Reading the Tulsa V S Naipaul Archive

Tom O’ Regan was a young scholar at Murdoch University when a book written by Bob Hodge and I was published. Forthright that he was, he disagreed with some of the things we said and wrote. A cultural historian with a strong pragmatic outlook – but certainly not a card carrying empiricist – he argued in favour of evidence and documentation. He was among the early critics of Dark Side of the Dream: Australian Literature and the Postcolonial Mind. ¹ He felt that we may have over-stressed the interred side of Aboriginal culture. But that was part of Tom’s outlook, always looking for substance over theory, historical documentation over speculation. In the end, though postcolonial theory and Aboriginal studies took our side, I have often wondered if Bob and I would have written a better book if we had consulted Tom a bit more. When later in life I turned my attention to the study of archives, first the Emory Salman Rushdie Archive and now the Tulsa V S Naipaul Archive, the haunting spectres of Tom are always there, telling me to get my readings of archives right in the first instance. I probably never will because I do not have Tom’s focus, his capacity to dissect archival material and produce from them carefully written, often dense but concise gems. About the time when we were writing Dark Side of the Dream, Tom was working on one of his foundational essays, ‘(Mis)taking Policy: Notes on the Cultural Policy Debate’, originally published in Cultural Studies 6/3 (1992) and soon after reprinted in Frow and Morris (1993), a volume which also carried Bob and my essay on postcolonial theory. I have not followed, in any historical sense, the trajectory of Tom’s contributions to matters relating to public policy and creative industries – areas in which he was an expert – but this early essay, to which I have returned after a long break, clearly sets out what I meant by Tom’s understanding of critical judgement measured by clearly defined vectors. Here Tom argued that valuable as it is, as a multidisciplinary theory of culture, cultural studies with its emphasis on the transmission and consumption of texts (within a strong ethical agenda as its implicit template) failed to pay due attention to ‘the institutions and structures which formulate and design anything from texts to the built environment to administrative programs’. ² The argument is developed in a tightly written prose in which the ‘policy debate’ is entered into through a reading of ‘polycentric’ institutional structures and processes. The crux of the argument – and herein lay Tom’s fundamental insight – is that cultural studies is a mode of ‘mediated’ practice, a relay between demand and desire and execution. It is at this juncture that Tom made, so early on, his most important theoretical intervention. He argued against the adoption of Foucault (a key theorist when it comes to positioning cultural studies as a legitimation exercise) as the provider of a legislative principle that could be applied to explore those implicit power structures that governed governmental policy regulations in favour of an understanding of what Foucault always felt was a gap ‘between cultural criticism and concrete intervention’. ³ Borrowing a phrase from Bruno Latour – ‘policy in action’ – Tom shifted the emphasis away from the application of Foucault as ‘technology’ of understanding to a reading of cultural policy as a ‘particular kind of informational practice with its own limitations, potentialities and linkages to other kinds of public discourses’. ⁴ In doing so, he did not misread or misunderstand Foucault; what he did was move away from prescriptive and, often, uncritical applications to the location of culture and cultural practice in lived material practices of which both cultural studies and cultural policy were super-structures.

Years back Tom had warned me of the need to pay close attention to polycentric cultural criticism (and by that he meant humanities criticism generally) and had alerted me to the importance of grounding one’s reading in detached, objective analyses. The study of archives is no exception as they too hold secrets. Indeed, how to get those ‘Freudian impressions’ right is the challenge. In 1993, the University of Tulsa purchased the V S Naipaul papers and installed the V S Naipaul Archive, principally a paper archive, a year later. ⁵ Some 20 years before, on 22 October 1972, Naipaul wrote to his erstwhile friend and disciple Paul Theroux saying he needed a lot of money:

I am thinking of disposing of all my papers; perhaps someone in the US may be interested. In Trinidad this time in an old cupboard box I found all the letters I had written home. The penciled notes I made on the PAA [Pan American Airlines] aeroplane as soon as I got off the ground in July 1950, my letter from S.S. America; my first letter from London . . . As you know I have been looking at my past (forgetting old fears), with the idea in my head of doing a kind of autobiography . . . I would be most grateful if you could help me with this. But perhaps you should say that I should hang on them for the time being.

