One of my New Year’s Resolutions for 2020 is to explore death at an intellectual level by reading what greater and more articulate minds than mine have written on the subject. Thus, I recently read the first-person narrative, “Grief,” written by V.S. Naipaul, and published in The New Yorker on January 6.
To review this article, I will follow the six “Reader Response” questions that we use at my charter school in the Bronx.
- Describe in your own words what happened in the pages you just read. What are the main points?
In the article, “Grief,” Naipaul writes about his experience before and after several deaths that he lived through (in some cases vicariously). Some of the deaths are of family members, other deaths are animals. How much does he write about each one? Here’s a breakdown by word count:
- Father’s death: 1599 words
- Brother: 544 words
- Sister: 7 words
- Stray cat: 48 words
- Stray cat’s kitten: 399 words
- Pack of wild dogs who killed the stray cat’s kitten: 27 words
- An adopted cat named “Augustus”: 3754 words
It’s strange that the bulk of the article focuses on his adopted cat, Augustus, and that his sister’s death is breezed over in seven words.
It’s also strange that in an article titled “Grief,” he doesn’t delve into grief itself very much. He writes a lot about what happened leading up to many of these deaths. For example, towards the end of his life, his father, a journalist for the Trinidad Guardian, started writing humorous short stories about the various cultures coexisting in Trinidad. But Naipaul is sparing about the impact these deaths had on him after they occurred.
For example, here’s the entire paragraph describing his response to his father’s death. Naipaul was a student at Oxford at the time, and had to take a train to London where some distant relatives were going to tell him about his father’s passing:
“By the time I got to London, grief – amazingly unknown until then, though I was twenty-one – had taken me over.”
That’s all he says about it – not what it felt like, not what he thought about. He goes on to write about how he sublimated his grief by drawing and painting a brass vase that his father had sent him just before he died, and later by writing fiction:
“The vase stayed with me for years. I drew it often, and sometimes attempted—more difficult, this—to render it in watercolor. Because of this detached study, it became in the end only an object, without associations; the grief of which it once spoke so directly was rubbed away, like the grief itself, though that stayed with me so completely and for so long, waiting to be recalled, that I was able, some years later, during the writing of my first novel, a comedy, very light (but full of anxiety for me), to transfer much of the episode … to that quite different book, in a concealment and sublimation of grief.”
So it appears that Naipaul is taking for granted that we all know what grief is, what it feels like, and how long it lasts. And that the readers take for granted this process of sublimating it.
This raises the question, “How does Wikipedia, the font of all knowledge, explain grief?” Let’s find out!
Here are the opening paragraphs in Wikipedia’s entry for “grief”:
“Grief is a multifaceted response to loss, particularly to the loss of someone or something that has died, to which a bond or affection was formed. Although conventionally focused on the emotional response to loss, it also has physical, cognitive, behavioral, social, cultural, spiritual and philosophical dimensions. While the terms are often used interchangeably, bereavement refers to the state of loss, and grief is the reaction to that loss.
“Grief is a natural response to loss. It is the suffering one feels when something or someone the individual loves is taken away. Indeed, Kenneth J. Doka describes the connection between love and grief as follows: “grief is the price you pay for love”. The grief associated with death is familiar to most people, but individuals grieve in connection with a variety of losses throughout their lives, such as unemployment, ill health or the end of a relationship. Loss can be categorized as either physical or abstract,the physical loss being related to something that the individual can touch or measure, such as losing a spouse through death, while other types of loss are abstract, and relate to aspects of a person’s social interactions.”
While Wikipedia says grief “is the suffering one feels when something or someone the individual loves is taken away,” Naipaul doesn’t write much about suffering he or others felt after losing someone or something they loved.
What does he focus on? For one thing, the brass vase his father sent him – how long he had to wait for it, and how, when he saw it in the London house of the relatives who had invited him to visit so they could pass on the news of his father’s death, he hesitated before he said, “I think that brass vase was what my father meant for me to have.”
After his father’s death, Naipaul finishes his studies at Oxford and sets out to become a writer. Thirty years pass, and he feels that his grief over his father’s death is wholly sublimated, and then he learns of the death of his brother, Shiva. Once again, he takes a train to London. He was not surprised at his brother’s death; Shiva had been sickly and looking like he was about to die for over a year.
Naipaul writes:
“…I was not surprised by the news of his death. The pain built up on the railway journey to London….The first symptom of grief that day was an inability to eat. It was new to me. It made my grief concrete, and it lasted all week, disappearing only after the cremation….My sorrow lasted for two years. For two years I mentally dated everything, even the purchase of a book, by its distance from Shiva’s death.”
So at points like this, Naipaul is sticking to the topic stated in the article’s title, “Grief.”
But let’s talk about cats. Naipaul and his wife adopt a frightened kitten from an adoption center, and Naipaul takes care of it, naming the creature Augustus. Naipaul knew nothing about raising a cat, but he quickly learned a lot, and Augustus became a beloved member of the household:
“…soon I was able, with delight, to follow Augustus’s development. I loved to see him sleeping. I loved to see him stretch (pressing down on his legs, his body curved) when he got up. I loved to see him trotting in grass half as high as he was. He jumped beautifully, assessing the height of the barrier and the narrowness of the ledge that was to receive him. He was a terrific runner; he liked to pretend there was some pursuer behind him, and as he ran he often looked back at this phantom pursuer.”
