Despite the implications of the marital misadventures of a certain gentleman from Thebes, a fellow who wed with all too little forethought, there is not much evidence that a mother exerts a more telling influence over a son than a father. Just as often—I would guess more often—the father is the more significant figure, for good and ill. Having a father who is benevolent or unjust, honorable or corrupt, cheerful or grim, a success or a failure in life, can, along with so many other things, weigh in heavily on the outlook, the ambition, the confidence, and the ultimate fate of a son. The kind of father one gets, of course, comes under that large and scientifically untrackable category known as the luck of the draw.

V. S. Naipaul, in this regard, drew very luckily indeed. His father, Seepersad Naipaul (1906–53), a man of the most modest worldly success, was entirely honorable, generous, selfless, and filled with good sense, for his son if not always for himself. No man ever had anyone more devoted in his corner than Naipaul had in the man he called Pa. When his father died, at the age of forty-seven, V. S. Naipaul, himself only twenty-one, sent home a telegram that, in part, read: “He was the best man I knew. Everything I owe to him.” Allow here for the exaggeration that accompanies grief, but no need to allow much. Later he added: “In a way I had always looked upon my life as a continuation of his—a continuation which, I hoped, would be a fulfillment.”

Until now our picture of Seepersad Naipaul derived largely from the eponymous figure from his son’s novel, A House for Mr. Biswas. Comparing his father to the father who is the protagonist of his novel, Naipaul has recently said: “My father was a profounder man in every way. And his wounds are deeper than the other man can say. [My novel is] based on him, but it couldn’t be the real man.” Affecting as the Mr. Biswas of the novel is—I happen to think him one of a small number of memorable comic characters in contemporary literature—Seepersad Naipaul turns out to have been kinder, gentler, more deeply touching than his portrait in fiction.

In A House for Mr. Biswas, Anand, the oldest son and easily most favored child in a crowded household, sails off from Port of Prince for England; a boyhood dominated by school examinations has paid off in a scholarship to Oxford, to which he is now headed. “He missed Anand,” Naipaul writes of Mr. Biswas, “and worried about him.”  

Anand’s letters, at first rare, become more and more frequent. They were gloomy, self-pitying; then they were tinged with a hysteria which Mr. Biswas immediately understood. He wrote Anand long humorous letters; he wrote about the garden; he gave religious advice; at great expense he sent by air mail a book called Outwitting Our Nerves by two American psychologists. Anand’s letters grew rare again. There was nothing Mr. Biswas could do but wait.

This passage, coming toward the close of Naipaul’s novel, is a less than adequate summary of the correspondence between Naipaul père et fils. The character of the correspondence, now printed in Between Father and Son[1] (which also includes a number of letters between the young V. S. Naipaul and his older sister Kamla, and occasional letters to other family members) is better captured in another passage in the novel, where Naipaul writes: “And now Mr. Biswas needed his son’s interest and anger. In all the world there was no one else to whom he could complain.” In fact, in real life, there was an extraordinary reciprocity between the two, father and son, who at different times complained to, bucked up, and relied upon each other.

The letters in Between Father and Son commence in earnest in August of 1950, when the eighteen-year-old V. S. Naipaul writes a letter to his younger sister Sati from New York, a brief stopover on his way to London and thence to Oxford, to take up his scholarship. He will be gone for six years, not once returning in the interval and never again to see the father who will suffer a heart attack in February 1953, which leaves him with a greatly weakened heart that will extinguish him by October of the same year.

Not long after his heart attack, his father writes to Naipaul, “Please take good care of yourself; for should anything untoward happen to you, ‘the last hope of England’ will have vanished.” The joke here is that the last hope of English literature is meant, but behind this small jest Naipaul’s father really meant that his own last hope will have vanished. V. S. Naipaul—Vido, as his family called him—was the family hope. Quick, disciplined, moody, good at school (with a “precociousness that marked you out from all the others [of my children],” as his father writes), Vido was his father’s and the family’s hope to leave some mark on the larger world.

As Naipaul would later—and quite accurately—write: Mr. Biswas’s “visions of the future became only visions of Anand’s future.” The hope was to break free of decades and decades of the deep obscurity in a country, Trinidad, that was the two stages beyond provincial. Ill, doing work that was beneath him, with every kind of cheese-paring money worry imaginable, Naipaul’s father nevertheless writes to him in England that “the truth is the only person I am often worried about is yourself.”

“I don’t want you to be like me,” Mr. Biswas tells his son Anand. The meaning of this in Naipaul’s novel is that he wants his son to lead a larger, more expansive life, to avoid the trap of domesticity in a provincial setting in which he has himself become ensnared. Although a Brahmin, Seepersad Naipaul was poor and a member of a minority in a country that played no role in the modern world—his life in Trinidad could be viewed as that of a speck on a pin on a dot. The word “marginalized,” so popular among academics doing “post-colonial” studies, does not even begin to get at the quality of his life; the metaphor of margin, after all, assumes a page, but it is not clear that the Naipauls were, in their lives in Trinidad, even on the page. At seventeen, V. S. Naipaul had already planned his escape —an escape with no return: “I have nine months left [in Trinidad]. Then I shall go away never to come back.” Six months after his father’s death, when his mother beseeches him to return home, Naipaul writes: “I think I shall die if I had to spend the rest of my life in Trinidad. The place is too small, the values are all wrong, and the people are petty.” His father would have had no difficulty understanding this.

