The Funeral Scores A final farewell with a fanfare of Nobel Naipaulian-flavoured fictive irony

The Funeral Scores, musical and otherwise of Sir Vidia S. Naipaul. A final farewell with a fanfare of Naipaulian-flavoured fictive irony

‘No other papers
carried the news.’

Poetic Prophesy

It is almost like poetic prophesy, that this line, written about the funeral of his classic small island anti-hero, Mr Biswas, of the classic A House for Mr Biswas published in 1961, could also read as ironic truth of Sir Vidia Naipaul’s own funeral.

The funeral of the 2001 Nobel Laureate, Sir Vidia S. Naipaul (Aug 17 1932 to August 11 2018) took place on Wednesday August 22, 2018, in a largely unnoted ceremony, noted by this blog, Demokrissy in understanding of the value of chronicling as the world he left torn asunder more on the demerits of the man than on the merits of his writings.

‘No other papers,’ it seems, ‘carried the news’ of his funeral, except one far-off Indian newspaper which tells of a reportedly private invitation-only ceremony in London, although there have been a continuous outpouring of tributes and assessments of his life and works since the announcement of his death on August 11, 2018, six days short of his 86^th birthday.

Mimic Men News

In these parts, media houses wait with accustomed unbated breath to receive news from the once-Empire to feed it into news feeds.

Long set to rest have been the ‘amazing scenes’ of national reporting meant to excite the imagination that hallmarked the journalistic tradition captured by his father Seepersad Naipaul (1906 to 1953) chronicles of Gurudeva, that echo through scenes of Sir Vidia’s biographical epic, A House of Mr Biswas, in ways that are yet to be fully articulated.

It found interpretation in Sir Vidia’s own grandiose brand of journalism-hardly-disguised-as-fiction that I have set in the contexts of its century-plus years of gestation from the soils of his birth in Finding a Place and which matured in his literary canon of 33 books.

Antidote to Magic Realism

A cross section of writing about Sir Vidia S Naipaul on the world of the writer

That style became the antidote to other literary legacies including what is known in literary circles as magic realism, a genre developed by his near-contemporaries as Gabriel Garcia Marquez (March 1927 – 17 April 2014) and Salman Rushdie (June 19, 1947-).  Rushdie, incidentally, who has been centerstage of one of the media-driven literary-feuds, tweeted on news of Naipaul’s death, ‘We disagreed all our lives about politics, about literature, and I feel as sad as if I just lost a beloved older brother. RIP Vidia #VS Naipaul.’ Needless to say, his brief tribute was received with a battery of insults.

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The description of Sir Vidia’s funeral, to which his immediate family in Trinidad and Tobago is said to have not been privy, indeed conjures up an ‘amazing scene’. Oh how I would have loved to read of it from the pen of Sir Vidia himself, or his journalist father: of a handful of some
100 from the US and UK identified as friends, literary associates including his
agent Andrew Wylie and ‘a few close relatives including Lady Nadira,’ wife of Sir Vidia.  

Instead, the report of what unfolded is laid out by a reporter that could almost be molded on the erstwhile ‘NightWatchman’ of what remains to me one of Naipaul’s most humorous pieces of dry comic satire, except that, unlike that ‘Nightwatchman,’ the reporter fills in sparseness of detail with some commentary jabs that have the effect of skimming stones on water.

Naipaulian comic irony

From the snipet, the gathering and events in the idyllc garden crematorium at London’s Kensal
Green, reeks of Naipaulian comic irony. Naipaul, if he instructed this final farewell, couldn’t have set a better stage for his send off.

The Indian-born reporter singles out among the guests, Alexander Waugh, grandson of author Evelyn Waugh, and Sonny Mehta, publishing mogul and editor-in-chief of the Random House imprint Alfred A Knopf for more than quarter a century. With the select guests, they reportedly listened to few lines from the Bhagavat Gita, part of the epic Mahabharata snuck in by his friend of some twenty years, Geordie Greig, who is soon to take over the editorship of the Daily Mail, reputedly Britain’s second largest tabloid.

