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The World Is What It Is: The Authorized Biography of V.S. Naipaul;The Authorized Biography of V. S. Naipaul
Since the acclaim accorded his early novels The Mystic Masseur and A House for Mr Biswas, Trinidad's VS Naipaul has been one of the giants of world literature, winning the Nobel Prize in 2001. Drawing on exclusive access to the writer's private papers and personal recollections, and infused with knowledge of Naipaul's vast body of work, this major biography offers a lucid and frank portrait of this elusive, outspoken and at times curmudgeonly genius. Off-mint.
576 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2008
75 people are currently reading
1303 people want to read
About the author
Patrick French
19 books45 followersPatrick French was a British writer and historian, based in London. He was educated at the University of Edinburgh where he studied English and American literature.
French is the author of several books including Younghusband: The Last Great Imperial Adventurer (1994), a biography of Francis Younghusband, The World Is What It Is (2008), an authorized biography of Nobel Laureate V.S Naipaul which won the National Book Critics Circle Award in the United States of America, and India: A Portrait, an intimate biography of 1.2 billion people.(2010)
During the 1992 general election, French was a Green Party candidate for Parliament. He has sat on the executive committee of the Tibet Support Group UK, and was a founding member of the inter-governmental India-UK Round Table.
French is the author of several books including Younghusband: The Last Great Imperial Adventurer (1994), a biography of Francis Younghusband, The World Is What It Is (2008), an authorized biography of Nobel Laureate V.S Naipaul which won the National Book Critics Circle Award in the United States of America, and India: A Portrait, an intimate biography of 1.2 billion people.(2010)
During the 1992 general election, French was a Green Party candidate for Parliament. He has sat on the executive committee of the Tibet Support Group UK, and was a founding member of the inter-governmental India-UK Round Table.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 95 reviews
August 12, 2018
How do you solve a problem like Naipaul? I’ll stop the Sound of Music references straight away; but this will be a difficult review to write. Naipaul is a Nobel laureate and is certainly one of the great writers of the twentieth century. Notably irascible and difficult to pin down. Accused of a great deal, including racism and imperialism; more British than the British, a fan of Margaret Thatcher. He wrote some great novels and a good deal of reportage from his extensive travelling. He was an acute observer, especially of ordinary people and their thoughts and feelings. His views have often been controversial and he began writing about political Islam long before most others. He also had a complex private life; marrying Pat Hale, a woman he met at Oxford. He also conducted a twenty year affair with an Anglo-Argentine woman, Margaret; never deciding between them and making contradictory promises to both. His relationship with Margaret was sometimes violent and she was seen with bruising round her eyes on a number of occasions. He admitted in a newspaper interview in the 1980s that he had regularly visited prostitutes for many years in the 1950s and 60s. Pat found out by reading the interview. When Pat was dying in the mid 1990s Naipaul travelled to Pakistan where he met Nadira, a journalist. They fell in love. It is recorded that Naipaul felt Pat wasn’t dying quickly enough. A few days before she died he told her about Nadira and that she would be his new companion. Nadira moved into Naipual’s house the day after Pat’s cremation and they married a couple of months later. Margaret, the mistress, found out about the wedding from the papers. How do we know all of the private details? When Naipaul agreed to allow Patrick French to write his biography he gave him access to absolutely everything, with no restrictions; including Pat’s diaries which detailed her feelings of inadequacy and Naipaul’s treatment of her. All of the skeletons in the cupboard were to be open to view. That is the contrariness of the man, and that is why this biography is so brilliant. The Guardian review sums it up; “Must be the frankest authorised autobiography of anyone alive and in possession of their senses.”
Naipaul is a contradiction; he lived in Britain as a struggling writer, experiencing the racism that was commonplace, and in a relationship with a white woman. He arrived in Britain having won a scholarship to Oxford from his native Trinidad. He is a perceptive observer of people and his writing is at times brilliant. Does that excuse his treatment of others? For me, No. But I recognise his sense of being an outsider and not belonging anywhere, his ambivalent relationship with India; changing from quite negative in his early work, to much more positive in later years. Here is not the place to talk about his work; French does that in detail and he is a perceptive analyst. I admired Naipaul’s tenacity and perception, but I wouldn’t like to know him or be in a relationship with him and Pat Hale’s story is so very sad. She deserved better.