Nothing came of it until, as he told Mel Gussow of the New York Times, the Tulsa people ‘did the right thing’ [They bid well?] ‘That’s what I mean: they did the right thing’. ⁶ Twenty years ago, in 1973, he tried to sell the archive to the British Library but he didn’t accept Bertram Rota’s valuation of the archive. He adds if the papers had not found a good bidder he would have given it to the Bodley.

At Tulsa the archival material took some 7 years to be properly catalogued and by 2000, the library defined the extent of the archive as ‘51.0 linear feet’ which I believe refers to the space taken up by all the boxes in the Tulsa McFarlin Library. The McFarlin chief archivist, initially Sidney F Huttner, subsequently Aaron Pope, described the scope and content of the archive as follows:

The collection is the life archive of Nobel prize winning author V. S. Naipaul. Sir Vidia was born in Trinidad, educated at Oxford, and author of A House for Mr. Biswas and 20 other volumes of fiction and non-fiction reporting. The collection also includes manuscripts, correspondence files and personal and family memorabilia.

The collection’s inventory has a very simple format: 1993.001.1 Series 1 – Writings with Subseries A: Seepersad Naipaul (1906–1953) materials, Subseries B: V. S. Naipaul writings, Subseries C: Patricia Ann Naipaul (1932–1996) writing and political activities; 1993.003.2 Correspondence files with Subseries A: V. S. Naipaul’s professional and personal correspondence, Subseries B: V. S. Naipaul letters to and from Patricia Ann Naipaul, Subseries C: Patricia Ann Naipaul correspondence files, Subseries D: V. S. Naipaul’s correspondence with his family; 1993.003.3 Memorabilia with Subseries A: Photographs, Subseries B: Sound recordings and video tapes.

Access to the last two series, 1993.003.4 Financial records and 1993.003.5 Medical records, is restricted until ‘25 years after V. S. Naipaul’s death’. Since Naipaul died in 2018, these files will be available after 2043, that is, in my next reincarnation. One of the conditions of the sale of the archive was that Naipaul would keep the last 5 years of his materials and would progressively deliver them at 5-year intervals. Depending on when the last instalment was delivered, it stands to reason that the archive will not be complete until around 2023, that is, 5 years after V S Naipaul’s death. I have read the entire archive as it stood in 2017. Sadly, it is an incomplete archive as much of the early material, up to A House of Mr Biswas (with early drafts), were mistakenly incinerated in a warehouse. For textual critics, one of the great disadvantages of the existing archive is that Naipaul largely retained only the copy-edited versions of his works. Even with this personal sense of propriety, what is striking about the archive is that it comes closest to the Jewish Geniza, a repository where no document was destroyed because the palimpsestic nature of many of the documents meant that each document carried secrets well beyond its manifest content. As far as I can see, there has been no editing of the material, no blacking out of passages and except for the sections noted above no restrictions as to what may be quoted. Unlike the Emory Salman Rushdie Archive, which I read between 2010 and 2014, there are no significant glossatory notes and no attempt is made to correct the historical record.

A turn to the archive, as a primary scholarly act if one is available, does not mean that an archive is pre-eminent, absolute, even mystical; none of these as Tom always pointed out. But it is a source, and a valuable source because in this instance, the selection of the consigned material is catholic in the sense that Naipaul has censored nothing. Except for names of his informants and a few other personal and financial details, this is an open archive, and its openness is precisely what has made the very project of writing a book on Naipaul so very painful. But even before a scholar or simply a good reader enters an archive, he is struck by the rich, deconstructive etymology of ‘archive’. The word comes from the French archif, archive via Latin archium, archivum which in turn derives from the Greek άρχείον, with its meaning of ‘magisterial residence, public office’. The early Oxford English Dictionary (OED) citations (1645, 1667) capture this meaning of a space where ancient records are ‘conserved’ (1667). Around the same period, however (1638, 1683), an archive referred to the preserved document itself. Hence ‘1683 Dryden Plutarch 63 He had travell’d over Greece to peruse the archives of every city’. Heavy reading one may say, but this is Dryden, the neo-classicist, celebrating Plutarch. There are, of course, ‘transferred’ meanings to use the OED’s description itself – a person as a living archive, the past itself as an archive and so on. More recently, and especially in our own postdigital age, the verb form, ‘to archive’, that is to store or to transfer, the latter often ‘to a lower level in the hierarchy of memories’, is the more common use.

