Half a Life Read online

  International acclaim for V. S. NAIPAUL and

  Half a Life

  “Stunning…. Brilliant…. A story of remarkable economy…. Naipaul writes with the haunting efficiency of an ancient legend … powerful and unsettling.”

  —The Christian Science Monitor

  “A superb exercise, in miniature, of Mr. Naipaul's finest gift, a revelation of history's disastrous impact on private life.”

  —The Wall Street Journal

  “Naipaul is a master of English prose, and the prose of Half a Life is as clean and cold as a knife.”

  —J. M. Coetzee, The New York Review of Books

  “Full of memorable passages that astonish by their economy and precision…. Naipaul has clearly not lost his gift … of summing up the sights and smells of a place within a few sentences. His powers as a shrewd observer communicate themselves strongly.”

  —The Boston Globe

  “As sly and funny as anything Naipaul has written…. Nobody who enjoys seeing English beautifully controlled should miss this novel.”

  —Sunday Times (London)

  “Brilliant…. Profoundly intimate…. Naipaul is a magical storyteller…. He weaves a complex, nuanced tapestry of colonial and postcolonial character and attitudes, of radical notions and movements, of the immense mysteriousness of singular personal identity. Naipaul, at the peak of his powers, never wastes a word. Half a Life affirms the wisdom of the Swedish Academy. It's a humane book, full of courage, wisdom and memorable reading.”

  —The Baltimore Sun

  “Magnificent…. With deft, elliptical plotting, Half a Life evokes the draining cost of [a rootless] way of living…. [It consists] of several journeys woven brilliantly into a larger, more restless spiritual one [and] offers a string of gemlike moments, ones where the intricate latticework of colonial identity rises up and makes itself brutally and indelibly felt.”

  —Dallas Morning News

  “Half a Life confirms Naipaul's stature as the greatest living analyst of the colonial and postcolonial dilemma. Those who have never approved of that analysis, and have objected over the years to what they see as Naipaul's fatalism, snobbery or even racism, may find in this book the surprise of a submerged radicalism, a willingness to see things from the eyes of the disadvantaged.”

  —James Wood, The New Statesman

  “Pure magic…. I cannot think of another novelist with Naipaul's feeling for the distinctiveness of cultures…. A fine book and no one but Naipaul could have written it.”

  —S. R. B. Iyer, The Columbus Dispatch

  “Nuanced and evocative…. Here, sentence by sentence, is the consummate craftsmanship, the perception, the precision, the style the Nobel committee lauded as ‘vigilant.’ Here, too, is Naipaul giving rein to comical talents that may not have been at full stretch since he published the incomparable A House for Mr. Biswas in 1961.”

  —The Globe and Mail

  “[A] gem of a novel…. [Naipaul's] descriptive powers are masterful, and his language spare and economical. Every word counts and conveys meaning…. A very well-crafted and brilliant novel of ideas.”

  —The Orlando Sentinel

  “A surprise and a pleasure…. Naipaul has produced the most complex and demanding body of work of any post-war British writer…. In sentences of great precision and balance, [he] reanimates the dilemmas of late and post-colonial experience…. He is without peer.”

  —The Observer Review

  “Beautifully imagined and subtly satiric…. Naipaul presents [a] disturbing social vision in prose that seems stripped of all emotion and yet proves emotionally powerful.”

  —Richmond Times-Dispatch

  “Naipaul writes a prose as clean as a stripped wand, but however plain the language, the ideas it delivers are not…. He is still peerless as a deviser of the shocking icon. He builds a scene of metaphysical loss as compelling as any Renaissance canvas of the expulsion from paradise.”

  —The Independent

  “A challenging, tantalizing book that … blossoms in the imagination of the reader.”

  —San Jose Mercury News

  “Almost casually, but beautifully, achieved…. Captures in miniature the trajectory of Naipaul's oeuvre.”

  —The Times Literary Supplement

  “The latest example of how powerful the search for identity can be in literature.”

  —The Buffalo News

  “A brief, insightful study of the development of a highly inventive writer.”

  —The Seattle Times

  “What Joseph Conrad was to his age, V. S. Naipaul is to ours. Conrad's meditation on the world of imperialism has its worthy counterpart in Naipaul's expansive account of postcolonial realities.”

  —The New Leader

  V. S. NAIPAUL

  Half a Life

  V. S. Naipaul was born in Trinidad in 1932. He went to England on a scholarship in 1950. After four years at Oxford he began to write, and since then he has followed no other profession. He is the author of more than twenty books of fiction and nonfiction and the recipient of numerous honors, including the Nobel Prize in 2001, the Booker Prize in 1971, and a knighthood for services to literature in 1990. He lives in Wiltshire, England.

