Collected Short Fiction Part 1

Collected Short Fiction.

V. S. Naipaul.

INTRODUCTION.

The stories in Miguel Street were begun by a man who had everything to learn about writing and himself. The writing ambition had come very early to me, but it had always been only a kind of warm glow inside me, giving me the vaguest idea of what I might do. The writing ambition had come without the wish to do a particular kind of book, and so it stayed for years. I didn't even know in the beginning what kind of writer I might be. Was my gift a comic one or was it profounder? I wrote many stories in this blank period, but nothing like a book announced itself to me. I did attempt a book; I attempted two books; but the creative fog refused to lift. The first book I attempted was a version of Black Mischief, giving it a Trinidadian setting. I managed, with a kind of self-induced blindness, to take this to the end in the long vacation, writing very fast when the end was in sight. One man said it was 'phoney Waugh'. I suffered at that, and marked this man down both for his wit and the soundness of his judgement. I believe the book was actually presented, by a very kind friend, to a London publisher, but fortunately for everyone it was turned down.

It seemed to me as a result that farce or comedy was not what I was meant for, and the next book I attempted three or four years later was extremely serious. I had no story; I thought I should do an account of a day in the life of someone such as I had been. The book lumbered on and on. When I left Oxford I took this dreadful half-book with me to London. I had had the good fortune to land a little editorial job at the BBC. This job not only saved me from dest.i.tution; it also put me in touch with real writers and real critics, and I had the folly or the vanity to send my ma.n.u.script to one of those people. He sent it back almost by return post and said that I should forget this work. It was very wounding to me; especially as it was so close to what I had begun to feel about the book. And it was with this great depression, of rejection and general hopelessness, that one afternoon, in the freelancers' room in the Langham Hotel, then a part of the BBC, I sat before one of the big typewriters and started the first story of Miguel Street. I had no idea where I was going, but somehow the idea had come to me that I should not leave the freelancers' room until I had finished the story. My life as a writer until then had been full of beginnings, and it would have added to my gloom to make yet another false start.

The next day I began and finished a second story, and the day after that I did a third. These stories had the same imaginative setting, were written in the same tone of voice, in the same spare language, and were in fact part of a vision I didn't know I possessed as a writer until the moment of writing. After a few days of immense excitement the stories became too long to be completed at a sitting. The stories had to be carried in my head until the following day, and sometimes for days. It was new to me to carry work with me for many days; and without my knowing it, without understanding what I had let myself in for I in this way learnt something about the nature of writing. The reader of this book can follow this process of learning and discovery in the stories of the Miguel Street sequence. He may think I claim too much for the stories, but I am speaking here of something very personal, something that tipped me over from despair into beginning to be a writer.

This is a process that happened in my own mind and will not be easy to explain. Until I had begun Miguel Street I had been obsessed with style and language, and had worked very hard to master that aspect of the craft. I had read and tried to learn from many of the approved masters, Defoe, Swift, Dryden and even a few of the moderns who had come my way the now-forgotten H. M. Tomlinson among them. I suppose they all helped in a way, but they didn't take me nearer to becoming a writer. They didn't take me nearer into understanding what my material was going to be. In fact they made it harder for me to have an idea of the value of my own material; their metropolitan glamour was too great.

The Miguel Street stories seemed to write themselves. I didn't step back to consider myself writing, and it was hard for me to understand where I had got that tone of voice. Many years later I thought the voice came from the Castilian, and especially from the sixteenth-century picaresque novel Lazarillo de Tormes. I had studied and greatly admired this book in the sixth form. Later I was to translate it. I was hoping that the Penguin Cla.s.sics might want to do it; but after a little initial encouragement it was not to be. But the effect of all this was that the tone of the old Spanish book sang in my head, and I am sure it helped me to get started.

The stories I was writing in this dreamlike way were of the life of a Port of Spain street. I had no idea where the stories would lead me, and the theme of the street and its life was part of the luck of that occasion in the freelancers' room in the BBC. I had worried a great deal about arriving at my material. This luck undid that worry. To write about the street, which I of course knew, was to be flooded with material, an embarra.s.sment of riches, folk myths, folk songs, newspaper stories, all worked on now by transforming memory. My concern when I began had been with language, a wish to raise my language above the language of the school essay, and to turn it into something closer to the writing one might come upon in a book. Yet, miraculously this concern with language led to narrative, to writing at length. It led me very close to having an idea of the book. I had begun, as I said, to carry the material in my head, and insensibly the stories became longer. I didn't know where I was going. The story of 'The Enemy', published here in a later section, was written as a part of Miguel Street. At this stage I was sufficiently in control of my material to understand that it was wrong for the Street. I kept it apart, then and later, and I was glad that I did so because three years later it led me to one of the stronger scenes of a much more important book, A House for Mr Biswas. To have used the material in another way would have been to lose it. So I was given a sense of what I was doing and was no longer as keen as I might have been earlier to bulk out a book. Inevitably the stories of Miguel Street came to an end; it became important to look for a publisher.