Naipaul is a contradiction; he lived in Britain as a struggling writer, experiencing the racism that was commonplace, and in a relationship with a white woman. He arrived in Britain having won a scholarship to Oxford from his native Trinidad. He is a perceptive observer of people and his writing is at times brilliant. Does that excuse his treatment of others? For me, No. But I recognise his sense of being an outsider and not belonging anywhere, his ambivalent relationship with India; changing from quite negative in his early work, to much more positive in later years. Here is not the place to talk about his work; French does that in detail and he is a perceptive analyst. I admired Naipaul’s tenacity and perception, but I wouldn’t like to know him or be in a relationship with him and Pat Hale’s story is so very sad. She deserved better.
June 21, 2023
I’m not any kind of fan (even less so now) but he loomed large for decades and I never quite got what the fuss was all about. I heard that this biography was a scandalous full disclosure, all kinds of nasty shocking stuff, so being a high-minded lover of literature I thought that’s for me.
First point : it was written ten years before he died, so having read it, I gotta say, respect to Naipaul, he clearly didn’t give a flying flook about what anybody thought.
***
He came from nowhere. Greatness strikes where it pleases, it really does. Born in a Hindu family half a generation from peasant farmers on the island of Trinidad, still a colony of the British Empire. If a guy only had his brains to get anywhere with, it was this guy. They were poor and there was a lot of them. The Indian community was a minority on Trinidad, it was a minority of a minority on an obscure island no one had heard of. From there to the Nobel Prize and being knighted and all. So there’s that.
He wrote novels but mainly he turned journalism into high art. He rushed about the world interviewing and probing and cranking out 500 pagers summing up India (twice, one gloomy and the second optimistic), the Caribbean, South America, you know… the whole world. He had it on a string. He was never especially popular but there was a hardcore of critics who thought he walked on water.
PAT’S STORY
He made it to Oxford University on a scholarship and like a lot of timid young men he married his first girlfriend, Pat. They were both 22. It was 1955. When they got married neither family was informed and there was no wedding ring. He said later it was because "I had no interest in jewellery. I didn’t think it was important…. I had been in too deep with Pat, who did not attract me sexually at all…”
Patrick French comments:
A wedding ring represented all that Vidia wanted to avoid: expense, the trap of marriage, social expectation. He had chosen to marry Pat, but did not want to accept the consequences of doing so.
Not a good start.
And like a lot of young couples they could never figure out how to talk about sex, it was too embarrassing.
In the summer of 1958…he started to have sex with prostitutes… he would visit them in the afternoon in secret while Pat was at work
Pat’s story is nothing but sorry and sad. It turned out that she was the perfect doormat. Friend David Pryce-Jones commented:
She would have done anything for Vidia. There is a human phenomenon called “a great man’s wife” and she was such a thing. Mrs Nabokov was another. They are absolutely convinced of their husband’s genius and will do anything the husband asks to promote that genius.
Another friend said:
She was awed by him… she had to do her bit to encourage the flowering of his talents: if that meant not creating a single creak when walking in the house, so be it.
MARGARET’S STORY
In 1972 at the age of 40 he was in Argentina and he met a hot Argentinian woman called Margaret.
Margaret was Vidia’s ideal woman, a woman of a kind who had existed previously only in his fantasy life: he could string her along and mistreat her, with her abject consent. Margaret was unlike Pat in almost all respects: tempestuous, cynical and sexy. Their relationship, battered and disturbed, would endure for almost a quarter of a century.
In the first couple of years after the affair began she had three abortions, saying each time it was VSN’s child. He commented later :
Margaret was going to have a child. I was quite happy for it to be aborted. Wicked people have said it was someone else’s, but I think it was mine.
Back to Patrick:
He wanted her to behave like a nun and sometimes come to England or wherever he happened to be travelling – for eight or ten days at a time to be the object of what she called his cruel sexual desires….Vidia even expected her to pay for it
At one point in a visit to India “he had a stormy falling out with Margaret.”
“I had to send her back,” said Vidia later, as if she were an unwanted parcel. This was to be a pattern on their foreign tours : passion, dispute, dismissal.
So this triangle went on for about twenty years. He would run about the world doing his journalism and dial her up and she would come a-running. Essentially Margaret became doormat number two.
AS I LAY DYING
Then Pat got breast cancer. While she was in remission, Vidia made some frank comments in an interview with Der Spiegel. He said
When I was young, you know, I was a great frequenter of prostitutes. I found them intensely stimulating.
