The Long Afterlife of Naipaul’s Biswas
By Missang Oyongha
Trinidadian by accident of birth, Indian by family tree, English by choice of domicile, V. S. Naipaul was a Darwinian by instinct. He was much taken with beginnings, origin stories, first causes that explained the individual. Brilliant in college and feted by his peers, he adapted early to a diet of admiration. At twelve, he dreamed of migratory flight from "small, remote , unimportant' Trinidad.’ A scholarship boy, he trusted in natural selection to underwrite his leap from provincial Port of Spain to imperial Oxford. Nurturing a fantasy of dominance , he wrote to his father from England that he wanted 'to beat the English at their language,' as if mere fluency would not suffice, as if wordplay were a spectator sport, swordplay.
Unburdened by nostalgia, Naipaul became a ruthless cosmopolitan, who insisted, like a temporal and biological puzzle, that he was ' without a past, without ancestors,’ In Trinidad he had felt marooned by the bargain of indenture that brought his grandparents from India to work in the cane plantations. In England his Indianness made him different, vulnerable, even exotic ; his talent gave him a sort of carapace. Visiting India for the first time in the 1960s, he found himself denied ' a special quality of response' - the face that had been distinctive in London became in Bombay merely prosaic. William James thought that his brother Henry belonged only to the tribe of the James family. Henry James was of course American by birth, European by cultural baptism, and English by transplant. V. S. was only incidentally, a Naipaul; being Trinidadian' was a mistake” ; in reality Naipaul was self-fashioned to resist classification, a tribe of one.
Convinced of the nobility of his vocation, Naipaul smothered the natural drive for children in favour of the acquired impulse to write. He courted the extinction of his branch, secure in the realisation that he would be perpetuated by his books. Other writers, save for his father, Seepersad, were peripheral creatures ; women writers in particular were a vestigial life form. The chilling opening lines from A Bend in the River( 1979) refer to 'men who are nothing, men who allow themselves to become nothing ' . In interviews the Naipaul who wrote those words came across as a man who by dint of fine prose, if not by force of tooth and claw, had himself overcome anonymity and inconsequence. He had a fine collection of Indian art. Like Bellow's von Humboldt Fleischer, he seemed to have no old friends, 'only ex-friends '. He often explained his work in terms of randomness, intuition ( ' Every book has amazed me' ) yet the man who 'followed no other profession' , who told his first wife Patricia that she was the ideal spouse for a ' future grand old man of letters' must have been acutely conscious of his life's teleological shape, and certain of his historically inevitable place.
Half a century ago Karl Miller insisted that ' there could be no cult of Naipaul'. For all its range, there was no tinge of the avant-garde about Naipaul's writing. He seemed unlikely to attract the obsession, imitation, and election to high priesthood that avant- garde writers claimed as their due. Miller was writing in 1967, in the first decade of Naipaul's writing career. This career had begun with three minor, fine statements of talent, and then issued in catholic, brilliant arcs of fiction [ A House for Mr Biswas, The Mimic Men), history (The Loss of El Dorado) and travel reportage (The Middle Passage, An Area of Darkness) . Naipaul' s themes were coalescing, book by book: cultural alienation, 'half-formed societies, the postcolonial world and its discontents, exile, India, personal history.
By the late 1960s a Naipaul admiration society, but no cult, was forming in the British literary pages, among commissioning editors, and in the writing prize committees. Miguel Street had been awarded, in 1959, the first Somerset Maugham prize given to a non- European writer. The Mimic Men won the W. H. Smith Award in 1968 . When The Middle Passage was published, in 1962, Evelyn Waugh reviewed Naipaul, publicly, with a right-handed salute to his 'exquisite mastery of the English language'. Later on Waugh would review Naipaul, to Nancy Mitford, in left- handed terms, as 'that clever little nigger' who had just won another literary prize. Naipaul's public persona was equally hardening into relief in the foreground of his prose. He was the presiding brahmin of a finishing school for snobs. He was the exile who felt existentially wronged by being born in Trinidad ; the student who had found his Oxford reading list inadequate; the traveller who couldn't bear Indian hotels, or Indian squalor; the reader who pronounced himself distinctly unimpressed by the novelistic gifts of Austen, Hardy , James, Conrad, and 'almost every contemporary French novelist'. I am put in mind, rehearsing the above, of the irascible Russian novelist Vladimir Brusiloff in P. G. Wodehouse's story, "The Clicking of Cuthbert,” who declares to the hapless Raymond Parsloe Devine of the Wood Hills Literary Society : "No novelists any good except me. Sovietski yah! Nastikoff - bah! I spit me of zem all".
In the 1970s a Naipaul admiration society, but still no cult, began to form in America. C L R James told an interviewer in 1980 that Naipaul's reputation in this period was essentially an American one. What Edward Said later disparaged as ' epistles to Hampstead and the Upper East Side ' appeared regularly in the New York Review of Books. In a 1968 NYRB piece on The Mimic Men V. S. Pritchett had hailed Naipaul as 'a virtuoso', and ' a brilliant chameleon from the Caribbean '. When Naipaul himself began to write for the NYRB, he reported from Mobutu's Zaire, Uruguay, Peron's Argentina, the Argentina too of Jorge Luis Borges. In 'Borges and the Bogus Past' , Naipaul would uncharitably chide the blind Borges for his perceived failures of political vision, for his 'ancestor worship '. Naipaul's essays were written ultimately as forensic accounts, a genre whose glories are morbid curiosity, blunt-force candor, detachment , and a fascination with dissection of people and places. The Killings in Trinidad was a noirish real-life story from Naipaul's native island. It was a tour- de - force of storytelling and characterisation in which Naipaul appears to have seen clinically through the curious mystique of a murderer, seen through the tragic delusions of white liberal chic . 'He saw everything', is Andre Parent's admiring summation , when S. Prasad, the novelist character based on Naipaul in Paul Theroux's My Secret History (1989), has swiftly deduced the female sex and Italian origins of a correspondent from West Africa merely by peering at the handwriting on the envelope.
When Miller wrote his essay in 1967, Naipaul was four years from winning the Booker Prize for In A Free State, but there were already intimations of the symbolic plumage to come the book-length studies of his work, the knighthood, the Jerusalem Prize, the David Cohen Prize, the Nobel. Theroux's Andre Parent noted of the fictional S. Prasad that in London 'his hotel and restaurant reservations often appeared in the name 'Sir Arch Prasad,’ which pleased him.’ He was not yet Sir Vidia but he was certainly seeming patrician in advance. Naipaul's work was beginning to appear like the 'fragments of a great confession', in Goethe's phrase. What we may consider the seven deadly sins of Naipaul's personal theology were being invoked in testament after testament from the Third World emptiness, faith, fantasy, fundamentalism, mimicry, rage, resentment . A House for Mr Biswas was increasingly being described, by critics and fellow writers, as a masterpiece.
'How do masterpieces arrive?' asked F. R. Leavis in The Common Pursuit. 'Gifted individuals occur, inspiration sets in, creation results.’ It was of course a facile formulation, a chimera that Leavis knowingly conjured to illustrate 19th century critical assumptions about literature and its making. It took no account of drafts and revisions or the writer's wrestle with language and form and tradition. Somerset Maugham wrote in The Summing Up that a masterpiece was "more likely to come as the culminating point of a laborious career than as the lucky fluke of untaught genius". Naipaul admitted that the writing of A House for Mr Biswas, owing to the psychological toll of artful recreation and fevered invention, had blurred his actual memory of the real-life occurrences behind the narrative. The novel has always seemed to me the one in which Naipaul's great gifts cohered most remarkably. The three early salvos - The Mystic Masseur, The Suffrage of Elvira, and Miguel Street - had revealed his comic gift, his ear for dialogue, and his ability to create memorable characters.
