Naipaul, Naipaul, Naipaul

So many reviews of Patrick French's biography The World Is What It Is, each one sounding much like the last--the same repetition of the list of Sir Vidia's sins, with emphasis on his marital life and sex "secrets", garnished by comments on the monstrousness of the man, and largely simplifying the subtleties, complexities, and ironies of the book. I was half in mind to do a follow-up roundup of TWIWIS coverage, but it's too exhausting to contemplate anything comprehensive--so I'll link to just a couple more reviews. First Hilary Spurling's in the UK Observer, which is illustrated with what is now my favourite photo of Naipaul, by Eamonn McCabe:



Second, Sunil Khilnani's review in Outlook India, which incisively describes what he calls French's "myth-puncturing"--his careful consideration of the uncomfortable but very human truths behind Naipaul's artfully crafted public persona. Khilnani concludes:

Naipaul came to perfect this stance: controlling a situation by appearing helpless, then getting others to do his bidding--while making them feel that they were doing it inadequately. In this biography, however, this method has failed him. This may be an authorised biography, but it is firmly and in every sense in Patrick French's control--and he has written a superb account of the life, as what it is. Now, knowing the myth, having read the life, one goes back to the work. That is Naipaul's monument. We are many, who lead less than exemplary lives; but very few are able to turn the matter of their lives into great work. Naipaul, as Patrick French lets us still better see, is one of them.

Meanwhile, it is announced today that TWIWIS has been longlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize for non-fiction, sponsored by the BBC.

"Somewhere in the Zone"

Over at Amazon's Omnivoracious blog, Brad Thomas Parsons has not only managed to snag a post-Pulitzer interview with Junot Diaz--he actually has the opening passage of Diaz's current work-in-progress, "Dark America", which starts:

I'm somewhere in the Zone, traveling on top of an transport. Bound for City.

The only City there is....

"Who knows when it will ever see the light of day again," says Diaz, making it sound like his readers will have to wait another eleven years....

Don't forget Shiva

From the midst of the flood of Naipaul-biography coverage, Nilanjana S. Roy reminds us, in the pages of the India Business Standard, about "The Other Naipaul Boy"--V.S.'s brother Shiva:

I remember The Fireflies and The Chip-Chip Gatherers as well-turned but slight novels, and the passage of years has preserved them well without transmuting them into classics. Both were set in Trinidad; for both Naipauls, the island that one sought to escape and the other sought to explore was a necessary source of material. The Fireflies offered a haunting image to set against the plight of those who couldn’t get away: fireflies trapped in a bottle, casting a beautiful light, but unable to find an escape. The Chip-Chip Gatherers has often been compared to V S Naipaul’s A House for Mr Biswas, to its detriment. It is clear from both novels, though, that Shiva had a way of seeing that was very much his own, and a fascination with the politics of identity that would never leave him.

(Small quibble--that should be Fireflies, no definite article....)

R.I.P. E.A. Markham, 1 October, 1939-23 March, 2008

I am shocked and saddened this morning to hear of the death of the Montserrat-born writer E.A. "Archie" Markham, via an email circulated by his publishers, Peepal Tree Press. Here is the text of that announcement:

"We have just received the sudden and shocking news of the death of E.A. (Archie) Markham in Paris on 23rd March, Easter day.

"Archie had apparently been taken to or gone to a Paris hospital where he died, it seems, of a heart attack. It was not until Monday 6th of April that news of his death was discovered by his family. As a hale 69 year old who was always on the move, no-one was too alarmed not to have heard from him for a week or two.

"As publishers of Archie's novel Marking Time, his retrospective collection of stories Taking the Drawing Room Through Customs, and just having sent his memoir, Against the Grain, due for publication later this month, to the printers, Archie has long been a part of our life, and over the last few months a regular presence either in the office or on the phone. It was always both an education and a joy to work with him. He was generous (we still have a bottle of good St Emilion awaiting an occasion), particular (he was still emailing small alterations -- which always improved the text -- right up to the last time we heard from him just before Easter) and immense fun when he was in the office.

"We know that there was so much more that Archie planned to write. In every way we feel deprived. There is so much more we want to say, but that needs more thought. In the meantime we send our deepest regrets to Archie's family and know that there will be many of our friends who will share our huge shock and sense of loss."

Archie Markham was also a member of the CRB's editorial board, in which role he was a source of strong (if mostly silent) moral support for the magazine. I deeply regret never having the chance to meet him, to match the wry, generous voice of his poems, fiction, and correspondence to the wryly generous man.

