For a long time, my working title for this piece was “Contempt.” It spoke to spectacles of scorn mounted by the late V.S. Naipaul and his harshest critics. But another thru-line came into focus when I placed Naipaul in relation to those I’ve termed his counterparts—C.L.R. James, Fr. Rick Frechette, and ethno-musicologist John Chernoff. Aspects of their mentalities—and Naipaul’s—seem to fall under the rubric of radical conservatism.
I’m aware it’s a stretch to suggest black Marxist C.L.R. James was any sort of conservative. He thought of himself as a revolutionary and always looked toward the next break with history. Yet James’s formation owed much to cricket pitches and British high culture. That made him, per one interpreter, “a sort of black Victorian gentleman.” Another student of James’ sporting life was struck by his refusal to hear excuses for American student athletes drawn into point-shaving scandals. Revalueshunary James taught respect for the game (as well as for his favorite dead white male humanists).
Fr. Frechette—a Catholic priest and physician who’s served Haitians for more than a generation—surely has a conservative side. It’s there in his most recent message from Haiti about a child suffering from a vicious cancer that had made her face into a mass of tumors. Frechette reproved a resident at one of his hospitals who’d allowed he wished to euthanize the little girl. That young physician’s words went through Frechette “like a spear”: “Is the curriculum now teaching that the elimination of those who are suffering is the proper application of medicine?” Frechette insists on staying “an old time doctor.” He may not be modish but he has plenty of earned wisdom. (He made sure to keep mirrors away from that dying child without a face even as he kept her in morphine and ice cream.) Frechette’s resistance to euthanizing times isn’t a sign he’s stuck on the past. There’s a radical novelty to his imitations of Christ in Port au Prince.
John Chernoff has always been pretty rad. (He lived on peanuts for years as an expat in West Africa.) Yet he’s trad too. Chernoff is out to preserve the heritage of drummers from Ghana who taught him how to play (and live). He’s a one man band who’s managed to tend tribal cultures in the Motherland though he’s been plugged into post-colonial African cities where there are a million mutinies now. (Pace Naipaul.) Chernoff’s roots moves aren’t those of a folkie purist or unworldly antiquarian. Better, perhaps, to think of him as an old school modernist.
Of this trio, only C.L.R. James had an actual tie to Naipaul—he mentored Naipaul for a season or two. Fr. Frechette and Chernoff are here on my say-so. But I think it will be apparent how their lives/writings work with and against Naipaul’s, taking you further than critiques by Naipaul’s haters on the left.
Back to that animating paradox: the phrase radical conservatism has been used to describe right-wing extremists, but they’re not my quarry now. The phrase has also been applied to Hannah Arendt’s smarts and that’s more in line with the bent of this piece. A statement on Arendt’s make-it-new approach to canonical thinkers highlights what she shared with radical conservatives I’m on about.
[Arendt’s] fondness for the art of foundation, and the political geniuses who framed new sets of laws perhaps reflects the importance she gave in her general thinking to beginning and beginners, to man as the animal capable of incessant novelty, of being born new each time as unique individual, in the repetitive pattern of species life.[1]
Naipaul repeatedly stressed the originary nature of his own art-life which he saw as something close to miraculous due to (what he regarded as) the thinness of his Caribbean context. His novels and his travel writing were founded on frisson of fresh starts, yet he was always alive to the weight of the past. His late and living counterparts have been history guys too even as they cultivated beginner’s mind.
Having invoked Arendt, I should probably note Norman Mailer styled himself a “left conservative.” But he was talking back to Sixties counterculturalists and my rad cons haven’t been locked on that decade’s frays. (Naipaul and James were formed before the Sixties; Fr. Frechette and Chernoff started out in the Seventies and Eighties.)