While there was no indication what those lines from the Gita might have been, I would hazard a guess that it is likely be classic instruction of Krishna to Arjuna on the nature of the soul, immutable, unchanging and indestructible while we change bodies as we change worn out clothes (Gita,
Chap 2).

Planted Picong

Greig had also been at Sir Vidia’s deathbed at his home, reporting, “He drifted off and it was peaceful and very, very sad but what a life, what an achievement, what a legacy…” He sent him off with a reading of a poem, Crossing the Bar, “which had great resonance and meaning to him and I just turned on my phone and found it and we read it.” It seems too apt choice to be a random selection and was perhaps requested by Naipaul himself, I discerned, in the same way he must have planted the notion of picong in Patrick French’s biography as a clue to deciphering the misunderstanding that has shrouded reception of his work. Crossing the Bar by Britain’s poet laureate of the Victorian age, Alfred Lord Tennyson, is an elegy on the soul’s return to its beginnings,

When that which drew from out the boundless deep

Turns again home.

Sunset and evening star

And one clear call for me!

And may there be no moaning of the bar

When I put out to sea

Alfred Lord Tennyson, Crossing the Bar

But such a tide as moving seems asleep,

Too full for sound and foam,

When that which drew from out the boundless deep

Turns again home.

Twilight and evening bell,

And after that the dark!

And may there be no sadness of farewell,

When I embark;

For tho’ from out our bourne of Time and Place

The flood may bear me far,

I hope to see my Pilot face to face

When I have crost the bar.

Alfred Lord Tennyson, Crossing
the Bar

Rustic Serenity

In the rustic serenity of the Kendal Green Cemetery, the mourners were also treated to a reading from Naipaul’s 1987 book, The Enigma of Arrival. As the exact passage was not identified, I searched
my memory of the book, thinking of the final chapter, The Ceremony of Farewell, where he identified, “it was only out of this new awareness of death that I began at last to write. Death was a motif…” If
it was, how ironic that would be, given the absence of his sisters at his funeral, as that chapter also details the traditional Hindu funeral with all its ritualistic oddities, described through his experience of his return to Trinidad for the funeral of his youngest sister who had died of a brain haemorrage!

Perhaps, the reading was from the Enigma’s first chapter, Jack’s Garden with its pathos in his
speculation of death with its echoes of the philosophy of the lines from the Bhagavad
Gita: of inevitability: ‘people die, people grow old, people change houses;’ and of immortality, discerned in walking through Stonehenge that fed, ‘my sense of antiquity, my feeling for the age of the earth, and the oldness of man’s possession of it,’ or of his reflection on his own life: That idea of ruin, of dereliction, of out-of-placeness, was something I felt about myself, attached to myself,: a man from another hemisphere, another background, coming to rest in middle life in the cottage of a half neglected estate….

Those lines remind me of his antithesis to that haunting philosophy articulated in A Bend In the River (1979). It gave Patrick French the title of his 2008 authorised biography of Naipaul, ‘the world is what it is, men who are nothing, who allow themselves to become nothing, have no place in it.’ It was his early realization, penned in the passionate – yes passion is an adjective that can be attributed to Naipaul – pronouncement on the life of his father in A House for Mr Biswas,

How terrible it would have been…to die…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.

Sir Vidia S Naipaul, A House For Mr Biswas

Choocking Fire

To me, reflected in this funeral to the end, the ultimate Naipaulian irony has been in how Naipaul created and sustained his own myth of himself. Knowing the world for what it is, he baited it, gleefully ruffled
feathers, choocking fire, as would have been the expression in his birth community, the family, the community, the society and the country that gave his imagination flight. He laid out his truths, personal truths that became universal truths, knowing the world would instead largely go after the coochoor.

