The Suffrage of Elvira by V. S. Naipaul

Foam's ebullience depressed Harbans more. The bargaining with Baksh had shaken him and he feared that Chittaranjan too might demand stiffer terms. Moreover, he was nervous about the Dodge; and the sweet drink and rock cakes he had had were playing hell with his inside.

'You shy, Mr Harbans,' Foam said. 'I know how it is. But you going to get use to this waving. Ten to one, before this election over, we going to see you waving and shouting to everybody, even to people who ain't going to vote for you.'

Harbans shook his head sadly.

Foam settle into the angle of the seat and the door. 'Way I see it is this. In Trinidad this democracy is a brand new thing. We is still creeping. We is a creeping nation.' He dropped his voice solemnly: 'I respect people like you, you know, Mr Harbans, doing this thing for the first time.'

Trinidad, at the time of V. S. Naipaul's The Suffrage of Elvira, is a newly independent and democratic state. Elections are being held, but no one has ever stood for them before, much less managed a campaign. There are no polls, no TV advertisements, no rallies--but there are vans, loudspeakers, and lots and lots of wheeling and dealing. The novel centers on an election between Sujurpat "Pat" Harbans, a Hindu merchant, and a Black Trinidadian known simply as "Preacher." The racial breakdown of the vote in diverse Trinidad is obvious, but there are many more votes--belonging to Muslims and "Spanish"--left up for grabs. Harbans enlists the young Foreman "Foam" Baksh as his campaign manager, which sets off a series of comic enterprises that mostly end with Harbans writing a check or a petrol voucher. Someone is getting rich off this election, but it isn't the candidate.

Naipaul became a much more "serious" writer with his later works, which are so often thoughtful and beautifully written investigations into the postcolonial spirit. But for my money, he was never better than at the beginning of his career, when he wrote these comedies set in Trinidad. The Suffrage of Elvira sits nicely between Miguel Street and A House for Mr. Biswas, the novel that made his career--all being vernacular-heavy novels that depict small-potatoes Trinidadian strivers. The irony from all of them comes from the presentation of Trinidad as a remote outpost; the election between Harbans and Preacher may share certain elements with English parliamentary elections, but England's a long ways away, and how many MPs owe their seats to fears that a puppy is imbued with obeah witchcraft? (This subplot, in which Foam's little brother nicks a newborn puppy and hides it in their storage room, leading to fantastic rumors, is maybe the funniest thing in the whole book.) It seems to me that Naipaul in his later work explored the anger and resentment that emerge in the spirit of the postcolonial subject, who knows how little he measures up to his colonizers, but these books are lighthearted because no one really seems to know or care.

"We is a creeping nation," Foam tells Harbans, and I think that's probably pretty close to Naipaul's view as well. There's something admirable, even honorable, about Trinidad's first forays into the world of electoral politics. But Naipaul captures well how, no matter the size of the country or how long it's been a democracy, elections turn not on clashing ideals but petty personal conflicts and jealousies, as with the breadfruit tree whose roots are in the yard of Ramlogan the tavernkeeper, but which drops its fruit in the yard of Chittaranjan the goldsmith. And it captures how everybody, even down to the lowest taxi driver wanting his ten dollars in petrol vouchers, wants to get his thumb in the pie.

The Enigma of Arrival by V. S. Naipaul

I had lived with the idea of change, had seen it as a constant, had seen a world in flux, had seen human life as a series of cycles that sometimes ran together. But philosophy failed me now. Land is not land alone, something that simply is itself. Land partakes of what we breathe into it, is touched by our moods and memoires. And this end of a cycle, and in the life of a manor, mixed up with the feeling of age which my illness was forcing on me, caused me grief.

For many years, V. S. Naipaul lived in (some kind of) caretaker's cottage on the grounds of a large manor in Salisbury, England, not far from Stonehenge. It was, as Naipaul describes it, a kind of permanence and stability after years of uncertainty and moving around; among other things The Enigma of Arrival describes in touching detail what it was like for a young man from Trinidad to move to England for the first time, a place which was represented in his imagination by the works of classic English literature, and also by the pictures of green fields dotted by dairy cows that appear on the cartons of milk children drank in Trinidad. That experience captures much of what Naipaul wrote about, the anxiety of Empire, of being unable to see either the colonized homeland or the imperial center well because one has been so trained in seeing the myths that regulate the relationship between them. Naipaul struggles, writes, moves back and forth between England, Trinidad, the U.S., and Canada. The manor in Salisbury, coming alongside literary success, gives the man an anchor in the world.