And later said the same thing to the New Yorker (“I became a great prostitute man”). It became headline news, given the reluctance of men on this subject. Patrick says:
For Pat, it was devastation… For Vidia, what he said was a memory of old days before Margaret; for Pat it was a gross revelation, and an insult to her status as his loving wife
The next thing that happened was that in 1995 in Pakistan he met a hot 42 year old woman and immediately decided to ditch Margaret, wait for Pat to die, then marry this new lady. Which he did.
DESERT ISLAND DISCS
When I found he had been on Desert Island Discs I dropped this book and grabbed my phone and instantly listened to the whole programme. (You can do this too. They are all available.) On this programme the distinguished guest is gently interviewed about their illustrious career and chooses eight gramophone records they can have to take with them to the imaginary desert island upon which they have been deposited. Norman Mailer confessed when he was on this programme that he didn’t care much for music and he had chosen his eight records not on their merit but because they reminded him of the eight women he’d been married to. VS Naipaul likewise confessed he did care much for music. From a notebook :
My detestation of music – the lowest art form, too accessible, capable of stirring people who think too little
It was eerie listening to the old buffer after reading about him for so long. He sounded posh – no surprise. But anyone who doesn't like music is just a plain weirdo in my humble opinion.
THE GOLD STANDARD GROUCH
As awards and honours and hard cash showered down upon him, he just got grouchier. Typical passage from this book :
With no family of his own, Vidia’s thoughts were often on his mother and siblings, nephews and nieces. This did not mean he felt benevolent towards them.
Or
When Vidia’s relations and foreign acquaintances visited Britain he did his best to avoid them.
KEEPING FIT THE NAIPAUL WAY
From a profile in Vogue, 1979
He keeps fit by flipping over backwards until the palms of his hands touch the ground behind him and whipping upright again 200 times a day.
I can’t even visualise this. I have been trying, but… VS Naipaul doing this?
200 times a day? Do people actually read what they write?
LIFE BEFORE MOBILE PHONES
On being told he had won the Booker Prize in 1971, he needed to confirm this exciting information. Philip French says
Despite the cost, he made a daytime telephone call
Later on, Philip French usefully reminds us that
In the early 1970s, international calls were expensive rarities and a telephone was a single, fixed, bulky contraption kept in one place such as a hall or a sitting room, attached to the wall by a wire.
This is I suppose for any reader who has never seen an old movie
First point : it was written ten years before he died, so having read it, I gotta say, respect to Naipaul, he clearly didn’t give a flying flook about what anybody thought.
***
He came from nowhere. Greatness strikes where it pleases, it really does. Born in a Hindu family half a generation from peasant farmers on the island of Trinidad, still a colony of the British Empire. If a guy only had his brains to get anywhere with, it was this guy. They were poor and there was a lot of them. The Indian community was a minority on Trinidad, it was a minority of a minority on an obscure island no one had heard of. From there to the Nobel Prize and being knighted and all. So there’s that.
He wrote novels but mainly he turned journalism into high art. He rushed about the world interviewing and probing and cranking out 500 pagers summing up India (twice, one gloomy and the second optimistic), the Caribbean, South America, you know… the whole world. He had it on a string. He was never especially popular but there was a hardcore of critics who thought he walked on water.
PAT’S STORY
He made it to Oxford University on a scholarship and like a lot of timid young men he married his first girlfriend, Pat. They were both 22. It was 1955. When they got married neither family was informed and there was no wedding ring. He said later it was because "I had no interest in jewellery. I didn’t think it was important…. I had been in too deep with Pat, who did not attract me sexually at all…”
Patrick French comments:
A wedding ring represented all that Vidia wanted to avoid: expense, the trap of marriage, social expectation. He had chosen to marry Pat, but did not want to accept the consequences of doing so.
Not a good start.
And like a lot of young couples they could never figure out how to talk about sex, it was too embarrassing.
In the summer of 1958…he started to have sex with prostitutes… he would visit them in the afternoon in secret while Pat was at work
Pat’s story is nothing but sorry and sad. It turned out that she was the perfect doormat. Friend David Pryce-Jones commented:
She would have done anything for Vidia. There is a human phenomenon called “a great man’s wife” and she was such a thing. Mrs Nabokov was another. They are absolutely convinced of their husband’s genius and will do anything the husband asks to promote that genius.