No sooner does Naipaul depart Trinidad than he breathes a different, a deeper and richer air. On the brief layover awaiting the trip to London, he finds New York an astonishment: “Luxury and decadence.” London is even better: “I don’t see how I could live anywhere else but in London.” He quickly picks up the reigning spirit at Oxford, which is to work hard but not too hard. He rightly gauges the closing down of the English aristocracy, yet enjoys all that is available to the Oxford undergraduate in the way of aristocratic leisure and small pleasures. The world opens up to him; during vacations he goes to France, visits Spain, meets Germans. A competitor in the skirt chase, he complains about the tallness of English girls. “I have got to learn how to dance,” writes the boy whose dour adult face would one day cause Saul Bellow to remark that one look at him and he could forego Yom Kippur.

As a young man on whom not much was lost, Naipaul did not remain callow for long. An old Arab proverb has it that, when your son becomes a man, make him your brother. Which is precisely what Seepersad Naipaul did. “I am remembering you today,” he writes on the boy’s birthday, “as my 19-year old brother.” Along with being brothers, they are fellow writers, shooting literary advice back and forth to each other across the waters. The father asks the son to help place some journalism for him in England, adding “keep the money.” He is working as a sub-editor, doing page make-up, on a Trinidadian newspaper, while his son, beginning to do reporting for Isis, an Oxford student magazine, reports: “I find I have a great liking for journalism.” Son writes to father: “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 intellectuals.” Father writes to son: “I cannot imagine seeing you write a bad story… . My God! At your age I could barely manage to write a good letter.” More encouraging yet: “I have no doubt you will be a great writer.”

Seepersad Naipaul’s advice to his son about writing is always sound. “Read Conrad for intensity of expression, but for the most part be yourself.” On the formation of style, he tells him:

Don’t care to please any person but yourself. Only see that you have succeeded in saying exactly what you want to say—without showing off; with utter, brave sincerity—and you will have achieved style, because you will have been yourself.

The son’s advice to the father is, naturally enough, less profound, more about the market for his work. Apropos of his father writing a novel—which he would not live long enough to get around to doing—his son reminds him that he “should realize that the society of the West Indies is a very interesting one—one of phony sophistication.” He reminds his father that Joyce Cary only began writing his novels after retiring from the Colonial Service. “You have enough material for a hundred stories,” he implores, typing out his exhortation in capital letters. “For heaven’s sake start writing them. You can write and you know it. Stop making excuses.” Imagine taking this from one’s child. Seepersad Naipaul did, without the least shred, insofar as one can determine, of resentment.

Even as the boy becomes the man the father himself wished to be, the father continues to worry about him, understanding that his temperament, so much that of the artist, cannot but cause him difficulty. “Perception is rare,” he writes to his son, “and intelligence is by no means widespread. Those who have it to any unusual degree often suffer terribly.” Meanwhile, the son writes: “I discover in myself all types of aristocratic traits.” He is an aristocrat in the making, at least in the sense, as Balzac once wrote, that “a true artist is a prince.” But the hauteur, which comes all too easily to the son, is not—small wonder—everywhere appreciated. He writes to his father that “a friend told me the other day that people don’t like me because they feel that I knew they were fools.”

Not all that passes between father and son is about art and soul. Money—money worries, chiefly—come up regularly throughout the correspondence. On the Trinidadian side the old family car needs a tire, the fridge breaks down, the typewriter is on the fritz. They attempt to smuggle in cheaper cigarettes to Vido through the mails; they send him clothes. The father encloses money with his letters whenever he can, but feels guilty that it isn’t enough. The son, less convincingly, on the plea from his sister in India, claims he is going to send money to help out at home, but can’t quite get round to doing so: “I am really just managing to live—very meagerly. And to have friends in this place, one must have money—to buy them drinks and tea.” In this realm, the father assumes all the guilt. “Do not worry about sending us money,” he writes. “It is bad enough we do not send you anything.” Near the end of his life, he tells his son: “Never despise money.” Quite right, of course, for being able to do so is a luxury available only to the rich.

Although it is the early 1950s—a time when, for the English, wogs began at Calais—there is not much mention of racial prejudice in Naipaul’s letters from England. It is his father, in fact, who first brings up the subject, when he complains that white employees on his newspaper in Trinidad get quicker advancement than he. The son notes that Germans he has met “respect Indians, and they are attracted to them,” which suggests that the same cannot be said about the English. Only once, now out of Oxford and thinking about his future, does he note to his mother, apropos of England, that “this country is hot with racial prejudices.”

