People who think I exaggerate the importance of Miguel Street in my development as a writer should consider some of the stories from A Flag on the Island. ‘The Mourners’ and ‘My Aunt Gold Teeth’ would be among the earlier things I wrote, ‘The Mourners’ done when I was eighteen and ‘My Aunt Gold Teeth’ when I was twenty-two. People were kind about ‘The Mourners’ in Oxford. It was read out to small groups and it flattered me to hear distinguished voices reading my words. But as the years passed I began to have doubts about ‘The Mourners’ and I pass these doubts to the reader. What was the basis of the narrator’s knowingness in ‘The Mourners’? How much did he know about grief or birth? How much of this knowingness was pretence, to go with the satirical tone of the narration? I got to feel in the end that that story and one or two others like it had got away by the skin of their teeth. I saw very clearly that skill with the language is no substitute for true experience. I leave these stories in this compilation because they are among the earlier work I wrote.
Day by day, as I wrote Miguel Street, I seemed to see the faces on the street. I saw their fences, the pavements outside their houses, and many of the other things that went to create their characters in my eyes. They were like a revelation, bringing back to life. Respectable old black women lived in tightly fenced jalousied houses, and one never saw what they looked like. Some houses, not of the best kind, had no fences; these were dwelt in for some reason by Indians. The shop at the end of the street was of course a Chinese shop, and the older people there still had trouble with English. As the street came near to me in this writing recall, I moved away from what was close to my house. I went near the sea, the area we knew as Docksite. This area of the harbour had been dredged and deepened before the war and the dredged-up mud of the Gulf had slowly dried into black saucers cracked at the edges. This area became the American military base. They ran up their attractive timber buildings very fast and their building talent, their elegance, put our houses to shame. The men were always neatly dressed, khaki trousers and shirt freshly ironed, the khaki tie tucked in between the third and fourth button of the shirt. Jeeps appeared on the street, driven by soldiers apparently indifferent to the wear of tyres; our own poor folk had to be more careful with their smooth, shiny, irreplaceable tyres. Every evening the American flag on the base was lowered, and the bugle sounded: an extra drama added to the life of the street.
In this section ‘The Nightwatchman’s Occurrence Book’ deserves a special mention. It is my most anthologised piece of short fiction, and deservedly so. It is very funny. The idea came to me from a boarding-house where I had stayed when I was doing the travel for The Middle Passage. I carried the idea for ten years and then, when I was in India, gathering material for An Area of Darkness, and being shocked out of my life as I have said earlier by a letter from a London bank, I wrote it all at once on the typewriter. Some of the sentences are still with me.
‘… he pelt a box of matches at me, matches scatter all over the place …’
‘Mr Wills complained bitterly to me this morning that last night he was denied entry to the bar by you. I wonder if you know exactly what the purpose of this hotel is …’
‘Mr Manager, remarks noted. I sorry I didnt get the chance to take some education sir. Chas. Ethelbert Hillyard’
‘This morning I received a report from a guest that there were screams in the hotel during the night. You wrote All Quiet. Kindly explain in writing. W. A. G. Inskip’
‘Sir, nothing unusual means everything usual. I dont know, nothing I writing you liking …’
The stories in the last section of this compilation are quite different from what has gone before. They are the work of a liberated man, and the reader may like to see how far he can link the stories of Miguel Street with the stories of this final section. Its theme is displacement in the modern world, an idea which would have been beyond the imagining of the people of Miguel Street. The main fiction of this segment has been left out here. It is now published as an independent novel in another place, and in that place I have written about the origin and inspiration of the work. The idea of displacement did not come out of the air; I had sold my London house, and was living and trying to write — not unhappily, but with a daily sense of wrongness — in someone else’s house. It was a far cry from that to the plight of two English expatriates caught in tribal conflict in East Africa; but that is the way literary inspiration sometimes works. The expatriates in this fiction are working for the local African government. They’re reasonably secure, and for them, besides, in the good times the country is a kind of resort, with every sort of amenity. The whole protected thing begins to break down at a time of local tribal conflict, and reaches a climax during a long drive from a place like Nairobi to a place like Kampala. I made these characters English because I wished to make the point that displacement doesn’t concern colonised people alone.
The managing of that narration, of the increasingly dangerous long drive, would have been taxing enough for an experienced writer. But I added to it two unrelated stories. These stories were meant to support, to add weight to, the main fiction and also indirectly to bring the writer into the picture, to link the writer to the material he was presenting to the reader. The first of these supporting stories was about an Indian servant in Washington, the second about a West Indian Asian in London. And, as though that wasn’t complexity enough, there was a non-fiction prologue, and a non-fiction epilogue. The prologue began in Greece and was played out on a Greek ship going to Alexandria; the epilogue was about Chinese communist sightseers in Egypt (the reader should bear in mind that the Egyptian piece was written in 1969–70).
The superstructure was too great. Perhaps the central fiction by itself (about the expatriates caught up in a tribal bloodletting) would have been enough to make my point; but this was the first time that I had ventured out into what I saw as metropolitan territory and I wished to leave nothing to chance. Later, when I had shed my nerves about the metropolis, I was to wonder why I had burdened myself with all the extra labour. The subsidiary pieces of In a Free State were not easy to write, they each required to be ‘set’. This slowed me at a time when I would have liked to move more quickly but the book brought me reward of a sort. It won the Booker Prize, then in its second or third year, and still at that stage dedicated to the idea of giving recognition to the unrecognised. So the book gave me a kind of reputation.
V. S. Naipaul
SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY
The Adventures of Gurudeva, André Deutsch, 1976, a collection of stories by Naipaul’s father Seepersad, with a foreword by Naipaul, is indispensable reading for anyone interested in this writer’s work, besides possessing its own considerable interest. The books of his brother Shiva are also recommended. They include the novels Fireflies, André Deutsch, 1970, and The Chip-Chip Gatherers, André Deutsch, 1973.
V. S. Naipauclass="underline" A Critical Introduction, Macmillan, 1975, by Landeg White, is valuable for its sensitive readings of the earlier work by a critic inward with West Indian life. Another critic of West Indian background is Selwyn Cudjoe, whose V. S. Naipauclass="underline" A Materialist Reading, University of Massachusetts, 1988, has an appreciative discussion of Biswas; the later work is discussed from an adversarial standpoint. A similar approach, concerned mainly with Naipaul’s non-fiction, can be found in London Calling: V. S. Naipaul, Postcolonial Mandarin, Oxford University Press, 1992, by Rob Nixon. An earlier account is William Walsh’s V. S. Naipaul, Oliver and Boyd, 1973. John Thieme’s The Web of Tradition, Hansib Publishing, 1987, deals with ‘the uses of allusion’ in the fiction. A short study by Peter Hughes, V. S. Naipaul, Routledge, appeared in 1988. Naipaul’s books have attracted a large amount of periodical criticism: a selection of such material is presented in Critical Perspectives on V. S. Naipaul, Heinemann Educational, ed. Robert Hamner, 1979.