Sir V. S. Naipaul was in mourning for the death of his cat. Augustus was old, in feline years, and had been exhibiting symptoms of senility. On the eve of his death he had wandered into a distant field where he had been kicked in the head by a fractious heifer. Returning home punch-drunk, he was rushed to the local veterinary hospital by the housemaid at the Naipauls’ home, in rural Wiltshire. Pentobarbital was administered to put an end to his pain.
I had come to stay for a weekend at the beginning of October, 2011, to find the household in a state of bereavement. The Naipauls’ housemaid told me that Sir Vidia had asked her to repeat, over and over again, her memories of Augustus’s final moments: “Did he mew for milk? Was he purring as the doctor approached with the needle? Did he die quickly?”
“Each time I told him only what I thought he wanted to hear,” she said. “The atmosphere of grieving has made life at Dairy Cottage intolerable.”
Nine years had elapsed since I first visited Sir Vidia at Dairy Cottage. The initial visit had not been my idea. I had received a telephone call on a weekend at my home in Somerset, quite out of the blue, from Sir Vidia’s wife, Nadira:
“You must come for lunch tomorrow,” said Lady Naipaul. “Vidia wishes to talk to you.”
“But I have people staying.”
“Never mind them. This is important.”
I told my guests I was sorry to abandon them, but one of the world’s greatest living writers had something important to say to me. Five minutes later the telephone rang again.
“Vidia says you are to be here early. He has much to say. Be here by 11.” The call ended as abruptly as it had begun. I told my guests that I hardly knew Naipaul, that I had met him only to shake his hand perhaps once or twice at literary functions in London. He had been a friend of my father’s and had come to stay a few times in my youth when I had been allowed to peep at him in my pajamas from the top of the stairs as he crossed the hall for dinner. My grandfather, Evelyn Waugh, had publicly championed Sir Vidia’s “exquisite mastery of the English language” and my father, Auberon, had revered him above all others as a writer of incomparable and inimitable skill.
As a teenager I had read, but was rather bewildered by, two of his early novels set in his native Trinidad: The Mystic Masseur and A House for Mr. Biswas. It wasn’t for a decade that I came to appreciate the exceptional brilliance of his writing, the slow, regular pulse that emits from layers of disarmingly simple syntax; the humor, compassion, and despair that he conjures from the astute observation of quite ordinary behavior; and his unique ability to sustain an atmosphere, to portray character, to describe places, to illuminate the souls of whole continents. His books commonly speak of the isolation of the individual in a society that is uncomprehending and incomprehensible; they cast a detached spotlight on the small, hopeful, culturally alienated man with his big idea, paddling ineffectually against the pervasive tide of human corruption and indifference. An Area of Darkness, In a Free State, A Bend in the River—these were the masterpieces that left me, as a young man starting out as a writer, awestruck at the great name of Naipaul.
So I was extremely apprehensive as I rang the Naipauls’ bell—shaking, as P. G. Wodehouse would have put it, “from base to apex like a jelly in an earthquake.” Sir Vidia was known to be irascible. He had made an aunt of mine burst into tears by telling her, over dinner, that she was stupid. Somewhere I had read of his saying, “Never give a person a second chance. If someone lets you down once, he’ll do it again.” What was it that he wanted so urgently to talk to me about?
Nadira Naipaul, a Pakistani journalist, who is Sir Vidia’s second wife, opened the door. She welcomed me in, explaining that Sir Vidia was not yet ready to see me. I was ushered into a bright sitting room, offered a chair and a cup of coffee, and left alone. Neither the ordered surroundings nor what little I had noticed of the exterior of the house met my expectations of a creative artist’s home. Dairy Cottage, in the village of Salterton, near Salisbury, is a red-brick Victorian dwelling with 1950s extensions—very English. And very different, I imagine, from the straitened conditions and overcrowded tenements with rusty, corrugated iron roofs at Tunapuna, in Trinidad, where Sir Vidia was born in 1932.
His father had been a journalist and a frustrated short-story writer. He was a proud Indian, who had never wanted his children to marry outside the Brahman caste. Sir Vidia was born and grew up in an Indian-style compound known as Lion House. What would his father have made of all this Englishness? From the window I saw a long, lawned garden stretching down to the River Avon, and on the other side a newly acquired strip of land laid out in the plan of the tree of life. Inside, the house was full of books, neatly shelved. There were no papers. These had all been packed off to the Special Collections Archive of the University of Tulsa. I had been told there was a large collection of Japanese pictures, but few were visible. Instead the walls were decorated with 18th-century prints, framed photographs (some of Augustus, the cat), and a few Indian pictures. I was squinting at one of these when Sir Vidia finally shuffled in. I jumped up and he told me to sit down again. He lowered himself slowly into an opposite chair, and we stared at each other for a while, the silence broken only by the solitary pitch of his wheezing. His face was set in a perpetual frown, and his black, narrow eyes seemed to reveal a disconcerting degree of inner torment. I could not be sure what mood he was in. The experience was unnerving.
