sentence was so direct, so uncluttered,
     so without complications, that it provoked the sentence that was to
     follow. Bogart would turn in his bed and mumble softly, so that no one
     heard, "What happening there, Hat?"

     The first sentence was true. The second was invention. But together - to
     me, the writer - they had done something extraordinary. Though they had
     left out everything - the setting, the historical time, the racial and
     social complexities of the people concerned - they had suggested it all;
     they had created the world of the street, they had set up a rhythm,
     which dictated all that was to follow.

From the essay Reading and Writing 1998

I was eleven, no more, when the wish came to me to be a writer; and then
very soon it was a settled ambition...

With me, though the ambition to be a writer was for many years a kind of
sham. I liked to be given a fountain pen and a bottle of Waterman ink and new
ruled exercise books (with no margins), but I had no wish or need to write
anything; and didn’t write anything, not even letters: there was no one to
write them to. I wasn’t especially good at English composition at school; I
didn’t make and tell stories at home. And though I liked new books as
physical objects, I wasn’t much of a reader.

[at 18, he escapes to Oxford (1950):
I won my scholarship – after a labour that still hurts to think about,... I
didn’t do this for the sake of Oxford and the English course; I knew little
enough about either. I did it mainly to get away to the bigger world and
give myself time to live up to my fantasy and become a writer.

in Prologue to an Autobiography he says: "The ambition to be a writer was
given me by my father. He was a journalist for much of his working life."

review by Charles Poore in NYT May 5, 1960

: Miguel Street
http://www.nytimes.com/books/98/06/07/specials/naipaul-miguel.html

Miguel Street," by V. S. Naipaul, is a beguiling book about growing up in the
West Indies. The sketches are written lightly, so that tragedy is understated
and comedy is overstated, yet the ring of truth always prevails.
The time of that world is the late Nineteen Thirties and most of the Nineteen
Forties on a sunny slum street in Port of Spain. Here the young narrator of
the story and his Hindu relatives live in a community as heterogeneous as,
say, that of Manhattan Island.

Songs, Cricket and Courage

Vivid characters with tenuous means of support populate the place. They sing
the latest Calypso songs and interest themselves in cricket matches and
collect junk and talk about migrating across the narrow sea to Venezuela. If
their attitude toward morals is informal it is shown openly, not
covertly. Their standards of courage are high. They speculate endlessly on
the tremendous trifles and mysteries that have troubled man's thinking
throughout his tenure on our strange planet.

A room with a view of a mango tree may contain a boisterously quarrelsome
family or a recluse devoted to carpentry or scholarship. The popular beverage
is rum, though the gay blades who enjoy it most turn to the ostentatious
patronage of a milk bar during an interval when joy through strength becomes
fashionable.

Talk is swift and vigorous. A Lardnerian precision in idioms animates it. The
following scene concerns one Mrs. Morgan, who has the temerity to doubt the
general prowess Mrs. Bhakcu ascribes to her lord and master, Mr. Bhakcu, a
man of many devices.

Mrs. Morgan speaks first:
   "I hear your husband talking in his sleep last night, loud, loud."
   "He wasn't talking, he was singing."
   "Singing? Hahahahaaah! You know something, Mrs. Bhakcu?"
   "What, Mrs. Morgan?"
   "If your husband sing for his supper, both of all of you starve like hell."
   "He know a damn lot more than any of the ignorant man it have in this
street, you hear. He could read and write, you know. English and Hindi. How
you so ignorant you don't know that the Ramayana is a holy book? If you
coulda understand all the good thing he is singing, you wouldn't be talking
all this nonsense you talking now, you hear."

Although World War II begins, continues and ends in the course of
Mr. Naipaul's book, it seldom dominates the scene. The arrival of American
armed forces to implement the bases-for-destroyers exchange between Britain
and the United States brings measures of disquiet and measures of
prosperity. But Miguel Street takes all that in its stride.

Leaving the ghetto : Patrick French

	http://www.newstatesman.com/books/2008/04/naipaul-bbc-writer-short

[Patrick French is the author of "The World Is What It Is: the Authorised
Biography of V S Naipaul"]

Short of money and short of food, V S Naipaul found his early life as a
writer in Fifties London harsh. Then the BBC offered him a lifeline with a
radio programme, Caribbean Voices. It became an important influence, but one
he later felt obliged to disown.