Another friend said:
She was awed by him… she had to do her bit to encourage the flowering of his talents: if that meant not creating a single creak when walking in the house, so be it.
MARGARET’S STORY
In 1972 at the age of 40 he was in Argentina and he met a hot Argentinian woman called Margaret.
Margaret was Vidia’s ideal woman, a woman of a kind who had existed previously only in his fantasy life: he could string her along and mistreat her, with her abject consent. Margaret was unlike Pat in almost all respects: tempestuous, cynical and sexy. Their relationship, battered and disturbed, would endure for almost a quarter of a century.
In the first couple of years after the affair began she had three abortions, saying each time it was VSN’s child. He commented later :
Margaret was going to have a child. I was quite happy for it to be aborted. Wicked people have said it was someone else’s, but I think it was mine.
Back to Patrick:
He wanted her to behave like a nun and sometimes come to England or wherever he happened to be travelling – for eight or ten days at a time to be the object of what she called his cruel sexual desires….Vidia even expected her to pay for it
At one point in a visit to India “he had a stormy falling out with Margaret.”
“I had to send her back,” said Vidia later, as if she were an unwanted parcel. This was to be a pattern on their foreign tours : passion, dispute, dismissal.
So this triangle went on for about twenty years. He would run about the world doing his journalism and dial her up and she would come a-running. Essentially Margaret became doormat number two.
AS I LAY DYING
Then Pat got breast cancer. While she was in remission, Vidia made some frank comments in an interview with Der Spiegel. He said
When I was young, you know, I was a great frequenter of prostitutes. I found them intensely stimulating.
And later said the same thing to the New Yorker (“I became a great prostitute man”). It became headline news, given the reluctance of men on this subject. Patrick says:
For Pat, it was devastation… For Vidia, what he said was a memory of old days before Margaret; for Pat it was a gross revelation, and an insult to her status as his loving wife
The next thing that happened was that in 1995 in Pakistan he met a hot 42 year old woman and immediately decided to ditch Margaret, wait for Pat to die, then marry this new lady. Which he did.
DESERT ISLAND DISCS
When I found he had been on Desert Island Discs I dropped this book and grabbed my phone and instantly listened to the whole programme. (You can do this too. They are all available.) On this programme the distinguished guest is gently interviewed about their illustrious career and chooses eight gramophone records they can have to take with them to the imaginary desert island upon which they have been deposited. Norman Mailer confessed when he was on this programme that he didn’t care much for music and he had chosen his eight records not on their merit but because they reminded him of the eight women he’d been married to. VS Naipaul likewise confessed he did care much for music. From a notebook :
My detestation of music – the lowest art form, too accessible, capable of stirring people who think too little
It was eerie listening to the old buffer after reading about him for so long. He sounded posh – no surprise. But anyone who doesn't like music is just a plain weirdo in my humble opinion.
THE GOLD STANDARD GROUCH
As awards and honours and hard cash showered down upon him, he just got grouchier. Typical passage from this book :
With no family of his own, Vidia’s thoughts were often on his mother and siblings, nephews and nieces. This did not mean he felt benevolent towards them.
Or
When Vidia’s relations and foreign acquaintances visited Britain he did his best to avoid them.
KEEPING FIT THE NAIPAUL WAY
From a profile in Vogue, 1979
He keeps fit by flipping over backwards until the palms of his hands touch the ground behind him and whipping upright again 200 times a day.
I can’t even visualise this. I have been trying, but… VS Naipaul doing this?
200 times a day? Do people actually read what they write?
LIFE BEFORE MOBILE PHONES
On being told he had won the Booker Prize in 1971, he needed to confirm this exciting information. Philip French says
Despite the cost, he made a daytime telephone call
Later on, Philip French usefully reminds us that
In the early 1970s, international calls were expensive rarities and a telephone was a single, fixed, bulky contraption kept in one place such as a hall or a sitting room, attached to the wall by a wire.
This is I suppose for any reader who has never seen an old movie
June 27, 2023
It is almost as interesting reading about V S Naipaul as it is reading his books. Many were scandalized by his opinions, and some were put off by his personal life. Nothing he did was so beyond the pale as to be truly shocking. A failed marriage, a torrid affair and a later love were all grist for the rumor mill during his lifetime. His sins were vanity, cruelty, selfishness, infidelity and occasional bouts of domestic violence. Certainly not an attractive set of traits, but not unusual ones either.