Contrary to Maugham's thesis of late-blooming masterpieces, A House for Mr. Biswas like Thomas Mann's Buddenbrooks or Achebe's Things Fall Apart, was written by a man only in his twenties. "Where in fiction is another Biswas ? " asked Paul Theroux in 1972. If A House for Mr Biswas is regarded as a masterpiece, or as an exemplar of what we might term the postcolonial sublime, it is surely due to Naipaul's sheer gift for storytelling; his thematic seriousness, leavened with wit; his aversion to cliche; his command of registers high and low; his psychological acuity; his exuberant and compelling characters; his historical consciousness ; his nuance.
In his Nobel lecture, "Two Worlds," Naipaul was nevertheless keen to maintain that, however much we may probe and parse, "the mystery of the writing will remain " In an author's note to The Return of Eva Peron and The Killings in Trinidad, Naipaul wrote that "from the end of 1970 to the end of 1973 no novel offered itself to me." That historical precision (the dates suggest parentheses enclosing a creative void) the scrupulous accounting, the passive tense that belies the unusual intensity of the prose that followed, was pure Naipaul. His brief note offered a glimpse into how novelists construe the anxious pauses between their books, while they are waiting for inspiration to set in, or for novels to offer themselves. His first three novels, in Naipaul's telling, had been mere apprenticeships for the writing of A House for Mr Biswas. As a travelogue, The Return of Eva Peron was thus haunted , in its grand flawed characters, in its portraits of political dysfunction, in its tracing of the arc from Michael X's tangled motives to his violent crimes ; in its gift for well- phrased malice, by the ghost of a deferred, if not necessarily preferred form, the novel.
Naipaul's fourth novel, A House for Mr Biswas was published in 1961 . When Naipaul spoke with Adam Low for the 2008 BBC documentary, The Strange Luck of V S Naipaul, he told his interviewer that he had originally conceived of the novel as one cataloging the possessions of a man at the end of his life. The finished version went beyond mere memorial inventory. It gave us Mohun Biswas, one of the touchstone figures of 20th century fiction, a character who was more than the sum of his earthly goods. Such a character required a novel of heft, and Naipaul conjured narrative length and heft of a 19th century vintage.
'English prose was the object of my writing ambition' , wrote Naipaul in a 2007 essay on the Walcott who dreamed of 'prolonging the line of Marlowe, of Milton'. When he came to write the English prose of his ambition, he plumbed a hoard of memory and experience to confect a novel that was a familial portrait, richly and comically drawn ; a filial tribute to his father Seepersad ; an exploration of Trinidadian masculinity and its discontents ; the chronicle of a marriage; the history of two obsessions, with writing, and with owning a house ; a quest narrative in which the object of pursuit is as consuming, as elemental, as Ahab's whale. It was also, ultimately, an exercise in Proustian recall.
In one of his lectures on Dickens, Nabokov praised the English novelist's gift, in Bleak House, for 'vivid evocation with or without the use of figures of speech and for a kind of incantation, a verbal formula repetitively recited with growing emphasis '. Nabokov could well have been describing the cadenced progress of the final paragraph of the prologue of A House for Mr Biswas. The passage is expressive to the border of eloquence, stealthily building up, clause by clause, to its poignant, forceful point:
How terrible it would have been at this time, to be without it: to have died among the Tulsis, amid the squalor of that large, disintegrating and indifferent family; to have left Shama and the children among them in one room worse, to have lived without even attempting to lay claim to one's portion of the earth; to have lived and died as one had been born. unnecessary and unaccommodated.
In writing A House for Mr Biswas, Naipaul favoured realist tradition over modernist vogue. Albert Guerard, arguing for the virtues of Saul Bellow's novel, The Adventures of Augie March (1953), referred to the ' impersonal gray realism ' of the American fiction against which Bellow was ostensibly in reaction. A House for Mr Biswas was realist, but not gray. Its prose was veined with irony, but not clotted with figurative cleverness, or written as though to resist paraphrase. Not for Naipaul Alain Robbe-Grillet's avant-gardist assertions that, as a fictional mainstay, ' the novel of characters belongs to the past' ; or that, as a fictional aim, psychological depth was obsolete. Naipaul was, however, not yet ready to do violence to the novel form, as he would ten years later with In A Free State (1971).
In the 1990s, visiting a Poussin exhibition in London, Naipaul noted the French painter's pictorial breadth and depth , that singular ability to evoke human and natural plenitude on the flat surface of the canvas. On the flat surface of the page, Naipaul's own pictorial breadth in A House for Mr Biswas was evinced in his penchant for panorama, for catalogue, and for the telling observation of minutiae.
Were he a painter rather than a writer, Naipaul would surely have been a figurative rather than an abstract one, given to precise rendering rather than occult connotation. He had the figurative painter's fidelity to the particulars of observed detail - His gift for panorama meant that 'he saw everything' . In this he reminds us of the Conrad who hoped by the power of the written word to make the reader 'see'. Early in the novel, Naipaul shows us Mr Biswas on the street in Pagotes, hunting for a job. It is a painterly scene, and while it may be isolated from future incident, it is nevertheless emblematic of a character who, like his author, sees everything, records everything :
Grocer's shops, smelling damply of oil, sugar and salted fish. Vegetable stalls, damp but fresh, and smelling of earth. Grocer's wives and children stood oily and confident behind counters. The women behind the vegetable stalls were old and correct with thin, mournful faces; or they were young and plump with challenging and quarrelsome stares; with a big-eyed child or two hanging about behind the purple sweet potatoes to which dirt still clung; and babies in the background lying in condensed milk boxes. And all the time donkey carts, horse carts and ox-carts rumbled and jangled in the roadway, the heavy iron-rimmed wheels grating over gravel and wobbling over the bumpy road.
Balzac's Old Goriot, arriving at the Maison Vauquer where he will live out his days, owns 'eighteen cambric shirts', a gold snuff box, and armoires laden with his household silver. It is an inventory of actual and sentimental value, fated to be depleted by the time of his death. In keeping with Naipaul's original scheme for the novel, A House forr Mr Biswas is shot through with a recurring catalogue of possessions. When the Biswases are leaving The Chase they find that they cannot do so on a donkey cart ; they have acquired more furniture than they arrived with: ' these disregarded years had been years of acquisition'. Ultimately, when they arrive at the house on Sikkim Street, the Biswas family counts among its possessions " the kitchen safe, the rocking chair, the fourposter, Shama's dressing table, the bookcase and desk , Theophile's bookcase, the Slumberking, the glass cabinet ; the destitute's dining table, the yellow typewriter." There are mementoes of the long arc from Hanuman House to Sikkim Street, the gatherings of a lifetime for so long scattered and even unnoticed."
Conferring with Seth during his early days at Hanuman House, Mr Biswas notices that a fellow son-in-law, Govind, just arrived from his labours in the Tulsi fields, is 'anxious to appear tired, anxious to please.’ We read also that Seth is pleased; Seth being of course the object of this homage of fatigue and fawning. It is a telling observation of what may seem like the minutiae of daily life in a large household. Naipaul is however prefiguring, with ironic humour, the idea of order in Hanuman House. It is, for Mr Biswas, a cautionary scene.