Pulitzer for Diaz

The 2008 Pulitzer Prizes have just been announced--and the fiction prize (possibly the most prestigious in American letters) has gone to The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, by Junot Diaz--one of the CRB's books of the year for 2007, reviewed in our current issue by Marlon James.

Addendum: thanks to Antilles reader Matthew Hunte for pointing me to this recent interview with Diaz in Newsweek. Nice quote:

The Caribbean generally and the island of Hispaniola specifically is the linchpin, the pivot point where the old world swung into the new world. If you want the transformation point, if you want the ground zero where the Old World died and the New World began, it's there. I mean, nothing is more quintessentially American—in the entire span of that description—than the Caribbean and more specifically the Dominican Republic. If you want to be incredibly grandiose, the entire world, we're all the children of what happened in the Caribbean, whether we know it or not. I mean, the extermination of indigenous people, the conquest of the New World, slavery and in some ways the rise of this form of capitalism that we all live under. I mean really the modern world was given rise by what began in the Caribbean.

Naipaul-spotting

As I mentioned in my last post, V.S. Naipaul is once again starring in the literary pages of newspapers on three continents, thanks to the long-awaited publication of Patrick French's authorised biography, The World Is What It Is. "It's hard to open a newspaper without seeing the face of Sir Vidia," said John Walsh in the Independent last week, and even the most dedicated Naipaul-philes must be getting a little weary now of the flood of newspaper articles--many of them with wonderfully scandalous headlines like "I Killed My Wife, Says Nobel Laureate". But for the sake of Antilles readers who have not been paying attention to this blitz, here's a roundup of some of the main reviews, features etc--rest assured there will be more to come.

- "The biggest surprise in Patrick French's colourful biography of Sir Vidia Naipaul is that its biographee should have allowed it to be published," says John Carey in his review in the Times. "For it exposes him as an egotist, a domestic tyrant and a sadist."

- "French's method is phenomenological: he presents the evidence as he finds it, in his subject's words or the words of those who knew him, keeping psychological analysis to a minimum, and intervening only occasionally to add his discreet opinions," suggests Aamer Hussein in the Independent; he also gets the name of one of Naipaul's novels wrong. That should be In a Free State, not A State of Independence.

- "Few people expected Patrick French's biography to be a full account of the writer's life.... It turns out that doubters underestimated French," says Christopher Tayler in the UK Guardian.

- "This is an excellent biography which does nothing to diminish one's respect for Sir Vidia and leaves one liking him much more than I had expected -- a judgement he might himself dismiss as impertinent." That's Allan Massie in the Literary Review, expressing what is surely a minority view.

- The Economist's review shows a blithe disregard for fact-checking (who were the Dutch settlers that supposedly exterminated Trinidad's indigenous population in the sixteenth century, and where exactly are the Greek immigrants that supposedly arrived sometime thereafter?), but the anonymous reviewer is at least tenderhearted enough to be moved to tears by the biography's closing pages.

- In the India Business Standard, Nilanjana S. Roy suggests in her thoughtful essay that "the real tragedy of Naipaul is not that he’s produced middling work in his later years -- this happens, all too often, to even the best of writers, and his earlier works will continue to find an audience. It’s that Naipaul has been overtaken by the banality he has so often condemned."

- And my favourite line in all this Naipaul coverage comes from a short essay by former Granta editor Ian Jack, writing in the Guardian. "Naipaul gave French access to everything, including Pat's diaries (which he sold to an American university without having read them), and the biography must be the frankest authorised biography of anyone alive and in possession of their senses. Thanks to the New Yorker, we knew about the prostitutes; now we learn about the sexual violence. We are none of us straight pieces of timber but the woodshed usually has locks."

Meanwhile, readers impatient to get hold of the book can satisfy themselves for the time being with "Leaving the ghetto", an article by French on Naipaul's time with the BBC Caribbean Voices programme, in the New Statesman; and the Telegraph has run a couple of substantial excerpts from the biography, on Naipaul's early relationship with his first wife Pat, and his onetime friendship with Paul Theroux. You can also hear French reading a passage from his book here, at the Telegraph website.

"Catapulted into privilege"

With Patrick French's biography of V.S. Naipaul about to hit the bookshop shelves, the literary pages of the British press are going into a Vidia-frenzy. More about that shortly. Meanwhile, a few days ago in the UK Guardian Chris Arnot profiled another celebrated West Indian-British writer, the Sabga-prize-winning David Dabydeen:

Dabydeen's own progress is a story that would test the imagination of any artist or writer. He was born in a one-roomed house on a sugar plantation in 1955, and won a scholarship to Queen's College, Georgetown, at the age of 10. "We had a solid colonial education modelled on the public-school system over here," he recalls. "That included Latin and strict discipline. We even had a tuckshop." So it must have come as quite a shock when he followed in his father's footsteps and arrived in south London in 1969....

