V. S.

Naipaul
Sir Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul, ; born 17 August 1932), is a Trinidadian Nobel Prizewinning British writer known for his comic early novels set in Trinidad and Tobago, his bleaker later
novels of the wider world, and his autobiographical chronicles of life and travels. [1] He has published
more than 30 books, both of fiction and nonfiction, over some 50 years.
Naipaul was married to Patricia Ann Hale from 1955 until her death in 1996. She served as first
reader, editor, and critic of his writings. He dedicated his A House for Mr Biswas to her. In 1996
Naipaul married Nadira Naipaul, a Pakistani former journalist.[2]Naipaul was knighted in 1989.[3]

Childhood
V. S. Naipaul, familiarly Vidia Naipaul, was born on 17 August 1932 in Chaguanas in Trinidad.[5] He
was the second child of his mother Droapatie (ne Capildeo) and father Seepersad Naipaul.[5] In the
1880s, his grandparents emigrated from India to work as indentured servants in Trinidad's sugar
plantations.[6] In the largely peasant Indian immigrant community in Trinidad, Naipaul's father became
an English-language journalist,[7] and in 1929 began contributing articles to the Trinidad Guardian.[8] In
1932, the year Naipaul was born, his father joined the staff as the Chaguanas correspondent. [9] In "A
prologue to an autobiography" (1983), Naipaul describes how his father's reverence for writers and
for the writing life spawned his own dreams and aspirations to become a writer.[10]
The Naipauls believed themselves to be the descendants of Hindu Brahmins,[11] though they did not
observe many of the practices and restrictions common to Brahmins in India. [12][13][14] The family
gradually stopped speaking Indian languages and spoke English at home. [15]
In 1939, when he was seven years old, Naipaul's family moved to Trinidad's capital, Port of Spain,[16]
[17]
where Naipaul enrolled in the government-run Queen's Royal College, a well-regarded school that
was modelled after a British public school.[18] Upon graduation, Naipaul won a Trinidad Government
scholarship that allowed him to study at any institution of higher learning in the British
Commonwealth; he chose Oxford.

Education in England[edit]
At Oxford, Naipaul's early attempts at writing, he felt, were contrived. Lonely and unsure of his ability
and calling, he became depressed.[19]In April 1952, he took an impulsive trip to Spain, where he
quickly spent all he had saved.[20] He called his impulsive trip "a nervous breakdown." [21] Thirty years
later, he called it "something like a mental illness."[22]
In 1952, before visiting Spain, Naipaul met Patricia Ann Hale, his future wife, at a college play. With
Hale's support, he began to recover and gradually to write. She became a partner in planning his
career. Her family was hostile to the relationship; his was unenthusiastic. In June 1953, Naipaul and
Hale graduated from Oxford.
In 1953, Naipaul's father died.[23] He worked at odd jobs and borrowed money from Pat and his family
in Trinidad.

Life in London
"The freelancers' room was like a club: chat, movement, the separate anxieties of young or youngish men below the
passing fellowship of the room. That was the atmosphere I was writing in. That was the atmosphere I gave to Bogarts
Port of Spain street. Partly for the sake of speed, and partly because my memory or imagination couldnt rise to it, I
had given his servant room hardly any furniture: the Langham room itself was barely furnished. And I benefited from
the fellowship of the room that afternoon. Without that fellowship, without the response of the three men who read the
story, I might not have wanted to go on with what I had begun."
From, "A Prologue to an Autobiography" (1983).[24]

Naipaul moved to London in 1954. In December of that year, Henry Swanzy, the producer of
a BBC weekly programme called Caribbean Voices, hired Naipaul as presenter. A generation of
Caribbean writers had debuted on Caribbean Voices, including George Lamming,Samuel
Selvon, Derek Walcott, and Naipaul himself. Naipaul stayed in the part-time job for four years. In
those years, Pat was thebreadwinner in the family.
In January 1955, he and Pat were married. Neither informed their family or friends. Pat continued to
live in Birmingham and visited Naipaul on weekends.
At the BBC, Naipaul appeared on Caribbean Voices once a week, wrote short reviews, and
conducted interviews. Sitting in the BBC freelancers' room in the old Langham Hotel one summer
afternoon in 1955, he wrote "Bogart", the first story of Miguel Street. The story was inspired by a
neighbour he knew as a child in Port of Spain. Naipaul wrote Miguel Street in five weeks. The New
York Times said aboutMiguel Street: "The sketches are written lightly, so that tragedy is understated
and comedy is overstated, yet the ring of truth always prevails."[25]

Early Trinidad novels[edit]

