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Tuesday 2 December 2008

The World Is What It Is

A mask that eats the face

Sebastien Smee on Patrick French's biography of V.S. Naipaul

French rates Seepersad’s only published book of fiction highly, and makes it clear that the example he set for the budding writer was crucial. So the letters that pass between father and son after Naipaul has arrived in England — letters at once encouraging to a son in crisis and needy on his own behalf (he desperately wanted Vidia’s help with his own literary ambitions) — are immensely poignant.

Many details emerging from the early years of struggle are lovely to read: Naipaul, for instance, depositing his first cheque at the bank, and the teller standing to shake his hand. Naipaul copying out extracts from early reviews to show his mother ‘like a tiger cub bringing home his first kill’.

The question of Naipaul’s status as a Brahmin is never quite resolved. Previous commentators — Paul Theroux in particular — have used it as a convenient explanation for Naipaul’s legendary haughtiness and fastidiousness. French sees things differently. To begin with, caste in Indian culture is patrilineal and, as Naipaul admits, ‘my father’s background is confused in my mind’. Nonetheless, he did embrace the ‘implied caste sense’ of his mother’s Brahmin family (despite rejecting almost everything else about them).

Either way, French believes the whole question is a distraction. In a key statement halfway through the book, he writes:

Contrary to the depredations that would be launched against Vidia with increasing force over the coming decades, his moral axis was not white European culture, or pre-Islamic Hindu culture, or any other passing culture; it was internal, it was himself.

Trying to explain Naipaul’s contrariness, his political provocations, his increasingly outrageous behaviour, French makes mention of the Trinidadian trait of ‘playing ole mas’, which apparently means ‘masquerading or making trouble for [one’s] own entertainment’. He also quotes an old schoolboy acquaintance of Naipaul saying that masks are indispensable in Trinidadian culture if one is to negotiate the island’s many ethnicities.

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