We accept, as a mark of fictional piety, the single-minded, linear progress of episodes, the unfurling of plot, the exposition of character, but A House for Mr Biswas is vivified also by sociological details which are both incidental and apposite; asides which are no less resonant for being unelaborated ; histories that haunt the margins of the narrative frame but do not breach the story. For instance, at the Shorthills estate of the Tulsis, Mr Biswas imagines " the other race of Indians moving about this road before the world grew dark for them, " suggesting a time before Columbus and a landscape latent with buried trauma. Early in the novel we are told, summarily, that the photographer at Raghu's funeral has "Chinese, Negro, and European blood," a family tree that reflects in its hybridity the racial melange of Trinidad.
As part of the tacit accord between reader and author, we submit to the entire gamut of formal and linguistic quirks. Naipaul exercises his storyteller's sovereign right to begin the novel with a prologue that lays out the death of the titular Biswas. One of Jose Saramago's characters says that "the true biography of each of us would be to ascend the river of thoughts to its primeval source." It may be argued that a record of thoughts is no more a totalising portrait than a catalogue of possessions. A House for Mr Biswas is biographical in scope, and it traces the course of its central character's inner life from childhood until near death .Throughout the novel Naipaul makes preemptive, but not fugitive asides that allow us to eavesdrop on Mr Biswas's present consciousness, as well as his future self.
We come to be fascinated, as a matter of course, by the eccentricities of the central characters ~ Mr Biswas, Ajodha, Mrs Tulsi, Shama - and their evolution chapter by chapter, but the novel is enlivened also by characters not granted extended tenancy in the novel: For instance, the Negro boy at Anand's school who places frist in the college scholarship examination has hitherto lulled his classmates into underestimating his scholarship. He has cultivated an air of Bertie Woosterish indifference to anything more serious than English county cricket, or the novels of P G Wodehouse. He has gained notoriety among his classmates as an adolescent lothario feverishly pursuing , alter school, his precocious initiation into the sexual mysteries.
Gore Vidal thought humour, " that most devastating of gifts," was "usually thrust at birth upon the writer in English." The Naipaul of A House for Mr Biswas, and before that, Miguel Street(1959), The Suffrage of Elvira( 1958), and The Mystic Masseur ( 1957 ), was an English language humourist of the first rank, an impresario skilled in the gamut from erudite wit to tumbledown slapstick . For playful irony, subversiveness, and sheer incitement of laughter, Naipaul belongs with the deans of English farce, the Wodehouse of a story like " The Clicking of Cuthbert " and the Peter Cook of a sketch like" 'Blacks Equals Whites." Consider this exchange of repartee from Miguel Street : Titus Hoyt asked me, "What is the accusative singular of bellum ? " Feeling wicked, because I was. betraying him, I said to Titus Hoyt, "Mr Titus Hoyt , when you was my age, how you woulda feel if somebody did ask you that question ?"
In A House for Mr Biswas, Naipaul was particularly adept at conveying the verbal tics, the self-policing of the educated Trinidadian veering, mid-speech, between registers: " The next time your aunt Chinta open that big mouth - he broke off remembering grammar- the next time she opens her big mouth ... you just ask her if she has ever read Marcus Aurelius and Epictetus".
Much of the humour in the novel is in the dialogue, but Naipaul achieved comic and ironic effects by means of stealth too. There is deadpan exaggeration : "Hari believed in chewing every mouthful forty times " . There is understated caricature : Govind's body broadened into the sort of body that needs a waistcoat to give it dignity " . There is Swiftian irony : " Bipti agreed that it was better to have servants from one's own family" . And there is straight- faced reductio ad absurdum: the Tulsi sisters, on hearing their brother Owad's tales about the allegedly scandalous behaviour of Indians in England , "grow gravely conscious of "their responsibilities as the last representatives of Hindu culture ".
Naipaul had a particular gift for portraiture, and for alerting the reader to the moral and aesthetic subtleties suggested by the individual face. The pundit invited to read the horoscope of the newborn Mr Biswas " " has a sharp satirical face ". Ajodha's face " could express benignity rather than warmth" . Alec has a 'perpetual air of abstraction and debauch.' Mrs Tulsi's face ' though not plump, was slack, as if unexercised' . Ajodha's brother, Bhandhat, has a curved forehead that repeats ' the curve of his nose' .
Mr Biswas is a master of picong, the Trinidadian oral culture of mockery, sarcasm, repartee, and wordplay as swordplay. The dialogue I cited earlier from Miguel Street was an example of picong at play. At Hanuman House, Mr Biswas regales the insidiously silent Govind with his nicknames for the Tulsi clan. Later on, properly briefed, Seth confronts Mr Biswas with his 'blasphemies' : " I is the Big Boss, eh ? And Mai is the old queen and the old hen?And these two boys is the old gods, eh? Deserted by his verbal bravado, Mr Biswas can only mutter that he is sorry. " " "How can anyone be sorry for something he thinks ? . . I don't see how anyone can be sorry for something he thinks?" : Mrs Tulsi's refrains of anguished inquiry make her sound more like an analytic philosopher than like the chatelaine of Hanuman House.
In March 1951, the young Vidia Naipaul would write to his family from Oxford, expressing a wish that his father should begin a novel, especially because ‘the society of the West Indies is a very interesting one - one of phoney sophistication.’ A society interesting for its phoney sophistication had clearly developed habits of individual and collective pretension ripe for the Naipauls' ironic deflation. But the novel-writing task would fall to Vidia, not Seepersad Naipaul. In A House for Mr Biswas the chapter titled "The Revolution” depicts the return from England of the younger Tulsi son, Owad . A carnival air overtakes the Tulsi household, and the entire clan throngs the dock to welcome the returnee. It is fitting that this chapter shows Naipaul at his most comic and carnivalesque.
Owad has succumbed in England to a delirium of Russophilia , and he infects his family members with his Red fever and revolutionary fervour. He speaks 'familiarly of Russian generals and their battles' and 'pronounces Russian names impressively.’ Mischiefmaker- in- chief Mr Biswas goads Owad: 'Those Russian names are ugly like hell .. Rokossovsky and Coca- cola Kovsky ... ugly like hell' . Anand, precocious and impressionable, declares to his college friends that he is a communist. Mrs Tulsi, in a tone both naive and Socratic, asks : Why don't we all go to Russia ? ' Owad demurs, saying the Russians fought for it , apparently by erasing the Romanov dynasty. Owad's superficial primer on the Soviet utopia obscures the fact that were a Bolshevik-style revolution truly to occur in Trinidad the Tulsis would be dispossessed as bourgeois landowners. Owad, who has added animal cunning and gnomic utterance to his repertoire, tells Anand that 'a tortoise can pull in its head and go through a cesspit and remain clean'. His job as a government doctor is therefore. no ideological compromise but a revolutionary manouevre carried out without fear of taint. Chinta, with one uncomprehending look at the Soviet constitution, agrees with its vaunted provision that he who does not work shall not eat. Owad is one of Naipaul's mimic men, for whom naive fascination with the romance of names and the sonority of words, passes for sophistication. Owad appears to have acquired in England not just a medical degree but a penchant for loathing: 'Picasso is a man I loathe'. His elder brother, Shekhar, not to be outdone, asks: 'What do you think of Matisse?'. Shekhar, who has always urged Mr Biswas to 'be a little more sophisticated' in their arguments about politics, shows that his own knowledge of modern art is phoney, and his sophistication has been gleaned from the pages of his favourite Life magazine.