Much of what The Enigma of Arrival has to say, I think, is that such stability is essentially an illusion. The essays collected here are mostly in the pastoral mode, describing the life of the gardens, the fields, the hills, the woods of the manor and its environment. Naipaul is deeply interested in the lives of the lower- and middle-class workers who keep the manor going: caretaker Jack, the Phillipses, the gardener Pitton, the driver Bray. He learns that where he sees stability and continuity there is also change; few of these people have been at the manor any longer than he has and have little claim to its magisterial aesthetic or history. Some are sacked, some die--there is a strangely incommensurate story of an affair that leads to murder--and the sands of the manor shift beneath Naipaul. He, too, grows ill, and must face his own aging and the possible end of his life at the manor. Perhaps this is the enigma of arrival--that it keeps going on, keeps changing, that arrival as such never really comes.

I enjoyed this--Naipaul can really write. In this setting, his English inspirations are worn very openly. But I also found it difficult to penetrate the specific milieu of the English countryside he clearly loves; something about it seems too private, to personally experience, to really resonate. I liked most those images of the young Trinidadian seeing the world the first time from the air.

Guerrillas by V. S. Naipaul

As he had been talking to Jane and Roche, as they had let him run on, he had begun to feel unsupported by his words, and then separate from his words; and he had a vision of darkness, of the world lost forever, and his own life ending on that bit of wasteland. After they had gone he allowed himself to sink into that darkness, keeping the memory of the afternoon close: the memory of Jane who, by her presence, manner, and talk, had suggested that darkness reserved for himself alone. Yet at the same time, in his fantasy, she washed away the darkness; he carried the picture of her standing outside the hut on the bare, bright earth, nervous, tremulous in her flared trousers.

Peter Roche is a South African, come to this unnamed island in the Caribbean to distance himself from political imprisonment and torture in his native country. Ostensibly, he has come to assist with various left-wing political projects, but the job he's taken is with a firm connected to global resource extractors. His girlfriend, Jane, is an American with little in the way of a political worldview; the Caribbean seems to be a kind of adventure for her, but one that has quickly soured, along with their relationship. Roche introduces Jane to Jimmy Ahmed, a local activist who has recently returned home (or been kicked out of) England, and who is trying to build an agricultural commune. Though Roche puts little stock in rumors, some say the commune is a front for guerrillas who threaten the island's political stability.

When Roche and Jane leave Jimmy's compound, he sits down and begins to write a letter: "Ever since I arrived here I have been hearing about the man they call Jimmy." One quickly realizes that what he's doing is writing as if he is Jane, describing himself in admiring and enigmatic terms. It's one of those brilliant touches that only Naipaul, who wrote about the inferiority complex of the post-colonial subject, could write. The island of Guerrillas, which is specifically not, but is inspired by, Naipaul's Trinidad, is a minor and disordered place. His long descriptions of the countryside focus on the accumulation of garbage, the desolation of wildfires. Even its revolutionaries are degenerate: Jimmy names his commune Thrushcross Grange, as if to borrow a little English respectability from Wuthering Heights, but he's sexually abusing the wayward young boys who come to work the land.

Guerrillas is a strangely oblique book. I don't know if I quite understood it. The instability, when it does come, happens off screen, while the white characters wait it out in their houses among the wealthier residents on the ridge outside of town. Though men like Jimmy and Roche should, by light of their fame, be important actors in these events, Naipaul makes it clear that they are mostly at the mercy of powerful figures never seen, some of the island, but also including the American bauxite extractors who arrive on the island carrying their stashes of explicit pornography. Guerrillas is a novel of waiting, of simmering tensions, until it finally does explode at the very end, in an act of sexual violence so grotesque and unpleasant (based on the real life murder conviction of Trinidadian activist Michael X) it's hard to think about the book as containing anything else.

When he wanted to, Naipaul could have a light touch; books like Miguel Street and A House for Mr. Biswas cover similar themes with a lot of humor and irony. But Guerrillas is a dark, mean book, which makes you wonder what anyone could ever find funny about the state of the post-colonial world. It might be said that Guerrillas better reflects the violent dysfunctions of that world, but it's no mystery why it doesn't make anybody's best-of lists.

