Literary Occasions (9 page)

Two years or so after I was born my father left the
Guardian,
for reasons that were never clear to me. For some years he did odd jobs here and there, now attached to my mother’s family, now going back to the protection of an uncle by marriage, a rich man, founder and part owner of the biggest bus company on the island. Poor himself, with close relations who were still agricultural labourers, my father dangled all his life in a half-dependence and half-esteem between these two powerful families.

In 1938 my father was taken on by the
Guardian
again, this time as a city reporter. And we—my father, my mother and their five children, our own little nucleus within my mother’s extended family—moved to Port of Spain, to the house owned by my mother’s mother. That was when I was introduced to the life of the street (and the mystery of the negro carpenter in the servant room, making “the thing without a name”). That was also when I got to know my father.

I had lived before then (at least in my own memory) in my mother’s family house in Chaguanas. I knew I had a father, but I also knew and accepted that—like the fathers of others of my cousins—he was not present. There was a gift one year of a very small book of English poetry; there was a gift another time of a toy set of carpenter’s tools. But the man himself remained vague.

He must have been in the house, though; because in the subsidiary two-storey wooden house at the back of the main building there were—on the inner wall of the upstairs verandah—jumbled ghostly impressions of banners or posters he had painted for someone in my mother’s family who had fought a local election. The cotton banners had been stretched on the verandah wall; the beautiful oil paint, mainly red, had soaked through, disfiguring (or simply adding to) the flowered designs my
mother’s father (now dead) had had painted on the lower part of the verandah wall. The glory, of the election and my father’s banners, belonged to the past; I accepted that.

My mother’s family house in Chaguanas was a well-known local “big house.” It was built in the North Indian style. It had balustraded roof terraces, and the main terrace was decorated at either end with a statue of a rampant lion. I didn’t like or dislike living there; it was all I knew. But I liked the move to Port of Spain, to the emptier house, and the pleasures and sights of the city: the squares, the gardens, the children’s playground, the streetlights, the ships in the harbour.

There was no American base at the end of the street. The land, still hardly with a name, known only as Docksite, had just been reclaimed, and the grey mud dredged up from the harbour was still drying out, making wonderful patterns as it crusted and cracked. After the shut-in compound life of the house in Chaguanas, I liked living on a city street. I liked looking at other people, other families. I liked the way things looked. In the morning the shadows of houses and trees fell on the pavement opposite; in the afternoon our pavement was in shadow. And I liked the municipal order of each day: the early-morning cleaning of the streets, with the hydrants turned on to flood the green-slimed gutters with fresh water; the later collection of refuse; the passing in mid-morning of the ice-cart.

Our house stood on high concrete pillars. The newspaper man threw the
Guardian
as high as he could up the concrete front steps. This delivery of a paper was one of the novelties of my Port of Spain life. And I also knew that, because my father worked for the
Guardian,
the paper was delivered free. So I had a feeling of privilege, a double sense of drama. And just as I had inherited or been given a feeling for lettering, so now I began to be given ambitions connected with the printed word. But these ambitions were twisted. They were not connected with the simple reporting that my father was doing for the
Guardian
at that time—he didn’t like what he was doing. The ambitions were
connected with what my father had done for the
Guardian
long before, in that past out of which he had so suddenly appeared to me.

My father had a bookcase-and-desk. It was a bulky piece of furniture, stained dark red and varnished, with glass doors to the three bookshelves, and a lipped, sloping, hinged lid to the desk. It was made from pine and packing crates (the raw, unstained side panel of one drawer was stencilled
Stow away from boilers
). It was part of the furniture my father had brought from where he had been living in the country. I was introduced to this furniture in Port of Spain, recognized it as my father’s and therefore mine, and got to like each piece; in my grandmother’s house in Chaguanas nothing had belonged to me.

Below the sloping lid of the desk, and in the square, long drawers, were my father’s records: old papers, where silver fish squirmed and mice sometimes nested, with their pink young—to be thrown out into the yard for chickens to peck at. My father liked to keep documents. There were letters from a London writing school, letters from the
Guardian.
I read them all, many times, and always with pleasure, relishing them as things from the past; though the raised letter-heads meant more to me than the letters. There was a passport with my father’s picture—a British passport, for someone from the colony of Trinidad and Tobago; this passport had never been used. And there was a big ledger in which my father had pasted his early writings for the
Guardian.
It was an estate wages ledger; the newspaper cuttings had been pasted over the names of the labourers and the wages they had been paid week by week.

This ledger became one of the books of my childhood. It was there, in the old-fashioned
Guardian
type and lay-out—and not in the paper that fell on the front steps every morning, sometimes while it was still dark—that I got to love the idea of newspapers and the idea of print.

I saw my father’s name in print, in the two spellings, Naipal and Naipaul. I saw the pen-names that in those glorious days he
had sometimes also used: Paul Nye, Paul Prye. He had written a lot, and I had no trouble understanding that the
Guardian
had been a better paper then. The Chaguanas that my father had written about was more full of excitement and stories than the Chaguanas I had known. The place seemed to have degenerated, with the paper.

My father had written about village feuds, family vendettas, murders, bitter election battles. (And how satisfying to see, in print, the names of those relations of my mother’s whose ghostly election banners, from a subsequent election, I had seen on the verandah wall of my mother’s family house!) My father had written about strange characters. Like the negro “hermit”: once rich and pleasure-seeking, now penniless and living alone with a dog in a hut in the swamp-lands. The
Guardian
called my father’s hermit Robinson Crusoe. Then, true to his new name, this Crusoe decided to go to Tobago, Crusoe’s island; he intended to walk there; and, fittingly, there was no more about him. There was the negro woman of 112 who said she remembered the days of slavery when “negroes were lashed to poles and flogged.” That didn’t mean much; but the words (which made one of the headlines) stuck, because I didn’t know that particular use of “lash.”