Those were particularly tough times for black and Asian immigrants to the UK. Enoch Powell's 1968 Rivers of Blood speech had stirred up already rampant racism. "When Powell died, 30 years later, I remember feeling quite sad," Dabydeen says mischievously. "Were it not for him, I wouldn't have had the drive to achieve academically. I watched him wipe the floor with opponents in television studios. There was no Paul Boateng or Trevor Phillips at the time to match Powell's erudition and eloquence. I remember thinking 'I'd better get to Oxford or Cambridge'."...

He likens the culture shock of moving to Selwyn College from the Ernest Bevin comprehensive, Balham, to being "catapulted into privilege". And he disliked it intensely, apart from the library. "I used to have the odd surreptitious cigarette in there," he admits. "You couldn't do it now and I shouldn't have done it then. I could have burnt the place down." He shakes his head in admonishment.

R.I.P. Milton George, 1939-2008

The National Gallery of Jamaica has issued an obituary of the Jamaican artist Milton George, who died on Monday 31 March:

Milton George (né George Oliver) was born in Asia, Manchester, in 1939 but lived in Kingston and Braeton for most of his life. While he attended part-time classes at what was then the Jamaica School of Art and Craft, he was in essence self-taught and developed a pictorial language which reflected his awareness of modernist expressionism but was uniquely his own. He was aptly described by Dr David Boxer, Chief Curator of the National Gallery, as “a born painter, who quickly understood the emotive power of line and colour when freed from the conventions of academia.”

George was indeed the ultimate expressionist, who freely used colour, paint application and imagery to appeal to the emotions and the senses. While he also commented on social and political issues -- perhaps most memorably in his hilarious The PM Speaks at 8 pm of 1987 -- most of his works were autobiographical and he often stated that all his paintings were self-portraits. Veerle Poupeye, Research Fellow and Curator at the Edna Manley College, wrote in 2007 that George’s “paintings convey feelings, moods and situations by means of an instinctive, poetic visual and verbal language -- and his titles are important -- that is not easily translated into rational terms but nonetheless speaks eloquently to those who are willing to listen. Milton's themes usually draw from his turbulent personal life but we can easily identify with what he is talking about: our most private and vulnerable moments, which are filled with tenderness or exhilaration but also with anxiety and aggression, and our bewilderment and impotence at the tragicomic spectacle of the private and public worlds we inhabit. In that sense his paintings are not only self-portraits but about all of us, about the human condition.”

George’s work evolved significantly over the years. In the 1970s, he was best known for his quiet, delicately coloured semi-abstract portrayals of women, although his Opening Night (1978), an irreverent send-up of the pretensions of the art world, revealed a more unruly, satirical eye that later came to dominate his work. By the early 1980s, George was at the peak of his artistic powers, with paintings and pastel drawings that expressed raging emotions, a wicked sense of humour and, in many instances, a raw sexuality. Some were hilariously funny, such as his Fourteen Pages from my Diary (1983), which depict the “battle of the sexes” in George’s own, rather turbulent private life, but even his most carnal and humorous images were always infused by a deep sense of anguish. His most haunting works dealt overtly with these anxieties, such as Journey (1984) and The Ascenscion (1993), two meditations on the subject of death. George had in recent years become less visibly present in the artistic community, because of lingering health problems, but continued working and exhibiting, among others in the National Biennial. In 2007, he had his last solo exhibition at the Mutual Gallery, in which he represented a new body of work in oil and watercolour paint, which exuded a gentle wariness that reminded of his work of the 1970s, thus bringing his work full circle.

George’s work has been widely exhibited in Jamaica and abroad, among others in Jamaican Art 1922-1982 (1983-86), which toured in the USA, Caribbean Art Now (1987), and New World Imagery (1995), which were shown in England, and has represented Jamaica in the Havana and Santo Domingo biennials. His awards include the Silver Musgrave Medal in 1987 and a gold medal at the 1994 Santo Domingo Biennial. His work is represented in major local and regional collections, such as the National of Jamaica, where his Opening Night is on permanent view, and the private collections of Wallace Campbell, David Boxer, Guy McIntosh and Herman van Asbroeck in Jamaica, and Mervyn Awon in Barbados. One of Milton’s children, Beverley Oliver, has recently also gained acclaim as a painter and shown her work at the National Gallery and Harmony Hall.

Milton George passed away on Monday, March 31. The National Gallery extends its condolences to his family and many friends.