Naipaul, though, will never be forgiven by Sixties nostalgics for picking up early on iffy trends that made it harder for them to keep remembering with advantages. Tariq Ali—author of Street Fighting Years, An Autobiography of the Sixties—did his worst when Naipaul died. He wrote a London Review of Books blog post imaging Naipaul as a backward twit who’d never been punctual, much less prescient. It was Ali’s snotty obit that got me started on this effort to clarify what’s hot and not in Naipaul’s legacy…
II
Ali began with a cheap yuk, recalling how Naipaul once mixed up George Lucas, Star Wars’ creator, with Marxist literary critic Georg Lukacs. Ali went on to tweak Naipaul for botching Francis Ford Coppola’s name after the writer took a meeting with the director in the late 70s. (A screw-up that’s behind the piece’s title, “Mr. Ford’s Hacienda,” which is also a pointless play on Naipaul’s A House for Mr. Biswas.) Ali’s mockery was in keeping with the sneery tone of his summative note on Naipaul’s life and work. A line uttered by one of Naipaul’s aggrieved comic characters came to mind as I read through Ali’s obit/micturition: “Not only pee…he shake it too.”
There’s nothing sacred about Naipaul’s work. But there were auguries in it as Ali’s bad mouth ends up underscoring. Take his take on Naipaul’s obliviousness to Star Wars. Recall that when Naipaul made the error that indicated the next stage of Sci-Fi world-making would be lost on him, he was about to trace Islamists’ new maps of hell. Naipaul would soon publish Among the Believers: An Islamic Journey (1981)—his account of his travels in Khomeini’s Iran and other nations—Pakistan, Malaysia, Indonesia—where Islamism was on the rise. (Google Naipaul’s title and you’ll get a sense of Among the Believers’ seery quality—what comes up is a documentary with that borrowed title focusing on Pakistan’s Red mosque—hub for a network of Jihadi suicide bombers who have slaughtered thousands in that country in this century.) Naipaul revisited those countries fifteen years later and wrote a sequel, Beyond Belief: Islamic Excursions Among the Converted People. The two books unveiled the mindset that led to fatwas against Satanic Verses and Buddhist statues and Danish cartoonists. Naipaul’s reporting lit up areas of darkness that would explode in America on 9/11: “The faith was pushing people to extremes … Unity, union, the backs bowed in prayers that were like drills, the faith of one the faith of all, the faith of all flowing into the faith of one and becoming divine, personality and helplessness abolished: union, surrender, facelessness, heaven.”
I don’t want to make too much of any earthly award, but a month after 9/11 there was a reason why the Nobel prize had to go to Naipaul. His writing had presaged what happened on that blue-sky day. Tariq Ali, by contrast, had foreseen nada. I’m reminded just now how he responded to 9/11 by doubling down on dim anti-Americanism. He published The Clash of Fundamentalisms—a quickie book with cover imagery that matched George W. Bush with Osama Bin Laden. An equation that ensured Ali’s leftism would be lost on most Americans who instinctively knew not to liken the cult leader who wanted them dead to Bush, even if it turned out W. was in way over his noodle.
Ali spun with his confederate Edward Said in the post-9/11 period, conflating lucid protests against Islam’s KKK(s) with Islamophobic rants and “West-is-Best” provocations. These two ideologues had long shared an aversion to Naipaul’s icy anatomies of Islamism and Third Worldism.
Said’s own Orientalism (1978) served as a totemic text for critics of Naipaul’s reports on his Islamic journeys. Bernard Avishai wrote up an account of a dispiriting 1982 Q&A at Harvard between Naipaul and academics who reduced themselves to proxies for Said. [See Avishai’s essay here.] That hostile Harvard crowd refused to concede Naipaul might know more about, say, traffic in Tehran than them, though he’d just visited the city while they’d been in ivy. Enthralled with Orientalism and enraged by Among the Believers, Naipaul’s respondents implicitly denied the possibility of a relatively autonomous writer or fact pattern. To their structurally muddled minds, journalism by outsiders about non-Western countries—not to mention history or anthropology—was inevitably propaganda. Harvard’s Saidists insisted Naipaul’s biases made him incapable of a response commensurate with Islamism in the Persian street. But Naipaul wasn’t swayed by his critics’ riffs on the unfathomable essence of triumphal mullahs’ traditional values (which would soon manifest in hangings of homosexuals, the stabbing of Rushdie’s Japanese translator, mutilation of children used to navigate minefields during the Iran-Iraq war…). He stayed stony: “He seemed determined to press home the point that he had observed these details directly, while some of his critics had not.” After about forty minutes, though, Naipaul was done. His host at the Harvard event, Avishai, justified Naipaul’s choice to step off:
You cannot say we must try to understand others on their own terms and deny that all people are called upon to do so. You cannot come to a seminar, use words like “tradition,” “values,” etc.—the very categories of historical analysis, of historical writing—and fail to condemn societies that fail to institutionalize basic liberties. On second thought, you can. But then you cannot expect Naipaul to stay…
Ali would’ve been with the believers at Harvard who patronized Avishai when he stood with Naipaul (“the modern philosophe” per the Nobel Committee), speaking up for “basic liberties” and against faith-based totalitarians. Not that you’d know from Ali’s obit that Naipaul or his deepest readers had ever served human liberty. Naipaul, in Ali’s version, was just another clever comprador, though one whose comic gifts made it possible to laugh with him as well as at him.
