Between father and son: Family letters

The letters are filled with much insight of the intimate relations enjoyed among the members of the Naipaul family and the words of encouragement exchanged between father and son after the latter departed Trinidad to commence studies in Literature at Oxford in October 1950. The letters span from September 1949 up to the death of the senior Naipaul four years afterward. A revealing postscript provides letters from Naipaul concerning work on “a series of connected stories about a street in Port-of-Spain” – what was to become Miguel Street (1959) and “the draft of a new novel” which was to later emerge as The Mystic Masseur (1957).

Naipaul’s sister Kamla writes from Benares University where she led at times a not too pleasant student life as revealed by her October 1952 letter to Vidia where she wishes “to go home immediately” as she has become “so disgusted with Benares and its staff.” This mood had, however, changed by February of the following year as she wrote “I am now very happy at Benares…we all have difficulties. I had mine and for a time I fought them alone…” Perhaps Between Father, Son and Daughter may have been an equally apt title for this series of letters of such engrossing interest.

The most enjoyable exchanges in the work are the bits of advice given between the elder and junior Naipaul on the craft of writing.

VS Naipaul’s encouragement of his father as writer is moving and full of pathos and gives one a unique insight into how hard, long and serious the craft of the novelist was looked upon in the family. The letter to his father in March 1951 illustrates: “Now I want to tell you something. I have always admired you as a writer. And I am convinced that, were you born in England, you would have been famous and rich and pounced upon by the intellectuals.” VS continued “Shaw achieved success at about forty-four, you should try to keep on writing.” Seepersad did continue as his son implored, but it is abundantly clear that the dreams of the father have been more than adequately fulfilled through his son the Nobel Laureate.

In May 1951 replying to his son, Seepersad wrote: “I feel exceedingly good at your encouraging words, because I know you are not flattering me and I have confidence in your opinion…Look, it isn’t that I lack confidence. I know I can write…” One may well ask oneself, who is encouraging whom, father or son? The self-conviction of the author is nowhere better illustrated than when VS intimated to his sister Kamla, after the death of Seepersad: “Look, I am going to be a success as a writer. I know that. I have gambled all my future on that possibility.” It is as if VS realised that he had to fulfill his father’s dreams.

The text is at its finest when we get an idea of the purity of the vision of the artist and writer that VS Naipaul displayed. In July 1952, writing to sister Sati who decided to pursue her Higher Certificate, VS admonishes: “You must do your own thinking about the books you read…In other words, if you are studying Milton, get to know something of his life, the temper of the times he lived in, the literary conventions.” Later on he elaborates in his letter “thought is indispensable. You must realise in the first place what the writer set out to do.”

Of course, Naipaul threw himself energetically at his studies for his literature degree and this provided the wherewithal for the formation of the writer. In May 1951 he confided to the family in Trinidad: “I have decided to do some extra work for my final examinations. I am doing the novelists of the nineteenth century, and I have piles of novels to read…Dickens, George Eliot, Thackeray, Meredith, Pater, Henry James, Kipling, Thomas Hardy.”

As a new year begins it is my sincere hope that more members of the national community would share in this desire to expand our reading horizons and so enrich the national sensibility.

Gregory O’Young is a PhD student at UWI