The barriers of English social class loom large. “These differences,” Naipaul writes home, “are real, whatever one may say.” He complains of a clique at Isis. When his father warns him against marrying too soon, he makes plain that he is scarcely in serious contention for doing so, his own social condition rendering him less than a prize catch: “I tell no one I am rich. I am not blessed with a striking appearance, and I am not a man of distinguished associations. A thorough nonentity, in other words.”

His parents worry about his marrying a white woman, which he eventually will. This supplies the one occasion when the father comes close to lecturing his son, the one time he becomes a touch social scientific: “If an investigation were made, it would show that by far the majority of inter-marriages end in failure.” But the job of pleading is left to his mother, who begs him, “don’t marry a white girl please don’t.” In the end, though, the father consents to his son’s marriage; such is his love, he isn’t about to lose this boy over anything— compared to the depth of this love—so trivial as race or religion.

At one point, Naipaul informs his parents that he “has been prey to the gravest emotional upset I have ever experienced.” He chalks it up to “growing up, I suppose,” but he will be plunged into it more than once, and it sounds very much like depression. He will himself later refer to these bouts as “nervous breakdown[s].” A psychologist whom he sees tells him that his breakdown was owing to fear of failure, which he, Naipaul, finds persuasive, though he writes to his mother that he believes it may have been owing to loneliness and the absence of affection. When first told of his son’s troubles, his father, a man of the pre-therapeutic generation, tells him that he must stop worrying, adding that “most of the things over which we worry are really no true causes of worry at all.” Buddhistically, he advises: “Keep your centre.” He sends him a book, You and Your Nerves, which he thinks will help him resolve his worries. Touching stuff.

Between Father and Son chronicles the story of an extraordinarily sweet relationship, but the one place that it can be said to have a more strictly literary significance is here, on the subject of what I have called the young V. S. Naipaul’s early depression. The reasons for his breakdown seem genuine enough: jerked from one culture to another; living with the pressures of being in a minority, without the support of family and friends nearby; the sense that so much rides on his success—all these things can conduce to knock anyone out of the box of normal mental stability.

But with writers of dark vision—of whom V. S. Naipaul is clearly one—the question of what an intrinsic depression might contribute to that vision seems almost as unavoidable as it is unanswerable. Psychoanalyzing the dead is unclean work; doing so to the living is even more insulting, and I feel intrusive even treading lightly here. But the question of depression and dark vision first arose for me in reading the letters of Joseph Conrad, in whose mental economy depression seems undeniably to have played a large role. In Conrad’s letters—where the gloom is so pervasive, the aura of hopelessness so strong, the sense of quotidian life as a ferocious combat so unrelenting—one has to wonder whether the writer’s vision is owing to the depression or the depression to the vision. Complicated, all this, hideously complicated, and useful in reminding us how little we really know about the workings of first-class literary minds.

If the initial reason for the interest in this book is the fame that V. S. Naipaul would later achieve, the book’s real hero is Seepersad Naipaul. The young, being intrinsically self-occupied, to put it gently, are almost never persuasively heroic, at least in civilian roles. Naipaul’s father’s utter selflessness toward his talented son speaks to a noble nature. Not long after his son has his first novel rejected, the father, offering to support him at home for three years, writes: “I want you to have that chance which I never had: someone to support me and mine while I write.” He knows his son, knows that “nothing but literary success will make you happy.” Later he writes: “Your work is cut out. I stand back of you.”

Seepersad Naipaul comes to seem all the more splendid when one learns that, all this while, life is inexorably grinding him down. “In this struggle for existence,” he writes to his son, “I feel just hemmed in by hard, inescapable facts and forces.” His large family makes its unending demands. His job doesn’t give him the time he requires to write the stories that, only after the wish for his son’s success, are the true name of his desire. The penultimate nail in the coffin comes when he writes to his son: “This will pain you: but your Ma will be having a baby,” their seventh child. The ultimate nail, of course, is the heart attack that comes in his forty-seventh year. Still, he soldiers on. In the last letter to his son printed in this book, he writes of his belief in a “divine Providence,” available “only for those who trust.”

At at time when V. S. Naipaul is blocked in his writing, his father urges him to begin a new novel and offers himself as a possible subject. “If you are at a loss for a theme, take me for it,” he writes, and then provides a sample opening. Nine years later—in 1961—V. S. Naipaul would show that he had taken up his father’s suggestion, when he published A House for Mr. Biswas, his one book, my guess is, that has a chance of living well beyond its author. Earlier, soon after his son arrives at Oxford in fact, the father suggests, “If you could write me letters about things and people—especially people—at Oxford, I could compile them in a book: letters between a father and SON, or MY OXFORD LETTERS. What think you?” It’s not known what his son thought of this suggestion, but now we have that very book. It’s almost enough to make one believe in a divine Providence, at least for those who trust.

Notes
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Between Father and Son: Family Letters, by V. S. Naipaul; Alfred A. Knopf, 297 pages, $26. Go back to the text.