III
Ali talked up Naipaul’s knack for comic dialogue but his praise left the impression Naipaul’s fiction was, at best, light stuff, which had me grinding my teeth when he brought up A House for Mr. Biswas. (His excuse for citing Biswas was that he’d once helped commission a witty script based on the novel for a BBC series that was never produced.) Given the derisive tone of Ali’s piece, his shorthand description of Biswas as a “comic masterpiece” amounted to traduction. Biswas isn’t without humor but its greatness rests on pathos not mirth. Biswas goes deeper than Naipaul’s first three novels—the author reached for something he hadn’t tried for in those earlier entertainments. (The prologue’s musing on the “unnecessary and unaccommodated” conditions of Biswas’s birth is attuned to Lear’s lament for “unaccommodated man” and a maddened Biswas will come to endure his own stormy night on a Caribbean heath.) A glance at one of Biswas’s most indelible scenes brings home how Ali misrepresented the book.
The novel’s anti-hero (who was based on Naipaul’s own father) has been forced to leave his wife and children in the house of his mother-in-law where they must cope with a crowd of other rivalrous relatives. Mohun Biswas is living in a barracks near where he works (on another property owned by his mother-in-law). One Christmas holiday, on his way back to the big house for the family celebration, the hard-up dad splurges on an elegant “dolly house” for his daughter. She’s entranced as are all the children (who are used to simple, disposable Christmas presents and a scoop of ice cream). Their parents are put out by the children’s wonder at Biswas’s gift:
At a signal the sisters pounced on their children, threatening horrible punishments on those who interfered with what didn’t belong to them.
‘I will peel your backside.’
‘I will break every bone in your body.’
And Sumati the flogger said, ‘I will make you heavy with welts.’
Biswas’s wife knows it will get worse: “’Savi, go and put it away,’ Shama whispered. ‘Take it upstairs.’”
Biswas won’t find just how bad it got until he returns the next weekend. His daughter burst into sobs when she meets him the door…
‘Tell me,’ he said.
She stifled her sobs. ‘They break it up.’
‘Show me!’ he cried. ‘Show me!’…
And there, below the almost bare branches of the almond tree that grew in the next yard, he saw it, thrown against a dusty leaning fence made of wood and corrugated iron. A broken door, a ruined widow, a staved-in wall or even roof—he had expected that. But not this: The doll’s house did not exist. He saw only a bundle of firewood. None of its parts was whole. Its delicate joints were exposed and useless. Below the torn skin of paint, still bright and still in parts imitating brickwork, the hacked and splintered wood was white and raw.
And Biswas’ sobbing daughter breaks it down even further: “‘Ma mash it up.’”
Mrs. Biswas had become a dolly house-wrecker because she couldn’t handle her extended family’s hatred for her absent husband’s largesse. She ended up acting like their dutiful daughter, forgoing her role as a wife and mother and earning Mr. Biswas’s curse: “‘Bitch!’”
Does this sound amusing to you? I’ll allow there are humorous touches in the dolly house episode (and throughout Naipaul’s novel). ‘Sumati the flogger’ is a sort of a comic Homeric epithet. (This figure punctuates another failed festivity with an epic beating of one of her children.) But, to say it again, Biswas isn’t an entertainment. Beginning with this book, Naipaul was out for more than laughs. Sumati and sister prefigure Naipaul’s rule for tough-minded latitudinarians (tendered in his novel, The Mimic Men): “Hate oppression, fear the oppressed.”
