Between Father and Son: Family Letters [Paperback]

V.S. Naipaul (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 13, 2001

  At seventeen, V.S. Naipaul wanted to "follow no other profession" but writing. Awarded a scholarship by the Trinidadian government, he set out to attend Oxford, where he was encountered a vastly different world from the one he yearned to leave behind. Separated from his family by continents, and grappling with depression, financial strain, loneliness, and dislocation, "Vido" bridged the distance with a faithful correspondence that began shortly before the young man's two-week journey to England and ended soon after his father's death four years later.
   Here, for the first time, we have the opportunity to read this profoundly moving correspondence, which illuminates with unalloyed candor the relationship between a sacrificing father and his determined son as the encourage each other to persevere with their writing.  For though his father's literary aspirations would go unrealized, Naipaul's triumphant career would ultimately vindicate his beloved mentor's legacy.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Writing to his eldest son, Vidia, at Oxford in 1950, Seepersad Naipaul observed: "Your letters are charming in their spontaneity. If you could write me letters about things and people--especially people--at Oxford, I could compile them in a book." Nearly 50 years later, the father's desire has been fulfilled by his son with the publication of V.S. Naipaul's Letters Between a Father and Son. The collection covers the period between Naipaul's departure from his native Trinidad in 1950 to study at Oxford to the untimely death of his father in 1953 at the age of 47. Alongside the letters between father and son are those between Naipaul and his older sister, Kamla, a student at the Benares Hindu University in India, who is advised by her then-17-year-old brother to "watch your personal effects carefully; the Indians are a thieving lot."

At the heart of the book lie Naipaul's undergraduate life at Oxford and his father's deeply moving support for his son as he strives to maintain his own writing career while Naipaul's literary talent flowers. The minutiae of Naipaul's college life offer a fascinating account of the genesis of the querulous, fussy, and patrician Naipaul of later years. The letters are full of stories of his endless rounds of tea parties, writing for the Oxford journal Isis, flirting with women, and endless requests for cigarettes from home. But the most revealing and moving dimension of the collection is the love and friendship between father and son. Seepersad vents his own literary frustrations upon his son while at the same time assuring Naipaul of his unconditional support: "I feel so darned cocksure that I can produce a novel within six months--if only I had nothing else to do. This is impossible. But I want to give you this chance." Seepersad's sudden death is very affecting, as is Naipaul's telegraphed response home: "Everything I owe to him." This is a deeply revealing collection of one of the most enigmatic writers of the postwar period, and it offers an absorbing insight into Naipaul's early fiction, particularly The Mystic Masseur and Miguel Street. --Jerry Brotton, Amazon.co.uk --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Publishers Weekly

The origin of this book seems to be in a letter from Seepersad Naipaul to young Vido (or Vidia): "If you could write me letters about things and people--especially people--at Oxford, I could compile them in a book: Letters Between a Father and Son...." Although the correspondence (much of it with sister Kamla--in college in India--as third party) is presented as a portrait of the artist as a young man, it is not always a likable one, resonating with pathos more than prophecy of fame or literary accomplishment. The future novelist (A House for Mr. Biswas, etc.), a Trinidadian of Indian background on scholarship in England in 1950, has left behind a family of diminishing prospects and on the edge of penury. His father, a talented writer stuck in marginal local journalism, soon loses his job after a heart attack. His mother, to everyone's guarded embarrassment, becomes pregnant again. Vido is anguished about his family's condition (there are more young children at home), but knows that returning is suicidal to his ambitions. While he begins making it by selling short fiction to the BBC for overseas broadcast, the Naipauls deteriorate further with the death of Seepersad at 47, in 1953. In an epilogue, V.S. is tasting early success, far removed from the backwater of Trinidad. More memorable than the ambitious son, who is often consumed by anxiety, is the pragmatic father, who assures Vido that he will be "a great writer" and advises him to "beware of undue dissipation," but not to be "a puritan." A terse cable from Vido to his family on his father's death begins, "HE WAS THE BEST MAN I EVER KNEW.... " The family letters are Seepersad's memorial. (Jan.)
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 320 pages
• Publisher: Vintage (March 13, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0375707263
• ISBN-13: 978-0375707261
• Product Dimensions: 5.2 x 0.7 x 8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,336,261 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

15 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars First-class letters., October 8, 2000

By 

G. Merritt (Boulder, CO) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Between Father and Son : Family Letters (Hardcover)

In 1950, 17-year old V. S. Naipaul left his home in Trinidad to study literature at Oxford. The letters collected here kept the Naipaul family connected from 1949 through 1957, and reveal the love, respect, and honest counsel "Vido" shared with his family during those years. They show that Naipaul's father Seepersad (1906-53), "Pa," was the family "guide" (p. 266) until his untimely death at age 47. For him, "the life of the mind--the writer's life--was everything" (p. vii), and he always reminded his son to "keep your centre" (pp. viii, 18, 31). He wrote to Naipaul: "Everywhere you will meet shallow-minded people; but it is precisely because they are shallow that they make a lot of 'to do'--we must learn to look at people objectively. Perception is rare and intelligence is by no means widespread. Those who have it to any unusual degree often suffer terribly: they are the most lonesome creatures in the world . . . Spot your drones and microbes among your fellow-creatures, but do not let them put you out of your centre" (p. 63). Naipaul's "Pa," we learn, also regularly coached him on writing: "When writing a good story it is a good thing to read good stories. Good reading and good writing go together" (p. 14).