It follows that once established an archive can acquire mystical power because it is seen as a kind of arbiter of disputes; it can command, direct, legislate and control textual questions as it may even be seen as the ‘origin’ of knowledge about the subject matter of the archive. Archivists and readers of archives are aware of this. In the Society of American Archivists’ Glossary of Archival and Records Terminology, ⁷ Richard Pearce-Moses identified ‘three fundamental aspects of a record’ as they affect a reader of the archive. ⁸ These three aspects are context, content and structure, with context, unarguably, the most problematic because beyond the specific circumstances of an archive’s creation (receipt, storage and the like), it involves ‘the circumstances that a user may bring to a document that influences that user’s understanding of the document’. ⁹ The circumstances that a user brings to the archive vary with reference to the aims of the researcher. A scholar of bibliography and textual criticism may come to an archive seeking empirical evidence about a writer’s life or holograph evidence of an earlier version of a creative work. Here an archive may be deemed a ‘proof text’ more or less beyond falsification and read in an objective, dispassionate manner with no personal investment beyond those defined by the protocols of textual scholarship. A subaltern or postcolonial reader on the other hand (to choose one of many alternative readers) may dispute ‘the archive as a place of fixity and stability’ ¹⁰ and read it as an ideological ‘text’ aimed at offering a select body of evidence on a particular issue. One such reading may be found in Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s account of a colonial archive in ‘The Rani of Sirmur: An Essay in Reading the Archives’ ¹¹ where she challenges the hegemonic 19th-century European historiography that designated ‘archives as a repository of “facts”’ by arguing that archives must be ‘read’ and are not a pre-given. In constructing the ‘Rani of Sirmur as an object of knowledge’ (p. 263), she argues the clerk cadets (whose requirement was that they be ‘well-grounded in Vulgar Fractions, write . . . a good Hand, and [have] gone through the Latin grammar’ (p. 254)) fabricated ‘representations of historical reality’ (p. 271) towards imperialist ends. The point she makes is that archives are held under an interdiction because they hold secrets. Derrida, in fact subtitled his monograph, Archive Fever, ‘A Freudian Impression’. ¹² I have noted, quoting Richard Pearce-Moses, the three fundamental aspects of any repository or record (context, content and structure) and additionally judgements about the facticity of archives. The archive thus frames or echoes or even functions as a censor to the task of interpretation. It is here that the question of context becomes urgent. What is my own investment in reading the Naipaul Archive?

I entered the Tulsa Naipaul Archive with a context in mind and considerable familiarity with the author. I came out with my centre displaced, the context (which was the placement of the Naipaul corpus within postcolonial concerns) destabilized. Naipaul’s first wife Patricia Ann Naipaul died in 1996. Her own diaries and notes are in the archive and to Naipaul’s credit, they remain there in their total, unedited form. But reading the diaries and related papers is a painful experience as one engages with an understanding of a suffering, aloof, detached English wife who believed in the value of great art and how it should be nurtured. One may spend time exploring Naipaul’s failure to love and I will have reason to examine this in the context of his own background. What is more important and may be immediately stated here is that after Patricia, Naipaul ceases to be, and here I use the infinitive quite consciously in its existential sense. After 1996, Naipaul wrote nothing of significance as his great work, his principal, enduring corpus, was possible only while Patricia remained alive. Five years after Pat’s death, Naipaul (2001) adds a late dedication to the Vintage edition of his masterpiece A House for Mr Biswas: ‘For this Book/Written between 1957 and 1960/A Late Dedication/ P.A.N./31 July 1932, Gloucester/3 February 1996, Salterton’. ¹³ Here it is Naipaul’s own admission, finally, of Patricia’s role in his creative life.