Freud told Lytton Strachey in 1928 that Hamlet was the first modern neurotic; arguably he is the one Shakespearean protagonist in whom one can discern a range of complexes that are resonant even today: repressed emotion, paralysing hesitancy, overthinking that wrecks the will to action. The modernist literary tradition equally gifted us a certain type of male neurotic. Eliot's Prufrock and Ellison's invisible man come to mind. They are sensitive characters, buttoned-up but not socially well-adjusted, assailed by deep personal complexes, possessing intricate inner lives. Mr Biswas is a character, but also a fascinating case history.
If alienation, disruption, and erasure are the quintessential modern themes, then Biswas is certainly modern. His peculiar neurosis springs from the disruption visited on him as an early fact of life when his father dies by drowning and the family is dispersed forever. In later years, when he has become a journalist for the Sentinel, he will discover to his chagrin that 'the world carried no witness to Mr Biswas birth and early years' ; the arcadia. of his childhood home and haunts has been erased. In its stead have sprouted oil derricks and grimy pumps, totems of the modern industrial complex.
Lionel Trilling thought that the archetypal hero of the modern novel, the ' Young Man from the Provinces' was by fictional custom equipped with poverty, pride and intelligence . A House for Mr Biswas belongs in the tradition of the apprenticeship novel , and its central character is born into poverty, while being naturally imbued with pride and intelligence. Poverty makes Mohun Biswas resentful of his mother, for their cramped lodgings , for leaving him vulnerable to Bhandat's violence and for their dependence on Tara's graces. His lifelong obsession with owning his own house can be traced to the formative trauma of life as a tenant and lodger, housed but not at home, whose welcome is provisional, liable to be revoked.
Mr Biswas's pride makes him unwilling to submit to the twin magisteria of Hindu observance and the Tulsi family. His sceptical, bruised intelligence means that even as a brahmin immersed since childhood in the dark motifs and brightly coloured ceremonies of Hindu religion, he is never wholly dyed to the point of fervour. He recalls one of Isaac Bashevis Singer's yeshiva boys who forswear the rabbinical path and lapse into sensual indulgence or secular rationality. Mr Biswas is apprenticed while young to a Hindu pundit in order that he might pursue a religious vocation, but he ruins his chances with a minor error. In one of the novel's Dickensian echoes, the young Mr Biswas is required to trawl through the pile of offerings to pick out pennies for Pundit Jairam. The pundit routinely searches his apprentice to see that not a farthing has been held back. Later on, during his adult flirtation with the Aryan sect, he suggests the mock- heroic idea of converting Orthodox Hindus by the sword.
Ironically,his intelligence and scepticism make Mr Biswas less decisive, more Hamlet -like in his hesitancy, especially at crucial moments. The agency that he presumed he was exercising when he impulsively wrote his love note to Shama quickly spirals away into the hands of. Mrs Tulsi and Seth. Even though he has misgivings about the speed and presumption of the betrothal to Shama, he acquiesces because he feels he has committed himself morally and legally. . Even his signal triumph, the acquisition of the house on Sikkim Street, is fraught with the same combination of impulsiveness and resignation : ' Having committed himself, he lacked the courage to go back, yet found the energy to go ahead.' The frisson of possession quickly fades; finally in hand, the house of Mr Biswas proves flawed in construction; its solidity more a matter of appearance than actuality; its purchase enabled by a loan whose interest keeps rising, whose principal remains largely unpaid at his death.
Mr Biswas takes pride in his difference. Thrown together in Port of Spain with his brother-in-law, Owad, he is ' flattered to be established as a wit and a madman. When he becomes a Sentinel journalist, after several incarnations as signpainter, bus conductor, plantation overseer, and shopkeeper, his uncle Ajodha says to him : 'Somehow I never felt you were made for a job in the fields.’ When his daughter Savi is born, the Tulsis fill out a birth certificate listing her father's occupation as labourer. Mr Biswas vents his outrage to Shama: ' Labourer ! Me! Where your family get all this bad blood, girl?' He decides that he will erase the offending designation and rename himself proprietor. This is during the period when he is superintending the Tulsi shop at The Chase. His wife objects: ' But you can't call yourself a proprietor. The shop belong to Mai'.
Mr Biswas is a bibliophile. He grows up reading the twenty volumes of The Book of Comprehensive Knowledge at Ajodha's house. He is not so bookish, however, that he cannot give up reading Samuel Smiles when he no longer finds any solace in that writer. When he first goes to the Sentinel offices to ask Mr Burnett for a job , he reels off, in lieu of journalistic experience, what he hopes are the talismanic names of the writers he has read: ' Hall Caine, Marie Corelli, Jacob Boehme. Mark Twain ... Samuel Smiles ... Marcus Aurelius... Epictetus' . At the heart of this recitation , slightly ridiculous as a job application, there is also something sublime. The flyleaf of Mr Biswas' s copy of Collins Clear-Type Shakespeare serves as a repository of births and vows, a makeshift Almanac de Biswas. Later on, he will come to think in headlines, imagining his own obituary with a certain alliterative dash: ROVING REPORTER PASSES ON. Mr Biswas is an enterprising journalist, with literary ambitions, but he remains a writer manque. He repeatedly initiates the beginning of a story titled 'Escape,' about a shopkeeper named Gopi, but it remains unfinishable, a telling germ beyond which no narrative will flourish.
When I referred earlier to the 19th century heft of A House for Mr Biswas, I had in mind the epic breadth of the narrative , in which Naipaul recreates the course of a man's life from cradle to pyre, and writes by default the history of a milieu. I meant also to invoke the way in which the novel rehearses the close observation and irony of the comedy of manners; the biographical trajectory and length of the apprenticeship novel; the sober mimesis of events, the unfurling of the interior life that marked the realist novel; the sense of exuberance and adventure that characterised the picaresque novel; and that tragic sense of life, in Unamuno's phrase, from which the naturalist novel drew its lifeblood. Mr Biswas recalls, in the sheer poignancy of his fate, such characters as Tolstoy's Ivan Ilych, dying in the new house that had so delighted him, and Balzac's self- sacrificing old Goriot.
When Mr Biswas dies, the Sentinel does not give him the exultant ROVING REPORTER PASSES ON headline of his fancy , which construes death as life resolved ; he gets instead the staid, matter-of- fact JOURNALIST DIES SUDDENLY, which suggests death as life interrupted. In his essay,' Freud : Within and Beyond Culture,' Trilling wrote about how literature has always recorded the impulse of the self to find affirmation even in its own extinction ... even by its own extinction ". Mr Biswas has earlier made plain his distaste for ' the Hindu delight in tragedy, and the details of death' and it is entirely in keeping with Naipaul's discipline that Biswas dies offstage. His cremation is tersely reported, with elaboration kept to nil. His is not the operatic death of Tolstoy's Ivan Ilych, with that character's stoic, questioning meditations providing the chorus to his own dark fate; his lingering physical agony ; the screams that resound like chilling arias; the pathetic postures of physical frailty, and the seemingly endless twilight before the last rites. Illness serves to extinguish in Ivan Ilych the bourgeois drives for high office and ornate furnishings that have previously impelled him. The frisson of wielding judicial omnipotence over others has yielded to the brute intimations of transience in Ivan Ilych, who had felt so necessary, who had been so amply accommodated in the upper reaches of privilege and in the salons of the ambitious. Mortally sardonic, Ivan Ilych muses on his deathbed that he should not speak to his wife and son about the relief his extinction will afford them from pain, but must reject speech in favour of action and simply die.