Biswas, though, isn’t an uptight book. It’s a grand read and Naipaul pulls off an up ending even as his father figure dies young (like Naipaul’s, who didn’t make fifty). Before his death, after years of trying, Biswas somehow manages to secure a home of his own for himself and his family. The arc of the story doesn’t mean Naipaul is conventionally house-proud or a booster of some local Carib variant of salvation-by-real-estate. His new man of property got ripped off by the petty speculator/amateur contractor who built his jerry-rigged dwelling and sold it to him at an inflated price. Yet that shaky structure will last. It may not be a pure tribute to strivings of its rarely do well patriarch (who’s saved by the tolling bell and a daughter who falls into a good paying job just in time to help pay the family’s mortgage), yet the novel’s ending is benign. As the lucky (soon to be) stiff lies dying, he feels he has overcome.
His private victory had a wider resonance in its time. Biswas was published the year before Trinidad became independent. The novel’s ending in which “achievement and failure are aspects of a single experience”—per Landeg White in an early study of Naipaul’s novels—seemed to hint at the felt quality of social life in newly independent countries, where liberation and corruption came together. Or as White had it: “The truth lies in the paradox and the house is the image of that paradox.” White wasn’t alone in suggesting Biswas’s compromised dwelling was emblematic of the state of emerging nations. It may also stand for a re-built self. Biswas endured a breakdown—shades of Naipaul’s own father who lived through a crack-up—and he’s never too far from a void. The novelist limns his protagonist’s looming sense of oblivion in a passage where Biswas—moonlighting as a bus driver—takes in the evening of a day…
In the gloom, a boy was leaning against the hut, his hands behind him, staring at the road. He wore a vest and nothing more. The vest glowed white. In an instant the bus went by, noisy in the dark, through bush and level sugar-cane fields. Mr Biswas could not remember where the hut stood, but the picture remained: a boy leaning against an earth house that had no reason for being there, under the dark falling sky, a boy who didn’t know where the road, and that bus, went.
Naipaul bashers like Ali or Prof. Nixon—author of London Calling: V.S. Naipaul, Postcolonial Mandarin—imply he couldn’t wait to leave nowhere boys and girls behind. But his critics fail to see how much he’s given back to readers on the periphery as Karl Miller pointed out in the preface to the Everyman’s Library edition of Biswas:
Biswas listens to the human sounds ‘thrown up at the starlit sky from a place that was nowhere, a dot on the map of the island, which was a dot on the map of the world.’ Naipaul’s books have done something for these dots. They have contributed to the somewhere they describe, as they have to the English literature which made his books possible.
IV
But let’s hear from a subaltern. Amitava Kumar has told how his mood slipped when he learned of Naipaul’s death. While he grasped why his wife, put off by Naipaul’s prickish persona, dismissed the writer as a “bigot,” he couldn’t sign off quickly. Naipaul had meant too much to him:
Reading him as a young man in a provincial town in India, I found Naipaul’s writing gave a solidity to my surroundings. In a language that was as clear as the dawn, he appeared to be giving our streets a name and a recognizable air. In books like India, A Million Mutinies Now, his 1990 book recounting travels in his ancestral home in India, he was also giving the ordinary person a voice.
Kumar ended his short reflection on Naipaul with an account of their brief correspondence. He’d sent Naipaul a piece about Kashmir after he’d come back from that country, where he’d visited to a place Naipaul had gone in the sixties and written about in one of his Indian travel books. Naipaul faxed him a response:
His letter began: “The Leeward was a doghouse, really. Better for it to be turned into the bunker you describe.”
Naipaul then proceeded to offer me a brief history lesson about the ruins in Kashmir. He was merciless, but also wrong, and perhaps more than a bit bigoted. But the real thing I want to tell you is that I lost the fax. And yet, until I found it many months later, I could recall each word of it. That is the real importance of Naipaul’s talent as a writer: to find in deceptively simple prose, an arresting syntactic rhythm that fixed for his reader an image of the world as it was.[2]
That final phrase echoes the severe opening lines of Naipaul’s A Bend in the River: “The world is what it is; men who are nothing, who allow themselves to become nothing, have no place in it.”[3]
That young Indian writer’s back and forth with Naipaul reminds me of my own attempt to reach the man. Back when we first began publishing First of the Month, I sent Naipaul a note along with an early issue, which he couldn’t be bothered to reply to. (His wife wrote back instead.) Contrary to those who assume Naipaul was attuned to the Call of the Anglosphere, he was clearly much more engaged by a letter from the “periphery” than by one from someone repping a (putative) new thing based in New York City.
