brute, come here,” and “Gavin, if you don't come here this minute, I make you fart fire, you hear.” These characters also seem to enjoy quoting passages from Calypso songs, which appear to comprise the island's national poetry. When Boyee sees that Eddoes's baby does not resemble him, he begins to whistle the calypso, “Chinese children calling me Daddy! / Oh God, somebody putting milk in my coffee.” And one of Laura's husbands, Nathaniel, boasts that he keeps her under control by a “a good dose of blows” and proceeds to quote from a calypso song: “Every now and then just knock them down. / Every now and then just throw them down. / Black up their eye and bruise up their knee / And then they love you eternally.”

The language of Miguel Street is so fundamental to its atmosphere, rhythm, and characters, that Naipaul later declared that the simple opening dialogue of this book created the world of the street and established the framework for the rest of the book. This dialogue marked the opening not only of the story but of Naipaul's writing career: “Every morning when he got up Hat would sit on the banister of his back verandah and shout across, ‘What happening there, Bogart?’ Bogart would turn in his bed and mumble softly, so that no one heard, ‘What happening there, Hat?’” Naipaul was twenty-two years old, recently graduated from Oxford University and working for the BBC, when he wrote those opening sentences for his first publishable book. “That was a Port of Spain memory,” he writes. “It seemed to come from far back, but it was only eleven or twelve years old.”

Hat was a Port of Spain Indian who lived on the same street as the Naipaul family. Connected with Naipaul's mother's family, Bogart was a young man who lived in a separate one-room building at the back of the Naipauls' yard. The first sentence of the book, Naipaul says, was “true.” “The second,” he goes on, “was invention.” The two sentences together, however, had done something extraordinary to Naipaul: “Though they had left out everything—the setting, the historical time, the racial and social complexities of the people concerned—they had suggested it all; they had created the world of the street. And together, as sentences, words, they had set up a rhythm, a speed, which dictated all that was to follow.”

Although there are many autobiographical elements in Miguel Street—the characters themselves being based upon people Naipaul knew as a boy growing up in Trinidad—Naipaul distances himself from the narrator in several respects. His narrator has no father or relatives and lives alone with his mother in a house on Miguel Street. Naipaul explains that in order to simplify his life he had to abolish the numerous members of his mother's extended family and make the narrator “more in tune with the life of the street than I had been.”

The microcosm of Trinidad is Miguel Street. As Naipaul puts it, he tried “to establish the idea of the street as a kind of club,” which had its own “city sense of drama.” In the story Bogart seeks freedom. In real life, Naipaul explains, Bogart was trying to escape from his Hindu family conventions. Although he advertises himself as a tailor, he possesses no skill. Given the name Bogart by his street friends (after Humphrey Bogart, who was one of the most popular film heroes of the time) and invested with an aura of mystery by these same people, Bogart wins the admiration of the narrator for being “sensual, lazy, cool.” He is finally done in by women. In Naipaul's analysis, Bogart had taken the easy way out: “He was that flabby, emasculated thing, a bigamist. So, looking only for freedom, the Bogart of my story ended up as a man on the run. It was only in the solitude of his servant room that he could be himself, at peace. It was only with the men and boys of the street that he could be a man.”

Each of the seventeen sections of Miguel Street focuses upon a single character. The sections are linked together by the narrator's voice as well as by the reappearance of various characters from earlier chapters. One of the most prominent recurring characters is Hat, the streetwise commentator whose insights and seeming self-sufficiency make him a big brother, almost a father, to the nameless young narrator. It is only at the end of the book that the narrator discovers Hat's failings. The young man's disillusionment thereby coincides with the reader's sense of compassion for the fallen street hero.

Naipaul develops almost all of his characters by focusing upon one or two dominant traits. Bogart “was the most bored man I ever knew”; Popo the carpenter was always “making the thing without a name”; Big Foot, a bully, was “the biggest and the strongest man in the street”; Man-man was mad; B. Wordsworth was a poet working on “the greatest poem in the world”; Eddoes “was crazy about cleanliness”; Uncle Bhakcu “was very nearly a mechanical genius” who spent most of his time disassembling his car's engine; Bolo's whole philosophy was never to believe anything you read in the newspapers; Edward (Hat's brother) modeled his life after the Americans; and Hat enjoyed life better than anyone the narrator had ever known.

The first character in Miguel Street is Bogart. The narrator first sees him as bigger than life: “He did everything with a captivating languor. Even when he licked his thumb to deal out the cards there was a grace in it.” Besides being one of the most popular men in the street, Bogart is also a man of mystery. Without saying a word to anyone he disappears for several months. When he returns he reveals that he has gone to British Guiana and become a cowboy and a smuggler. Then he began running “the best brothel” in Georgetown when the police arrested him. Not only do these experiences change Bogart but the people on Miguel Street begin to see him as someone to fear now. Then he disappears twice again, each time returning a bit fatter, more aggressive, and sounding more American. Finally Bogart is arrested and it is revealed that he is a bigamist. Hat comes up with the details of his two wives. His first wife being childless, Bogart deserted her to marry a girl he got pregnant in another town. When Eddoes asks Hat why Bogart left the second wife, Hat explains, “To be a man, among we men.”

One of the recurrent themes in Miguel Street is the ideal of manliness. With the exception of Laura in “The Maternal Instinct,” all of the character sketches in the book focus upon men. The women remain in the background, in their houses, while the men rule the street and seem to run the small world of Miguel Street. The male voice is the dominant one and throughout the stories there are several references to the importance of a man beating a woman in order to win her love and respect. This macho ritual is even enshrined in the lyrics of the calypso songs, such as the one previously quoted. In the sketch entitled “Love, Love, Love, Alone” (taken from a calypso song that explains why King Edward left the throne), the well-to-do Mrs. Christiani leaves her physician husband in order to live with a penniless sadistic drunkard who regularly beats her. Even Hat acknowledges that it “is a good thing for a man to beat his woman every now and then, but this man does do it like exercise, man.”