“So,” he said at length, “you are writing a book about your father and grandfather?” Someone must have told him that I was working on what was to become Fathers and Sons, the biographical memoir of the men in my family which was eventually published in 2008.
“Yes?”
A thoughtful pause . . .
“So tell me, what is your first sentence?”
Suddenly my nervousness was transformed to indignation. I hadn’t yet written my first sentence. Had he summoned me all this way just to ask me that? I improvised a furious opening line, and though I can no longer recall what it was, I do remember that it came out miraculously well. Sir Vidia looked at me. “That is very good,” he said. After another pause he added, “Your book must be a critical-loving memoir.”
And that was all. There was no more substance to the conversation than this exchange. We moved through to luncheon, where we ate curried vegetables and talked about the garden and the cat and exchanged gossip about literary agents. As I drove home after lunch, I wondered what the point of it all had been and why the tone of my first sentence or the matter of my being “critical-loving” had been so important to Naipaul that he had asked me to drive two hours on a weekend to hear him pronounce 20 words.
It was not until long afterward that I came to understand a little better. Sir Vidia knew the Evelyn Waugh story well and seemed to have recognized in it reflections of his own. Both the Waughs and the Naipauls had risen from “apparent ordinariness,” as Naipaul put it, to positions of influence in the literary world. He saw how his own father, like Evelyn Waugh’s, had been a failed writer, one who lacked the necessary confidence to produce and who had consequently vested his life’s hopes and aspirations in advancing his son’s literary career. Years later I asked Sir Vidia if he had been conscious of all this. When he speaks his voice is sonorous and his words carefully weighed. “I suppose that was so,” he said.
His interest in Fathers and Sons was connected also to his friendship with “Bron,” my father. Perhaps he was worried that in my youthful ineptitude I might inadvertently traduce my father’s memory. He was pleased and relieved when eventually he read what I had written, later presenting me with a large, framed photograph inscribed on the back: “This photograph of Bron, great wit, great writer and good friend, from V. S. Naipaul on the occasion of Alexander’s visit to Salterton 13 March 2010.”
That, too, was a memorable occasion: Sir Vidia was being painted by the artist James Reeve. Both men can be tricky—Reeve hates having to talk while he is working, and Sir Vidia dislikes sitting for portraits. He was particularly cross when the National Portrait Gallery foisted the South African artist Paul Emsley upon him, and he tried to delay the sittings indefinitely. Reeve and Sir Vidia did not know one each other well, and since I was acquainted with both of them I was invited along in case things went awry.
I arrived with Reeve at 7:15 in the evening. We were told we were late. Sir Vidia was upstairs. Nadira offered whiskey, and when Sir Vidia finally came down he said he didn’t want a drink. Only later did I discover that he had already consumed a large vodka at six. He was in an amiable and humorous mood. Nadira talked with great passion about the awfulness of Benazir Bhutto, explaining how the late prime minister of Pakistan was obsessed with cookery menus and Waterford crystal, and wanted to “grind her people into the dirt.” Sir Vidia listened to all this with a gnomic grin. His eyes were expressive, and the flickers of rage or irritation that crossed them were easily visible. Sometimes he could look completely lost.
That night, at about three in the morning, he got up to check that my bedroom door was open, so that Augustus, the cat, could come and go as he pleased.
The painting was started at 10 A.M. Reeve had converted the Naipauls’ neat sitting room into a bohemian studio that stank strongly of camphor oil. Sir Vidia, aware that Reeve did not wish to be spoken to, started bombarding him with questions. He wanted to know what Reeve thought of a host of different writers—Jane Austen, Honoré de Balzac, Compton Mackenzie. It was clear from his cast of eye that he knew exactly the effect he was having on the artist, so I joined the conversation to deflect his provocations. He asked my opinion of William Hazlitt (whose writing he did not enjoy) and of Ludwig Wittgenstein. He told me that he had no time for philosophy, although he had studied it briefly while he was at Oxford. We talked about “good” and “bad” writing. “The style in Hazlitt’s day was formulaic,” he said. “Now we write as we wish. Good style should be imperceptible so that the messenger is never observed.” I agreed, pointing out that a beautiful, well-turned paragraph can be as distracting as bad writing. “This is a problem,” he said.
