A Writer's People by V. S. Naipaul Read Free Book Online Page A

rough, when difficult or subtle things have to be handled, the clichés will come tumbling out anyway; the inadequate language will betray itself; but not many will notice after your very simple beginning and your later simple paragraphs. Don’t forget the flashback; and, to give density to a banal narrative, the flashback within the flashback. Remember the golden rule of writing-school narrative: a paragraph of description, followed by two or three lines of dialogue. This is thought to make for realism, though the dialogue can’t always be spoken. Chinese and Indian and African experience sifted down into this writing-school mill comes out looking and feeling American and modern. These writing-school writers are all given the same modern personality, and that is part of their triumph.
    I grew up on an island like Walcott’s. Other races were close, but for my first five or six years, in the 1930s, I lived in a transplanted peasant India. This India was being washed away by the stringencies of our colonial life, but it still felt whole, and this gave me a base of feeling and cultural knowledge which even members of my family who came later didn’t have. This base of feeling has lasted all my life. I think it is true to say that, in the beginning, living in this unusual India, I saw people of other groups but at the same time didn’t see them. This made me receptive to my father’s stories of a self-contained local Indian life and the healing power of Indian ritual. I was more than receptive to these stories; I was greatly moved by them. I saw them being written and was dazzled by them. They were among my first literary experiences, togetherwith a roughly done country
Ramlila
, a pageant-play based on the Ramayana epic.
    I wonder what Edgar Mittelholzer would have made of my father’s story in the green-covered booklet (if in his mood of final Buddhist resolve he could have broken off to look at it). I don’t think he would have made much of it. Edgar’s greatest wish was to be a popular writer in the style of the 1930s or even earlier, and, amazingly, he half succeeded. Just as house-brokers talk of situation, situation, situation, so Edgar believed in story, story, story (he actually used these words to me once). He also with his uncertain Dutch-Swiss-Guyanese past had his own idea of what was universal. He would have seen my father’s story as folklore, Indian local colour, far away, and to a certain extent he would have been right; my father should have written of the 1940s world around him and not gone back to a misty world of 1906.
    Edgar, and other people who at various times have asked me about my influences, would have been puzzled by the importance I attached to those stories. They not only gave me an example of literary labour; they gave me an idea of my background and my past. I was born in the Indian countryside of Trinidad, but I very soon began to live away from it. My father’s stories peopled that countryside for me, gave me a very real kind of knowledge. Without this knowledge in colonial Trinidad I would have been spiritually adrift like so many of the people around me whom I observed later. I suppose I would have been like Edgar and others, fabricating an ancestry for myself—the colonial neurosis—or even like Sam Selvon, who was Indian and handsome, but had been cut off fromhis background (in his stories his ignorance of Indian ways was like a kind of illiteracy), and had only the race and the good looks to show.
    Perhaps my father’s stories matter more to me than to anybody else. My father first brought them out in a little blue-covered booklet in 1943, rather like Walcott’s
25 Poems
six years later. Walcott’s book was printed by the Advocate newspaper press in Barbados, my father’s by the Guardian Commercial Printery in Trinidad, the printing press of the
Trinidad Guardian
. Both books were sold for a local dollar, about twenty-one