In Naipaul's case, his determined self-construction during five decades in
print was a provocation in itself: who was this Trinidadian man who lived as
a knight of the shires and denounced multiculturalism as "multi-culti"? He
said, or was said to have said, that Africa had no future, Islam was a
calamity, France was fraudulent and interviewers were monkeys. How dare he
support Hindu nationalism? If Zadie Smith - optimistic and presentable - was
a white liberal's dream, Naipaul was the nightmare.

For a successful immigrant writer to take the positions he did was seen as
a special kind of treason, a betrayal of what should be a purely literary
genius. "Great art, dreadful politics," complained Terry Eagleton.

Naipaul's public persona is so well formed that it is all too easy not to
look behind it, and to imagine he had an easy start, being taken up quickly
by a London publisher and bypassing the racial prejudices of 1950s
England. But post-colonial writing had not yet been invented, and he lived in
something close to penury until the 1970s. He made a career as a writer in
Britain only through uncompromising ambition.

During Naipaul's schooldays in Port of Spain, his friends were all, in the
language of the time, negroes or mulattos. When he left Oxford he struggled
to find a bedsit or a job. At an interview with the Advertising Appointments
Bureau, he was informed that he had the wrong sort of face. Once, when he
visited the Colonial Office, an official told him to stop feeling sorry for
himself and go back home. As he wrote bitterly to his future wife, Pat Hale:
"It is my own fault. Why don't I go back where I came from, and not be a
nuisance to anyone? Niggers ought to know their place." At times, he did not
have enough money for food. "I do not wish to alarm you," he wrote to Pat,
"but it will be an act of great charity if you can send me a small amount of
money: this will enable me to eat a bit for two or three days . . . I am
literally starving these days, and have lost nearly 12 pounds." His
breakthrough came when he was made a presenter on the BBC radio show
Caribbean Voices in 1954, working with other aspiring West Indian writers,
some of whom had fought in the army or the RAF during the war.

Caribbean Voices had a catalytic effect, linking writers from across the
English-speaking Caribbean, from British Honduras to British Guyana. It had
grown from a morale-boosting wartime radio show produced by the Jamaican poet
Una Marson, the first black woman to make programmes at the BBC. Contributors
would send a story or poem to a BBC agent in Jamaica, who would sift the
material and send it by boat to London for consideration. Back in the West
Indies, people would cluster around a wireless or Rediffusion set and listen
for the legendary opening: "This is London calling the Caribbean." Under a
new editor, Henry Swanzy, a plump, musical man of Irish origin, Caribbean
Voices became a weekly display case for new writing.

Outwardly, the programme was a classic assertion of imperial authority:
colonial subjects would produce writing which, after scrutiny by their
masters in London, was broadcast back to them. In practice, the process was
highly collaborative and creative, as writers and manuscripts travelled back
and forth across the Atlantic in the early 1950s, leading to the flowering of
postwar talents such as Edgar Mittelholzer, Andrew Sal key, Samuel Selvon,
George Lamming, Edward Brathwaite, Derek Walcott, V S Naipaul and his father,
Seepersad Naipaul.

For four years, Vidia Naipaul had an insecure billet as a stalwart of the BBC
Colonial Service. It gave him an opportunity to find his feet as a writer, to
widen and extend his talents and to feel an integral part of a circle of
intelligent men, and a few women, of roughly his own age and background. Gone
was the cliquey white world of Oxford University; he was again among people
who reminded him of home. Swanzy left him and his colleagues in no doubt that
their material was real material. The Caribbean Voices "boys" would chat in
the freelances' room at the old Langham Hotel, a grand Victorian edifice
opposite Broadcasting House. Naipaul ate lunch each day in the BBC canteen,
finishing with heavy English puddings topped with custard.