Naipaul himself has written about his first visit to the city and his account of that trip suggests he wasn’t a perfect match for a certain kind of New York intellect. His hosts in the city were independent radicals close to C.L.R. James who’d linked them to Naipaul in the early 60s. Naipaul fictionalized his meetings with James et al. in sequences in his half-true life novel, A Way in the World (1994). Those scenes angered Jamesians who felt Naipaul’s version of their hero’s life and times was tendentious. It’s true Naipaul wasn’t a disinterested imaginer. He may have been out to counter leftist critics who’ve repeatedly leaned on invidious contrasts between him and James to zap Naipaul’s incorrect politics. (Tariq Ali’s obit, btw, re-upped on that opposition, contrasting pure anti-colonialist James with impure imperial Naipaul.) But if pay-back is on the menu when Naipaul describes dinner parties with James and his acolytes, it’s not the only thing Naipaul brings to the table. He makes us feel how he couldn’t stomach (literally) a certain kind of leftism. His retching at, respectively, “small island food” (coo-coo) and gefilte fish will stay with you even if you’re not a Cartesian diner (and/or a fussy Brahminesque one) like Naipaul. His own revulsion at his hosts’ mushy, neo-popular front cookery hints at how politics may come from the gut. And that’s true whether you lean left or right.[4]
Naipaul recalls how his meetings with metropolitan radicals made him feel like an unmannerly provincial. Then he flips shaming memories of his time among Jamesians in New York (and London), giving his upchucks a counterintuitive upshot. His inability as a young man to fit in with a nice bunch of engaged citizens of the world turns out (in his recap) to be enabling. It allowed him to avoid ideological and social entanglements that might’ve squeezed his talent. Unlike CLR James whose life was often shaped by imperatives of political sects or a wish to appeal to race-based radical groupings, Naipaul was thrown back on himself. That, in his view, helped keep his writing fresh. James, by contrast (per Naipaul), allowed his own fine mind to be ever more constrained by a kind of radical public relations. Naipaul was particularly put out by James’ refusal to speak against race-first politics since Naipaul grasped Black Power was a dicey notion in Caribbean and African countries with significant Indian populations. OTOH, he couldn’t help but appreciate (eternally) the singularity of James’ immediate response to Biswas: “In literature the finest study ever published in the West Indies (or anywhere that I know) of a minority and the herculean obstacles in the way of its achieving a room in the national building.” (I’ve quoted James’s line before and I’ll keep hammering on in the hope it gets through to readers who’ve been steered away from Biswas by correct leftists.)
V
I don’t believe Naipaul wanted his own story of differences between these two Trinis-in-exile to obscure what they shared. The place to begin here might be with the name Naipaul gives his James-y figure. “Lebrun” signifies Naipaul’s time-toughened, skin-I’m-in bond with his fellow brown. Each grew up knowing what it was to be seen as a wog even as they came to have a deeper feeling than any Euro-supremacist for the best of Western cultures.
There’s more to “Lebrun,” however, than the allusion to what made Naipaul and James sympatico. A reviewer’s insight into one of Naipaul’s lesser novels is on point: “Naipaul is suggesting that our racial and ethnic fate is sealed; we can never escape who we are, and must learn to live with our unchosen identities whether we like them or not.” Naipaul’s reimagining of Lebrun’s/James’ life implies his counterpart failed to come to terms with his own unchosen identity (leading him to oscillate between Marxism and black nationalism), yet Naipaul was also aware James’ Beyond a Boundary (1964) offered a sharp preview of how race and class played out in Trinidad’s Afro-Caribbean communities. Naipaul celebrated that testament to the meaning of cricket (and life) in a 1963 review. I’d now place that book’s dark exemplar, Mathew Bondsman—the player who was (according to James’ relatives) “good for nothing but cricket”—in the nimbus of the famous “nothing” opening to Naipaul’s A Bend in the River. What’s certain is that Naipaul’s tribute to Beyond a Boundary complemented James’s own commentaries on Naipaul’s early work. In A Way in the World, Naipaul credits James/Lebrun with writing an article that probed beneath the surface of his comedies, exposing a collective desperation that Naipaul hadn’t meant to evince. And James not only offered revelatory readings of Naipaul’s early novels, he wrote a collection of stories, Minty Alley (1937), that provided one map for Naipaul’s first novel Miguel Street.