Naipaul sets in motion an ironic countercurrent to this antifeminist theme. As John Thieme observes, “the dominant pattern of the stories is centered on an ironic exposure of the pretense of manliness.”¹ Naipaul exposes Bogart's macho facade and reveals him as a “flabby, emasculated thing, a bigamist.” Nathaniel, who quotes the calypso “Knock Them Down,” turns out to be on the receiving end of the beatings. Big Foot, the most feared man on Miguel Street, becomes terrified that he is dying after he cuts his foot on a broken bottle. Only the narrator witnesses this private humiliation. Later, however, when Big Foot takes up boxing and loses his first fight, everybody laughs at him and he begins sobbing like a child.

The ritual of male posturing and aggressiveness is fundamental to life in Miguel Street (and reappears in various guises in several of Naipaul's later works). Popo, the carpenter who is building “the thing without a name,” has no children and therefore allows his wife to go out and work. Because of this Hat says that “Popo is a man-woman. Not a proper man.” Later, however, after Popo's wife runs off with another man and Popo begins drinking and fighting everyone around him, Hat reassesses him: “We was wrong about Popo. He is a man, like any of we.”

The narrator has difficulty coping with the reality that continues to intrude upon the image of the macho hero. When Big Foot loses his fight, for example, the narrator reports that “all of us from Miguel Street laughed at Big Foot. All except me. For I knew how he felt although he was a big man and I was a boy.” More devastating still, however, is the narrator's discovery that Hat has been imprisoned for beating his woman, that Hat even needed a woman like other men. About twice the narrator's age, Hat is described as resembling Rex Harrison. “He didn't appear to need anything else. He was self-sufficient, and I didn't believe he even needed women. … And then this thing happened. It broke up the Miguel Street Club, and Hat himself was never the same afterwards.” Hat discovers that Dolly has run away, goes after her, finds her with another man, and nearly beats her to death. Thus Eve and the serpent enter the narrator's Garden of Eden revealing Hat to be a mere corruptible mortal, dependent upon women, and not the manly, handsome, and cool British Hollywood hero after all.

Thieme's contention that “The Maternal Instinct” illustrates what is latent throughout Miguel Street, namely, that the society is fundamentally matriarchal,² is more inferential than demonstrable. Nevertheless, this chapter on Laura, the legendary woman of Miguel Street who had eight children by seven different men, is an excellent example of Naipaul's distressing portrait of the devastated hopes of the island woman. Laura is a strong, domineering person who, in order to support herself and her numerous children, sells her sexual favors. Despite all of her hardships she manages to raise her children with a certain degree of authority and responsibility. All of the selfish men in her life have not managed to make her cynical or diminish her sense of humor. She is finally broken, however, by the powerful influence she unwittingly has upon one of her daughters. When her eldest daughter announces “I going to make a baby,” Laura is devastated. The narrator describes the painful scene:

She seemed to be crying all the cry she had saved up since she was born; all the cry she had tried to cover up with her laughter. I had heard people cry at funerals, but there is a lot of showing-off in their crying. Laura's crying that night was the most terrible thing I had heard. It made me feel that the world was a stupid, sad place, and I almost began crying with Laura.³

Naipaul seems to see Laura as the representative of all the island women, doomed to broken dreams, frustration, and hopelessness. Their poverty and dependency have the appalling quality of deadly genes passed down through the generations. Given woman's place in this oppressive society, the strength of her character, her maternal instinct, cruelly enslaves her and predestines her children to repeat her hapless life. After Laura's daughter brings home the new baby Laura's house becomes “a dead, silent house.” Hat's final comment demonstrates the stoical wisdom necessary to survive in this society: “Life is helluva thing. You can see trouble coming and you can't do a damn thing to prevent it coming. You just got to sit and watch and wait.” Laura's daughter commits suicide and Laura, when informed of this by the police, simply says, “It good. It good. It better that way.”

Most of the characters in Miguel Street are eccentrics and one of them, Man-man, comes closest to being designated mad. The narrator, however, has the wisdom to observe that “I am not so sure now that he was mad.” Man-man, first of all, does not look mad. He is fairly good-looking, does not stare at people, and makes reasonable replies to questions. One of the ways he makes money is to train his dog to defecate upon the clothes that people have put out to bleach. Everyone is willing to give him these clothes and he turns around and sells them. His dog then gets run over by a car and Man-man spends the next few days wandering about aimlessly.

One day he suddenly claims that after having a bath he has seen God. (The narrator mentions at this point that Ganesh Ramsumair, the pundit the reader has already met in The Mystic Masseur, has also seen God). Man-man proceeds to announce that he is the new messiah. Some men put up a cross, tie him to it, and he cries out for the onlookers to stone him. When the people begin hurling the stones in earnest, Man-man cries out (in contrast to his earlier prayer, “Father, forgive them. They ain't know what they doing”): “What the hell is this? What the hell you people think you doing? Look, get me down from this thing quick, let me down quick, and I go settle with that son of a bitch who pelt a stone at me.” Not really that mad at all, Man-man nevertheless is taken away by the police and the authorities lock him away.

The people in Miguel Street, it turns out, are almost all actors. Man-man is too convincing for his own good. B. Wordsworth, on the other hand, is a fascinating character who has adopted the role of poet as his persona. He resembles Lewis Carroll's White Knight in his gentle madness, and the narrator admires him and his talent. B. Wordsworth one day knocks on the narrator's door and asks if he can watch the bees in his backyard. He explains that the “B” stands for “Black,” and that “White Wordsworth was my brother.” He and the narrator become good friends. Wordsworth tells him wonderful stories about young love and nature. “He did everything as though he were doing it for the first time in his life,” the narrator observes. His energy and imagination make the dull island come alive. He even makes a simple visit to a restaurant seem exciting: “I think I will go and negotiate the purchase with that shop,” he says. In short, “The world became a most exciting place.”