He had recently finished his book The Masque of Africa and was in a creative slump. He told me how exhausting the process of writing was for him and how flat he felt after finishing each book. His new agent was determined that he should write another novel, but at 77, with weak legs and strained breathing, he felt he was “too tired now to write any more.” He had won just about every literary award worth having—the Booker Prize, the Somerset Maugham Award, the Hawthornden Prize, the Jerusalem Prize, the Nobel Prize for Literature. “I have done all that I need to do. I wish they would let me rest.” And yet his life had come to feel somewhat empty, and he appeared to be bored much of the time. Physical fitness, Sir Vidia said, is essential for a writer—“I can no longer continue because I am unfit.”
The painting went well, and by evening the atmosphere was relaxed. Vikram Seth, the Indian novelist and author of A Suitable Boy, lived nearby and was invited to dinner. He looked at me foggily, saying that I reminded him of something “very delicious” from his past. Nadira took this to mean that I had had a homosexual involvement with him. In fact, I had accompanied his singing of Schubert’s “Die schöne Müllerin” a few months earlier, and it was this happy event that he was struggling to recall.
The Naipauls’ housemaid, an imposing servant in the Molière mold, appeared to run the household. She served at table, sometimes clad entirely in leather, interrupting the conversation of dinner guests in booming tones of censure as she passed the plates around. She called Naipaul “Sir Vidia” and Nadira “Madam.” Nadira called her “Darling.” Reeve addressed her throughout dinner as “Liza Minnelli.” Asked if she minded, she said with a glance of reproach, “I can give as good as I get.” After dinner she locked Reeve’s bedroom door and he was forced to spend the night on the sofa downstairs.
Sir Vidia seemed to revel in the anarchy of the occasion. He had that same look in the eyes that I had noticed when he asked me to recite the first sentence of my book, and which I had seen again that morning as he tried to ensnare Reeve in conversation. It was a look I was to encounter on another excruciating occasion, at the famous Hay-on-Wye Literary Festival.
I was all set to interview Sir Vidia about his book Letters Between a Father and Son and needed to ascertain in advance what sorts of questions he would like to be asked. He is notorious for walking out of interviews when he finds the questions inconvenient. “It’s a waste of time. It’s an insult!” he said to one hapless Dutch interviewer. “I think we should call it off.” He got up and left. He is disgusted by what he deems to be idiotic and ill-informed questions and likes to be prepared well in advance for the type of interview he is to expect: “Let me know the range of what you are doing and how you are going to approach it,” he told Jonathan Rosen, of The Paris Review. “I want to know with what intensity to talk.”
So I had good reason to feel apprehensive. We arranged to meet in the green room an hour before going on stage. “Is there anything,” I asked him, “that you do not wish me to ask you?” “Don’t worry about that,” he said, “I have a typescript,” (thrusting one toward me), “It has all I wish to say. I shall read it out.” “So you don’t wish to be interviewed at all, then?” I asked in a mixture of relief and despondency. “All you need to do,” he said, “is lead me onto the stage, introduce me to the audience, then pass me the typescript and I shall read it.” “That is all I need to do,” I said.
So I led Sir Vidia onto the stage. Nine hundred people clapped fanatically. I introduced him to the audience, passed him the typescript and sat down. He stared at it for a long time in silence, occasionally turning the pages, then turning them back again. The audience held its breath. Then, without warning, he threw the typescript to the ground and turned staring at me silently. I could see that this was, after a fashion, fun for him. But when I started to ask questions about his father and his family and his upbringing in Trinidad, the mood changed abruptly. In fact, he wept. Great silent tears filled his eyes and passed down his cheeks.
Even as he was approaching 80 years old, there was still a great deal within him that was raw and undiscussable. Although he allowed the letters between himself and his father to be published, he had not read them since the early 1950s, when they were sent. He left Trinidad for Oxford University 68 years ago. His father knew he would one day become a great writer. Vidia, even then, as a 17-year old student in a foreign land, seemed certain of it too, but he wanted also to encourage his father to do better—to stop making excuses and forge ahead with his own writing career. “The essential thing about writing is writing,” he wrote from Oxford. “You are the best writer in the West Indies, but one can only judge writers by their work.” Sir Vidia later acknowledged that his father “shaped my life, my views, my tastes,” but the two men were never to meet again. Naipaul was too poor to be able to afford a return to Trinidad before his father’s sudden death, in 1953. “He was the best man I knew,” he wrote to his mother after receiving the news. “Everything I owe to him. I had always looked upon my life as a continuation of his—a continuation, which I hoped, would also be a fulfillment. It still is . . . but I have to get the strength to stand alone.”