Diana Athill, the editor at the publishing company Andr Deutsch, who read Miguel Street, liked it.
But the publisher, Andr Deutsch, thought a series of linked stories by an unknown Caribbean writer
unlikely to sell profitably in Britain.[26] He encouraged Naipaul to write a novel.[26] Without enthusiasm,
Naipaul quickly wrote The Mystic Masseur in Autumn 1955.[26] On 8 December 1955, his novel was
accepted by Deutsch, and Naipaul received a 125 payment.[26]
In August 1956, Naipaul returned to Trinidad for a two-month stay with his family. Travelling by ship
there, he sent humorous descriptions of the ship's West Indian passengers to Pat.[27] By the time he
left Trinidad, he had plans for writing The Suffrage of Elvira, a comic novella about a rural election in
Trinidad.[28]He wrote the novella with great speed during the early months of 1957. [29] He copied out
many of the reviews by hand for his mother, including one from the Daily Telegraph: "V. S. Naipaul is
a young writer who contrives to blend Oxford wit with home-grown rambunctiousness and not do
harm to either."[30] Awaiting his book royalties, in summer 1957, Naipaul accepted his only full-time
employment, the position of editorial assistant at the Cement and Concrete Association (C&CA). The
association published a magazine calledConcrete Quarterly.[31] The C&CA was to be the setting for
Naipaul's later novel, Mr. Stone's and the Knight's Companion.[31] Around this same time,
writer Francis Wyndham, who had taken Naipaul under his wing, introduced him to novelist Anthony
Powell. Powell, in turn, convinced the New Statesman's Kingsley Martin to give Naipaul a part-time
job reviewing books.[32] Naipaul reviewed books for the New Statesman from 1957 to 1961.[32]
With promotional help from Andr Deutsh, Naipaul's novels received critical acclaim. [33] The Mystic
Masseur was awarded the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize in 1958, and Miguel Street the Somerset
Maugham Award in 1961, W. Somerset Maugham himself approving the first-ever selection of a nonEuropean.[33] Eventually, the novel would be produced as a film under the same name in 2001.
The Capildeo clan with matriarch, Sogee Capildeo Maharaj, center middle row, maternal grandmother of V.S.
Naipaul, with her nine daughters and two sons. They were to be the inspiration for the Tulsis in A House for Mr
Biswas.

For his next novel, A House for Mr Biswas (1961), Naipaul took for inspiration childhood memories of
his father (later he wrote that the novel "destroyed memory" in some respects). [34] In the novel, title
character Mohun Biswas is propelled by circumstances to take a succession of vocations
(apprentice to a Hindu priest, signboard painter; a grocery store proprietor, and reporter for The
Trinidad Sentinel).[35] What ambition and resourcefulness Mr Biswas has is inevitably undermined by

his dependence on his powerful in-laws and the vagaries of the colonial society in which he lives.
[35]
According to author Patrick French, A House for Mr Biswas is "universal in the way that the work
of Dickens or Tolstoy is universal; the book makes no apologies for itself, and does not contextualize
or exoticize its characters. It reveals a complete world."[35]
The book consumed Naipaul. In 1983, he wrote:
The book took three years to write. It felt like a career; and there was a short period, towards the end
of the writing, when I do believe I knew all or much of the book by heart. The labour ended; the book
began to recede. And I found that I was unwilling to re-enter the world I had created, unwilling to
expose myself again to the emotions that lay below the comedy. I became nervous of the book. I
haven't read it since I passed the proofs in May 1961.[36]

Novels and Travel Writing

After completing A House for Mr Biswas, Naipaul and Pat spent the next five months in the
Caribbean.[38] [39] As a result of this trip, Naipaul wrote The Middle Passage: Impressions of Five
Societies British, French and Dutch in the West Indies and South America, his first travel book.[38]
[40]
To
gather
material
for
the
book,
he
and
Pat
travelled
to British
Guiana, Suriname,Martinique and Jamaica.[40] In the book, Naipaul portrayed the West Indies as
islands colonized only for the purpose of employing slaves for the production of other peoples'
goods. He wrote, "The history of the islands can never be told satisfactorily. Brutality is not the only
difficulty. History is built around achievement and creation; and nothing was created in the West
Indies."[41]
In early 1962, Naipaul and Pat went to India for a year-long visit. It was Naipaul's first visit to the land
of his ancestors. The title of the resulting book, An Area of Darkness, was not so much a reference
to India as to Naipaul's effort to understand India. [42][43] For the first time in his life, he felt anonymous,
even faceless. He was no longer identified, he felt, as part of a special ethnic group as he had been
in Trinidad and England; it made him anxious. [44][45] He was upset by what he saw as the resigned or
evasive Indian reaction to poverty and suffering. [46][47] Naipual wrote Mr. Stone and the Knight's
Companion in Srinagar. Before he left India, Naipaul accepted an invitation from the editor of
the Illustrated Weekly of India, a prominent English-language magazine, to write a monthly "Letter
from London" for the magazine.[48]
See also: A Flag on the Island and The Mimic Men
Naipaul and Pat spent nine months in Africa, Naipaul serving as writer-in-residence at Makerere
University inKampala, Uganda. He refused to do any teaching, but finished his novel The Mimic Men during his
stay.

