A dozen years ago VS Naipaul strolled into the atrium of Bush House. He was to appear on the World Service programme that I produced. A small retinue fussed around him; he seemed amused and serene. We found him a seat and I knelt beside him and whispered that he was the writer I most admired; he had defined the world for me. Naipaul nodded more out of expectation than appreciation. After a while he stood and as we proceeded into the building Sir Vidia held out his elegant fedora and gave it to me to hold – as if I were his valet.
Thirty years earlier, Viv, a book-loving uncle, had introduced me to the exacting delight of Naipaul’s writing; we championed him for demonstrating, through his literary virtuosity, that descendants of immigrants could be just as erudite and accomplished as the very best of our British hosts.
Like my Jamaican parents, Naipaul’s formative years under colonial rule in Trinidad were a time when, as was often said, it was the ambition of every black and Asian man to be white. Even in the early comic work of Miguel Street, his colonial anxieties over class and race were exposed. He’d inherited the notion of writing as an honourable vocation from his father. With A House for Mr Biswas, Naipaul made good on that investment: the novel was an act of filial devotion.
I still marvel at Naipaul; at the assured humour of the nervous freelancer (“a depressed and suppliant class”) who in the 1950s set down “on smooth, non-rustle BBC script paper” the first sentence of his first publishable book. The loving tenderness of Miguel Street – evident in the story of a carpenter who makes a thing without a name – always enthralled my children as I read to them at bedtime.
A few books into his career, though, Naipaul’s prose seemed to become more acidic. Sometimes, as a black man, it felt like a betrayal to read him. But Naipaul has always been a guilty pleasure, especially when adopting the provocative jousting of Trinidadian picong, or banter. At the start of the Middle Passage he wrote: “There was such a crowd of immigrant-type West Indians on the boat-train platform at Waterloo that I was glad I was travelling first class.”
It was no consolation that he also turned his eviscerating gaze on the Caribbean’s Hindu populations. “My Aunt Gold Teeth”, the story of a wealthy relative who exchanged her sound teeth for 16 gold ones “to announce to the world that her husband was a man of substance”, read both as caricature and truth.
Some pathology, though, was surely on display in the The Middle Passage, where Naipaul concluded that in post-independence Caribbean societies the descendants of enslaved Africans and indentured Indians were left to argue among themselves like “monkeys pleading for evolution”. Naipaul pushed beyond Graham Greene’s counsel to write with a sliver of ice in the heart; he dissected his characters with a scalpel.
Even though I increasingly winced at Naipaul’s sneering, I recognised its source in the antipathy that kith can feel for kin; Naipaul was Trinidad’s recalcitrant prodigal son, whose rejection of his homeland deeply hurt his compatriots and whose affection they most craved.
I defended Naipaul. Didn’t they recall how funny Naipaul could be? His comedy would return, I argued, as would his humanity. And in part it did. The Brahmin’s snobbery and defeated gloom of India: A Wounded Civilization lifted and gave way to the near celebratory India: A Million Mutinies Now. Inevitably with time my defence became less forceful. Still though I might bend away from Naipaul I would not break with him.
Twelve years ago at the BBC, I contemplated how I might damage VS Naipaul’s fedora without being detected. Emerging from the studio he thanked me with such disarming grace I feared he’d read my intentions. When Naipaul reached for the fedora I did not let go of it immediately. In that moment I wanted him to know that despite all the writing of “ill-made Negroes” I had remained in his corner. Here was the evidence: I had held his hat – and it was intact.