The other contributors, actors and presenters were older than the precocious
Naipaul, and with the exception of the creolised Sam Selvon - a Trinidadian
novelist who was having an intermittent affair with Vidia's beloved elder
sister Kamla - none was an East Indian West Indian. To Naipaul, they seemed
more experienced, adept and socially confident. Despite his subsequent barbs
and snubs, he was a wholehearted member of this group. The Guyanese writer
Jan Carew remembered:

    "Vidia was a very good companion, very witty. Cruel wit. Some West
    Indians used to work at the back of the kitchen at the BBC cafeteria. He
    called them 'the blackroom boys'. He had an underlying sense of
    compassion for the less well-off West Indians in London, which later he
    was accused of not having. People of my generation spoke about race in a
    way that was full of jokes; there was no animus, we would joke about each
    other's background - race and class. Vidia didn't hold himself apart."

At the BBC, Naipaul reviewed novels, interviewed writers and chaired
discussions with scripted informality. He contributed to a series on
"Contemporary Negro Poetry",

Naipaul's subsequent claim to have had no literary influences bar his father
was a deliberate blanking of the role of colleagues at Caribbean Voices, who
were crucial in forming his idea of what did and did not work on the page.

In the early summer of 1955, in the freelances' room at the Langham with its
ochre walls and pea-green dado, Naipaul wound a piece of "nonrustle" BBC
studio paper into a standard typewriter and adopted a singular posture, his
shoulders thrown back, his knees drawn up, his shoes resting on the struts on
either side of the chair in a "monkey crouch". Setting the typewriter to
single space, he wrote: "Every morning when he got up Hat would sit on the
banister of his back verandah and shout across, 'What happening there,
Bogart?'" He had a sentence, a start. He tried to go on. "The man addressed
in this way would turn in his bed . . ." He crossed it out and began
again. "Bogart would turn in his bed and mumble softly, so that no one heard,
'What happening there, Hat?'" Naipaul had the opening of his first
publishable book, Miguel Street. Before long, he had written and published
two more comic novels.

As his literary reputation developed, his relationship with the BBC frayed;
Caribbean Voices had been a place of opportunity, but it was also an ethnic
ghetto. When he applied to become a BBC general trainee, the interview panel
was not receptive: "They were sniggering as I entered; all of them were
sniggering. There was a man there called Laurence Gilliam, famous as a
so-called features writer, producer. He asked what I wanted to do. I said I
wanted to do some features and they roared with laughter, as though I had
said I wanted to write the Bible . . . It was the historical moment. You
couldn't be a victim in the 1950s. There wasn't the market."

Only in 1960 did his star begin to rise. The BBC Home Service - he was out of
the ghetto now - wanted him to give a talk, but he demanded double the
standard rate. "If he could be shown to have a stature above that of the
general run of literary contributors to the quality press and journals, we
would certainly consider putting his rate up," the talks booking manager
noted in a memo. What was his status now? Did Naipaul deserve more than the
oenophile Cyril Ray, who was paid 30 guineas for 1,000 words? The Third
Programme asked him to write a script about his ancestral land, India, and
offered the sum of 80 guineas, ten times what he had been paid for his early
short stories. A letter came back from his agent stating that Mr Naipaul "has
asked me to inform you that he 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,
Naipaul was on his way.

By 1962, he was aware that his identity had been compromised by external
events. East Indians in independent Trinidad appeared to be facing black
majority rule, and many were trying to emigrate. Under a new law, however,
Commonwealth citizens would be denied the right to move to the UK. Naipaul
regarded the Commonwealth Immigrants Act as a betrayal. In a copy of A House
for Mr Biswas, he wrote his signature and, "For Andrew Salkey, in London,
from which one may in future be banned." The mother country had abandoned a
generation of orphaned children.

Ambitious, protean, deracinated by the accelerated politics of the end of
empire, Naipaul made a conscious choice to refashion himself. The publishing
vogue for West Indian writing was over and, uniquely among his contem
poraries, he saw the implications of this early enough to do something about
it. Jan Carew remembered:

The last time we met was in a café in the Tottenham Court Road. By then,
there were rumours that Vidia was living in some part of London where West
Indians were not welcome, and was taking up with different people. He told me
he was going to become English, and I thought he was pulling my leg. The
English are very strict about letting you in, particularly if you are a
different colour. I thought it was one of his jokes, but he was quite serious
about it. He meant he was giving up his West Indian imprimatur and taking on
an English one.

