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review Zia
Mohyeddin column
An Indian novelist reviews the result of Patrick French's meticulous research on the life of V. S. Naipaul By Ankush Saikia The
World Is What It Is: The Authorized Biography Of V. S. Naipaul Even before this book was
released, newspapers and magazines the world over naturally focussed on As French points out in his Introduction, Naipaul's achievement was a supreme act of will: the large and chaotic family in small Trinidad, the obsessive study for a scholarship to Oxford, the long, mean and poor years in England as he slowly found his feet as a writer, the slow and hard rise to his position of eminence, and above all the freshness and honesty and technical surety of his writing. There is the wonder of his
father, Seepersad Naipaul, affectionately called Pa by the children, a Naipaul married Patricia Ann Hale just after they both passed out of Oxford. Her family was against it, especially her father. The book recounts in touching detail her support for the ambitious but naïve boy from Trinidad, and very soon her life took a back seat to looking after the man she called "the Genius" in her diaries. It was a role she was to play for the rest of her life. It was a troubled marriage, with Naipaul feeling that the union was a mistake (while characteristically requiring his wife's support at the same time). Patricia's inability to have children compounded matters (but Naipaul would take the position that he had never wanted to have children). He relied upon Pat's support, and her literary judgement. Books like Guerrillas and A Bend In The River depended to a large extent on her quick, instinctive judgement of what Naipaul had written over the course of a day. Naipaul mentions reading out his travel notes for Beyond Belief to Pat a few days before she died of cancer. "She always gave good advice, literary advice. She was always very good. A few days before her death she was able to judge it." He met Margaret, the woman
who was to be his mistress on and off for over two decades, on his first trip
to Argentina in 1972 on a commission for the New York Review. She gave him an
outlet to fulfil his sexuality, and, in Naipaul's own words,
"liberated" him sexually. Naipaul would ask her to The book gives us an insight into the intensity with which Naipaul followed what he believed was his true calling in life. It was more of a fantasy at the beginning, and after Oxford, as a colonial in a hard and cruel 1950s Britain, he painfully went back to the beginning, both in terms of his material and the way he wrote--simple concrete sentences, one after the other, making a paragraph, a page. "You couldn't be a victim in the 1950s. There wasn't the market for it," Naipaul says of this period in his usual blunt style. His initial Caribbean fiction came out of this: The Mystic Masseur, Miguel Street, and that great post-colonial epic A House For Mr Biswas. Having exhausted his material, and not being one blessed with an ability to make things up, he took to travelling for material for his books: the Caribbean, India, Africa, Argentina. Every step of the way, through all the struggles and complications of his life, the purity of the writer's vocation was something he never abandoned. The important thing about writing to him was the writing. Later, after Margaret, a new sexual charge was to be found in his work, especially in Guerrillas, set in the Caribbean, and A Bend In The River, set in Africa, and whose opening sentence gives French's book its title. French describes well the terrifyingly claustrophobic conditions that developed in Naipaul's Wiltshire home as he wrote in a creative frenzy the first draft of Guerrillas--a story of racial politics and sexual violence and Naipaul's pet subject of third world fraudulence--while needing Pat to sound out what he wrote each day, even as tensions grew between them over his affair with Margaret and the violence of his material. By the 1980s, with his reputation at its peak, a reputation earned by decades of effort and persistence, a new technical mastery appeared in subtle layered works like The Enigma of Arrival and A Way in the World, even as he extended the form he had pioneered--the history and reportage and personal inquiry combined--with books like his third book on India and his second on Islam. Through his seriousness of purpose and sense of high values and an unsentimental engagement with the world he had created a body of fiction and non-fiction that would stand the test of time. But though the ambition is revealed, along with the techniques and the hard work and the personal cost, what remains a mystery is the creativity. This is as it should be: it is something Naipaul himself says is impossible to pin down. To fully appreciate this book it is necessary to have read at least a few of Naipaul's books and to have been somewhat aware of his place in the world as a writer. An illumination is the explanation of Naipaul's tendency over the years to make outrageous statements and stir people up. French places this in context of the Trinidadian practice of "picong", from the French "piquant," of deliberately provoking people. French says: "Whenever he got the chance in an interview, he would denounce something or somebody; in a Caribbean symbiosis, the subtler and more intense his writing grew