Between today and Friday The Friends of Mr Biswas will host a conference entitled Seepersad & Sons, focusing on Seepersad Naipaul and his sons Shiva and Vidia. The conference will be at the UWI's Open Campus on Gordon St in St Augustine, and will include visits to Chaguanas, to the Lion House, made famous by VS Naipaul's novel, A House for Mr Biswas.
Such an enterprise is long overdue. Even at a casual glance, it's evident that the three Naipauls' experience and achievements are a bona fide phenomenon. Seepersad began life as a sign painter, but nurtured literary ambitions, which he realised, beginning as a reporter for the Guardian in the 1930s. But he was also a man who liberated himself from the mental bondage of rural Indo-Trinidadian atavism, and embraced the society and world of which he was part. (His stories in the Guardian were about a variety of things, including the Shouter Baptists.)
Seepersad freed himself and his whole family, and launched his sons into the world, where against overwhelming odds, both made it through the impossibly slender pass of the national scholarship, Oxford, and achieved glory in the society and tradition (England and the Western world) their father revered. Seepersad's daughters were remarkable in their own right, educated and accomplished, but not famous like their brothers. Today, the whole country benefits from that single existential act of heroism: a man who dared to want more from life.
Shiva, like his father, died young, at the age of 40 in 1985. He produced three novels, two travel books, and left enough essays and short stories behind for a miscellany, Beyond the Dragon's Mouth. He's now largely obscure, a genius that could have been. Much better known, for many of the wrong reasons, is his elder brother Vidia, perhaps the most hated living writer, and one who the West Indies, and T&T, only grudgingly acknowledge.
The reason(s): he's a racist (say the experts and the hoi polloi); his writing has insulted and let down the side (the West Indies and non-white people generally) embracing a tradition of metropolitan contempt, initiated by Froude, Trollope, Carlyle and others. That most of what he's said and predicted (in fiction and non-fiction) has actually come to pass seemingly troubles no one; neither does the fact that most of what he's said has been said by many others, like Derek Walcott, Lloyd Best, CLR James and JJ Thomas.
I was mulling this irony looking at the conference programme when coincidentally, my eyes fell on Gordon Rohlehr's new book of essays on the (calypsonian) Sparrow, sitting on my desk. Sparrow and Naipaul; an interesting comparison: both started as young, brash, bad-john types (although Sparrow was an actual badjohn; Vidia was another type of badjohn); both left Trinidad, though it continues to preoccupy them; both are outsiders when it suits their detractors (Vidia the Indian, Sparrow the Grenadian); both have achieved worldwide fame which is intimately related to Trinidad; and finally, either one is ever ready for a punch-up, and neither is going gentle into that good night.
This is sheer fancy, coincidence more than meaningful parallels, but if the similarities in provenance and achievements exist, the same can't be said for their endings. Sparrow is as loved as Naipaul is hated–though Sparrow took hard criticism many times during his career, like for his turning on the PNM. Sparrow responded by dropping his pants onstage and inviting all critics to kiss him where it counted. Naipaul did much the same thing, but in a different way: after the criticism of The Middle Passage, he responded with The Mimic Men and Guerillas which still riles up "nationalists" and "true Trinidadians" and whatnot. No small achievement.
Though Naipaul has been honoured in Trinidad and the UK (with the Trinity Cross, a knighthood, and various other prizes) he remains popularly disliked. Sparrow is adored, heaped with honours and celebrated. But Naipaul's work, which resonates the same themes that made Sparrow a legend (Trinidad, its character and fate, albeit on different scales and canvases), and which is much more durable and important than Sparrow's (still relevant, as Sparrow's is nostalgic), remains reviled by his small country.
This is itself remarkable, but it's also possible this is by design. Naipaul has created two bodies of work. One is his writing, in several books which will endure for generations. But there's also the years-long ongoing performance (almost like a Sacha Baron Cohen-movie) which might be called "I, VS Naipaul."
The Naipaul Show features the misadventures of an apparent misogynist and misanthrope, who has publicly admitted to woman battering, infidelity, treating his long-suffering, now dead wife appallingly, and stepping over her corpse to marry another woman. Admissions like this are the literary equivalent of the performance artist who makes paintings and sculptures with his or her own bodily fluids and excrement. Unlike those artists, Naipaul is enticing the world to follow him with a macabre fascination, and involuntary admiration.
The term "performance art" might not resonate with the present generation. Think of it as Reality TV, without the TV. But whatever you want to call it, it's clear in retrospect that the persona has been as carefully crafted as one of his great characters. So much so that at the end of his life, Naipaul would have left the legacy of a Borgesian novel, waiting to be written.
Tomorrow morning is one of the conference high-points, with a keynote address by Prof Arnold Rampersad, whose father, Jerome Rampersad, was as close to a Naipaulian character as any Trini has come, and who also worked for the Guardian (or its evening paper, The Evening News, till his death in 1978).
Conference details can be found on www.friendsofmrbiswas.org.