Yours Ever (8 page)

There is always a novel’s worth of news and complication and worry coming from Port-of-Spain. The elder Mr. Naipaul seeks the advice of his precocious son on how to handle Deo and Phoolo, two young female cousins who are living under the family’s roof: “I had never realised, until about three weeks ago, how shockingly ‘advanced’ these girls have become … so ultra-modern that they make no distinction between Negroes, Mussulmans or any other people.” While Vido is grateful for his parents’ affection and sacrifice (“Frankly, whenever I think about you and Pa, I think that you have been noble”), his letters also make plain that his own home will finally have to be somewhere else. Running into an old Trinidadian friend after three years in England throws him into a xenophobic snit about his own country: “Two days ago I met Solomon Lutchman. I never realised the man was so utterly ugly, so utterly crass—his low forehead, square, fat face, thick lips, wavy hair combed straight back. Now S. L. is an educated man. Yet to me he appears uncultured. The gulf that I felt between people and myself at home—people called me conceited, you remember—has grown wider. Take Lutchman. Narrow, insular, still looking upon Trinidad as the source of all effulgence.”

Naipaul may miss his home island’s climate, but his longing for distinction—and even luxury—will keep him in the midst of England’s chills and damp: “I discover in myself all types of aristocratic traits, without, you know too well, the means to keep them alive.” Right now he must endure ordinary student poverty, a condition that his always-tender father tries to alleviate in ways large and small. In July 1951, Mr. Naipaul sends Vido a ten-dollar money order. “It will help you see a patch or two of France. It’s such a fleabite,
but I’d feel brutal if I didn’t send anything at all.” The following March, thinking bigger, he makes a pledge as touching as it is implausible: “I want you to have that chance which I have never had: somebody to support me and mine while I write. Two or three years of this should be enough. If by then you have not arrived, then it will be time enough for you to see about getting a job. Think over this thing. I mean every word of it.”

“Pa,” with his own thwarted literary aspirations—a writing life sacrificed to the production of inconsequential newspaper features—is, even beyond Kamla, the central figure in both Vido’s psyche and the family letters, which would eventually be published in the United States as
Between Father and Son
. As gentle as his son is imperious, the senior Naipaul again and again counsels Vido against depression and anxiety, sounding like a man who has been battered by both: “Be cheerful … Home is bright and gay. Plush carpets and so on. Next week I might have the outside of the house painted. We never forget you for a day.” Though he claims to believe in the power of mind over matter, Mr. Naipaul’s troubles forever mount. At one point he feels forced to make an embarrassed confession to the humorless Vido: “This will pain you: but your Ma will be having a baby—in September or October … I know it’s a mess, but there we are.”

For all their difference in temperament, father and son share a host of mannerisms and seem, even an ocean apart, to be on the same somatic wavelength, experiencing similar eye trouble, the same indigestion, shared sleep patterns, even the same mechanical problems: “My typewriter, too,” writes Pa, “is behaving badly, n & g sticking, the v not typing.” But their father-son relation isn’t leveled into fraternity so much as simply reversed. In any number of matters, but especially literary ones, Vido parents his own Pa, criticizing the older man’s use of the apostrophe, holding up the late-blooming Joyce Cary as an example to him, and taking advantage of his own malfunctioning keyboard to hector Mr. Naipaul with the following advice:
YOU HAVE ENOUGH MATERIAL FOR A HUNDRED STORIES. FOR HEAVEN’S SAKE START WRITING THEM. YOU CAN WRITE AND YOU KNOW IT. STOP MAKING EXCUSES
. But the
marching orders seem to leave Pa crumpled instead of invigorated. In his next letter to Vido, he demurs: “Go on writing, for progress’ sake, and don’t mind me. I am all right. I just want to see you do the thing … I am going in for orchid-collecting—in a small way.”

