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  Throughout his young adulthood, Faulkner seems less a harbinger of modernism than a figure out of Booth Tarkington. His humor and style remain a boy’s. In the letters addressed to her, Mrs. M. C. Falkner (the “u” would be her son’s later affectation) is sometimes “Mother,” sometimes “Moms,” and sometimes “Momsey.” Billy sends candy home to his little brother, Dean, and wants to be remembered to his “Mammy,” Caroline Barr. During his first stint in New Haven, he delightedly conveys to his mother the humor of Ray Noon, the Irish housemate who has “just wandered in and said—‘Give her my love, Bill’—taking it that I was writing to a flapper. I told him it was you, and he said—‘Then be sure and send my message, and tell her we have only had to get you out of jail twice.’” Mrs. Falkner sends cakes to her son for years, and he guards them when his pals crowd in like “vultures.” Billy insists that being “naturally rather unapproachable” helps to fend the others off, but he’s tenderhearted enough to buy a “pink ice-cream soda” for a newsboy who reminds him of Dean, whom he misses so much “I almost dream about him every night.”

  When Faulkner returns to New Haven a few years after the war, a racial and regional smugness have settled over him. He blows hard to his mother, refusing to believe that Northern “niggers are as happy and contented as ours are, all this freedom does is to make them miserable because they are not white.” It will serve him right, a month later in New York, when he has to write that “the other dishwashers, Greeks and one Irish, thought I was a wop, and looked down on me.” His first subway ride proves repellent: “The experience showed me that we are not descended from monkeys, as some say, but from lice.” Struggling to break into magazines, he finds that he’s got competition throughout Greenwich Village: “all Oshkosh is here with portfolios of strange verse and stranger pictures under one arm.” He lands a job at Lord & Taylor, but the department store’s management proves so unfriendly he has to tell his mother not to “send any more mail to the store.”

  The young Faulkner is an appealingly self-conscious letter-writer, curious about epistolary form, the way it both mirrors and distorts human action. He can be “having such a hurried life that all [his] letters sound disjointed,” but on the other hand, mail from home takes so long to reach him that “things happen and then un-happen by the time I hear of them.” Faulkner will complain of being unable to remember what he intended to write once he finally gets the chance to pick up a pen, though a few weeks earlier he’d scolded himself for allowing a moderately long letter written at different sittings to turn into something more like a diary. After realizing that his awful penmanship is causing some of his letters to get lost in the mail, he vows to start putting a return address on the envelope. Mixing sweetness and strut during his RAF days, he tells his mother that every time one of his letters does make it through, “I feel a certain pleasurable glow of exultation, as though I had downed a Hun machine.”

  By 1925, during a productive half-year in New Orleans that will have him metamorphosing from poet to novelist, Faulkner keenly begins to feel himself a writer. (Indeed, he sometimes Writes as determinedly as Elinore Stewart: “Sky all full of fat white clouds like little girls dressed up and going to a party.”) Along with verse and fiction, he’s turning out newspaper sketches that are almost literally potboilers: “They want some short things,” he explains to his mother, “about 200 words with a kick at the end. I can knock off one of them while I’m waiting for my teakettle to boil.” The longer ones, he believes, are fit for a scrapbook, and his work is provoking fan letters from “strange females” who’ve seen the author’s picture in The Times-Picayune. A new bumptiousness infuses his correspondence; he pronounces his novel-in-progress “very good” and boasts of having put down “7000 words in one day this week.” By the summer of ‘25 he can tell his mother that writing letters has become a busman’s holiday.

  Actually, it was the three years between his days in New York and his time in New Orleans that really dimmed the luster of letter writing. Back home during that period, Faulkner supported himself as the University of Mississippi’s postmaster, playing cards and writing on the job and sometimes throwing away letters before they could be delivered. “I reckon I’ll be at the beck and call of folks with money all my life,” he declared after being fired, “but thank God I won’t ever again have to be at the beck and call of every son of a bitch who’s got two cents to buy a stamp.”

  THE MODERN TRAVELER’S iPhone will begin pulling e-mail down from the sky the moment his plane has landed in Ulan Bator, whereas little more than half a century ago, while studying and traveling abroad, the young V.S. Naipaul could write to his family back in Trinidad and say, almost believably: “I have been in Paris for a week and have only just come across a post office.” Before Xerox and the SEND ALL button, dispatching the same news to multiple recipients also required considerable labor from a novelist on the make; as Naipaul explains to Kamla, his sister studying in India: “Writing two copies of a letter is pretty tiring. To write home and then to write to you about the same thing is a heavy task.”