My father had his own adventures. Once, on a rainy night, and far from home, his motorcycle skidded off the road and for some reason he had to spend the night up a tree. Was that true? I don’t remember what my father said, but I understood that the story was exaggerated.

It didn’t matter. I read the stories as stories; they were written by my father; I went back to them as to memorials of a heroic time I had missed. There was something about the ledger I noticed but never asked about, accepting it as a fact about the ledger: the clippings stopped quite suddenly; at least a third of the book remained unused.

In the
Guardian
that came to the house every day my father’s name didn’t appear. The style of the paper had changed; the
reporting was all anonymous. The paper was part of the drama of the early morning, but I was interested in it only as a printed object. I didn’t think to look for what my father had written.

The fact was I was too young for newspapers. I was old enough only for stories. The ledger in the desk was like a personal story. In it the ideas of “once upon a time” and my father’s writing life in old Chaguanas came together and penetrated my imagination, together with Charles Kingsley’s story of Perseus (a baby cast out to sea, a mother enslaved), which was the first story my father read to me; the early chapters of
Oliver Twist;
Mr. Murdstone from
David Copperfield;
Mr. Squeers. All this my father introduced me to. All this was added to my discovery of Port of Spain and the life of our street. It was the richest and most serene time of my childhood.

It didn’t last long. It lasted perhaps for two years. My mother’s mother decided to leave Chaguanas. She bought a cocoa estate of 350 acres in the hills to the north-west of Port of Spain, and it was decided—by the people in the family who decided on such matters—that the whole family, or all its dependent branches, should move there. My mother was willing enough to be with her family again. The rest of us were not so willing. But we had to go. We had to leave the house in Port of Spain. After the quiet and order of our two years as a separate unit we were returned to the hubbub of the extended family and our scattered nonentity within it.

The intention was good, even romantic. It was that the family should together work the rich and beautiful estate. It was more the idea of the commune than a continuation of the extended family life of Chaguanas, where most people had their own land and houses and used the family house as a centre. Here we all lived in the estate house. It was a big house, but it wasn’t big enough; and the idea of communal labour turned out to be little more than the exaction of labour from the helpless.

In Chaguanas the family had been at the centre of a whole network of Hindu reverences. People were always coming to
the Chaguanas house to pay their respects, to issue invitations or to bring gifts of food. Here we were alone. Unsupported by that Chaguanas world, with no one outside to instruct us in our obligations, even to ourselves, our own internal reverences began to go; our Hindu system began to fail.

There were desperate quarrels. Animosities and alliances shifted all the time; people had constantly to be looked at in new ways. Nothing was stable. Food was short; transport to Port of Spain difficult. I didn’t see my father for days. His nerves deteriorated. He had been given one of the servant rooms (we children slept anywhere). In that room one Sunday evening, in a great rage, he threw a glass of hot milk. It cut me above my right eye; my eyebrow still shows the scar.

After two years we moved back to the house in Port of Spain, but only to some rooms in it. There was a period of calm, especially after my father got a job with the government and left the
Guardian.
But we were under pressure. More and more people from my mother’s family were coming to Port of Spain, and we were squeezed into less and less space. The street itself had changed. On the reclaimed area of Docksite there was the American base; and at least one of the houses or yards had become a kind of brothel ground.

Disorder within, disorder without. Only my school life was ordered; anything that had happened there I could date at once. But my family life—my life at home or my life in the house, in the street—was jumbled, without sequence. The sequence I have given it here has come to me only with the writing of this piece. And that is why I am not sure whether it was before the upheaval of our move or after our return to Port of Spain that I became aware of my father writing stories.

In one of the drawers of the desk there was a typescript—on
Guardian
“copy” paper—of a story called “White Man’s Way.” It was an old story and it didn’t mean much to me. A white overseer on a horse, a girl in a cane-field: I cannot remember what happened. I was at sea with this kind of story. For all my reputation
in the house as a reader of books—and my interest in books and magazines as printed objects was genuine—there was an element of pretence, a carry-over from the schoolroom, in much of the reading I did on my own. It was easier for me to take an interest in what my father read to me. And my father never read this story aloud to me.

I remember that in the story there was a phrase about the girl’s breasts below her bodice; and I suppose that my father had grafted his sexual yearnings on to an English or American magazine-style tropical story. In the desk, hoarded with his other papers, there was a stack of these magazines, often looked at by me, never really read. My father had done or partly done a correspondence course with a London writing school before the war—some of the letters were in the desk. The school had recommended a study of the “market.” These magazines were the market.

But “White Man’s Way” was in the past. The stories my father now began to write were aimed at no market. He wrote in fits and starts. He wrote in bed, with a pencil. He wrote slowly, with great patience: he could write the same paragraph over and over again. Liable to stomach pains, and just as liable to depressions (his calls then for “the Epictetus” or “the Marcus Aurelius,” books of comfort, were like calls for his stomach medicine), my father became calm before and during his writing moods.

He didn’t write a great deal. He wrote one long story and four or five shorter stories. In the shorter pieces my father, moving far from my mother’s family and the family of his uncle by marriage, re-created his own background. The people he wrote about were poor, but that wasn’t the point. These stories celebrated Indian village life, and the Hindu rituals that gave grace and completeness to that life. They also celebrated elemental things, the order of the working day, the labour of the rice-fields, the lighting of the cooking fire in the half-walled gallery of a thatched hut, the preparation and eating of food. There was very little “story” in these stories. But to me they gave a
beauty (which in a corner of my mind still endures, like a fantasy of home) to the Indian village life I had never known. And when we went to the country to visit my father’s own relations, who were the characters in these stories, it was like a fairytale came to life.