Wordsworth also makes the future bright with his great plans. His chief goal is to write “the greatest poem in the world,” a task that would take about twenty-two years to achieve, since he writes only one line a month. The world that Wordsworth makes sparkle for the young narrator then suddenly turns dark. The boy visits him and finds the poet lying in bed looking old and weak. Wordsworth tells the boy that the romantic stories he told him were all false and that all the talk about his writing the greatest poem in the world is not true either. The boy “left the house, and ran home crying, like a poet, for everything he saw.” The following year he returns to the poet's neighborhood and finds his house gone: “It was just as if B. Wordsworth had never existed.”

Throughout Miguel Street the narrator undergoes several such disillusionments. Reality continues to break in upon the intimate fantasy constructed among the members of the Miguel Street community. B. Wordsworth is an important person in the narrator's development, for he teaches him the value of language and fantasy. A seer and a writer can, in fact, make the world an exciting place. B. Wordsworth may have been a charlatan, but he invested the ordinary with a colorful vision. When the narrator, for example, asks him why he keeps his yard filled with bush, the poet tells him a tale about a young girl, a poet, who loved grass and flowers and trees. She tells her poet husband that she is expecting a baby poet. The girl, however, dies, along with her baby poet, and the husband, out of respect for his wife's love of the garden, never touches it again. Thus the high, wild growth. And so the narrator, unaware that his friend is simply too lazy to mow his grass, has Wordsworth's untidy plot transformed into a garden of romance and mystery. With the narrator's final disillusionment at the end of the book, however, he sees all too clearly that the Arcadian world of his youth has vanished as definitively as did B. Wordsworth's house and person.

Despite the disillusionments there are the continuous efforts of the community to enhance their dull lives with fantasy. Fantasy becomes the lifeblood of the island's underdogs. When Morgan, the pyrotechnician, has his house go up in flames along with his fireworks (“It was the most beautiful fire in Port of Spain since 1933,” the narrator observes), he is charged with arson but is not prosecuted. The inhabitants of Miguel Street then speculate about his whereabouts: “They said Morgan went to Venezuela. They said he went mad. They said he became a jockey in Colombia. They said all sorts of things, but the people of Miguel Street were always romancers.”

Even Miguel Street's half-baked intellectuals are romancers. His head filled with big words, snippets of self-taught Latin, and fragments of Trinidad history, Titus Hoyt, I. A. (Inter Arts), “was a natural guide, philosopher and friend to anyone who stopped to listen.” Although lacking the rich imagination of B. Wordsworth, Titus Hoyt is similarly obsessed with the written word. He persuades the narrator to write a letter to the Trinidad Guardian because “only big big man does write to the Guardian.” The substance of the letter explains how the narrator, lost in Port of Spain, was rescued by Titus Hoyt. Hoyt feeds the boy words like “peregrination” and “metropolis” in an effort to demonstrate an educated style of writing, but the letter is never published. Hoyt then attempts to further his own education by studying Latin and also dedicates himself to training the minds of several young men in Miguel Street.

It is at this point in the story that Naipaul obviously uses Hoyt as a spokesman for his attack upon the ignorance of his people about their own country. “Titus Hoyt said, ‘You see, you people don't care about your country. How many of you know about Fort George? Not one of you here know about the place. But is history, man, your history, and you must learn about things like that.’” He explains to his unwilling charges that the fort was built during the time the French were planning to invade Trinidad. The narrator's response to this revelation captures the essence of Naipaul's keen awareness of the insularity, ignorance, and demeaning self-image of his people: “We had never realized that anyone considered us so important.”

The final chapter, entitled “How I Left Miguel Street,” reintroduces Ganesh Pundit. The narrator's mother decides that her son has become too wild and needs to leave the island. She takes him to Ganesh (who at this time is a minister in the government and running for the MBE) to see if he can arrange a scholarship for him in London. Ganesh explains that there is only one scholarship left, for pharmacy. Although the young man has absolutely no interest in this subject, Ganesh reminds him that in London he will be able to see snow, the Thames, and Parliament. So, the narrator agrees and his mother pays Ganesh the appropriate bribe.

On the day of his departure, the narrator, having said his good-byes to his family, discovers that his plane will be delayed for several hours and so returns to Miguel Street. The first person he sees is Hat. “I was disappointed,” he says, “Not only by Hat's cool reception. Disappointed because although I had been away, destined to be gone for good, everything was going on just as before, with nothing to indicate my absence.” The realization that he is not a vital presence, that his absence whether through travel or death, really alters nothing, that life grinds on with no regard for his ego or his place in the grand club called Miguel Street comes as a shock to the narrator. Furthermore there is a sense of déjà vu in this episode because earlier he had the same realization about B. Wordsworth when he returned to his street years later and discovered that his house was gone and that “it was just as though B. Wordsworth had never existed.”

As the years slip past, the narrator gradually sees the fiction that creates and sustains all of his romanticized characters and situations in his narrative. Hat is no more than a woman beater, Titus Hoyt a stupid bore, Bogart a shallow bigamist, and the narrator himself, perhaps a fool for not having seen this earlier. “I left them all,” he says, “and walked briskly towards the aeroplane, not looking back, looking only at my shadow before me, a dancing dwarf on the tarmac.” The narrator more than Miguel Street has changed and what he is leaving behind is a stunning city pastoral, the breeding ground for the great romancers who inhabit and shape the fiction. Miguel Street, then, contains both a young boy's version of street heroes drawn bigger than life and his subsequent awareness that he must not look back to his fictionalized childhood, that he must accept the new reality and follow his dancing shadow to the airplane, to London, to new reflections.