Seeking artistic truth as he was, by resurrecting his own demons, tapping into his self-hatred so succinctly
that language and metaphor and literary masking were as potent as the characters he created; that others saw themselves mirrored therein, and many, unable to bear its starkness, could only reflect the self-hate. Nobel Laureate, Derek Walcott, poet and dramatist, often presented, like Rushdie, as justification for hating Naipaul, mused that Naipaul is “our finest writer of the English sentence.” See Link Nobel Tears for and Of a Nobel Bard

Finding A Place

The processes, the tradition, the society, the global events and movements that set the stage for all of this is, whether we want to accept that with pride or heap on scorn, are embedded in my home soil, the truth that I had set out to unearth and is among the myths I believe I was able to somewhat explode in some of the published in Finding a Place which stimulated his interest, voiced as containing ‘things about my father that I did not know.’

But Finding a Place and the skeletons it resurrects as I hope the illustrated graphic edition will make clearer, was not, and never, solely about VS Naipaul, although it has been one of the elements that other critics have isolated to help them in their process of understanding, if not unravelling the enigma of
Naipaul. It is about conscience creation, of society-formation, the minute in the contexts of larger world; the piecing together of disparate elements, of social, cultural, economic, political fragments that shaped themselves into processes
that made little villages and towns and a society and culture and beliefs and
practices and women, and men like Naipaul. It defined the place to which he would
return again and again and again to fed his creative genius, and that, whether
he was writing about India or Africa or the Islamic Front or the American
South. So what was seen as an omission in his Nobel remarks, was no less than a deliberate act of chooking fire. But we have always been a society and a people
who celebrate the inebriety that rhetoric masking and illusion affords, weaving
it into our lifestyles that to attempt to tear it off would be like pulling off
bits of our flesh, and sense of being.

Even the attempts to hold up the antithesis of that, the
celebration of self, as LiTTscapes does, without glossing
over but placing in context the nihilism, the violence and criminality that are
entrenched in the raison d etre of the place, meets with the same blinders.

Despite the outward rhetoric, as noted above, there was no
sparing the ritualism of death as a final rite at the funeral of this so-called
agnostic (another myth I have explored and exploded), as he is set to sea on
the British greens. Apart from the disguised ritual of last rites, there was no
small measure of sentimentality, too, and I am tempted to speculate that that
too was by choice. Though Sir Vidia has so often been painted as impatient of
the sentimental, but which my account of our encounter, and from some of the testimonies
of other encounters I have read by others in tribute on his death, suggest
otherwise.

The funeral service reportedly heard two pieces of music: The quintessential
sentimental last wish made popular by Doris Day, Dream A Little
Dream of Me sounds incongruous and like a jarring note of the portrait that
has emerged of Naipaul’s way in the world, or is it? The reporter now folded
into the comic irony of the event conveys becomes part of the heightened
Naipaulian ironic humour, quoting the concluding whimsical notes of the song, Sweet dreams till sunbeams find you/Sweet dreams that leave all worries far behind you/But in your dreams whatever they be/Dream a little dream of me.

To unravel that enigma one may need to gobeyond the lyric.