How I can handle this Freudian impression in the context of a book so very personal and which would deal with Naipaul’s ideology of the aesthetic is the challenge. And this challenge acquires a different slant because when reading the Patricia Naipaul Section of the Naipaul Archive, tears flow: lacrimae rerum. Pat’s journals, letters and unpublished essays begin to reveal a relationship where a writer finds sexual gratification and stirrings of the literary imagination in different places and with different people. Margaret Gooding was one such person. Her own contribution should not be overlooked even if her presence in the archive is only through stray letters of sexual gratitude and desire. The imaginative boldness that we find in Naipaul’s later style, the sense that he now understands the body as the site of aesthetic judgement – the bodily affects that make their way into A Bend in the River, for instance – are attributable to her. But the confirmation of that judgement came from Pat. As Mel Gussow points out, even while writing A Bend in the River (a work based on travels undertaken with Margaret Gooding) he would talk to his wife, ‘telling her the problems’ and she would say ‘that sounds very good, go write it’ and he would go ‘back that night (a Saturday)’ and write.

Although never mentioned in his works (except for the dedication in The Suffrage of Elvira, in Guerrillas and a late dedication in A House for Mr Biswas), Gussow in his essay ‘Writer Without Roots’ wrote, ‘(Patricia Hale since her marriage in 1955) has been his chosen editorial advisor, totally dedicated to his work . . . a co-producer with him of his privacy’. ¹⁴ The Archive has many references to endless discussions Naipaul had with his wife about his writing. In the diary and journals, her interaction with Naipaul’s works as they progress – from The Mystic Masseur (1957) to A Way in the World (1994) – is clear. More specifically one doubts very much if Naipaul could have written his paeon to Englishness, The Enigma of Arrival (1987), without her critical eye.

In a phone interview with Mel Gussow recorded 3 years after Pat’s death, Naipaul would again declare his indebtedness to Pat as a listener.

‘I read a lot to Pat, even just a line. I read everything to her, for her approval, even a few days before she died. For three years, from 1952 to 1955, all I read was rubbish, three years of nonsense. It changed with Miguel Street’.

‘Would she edit the work?’

‘No. She gave her response and it was very valuable. You need a person. When things are going badly, you need someone to tell you what’s good and to point that out. I trusted her quite a lot’. ¹⁵

On a separate page in the Archive dated ‘Jan 25 ’85’, and quite possibly, as an exercise in Socratic irony, Naipaul answers the question ‘pourquoi ecrivez-vous?’ [‘Why do you write?’]. Earlier he had written ‘out of panic and the fear of the abyss’; now he writes in search of ‘something new . . . a new piece of writing’ which alone could ‘truly engage the mind’. ‘Not to write’, he adds, ‘is to fail to extract the full value or meaning of one’s experience’. There is a ‘contemplation that goes with writing, and the clarity it requires, makes for calm’. To him writing is thus ‘equivalent to religion’. While Pat was alive, the equanimity, however devalued or deflected, was always there and his works, even when they did not charm, as Diana Athill conceded, nevertheless were, with occasional lapses, impressive. ¹⁶

It is 1995 and Patricia is dying. Naipaul once again makes ‘Islamic excursions among the converted peoples’ over a period of 5 months, accompanied, for the most part, by Margaret Gooding. The book he writes extends his earlier book on Islam – Among the Believers (1981) – and is published in 1998 as Beyond Belief. In death Patricia doesn’t get a dedication; instead the book is dedicated to ‘Nadira Khannum Alvi’ who had little to do with the difficult period of research and writing undertaken by Naipaul. With the exception of his literary essays (2007) and this too Pat would have understood best, the books that follow Patricia’s death – Letters Between a Father and Son (effectively letters written between 1950 and 1953), Half a Life (2001, and this too dedicated to ‘NKN’), Magic Seeds (2004) and The Masque of Africa (2010) – are works, I believe, of little consequence. There was no longer the critical first reader, there was no longer his first ‘English’ reader whose support and confirmatory adulation he so desired. After Patricia, Naipaul writes nothing of consequence. Naipaul’s astrologer, one Mr M V Vasudeva Rao of Bangalore (the Horoscope is in the Tulsa Naipaul Archive) had predicted that he would live for 84 years 9 months 24 days, he would have ‘only one marriage in [his] life’ and his wife would die in beatitude. The palmist got it wrong: Naipaul lived for 85 years 11 months 24 days; his wife Patricia died in pain; and Vidia re-married soon after, ‘but two months dead – nay, not so much, not two –’.