Naipaul refused to be classified as a Caribbean novelist any longer. He would
try to make himself into a new type of writer, a world writer. Only very
occasionally would he lift the mask. In Trinidad in the late 1980s, he bumped
into Sam Selvon at his sister's house and accepted an invitation to go
boating near Soldado Rock. In the words of an eyewitness: "Sam said he wanted
to swim. It was a real hot day. Vidia says, 'I would love to, but I don't
have my bathing things.' Sam says, 'I swimmin' in my jockey shorts.' Vidia
says, "I can't do that.' We were in the sea, then kerplunk, V S Naipaul was
in the water, swimming around the boat in his jockey shorts."

review of The Strange Luck of VS Naipaul: Sam Wollaston

(The Strange Luck of VS Naipaul is a 1 hr film by Arena shown on BBC)

    VS Naipaul is so poisonous and slippery, I wouldn't be surprised if his
    tongue was forked. The guardian

It's impossible not to astonished by the paradox of VS Naipaul: that someone
so fiercely clever, who writes so beautifully and humanely, can be so very
unlikable. For that's how he comes across, even without a proper grilling.

He is self-possessed and cruel, and feels rejected and misunderstood by
people and countries. Much of his life seems to have been about proving
people wrong, getting his revenge. I even found myself disliking the way he
proposed to Nadira: "Will you consider being Lady Naipaul one day?" Not marry
me, or be my wife, but be Lady Naipaul. Married to Sir Vidia, the great
writer, knighted for services to literature. Oh, and he was still with his
first wife Pat at the time, although she was dying.

She - the new Lady N - is good value, though. Her job is to big her husband
up while chopping vegetables in the kitchen, to put down the "creeps" who
criticise him without even having read him, to clap and squawk as he receives
his prizes, to call him darling a lot. And to be his echo. Wandering round
the tomb of Mughal Emperor Humayun in Delhi, he's explaining how the building
appears to change as the visitor approaches. "You're endlessly playing with
the rise and fall of the dome," he says.

"... fall of the dome," she echoes.

And she does it the whole time...

(Is it possible that the whole thing, all this bad behaviour and prickliness,
is a big joke at our expense?) But, more accurately, everything about the way
he is, his slippery poisonousness, is serpentine. If he stuck his tongue out
- into Lady Naipaul's ear possibly - I wouldn't be surprised if it were
forked.

review of Strange Luck by Robert Hanks, Independent

	The independent

There's an odd incident in A House for Mr Biswas, by general consent V S
Naipaul's masterpiece, which seems to set the pattern for the writer's
career. Anand, Mr Biswas's son, has been set a composition at school with the
title "A Day by the Seaside". This is Port of Spain, Trinidad, in the 1940s,
and though Anand is poor and Indian, he is expected to write about the sort
of day that middle-class English people might have. The teacher even writes
down acceptable phrases: "feverish preparations – eager anticipation – laden
hampers – wind blowing through open car". Instead, Anand describes a day he
really had, going down to swim at the docks and nearly drowning. "I opened my
mouth to cry for help. Water filled it. I thought I was going to die and I
closed my eyes because I did not want to look at the water." The teacher
awards him 12 marks out of 10.

Anand is Naipaul himself, and what the incident reveals is a reluctance to
settle for sentimental clichés, and an uncluttered, literal view of the world
expressed in stark prose. Naipaul's refusal to soften the edges has won him
some wealth, a knighthood, the Booker Prize and, in 2001, the Nobel Prize for
Literature; but it has also got him a reputation for prickliness and
arrogance. Paul Theroux, a friend with whom Naipaul fell out, put the case
for the prosecution brilliantly but unreliably in his book Sir Vidia's Shadow
(Vidia, short for Vidiadhar, being how he is known), and a number of
reviewers of Naipaul's most recent work have been piqued by his haughty
dismissal of other writers, his perceived condescension to non-Western
cultures.

The Strange Luck of V S Naipaul showed a different side. "I mustn't sound
curmudgeonly," he said early on, and then laughed, as if perfectly aware that
there wasn't much hope of that. Throughout, his tone to the camera was warm,
occasionally tinged with self-reproach, as when he spoke of his first wife,
Pat. Their relationship was, he said, "dry", without passion, which he found
instead through visits to prostitutes and a 20-year affair.

Lady Naipaul is a natural star, though, a kind of Indian version of Penelope
Keith playing Margo Leadbetter, managing to maintain a grand theatricality of
tone and gesture while peeling the vegetables.