over the years, the more throwaway his public remarks would become. In a much-quoted comment, when asked to explain the symbolism of the bindi (the coloured dot worn on the forehead of Indian women) he said, 'The dot means: my head is empty.'" Other interesting revelations include his enthusiastic embrace of the computer after a lifetime on a typewriter, his ardent cultivation of certain upper-class Englishmen and women leading him to appear later much like a country squire, and the huge sums he was earning in the 1980s with the help of his new agent Andrew Wylie (also, the details of his persistent worry over tight finances prior to the 1980s). French's book is meticulously researched and splendidly written, with the human element, the rich fabric of one man's life, holding our attention throughout. His writing never calls attention to itself--the story always moves ahead--and that pulls in the reader more than anything else. In 1990, a few days after he is knighted, Naipaul visits Trinidad. He meets Sam Selvon, whom he knew before leaving Trinidad in 1950. Selvon, in his 60s, lives in Canada, and has dropped by to meet his old flame, Naipaul's beautiful sister Kamla. Naipaul, Selvon, and an old friend called Ken Ramchand go fishing at 4am the next morning. They hire a boat, and Sir V.S. Naipaul, future Nobel Prize winner, strips down to his jockeys and jumps into the water with the other two, speaking dialect ("What she say to that?"), and being one of the boys, this man from a small place who went on to become one of our greatest writers and chroniclers, and whose life in its complexity mirrored the movement and turmoil of our last century. The book has a collection of rare photos covering the course of Naipaul's career, most never seen before. It ends with Naipaul and his new wife Nadira scattering Pat's ashes in a wood, Nadira saying the Muslim Fatiha for her, and Naipaul crying, and then (in an echo of the last line of Mr Biswas), "they went back in the taxi to the empty house." Ankush Saikia is author of the novel Jet City Woman. This is his exclusive contribution to TNS.
Zia
Mohyeddin column The expression 'as right as
rain' means that someone or something is all right. It can apply to a I, like many other people, have always assumed that since rain is a regular feature of life in England the expression must have come into everyday speech to acknowledge the permanence of rain. Behold my surprise when I learned that the original phrase was 'as right as a 'trivet' which was still in use in the beginning of the 19th century. A 'trivet' was a tripod-like stand which remained steady on its three legs as it supported cooking vessels by the fire in the correct upright position. The connection between 'right' and 'trivet' does not become clear until the original meaning of 'right' is understood. 'Right' meant 'steady.' In an age when there wasn't a great deal of information about weather, it was assumed that when it rained it rained steadily. I learned all this from a wonderful book, "Everyday Phrases: Their Origins and Meanings," written by Neil Ewart. For someone like myself, who thrives on words and their import, this book was like manna. I devoured it avidly. Ewart sheds light on many everyday phrases that appear to us to be modern, but have been in existence for hundreds, in some cases, thousands of years. We use them automatically knowing something of their meaning but not always their full implication. He also tells us the fascinating stories behind the origin of some of the expressions. For the edification of my readers I pick a few of my favourites. 'Saved by the bell.' Today the expression is associated, by most people, with the ringing of the bell at the end of each round in a boxing match, but used in a non-sporting context, it means to be saved from a dire situation at the last possible moment. The strangest example of this occurred in England in the late 17th century, during the reign of William and Mary, when a sentry at Windsor Castle was accused of being asleep on duty. His defense at the court-martial was that he was not asleep because he had heard the clock of St. Paul's in London strike thirteen at midnight. The court ridiculed the idea that the sound of the bells of a London church tower could carry over the twenty miles between London and Windsor. The sentry was sentenced to death. While imprisoned and awaiting execution, some citizens of London heard of the sentry's story and his denial of the charge: they verified, to the satisfaction of the authorities, that the clock of St.Paul's did, in fact, strike thirteen instead of twelve on that particular night. The sentry was 'saved by the bell.' The story may be apocryphal but it throws some light on how quiet city life was in those days. Incidentally, the sentry, Ewart tells us, lived to the ripe old age of 102. The origin of 'a frog in the throat', an expression used to describe anyone with a croaking voice, is no less interesting. In the middle ages frogs were actually put into throats, not to be eaten, but to cure infections, such as fungus growth, known as 'thrush.' The head of a live frog was placed in the mouth and, as it breathed, it was said to withdraw disease into itself. One of my favourite expressions is: 'grin like a Cheshire cat' probably because I have fond memories of Cheshire, a county in which I once worked as