Naipaul kept learning from James’s work. In a 1992 interview, he allowed he’d been dipping into James again. He didn’t specify what book he’d been reading, but, on the basis of another quote in that Q&A, I’d bet it was James’s posthumously published meditation on American civilization: The Struggle for Happiness. Here’s Naipaul musing on the “pursuit” of happiness in that same Q&A:
So much is contained in it: the idea of individual responsibility, choice, the life of the intellect, the idea of vocation and perfectibility and achievement. It is an immense human idea. It cannot be reduced to a fixed system. It cannot generate fanaticism. But it is known to exist; and because of that, other more rigid systems in the end blow away.
James’s own case for happiness, which came with a commitment to class struggle that Naipaul evaded, dates back to the Forties. Naipaul ignored work James published in his declining years. His disregard is apparent in A Way in the World when he cites one of the “dreadful” collections of speeches/essays sent him by the elderly Lebrun. Yet he seems intent on fixing in readers’ minds the note Lebrun wrote in the book. The old man inscribed it to Naipaul as to “a fellow humanist,” adding: “To understand that is at any rate to make a beginning.”
These two outliers of the islands shared a foundational sense that “the-root-is-Man,” yet it’s undeniable Naipaul, unlike James, wasn’t one to hang tight with everyday people acting together. Hard to imagine Sir Vidia among crowds at cricket fields or dancing in streets during Carnival. The commons wasn’t his realm. Naipaul’s own quirks (and tastes) made it hard for him to play well with others or stay in solidarity with the oppressed.[5]
VI
Back in the mid-Sixties, Naipaul once asserted “to be active in politics is…to over-estimate the capacity of the animal” (though he conceded there might’ve been “two good causes within recent times”: against Hitler and apartheid “possibly”). That “animal” above bespeaks a history of disdain that complicates—and sometimes quashes—Naipaul’s humane instinct. Though I’d distance his contempt from, say, Tariq Ali’s. Consider, on that score, blowback from Ali’s sketch of Naipaul’s early years as an émigré in the UK. After Oxford, per Ali, Naipaul “joined the lesser ranks of vassalage (the BBC).” A lordly dis that led one reader to talk back: “If a regular slot on BBC radio put Naipaul in ‘the lesser ranks of vassalage,’ I dread to think what station Tariq would assign to those of us who had to go out and get jobs—helot, perhaps.”
I googled Ali’s net worth and that figure may inform his chatter about vassals (and helots). I’m tempted to refer to him from now on as the $14,000,000 man. His own flush background probably explains his callow response to what’s behind Biswas—“the fear of destitution in all its forms, the vision of the abyss.” (Naipaul called cosseted liberals “infies”—short for inferiors. The shadow of Naipaul’s own condescending smile is something every reader must wrestle with—and I’m just getting started here—but in the meantime his mean term made me coin one of my own for rich and impervious types like Ali. May we call him/them impervs?)