And yet, more embarrassing than the new baby, Pa’s dream of publishing his fiction persists. Late in 1952, he tells Vido that he wants to send him the manuscript of a newly fattened story collection, hoping it “will not interfere too much with your studies. Exams are near. Can you manage taking it to two or three publishers during the Christmas vacation?” Within a few months, Mr. Naipaul will have suffered a heart attack, leaving his wife and daughter convinced that only publication of the book will allow for his recovery. Kamla lays down the law in a letter to Vido: “Write now to Pa. See about his stories. Write me saying what you have done. Carelessness about these means Pa’s death.”

Mr. Naipaul himself becomes increasingly desperate in his urgings (“I don’t want you to delay over this business”). Even his job at the newspaper is gone: “the
Guardian
no longer wants me, nobody wants me,” he writes on September 24, 1953. A few weeks after sending this last, terrible letter, he is dead. Upon hearing the news, Vido sends a telegram home, the all-caps conveying, this time, not only commands but grief:
HE WAS THE BEST MAN I KNEW STOP EVERYTHING I OWE TO HIM BE BRAVE MY LOVES TRUST ME
.

The next cable printed in
Between Father and Son
was sent two years later, when Vido could tell the family back in Port-of-Spain:
NOVEL ACCEPTED
. He was on his way, in bitter, baleful flight, ever farther away from the gentle hand that had sent him aloft.

UNLIKE DONNE
—and he was, to say the least—Milton wrote few letters. Those he did compose were often in Latin, and so far as we know not one of them to a woman. Toward the end of his life he authorized their publication
(Epistolarum Familiarium)
along with his youthful
Prolusions;
the printer, in a note to the reader, acknowledged the “paucity” of the letters by themselves. Indeed, Milton’s laxness as a correspondent is one of his own themes. On March 26, 1625, he responds to Thomas Young’s complaint about the shortness and infrequency of his letters, admitting that the only thing to recommend them is “their rarity.”

And yet, in this same letter to his former tutor, the still-teenaged Milton comes up with what may be the most self-serving, and charming, rationale ever made for the epistolary neglect of a friend:

What letter could compete with this excuse for one?

The man who in his epic poem would justify the ways of God to man usually seeks, in his letters, to explain his own silence. In 1628, again apologizing to Young, he can say only that he “preferred writing little, and that in a rather slovenly manner, to not writing at all,” and nearly a decade later, to Charles Diodati, the greatest friend of his youth, he makes the excuse that he is “one by nature slow and lazy to write.” Unlike Diodati, he teases, he cannot take epistolary breaks from scholarly effort: “my genius is such that no delay, no rest, no care or thought almost of anything, holds me aside until I reach the end I am making for.”

In the young Milton’s letters, we can glimpse the competing moods of both “L’Allegro” and “Il Penseroso,” the so-called “twin poems” of gaiety and contemplativeness. But it’s mostly the peaceful, melancholic atmosphere of the latter that Milton endorses to his friends. His letter to Young of March 26, 1625, is “written in London amid city distractions, and not, as usual, surrounded by books: if, therefore, anything in this epistle shall please you less than might be, and disappoint your expectation, it shall be made up for by another more elaborate one as soon as I have returned to the haunts of the Muses.” Writing from Cambridge to Alexander Gill, he looks forward to a summertime of “deeply literary leisure, and a period of hiding.” The pensive mood asserts itself yet again when he accepts an invitation from Young in July of 1628, glad to “withdraw myself from the din of town for a while” to the rural spot where Young peacefully resides in “triumph over riches, ambition, pomp, luxury, and whatever the herd of men admire and are amazed by.”