In this 2008 award winning biography of the Nobel laureate novelist and journalist, Patrick French delves deeply into Naipaul's life. As an authorized biographer he was allowed full access to Naipaul for interviews and papers, including the diaries and correspondence of his first wife and his mistress. Naipaul believed a writer's life to be a legitimate subject of literature. True to his character, he wanted a full and honest account. Reportedly he did not edit anything although he was given an opportunity.
Of greater interest than personal peccadilloes was his critique of entire countries and cultures. Beyond scrutiny of India and Islam, South America came under withering examination. Seen as a place of graveyards, brothels and genocide, Naipaul was unsparing in his denunciation. Africa was perceived as a continent where inferior whites went to dominate weakened blacks. He had contempt for the subjugated as well as their oppressors. The British Indies where he was born and raised were no exception.
When British abolished slavery in 1833 they substituted indentured labor in their Caribbean colonies. Naipaul's grandfather arrived at Trinidad in 1894 from India, and later became a successful patriarch. His father was a poor and aspiring writer who married into the family. Naipaul won a scholarship to Oxford against all odds, and became a famous regional author. He went on to chronicle post-colonial conditions throughout the world. The story is both a personal and family triumph.
The book covers the years up to Naipaul's second marriage in 1996, within weeks after his first wife's death. It may be a more fair and accurate portrait than the earlier semi-fictional account by Naipaul's literary friend (and sometime foe) Paul Theroux, written during their years of feud. The exhaustive detail included by the author is a challenge. At 500 pages it is as close to a blow by blow account as is reasonable. French does not sermonize or pass judgement, but tells the life of the writer as he saw it.
In this 2008 award winning biography of the Nobel laureate novelist and journalist, Patrick French delves deeply into Naipaul's life. As an authorized biographer he was allowed full access to Naipaul for interviews and papers, including the diaries and correspondence of his first wife and his mistress. Naipaul believed a writer's life to be a legitimate subject of literature. True to his character, he wanted a full and honest account. Reportedly he did not edit anything although he was given an opportunity.
Of greater interest than personal peccadilloes was his critique of entire countries and cultures. Beyond scrutiny of India and Islam, South America came under withering examination. Seen as a place of graveyards, brothels and genocide, Naipaul was unsparing in his denunciation. Africa was perceived as a continent where inferior whites went to dominate weakened blacks. He had contempt for the subjugated as well as their oppressors. The British Indies where he was born and raised were no exception.
When British abolished slavery in 1833 they substituted indentured labor in their Caribbean colonies. Naipaul's grandfather arrived at Trinidad in 1894 from India, and later became a successful patriarch. His father was a poor and aspiring writer who married into the family. Naipaul won a scholarship to Oxford against all odds, and became a famous regional author. He went on to chronicle post-colonial conditions throughout the world. The story is both a personal and family triumph.
The book covers the years up to Naipaul's second marriage in 1996, within weeks after his first wife's death. It may be a more fair and accurate portrait than the earlier semi-fictional account by Naipaul's literary friend (and sometime foe) Paul Theroux, written during their years of feud. The exhaustive detail included by the author is a challenge. At 500 pages it is as close to a blow by blow account as is reasonable. French does not sermonize or pass judgement, but tells the life of the writer as he saw it.
June 22, 2023
This book is an account of sheer willpower. I mean, who wanted to read books written by an Indian guy who moved to Britain, whose ancestors were bonded laborers in the Caribbean? But Vidia Naipaul did it. In the fucking 1950s. He was active in a time when it must have been tough for Indians to travel across the world. But where all did Naipaul not go? He went to every nook and corner of India. He went to the Muslim countries. He went to Argentina. He even went to the American South. Most Indians do not even know what goes on behind their own house. Naipaul wrote books about whole countries. He is a fucking legend.
Yes, he shat on us Indians. He did not like Muslims and blacks. He did not like Hindus either, though he did sympathize with the Hindutva movement. But if you've read his books, you know he is not just some racist or prejudiced guy. Naipaul was Jordan Peterson with some fucking talent. Hahaha! He wanted Indians to get their act together. Even the most hardcore leftist Indian concedes that Naipaul was a great writer. Everyone from John Updike and Hunter S Thompson to Marlon James and Barack Obama (who said he based his foreign policy based on Naipaul's harshness) adored him.