Naipaul had spent an overwrought year in India. [50] Back in London, after An Area of Darkness was
completed, he felt creatively drained.[50] He felt he had used up his Trinidad material. [51] Neither India
nor the writing of Mr Stone and the Knight's Companion, his only attempt at a novel set in Britain with
white British characters, had spurred new ideas for imaginative writing. [51] His finances too were low,
and Pat went back to teaching to supplement them. [50] Naipaul's books had received much critical
acclaim, but they were not yet money makers.[50] Socially, he was now breaking away from
theCaribbean Voices circle, but no doors had opened to mainstream British society.[52]
That changed when Naipaul was introduced to Antonia Fraser, at the time the wife of conservative
politician Hugh Fraser.[53] Fraser introduced Naipaul to her social circle of upper-class British
politicians, writers, and performing artists.[53] In this circle was the wealthysecond Baron Glenconner,
father of novelist Emma Tennant and owner of estates in Trinidad, who arranged for an unsecured

loan of 7,200 for Naipaul.[54] Naipaul and Pat bought a three-floor house on Stockwell Park
Crescent.[55]
In late 1964, Naipaul was asked to write an original script for an American movie. [56] He spent the
next few months in Trinidad writing the story, a novella named "A Flag on the Island", later published
in the collection A Flag on the Island. The finished version was not to the director's liking and the
movie was never made.[56] The story is set in the present time1964in a Caribbean island that is
not named.[57]The main character is an American named Frankie who affects the mannerisms of
Frank Sinatra.[56] Frankie has links to the island from having served there during World War II. [58] He
revisits reluctantly when his ship anchors during a hurricane. [58] Naipaul wilfully makes the pace of the
book feverish, the narrative haphazard, the characters loud, the protagonist fickle or deceptive, and
the dialogue confusing.[58][56] Balancing the present time is Frankie's less disordered, though
comfortless, memory of 20 years before.[59] Then he had become a part of a community on the island.
[59]
He had tried to help his poor friends by giving away the ample US Army supplies he had. [59] Not
everyone was happy about receiving help and not everyone benefited. [59] Frankie was left chastened
about finding tidy solutions to the island's social problems. [59] This theme, indirectly developed in the
story, is one to which Naipaul would return again.
Not long after finishing A Flag on the Island, Naipaul began work on the novel The Mimic Men,
though for almost a year he did not make significant progress. [60] At the end of this period, he was
offered a Writer-in-Residence fellowship at Makerere University in Kampala,Uganda.[61] There, in
early 1966, he began to rewrite his material, and went on to complete the novel quickly.[62] The
finished novel broke new ground for him. [62] Unlike his Caribbean work, it was not comic. [63] It did not
unfold chronologically.[64] Its language was allusive and ironic, its overall structure whimsical. [65] It had
strands of both fiction and non-fiction, a precursor of other Naipaul novels. [66] It was intermittently
dense, even obscure,[64] but it also had beautiful passages, especially descriptive ones of the fictional
tropical island of Isabella. The subject of sex appeared explicitly for the first time in Naipaul's work.
[67]
The plot, to the extent there is one, centres on a protagonist, Ralph Singh, an East Indian-West
Indian politician from Isabella.[65] Singh is in exile in London and attempting to write his political
memoirs.[65] Earlier, in the immediate aftermath of decolonization in a number of British colonies in
the late 1950s and early 1960s, Singh had shared political power with a more powerful AfricanCaribbean politician. Soon, the memoirs take on a more personal aspect. There are flashbacks to
the formative and defining periods of Singh's life. In many of these, during crucial moments, whether
during his childhood, married life, or political career, he appears to abandon engagement and
enterprise.[65] These, he rationalizes later, belong only to fully made European societies. When The
Mimic Men was published, it received generally positive critical notice. In particular, Caribbean
politicians, such as Michael Manley and Eric Williams weighed in, the latter writing: "V. S. Naipaul's
description of West Indians as 'mimic men' is harsh but true ..." [68]
Back in London in October 1966, Naipaul received an invitation from the American publisher Little,
Brown and Company to write a book on Port-of-Spain.[69] The book took two years to write, its scope
widening with time. The Loss of El Dorado eventually became a narrative history of Trinidad based
on primary sources. Pat spent many months in the archives of the British Library reading those
sources.[69] In the end, the finished product was not to the liking of Little, Brown, who were expecting
a guidebook.[69] Alfred A. Knopfagreed to publish it instead in the United States, as did Andr Deutsch
later in Britain.[69]
The Loss of El Dorado is an attempt to ferret out an older, deeper history of Trinidad, one preceding
its commonly taught history as a British-run plantation economy of slaves and indentured workers.
[70]
Central to Naipaul's history are two stories: the search for El Dorado, a Spanish obsession, in turn
pursued by the British, and the British attempt to spark from their new colony of Trinidad, even as it
was itself becoming mired in slavery, a revolution of lofty ideals in South America. [70] Sir Walter
Raleigh and Francisco Miranda would become the human faces of these stories. [70] Although slavery
is eventually abolished, the sought for social order slips away in the face of uncertainties created by