The playfulness in Milton’s youthful letters to friends—another part of the above-quoted RSVP swells with a mock-heroic pileup of classical allusion—surprises and supplements our usual idea of the poet. Decades later, by the time Milton has stiffened into Cromwell’s theocrat and become literally blind to much that once
delighted him, it will be too late for us to seek frivolity or fellowship in his company. In the meantime, it’s to Diodati that Milton makes his most fervent expressions of affection. Late in 1637, he tells him that “when it had been fallaciously reported to me in London by some one that you were in town, straightway and as if by storm I dashed to your crib; but ‘twas the vision of a shadow! for nowhere did you appear.” He longs to see Diodati, needs to know when he will. This letter of longing is enthusiastic, flirtatious, more like the production of an undergraduate than the twenty-eight-year-old that Milton is when he writes it. A few weeks later, when he outlines some musings upon immortality and the nature of the beautiful, Milton tells Diodati:

English literature’s most august and terrifying adherent to convention here criticizes, if not letter writing itself, then rote epistolary expression, almost as if he were Whitman trying to liberate a genre from the overused forms that are crushing the emotions it’s supposed to convey.

IF FRIENDSHIP DEPENDS
on the endurance of similarities—not the combustibility of opposites that passion requires—then George Sand and Flaubert should have enjoyed a torrid fling. And yet, despite wildly disparate temperaments, they sustained a close epistolary companionship over the last decade of Sand’s seventy-two years. “I don’t think there can be two workers in the world more different from one another than we are,” she writes to the much
younger but already middle-aged Flaubert in January of 1869. There he is, she imagines, “confined to the solitary splendour of the rabid artist,” struggling for the mot juste and “scorning the pleasures of this world,” while she goes on gobbling them up, never allowing the production of mere literature to keep her from the delights of the table or the garden or the bedroom.

Their correspondence begins in 1863, at a moment when Flaubert is critically friendless. Against the contempt of other reviewers, Sand rises in print to defend his
Salammbô
. He writes to thank her, suppressing the revulsion he’s often felt toward her own crowd-pleasing and message-laden books. Three years later, once their exchange gets going in earnest, Sand sends him her complete oeuvre, with a warning that “There’s lots of it.”

In the time he takes to finish a chapter, she can usually complete a book, barely noticing she’s done it amid the rest of her life in the country: “every day I pitch myself into an icy brook that shakes me up and makes me sleep like a top. How comfortable one is here, with the two little girls [her granddaughters] laughing and chattering like birds from morn till night, and how foolish one is to go writing and putting on
fictions
when reality is so easy and good!” When Flaubert reports feeling nauseated over the last corrections he’s making to
L’Éducation sentimentale
, Sand confesses that, when it comes to reading her own proofs, “I always scamp it, but I don’t set myself up as an example.” Early in their friendship she’s abashed by his exacting artistry (“When I see the trouble my vieux goes to to write a novel I’m depressed at my own facility and tell myself my work is only botched stuff”), but as the years pass she relaxes into a kind of amusement about the contrast: “We’re not literary enough for you here, I know, but we love, and that gives life a purpose.”

Admitting to the “mania of Perfection,” Flaubert says he can only remain the way he is, “living absolutely like an oyster,” his novel “the rock I’m attached to.” He won’t so much as attend the christening of Sand’s grandchildren, lest witnessing such an event inflict too much life upon his art: “My poor brain would be filled with real pictures instead of the fictive ones I’m at such pains to invent; and my house of cards would crumble to dust.” The reader
can picture Sand throwing up her hands over this; she responds with a request that Flaubert at least admit the pleasure his aesthetic hair-shirt gives him. Ten days later he owns up to it—more or less: “As to my mania for work, I’ll compare it to a rash. I keep scratching myself and yelling as I scratch. It’s pleasure and torture combined.”

There are real rashes, too—a nervous eczema, as well as grippe, a facial boil, morbid sensitivity to noise and capacious self-pity. Living with his frail and ever-more-deaf mother, Flaubert complains—no more convincingly than when he curses his creative burdens—about the “terrible solitude” of his “arid” existence. He is probably at his most considerate and least self-absorbed when he concedes to Sand, “I must be boring you with my eternal jeremiads.” On one occasion she does lose patience with him, but confides the irritation only to her son: “I’ve had enough of my young friend. I’m very fond of him, but he gives me a splitting headache. He doesn’t like noise, but he doesn’t mind the din he makes himself.”