With Mr Biswas the extinction of the self, his physical decline, begins as listlessness, ennui, a sense that 'there was nothing to wait for.' Biology being destiny, and thought being augury, there is ample precedent for this state of affairs in his biography. Mr Biswas has always been physically vulnerable with his unimpressive physique, his 'hammock-like calves' and his high-strung bowels. 'The void' has always been a theme of his dark ruminations, and towards the end he finds himself in a creative void, as well as a mental one. Mr Biswas has come to feel undervalued at work. His stint at the Community Welfare Department comes to an end, and he makes a return to the Sentinel at a reduced salary. To Anand he had inveighed against the Sentinel as just another capitalist rag, when his byline was erased and the disruptive new management directed his writing away from the freewheeling features of the Burnett days towards bland reportage so blinkered as to verge on officialese. The Sentinel puts him on half pay when he takes ill, and then finally sacks him. Fate being capable of irony, as Saramago wrote, Savi returns to a well-paid job just as her father loses his. Mr Biswas writes to sceptical Anand in England : " How can you not believe in God after this ?". Mr Biswas, who has ceded ambition and optimism to his children, cedes as well the debt to Ajodha. The self that is soon to be extinguished will nevertheless live on in Savi and Anand and Myna and Kamla. With Wordsworthian delight, with Wordsworthian pathos, in his dying days Mr Biswas tends his butterfly orchid, and marvels at the scent of the fast flowering shade tree. The narrator of Bellow's Ravelstein, on hearing that the dying, eponymous character is heading off to Paris for one final jaunt, admits that "it seemed an unserious thing for a dying man to be doing." In the midst of the void., the sublime.
In place of friends, Mr Biswas has situational allies and transient acquaintances: his classmate and signwriting partner Alec in Pagotes; Misir from his days with the Aryan sect; Mr Burnett at the Sentinel, and Miss Logie at the Community Welfare Department. In place of a proper filial relationship with his mother, Bipti, there is emotional estrangement, rancor and reticence. With his siblings, Prasad, Pratap, and Dehuti, there is actual and emotional distance. In place of domestic warmth with his wile Shama, he displays the marital equivalent of buyers remorse, with sniper fire and retorts instead of conversation: ' Family ? Family? This blasted fowlrun you calling family ? There are only fitful moments of tenderness between them : 'By now Shama's head was on his soft arm, and they were lying side by side'. Near the end of the novel there is a striking passage where Mr Biswas, on the way to a beachside holiday with his family and Miss Logie, finds himself startled, like a stranger, by his wife's conversation with his boss : 'He had never imagined that Shama was so well-informed and had such violent prejudices'.
For solace he has his books, his Marcus Aurelius and Epictetus. For escape, when he moves to Port of Spain, there are the Sunday excursions to Pagotes, where, playing at adult delinquents, he and Jagdat indulge in secret drinking. To mask his inebriation on these occasions, Mr Biswas resorts to a curious pantomime of sobriety, saying little and moving slowly
His closest and most profound relationship is with his son, Anand. The paternal instinct being inseparable from the pedagogical one, Mr Biswas is gratified to educate his son about Coppernickus and Galilyo' ( 'Remember Galilyo. Always stick up for yourself' ). At the Green Vale Estate when he is an overseer, Mr Biswas teaches Anand about mixing colours, about making a compass, and to chant Rama Rama Sita Rama. Ever the imp, Mr Biswas is not above disclaiming his fatherhood for the sake of a theological point : ' God is your father ...l am just a man you know.: A House for Mr Biswas is rightly held to be about the writing apprenticeship of Mohun Biswas, but it is also in part about the writing apprenticeship of Anand Biswas, avatar of Vidia Naipaul. Precocious Anand already has, in elementary school, an obsession with the stylistic device of the noun followed by a dash, an adjective and the noun again: for example, the robbers - the ruthless robbers'. Later on in the novel, when Mr Biswas is writing his indignant letter to the Indian doctor who issues his mother's death certificate, he and Anand " hunted through the Collins Clear-Type Shakespeare and found the play Measure for Measure rich in things that could be quoted. They also quoted from the New Testament and the Gita. Mr Biswas introduces Anand to the novels of Dickens. Anand, offered a brandy - water confection by his grandmother Mrs Tulsi , accepts it only because of its Dickensian resonances. The father-son relationship is defined by awkwardness, mutual vulnerability, paternal pride, paternal solicitude and a shared fondness for the written word.
Mr Biswas exhibits a patently paternal wish for a counterlife for his son, a willingness to cede ambition and optimism to his offspring. Anand is placed on a talismanic diet of prunes and milk and receives private tutelage for the college scholarship examination. There are moments of rueful tension : I don't want you to be like me', says Mr Biswas' . to his son in self-reproach and expectation. Attempting to wean Anand off a schoolboy penchant for Westerns, Mr Biswas tells him, "When you get to my age you wouldn't care for Westerns" , only to be met with a vehement and wounding filial rejection : "When I get to your age I don't want to be like you."
A House for Mr Biswas continues a motif that recurs in Naipaul's writing, of sons dogged by the shadow of paternal incapacity, a taint or spectre to be exorcised. " If you don't look out you will become a grasscutter just like your father', " says his aunt Chinta to Anand. " You have the example of your father before you, and if you aren't careful you will become an idler like him ", writes Sarojini to her brother Willie Chandran in Naipaul's 2001 novel, Half a Life. It is a choric line, uttered first in mockery, written later in warning.
In Beyond Belief [ 1998 ], Naipaul related the affecting story of the Malaysian playwright, Syed Alwi, who lived in an unfinished house on the outskirts of Kuala Lumpur, and whose father had begun building, in his time, a two-storey house that he too could not complete. 'Things work like that in families' , fictional Sarojini wrote in her warning to Willie Chandran, and this seemed poignantly true of the real-life Alwis. The parallels with Mr Biswas are striking: for instance, when we read that Syed Alwi pere had married the daughter of rajas - people of princely lineage ~ just as Mohun Biswas had married the daughter of the brahmin Tulsis, just as in The Mimic Men Ralph Singh's father had married into the Bella Bella Bottling family , and just as Seepersad Naipaul had married the daughter of the wealthy Capildeos of Trinidad.
Syed Alwi pere, intelligent and at the start of a career as a magistrate in British-era Malaya suffers a mental breakdown at the age of twenty-two that lasts until his death at forty-five. In a Malay version of the idea of the tortured scholar, Syed Alwi pere is considered gila-isin', to have nobly wrecked his faculties by 'studying too hard, believing too hard'. In the twenty odd years before he dies, moving between states of lucidity and violent mania, he fathers six children in addition to the three born before his breakdown. ( "It sounds murderous, " said Naipaul to Syed Alwi fils) . With the help of an Indian woman who is a veritable deus ex machina ~ she pawns her gold to pay the Alwi children's fees - Syed Alwi pere is able to educate his children. 'Syed Alwi understood later that his father, through all his darkness, was educating him to be a high civil servant , as he himself had been '.
Naipaul wrote that this wrenching drama of his early life may have given Syed Alwi fils his vocation as a playwright. In a line that refers to Alwi, but might well have applied to Naipaul himself, he wrote that 'sometimes distance is required,sometimes an experience is so bad that it cannot be written about directly." Later on in his story about the Alwis, Naipaul adds tellingly that "a writer's earliest imaginative work ... can hold, sometimes in coded ways, the impulses and emotions that will always rule him. " Obliquely, Naipaul might well have been alluding to his own themes, his own family history of thwarted ambitions and transferred hopes, his own family ghosts, the mental breakdown of Seepersad Naipaul, the house in Sikkim Street that Mr Biswas bought, and the vexed nature of Naipaul's own relationship with his natal Trinidad.
