Serious Noticing by James Wood

Author:James Wood [Wood, James]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Published: 2020-01-16T18:30:00+00:00

Instead, as an Indian restaurant owner tells Santosh: ‘This isn’t Bombay. Nobody looks at you when you walk down the street. Nobody cares what you do.’ He means it consolingly – that Santosh is free to do whatever he likes. But Naipaul is alert to Santosh’s negative freedom, in which nobody in America cares what he does because nobody cares who he is. Santosh leaves his master, marries an American, becomes a citizen. He is now ‘in a free state’, but ends his tale like this: ‘All that my freedom has brought me is the knowledge that I have a face and have a body, that I must feed this body and clothe this body for a certain number of years. Then it will be over.’

And above all there is Mohun Biswas, the protagonist of Naipaul’s greatest novel, A House for Mr Biswas, who is born into poverty in Trinidad, begins his professional life as a signwriter (‘IDLERS KEEP OUT BY ORDER’ is his first commission), miraculously becomes a journalist in Port of Spain, and ends his life at the age of forty-six, lolling on his Slumberking bed and reading Marcus Aurelius – a homeowner but barely housed: ‘He had no money … On the house in Sikkim Street Mr Biswas owed, and had been owing for four years, three thousand dollars … Two children were at school. The two older children, on whom Mr Biswas might have depended, were both abroad on scholarships.’ Naipaul ends the short prologue to that novel with a deep autobiographical shudder: imagine if Mr Biswas had not owned this poor house, he suggests to his comfortable readers. ‘How terrible it would have been, at this time, to be without it … 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.’ How much land does a man need? asks Tolstoy in a fierce late tale. Six feet, just enough to be buried in, is that story’s reply. Mr Biswas had a little more than that; but he had so narrowly avoided being the ‘unaccommodated man’, the naked savage found on the heath in King Lear.

Unnecessary, unaccommodated – and unnoticed, until Naipaul made him the hero of his book. The shudder is autobiographical, because Mr Biswas is essentially Vidia Naipaul’s father, Seepersad Naipaul, and the fictional house on Sikkim Street is the real house on Nepaul Street from which Vidia was launched, at nearly eighteen, on his enormous journey to England – ‘a box,’ writes Patrick French, ‘a hot, rickety, partitioned building near the end of the street, around 7 square metres on two floors with an external wooden staircase and a corrugated iron roof’. Seepersad’s father was an indentured labourer, shipped from India to Trinidad in order to fill out the workforce on the sugar-cane plantations. Indentured servitude differed from slavery in that it was theoretically voluntary, and families were allowed to stay together. After five or ten years, the labourer could return to India or stay and take a small plot of land.

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