Miguel Street by V. S. Naipaul

A stranger could drive through Miguel Street and just say 'Slum!' because he could see no more.  But we, who lived there, saw our street as a world, where everybody was quite different from everybody else.  Man-man was mad; George was stupid; Big Foot was a bully; Hat was an adventurer; Popo was a philosopher; and Morgan was our comedian.

In the vignette "The Mechanical Genius," the narrator of V. S. Naipaul's Miguel Street offers a brief sketch of his Uncle Bhakcu.  Bhakcu isn't quite a mechanical genius, though he fancies himself one.  Most of the time when he slides beneath an automobile he's trying to fix a problem that isn't there, and when he slides back out he's made things a little bit worse.  But he has a little more knowledge than his nephew, or most people, so that gives him a kind of relative prestige, even when the mechanic called in to fix his mistakes looks up angrily and says, "When you have all sort of ignorant people messing about with a engine the white people build with their own hands, what the hell else you expect?"  At which point Bhakcu winks at his nephew and says, "I think is the carburettor."

Though the characters whose lives make up the vignettes in Miguel Street are all different from one another, they are all, in a sense, like Bhakcu.  For Morgan, it's not cars but the homemade fireworks he makes that are his pride.  For Edward, it's ties he paints by hand, for Popo it is carpentry, for Titus Hoyt, it is a tutelary knowledge of letters and law.  Their gifts and passions are minor things, on an absolute scale, but they're not any more minor, I'd reckon, than those of people in small communities all the world round.  And yet there is a kind of common knowledge, often flouted but not denied, that such things are better left to whites--to English colonials, to American soldiers.  A lot of the obituaries for Naipaul, who died this week, talk about this big theme: the way that colonialism creates stunted societies and stunted people.  Bhakcu really does screw up the cars, and Titus Hoyt is the kind of person who brings "Volume 2 of the Everyman edition of Tennyson" as a gift, not knowing or willing to see just how incomplete the present is.

That makes Miguel Street sound rather cruel.  A lot of the humor is predicated on the pretensions of the residents of Miguel Street, just as the joke is ultimately on the proud protagonist of A House for Mr. Biswas.  But the stories seem to be to be full of empathy for the Miguel Street Club, who are presumably versions of the same folks that Naipaul knew growing up in Trinidad and who formed his first knowledge of the world.  Their pride is touching, not tragic, and perhaps the saddest error they make is assuming that the English and the Americans are any better than they are--that the biggest difference between Bhakcu and the (possibly) white engineers who designed his car is their inherent aptitude, and not a system of marginalization on a worldwide scale:

To hear Edward talk, you felt that America was a gigantic country inhabited by giants.  They lived in enormous houses and they drove the biggest cars in the world.

Edward used to say, 'Look at Miguel Street.  In America you think they have streets so narrow?  In America this street could pass for a sidewalk.'

Naipaul died too late.  If he'd passed away five, maybe ten years earlier, his savage treatment of his wife and mistress might have been minimized in his obituaries, but that's not the way the world leans anymore, much for the better.  It might have been easier to forget he once said that women can't write fiction, which just goes to show how sometimes only very intelligent people can make claims of such gross stupidity.  Nearly all of the vignettes in Miguel Street are about men, with the exception of one, "The Maternal Instinct," about a woman who has eight children by seven men, named Laura.  Laura's story, situated between tragedy and comedy, is not so different from those of the men, but it emphasizes how few female voices are really heard throughout the novel.  Nearly all of the men beat their wives, and the wives themselves are often used to provide a sitcommy kind of humor about nagging and henpecking.

Miguel Street doesn't extend the same empathetic eye toward the women of the Miguel Street, which is probably to say that the young Naipaul didn't pay enough attention to the women of the street where he grew up.  (He spent the rest of his life not giving women enough attention, or the wrong kind.)  But take it as it is: Miguel Street is, among other things, a story about growing up in a kind of masculine crucible, an instruction in how to be a man.  I loved the story "The Coward," about the street bully, Big Foot, who makes the narrator promise not to divulge his secret--that he once cried after cutting his foot on a shard of glass in the street--only to reveal it himself, after losing badly to a white American soldier in a highly publicized boxing match.  Big Foot is so embarrassed he has to leave Miguel Street--so many people do in these stories; for many of them life in Trinidad is so transitory--but the story itself suggests that Big Foot has been done dirty by some force larger than Miguel Street, something tied up with masculinity as well as colonialism and anti-blackness.