Naipaul's father was always a source of intellectual encouragement, and these letters reveal a father and son always "in step" (p. vii). Naipaul recognized his father's influence upon him: "As I grow older, I find myself doing things that remind me of Pa, more and more. The way I smoke; the way I sit; the way I stroke my unshaved chin; the way in which I sometimes sit bolt upright; the way in which I spend money romantically and foolishly . . . The more I learn about myself, the more I learn about him . . . But who has shaped my life, my views, my tastes, Pa" (p. 126).

These letters not only follow Naipaul's intellectual growth at Oxford, but also reveal his periods of "black depression" (p. 235) and his nervous breakdown in 1952 and 1953. "I have found it difficult to live up to my own maxim," he advised his family prior to his collapse. "I say, 'We must ignore the pain-shrieks of the dying world,' yet I can't. There is so much suffering--so overwhelmingly much. That's a cordial feature in life--suffering. It is elemental as night. It also makes more keen the appreciation of happiness" (p. 9). He also reported to his family: "A feeling of emptiness is nearly always on me. I see myself struggling in a sort of tunnel blocked up at both ends" (p. 36). Later, he attributed his breakdown to "loneliness and lack of affection . . . some people, alas, feel more and think more than others, and they suffer" (p. 177).

The Naipaul letters also include correspondence from other family members, including the writer's free-thinking older sister, Kamla (1930- ). About the prospect of marriage, she wrote to her brother: "I have grown to hate the idea of marriage. I think it's the end of life" (p. 178). The letters are followed by an excellent Naipaul family bibliography and Editor, Gillon Aitken's index to the collection.

These are first-class letters. In an age when email is unfortunately replacing the personal letter, which has been reduced to "snail mail," the Naipaul family correspondence is a rare treasure full of genius I urge you to experience.

G. Merritt

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Real Mr. Biswas?, June 7, 2000

By 

supastar (brooklyn) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Between Father and Son : Family Letters (Hardcover)

The book offers insight into the life and thoughts of Naipaul and shows us a more personable side of the author, who seems to be on such a solo mission. Furthermore, we learn of his relationship to his father and the background of Naipaul's greatest character, Mohun Biswas. Naipaul's father was a true writer, a literature buff, unlike Biswas, who liked Marcus Aurelius and kept info in a Shakespeare that he may or may not have ever read. In letters, we don't see much of the temper or the actions of the character Biswas, but we see the meditations of the man who was his source. We also see VS Naipaul's transformation from West Indian student leaving the island for the first time, to a published author four years later. We read that "useless letter" that Naipaul describes in A House for Mr. Biswas, sent home following Biswas' death, and we learn all about the sympathy and respect that Naipaul had when writing this character. From this time on, he knew he would be a writer. He has longings and inklings towards India and Africa, he is already an anglophile with a strong rejection of coloured people, and an inclination to disassociate himself with these people, whom he finds ignorant and barbaric, a common criticism of his literature. There seems to show, in the uncommented upon letters, some of Naipaul's faults and prejudices and feelings of shortcomings, as a West Indian in England, as an outsider, always. But he never rejected his family, and was in fact a very sincere and loving brother and son. This is somewhat surprising considering the coldness that he sometimes can exude. His discussions of loneliness, of brotherhood and the need to take care of each other seem like preludes to stories from "In a Free State." Naipaul describes his life as an extention of his father's, fulfilled. And his father was already talking about writing an autobiography in the third person. Naipaul may have fulfilled this in Biswas, a fictional account. There is a hopefulness in Naipaul's letters that may not be as apparent in some of his later works, there is also the dark depression and dim view of the world and its inhabitants that is seen. His social attitudes and the way he writes about them shed more insight into his characters' social interactions as well. "The women I have known I have met quite by chance. Acquaintanceship is struck up almost unconsciously." This is similar to relationships that develop in Bend in the River and other books. Mostly, this is the development of the ideas of writing, the motivations, financial (primarily), emotionally. Both Naipauls saw writing as a profession, not a spiritual letting out of feelings or something, they approached writing professionally and with dignity, even in their letters, which they do critique. This book is a primary source of insight into the life and mind of one of the greatest writers of our time. I recommend it to any Naipaul enthusiast. Naipaul's literary career seems to have been well-plotted and worked out before it even began.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars "Must" reading for all V.S. Naipaul fans., April 4, 2000

By 

Midwest Book Review (Oregon, WI USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Between Father and Son : Family Letters (Hardcover)

V.S. Naipaul's Between Father And Son gathers family letters, revealing family interactions and a powerful drama with insights into Naipaul's formative years. Fans of Naipaul's writings will find this essential to understanding his works.