Naipaul’s contempt comes from the bottom up. It began as a defense against his own sense of unaccommodation, which was, in turn, amped up by the great fear he inherited from his father whose working life brought him up close to the underside of a city:
Day after day he visited the mutilated, the defeated, the futile and then the insane living in conditions not far removed from his own: in suffocating rotting wooden kennels, in sheds of box-board, canvas and tin, in dark and sweating concrete caverns. Day after day he visited the eastern sections of the city where the narrow houses pressed scabbed and blistered facades together and hid the horrors that lay behind them: the constricted, undrained backyards coated with green slime, in the perpetual shadow of adjacent houses and the tall rubble-stone fences against which additional sheds had been built: yards choked with flimsy cooking sheds, crowded fowl-coops of wire-netting, bleaching stones spread with sour washing: smell upon smell, but none overcoming the stench of cesspits and overloaded septic tanks, horrors increased by the litters of children, most of the illegitimate, with navels projecting inches out of their bellies as though they had been delivered with haste and disgust. Yet occasionally there was the neat room, its major piece of furniture, a table, a chair, polished to brilliance, giving no hint of the squalor it erupted into the yard. Day after day he came upon people so broken, so listless, it would have required the devotion of a lifetime to restore them. But he could only lift his trouser turn-ups, pick his way through mud and slime, investigate, write, move on. [6]
Leftists, who claim Naipaul always punches down, skip over such passages which may be beyond their bubble-heads. But I don’t want to suggest Naipaul’s way in and out of ghettos is the only route. I stumble over those polished objects that bring home the squalor down yard, even as I bow to the cogency of Naipaul’s effects. There’s something overly aesthetic—and less than humanly responsive—about the way those pieces “erupt” in the middle of the graph. Naipaul’s ender, as well, is less conclusive than it seems on first reading. There are, after all, soulful survivors who refuse to “move on.”
C.L.R. James’s life offers something less than an exemplary contrast on this score due to his own uprootings, which Naipaul invoked when he nailed his Lebrun as “a man on the run.” But Naipaul’s clarity about James’ unsettled life brings to mind a better angel, with deeper roots. Fr. Rick Frechette is a moun blanc who shelters in place with Haitians.
Naipaul’s return in A Way in the World to the guts of his non-aligned stance flashed me back to Fr. Frechette’s own finicky stomach. He tries not to puke when he and his comrades carry out the unclaimed dead whom they bury by the dozens one day each month. The smell of unrefrigerated cadavers in Port au Prince’s main morgue is terrible and Frechette needs cigarettes and shots of rum to keep him from throwing up. He must be tempted to let the dead bury the dead but…“If we treat the dead like garbage…then the living are just walking garbage.”
Frechette is a stand-up guy, not a stand-up comedian, but he’s not averse to dark humor. The army boots he wears to mass burials have acquired a deadly smell. When he has to take those boots off before he flies back and forth from Haiti to Florida to oversee shipments of medical supplies etc., airline attendants are shocked by the whiff. He’s not entirely unamused by the idea they must figure the good Father has seriously nasty feet.
We’ll walk more with Fr. Frechette in the second part of this piece…
End of Part I. Part II begins here.
NOTES
1 Mary McCarthy, from a lecture included in Partisan Review, The 50th Anniversary Edition, 1981.
2 https://www.cnn.com/2018/08/12/opinions/vs-naipaul-books-changed-writers-like-me-kumar/index.html
3 The best, direct comeback to Naipaul’s opener may be the envoi in Russell Banks’ novel Continental Drift (1985). Banks admits the limits of his fiction about afflicted underdogs—It won’t “set people like them free” and “changes nothing in the world.” Yet he still insists attentiveness to facts of their imagined lives (or death) isn’t frivolous:
Good cheer and mournfulness over lives other than our own, even wholly invented lives—no, especially wholly invented lives—deprive the world as it is of some of the greed it needs to continue to be itself. Sabotage and subversion, then, are this book’s objectives. Go, my book, and help destroy the world as it is.
4 Rhonda Cobham-Sander writes penetratingly about these scenes in the chapter devoted to Naipaul and C.L.R. James in I and I: Epitaphs for the Self in the Work of V.S. Naipaul; Kamau Brathwaite and Derek Walcott. I’ll lean on her reading of A Way in the World again in Part 2 of this essay.
5 A Way in the World’s sour take on Trinidad’s oil field riots of 1937—and the agitator, Butler, who sparked them before going on to a career as a politico—serves as a sort of rejoinder to James’s early 30s pamphlet lauding another West Indian labor leader and anti-colonialist politician: The Life of Captain Cipriani.
6 Naipaul’s foul “infees” is a next-level corruption of his shorthand for the recipients of the “Deserving Destitutes Fund” whom Biswas reports on at the tail end of his career as a journalist. He/Biswas calls them “Destees.