  ALSO BY V. S. NAIPAUL

  NONFICTION

  The Writer and the World

  Between Father and Son: Family Letters

  Beyond Belief: Islamic Excursions Among the Converted Peoples

  India: A Million Mutinies Now

  A Turn in the South

  Finding the Center

  Among the Believers

  The Return of Eva Perón (with The Killings in Trinidad)

  India: A Wounded Civilization

  The Overcrowded Barracoon

  The Loss of El Dorado

  An Area of Darkness

  The Middle Passage

  FICTION

  A Way in the World

  The Enigma of Arrival

  A Bend in the River

  Guerrillas

  In a Free State

  A Flag on the Island*

  The Mimic Men

  Mr. Stone and the Knights Companion*

  A House for Mr. Biswas

  The Suffrage of Elvira*

  Miguel Street

  The Mystic Masseur

  *Published in an omnibus edition entitled The Nightwatchman's Occurrence Book

  N. K. N.

  1

  A Visit from Somerset Maugham

  WILLIE CHANDRAN asked his father one day, “Why is my middle name Somerset? The boys at school have just found out, and they are mocking me.”

  His father said without joy, “You were named after a great English writer. I am sure you have seen his books about the house.”

  “But I haven't read them. Did you admire him so much?”

  “I am not sure. Listen, and make up your own mind.”

  And this was the story Willie Chandran's father began to tell. It took a long time. The story changed as Willie grew up. Things were added, and by the time Willie left India to go to England this was the story he had heard.

  *

  THE WRITER (Willie Chandran's father said) came to India to get material for a novel about spirituality. This was in the 1930s. The principal of the maharaja's college brought him to me. I was doing penance for something I had done, and I was living as a mendicant in the outer courtyard of the big temple. It was a very public place, and that was why I had chosen it. My enemies among the maharaja's officials were hounding me, and I felt safer there in the temple courtyard, with the crowds coming and going, than in my office. I was in a state of nerves because of this persecution, and to calm myself I had also taken a vow of silence. This had won me a certain amount of local respect, even renown. People would come to look at m
e being silent and some would bring me gifts. The state authorities had to respect my vow, and my first thought when I saw the principal with the little old white fellow was that it was a plot to make me talk. This made me very obstinate. People knew that something was afoot and they stood around to watch the encounter. I knew they were on my side. I didn't say anything. The principal and the writer did all the talking. They talked about me and they looked at me while they talked, and I sat and looked through them like someone deaf and blind, and the crowd looked at all three of us.

  That was how it began. I said nothing to the great man. It's hard to credit now, but I don't believe I had heard about him when I first saw him. The English literature I knew about was Browning and Shelley and people like that, whom I had studied at the university, for the year or so I was there, before I foolishly gave up English education in response to the mahatma's call, and unfitted myself for life, while watching my friends and enemies growing in prosperity and regard. That, though, is something else. I will tell you about it some other time.

  Now I want to go back to the writer. You must believe that I had said nothing to him at all. But then, perhaps eighteen months later, in the travel book the writer brought out there were two or three pages about me. There was a lot more about the temple and the crowds and the clothes they were wearing, and the gifts of coconut and flour and rice they had brought, and the afternoon light on the old stones of the courtyard. Everything the maharaja's headmaster had told him was there, and a few other things besides. Clearly the headmaster had tried to win the admiration of the writer by saying very good things about my various vows of denial. There were also a few lines, perhaps a whole paragraph, describing—in the way he had described the stones and the afternoon light—the serenity and smoothness of my skin.

  That was how I became famous. Not in India, where there is a lot of jealousy, but abroad. And the jealousy turned to rage when the writer's famous novel came out during the war, and foreign critics began to see in me the spiritual source of The Razor's Edge.

  My persecution stopped. The writer—to the general surprise, an anti-imperialist—had, in his first Indian book, the book of travel notes, written flatteringly of the maharaja and his state and his officials, including the principal of the college. So the attitude of everybody changed. They pretended to see me as the writer had seen me: the man of high caste, high in the maharaja's revenue service, from a line of people who had performed sacred rituals for the ruler, turning his back on a glittering career, and living as a mendicant on the alms of the poorest of the poor.

  It became hard for me to step out of that role. One day the maharaja himself sent me his good wishes by one of the palace secretaries. This worried me a lot. I had been hoping that after a time there might be other religious excitements in the city, and I would be allowed to go away, and work out my own way of life. But when during an important religious festival the maharaja himself came barebacked in the hot afternoon sun as a kind of penitent and with his own hand made me offerings of coconuts and cloth which a liveried courtier—a scoundrel whom I knew only too well—had brought, I recognised that breaking out had become impossible, and I settled down to live the strange life that fate had bestowed on me.