In a better-ordered world the stories of Miguel Street would have excited a publisher. The publisher I was dealing with was indeed excited; he wanted to publish me, but he had the publisher's wisdom about short stories. He said that they never sold. He wanted a novel before anything else and so I spent the rest of the year trying to write a novel. It was four years before Miguel Street was published, and alas for the publisher's wisdom it has never been out of print, earning its regular fifty percent for the publisher. The stories that were done later need no apology; I consider them part of my work.

Three or four of these stories, however, deserve a special word. I was in India at the time, writing Mr Stone and the Knights Companion in a small lake hotel in Kashmir. I had an arrangement with my London bank whereby they regularly sent me money. It occurred to me one day out of an abundance of caution, as the lawyers say to write to the bank to find out how my money was holding up. They replied in a frightening and unexpected way that my money had almost run out.

'The Baker's Story' and 'A Christmas Story' were written out of that ensuing panic. They were written on the typewriter at a great rate, and almost nothing was corrected. I have written nothing else in this way, and I suppose it was possible because I had trained myself to write carefully during the writing of Miguel Street.

People who think I exaggerate the importance of Miguel Street in my development as a writer should consider some of the stories from A Flag on the Island. 'The Mourners' and 'My Aunt Gold Teeth' would be among the earlier things I wrote, 'The Mourners' done when I was eighteen and 'My Aunt Gold Teeth' when I was twenty-two. People were kind about 'The Mourners' in Oxford. It was read out to small groups and it flattered me to hear distinguished voices reading my words. But as the years pa.s.sed I began to have doubts about 'The Mourners' and I pa.s.s these doubts to the reader. What was the basis of the narrator's knowingness in 'The Mourners'? How much did he know about grief or birth? How much of this knowingness was pretence, to go with the satirical tone of the narration? I got to feel in the end that that story and one or two others like it had got away by the skin of their teeth. I saw very clearly that skill with the language is no subst.i.tute for true experience. I leave these stories in this compilation because they are among the earlier work I wrote.

Day by day, as I wrote Miguel Street, I seemed to see the faces on the street. I saw their fences, the pavements outside their houses, and many of the other things that went to create their characters in my eyes. They were like a revelation, bringing back to life. Respectable old black women lived in tightly fenced jalousied houses, and one never saw what they looked like. Some houses, not of the best kind, had no fences; these were dwelt in for some reason by Indians. The shop at the end of the street was of course a Chinese shop, and the older people there still had trouble with English. As the street came near to me in this writing recall, I moved away from what was close to my house. I went near the sea, the area we knew as Docksite. This area of the harbour had been dredged and deepened before the war and the dredged-up mud of the Gulf had slowly dried into black saucers cracked at the edges. This area became the American military base. They ran up their attractive timber buildings very fast and their building talent, their elegance, put our houses to shame. The men were always neatly dressed, khaki trousers and s.h.i.+rt freshly ironed, the khaki tie tucked in between the third and fourth b.u.t.ton of the s.h.i.+rt. Jeeps appeared on the street, driven by soldiers apparently indifferent to the wear of tyres; our own poor folk had to be more careful with their smooth, s.h.i.+ny, irreplaceable tyres. Every evening the American flag on the base was lowered, and the bugle sounded: an extra drama added to the life of the street.

In this section 'The Night.w.a.tchman's Occurrence Book' deserves a special mention. It is my most anthologised piece of short fiction, and deservedly so. It is very funny. The idea came to me from a boarding-house where I had stayed when I was doing the travel for The Middle Pa.s.sage. I carried the idea for ten years and then, when I was in India, gathering material for An Area of Darkness, and being shocked out of my life as I have said earlier by a letter from a London bank, I wrote it all at once on the typewriter. Some of the sentences are still with me.

'... he pelt a box of matches at me, matches scatter all over the place ...'

'Mr Wills complained bitterly to me this morning that last night he was denied entry to the bar by you. I wonder if you know exactly what the purpose of this hotel is ...'

'Mr Manager, remarks noted. I sorry I didnt get the chance to take some education sir. Chas. Ethelbert Hillyard'

'This morning I received a report from a guest that there were screams in the hotel during the night. You wrote All Quiet. Kindly explain in writing. W. A. G. Inskip'

'Sir, nothing unusual means everything usual. I dont know, nothing I writing you liking ...'

The stories in the last section of this compilation are quite different from what has gone before. They are the work of a liberated man, and the reader may like to see how far he can link the stories of Miguel Street with the stories of this final section. Its theme is displacement in the modern world, an idea which would have been beyond the imagining of the people of Miguel Street. The main fiction of this segment has been left out here. It is now published as an independent novel in another place, and in that place I have written about the origin and inspiration of the work. The idea of displacement did not come out of the air; I had sold my London house, and was living and trying to write not unhappily, but with a daily sense of wrongness in someone else's house. It was a far cry from that to the plight of two English expatriates caught in tribal conflict in East Africa; but that is the way literary inspiration sometimes works. The expatriates in this fiction are working for the local African government. They're reasonably secure, and for them, besides, in the good times the country is a kind of resort, with every sort of amenity. The whole protected thing begins to break down at a time of local tribal conflict, and reaches a climax during a long drive from a place like Nairobi to a place like Kampala. I made these characters English because I wished to make the point that displacement doesn't concern colonised people alone.

