Free Yours Ever by Thomas Mallon Page B

Trinidadian friend after three years in England throws him into a xenophobic snit about his own country: “Two days ago I met Solomon Lutchman. I never realised the man was so utterly ugly, so utterly crass—his low forehead, square, fat face, thick lips, wavy hair combed straight back. Now S. L. is an educated man. Yet to me he appears uncultured. The gulf that I felt between people and myself at home—people called me conceited, you remember—has grown wider. Take Lutchman. Narrow, insular, still looking upon Trinidad as the source of all effulgence.”
    Naipaul may miss his home island’s climate, but his longing for distinction—and even luxury—will keep him in the midst of England’s chills and damp: “I discover in myself all types of aristocratic traits, without, you know too well, the means to keep them alive.” Right now he must endure ordinary student poverty, a condition that his always-tender father tries to alleviate in ways large and small. In July 1951, Mr. Naipaul sends Vido a ten-dollar money order. “It will help you see a patch or two of France. It’s such a fleabite,but I’d feel brutal if I didn’t send anything at all.” The following March, thinking bigger, he makes a pledge as touching as it is implausible: “I want you to have that chance which I have never had: somebody to support me and mine while I write. Two or three years of this should be enough. If by then you have not arrived, then it will be time enough for you to see about getting a job. Think over this thing. I mean every word of it.”
    “Pa,” with his own thwarted literary aspirations—a writing life sacrificed to the production of inconsequential newspaper features—is, even beyond Kamla, the central figure in both Vido’s psyche and the family letters, which would eventually be published in the United States as
Between Father and Son
. As gentle as his son is imperious, the senior Naipaul again and again counsels Vido against depression and anxiety, sounding like a man who has been battered by both: “Be cheerful … Home is bright and gay. Plush carpets and so on. Next week I might have the outside of the house painted. We never forget you for a day.” Though he claims to believe in the power of mind over matter, Mr. Naipaul’s troubles forever mount. At one point he feels forced to make an embarrassed confession to the humorless Vido: “This will pain you: but your Ma will be having a baby—in September or October … I know it’s a mess, but there we are.”
    For all their difference in temperament, father and son share a host of mannerisms and seem, even an ocean apart, to be on the same somatic wavelength, experiencing similar eye trouble, the same indigestion, shared sleep patterns, even the same mechanical problems: “My typewriter, too,” writes Pa, “is behaving badly, n & g sticking, the v not typing.” But their father-son relation isn’t leveled into fraternity so much as simply reversed. In any number of matters, but especially literary ones, Vido parents his own Pa, criticizing the older man’s use of the apostrophe, holding up the late-blooming Joyce Cary as an example to him, and taking advantage of his own malfunctioning keyboard to hector Mr. Naipaul with the following advice: YOU HAVE ENOUGH MATERIAL FOR A HUNDRED STORIES. FOR HEAVEN’S SAKE START WRITING THEM. YOU CAN WRITE AND YOU KNOW IT. STOP MAKING EXCUSES . But themarching orders seem to leave Pa crumpled instead of invigorated. In his next letter to Vido, he demurs: “Go on writing, for progress’ sake, and don’t mind me. I am all right. I just want to see you do the thing … I am going in for orchid-collecting—in a small way.”
    And yet, more embarrassing than the new baby, Pa’s dream of publishing his fiction persists. Late in 1952, he tells Vido that he wants to send him the manuscript of a newly fattened story collection, hoping it “will not interfere too much with your studies. Exams are near. Can you manage