Miguel Street is very funny, even when it's very sad.  There's the story of the boy Elias, who takes and fails the Cambridge admittance exam several times, only to admit it is the "English and litritcher" and the "poultry" that have done him in.  I also liked the image of Eddoes, the rubbish collector, whose need to be seen as clean drives him to walk around all day with a toothbrush in his mouth.

In the end, the narrator--no doubt not far removed from Naipaul himself--leaves Miguel Street to go to England.  He leaves not just for a better life, but because it's become apparent to him that Bhakcu is not a mechanical genius, that the dreams of the people around him seem small and futile.  Walking out to the plane he sees his own shadow as "a dancing dwarf" on the tarmac, a painful image of what the real Naipaul seems to have felt about his own place in the world as a colonial subject.  He inflicted as much cruelty as he observed--James Wood calls him the "Wounder" as well as the "Wounded"--but what he observed he did so with a powerful vision and a bittersweet humor.

A Way in the World by VS Naipaul

When I began to write of it, the Trinidad landscape that was present to me was the landscape I had known as a child and felt myself part of... Later, in London, when I was writing a book of history, I studied for many months the historical documents of the region. The documents (the early ones were copies of Spanish originals stored in Seville) took my back to the discovery. They gave me a sense of a crowded aboriginal Indian island, busy about its own affairs, and almost without relation to what I had known. A sense, rather than a vision: little was convincingly described in those early documents, and few concrete details were given. In my mind's eye I created an imaginary landscape for the aboriginal peoples living--on what was to become my own ground--with ideas I couldn't enter, ideas of time, distance, the past, the natural world, human existence. A different weather seemed to attach to this vanished landscape (like the unnatural weather in an illuminated painted panorama in a museum glasscase), a different sky.

Naipaul is the foremost postcolonialist we have still writing, not least because he himself is a thoroughly colonial product. British but born in Trinidad, an island which is perhaps not technically more diverse than the rest of the Western Hemisphere, but which has a diversity enlarged by its smallness: people of African and Indian descent have long shared tight quarters with Arawak natives, and the island itself has been ruled by the English, Spanish, French, and no joke, Latvia.

A Way in the World is Naipaul's attempt to sort through that heritage, to sift through the muddled sands of Caribbean history and discover himself. The narrator is a fictionalized Naipaul, who begins with his childhood and works strangely backward, telling stories of Columbus and Raleigh, and a failed South American revolutionary named Francisco Miranda, each of whom are in some sense, like Naipaul's narrator, frustrated and bewildered by the political and ethnic realities of the Caribbean. He tells us of an unfinished writing project about the three of them, here focusing on Raleigh's last excursion to the New World:

Perhaps a play or a screen play, or a mixture of both--that is how it came to me, an unrealizable impulse, a long time ago: the first set being a view in section of the upper decks of a Jacobean ship, the Destiny. The time, 1618. The setting, a South American river, grey when still, muddy when rippled. It is almost dawn. The sky is silver.

Naipaul wants to keep us at arm's length, to screen Raleigh's story through the false pretense of an unwritten play. Don't forget that I'm here, he tells us, this is not a story about Raleigh but a story about me. This choice causes Naipaul to descend into some truly horrific prose, as if pretending this were just a treatment would permit authorial laziness. Why does Raleigh's ship surgeon insist on recounting Raleigh's own story as if he didn't know it already?:

"When you showed the North African gold, people asked why you hadn't brought more back from this fabled land of El Dorado. Of course you didn't have the money to buy more. But you say in your Advertisement rather sharply that no one has the right to ask you for more. You go on to say that you didn't have the time or the tools or the men when you were on the river of El Dorado."

If Naipaul means to bring to mind the sort of illogical plot-recapping that takes place in bad movies, he succeeds. Elsewhere, this approach treats us to similarly banal sentences like, "We focus again on Don Jose: his confident face, his fine Jacobean tunic. He takes up his narrative again." Yes, I get it: We're all in this together.