In a 1979 interview Naipaul expresses a dissatisfaction with his early work, claiming that it creates a fraudulent world: “Of course, when you're starting, you really have got to try to establish a world and it's much easier if you can even pretend that the tribal culture is a world, that the life of the street puts you in touch with the wider world. The early comedies make this pretense.”⁴ After writing Mr. Stone and the Knights Companion, however, Naipaul says: “Only after that did I really get going.”

Naipaul's concern that the tribal culture of Trinidad that he depicts in Miguel Street is not really a world at all tells more about Naipaul than it does about the book. Having abandoned the simple human comedy of his native land depicted in his early works for the complex tragedies of his later novels set in England, Africa, and the revolution-torn Caribbean, Naipaul has become mistrustful of the comforting simplicity, vitality, and camaraderie of his city pastoral. True, life on Miguel Street may only seem to put one in touch with the wider world, but that never appears to be a central issue in the book. The very fact that in the last chapter the narrator manages to move away from Trinidad to the cultural mecca of London makes the point that despite the delightful play among the rich array of eccentric characters, and despite the reassuring rituals of tribal life in Miguel Street, there comes a time when a sensitive, imaginative, and intellectual young man must break away from his tight little island, its colorful dialect and cultural limitations or else remain forever a child.

Once Naipaul does acquire a taste of the wide world he can never again return home. In his history of Trinidad entitled The Loss of El Dorado, Naipaul makes this point quite clear: “The Garden of Eden [Trinidad] was dispeopled, abandoned, repeopled, neglected. The place where I was born had been made by more than four centuries of misuse.” Not only has his pastoral world been despoiled by Europeans during previous centuries, but his own childhood sense of its innocence has been undermined by his later experiences in Europe.

In The Middle Passage (1962), Naipaul portrays Trinidad as a down-at-the-heels, cultureless, noisy, exploited, and imitative society. He characterizes his homeland as “unimportant, uncreative, cynical,” and as a place where power is recognized but dignity is allowed no one. “Every person of eminence was held to be crooked and contemptible. We lived in a society which denied itself heroes.” There are no scientists, engineers, explorers, soldiers, or poets, Naipaul observes. There is no community; rather, only a mixture of various races, religions, and cliques that haphazardly find themselves on the same island. “It was only our Britishness,” he explains, “our belonging to the British Empire, which gave us any identity.” The chief degrading fact, Naipaul argues, is that as a colonial society Trinidad never required efficiency or quality and because these things were not required they became undesirable.

In light of this critical attitude toward Trinidad it becomes easier to understand why Naipaul feels that there is something fraudulent about his early fiction since it does not assume the broad critical perspective he came to express in his later works. Still, one can understand Naipaul's rejection of his Garden of Eden without accepting his subsequent personal prejudice against the simple energy and design of a work like Miguel Street.

TALES FROM A FLAG ON THE ISLAND

Between 1950 and 1962 Naipaul wrote several short stories (most of which appeared in periodicals in England and America) that he later collected in the 1967 volume entitled A Flag on the Island. Given their early composition and their affinity in form and content with the sketches in Miguel Street and with his two subsequent novels set in Trinidad, I shall briefly discuss some of them here. The long title story, however, belongs to a later period and will be examined in chapter four.

Written from the first-person point of view, “The Mourners” (1950) is a slight piece that focuses upon the self-indulgent grief of a couple for their dead child, Ravi. The narrator, a boy named Romesh, visits his wealthy relatives and becomes an unwitting audience for their recollections of Ravi. Even though Romesh does not know the dead boy, when the boy's mother breaks down and cries he politely listens to her grieved account of her son. Occasionally she regains her composure and asks Romesh a perfunctory question about his forthcoming examinations at school. She proceeds to show Romesh a photograph album crammed full of pictures of Ravi and he turns the pages “with due lassitude.” Romesh becomes restless and is ready to leave when Ravi's father arrives home to regale him with more memories of the deceased. Naipaul depicts the father's superficial grief through his cliches: “It makes you think, doesn't it? Makes you think about life. Here today. Gone tomorrow.” The father does not have any real concern for Romesh, either. Abruptly shifting the topic from his son's death, he asks Romesh why he does not start giving lessons to children. “You could make money that way,” he says. When Romesh replies that he has to study for his examinations, the father simply ignores his answer and asks if he has seen the pictures they took of Ravi. Unwilling to hurt the man's feelings, Romesh says no and is faced again with the prodigious photograph album.

This sketch captures the rather familiar gulf that separates youth and age, the living and the dead, and suggests the self-indulgent and superficial nature of the mourners. The parents of the dead boy are so absorbed with their memories that Romesh becomes a mere sounding board for their sorrow. They have no real concern for him, no place for him in their grief. Similarly, Romesh has little reason to care about Ravi or the parents' loss. Uppermost in his mind are his examinations, his passport to the future. Although the mutual isolation of the characters in this story is simple and matter-of-fact, Naipaul later develops the theme of isolation and alienation on a much grander scale in such works as A House for Mr. Biswas and The Mimic Men.

“My Aunt Gold Teeth” is a more vibrant story, resembling the tales in Miguel Street and recalling the characters in The Mystic Masseur. The narrator's aunt is called Gold Teeth because after she married, this lyrical eccentric had all of her perfectly good teeth replaced by gold ones. Although she and her family are orthodox Hindus, she persists in shopping around among other religions that seem to accommodate her desires. A simple woman, Gold Teeth knows only the rituals and taboos of her Hindu family and sees the rituals as a means of obtaining her wishes. She feels she has been cursed to have no children and seeks to overcome this curse through any ritual or prayer available to her. And so, she begins secretly to visit a Catholic church in another country. Before long, she acquires a crucifix and holy pictures. “The prayers she offered to these Christian things filled her with new hope and buoyancy. She became an addict of Christianity,” the narrator observes.