  I began to attract visitors from abroad. They were principally friends of the famous writer. They came from England to find what the writer had found. They came with letters from the writer. Sometimes they came with letters from the maharaja's high officials. Sometimes they came with letters from people who had previously visited me. Some of them were writers, and months or weeks after they had visited there were little articles about their visits in the London magazines. With these visitors I went over this new version of my life so often that I became quite at ease with it. Sometimes we talked about the people who had visited, and the people with me would say with satisfaction, “I know him. He's a very good friend.” Or words like that. So that for five months, from November to March, the time of our winter or “cold weather,” as the English people said, to distinguish the Indian season from the English season, I felt I had become a social figure, someone at the periphery of a little foreign web of acquaintances and gossip.

  It sometimes happens that when you make a slip of the tongue you don't want to correct it. You try to pretend that what you said was what you meant. And then it often happens that you begin to see that there is some truth in your error. You begin to see, for instance, that to subtract from someone's good name can also be said to detract from that name. In some such way, contemplating the strange life that had been forced on me by that meeting with the great English writer, I began to see that it was a way of life that for some years I had been dreaming of: the wish to renounce, hide, run away from the mess I had made of my life.

  I must go back. We come from a line of priests. We were attached to a certain temple. I do not know when the temple was built or which ruler built it or for how long we have been attached to it; we are not people with that kind of knowledge. We of the temple priesthood and our families made a community. At one time I suppose we would have been a very rich and prosperous community, served in various ways by the people whom we served. But when the Muslims conquered the land we all became poor. The people we served could no longer support us. Things became worse when the British came. There was law, but the population increased. There were far too many of us in the temple community. This was what my grandfather told me. All the complicated rules of the community held, but there was actually very little to eat. People became thin and weak and fell ill easily. What a fate for our priestly community! I didn't like hearing the stories my grandfather told of that time, in the 1890s.

  My grandfather was skin and bones when he decided he had to leave the temple and the community. He thought he would go to the big town where the maharaja's palace was and where there was a famous temple. He made such preparations as he could, saving up little portions of rice and flour and oil, and putting aside one small coin and then another. He told no one anything. When the day came he got up very early, in the dark, and began to walk to where the railway station was. It was very many miles away. He walked for three days. He walked among people who were very poor. He was more wretched than most of them, but there were people who saw that he was a starving young priest and offered him alms and shelter. At last he came to the railway station. He told me that he was by this time so frightened and lost, so close to the end of his strength and courage, that he was noticing nothing of the world outside. The train came in the afternoon. He had a memory of crowd and noise, and then it was night. He had never travelled by train before, but all the time he was looking inward.

  In the morning they came to the big town. He asked his way to the big temple and he stayed there, moving about the temple courtyard to avoid the sun. In the evening, after the temple prayers, there was a distribution of consecrated food. He was not left out of that. It was not a great deal, but it was more than he had been living on. He tried to behave as though he were a pilgrim. No one asked questions, and that was the way he lived for the first few days. But then he was noticed. He was questioned. He told his story. The temple officials didn't throw him out. It was one of these officials, a kindly man, who suggested to my grandfather that he could become a letter-writer. He provided the simple equipment, the pen and nibs and ink and paper, and my grandfather went and sat with the other letter-writers on the pavement outside the courts near the maharaja's palace.

  Most of the letter-writers there wrote in English. They did petitions of various sorts for people, and helped with various government forms. My grandfather knew no English. He knew Hindi and the language of his region. There were many people in the town who had run away from the famine area and wanted to get news to their families. So there was work for my grandfather and no one was jealous of him. People were also attracted to him because of the priestly clothes he wore. He was able after a while to make a fair living. He gave up skulking about the temple courtyard in the evenings. He found a proper room, and he se
nt for his family. With his letter-writing work, and with his friendships at the temple, he got to know more and more people, and so in time he was able to get a respectable job as a clerk in the maharaja's palace.

  That kind of job was secure. The pay wasn't very good, but nobody ever got dismissed, and people treated you with regard. My father fell easily into that way of life. He learned English and got his diplomas from the secondary school, and was soon much higher in the government than his father. He became one of the maharaja's secretaries. There were very many of those. They wore an impressive livery, and in the town they were treated like little gods. I believe my father wished me to continue in that way, to continue the climb he had begun. For my father it was as though he had rediscovered something of the security of the temple community from which my grandfather had had to flee.