A Way in the World reminds me of Joyce, in that the novel recounts the story of its own creation. But Naipaul is telling us obliquely that this book is explicitly not the product he desired, but some sort of meek compromise crafted in the face of failure. Portrait is the proof of its own labor; it insists on its own triumph. A Way in the World insists on its own failure, and necessarily compounds it. It is unflinchingly bland, reticent to tell us that Naipaul's search for identity as a Trinidadian has produce fruit of any kind. With fodder like Raleigh and Miranda, it should have been better, but Naipaul is not comfortable handing his book over to them, perhaps worried that they will consume him. But neither can he give us any convincing account of his own innermost self. He uses dead prose and cheap tricks to keep us strung between the two poles of then and now, not frustrated and bewildered as he seeks to make us, but merely bored.

This is only the second Naipaul book I have read; did he expend all of his creative power in the formation of Mr. Biswas, who outstrips nearly all of his latter-20th-century peers for pathos? The greatest impact of this book is the realization that it is wholly unlike that one, sharing only its setting. It makes me worry that Biswas, who is wonderfully and repeatedly ironic, may present his strangest irony in that he understands more of his origins and more deeply than the author who created him.

A House for Mr. Biswas by VS Naipaul

He had lived in many houses. And how easy it was to think of those houses without him! At this moment Pundit Jairam would be at a meeting or he would be eating at home, looking forward to an evening with his books. Soanie stood in the doorway, darkening the room, waiting for the least gesture of command. In Tara's back verandah Ajodha sat relaxed in his rockingchair, his eyes closed, listening perhaps to That Body of Yours being read by Rabidat, who sat at an awkward angle, trying to hide the smell of drink and tobacco on his breath. Tara was about, harrying the cowman (it was milking-time) or harrying the yard boy or the servant girl, harrying somebody. In none of those places he was being missed because in none of these places had he ever been more than a visitor, an upsetter of routine. Was Bipti thinking of him in the back trace? But she herself was a derelict. And, even more remote, that house of mud and grass in the swamplands: probably pulled down now and ploughed up. Beyond that, a void. There was nothing to speak of him.

In many ways, A House for Mr. Biswas reads like an ancient epic, or one of Plutarch's Lives. It's scope is certainly massive; it follows its main character, Mohun Biswas, from his birth to his death. But Mr Biswas, as he is called, even in infancy, is hardly an epic character, instead a characteristically weak man who seems to be surrounded by humiliation and misfortune who marries--almost by accident--into a domineering family, the Tulsis, in the Indian community of mid-century Trinidad. They provide him with work, but control his existence with cruel indifference, and his ultimate goal is to buy or build a house of his own so that he might no longer have to depend on them.

The power of A House for Mr. Biswas lies in Naipaul's subtle, reserved style. The book seems rather plain and underwritten, but a single word of Naipaul's can do heavy lifting. In How Fiction Works James Wood cannily points out that that "Mr"--as in Mr Biswas, by which he is always referred, though other characters are called by their first names--is an honorific that once had value but now has become common and meaningless. Mr Biswas reads prodigiously and encourages his children to become learned, and sleeps in a bed always referred to by its brand name, "Slumberking," but his reality, his meekness and insignificance, are always prevalent.

In awarding him the Nobel Prize in 2001, the Nobel Committee compared Naipaul to Joseph Conrad; the irony not being lost, I'm sure, that Conrad would probably have regarded Trinidad as unfavorably as he did the Congo. But A House for Mr Biswas is a quintessentially postcolonialist novel, in which the strangely convoluted ethnic history of Trinidad is a significant factor--colonized by the Spanish, British and Dutch, replete with ethnic Africans and Indians. In another one of those subtle twists of vocabulary, Naipaul describes how the schoolchildren of Trinidad consciously choose to call their parents "Mommy and Daddy" instead of "Bap and Mai" as a reflection of their English education. But I admit I wasn't thinking of Conrad when I read it; instead I was thinking that something about it struck me as similar to Russian authors like Pushkin, Chekhov, and Tolstoy, the latter especially in the way Naipaul fills the narrative with about a billion characters.

I am happy to report that the novel, though I was sure it wouldn't, has a relatively happy ending. It isn't perfect by any means, but in the end it is a great pleasure to see Naipaul vindicate Mr Biswas in some way.