Every book of his had the most sad, dark shit about some of the most humiliated people in history. It is not pleasant reading a Naipaul novel. For an Indian or even anybody else. But Naipaul never buttered it up for easy consumption. His last novel Magic Seeds must be one of the most depressing novels that I ever read in my life. It is no wonder that he has gone out of fashion.
Naipaul should be a poster boy for the me too moment because he admitted that he used to beat up his Argentinian mistress. He was not very nice to his English wife either. He was posessed by a sexual rage for much of his life. He conceded that he achieved sexual fulfillment very late in his life. Did that power his writing?
There is nobody like him. He really cared for his craft. He had a point of view. He stuck to it. Not the kind of guy whom you would invite home for breakfast and a leisurely chat. Naipaul meant business. He was not some guy who visited an exotic country and wrote about the food. He knew what was going on. He was an asshole and lived and wrote like one. He once said that most Indian writers do not know anything except their Mammaji and Pappaji. Hohoho! So true. This is a great sanctioned biography. I hope French writes Part 2 of this book.
Yes, he shat on us Indians. He did not like Muslims and blacks. He did not like Hindus either, though he did sympathize with the Hindutva movement. But if you've read his books, you know he is not just some racist or prejudiced guy. Naipaul was Jordan Peterson with some fucking talent. Hahaha! He wanted Indians to get their act together. Even the most hardcore leftist Indian concedes that Naipaul was a great writer. Everyone from John Updike and Hunter S Thompson to Marlon James and Barack Obama (who said he based his foreign policy based on Naipaul's harshness) adored him.
Every book of his had the most sad, dark shit about some of the most humiliated people in history. It is not pleasant reading a Naipaul novel. For an Indian or even anybody else. But Naipaul never buttered it up for easy consumption. His last novel Magic Seeds must be one of the most depressing novels that I ever read in my life. It is no wonder that he has gone out of fashion.
Naipaul should be a poster boy for the me too moment because he admitted that he used to beat up his Argentinian mistress. He was not very nice to his English wife either. He was posessed by a sexual rage for much of his life. He conceded that he achieved sexual fulfillment very late in his life. Did that power his writing?
There is nobody like him. He really cared for his craft. He had a point of view. He stuck to it. Not the kind of guy whom you would invite home for breakfast and a leisurely chat. Naipaul meant business. He was not some guy who visited an exotic country and wrote about the food. He knew what was going on. He was an asshole and lived and wrote like one. He once said that most Indian writers do not know anything except their Mammaji and Pappaji. Hohoho! So true. This is a great sanctioned biography. I hope French writes Part 2 of this book.
February 7, 2024
Upon finishing this book, these are the words I whispered to myself: "What a fucking bastard."
Here's how good Patrick French is: I knew exactly, exactly what was going to happen in the last twenty pages, because French had defined Naipaul's character so indelibly by that point. Yet those twenty pages still managed to draw tears.
French has assembled an amazing book: meticulous reporting, gripping writing, and one of the most fascinating writers' lives I've ever looked into this deeply. Readers will understand Naipaul as someone with perhaps unmatched intellectual honesty, and emotional dishonesty so deep and rending and disgusting that you close this book wondering whether genius and madness ought to just cancel each other out.
In other words, if great artists must be indulged to this degree as they mistreat those around them for the sake of their art, I wonder whether it's better to leave the art unmade and prevent the damage to the lovers, patrons, and families that make the art possible.
As far as this biography being authorized, Ian Jack of the Guardian puts it best: "Must be the frankest authorised autobiography of anyone alive and in possession of their senses."
Here's how good Patrick French is: I knew exactly, exactly what was going to happen in the last twenty pages, because French had defined Naipaul's character so indelibly by that point. Yet those twenty pages still managed to draw tears.
French has assembled an amazing book: meticulous reporting, gripping writing, and one of the most fascinating writers' lives I've ever looked into this deeply. Readers will understand Naipaul as someone with perhaps unmatched intellectual honesty, and emotional dishonesty so deep and rending and disgusting that you close this book wondering whether genius and madness ought to just cancel each other out.
In other words, if great artists must be indulged to this degree as they mistreat those around them for the sake of their art, I wonder whether it's better to leave the art unmade and prevent the damage to the lovers, patrons, and families that make the art possible.
