“All of (Vidia) Naipaul’s work came from what (his father) Seepersad wrote,” said Prof Arnold Rampersad, Trinidadian Professor Emeritus at Stanford University, while delivering the feature address at the literary conference, Seepersad & Sons, on Seepersad Naipaul and his sons, Shiva, and Sir Vidia, at the UWI Open Campus in St Augustine, last Thursday morning.
In a wide-ranging address, Rampersad looked at the Naipauls as “Trinidad’s first literary family,” and proposed that the contribution of Seepersad to his sons’ success, and in his own right, as a writer, had been downplayed and overlooked. Rampersad’s own father, Jerome, had worked with Seepersad at the Trinidad Guardian in the 1930s, he said, but his interaction with the Naipauls had been non-existent.
Much of Seepersad’s writing was done when he was employed at the Trinidad Guardian, under editor Gault McCowan in the 1930s. He published the Gurudeva Stories in the midst of World War II.
In the 1960s, though, said Rampersad, young Trinidadians like himself were energised and excited by Vidia’s achievements.
But this was before the publication of The Middle Passage which brought Vidia widespread obloquy.
In examining the Naipauls’ motivations and antecedents, Rampersad advanced the thesis that rather than the British literary tradition, with which VS Naipaul is often associated, he believed Seepersad and his sons had more in common with the American literary tradition.
Acknowledging British literary families, like Kingsley and Martin Amis, and the Shelleys, Rampersad said nonetheless, the links between the Naipauls and British writers was “superficial.”
He said more compelling parallels with the Naipauls existed in the American tradition, and he used the James family as an example: these are William James, the 19th century American philosopher who is also widely hailed as the father of American psychology, and his brother, Henry, was an eminent fin de siècle novelist.
Their relations and disagreements as to the culture of their native land had much in common with the Naipaulian relations between father and sons.
The core of this disagreement was the fact that America in the 19th and early 20th centuries still felt culturally overshadowed by Europe.
In the 19th century, many American writers and thinkers looked to a variety of sources to break this hold, including Indian philosophy and mysticism as engines to make sense of the new landscape—like Whitman, Emerson, and Thoreau, who wrote that Transcendentalism (a philosophical/spiritual movement in early 19th century America) was influenced by Indian religion.
William James, said Rampersad, was interested in unlocking the psychic and creative potential of America, rather than decrying its lack of civility as his brother, Henry, who would eventually emigrate to England, had done.
Henry James, in his biography and critical study of Nathaniel Hawthorne, decried America’s lack of “an aristocracy, churches, literature (and) Oxford.”
He was also condescending in his view of American humour and vernacular, which was being opened up by people like Walt Whitman and Mark Twain.
Just so, said Rampersad, Seepersad disagreed with his sons about the cultural potential of T&T and its people and their lives.
“The history and geography of these new territories required a different way of telling stories.” In this Seepersad was a proponent, and inspired his sons.
But even though his sons continued to write about Trinidad and the West Indies, they disagreed with their father as to the value of the local life, experience and environment.
This conflict is not unique, said Rampersad, and and was echoed in conflicts between other American writers like Eliot and Hemingway, and Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison.
Chaguanas was the focus of the second day of the Seepersad and Sons conference when attendees took a tour of Lion House, the ancestral home of the Naipauls and the Capildeos.
After the tour, conducted by Prof Brinsley Samaroo, there was a session of the conference featuring writers Raymond Ramcharitar and Sharon Millar and artist Shastri Maharaj at the Chaguanas Borough Corporation.
They spoke about how their work was inspired by VS Naipaul.
After the talk, Mayor Gopaul Boodhan hosted a reception at which he announced plans to create a heritage building at the Chaguanas Borough to “preserve the history of Chaguanas.”
Boodhan said he would be calling on the business community to support the project.
Rampersad sees Wright’s dismissal of African-American culture and that dismissal’s repudiation by Ellison, as parallel to VS Naipaul’s dismissal of West Indian culture and his father’s embrace of the same culture.
It was Seepersad the progenitor, said Rampersad, “who was imbued with the greatest, most rebellious cultural vigour... he had the greatest love of the common people and explored issues like caste… Vidia has been most generous and (at the same time) withholding as to how much he owed his father.
He attributes his temperament to his father’s fear of extinction, rather than his skill.”
Rampersad acknowledged that this was not a cut-and-dried conclusion, and he preferred not to “cross critical swords with Vidia.”
But Seepersad, said Rampersad, in his descriptions of Indo Trinidad “gave a beauty to the Indian village life,” in its landscape, rituals and its quotidian rhythms.
He said this would be derisively called “local colour writing,” but Rampersad likens Seepersad’s choice of material to Mark Twain’s choice to make the narrator of his most famous novel (Huckleberry Finn) an illiterate 12-year-old boy.
Turning his attention to Shiva Naipaul, who died at the early age of 40 in 1985, Rampersad said when reading one of Shiva’s early books, he encountered the word “negresses,” which was used in a non-ironical fashion, and spoken by the author’s omniscient narrator.
This racial insult had caused him to abandon Shiva’s work for many years, but when he returned to them, he found a subtle and talented writer.
What was most fascinating about Shiva Naipaul, said Rampersad, was that he was the least American of the three Naipauls, and believed he might be the most scarred. The way Shiva saw the world was infused with a recurring theme which linked beauty with terror or death.
Quoting a passage from one of Shiva’s books which describes a trip to Maracas, which imbued the writer with a sense of terror, Rampersad said had made that same journey to Maracas many times, but had never seen it the way Shiva did.
Rampersad believes a possible cause of Shiva’s conflation of beauty and terror lies in his experiences growing up in Trinidad and in Port-of-Spain at the time he did.
At the time, said Rampersad, “There was routine abuse of Indians in the streets. Even in my village of Diego Martin.”
This was a possible source of trauma which never left Shiva suggested Rampersad, and one which he was never able to exorcise.
In Africa (described in his travel book, North of South) Shiva observed for the Gujratis, “time had stood still,” that they spoke Gujrati (which he did not understand) and looked upon him as an enigma.
Shiva’s self-image, said Rampersad, was encapsulated in his declaration: “When I left Trinidad at 18, I was nothing.”
He saw Trinidad as a place where he was cobbled together from bits and pieces, incomplete and inferior. And Shiva was never able to take any solace in the idea of India, nor a family tradition. He wrote, he said, because it was all he could do.
The Naipaul family has produced at least two other writers: nephew Neil Bissoondath, and niece, Vahni Capildeo. The Naipaul conference ended on October 30. It featured presentations by local and international academics, like Dr Aaron Eastley, and Dr Brinsley Samaroo.
A tour was made to the Lion House in Chaguanas, where one of Seepersad’s daughters, Savitri Akal, made a plea to the mayor that the Lion House, which was in a dilapidated state, be rescued and bought by the state and transformed into a National Heritage site.
The conference closed with a reception at the Naipaul House in Nepaul St in St James on Friday night.