  Like the letters Faulkner sent home from New Orleans, the ones Naipaul mails from Oxford show him quickly gaining traction as a writer and fast coming into a sense of his own superiority, though he seems to have been inclined to that almost from birth. As the family prince, its great hope for distinction, “Vido” reports on his social navigation through the university—his attendance at bottle parties, his need for dance lessons—as well as his decidedly unimpressed view of the competition: “There are asses in droves here,” he writes just months after arriving. He has every reason to believe that he “can beat them at their own language.”

  The hauteur of this fellow, still a teenager, who likes being called “sir” and believes Jane Austen’s books to be “mere gossip,” makes him scorn fellow passengers on a train as well as the offspring of an uncle who resides in England (“The children nauseate me”). He finds it difficult to be polite, and can’t even beg his family’s pardon for the bad typing in one of his letters without adding: “I have no time nor the desire to correct.” As his sister’s birthday approaches, he tells her: “I shan’t send a card, but I offer my best wishes.”

  All the salient personal features of the Nobel Prize winner are on display fifty years before he takes the stage in Stockholm. Misogyny is everywhere in the letters. Patricia Ann Hale, the wife he will make miserable for decades, occasions a premarital assessment, written for his family, that seems in spots more like literary criticism than love: “She is a member of the university, not unintelligent, nor altogether unattractive … About her character: she is good, and simple. Perhaps a bit too idealistic, and this I find on occasion rather irritating.” The Naipaul who will come to dismiss entire civilizations that have offended his intelligence or nose, is up and running even before he leaves Trinidad. On November 24, 1949, he writes to Kamla, already in India: “My thesis is that the world is dying—Asia today is only a primitive manifestation of a long-dead culture; Europe is battered into a primitivism by material circumstances; America is an abortion.”

  But between the broadest brushstrokes one sees a corresponding love of precision and cool: “This is my last day in Paris. I have not been having a wonderful time, as all good postcard-writers say. I have been having a quiet, agreeable stay.” The young man who “hate[s] writing badly, at any time” speaks of “the process of my emergence” and reports from Oxford that “when I do write an essay it turns out to be a really excellent one. This is not boasting; for my tutor is truly impressed.” Any doubts he may have about a paper he’s to deliver to his college’s literary society are dispelled as soon as it’s been given: “This morning someone told me that my paper was by far the brightest he had ever heard at the society. So it appears that I still retain some of the old fire.” He is nineteen years old.

  But the rejection of his novel seems to unleash the full force of suppressed loneliness, and early in 1952, Naipaul suffers what even he is not too proud to call
a nervous breakdown. He pleads with the family back in Trinidad (“My love to all, and don’t forget me”), though it is only to Kamla that he can make himself truly vulnerable. She urges him not to hold back: “Tell me everything and, believe me, I’ll understand.” Even before the breakdown, Naipaul had beseeched her: “Please keep me alive with letters.” Their epistolary relationship can be stormy, scolding, interrupted by the sort of regrets that can cost extra postage. As Naipaul explains to those back home: “Just last night I tore up a letter that I had written to Kamla—on an air-letter form too. I get into certain moods and write things which, when read the following morning, read badly and are usually disgustingly maudlin.”

  In a collection of the Naipaul family’s correspondence, a reader sees Kamla, during the years of her own university exile, becoming not so much older and wiser as a little harder and sadder. She at one point advances to her brother the theory that it’s “best to marry the person who is mad after you—almost worships you—than marry one you love.” It is difficult for her and Naipaul to have any relationship that exists outside the vexed and loving context of the family that remains far away on a third continent entirely. Letters from one Naipaul to another often involve a kind of emotional triangulation, at once delicate and manipulative. During one bad misunderstanding, Vido receives this request from his father: “Please explain to [Kamla] and say we love her and want her home for her own sake and not for any money she may have to give to us.”

  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.

  CHAPTER TWO Friendship

  Sir, more than kisses, letters mingle souls;

  For, thus friends absent speak.

  John Donne, verse letter to

  Sir Henry Wotton

  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:

  as that most vehement desire after you which I feel makes me always fancy you with me, and speak to you and behold you as if you were present, and so (as generally happens in love)
soothe my grief by a certain vain imagination of your presence, it is in truth my fear that, as soon as I should meditate a letter to be sent you, it should suddenly come into my mind by what an interval of earth you are distant from me, and so the grief of your absence, already nearly lulled, should grow fresh, and break up my sweet dream.

  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.”