When Gold Teeth's husband, Ramprasad, suddenly falls ill, she believes that her unorthodox religious behavior is to blame and not, as the doctor insists, diabetes. Although she uses the insulin that he prescribes, she also consults Ganesh Pundit, the faith healer. The same Ganesh from The Mystic Masseur, he tells her that seven spirits possess her husband and proceeds to go through a comforting ritual that promises to seal off the house from the tormenting spirits.

When Gold Teeth confides her secret practices to Ganesh, he cleverly assuages her anxiety. Naipaul gently satirizes the Trinidadian homegrown variety of Hinduism here when the narrator observes: “In his professional capacity Ganesh was consulted by people of many faiths, and with the license of the mystic he had exploited the commodiousness of Hinduism, and made room for all beliefs. In this way he had many clients, as he called them, many satisfied clients.”

When Ramprasad's condition continues to worsen, Gold Teeth, a typical Indian daughter, brings him to her mother's home. He begins to improve but Gold Teeth suddenly realizes that this house has not been spirit-sealed. Too embarrassed to ask Ganesh to protect the house again, she decides to pray to Jesus in the Catholic church. The rest of the family tolerate her burning incense at home before the pictures of Krishna and Shiva and Jesus and Mary.

One day the family enters her room and finds her prostrate on the floor, chanting prayers to Mary and Rama and crying out that seven snakes are after her. Ramprasad dies the next morning and the narrator's grandmother tells Gold Teeth that her husband would still be alive if she had “not gone running after these Christian things.” The narrator and his family “listened in astonishment and shame. We didn't know that a good Hindu, and a member of our family, could sink so low.” That evening Gold Teeth destroys every remnant of Christianity in the house. The story ends with a delightful irony that brings the plot full circle. Gold Teeth's mother says to her, “You have only yourself to blame if you have no children now to look after you.”

As he did with his eccentrics in The Mystic Masseur Naipaul quickly sketches his main character with a physical detail or two—her gold teeth and her fat body—and endows her with a ruling passion, in this case a blind faith in the powers of religious ritual. Although this is a light comic story that presents Gold Teeth as a lively and resourceful woman trying in her mad way to make the best of her limited world, it also reveals Naipaul's critical perception of orthodox Hinduism in the Third World. Later, in A House for Mr. Biswas, he develops his satire of Trinidadian Hinduism through his account of the Tulsi family. Despite their orthodox Hindu roots, the Tulsis keep pigs and send their children to Catholic schools. The breakdown of this orthodoxy provides a continuing source of sarcasm for Mr. Biswas to use against his wife's family.

“The Enemy” (1955) is an especially interesting story for it has ties both to Miguel Street and A House for Mr. Biswas. Both Hat and Mrs. Bhakcu put in brief appearances here, and the major portion of the story Naipaul later incorporates into the chapter entitled “Greenvale” in A House for Mr. Biswas.

The nameless narrator tells of his youthful conflict with his mother, who decides to leave her husband and take the boy with her to her mother's house. Lured by the prospect of having a whole box of crayons, the boy decides to stay with his father, a driver on a sugar estate in Cunupia. As in A House for Mr. Biswas, the father realizes that the laborers whom he oversees are prepared to kill him in retaliation for his authority over them. He and his boy move from the barracks into a small wooden house where they spend a night of terror. The potential for violence is evidenced in the death of their dog, Tarzan, who is found hacked to death on their doorstep. The dog bears the same name and fate in the novel. To while away the evening the father tutors his son in such subjects as religion and art, even as he does in the novel. Then a powerful storm comes up and the boy begins chanting prayers to Rama to secure their safety. Terrified both by the storm and the prospect of the laborers killing him, the father dies of fright.

Now subject to his mother's control, the narrator decides that she is his enemy, that if his father were alive she would be kinder to him. “She was someone from whom I was going to escape as soon as I grew big enough.” In the meantime, he becomes caught up in the progress that invades Port of Spain, where he is now living. The Americans and the British begin programs of social development, one of the signs being the disappearance of the latrines. “I hated the latrines,” the narrator says, “and I used to wonder about the sort of men who came with their lorries at night and carted away the filth; and there was always the horrible fear of falling into a pit.” Naipaul's revulsion at fecal waste later surfaces in A Wounded Civilization, where he dutifully describes the Indians defecating along the roadsides, and again in Guerrillas, where the Englishwoman, Jane, is sodomized, hacked to death, and buried in a latrine pit. “The Enemy” ends with the narrator breaking his hand as he and Hat attempt to knock down the walls of a latrine. He passes out from the pain and his mother, filled with anxiety, begins weeping over him. The boy concludes by wishing he were a Hindu god who could have all two hundred of his arms broken just so that he could see his mother's tears again.

The image of a frightened, creative, and sensitive father is obviously of great importance to Naipaul, reflecting, as it does, the character of his own father. This story captures a scene of powerful intimacy between father and son that Naipaul re-created nearly verbatim in A House for Mr. Biswas. By shifting the point of view from first person to omniscient narrator in the novel, however, Naipaul was able to present a more analytical and less subjective analysis of that relationship. Furthermore, Mr. Biswas does not die of fright, but recovers and is a changed man after his night of terror. In “The Enemy” the focus is clearly upon the boy; in the novel Naipaul is concerned with the development of his hero. The short story being an early work, Naipaul more readily allows himself to identify with the youthful narrator, who is both intrigued and confused by his father's dynamic and neurotic character. In A House for Mr. Biswas, however, Naipaul rather self consciously underdevelops the character of Mr. Biswas's son, Anand, in order to distance himself from the dominant figure of his hero, thereby avoiding an overtly autobiographical and subjective portrait.