My questions had served as sharp reminders of that distant, unsettled past. I asked Sir Vidia to elaborate on the statement that his life was a continuation of his father’s. “I never wrote that,” he replied with a glacial stare. Subject closed.
Then Sir Vidia, deciding perhaps that an interview was uncongenial after all, retrieved his discarded script. He read it aloud, but quietly, for the rest of the session.
Before the interview began, as I walked Sir Vidia through the writers’ tent at Hay-on-Wye, we were suddenly sprung upon by the novelist Paul Theroux and what seemed like a pre-planned ambush of paparazzi. Theroux had been Sir Vidia’s friend of 30 years until they fell out over a woman and an inscribed book. Naipaul had accused Theroux of trying to seduce his first wife, and he had then put one of Theroux’s books, with its personal inscription from the author, up for sale for £1,500. When Theroux complained, Naipaul told him to “take it on the chin and move on.” Instead, Theroux wrote about the bust-up of the friendship in a memoir called Sir Vidia’s Shadow. They had not spoken for 15 years. I remember Paul Theroux coming to stay in the old days with my father—a smooth, handsome, dark-haired fellow who knocked back cocktails with strange slurping sounds in the kitchen—but he had changed over the years, and neither Sir Vidia nor I recognized him. The photographers flashed away, and all the next day’s papers ran with the story: an old literary hatchet had been finally buried. In point of fact, Sir Vidia was not at all sure to whom he was talking, believing only that he was mollifying some newly met, and possibly lunatic, fan. “I have missed you,” Theroux said. “And I have missed you too,” Sir Vidia replied. They shook hands, but the meeting between the two writers lasted only a minute, and when it was later explained to Sir Vidia who it was that had greeted him, he said only that he was glad, as he saw no point in feuds. Afterward, the two writers exchanged friendly letters.
The next time I visited the Naipauls’ Dairy Cottage, I went as a friend. This was the time that a blanket pall enveloped the house: Sir Vidia could think of little else but his departed cat. Nadira told me that he would be annoyed when he discovered that their housemaid had planted, on her own initiative, a wooden cross on the little mound in front of the house where Augustus had been laid to rest. “I must take it away before Vidia notices it,” she said. There was already a stone carving in place—for some reason, it depicts an otter—a benefaction from a sympathetic neighbor. Sir Vidia’s breathing seemed a little better than it had been, and I mentioned to him that maybe he had been allergic to Augustus. “Yes, my doctor suggested that, too, but I told him I would rather have Augustus and wheeze than breathe freely without him.” Sir Vidia said that he had always believed Augustus would outlive him, and that he had made generous provision for the cat in his will. I asked what it was that made Augustus so special: “He knew the land and the garden. He recognized the house and everything in it. He knew me. Therefore he cannot be replaced.” Augustus had been anointed king of Dairy Cottage on the day of his arrival from a cats’ home. He was so named because it was clear from the start that he would rule the household. Life for the Naipauls would never be the same without him, though it would be wrong to assume that this fierce little tragedy had extinguished the light entirely. When the Naipauls were restless, they talked in animated tones about moving permanently to Portugal, but they never did. England would always remain their home. Sir Vidia told me that for the first time in his life, he felt financially secure. His agent had said to him, “Just go out and spend. I will find the money.” It was not easy to guess what he might choose to spend his money on. Sir Vidia told me that he wanted a treadmill to bring the strength back to his legs, “but Nadira says I can’t have one”—a striking admission from a man known for his forceful and peremptory character.
The slow machinery of his muse, which once seemed to have ground to a standstill, was coming back into motion. I asked him what he planned to write. He said, “I intend an extended essay on grief, which will center on the death of Augustus.” The subject seemed at once haunting and ironic. I egged him on, but I don’t think he ever started it.
I left early in the morning before the Naipauls had arisen. At breakfast the housemaid filled me in on the couple’s plans. “They are having to go abroad to recover, you know,” she said, “and they’re planning a memorial service for Augustus on their return.” Later she told Lady Naipaul that my fly buttons had been undone the whole time that she was talking to me—as no doubt they remained undone when I passed out of the house and drove by the little shrine to Augustus, leaving Sir Vidia, still in bed, to marshal his thoughts on the profound, personal, and universal complexities of grief.
Sir Vidia Naipaul passed away on August 11, 2018 at age 85.