changeable populations, languages, and governments and by the cruelties inflicted by the island's
inhabitants on each other.[70]
Before Naipaul began writing The Loss of El Dorado, he had been unhappy with the political climate
in Britain.[71] He had been especially unhappy with the increasing public animosity, in the mid-1960s,
towards Asian immigrants from Britain's ex-colonies. [71] During the writing of the book, he and Pat
sold their house in London, and led a transient life, successively renting or borrowing use of the
homes of friends. After the book was completed, they travelled to Trinidad and Canada with a view to
finding a location in which to settle.[72] Naipaul had hoped to write a blockbuster, one relieving him of
future money anxieties. As it turned out, The Loss of El Dorado sold only 3,000 copies in the US,
where major sales were expected; Naipaul also missed England more than he had calculated. It was
thus in a depleted state, both financial and emotional, that he returned to Britain. [72]
Earlier, during their time in Africa, Naipaul and Pat had travelled to Kenya, staying for month
in Mombasa on the Indian Ocean coast.[73] They had travelled in rural Uganda toKisoro District on the
south-western border with Rwanda and the Congo.[73] Naipaul showed interest in the great culture,
history and traditions of the Baganda people.[73] When Uganda's prime minister Milton
Obote deposed, militarily, the President of Uganda, who was also the Kabaka of Buganda, Naipaul
was critical of the British press for not condemning the action enough.[74] Naipaul also travelled
to Tanzania with a young American he had met in Kampala, Paul Theroux.[74] It was upon this African
experience that Naipaul would draw during the writing of his next book, In a Free State.[75]
In the title novella, "In a Free State", two young expatriate Europeans drive across an African
country, which remains nameless but which offers clues of Uganda, Kenya, and Rwanda. [76] The
novella speaks to many themes. The colonial era ends and Africans govern themselves. [76] Political
chaos, frequently violent, takes hold in newly decolonized countries. [76] Young, idealistic, expatriate
whites are attracted to these countries, seeking expanded moral and sexual freedoms. They are
rootless, their bonds with the land tenuous; at the slightest danger they leave. [77] The older,
conservative, white settlers, by contrast, are committed to staying, even in the face of danger.[77] The
young expatriates, though liberal, can be racially prejudiced.[77] The old settlers, unsentimental,
sometimes brutal, can show compassion.[78] The young, engrossed in narrow preoccupations, are
uncomprehending of the dangers that surround them. [77] The old are knowledgeable, armed, and
ready to defend themselves.[78] The events unfolding along the car trip and the conversation during it
become the means of exploring these themes.[77]

Writing of Guerrillas[edit]
In late December 1971 as news of the killings at Michael X's commune in Arima filtered out, Naipaul,
accompanied by Pat, arrived in Trinidad to cover the story.[79] This was a time of strains in their
marriage.[80] Naipaul, although dependent on Pat, was frequenting prostitutes for sexual gratification.
[80]
Pat was alone. Intensifying their disaffection was Pat's childlessness, for which neither Pat nor
Naipaul sought professional treatment, preferring instead to say that fatherhood would not allow time
for Naipaul's sustained literary labours.[81] Naipaul was increasingly ill-humoured and infantile, and
Pat increasingly reduced to mothering him.[81] She began to keep a diary, a practice she would
continue for the next 25 years.[80] According to biographer Patrick French,
"Pat's diary is an essential, unparalleled record of V. S. Naipaul's later life and work, and reveals
more about the creation of his subsequent books, and her role in their creation, than any other
source. It puts Patricia Naipaul on a par with other great, tragic, literary spouses such as Sonia
Tolstoy, Jane Carlyle and Leonard Woolf.[80]"
Naipaul visited the commune in Arima and Pat attended the trial. Naipaul's old friend Francis
Wyndham was now editor of The Sunday Times and offered to run the story in his newspaper.
Around the same time Naipaul received an invitation from Robert B. Silvers, editor of the New York
Review of Books, to do some stories on Argentina and Eva Pern. The Review, still in its first