If the man Naipaul saw Trinidad as a dot on the atlas, the novelist Naipaul drew its capital, Port of Spain, in its sprawling dimensions. In A House for Mr Biswas, Naipaul shows us the quarters of the city's destitutes, the 'aspirations of its districts', and the enzymes that roil its body politic: race, class, ambition, imperial rule, cricket, money, deprivation, the long hand of Hollywood, the American military presence.
Walking through Buenos Aires with Borges, Paul Theroux concluded that "the city belonged to him, and he had had a hand in inventing it.” Borges himself, visiting New York, was thrilled by the idea that the labyrinth of streets and the towers of steel and glass were his own fantastic creations. As readers, we come to think of cities in terms of their literary resonances; to our minds, cities owe more to the artifice of writers than to the bland ink of town planners, or to the vagaries of generations of settlers. Even such felicities of the landscape as cathedrals and squares, faceted hedges and sculpted facades, seem to have been imagined into being by a Borgesian conclave of fabulists. Thus it is Joyce's Dublin, Mahfouz's Cairo, Hugo's Notre Dame. If Borges held the patent for Buenos Aires, and spawned New York in a fit of invention, then Dublin surely was forged once and for all in the smithy of Joyce's cranium; and London, Rushdie's Ellowen Deeowen, was not merely once the imperial seat of Victoria but also the literary estate of Dickens. Port of Spain, of course, was formed by the pens of C. L. R. James , Samuel Selvon, Edgar Mittelholzer, and V. S. Naipaul. James's Port of Spain was Minty Alley (1935), just as Naipaul's earliest etching of the city's contours was Miguel Street. Selvon's Port of Spain has coolies and Yankees and fellows stealing away for oil-rich Venezuela at night. Mittelholzer's Port of Spain is an anthropological site, its social air charged with aspiration and ' phoney sophistication'. There is, as Mittelholzer writes in A Morning at the Office( 1950), 'the Belmonter's Club, for pure blooded negroes of no class, and the Woodstock club for pure-blooded negroes of the socially -rising lawyer- doctor civil servant class'. Mittelholzer's Port of Spain, in his Byronically quaint phrase, has firms of 'Assyrian merchants'. It also has "middle class West Indians brought up in the Victorian and Edwardian schools of restraint and hypocrisy".
Bruno Bettelheim's essay, “The Child's Perception of the City” (1990), explored the way in which the urban experience exercised the imagination of the young. The Vienna of his childhood was fixed in Bettelheim's memory as the city of crystalline water and fragrant Anchor bread Chicago, thanks to his reading of Upton Sinclair, seemed to Bettelheim "a city of gangsters and slaughterhouses". In A House for Mr Biswas, Port of Spain is the city of real ice cream and Coca Cola that lures Anand; the city of street lamps, the Botanical Gardens, and the harbour that draws Savi from the Tulsi estate at Shorthills. In Anand's school the boys talk of English county cricket and Henry Fonda and The Return of Frank James. Anand, whose uncle Owad has newly returned from England with qualifications in medicine and name-dropping, tells his mates : " T S Eliot is a man I loathe ... I know someone who knows him". Govind's six suits are bought with money he makes working for the Americans in their military base. Bhandat, he of the ominous curved nose and curved forehead, lives in a city warren with his Chinese mistress. The Tulsi house in Port of Spain teems with.' readers and learners', acquiring the education needed for entry into the ' lawyer- doctor- civil servant class'.
Port of Spain is the city where Mr Biswas, a young man from the province of Arwacas, arrives on impulse and of necessity with a cardboard suitcase; where he begins his career as a journalist, imbued anew with purpose, and no longer unnecessary. It is the city from where he will achieve a modest island - wide renown as the Sentinel's Scarlet Pimpernel ; the city where he will die at forty- six, in his own house, no longer unaccommodated.
In his fictional biography of Henry James, The Master, Colm Toibin has his subject reflect, of the English, that they had 'a system of manners developed without interruption for a thousand years.' James's own 19th century New England was thus a civilisation still juvenile green by comparison with Old England and its thousand- year patina. Naipaul, brimming with ambition but not yet with English prose, was prey to an early diffidence about whether the Trinidad he remembered deserved to be written about: "Frederick Street in Port of Spain, Marine Square, the districts of Laventille and Barataria- to attempt to use these names required courage".
Naipaul, brimming with ambition but not yet with English prose, was prey to an early diffidence about whether the Trinidad he remembered deserved to be written about.
In Toibin's novel, The Master (2004) the fictional Henry James and his friend Sargy Perry agree that 'literature lay in the places where Roman coins could be found...’ In lines made famous by his life of Hawthorne, James laments the fact that New England has "no cathedrals, nor abbeys, nor little Norman churches, no literature, nor novels…" James imagines a counterlife in which Balzac, Dickens, Trollope, and Zola, instead of being born in Europe , are condemned to breathe all their lives the thin social air of New England, and end their days not as famous writers but as crazed preachers and schoolmasters. Mr Biswas, to return to Naipaul, feared that if his son Anand were not able to secure a scholarship to study abroad, the boy would have only the meagre option of becoming either a customs officer or government clerk, resigned to 'intrigue, humiliation, dependence.’ In 1994 Naipaul admitted that he would surely have killed himself had he remained in Trinidad.
Naipaul's qualms about Trinidad were clearly not merely literary ones: arriving in Port of Spain aboard the Francisco Bobadilla at the start of the journeys recorded in The Middle Passage (1962 ), he expressed a sense of apprehension, of self-entrapment even, at returning to the island he had vowed to leave at the age of twelve, the island he had left at eighteen. He recalled a recurring nightmare in London: " falling asleep in bed-sitters with the electric fire on, I had been awakened by the nightmare that I was back in tropical Trinidad.” Just as James had found in New England a cultural nullity, Naipaul insisted that "history is built on creation and achievement, and nothing was created in the West Indies". In an early piece for the New York Review of Books, "Power to the Caribbean People”, Naipaul described the Caribbean colonies as 'dependent on empire for law, language, institutions, culture, even officials.’
Mr Biswas, the hero of Naipaul's great novel, had deemed Trinidad a limiting society , and it is apparent that his creator shared that pessimism. In The Middle Passage, Naipaul's dread and claustrophobia seemed to licence a vocabulary of Darwinian spite, as in the consequential clause where he likens his countrymen to 'monkeys pleading for evolution'. When Derek Walcott reviewed Naipaul's 1987 novel, The Enigma of Arrival, he rehearsed a catalogue of the grievous faults of which its author was guilty, among them 'an idealisation of History and Order', 'an abhorrence of the Negro', and :a hatred of Trinidad'. Ralph Singh, narrator and hero of The Mimic Men [1967) wrote that to be born on an island like Isabella, an obscure New World transplantation, second-hand and barbarous, was to be born to disorder". In its particulars, if not in its name, Isabella is Trinidad. And in his tribute on being awarded the Nobel Prize forLiterature in 2001, Naipaul contrived to ignore what he could not obscure: his Trinidadian roots, pointing instead to England, his home for half a century, and to India, the ancient root of his family tree.