The other musical rendition was The Lark Ascending by Ralph Vaughan Williams. Ilink a rendition by the London Philharmonic here (The musical score
by Williams is still not public-domain material in some jurisdictions.) This is
a musical interpretation of the George Meredith 1881 paean/lyrical poem. It is
easy to see why this choice, as much of what is said of the sound of the skylark
which the poem engages, He drops the silver chain of sound/Of many links without a break, could be said of
Naipaul’s art, technique and aspirations and achievements as a writer as well: Where ripple ripple overcurls/And eddy into
eddy whirls;/A press of hurried notes that run/So fleet they scarce are more
than one: (See image this page, the scores on Naipaul ) THE LARK ASCENDINGBy George MeredithHe rises
and begins to round, He drops
the silver chain of sound Of many
links without a break, In
chirrup, whistle, slur and shake, All
intervolved and spreading wide, Like
water-dimples down a tide Where
ripple ripple overcurls And eddy
into eddy whirls; A press
of hurried notes that run So fleet
they scarce are more than one, Yet
changeingly the trills repeat And
linger ringing while they fleet, Sweet to
the quick o’ the ear, and dearTo her
beyond the handmaid ear, Who sits
beside our inner springs, Too often
dry for this he brings, Which
seems the very jet of earth At sight
of sun, her music’s mirth, As up he
wings the spiral stair, A song of
light, and pierces air With
fountain ardour, fountain play, To reach
the shining tops of day, And drink
in everything discerned An
ecstasy to music turned, Impelled
by what his happy bill Disperses;
drinking, showering still, Unthinking
save that he may give His voice
the outlet, there to live Renewed
in endless notes of glee, So
thirsty of his voice is he, For all
to hear and all to know That he
is joy, awake, aglow,The
tumult of the heart to hear Through
pureness filtered crystal-clear, And know
the pleasure sprinkled bright By simple
singing of delight, Shrill,
irreflective, unrestrained, Rapt,
ringing, on the jet sustained Without a
break, without a fall, Sweet-silvery,
sheer lyrical, Perennial,
quavering up the chord Like
myriad dews of sunny sward That
trembling into fulness shine, And
sparkle dropping argentine; Such
wooing as the ear receives From
zephyr caught in choric leaves Of aspens
when their chattering net Is
flushed to white with shivers wet; And such
the water-spirit’s chime On
mountain heights in morning’s prime, Too
freshly sweet to seem excess,Too
animate to need a stress; But wider
over many heads The
starry voice ascending spreads, Awakening,
as it waxes thin, The best
in us to him akin; And every
face to watch him raised, Puts on
the light of children praised, So rich
our human pleasure ripes When
sweetness on sincereness pipes, Though
nought be promised from the seas, But only
a soft-ruffling breeze Sweep
glittering on a still content, Serenity
in ravishment.

For
singing till his heaven fills,‘Tis love
of earth that he instils, And ever
winging up and up, Our
valley is his golden cup, And he
the wine which overflowsTo lift
us with him as he goes: The woods
and brooks, the sheep and kine He is,
the hills, the human line, The
meadows green, the fallows brown, The
dreams of labour in the town; He sings
the sap, the quickened veins, The
wedding song of sun and rains He is,
the dance of children, thanks Of
sowers, shout of primrose-banks, And eye
of violets while they breathe; All these
the circling song will wreathe, And you
shall hear the herb and tree, The
better heart of men shall see, Shall
feel celestially, as long As you
crave nothing save the song.

Was never
voice of ours could say [youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wZWK7A-Abd0&w=320&h=266]Our
inmost in the sweetest way, Like
yonder voice aloft, and linkAll
hearers in the song they drink: Our
wisdom speaks from failing blood, Our
passion is too full in flood, We want
the key of his wild note Of
truthful in a tuneful throat, The song
seraphically free Of taint
of personality, So pure
that it salutes the suns The voice
of one for millions, In whom
the millions rejoice For
giving their one spirit voice. Yet men
have we, whom we revere, Now
names, and men still housing here, Whose
lives, by many a battle-dint Defaced,
and grinding wheels on flint, Yield
substance, though they sing not, sweet For song
our highest heaven to greet: Whom
heavenly singing gives us new,Enspheres
them brilliant in our blue, From
firmest base to farthest leap, Because
their love of Earth is deep, And they
are warriors in accord With life
to serve and pass reward, So
touching purest and so heard In the
brain’s reflex of yon bird: Wherefore
their soul in me, or mine, Through
self-forgetfulness divine, In them,
that song aloft maintains, To fill
the sky and thrill the plains With
showerings drawn from human stores, As he to
silence nearer soars, Extends
the world at wings and dome, More
spacious making more our home, Till lost
on his aerial rings In light,
and then the fancy sings.