As far as this biography being authorized, Ian Jack of the Guardian puts it best: "Must be the frankest authorised autobiography of anyone alive and in possession of their senses."
April 6, 2025
Yes he was terrible, uniquely terrible even, it’s not new knowledge. But he was also one of the greatest writers in modern literature. When I first began to read Naipaul and I could only ever find muddled reviews about his character I knew I would form an obsession with studying his psychology and this biography really hit the spot. It’s long but it keeps you engaged the entire time, especially when describing the millions of tantrums he would throw about the simplest things like the way teapots were painted at a hotel in India.
April 12, 2010
I've written a piece on French's book together with Michael Slater's Dickens and Andrew Motion's Philiip Larkin at Templeton's InCharacter.org called
Goodish Writers, Bad-ish Men.
We have many goodish writers in this country, but few great ones, and V.S. Naipaul is a great writer." - A.N. Wilson
Everyone knows one thing about the life of Charles Dickens: the trauma of his childhood stung him into bestsellerdom. The 12-year-old boy whose parents were imprisoned for debt and who toiled in Warren's Blacking Factory is father to the man who wrote David Copperfield. But I was ashamed to learn only now, in Michael Slater's new biography, Charles Dickens, that the autobiographical background of David Copperfield was completely unknown to Dickens's huge contemporary fan base - hundreds of thousands of people who bought his novels in their serial form, subscribed to the magazines he published for twenty years, attended the marvelous public readings he gave of his own works, and bought his Christmas books for their friends. More than a year passed after Dickens's death in 1870 at the age of 58 before the first volume of John Forster's Life of Dickens was published, and the facts of Dickens's childhood became known. Slater says that it is hard for us "to register just how sensational all this was to the vast majority of Dickens's readers, so many of whom felt themselves to be on terms of personal friendship with him." Hundreds of thousands learned for the first time that when Copperfield labored in Murdstone & Grimby's warehouse, it was Dickens who wept, and that Dickens's Micawberesque father was the cheerful resident of King's Bench Prison.
That Dickens's contemporary audience, still mourning his death, found this knowledge sensational is sensational. I could almost feel sorry for his readers, knowing what I know, as if their ignorance denied them some pleasure In his work. But that's absurd. A vast public managed nevertheless to love Dickens, to feel kinship with him, and esteem him rightly, believing (as he did himself) that he was entitled to a grave in Westminster Abbey among his peers Milton, Shakespeare, and, since last week, Ted Hughes.
Of course Dickens concealed other private facts about his life, including one act so low that he never honored it with even a character in his novels. At the age of 45, he decided that his wife no longer deserved his love, and he made her leave their home--her youngest children were then 9 and 6. "To think of the poor matron after 22 years of marriage going away out of her house!" said Thackeray at the time. The chattering classes probably knew about it, but Dickens continued to write his books celebrating the healing of families, the love of young sweethearts and the creation of new homes - while his discarded wife tried to preserve her early letters from her husband in order to prove to the children he tried to estrange from her that there was indeed a time when her husband had loved her.
A great majority of us have done discreditable, even cruel things in our lives, even after we have ceased to be children. And the great majority of that majority find it in our hearts to forgive ourselves, and to think more about how we have been injured than the injuries we have made. But it seems to matter more when a writer or artist behaves badly. Why should it? If my dentist loves one of his daughters more than any of his other children, or a Boeing engineer is having an affair with her best friend's husband, it is cruel. But their cruelties don't impair the quality of my bridgework or disturb my tendency to sleep peacefully through take-offs and landings. Why does the bad character of a writer or artist matters so much more? And how does "mattering" work?
Big biographies of major authors tend to raise or lower their subjects in the esteem of their publics: Flannery O'Connor, up; John Cheever, not so much. But when there is a big revelation - especially a revelation of weakness or worse - there is a stimulus effect. The reputation of Philip Larkin has never recovered from his friend Andrew Motion's biography, which pointed out repeatedly that he, Motion, though a pretty dreadful poet, is a far better human being than Larkin was. Readers knew about John Cheever's alcoholism and his bisexual priapism from his journals, first published in the same magazine which published his beautiful short stories and from the complaining memoirs of his daughter before Brad Bailey's Cheever biography of last year. The big shock of the year, however, was the "authorized biography" of V.S. Naipaul, by Patrick French: "The World Is What it is."