But the next paragraph heads in a different direction:
“But with cats, so brief is their span, every sign of vigor comes with a foreshadowing of decay.” He mentions the folkloric concept that cats have nine lives, and for much of the remainder of his essay, he documents all the times Augustus might have died. Augustus eats a mole that may have been poisoned; the cat becomes severely sick. “Feeling death approaching, [Augustus] ran away from the house, in order to die in the dignity of solitude.” Naipaul finds him down by a river, where he surmises that Augustus intended to drown himself. Naipaul brings him back to the house, summons a vet, and all is well for the time being. Similar catastrophes occur as Augustus ages until finally his hindquarters are severely injured in an accident, and the vet predicts that Augustus has about six months left to live.
This begins Augustus’ final decline, and eventually, he stops eating. The vet comes and says that Augustus is surviving only because he’s living off his own tissue. Everyone agrees that the best option is to put the cat to sleep. Naipaul describes how he held the cat in his lap; how a household helper wrapped the cat in its favorite towel (“Whether she did this to comfort Augustus or to save my trousers I don’t know”); how the vet injected a drug to make the cat fall asleep, then injected another drug that ended the cat’s life.
Naipaul writes:
“Good manners now took over from whatever emotion we felt. I said to the vet, ‘You’ve looked after him all his life.’
“The vet said (I believe), ‘It was a pleasure.’
“He offered me his hand I shook it. It was only later that I thought that good manners had made us both use strange celebratory language at this bad moment over the fresh corpse of Augustus.”
The final paragraph in this essay says the following:
“Nearly sixty years ago my father died. In that dark time my younger sister Sati hit upon a comforting idea. Our father, with all his cantankerousness, was a humorist, and Sati’s idea was that during this time our father was considering the family grief and having a good laugh. Something like this occurred to me after the death of Augustus. We saw him everywhere, in the house, the garden, the hedge. My idea was that Augustus was considering everything in the house which no longer held him: he was considering everything and working out in his intelligent way how he should respond.”
2. What’s your reaction to the story/article?
In my summary above, I listed seven different instances of death that Naipaul writes about in his essay on grief. But there’s an eighth death, too: Naipaul’s own. He died in August 2018, more than a year before the New Yorker published this article. This adds a whole new layer to reading and responding to the essay. It’s as if Naipaul is viewing me, the reader of his essay, from his perch in the afterlife, noting what I underlined in my hard copy of the article, what I wrote in the margins, even how I read and reread it while lying down on my bed. Every time I finished rereading the essay, I typically placed the article and my reading glasses on the nightstand next to my bed and took a nap (where, presumably, I worked on my understanding of Naipaul’s words).
And there’s another layer of meaning for me: my husband and I have two house cats, sisters from the same litter, who are about 14 years old. They are showing their age now, and we’ve had about a half-dozen trips to the vet since last summer, as the cats battle their internal decline, with things going wrong with their thyroid, their digestive system, and more.
We’re very fond of our cats and treat them as members of our family. One of them, Toro, has a vast vocabulary, and she often joins my husband and me in conversation, even after we feed her. Her sister, Tako, is calm and quiet, although she craves being petted by us.
So all-in-all, reading Naipaul’s essay pulls on me in several ways.
3. What does the story/article make you think about from your own life?
Augustus, Naipaul’s cat, stops eating in the final days of its life. My father did the same. He had been living in an assisted care facility for many years after my mom died. Eventually, he was moved to the building’s basement, which was for people with dementia. After many months of this, he threw in the towel when he fell out of bed and hit his head. From that point on, he refused to eat or drink, and for the rest of the family, it was just a matter of waiting for him to pass away.
4. Copy a sentence from the story/article that you find especially interesting or unusual. Use quotation marks and write the page number:
This paragraph comes from page 19-20 of the print edition; it describes what Naipaul did the week following his brother’s death, while waiting for the cremation:
“That week of waiting for the cremation I spent reading the first of Shiva’s books. I did so in a state of exaltation. It is perhaps how all writers should be read, if we are to seize their essence and understand what the writing meant to them. There was, unexpectedly, a description of our father’s funeral, thirty-two years before; it was shot through with emotion, and taught me in some ways how to deal with Shiva’s own occasion.”
5. What makes this sentence interesting for you?
It makes me
think Naipaul wants us to read a writer’s work after the writer has recently
died, to get the full flavor of the writer’s personal essence.
6. What questions does the story/article raise in you? What questions are you left with?
What was going on at the New Yorker that made them publish this essay now, over a year after Naipaul’s death?
I read a lot of Naipaul’s novels when I was younger. I especially read his most famous book, In a Free State, many times. If I were to go back and reread it (it’s right here on my bookshelf), in what state of mind would I interpret the words, the story, the characters, the author’s point of view?