decade after founding, was short of funds and Silvers had to borrow money from a friend to fund
Naipaul's trip. Naipaul also covered the 1984 Republican National Convention in Dallas, Texas, at
the behest of Silvers, after which Naipaul wrote "Among the Republicans," an anthropological study
of a "white tribe in the United States."[82]

Critical responses[edit]
In awarding Naipaul the 2001 Nobel Prize in Literature, the Swedish Academy praised his work "for
having united perceptive narrative and incorruptible scrutiny in works that compel us to see the
presence of suppressed histories."[83] The Committee added, "Naipaul is a
modern philosophe carrying on the tradition that started originally with Lettres
persanes and Candide. In a vigilant style, which has been deservedly admired, he transforms rage
into precision and allows events to speak with their own inherent irony." [83] The Committee also noted
Naipaul's affinity with the novelist Joseph Conrad:
Naipaul is Conrad's heir as the annalist of the destinies of empires in the moral sense: what they do
to human beings. His authority as a narrator is grounded in the memory of what others have
forgotten, the history of the vanquished.[83]
His fiction and especially his travel writing have been criticised for their allegedly unsympathetic
portrayal of the Third World. The novelist Robert Harris has called his portrayal of Africa racist and
"repulsive," reminiscent of Oswald Mosley's fascism.[84] Edward Said argues that Naipaul "allowed
himself quite consciously to be turned into a witness for the Western prosecution", promoting what
Said classifies as "colonial mythologies about wogs and darkies".[85] Said believes that Naipaul's
worldview may be most salient in the author's book-length essay The Middle Passage, which
Naipaul composed after returning to the Caribbean after 10 years of exile in England, and the
work An Area of Darkness.
Naipaul has been accused of misogyny, and of committing acts of "chronic physical abuse" against
his mistress of 25 years, Margaret Murray, who wrote in a letter to the New York Review of Books:
"Vidia says I didnt mind the abuse. I certainly did mind." [86]
Writing in The New York Review of Books about Naipaul, Joan Didion offers the following portrayal
of the writer:[87]
The actual world has for Naipaul a radiance that diminishes all ideas of it. The pink haze of the
bauxite dust on the first page of Guerrillas tells us what we need to know about the history and social
organization of the unnamed island on which the action takes place, tells us in one image who runs
the island and for whose profit the island is run and at what cost to the life of the island this profit has
historically been obtained, but all of this implicit information pales in the presence of the physical
fact, the dust itself.... The world Naipaul sees is of course no void at all: it is a world dense with
physical and social phenomena, brutally alive with the complications and contradictions of actual
human endeavour.... This world of Naipaul's is in fact charged with what can only be described as a
romantic view of reality, an almost unbearable tension between the idea and the physical fact...

Bibliography
Fiction

The Mystic Masseur (1957) film version: The Mystic Masseur (2001)

The Suffrage of Elvira (1958)

Miguel Street (1959)

A House for Mr Biswas (1961)

Mr. Stone and the Knights Companion (1963)

The Mimic Men (1967)

A Flag on the Island (1967)

In a Free State (1971) Booker Prize

Guerrillas (1975)

A Bend in the River (1979)

The Enigma of Arrival (1987)

A Way in the World (1994)

Half a Life (2001)

The Nightwatchman's Occurrence Book: And Other Comic Inventions (Stories) (2002)

Magic Seeds (2004)

Non-fiction

The Middle Passage: Impressions of Five Societies British, French and Dutch in the West
Indies and South America (1962)

An Area of Darkness (1964)

The Loss of El Dorado (1969)

The Overcrowded Barracoon and Other Articles (1972)

India: A Wounded Civilization (1977)

A Congo Diary (1980)

The Return of Eva Pern and the Killings in Trinidad (1980)

Among the Believers: An Islamic Journey (1981)

Finding the Centre: Two Narratives (1984)

A Turn in the South (1989)

India: A Million Mutinies Now (1990)

Beyond Belief: Islamic Excursions among the Converted Peoples (1998)

Between Father and Son: Family Letters (1999, edited by Gillon Aitken)

The Masque of Africa (2010)