Free Yours Ever by Thomas Mallon Page A

criticism than love: “She is a member of the university, not unintelligent, nor altogether unattractive … About her character: she is good, and simple. Perhaps a bit too idealistic, and this I find on occasion rather irritating.” The Naipaul who will come to dismiss entire civilizations that have offended his intelligence or nose, is up and runningeven before he leaves Trinidad. On November 24, 1949, he writes to Kamla, already in India: “My thesis is that the world is dying—Asia today is only a primitive manifestation of a long-dead culture; Europe is battered into a primitivism by material circumstances; America is an abortion.”
    But between the broadest brushstrokes one sees a corresponding love of precision and cool: “This is my last day in Paris. I have not been having a wonderful time, as all good postcard-writers say. I have been having a quiet, agreeable stay.” The young man who “hate[s] writing badly, at any time” speaks of “the process of my emergence” and reports from Oxford that “when I do write an essay it turns out to be a really excellent one. This is not boasting; for my tutor is truly impressed.” Any doubts he may have about a paper he’s to deliver to his college’s literary society are dispelled as soon as it’s been given: “This morning someone told me that my paper was by far the brightest he had ever heard at the society. So it appears that I still retain some of the old fire.” He is nineteen years old.
    But the rejection of his novel seems to unleash the full force of suppressed loneliness, and early in 1952, Naipaul suffers what even he is not too proud to call a nervous breakdown. He pleads with the family back in Trinidad (“My love to all, and don’t forget me”), though it is only to Kamla that he can make himself truly vulnerable. She urges him not to hold back: “Tell me everything and, believe me, I’ll understand.” Even before the breakdown, Naipaul had beseeched her: “Please keep me alive with letters.” Their epistolary relationship can be stormy, scolding, interrupted by the sort of regrets that can cost extra postage. As Naipaul explains to those back home: “Just last night I tore up a letter that I had written to Kamla—on an air-letter form too. I get into certain moods and write things which, when read the following morning, read badly and are usually disgustingly maudlin.”
    In a collection of the Naipaul family’s correspondence, a reader sees Kamla, during the years of her own university exile, becoming not so much older and wiser as a little harder and sadder. She at one point advances to her brother the theory that it’s “best to marry the person who is mad after you—almost worships you—thanmarry one you love.” It is difficult for her and Naipaul to have any relationship that exists outside the vexed and loving context of the family that remains far away on a third continent entirely. Letters from one Naipaul to another often involve a kind of emotional triangulation, at once delicate and manipulative. During one bad misunderstanding, Vido receives this request from his father: “Please explain to [Kamla] and say we love her and want her home for her own sake and not for any money she may have to give to us.”
    There is always a novel’s worth of news and complication and worry coming from Port-of-Spain. The elder Mr. Naipaul seeks the advice of his precocious son on how to handle Deo and Phoolo, two young female cousins who are living under the family’s roof: “I had never realised, until about three weeks ago, how shockingly ‘advanced’ these girls have become … so ultra-modern that they make no distinction between Negroes, Mussulmans or any other people.” While Vido is grateful for his parents’ affection and sacrifice (“Frankly, whenever I think about you and Pa, I think that you have been noble”), his letters also make plain that his own home will finally have to be somewhere else. Running into an old