“The Raffle,” “Greenie and Yellow,” and “Perfect Tenants,” all written in 1957, extend the range of Naipaul's scope. “The Raffle” is a trifling story about a Trinidad schoolboy who wins a problem goat. The next two stories, however, are both set in England, anticipating Naipaul's first novel set in that country, Mr. Stone and the Knights Companion. “Greenie and Yellow” tells the story of a lonely and childless Englishwoman, Mrs. Cooksey, who entertains herself by arranging love matches with her caged bird. Her interference, however, leads two birds to die and her original, lonely bird, to become sick and morose. “Perfect Tenants” depicts a slice of lower middle class suburban life and continues to feature Mrs. Cooksey, the landlady of a London tenement. The narrator records the rather mundane lives of some of the tenants and the growing concern of Mr. and Mrs. Cooksey that the Dakins are not the perfect tenants they appeared to be when they first moved in, being rather careless with the premises and threatening to disturb the Cookseys' cherished image of respectability. The Cookseys finally evict the Dakins, whose flat is taken over by a middle-aged woman with a dachshund named Nicky. The narrator ends his tale by noting that the new tenant's letters “were posted on from a ladies' club whose terrifying interiors I had often glimpsed from the top of a number sixteen bus.”

In all three of these stories Naipaul manages to make the ordinary somewhat interesting, a technique that he would come to master in his subsequent novels. Rejecting the melodramatic and the sentimental aspects of life, he focuses deliberately and rather remotely upon ordinary people in order to reveal their quiet battles, fears, and aspirations. The danger in such an approach, however, is that such stories can become tedious and their characters unmemorable. Naipaul makes more effective use of his ordinary characters in the later novels where he allows powerful feelings and overwhelming terror gradually to unfold from their mundane lives and to devastate them.

The remaining four tales, originally published in the early 1960s, are all set in Trinidad: “The Heart” (1960), “A Christmas Story” (1962), “The Night Watchman's Occurrence Book” (1962), and “The Baker's Story” (1962). Although none of these tales is exceptional in its own right, together they reveal Naipaul's developing concern with such subjects as sadism, failure, hypocrisy, and racism.

“The Heart” is the simple story of a ten-year-old boy named Hari. An only child, Hari is pampered by his wealthy parents because of his weak heart. He does not participate in school athletics, is fat and out of shape, and unpopular among the other boys, who delight in bullying him. To make matters worse, as he goes to and from school he must pass a house with a yard containing fierce Alsatians that try to attack him through the fence. His fears are later brought to a climax when several Alsatians pursue him while he is riding along on his bicycle. This trauma causes him to spend a month in a nursing home and to drop out of school for the term. On his birthday his parents attempt to cheer him up by buying him a puppy.

The remainder of the story focuses upon Hari's attempt to resolve his cowardice and frustrations by punishing the puppy whenever it disobeys him. The small animal becomes the scapegoat for all of the bullying and fear that Hari has undergone in previous years. At last he has power and control over his blighted little world and he asserts it with calculated precision. When his father accidentally runs over the dog and kills it, Hari's eyes fill with tears. His mother seeing the boy's reaction says to her husband, “Go after him. His heart. His heart.”

Robert Hamner concludes that “it is apparent that though the tears may stem from a species of love, the source is not altogether healthy or pure.”⁵ While it is true that Hari would on occasion withhold his affection from the dog in order to control its behavior, there is little in this story that suggests Naipaul's interest in any species of love whatsoever. Hari's tears come in consequence of his loss of a victim, a creature that he can manipulate with the same vicious disregard as the boys at school exhibit toward him. The story is about the ruthless and sadistic quest for power and it traces the need for that power to its psychological roots: fear, cowardice, and vengeance. The force that drives Hari to beat his puppy is the same that drives the hand that whips the children in “The Circus at Luxor” or compels Jimmy Ahmed to sodomize Jane in Guerrillas.

In “A Christmas Story” Naipaul turns his interest to the subject of a converted Hindu schoolmaster's dreadful sense of failure and paranoia. Having freed himself from the limitations placed upon him by his Hindu upbringing, the narrator feels that his lately acquired Presbyterianism opens the door for his success as a teacher in the Presbyterian schools. “Backwardness has always roused me to anger,” he declares. For the sake of progress, however, he has deliberately cut himself off from his family and their outmoded traditions. The narrator thus reflects one of the many faces of Naipaul's recurrent figure of the alien or outcast. Suffering, however, seems to lie in the path of Naipaul's heroes whether they stick to their cultural lasts or rebel against them.

Fifty years old, the narrator carefully selects for his bride a woman some fifteen years younger than himself, a person well connected within the educational system of the island. They have a child with the solid British name of Winston, and the major difficulty that the narrator must face is his imminent retirement. Restless and despondent in his retirement, he suddenly is enlivened by the news that he has been appointed school manager, a post that promises to crown his otherwise successful life. Although he enjoys his new position of power and financial responsibility, he gradually becomes aware that he is incapable of managing the details of his grand project of constructing a new school building. Error after error, he continues blundering his way into debt and fears that his “entire career could be forgotten in the crowning failure.”

Rather than face the possibility of being disgraced in the twilight years of his career as a capable Christian educator, the narrator plans to burn the new school down during Christmas. He even discloses his plan to his wife and child. Later, however, he has a change of heart and decides that he will not disgrace himself with an act of cowardice, that he will proclaim his failure to the whole world. His wife begs him to follow his initial plan and when he refuses, she leaves with Winston vowing never to see him again in hopes of disengaging themselves from his disgrace. Sitting alone, meditating on his fate, the narrator suddenly is visited by a boy who announces that the school is ablaze. “Even final expiation, final triumph, it seemed, was denied me,” he reflects. His wife and child return and the family is happily reconciled: “So it was Christmas after all for us.”

The fastidious, meticulous narrator, who breaks with his traditions and sets himself above his people, enjoys a paradoxical reward in this story. He maintains his dignity and carefully wrought reputation as an educator and administrator, but he knows he is a failure and has been denied the opportunity to be punished for his dishonest intentions. Instead of enjoying his retirement he finds his later years racked with paranoia, awaiting the Audit Department to prove him a fraud. The fact that the inspectors do not come after the fire means only that the world will not discover his family secret. The overriding sense of failure that dominates this story later resurfaces in such works as A House for Mr. Biswas and The Mimic Men. Naipaul's own insecurity as a young writer is reflected in his various personae as they struggle to find their place among shifting cultures.