a farm labourer. I didn't see too many cats there; the one owned by the wife of my employer was mostly asleep by the log fire. Cheshire is famous for its cheeses. They used to be marked with the head of a cat. Ewart says that the true meaning of the saying has nothing to do with a cheese, as the 'cat' was a man and the original saying was: 'grin like a Cheshire Caterling.' Caterling was the name of a forest ranger 500 years ago, who was a skilled swordsman, and not only a terrifying individual for poachers, but also a man with a huge, hideous grin. Over the years Caterling became shortened to 'cat.' Ewart informs us that the expression was in use long before Lewis Carroll employed it in 'Alice in Wonderland.' (Alice saw a cat in Wonderland which vanished and all Alice could see was the grin). I first came across the expression 'like the curate's egg' in a review of the old Vic production of Macbeth. The reviewer had written that Paul Rogers' Macbeth was like the curate's egg. I asked Kay, a fellow drama student, what it meant and she, being an American, was equally puzzled. Later on, we learnt that it meant something good or satisfactory in some ways, through not in the others. In tracing the origin, Neil Ewart explains that the phrase arose from an illustrated joke in Punch in the year 1895. A curate is taking breakfast in the home of his bishop who says, "I'm afraid you've got a bad egg, Mr. Jones." As the curate continues to dip his spoon into the egg he looks across at the Bishop and says, "Oh no, my good Lord, I assure you! Parts of it are excellent." The vagaries of pronunciation know no bounds. Take the well-known proverb, 'to spoil the ship for a hap'orth o'tar: The 'ship' does not refer to a sailing boat but to 'sheep', a word which in many areas of England, is pronounced as 'ship.' 'To spoil the ship for a hap'orth o' tar', meant losing a sheep by failing to protect the wounds or sores by treating them with the tar which was known to be effective – and cheap. (Hap'orth was short for half a penny worth). The other phrase which is very much in use these days is 'to steal someone's thunder' which means to take the credit for someone else's work, idea or achievement. The phrase has a theatrical background. In the mid-17th century a dramatist, probably Nahum Tate, invented a machine for reproducing the sound of thunder to be used in the famous storm scene in his version of 'King Lear.' It is said that a few days later he visited another playhouse and was greatly dismayed to find that a rival had copied his idea and was using a similar machine. In his anguish he proclaimed, 'Someone has stolen my thunder." Everyday Phrases: Their Origins and Meanings is a treasure trove. |
the salacious details it provided: the great writer who had frequented
prostitutes, his long-suffering wife, the hints of S&M in his affair with
his mistress, his open admission that he had in all probability caused the
death of his wife, then the dumping of his mistress and a sudden second
marriage. This is interesting stuff no doubt, both for lay readers and for
long-time Naipaul followers. But it tends to distract from the achievements
of this remarkable book and its contentious subject. To read this book is to
comprehend the full extent of Naipaul's ambition and struggle to become the
writer he is today. People have questioned his wisdom in allowing such a
candid portrait of himself to emerge, but French, without taking sides, makes
us admire the sheer bloodyminded-ness with which Naipaul rose to the top,
never mind the consequences to himself or to others. Always the writer,
Naipaul was recently travelling through Africa again, in his 75th year,
looking for material for a work of non-fiction.
neurotic and impractical man dependant on his wife's large family, who
somehow overcame his background of deprivation and blankness and managed to
become a local journalist and the author of a couple of short stories. He is
the "Mr Biswas" of Naipaul's most enduring achievement, and it was
he who transmitted to his young son--along with the wish to write and the
idea of the nobility of the writer--his own hysteria and neuroses. His
influence on Vidia cannot be overstated; indeed, one could say it was to Pa's
writing that Naipaul turned to in his darkest hour in Britain and saw what he
could write about and how.
accompany him on his travels in search of his material, and then come home to
Pat to work on his books. Both women suffered, and Naipaul kept it going for
more than 20 years, both needing and abusing them. Some kink in both these
women kept them from leaving him. Pat died of cancer (brought on by a fatal
relapse which was caused in part by Naipaul's admission that he had been a
"great prostitute man" in his youth) in 1996, and then Naipaul
finished things with Margaret by asking his agent to send her a sum of money,
and promptly married Nadira Alvi, an ambitious Pakistani woman some 24 years
younger than him, and whom he had met in Pakistan while travelling for Beyond
Belief, his second book on Islam.
person's health or circumstances, or to an opinion which is considered to be
quite sound. We use it more often than we think. Consoling a friend who is
moping, or stroking a child's hair, who is crying because she has bruised her
knee, you tend to resort to this catch phrase: "Don't fret: you'd be as
right as rain tomorrow."