If he was returned to the place where his
umbilical cord was buried – as would have been perhaps the wishes of his blood
family here, who complained of being in the dark about his funeral arrangements
– a traditional funeral in his home island would have been something of what he
described of the last rites of his sister contained in The Enigma of Arrival.
The alternative, more traditional version of that that is the described funeral
of Mr Biswas’ ill-fated father, Raghu, whose death by drowning was owed to
actions of his cursed son, ‘six-fingered, and born in the wrong way,’ and
destined to ‘eat up his own mother and father,’  testimony to the cruel pronouncements of fate
which are assigned to being born in inauspicious circumstances. To a grieving
family reflecting on a brother that time and circumstance might have estranged,
the similarities may not be immediately evident. Had he died in and or was to be sent off in his birth island, Sir Vidia might
have been dressed in his ‘finest dhoti, jacket and turban’ even – his
description of Raghu’s attire. As I have argued, Naipaul’s absorption of his
ritualistic upbringing, is reflected and nuanced subtly in the texture of his
work, disguised and masked by the rhetoric, when the rhetoric itself is
embedded in the ritualism and traditions, but that has been given less than superficial
attention and largely, it seems, only when it could feed the fury and the
furore about his histrionic rejections. Much of that became clear when I considered his work in the
contexts of the literary and oral traditions and the socio-cultural and
political milieu from which he emerged when even those were still only in
embryonic form in the island of his birth. The umbilical link, ritualistically
distended in his attempts to distance himself from connections, from
sentimentality, were never altogether severed, and are in fact, I believe, smack
core and centre to the man and his writings. That he has so often duped many into accepting otherwise was
only part of his very successful mythmaking, using truth to turn it on itself,
and so too remodel himself in the image of the mythical self to which he
aspired. That he himself understood that in all its irony, I believe, prompted
his acknowledgement of the value of Finding A Place to himself, as it
unearthed and exposed some truths, one of which he identified as in its ‘
discovering much more about (my) father than I knew.’ But that in itself is
only a part truth. While that is the value he identified in it, it is a value
that is true of the entire society on which that study focused. It might have
been about the traditional base of his father but only because it was about the
ancestral people as Finding A Place was not a book about him, Naipaul, nor about
his father, Seepersad, but about the social, political and cultural processes
that shape the writer, the journalist, the thinkers of our place and time. In his movements forward, the pull of India, Africa, the
American South, the Islamic journeys, every turn to the North, South, East and
West, and every way in the world, were all the pull and tug of the umbilical cord
buried in the village upbringing in a small island for which there is ample
evidence. That the world has bought hook, line and sinker, the myth of
the man, created by himself, is the final irony, the mock chuckle, the picong
pelted up from his grave, the last laugh of a world that didn’t quite get that
the joke’s on us. Now past the sound and the fury that he has stirred in
whirling whillying winds in more than two thirds of a century of poking public
conscience, the closed
funeral, in some respects may seem a disservice to the man who had been trying to
flee the ignominy of his birth, and for the most part succeeded. Like the lark,
Our wisdom speaks from failing blood,,/Our
passion is too full in flood,/We want the key of his wild note/Of truthful in a
tuneful throat,/The song seraphically free/Of taint of personality, Having claimed his portion of the earth, now cros’t the bar and Put out to sea, drawn from out the boundless deep, Sir Vidia S. Naipaul Turns again home.   PostNote: These scores from Sir Vidia S. Naipaul’s funeral would
unfold through various forms as we explore the global connections in this
declared Year of LiTTributes to the LaureaTTes. Join, collaborate, partner, subscribe
and stay tuned. Next, an extract from my upcoming autobiography, Life! HoleHeartedly!“I first
met VS Naipaul when I was just about four years old, though I didn’t know I
had. My sister brought him home to me, though she didn’t know she did…” 

Dr Kris Rampersad is a researcher, wrter and promoter of interculturality, literacy, and literary, author and other creative endeavours. See moreAsk about how you can partner and collaborate in our Year of LiTTributes tot he Laureate or other stimulating creative endeavour and about LiTtours, LiTTeas, LiTTevents, LiTTributes and LiTTscapes.

About Dr Kris Rampersad

 

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