Literary Occasions by V S Naipaul

Author:V S Naipaul [Naipaul, V S]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Usenet, Literary Collections, Letters, C429, Kat, Exratorrents
ISBN: 9781743295953
Publisher: Picador
Published: 2004-02-01T10:02:22+00:00

5

THE MANAGING editor of the Trinidad Guardian from 1929 to April 1934 was Gault MacGowan. I heard his name often when I was a child: he was the good man who had helped in the early days, and I was told that I had been shown to him as a baby one day in Chaguanas.

The Hindu who wants to be a pundit has first to find a guru. My father, wanting to learn to write, found MacGowan. It was MacGowan, my father said, who had taught him how to write; and all his life my father had for MacGowan the special devotion which the Hindu has for his guru. Even when I was at Oxford my father, in his letters to me, was passing on advice he had received twenty years before from MacGowan. In 1951 he wrote: “And as to a writer being hated or liked—I think it’s the other way to what you think: a man is doing his work well when people begin liking him. I have never forgotten what Gault MacGowan told me years ago: ‘Write sympathetically’; and this, I suppose, in no way prevents us from writing truthfully, even brightly.”

MacGowan seems to have understood the relationship. In a letter he wrote me out of the blue in 1963, nearly thirty years after he had left Trinidad—a letter of pure affection, written to me as my father’s son—MacGowan, then nearly seventy, living in Munich and “still publishing,” said he had always been interested in the people of India. He had found my father willing to learn, and had gone out of his way to instruct him.

An unlikely bond between the two men was a mischievous sense of humour. “Trinidad Hangman Disappointed—Robbed of Fee by Executive Council—Bitter Regret.” That was a MacGowan headline over a news item about a condemned man’s reprieve. It was the kind of joke my father also relished. That particular headline was brought up in court, as an example of MacGowan’s irresponsibility, during one of the two big court cases MacGowan had in Trinidad. MacGowan said, “Doesn’t the headline tell the story? I think that just the word ‘robbed’ is out of place.” Publicity like this wasn’t unwelcome to MacGowan. He seems to have been litigious, and as a Fleet Street man he had the Fleet Street idea that a newspaper should every day in some way be its own news.

He had been brought out from England to Trinidad, on the recommendation of The Times, to modernize the Trinidad Guardian. The Port of Spain Gazette, founded in 1832, and representing French creole planter and business interests, was the established local paper. The Guardian, started in 1917, and representing other business interests, was floundering a long way behind. Its make-up was antiquated: on the front page a rectangle of closely printed news cables was set in a big frame of shop advertisements.

MacGowan changed the front page. He gave the Guardian a London look. He had a London feeling for international news (“Daily at Dawn—Last Night’s News in London”).

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