“The Night Watchman's Occurrence Book” is notable chiefly for its unusual style. It is written as a diary of a night watchman who dutifully and naively records the comings and goings of various people at the hotel where he is employed. What he never understands is that the hotel is being used for prostitution and that the manager, to whom he is reporting, is involved in the proceedings. The night watchman's dialect adds to the humor of the piece. As he explains, “All I want is a little quiet night work and all I getting is abuse.”

“The Baker's Story” is also a comic tale but one that focuses upon the racism in Trinidad. The narrator, a Grenadian, “Black as the Ace of Spades, and ugly to match,” announces at the beginning of his story that he has become one of the richest men in Port of Spain. His account of his rise to wealth is a simple one. After spending years working for a Chinese baker, he decides to go into the business for himself. He quickly discovers that he cannot make a profit and cannot understand why. One day it suddenly dawns on him that “when black people in Trinidad go to a restaurant they don't like to see black people meddling with their food. And then I see that though Trinidad have every race and every colour, every race have to do special things.” With that realization, he hires a boy who is half-black and half-Chinese to deal with his customers while he remains in the kitchen baking the bread. He concludes his tale with this striking observation about island capitalism and racism: “As I say, I only going in the shops from the back. But every Monday morning I walking brave brave to Marine Square and going in the bank, from the front.”

All of these short stories, as well as the sketches in Miguel Street, exhibit Naipaul's ambiguous feelings about his native land. It is at times rich, colorful, comic, and innocent, and at other times it is stark, sad, oppressive, and degrading. Out of this swirl of Indians, blacks, Chinese, Hindus, and Moslems, out of the vertigo caused by poverty, ignorance, ambition, steel bands, and rumors of high culture in other lands, comes the developing world of a new writer who was to shape his fragmented creative insights into his first novel, The Mystic Masseur.

.....

A FLAG ON THE ISLAND

The title novelette in a collection of short stories, A Flag on the Island was written in 1965 but published in 1967. Most of Naipaul's critics do not have very much to say about this work, except to note its unusual style. As with Mr. Stone and the Knights Companion, Naipaul chooses a foreign narrator, in this instance, an American named Frank. He also employs a form of stream of consciousness in order to convey Frank's swirling thoughts as he revisits a Caribbean island where he was stationed years ago during World War II.

A passenger aboard a tourist liner, Frank and his fellow travelers are forced by hurricane Irene to dock at an unnamed West Indian island until the storm passes. Although Frank has given much thought to his former life on the island, he has deliberately steered away from ever returning to it, fearing that his memories of old friends and associates would be violated by a revisitation. One need only to recall Naipaul's own fear of returning to Trinidad in 1960 to find the source of his fictional hero here. Writing in The Middle Passage he says, “I never examined this fear of Trinidad. I had never wished to. In my novels I had only expressed this fear; and it is only now, at the moment of writing, that I am able to attempt to examine it.” What he says here is not entirely true, for A Flag on the Island certainly is an attempt to understand this fear. The fact that Naipaul has chosen an American for his narrator attests to his attempt to arrive at an outsider's point of view, an attempt, however impossible, to stand outside of himself and superimpose the past upon the present of a failing culture.

Frank begins his story with an expression of fear that the inviolate sense of the past may be contaminated by the sordidness of the present, a fear that the tale bears out: “It was an island around which I had been circling for some years. My duties often took me that way and I could have called there any time. But in my imagination the island had ceased to be accessible; and I wanted it to remain so.”⁶ Nevertheless, the unscheduled arrival of the tropical storm forces Frank to come to grips with a past purified by memory and imagination. Mr. Blackwhite, a local writer, used to say, “This place doesn't exist,” and Frank, recognizing the wisdom of that remark, observes that the island is actually a place each person constructs out of his own imagination. The union jack no longer flies here, having been replaced by the island's own flag, but Frank discerns no significant national character here: “The island was a floating suspended place to which you brought your own flag if you wanted to.”

All that Frank sees and hears declares the corruption of the past. His old stomping ground, Henry's place, has vanished, with the slick nightclub called the Coconut Grove now serving the locals and tourists; Priest, the tall bearded itinerant prophet, has become a popular television personality named Gary Priestland; and Selma, Frank's gentle and sensitive mistress, now lives with Priestland in the suburbs. Frank tours the island stunned by the caricatures of the past, and then, in the second section of his tale, he retreats to his comfortable and inviolable memories of the past.

After Frank returns to the section of town in which his old house used to stand, he begins to reflect on the annihilated past. His focus is upon Henry's place, a gathering spot for local characters, reminiscent of those depicted in Miguel Street, a group of simple people with no past who rely upon style and eccentricity to make their mark. “I don't belong here,” Henry says to Frank. “I am like you.” It is on the street outside of Henry's place that Frank first meets Priest: “He was a man in love with his own fluency. His accent was very English.” Naipaul has already observed in his early stories that a facility with the language wins the respect of and a certain amount of power over others. Followed by a small troupe of young girls singing hymns, Priest moves through the streets collecting money, a scene that foreshadows his later commercial success on television that brings a wider audience. But even at this point his preaching is related to financial matters, for he sells insurance when he is not frightening people about death.

Frank's meeting with the unattached and cool Selma leads to a discussion of Priest. Selma is impressed with Priest's manner of speaking: “I always like hearing a man use language well.” It is a sign that he is an educated man, a rarity among the people at Henry's place. Selma herself has been educated and over the years drifted from one relationship to another. “She feared marriage,” Frank concludes, “because marriage, for a girl of the people, was full of perils and quick degradation.” She and Frank settle into a relationship with the understanding that each one is free to do what he or she wants.

