V. S. Naipaul

Childhood and roots

Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul, known as V. S. Naipaul, was born on 17 August 1932 in Chaguanas, a sugar town on the island of Trinidad, in the British crown colony of Trinidad and Tobago. He was the son of Droapatie Capildeo and Seepersad Naipaul, and the couple's second child and first son. His grandparents had come from northern India in the late nineteenth century as indentured labourers on sugar plantations. According to the genealogy the family reconstructed in Trinidad, they were Brahmins, though his father's background remained less certain. Over time the ritual restrictions of their ancestors loosened: chicken and fish appeared at the family table, Christmas was celebrated with a dinner, and the men wore only Western clothes. The languages of India also gradually disappeared from the home.

A journalist father

Seepersad Naipaul was an English-language journalist with a deep reverence for writers and the literary life, an enthusiasm he passed on to his eldest son. He began contributing stories to the Trinidad Guardian in 1929 and in 1932 joined its staff as the provincial correspondent for Chaguanas. When the young Vidia was seven the family moved to the capital, Port of Spain, and later settled there permanently. Naipaul would later describe in his autobiography how his father's aspirations shaped his own dreams.

Education in Trinidad and Oxford

Naipaul enrolled at Queen's Royal College, a government-run school in Port of Spain modelled on a British boys' public school. Before turning seventeen he won a Trinidad government scholarship to study abroad. He later recalled that it could have funded any subject at any institution in the Commonwealth, but he chose Oxford to read English, with the aim of becoming a writer. In August 1950 he boarded a Pan Am flight to New York and continued by boat to London. His notes and letters from that journey later became the basis for a chapter of his novel The Enigma of Arrival, written thirty-seven years afterwards.

At Oxford he initially felt adequately prepared, but by 1951 his attempts at writing seemed contrived to him, and loneliness and uncertainty brought on depression. In April 1952, after an impulsive trip to Spain that exhausted his savings, he described the episode as a nervous breakdown, and decades later as something like a mental illness. That same year he met Patricia Ann Hale, a history student, who became his support and, gradually, the partner who helped plan his career. Both graduated in June 1953 with modest results. Naipaul, however, earned praise from J. R. R. Tolkien, the Anglo-Saxon professor, who judged his paper the best in the university.

Grief and hardship in London

In 1953 his father died, and by Hindu custom it fell to the eldest son to light the funeral pyre. Naipaul could not return for lack of time and money, so his eight-year-old brother Shiva performed the cremation rites. Naipaul wrote that the event marked his brother deeply. Through 1953 and 1954 the writer lived with little money in post-war Britain, depending on Pat and his family, and reluctantly enrolled in a postgraduate course in English Literature at Oxford, which he abandoned after failing the viva voce in February 1954.

Caribbean Voices and marriage

In December 1954 Henry Swanzy, producer of the BBC's weekly programme Caribbean Voices, offered him a renewable three-month contract as presenter. The programme had launched a generation of Caribbean writers, among them George Lamming, Samuel Selvon and Derek Walcott. Naipaul stayed for four years, though during that time Pat remained the couple's chief earner. In January 1955 they married in a ceremony with only the two legally required witnesses, and neither told their families. Naipaul would later say that the marriage was in many respects unhappy, and that they lived together for forty-one years, until her death from cancer in 1996.

The first Trinidad books

In the summer of 1955, in the freelancers' room of the old Langham Hotel, Naipaul typed out in about five weeks Miguel Street, a set of linked stories about a street in Port of Spain, drawn from the memory of a childhood neighbour. Diana Athill, an editor at André Deutsch, liked it, but the publisher doubted that a collection by an unknown Caribbean author would sell in Britain and asked for a novel instead. Naipaul quickly wrote The Mystic Masseur, a satire on the social climbing of a man from the rural Hindu world of Trinidad. It was published in June 1957 to generally favourable reviews. Next came The Suffrage of Elvira, about a rural election in the island, and in 1961 A House for Mr Biswas, considered his great early novel. Its protagonist is modelled on his father's life, and the author himself said the book had in some respects "destroyed memory". Patrick French has called it universal in the way Dickens or Tolstoy is, for revealing a complete world without apology or exoticism.

Travel, essays and the view of India

After tensions with the BBC, which ended in his departure in 1958, Naipaul turned more to criticism and journalism. In 1961 he published The Middle Passage, his first travel book, on the West Indies, British Guiana, Suriname, Martinique and Jamaica, which exposed poverty, racism and cultural alienation in those societies. In 1962 he travelled with Pat to India, the land of his ancestors, and the result was An Area of Darkness (1964), a book that expresses his frustration with Indian resignation in the face of poverty and offers a critical reading of Gandhi. That book and his novel The Mimic Men (1967), about a kind of "colonial schizophrenia", established his reputation as a relentless observer of postcolonial worlds.