I turn to a personal statement. With Naipaul, the archive itself although important, cannot be the centre (however unstable) of the writing of a book on Naipaul by someone with my background. And here context takes another form. Both Naipaul and I are children of indenture, the world of the coolie theorized by Khal Torabully as ‘coolitude’. ¹⁷ Like Naipaul, I am also a grandson of illiterate indentured coolies brought to work on colonial sugar plantations in the 19th century. Naipaul’s people were sent to Trinidad, mine ended up in Fiji. A writer, Naipaul would tell Mel Gussow, needs a constituency which is often a recognizable society or country. It is the latter that made a work like A House for Mr Biswas totally accessible only to people of the Indian plantation diaspora. Which is why only the indenture/coolie diaspora weep whenever they read the final sentence of the Prologue to A House for Mr Biswas:

How terrible it would have been, at this time, to be without it; to have died among the Tulsis, amid the squalor of that large, disintegrating and indifferent family; to have left Shama and the children among them, in one room; worse, to have lived without even attempting to lay claim to one’s portion of the earth; to have lived and died as one had been born, unnecessary and unaccommodated. ¹⁸

Across the Indian plantation diaspora, our lives were similar with the same desire to belong, to own, to find meaning in our lives, to be ‘accommodated’, in Lear’s usage (III.iv.105), to learn the trappings of civilization (a word, in the negative, never used by Shakespeare in the modern sense), to conform to Macaulay’s dictate about colonial English and learn it as a discipline along the lines of the colonial cadet mentioned by Spivak and become a colonial ourselves. ¹⁹ My father, too, finally, built a house and died in it, again escaping from the single windowless room of his father’s house and the jalousied shutters, roughly hinged at the top and propped open with a stick, of the Methodist Mission quarters. So there is this contextual baggage I carry when it comes to Naipaul. Against this backdrop, both Naipaul’s works and the archive are read. The overriding theme of my book is Naipaul’s ideology of the aesthetic and its place in postcolonial theorizations of the writer, however minimal thus far it has been. The book does not wish to engage directly with his exclusion from postcolonial theory, which indeed is a self-evident case. What it attempts to do is argue that Naipaul’s works were postcolonial avant la lettre.

This is the story – written in the shadow of an archive – I want to tell in this book and it is a sad tale in which the works of a great writer will be viewed through bifocals: a distant reading that locates the writer as artist in an Anglo-American and European tradition and a close reading of a tortured writer who never escaped from the trauma of his peasant, coolie background. More immediately, for the second reading, the story begins with the triangular relationship between father, son and sister in the context of an extended family emerging out of the detritus of Indian indenture life. The shape that the artistic imagination takes – art as an act of labour, of persistence, of struggle – Naipaul owed to his wife Patricia. V S Naipaul never destroyed anything, such was his respect for the written word. He preserved what many could consider accidentals or minutiae; but here he is, in the archive, with almost everything he ever wrote or was written to him. Sadly, though, his early archive, material relating to his works from The Mystic Masseur (1957) to An Area of Darkness (1964), to many the period of some of his best works, was mistakenly removed from a London depository and destroyed. Except for some typed pages of Miguel Street, we have no holograph information for that period. If the early manuscript material disappeared, this was not the case with letters which Naipaul and his family, primarily parents and sisters, held on to throughout their lives so that the archive not only carries letters received by Naipaul (which is what we find in most archives) but those sent by him to his family. Their presence and the diaries and letters of Patricia make this an extraordinarily rich and diverse archive. Tom told me that archives must be respected but the personality, the worldview, the ethical principles of the scholar, his values, his sense of goodness and indeed his own personal investment in the act, never forgotten. Thirty years ago, I did not heed his advice. It saddens me that now that I have, he is not around to tell me if I am getting my readings right.