Yet Naipaul could not escape what Milan Kundera, in a 2007 New Yorker essay, Die Weltliratur, called the provincial context in which a work of art may be placed, even as he had written his way into the 'supranational' context of the 20th century English language novel. In 1967 Karl Miller had described Naipaul as the best of the younger British novelists. By 2009, the oeuvre enlarged and nearly complete, the man of letters settling into the grand old age of his early prophecy, Jason Cowley could write that Naipaul's was 'perhaps the most complex, provocative and demanding body of work by any postwar British writer.' Thus A House for Mr Biswas, considered provincially in Kundera's terms, is a great Trinidadian novel, a great Caribbean novel. It is also a supranational artifact, a classic work of English language literature by a writer feted as the most talented inheritor of Dickensian comedy. Indeed, the epithet most commonly applied to the early fiction of V. S. Naipaul and his equally talented brother Shiva Naipaul, is 'Dickensian'.
The 1996 Oxford Guide to Contemporary Writing paid unwitting tribute to the three traditions alloyed in the writer Naipaul. His work was lauded and examined at some length in the surveys of English and Caribbean literature, and the chapter on Indian literature took its preamble from a 1964 Naipaul postmortem about the extinction of Indian writing in English. It was a mark of how, having transcended narrow genre, Naipaul had transcended mere nationality as well. In the 1990s too, India was no longer for Naipaul an area of darkness, or a wounded civilisation, but the home of 'an intelligentsia growing in leaps and bounds'. Naipaul himself was no longer an ersatz Indian without a past, without ancestors, but a man who could find the workings of poetic justice, not rage or resentment, in the storming of the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya by Hindu partisans fired to assuage a centuries-old grudge. And on New Year's Day 1990, nearly forty years after he first set foot in England, 'Sir Arch Prasad' became Sir Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul, knight of the Queen”s realm and master of English prose.
George Orwell began his essay on Koestler by remarking on how English literature in the first quarter of the 20th century had come to be dominated by foreigners. Except for Conrad, all of the names in Orwell's array of conquistadors came from what we would call today the Anglosphere - the Irish Shaw, Yeats and Joyce; the Americans James, Eliot, and Pound. Conrad was of course Polish by birth, Odyssean by trade,and English by literary destiny. Had he lived past 1950, Orwell, former imperial police officer in Burma, might have been fascinated to find that the British forfeited, along with their territorial rights to colonies, most proprietary rights to the English language. Naipaul's work appeared alongside that of an assemblage of.young writers from the provinces, ex colonials - whose work was coming to fruition in the high noon of imperial decline. The Caribbean contingent, Naipaul, Mittelholzer, Selvon, Harris, Lamming et al, came to be known as the Windrush generation, named for the Empire Windrush that had docked in Tilbury Harbour in 1948, bringing Jamaicans, Trinidadians and Barbadians to work in labour- famished postwar Britain. Alluding to the tenor of Naipaul's early novel, Miguel Street, the Nobel citation in 2001 stated that he combined 'Chekov and calypso.’
The African contingent included writers like Achebe and Soyinka. They also wrote literature conceived in linguistic debt to English but not condemned to indenture. Like Naipaul, they had been shaped in part by reading lists and bookshelves consecrated to the Western canon. Amartya Sen's 2007 essay, ‘Imperial Illusions’, quotes the English writer James Mill, who wrote in 1817 that ' a single shelf of a good European library ( is) worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia'. Today the shelf of a good European library would necessarily comprise books by writers from India and the Arab world, and from places even more distant than Mill could have imagined. Frank Kermode, in his 2001 Tanner lecture surmised that each member of the canon could only exist fully in company of another. The English language, mercurial from infancy, ever evolves into a pulsing alloy of idioms from Saxon to Sanskrit, Mumbai locutions to Trinidadian Creole, resonant Nigerian pidgin to quasi-Orwellian opacities.
Orwell, former imperial police officer in Burma, might have been fascinated to find that the British forfeited, along with their territorial rights to colonies, most proprietary rights to the English language.
In the Bettelheim essay to which I adverted earlier, he argued that 'the metropole is the setting which makes high culture, and with it literary creations possible' . Shakespeare, by this formula, was made in London, with its Globe Theatre, not in backwater Stratford; and Goethe required for his literary fruition the cosmopolitan, social air of Frankfurt, not country Weimar. Accordingly, all of the institutions which played a catalysing role in Naipaul's early career were located in the English or American metropole: Oxford University, the BBC's Caribbean Voices programme, Andre Deutsch publishers, The New Statesman, The Daily Telegraph Magazine, the Sunday Times magazine, The Spectator, the New York Review of Books. The British Museum Reading Room and its cache of historical documents and records was as crucial in the writing of Naipaul's The Loss of El Dorado [ 1969] as it had been a century earlier in the composition of Marx's Das Kapital (1867 ). Naipaul himself thought that his career would have been unimaginable in any other country except England, where for centuries the man of letters has been, by decree of nature, an essential part of the fauna.
The sheer complexity and depth of Naipaul's work thus owes as much to his peculiar biography as to his singular genius. Orwell thought that a certain narrowness of experience, a certain English insularity, would have prevented an English contemporary of Koestler's from writing work which matched his in political intensity. In Naipaul's case, he was raised in a Hindi-speaking milieu in a British colony . His father introduced him to the novels of Conrad, whose footsteps he would repeat as a traveller, whose themes he would revisit as a writer, whose destiny he would share in dying as an Englishman. The vow that Naipaul made, to leave Trinidad within five years, was committed to the flyleaf of his Latin primer. At Queens Royal College in Port of Spain, he studied French and Spanish. It was as well that in his 1968 piece on Naipaul, V S Pritchett wrote of the West Indies as ”a very fertilizing Victorian enclave'
At Oxford in the 1950s Naipaul had 'looked forward to wandering among large tracts of writing' ; his work showed that he was conscious, if typically disparaging, of whole swathes of the great tradition , and had metabolised the idiom from Shakespeare through Dickens to Conrad. There were tensions, naturally: as Naipaul admitted in the 1960s : 'the English language was mine ; the tradition was not'. In An Area of Darkness [1964], he also wrote:' I was not English, or Indian; I was denied the victories of both '. In his Nobel tribute, thirty-seven years later, V S Naipaul claimed his literary victory as an English one, an Indian one as well.
In Through Open Doors [ 1983), Cynthia Salvadori's fine, encyclopaedic study of Asian cultures in the former British colony of Kenya, she wrote that ,'the Asians were entirely self-sufficient, socially and spiritually- and extremely successful economically'. When C L R James praised A House for Mr Biswas in typically Marxist terms as a seminal portrait of Trinidadian Indians and their ascendancy , it was on account of a similar self-sufficiency and entrepreneurial acumen. Mr. Biswas is born into an Indian milieu only just extricating itself from its proletarian roots in the canefields. Beginning with the fateful journey of the Fatel Rozack in 1845, thousands of Indians were transported to Trinidad in the service of a British empire that was, as Orwell wrote in his essay on Kipling, ' primarily a money-making concern.
