Portrait of the artist as a young pharmacist: Naipaul's early stories

V.S. Naipaul's early stories (from the 1950s), collected in the Everyman edition, Collected Short Fiction - from Miguel Street and the first from from A Flag on an Island, don't really give a lot of evidence of the great talent to arise: these stories are clearly, as Naipual, notes in one, "sketches," almost like exercises in which he describes either a character or a brief incident, based on his neighbors in the Miguel Street neighborhood of Port of Spain - most of them older men as seen by the narrator and other young boys of the neighborhood. The narrator gradually grows older, from a young boy in the earliest stories to a teenager about to leave Trinidad to study "drugs" (i.e., pharmacy) in England - but these stories are not at all about the narrator, much less about Naipaul: though the narrator bears his name (in one story, I think) there is no sense that this is a portrait of an artist - and in fact Naipaul's decision to have the narrator leave to study pharmacy is a deliberate attempt to remove him from an authorial stand-in. Also, the narrator's father is absent in these stories - almost as if Naipaul were holding him in reserve for the great novel to come: A House for Mr. Biswas (in the first story in the collection, the narrator paints a sign - a hint of Mr. Biswas's profession, but the period setting the 1940s, would make it clear that the narrator is not Naipaul's father in any real way). The first story in Flag is similar in scope - but interestingly it's based not on a neighbor but on the narrator's aunt (Gold Tooth) - written in the 1950s but held back for some reason from Miguel Street - Naipaul was just gradually trying to write about his family and even himself. Also, the Gold Tooth story - in which the aunt begins praying in a Catholic church, even though she's a devout Hindi - is the first glimpse of another great Naipaul theme, the clash and intersection of different cultures, faiths, and continents. Through these early stories, we see hints and demonstrations of the Naipaul wit and precision, but only a glimpse of the three masterpieces that would made him one of our greatest living writers: Biswas, A Bend in the River, and the Enigma of Arrival - each much more complex and sophisticated that these humorous, provincial sketches - but these are the soil out of which those great works grew and flourished.