Through Frank's discussions with the writer, Blackwhite, Naipaul examines a fundamental concern in his own writing, namely, how to transform his mundane island life into fiction when the creative center of gravity for the novel lies in England. Frank tells Blackwhite that he is not black at all, that he is terribly white: “You are English. All those lords and ladies, Blackwhite. All that Jane Austen.” Frank urges him to abandon writing second-rate romantic novels and to write about the island, about Selma and Henry and the others. Blackwhite's response echoes Naipaul's own fear about his Trinidadian stories: “But you think they will want to read about these people? These people don't exist, you know. … This place, I tell you, is nowhere. It doesn't exist. People are just born here. They all want to go away.” If Churchill were born here, Blackwhite continues, he would have wound up importing sewing machines and exporting cocoa.

Living up to the other half of his name, Blackwhite gradually comes around to Frank's way of thinking and announces that what he needs is his own language and that he intends to write in patios: “Not English, not French, but something we have made up. This is our own. You were right. Damn those lords and ladies. Damn Jane Austen. This is ours, this is what we have to work with.” And thus the fluctuating Blackwhite puts out a notice on his house that reads “Patois taught here.” Beneath the comedy of these scenes again lies Naipaul's dilemma as a novelist. Faced with a poverty-stricken culture made up of local characters shaped by the political and economic winds of Europe and America on the one hand, and the rich and domineering tradition of the English novel on the other, how does the writer proceed? The move from the eccentric characters and patois of Miguel Street and The Suffrage of Elvira to the universal theme of the quest for identity and a sense of place in A House for Mr. Biswas to the English persona and his quiet struggle against his mortality in Mr. Stone and the Knights Companion represents Naipaul's own progressive struggle to work his way out of this dilemma.

Frank's pleasant memories of the island's local characters and his involvement with them are quickly displaced in a few pages as he chronicles the departure of the American troops and the arrival of the white tourist boats that begin the final destruction of the island's identity. “No place for us now. Change, change. It was fast and furious,” Frank reflects. In the third section of the story Frank confronts the degradations that time has wrought upon the island.

Blackwhite's decision to write about the blacks in their own language has ironically led to his corruption. Various foundations have sought him out to support his studies, having brought him to Cambridge and various lecture halls. Naipaul's satire here is rather heavy-handed, as he depicts three foundation representatives named Bippy, Chippy, and Tippy fawning on Blackwhite, eager to support his every foolish novel. When Blackwhite tells them that he is thinking of writing an experimental novel in which a black man falls in love with a black woman, the obsequious trio exclaim, “You'll have the liberals down your throat.” They, and the mindless public, want more novels like I Hate You, in which he excoriates the white world. Naipaul here channels his disgust with the formulaic and exploitative native fiction, sponsored by American and European foundations, into blunt satire. Money, success, and fame have degraded and undermined the ambiguous Blackwhite, the author without a center of creative consciousness, without roots, and without any cultural identity.

Henry's place has become the Coconut Grove, run by a board of governors, and Henry himself has been awarded the Order of the British Empire. When Frank asks Henry about Selma, Henry says,

Forget Selma. Sometimes you want the world to end. You can't go back and do things again. They begin just like that, they get good. The only thing is you never know they good until they finish. I wish the hurricane would come and blow away all this. I feel the world need this sort of thing every now and then. A clean break, a fresh start. (A Flag on the Island, p. 213).

Like Frank, Henry enjoys “moving backwards” instead of moving with the times. He is the spokesman of Naipaul's own view that one does not fully understand or appreciate a quiet, supportive, friendly landscape—a paradise of sorts—until it has vanished. True paradise, then, resides only in the memories of evanescent worlds. Naipaul develops and explores this observation in great detail in a much later work, The Enigma of Arrival. Here, however, the focus turns upon annihilation of the present as the final pages chronicle a danse macabre.

Frank visits Selma in her modern suburban home equipped with swimming pool and contemporary furnishings. Frank characterizes it as a “lovely, ghastly, sickening, terrible home.” He goes to bed with her but too much drink makes him impotent. In the background of this section of the story is Gary Priestland on the television announcing death and destruction from the hurricane. The city becomes convulsed with dancing: “The world was ending and the cries that greeted this end were cries of joy. We all began to dance.” In the danse macabre all of the figures from the past and present gather together in anticipation of the apocalyptic climax, but the hurricane does not arrive. The exhausted people readjust themselves to their ordinary fates, and Frank returns to his hotel to await the sailing of his ship back home.

Clearly not one of Naipaul's major works, A Flag on the Island nevertheless contains a perceptive analysis of the writer's anguish over his lost world. Naipaul's confrontation with his fear of returning to Trinidad has created an interesting piece of fiction that accommodates even though it does not dismiss that fear. The failure of the hurricane to destroy the corrupted island parallels the inadequacy of the author's infantile wish fulfillment that would obliterate his own degraded Trinidad. The anticlimax of the story leaves the harsh residue of reality to be dealt with in later fiction. The childhood innocence of Frank's first arrival is corrupted by his second arrival. Like the naive child, Frank has made the island sacred by filling it with wonder years ago, and now, having come out of the nightmare of the present, has, like the novelist, secured his unrecognized paradise in memories, in words.

Notes

1. John Thieme, “Calypso Allusions in Naipaul's Miguel Street,” Kunapipi 3, no. 2 (1981): 25.

2. Ibid., p. 27.

3. V. S. Naipaul, Miguel Street (New York: Vintage Books, 1984), p. 90.

4. Mukherjee and Boyers, “A Conversation with V. S. Naipaul,” Salmagundi 54 (Fall 1981): 7.

5. Robert D. Hammer, V. S. Naipaul (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1973), p. 32.

6. V. S. Naipaul, A Flag on the Island (London: Andre Deutsch, 1967), p. 149. Hereafter cited as FI.