But unlike 'that other race of Indians', the pre- Columbian inhabitants for whom 'the world grew dark,’ the Indians from the Raj-era subcontinent showed great resilience. Indentured servitude did not have to lead to social or actual death. The fictional Tulsis have become part of the Arwacas gentry by the time Mr Biswas marries into the family (or is married by it). They own Hanuman House, grandly named but lapsing into shabby gentility. They have a cane plantation, a shop in The Chase, the Shorthills estate, and a house in Port of Spain. Like an aristocratic family in the American South, they have a black housekeeper, mnemonically named Miss Blackie - The Tulsis enjoy in Trinidad all the privileges apt to their high Hindu caste. They are committed to the accumulation of wealth, as well as the acquisition of social capital. As with all the other Indians, they are a minority race grasping for the rungs and levers of mobility. Mrs Tulsi, as if reciting a mantra, tells Mr Biswas in reproach that her sons Shekhar and Owad are devoted to "reading and eating and selling', :reading and eating and counting money', not averse to dirtying their hands.
Naipaul being the writer that he was, in the Tulsis he portrayed a family of Trinidadian Indians who had formed, in less than a hundred years, 'a system of manners' ripe for ironic deflation.When they go in search of a wife for Shekhar, it is telling that theTulsis have to trawl diligently through eligible Indian 'families in soft drinks, the families in ice, the transport families, the cinema families, the families in filling stations'. The Tulsis understand that 'the oil families, whatever their original condition, were too grand'. The Tulsis exhibit, however, none of the complexes of a character like Mittelholzer's Mr Jagabir, who locates the source of the animus he perceives from his colleagues in the fact that he is the son of indentured coolies.
Mrs Tulsi's repeated invocation of reading as a filial duty for Shekhar and Owad, alongside Hindu piety and capitalist nous, calls attention to another factor in the rise of the Indians in Trinidad: education. During his time at The Chase, Mr Biswas is told by Moti: ' You know, the thing to do is to have three sons: Make one a doctor, one a dentist, and one a lawyer '. Glancing about Hanuman House on one occasion, Mr Biswas himself comes to realise how children are valued ' as assets, a source of future wealth and influence. The voluble Ramchand, husband of Mr Biswas: s sister Dehuti, tells his brother-in-law : ' This education is a helluva thing ... Any little child could pick up - And yet the blasted thing does turn out so damn important later on . It is lelling that dynastic succession falls to Owad, the younger Tulsi son, after he returns with his medical degree from England . His older brother Shekhar, bourgeois pragmatism and caste propriety having been satisfied, , has married into ' a laxly Presbyterian family with one filling station , two lorries,a cinema, and some land. When Shekhar goes into politics it is clear that the Tulsis have gained entree, in two generations, into the merchant class, the property owning class, and the intelligentsia. History being capable of irony, the Tulsis have also gained themselves an underclass of disgruntled labour on their cane plantation.
The ultimate exemplar of Indian social mobility in the novel , is of course Mr Biswas himself. He begins the novel as the young boy who is paid to look after Dhari's calf; later on he becomes the sort of husband who can casually say to his wife ' As we were leaving Government House today HE asked me, ' Which is your car ?' . It is remarkable that Mr Biswas is able to become an autodidact, to find his metier as a journalist, on a 'small, remote and unimportant' island like Trinidad. He is determined that his own son, Anand, should go to college. He dreads the fate that he assumes awaits Anand if he cannot go abroad to study : 'a job in the customs, a clerkship in the civil service.. ' When the Americans come to Trinidad they spur among the Islanders an entrepreneurial zest, a Yankee frontier spirit, and a thirst for the comforts that the Yankee dollar can buy.. Govind buys six suits, and drives the Americans in his Chevrolet. W C Tuttle, another Tulsi son-in-law , hires out his lorry to the Americans. The island is awash with new cars and new houses. Mr Biswas,eternal outsider, has no share in the spoils.
Making an actuarial, rather than an aesthetic argument for reading fiction, Naipaul wrote in the 1960s that "no novel which has lasted a hundred years can fail to give pleasure" . It is as well that he admitted that his judgement was provisional. In the mere sixty years since it was first published an admiration society has formed around A House for Mr Biswas. This fascination persists because the novel is above all a great work of literature, and only incidentally a tool for literary theorists and biographical sleuths.. It has had a long afterlife, more often mentioned, and more often mentioned in praise than Naipaul's other novels.
In 2019, it was named by the BBC on its list of the one hundred most influential novels. In 2018, Barack Obama lauded it as one of the best books on his reading list that year. In 2013, the Naipaul House and Literary Museum opened in Port of Spain, Trinidad . It is housed in the actual building on Nepaul street that inspired the fictional house on Sikkim Street. The house had been restored by a group of admirers called the Friends of Mr Biswas. (Perhaps Friends of Sir Naipaul would have run the risk of oxymoron?). In 2009, the novel was included in a selection of twenty modern classics by the Irish Independent. A House for Mr Biswas was dramatised in two parts by BBC Radio Four in 2006. When the Swedish Academy awarded Naipaul the 2001 Nobel Prize for Literature, James Wood argued in The New Republic that the honour ought to reward, perforce A House for Mr Biswas, and not Naipaul's controversial books on Islamic societies, The Nobel citation praised A House for Mr Biswas as "one of those singular novels that seem to constitute their own complete universes." In a 1981 essay on the occasion of the twentieth anniversary of its publication, Naipaul wrote : " Of all my books A House for Mr Biswas is the one closest to me. It is the most personal, created out of what I saw and felt as a child ". Paul Theroux , in his seminal 1972 study of Naipaul's writing asked: "Where in fiction is another Ganesh, or another Mr Biswas ? " Derek Walcott, future former friend of Naipaul's, wrote a review in the Trinidad Guardian in November 1961, hailing A House for Mr Biswas as ‘a great new novel of the West Indies.’ C. L. R. James recalled getting into an argument with George Lamming over whether Selvon or Naipaul was the better writer. After Lamming read A House for Mr Biswas, he is reputed to have called Naipaul and said to him : "I have just read A House for Mr Biswas,. I think it is a masterpiece. ".
Naipaul believed that A House for Mr. Biswas would make a good film because, in justifiable self-homage, the dialogue had already been written. Naipaul's sense of drama , his evocative scene-setting and his pictorial breadth and depth, are much in evidence in the novel. Novels are of course written to be read and visualised, imagined into being . A film of the novel would thus be a logical afterlife for the work of art in the age of cinematic reproduction.
For me the passage that lends itself most tellingly to cinematic transfer comes when Mr Biswas buys a new suit and chooses to display it by going to the Oval to watch a cricket match. He has never previously taken an interest in the game, or any aptitude for sport at all. He arrives at the Oval, dandied to the nines, with his fifty-stick cigarette tin in hand. He does not wish to 'derange the hang' of the suit by stuffing it with his smoking gear. The match is about to end, but Mr Biswas does not know it, as he makes his way with polite excuse - mes through the crowd on the stands. The final whistle is blown, Mr. Biswas stands up to applaud with the roaring crowd, makes his way out again, and rides his bicycle home. The journey to the Oval has been its own reward.
It is a scene ripe for incidental music, tracking shots, close-ups, a dialogue- free sequence of images, and a final aerial shot of Mr Biswas cycling away through the evening streets of Port of Spain. It is dramatic action untethered to plot but deeply emblematic of character - Walter Benjamin, admittedly writing about history, not fiction, praised the chronicler who chooses not to winnow away minor events in his narration of the past. In the novel the scene does not seem like a ridiculous affectation of gentlemanliness - Mr Biswas, shouldering his way through the crowd, is not aiming for the feline elan of the social climber. Instead it should be seen as a piece of self- consolatory theatre; one man's solitary stand in a world where 'despite Marcus Aurelius,” despite Mohun Biswas's sometime hope that 'some nobler purpose awaited him', the vexed course of his life must constitute its own reward.