The managing of that narration, of the increasingly dangerous long drive, would have been taxing enough for an experienced writer. But I added to it two unrelated stories. These stories were meant to support, to add weight to, the main fiction and also indirectly to bring the writer into the picture, to link the writer to the material he was presenting to the reader. The first of these supporting stories was about an Indian servant in Was.h.i.+ngton, the second about a West Indian Asian in London. And, as though that wasn't complexity enough, there was a non-fiction prologue, and a non-fiction epilogue. The prologue began in Greece and was played out on a Greek s.h.i.+p going to Alexandria; the epilogue was about Chinese communist sightseers in Egypt (the reader should bear in mind that the Egyptian piece was written in 196970).

The superstructure was too great. Perhaps the central fiction by itself (about the expatriates caught up in a tribal bloodletting) would have been enough to make my point; but this was the first time that I had ventured out into what I saw as metropolitan territory and I wished to leave nothing to chance. Later, when I had shed my nerves about the metropolis, I was to wonder why I had burdened myself with all the extra labour. The subsidiary pieces of In a Free State were not easy to write, they each required to be 'set'. This slowed me at a time when I would have liked to move more quickly but the book brought me reward of a sort. It won the Booker Prize, then in its second or third year, and still at that stage dedicated to the idea of giving recognition to the unrecognised. So the book gave me a kind of reputation.

V. S. Naipaul.

SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY.

The Adventures of Gurudeva, Andre Deutsch, 1976, a collection of stories by Naipaul's father Seepersad, with a foreword by Naipaul, is indispensable reading for anyone interested in this writer's work, besides possessing its own considerable interest. The books of his brother s.h.i.+va are also recommended. They include the novels Fireflies, Andre Deutsch, 1970, and The Chip-Chip Gatherers, Andre Deutsch, 1973.

V. S. Naipaul: A Critical Introduction, Macmillan, 1975, by Landeg White, is valuable for its sensitive readings of the earlier work by a critic inward with West Indian life. Another critic of West Indian background is Selwyn Cudjoe, whose V. S. Naipaul: A Materialist Reading, University of Ma.s.sachusetts, 1988, has an appreciative discussion of Biswas; the later work is discussed from an adversarial standpoint. A similar approach, concerned mainly with Naipaul's non-fiction, can be found in London Calling: V. S. Naipaul, Postcolonial Mandarin, Oxford University Press, 1992, by Rob Nixon. An earlier account is William Walsh's V. S. Naipaul, Oliver and Boyd, 1973. John Thieme's The Web of Tradition, Hansib Publis.h.i.+ng, 1987, deals with 'the uses of allusion' in the fiction. A short study by Peter Hughes, V. S. Naipaul, Routledge, appeared in 1988. Naipaul's books have attracted a large amount of periodical criticism: a selection of such material is presented in Critical Perspectives on V. S. Naipaul, Heinemann Educational, ed. Robert Hamner, 1979.

CHRONOLOGY.

1932.

AUTHOR'S LIFE: Birth of Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul in Trinidad (August 17).

LITERARY CONTEXT: Huxley: Brave New World.

Faulkner: Light in August.

HISTORICAL EVENTS: Election of Roosevelt in US. n.a.z.is become largest party in German Reichstag.

1933.

HISTORICAL EVENTS: Roosevelt announces 'New Deal'; Hitler becomes German Chancellor.

1934.

LITERARY CONTEXT: Fitzgerald: Tender is the Night.

Miller: Tropic of Cancer.

Waugh: A Handful of Dust.

1935.

LITERARY CONTEXT: Lewis: It Can't Happen Here.

Steinbeck: Tortilla Flat.

HISTORICAL EVENTS: Nuremberg Laws depriving Jews of citizens.h.i.+p and rights.

1936.

LITERARY CONTEXT: Faulkner: Absalom, Absalom!

Eliot: Collected Poems.

HISTORICAL EVENTS: Outbreak of Spanish Civil War (to 1939). Hitler and Mussolini form RomeBerlin Axis. Stalin's 'Great Purge' (to 1938).

1937.

LITERARY CONTEXT: Dos Pa.s.sos: USA.

Steinbeck: Of Mice and Men.

Hemingway: To Have and

Have not.

HISTORICAL EVENTS: j.a.panese invasion of China.

1938.

LITERARY CONTEXT: Greene: Brighton Rock.

Waugh: Scoop.

HISTORICAL EVENTS: Germany annexes Austria; Munich crisis.

1939.

LITERARY CONTEXT: Steinbeck: The Grapes of Wrath.

Joyce: Finnegans Wake.