French's book shocked only partly because of the story it told, the real surprise was that Naipaul collaborated so completely with its telling. Readers like me expected the story of the grandson of self-proclaimed Brahmins who had come to Trinidad as indentured laborers in the 1870s; how the failure of his father and the fear of being trapped on a small island drove him to excel in school and win a rare scholarship to an English university; how young Naipaul then struggled to become a self-supporting literary man in 1950s racially super-conscious Britain. Knowing his novels, readers were more delighted than surprised to hear anecdotes of the life behind them - a colonial outsider with talent sufficient to outdo the natives, but with a racial and a caste identity that makes him feel at the same time superior and inferior to those who posses clear title to a world that he yearns for. After graduation from Oxford, he was on the phone with a prospective landlady with a flat to let in London. When she asked him if he was "colored," he answered, "hopelessly!"
We are not surprised to see a lot of evidence for his attitude of superiority to the third-world places he visits - India is filthy, his native West Indies are trapped in a contest between groups of former slaves and near-slaves to imitate their former masters. Patrick French is at the ready with the testimony of one left-of-center reader after another to prove Naipual's sympathy with the poor and oppressed despite his reactionary tone: Irving Howe, Joe Klein, Karl Miller and Harold Pinter.
But his romantic life! Naipaul reluctantly marries Patricia Brent, his undergraduate girlfriend, and has a long, cold, selfish marriage with her. Almost as soon as he meets her, he forced her to give up her undergraduate acting: she contents herself by imagining the children they are going to have, but never do. He finds what feeble pleasure he can by purchasing sex outside his marriage - he has no "faculty" for seduction - but at the age of 40, discovers passion for the first time with an Anglo-Argentine woman called Margaret Murray.
For the next 20 years, he remains married to Pat, while he and his mistress share occasional Elinor-Glyn-style sauna-baths of exotic travel combined with the infliction of pain upon one another and upon the wife left at home. At the age of 50, the Naipauls separated, but when the writer needed the wife - as he did to help him dictate the entire text of his masterpiece, "The Bend in the River" - she came. The day after he dictated the last page of the book to Pat, he decided to move to America with Margaret. But she too is abandoned in time, and someone else, a younger Pakistani woman whom he had known for a few weeks, becomes the "second Lady Naipaul," and has the privilege of helping a sobbing Naipaul scatter Pat's ashes in a wood after she dies of cancer.
For me, the effect of reading French's book - controlled, as it was, by Naipaul himself - was unexpectedly to stop me from being able to read him. When French's book was published, I had been reading the better part of Naipual's travel books for the first time. And what I learned from French about Naipaul's private life, and how it impinged on, yet been expunged from his writing, took the pleasure away from me. What mattered to me was not his estrangement from his wife, or how he treated his wife and the Indians he met on their long stay in India, but to find out too much about his artifice. I could no longer enjoy in ignorance what as a reader I thought was my right in his work. What I had just read before the biography was the magnificently funny and vivid Kashmir section of "An Area of Darkness," in which the writer sojourns (by himself!) in a Kashmiri Fawlty Towers on the shimmering lake, with all its humor, mystery and complexity. It now seemed meager compared to the reality that went into its making, which included Naipaul's - and Pat's - entire story up to 1962, his 31st year, when he first went to India, the land of his ancestors.
Knowing the truth about how he had made it - the way that he had partially to abandon mother, sisters, country, in order to make his career as a writer, how he had to determine that in order to succeed at the literary ambition that had defeated his father that he had to overcome his father - it made it impossible to go on with his autobiographical novels as well. Patrick French had taken me backstage and showed me the machinery, and I could not recapture the illusion. And more: it annoyed me to learn I had not been an attentive enough reader to realize that something undisclosed that was going on in Naipaul's real life. Should I not have known? It was little comfort to know that I was not alone. Hilary Spurling, the distinguished biographer of a number of artists and writers, told French that Naipaul's "strange character and stranger career, coupled with rumors about his triangular private life, mystified people who knew him almost as much as people who didn't."
Still the question remains. What does it matter that Larkin sneered in his letters and conversation (fearfully and fretfully, it seems to me) about foreigners and women, that Naipaul made selfish use of people from the beginning of his life, and no doubt continues to do so now? What does it matter that Dickens knew what it was like to be dependent and abandoned as a boy, but made sure that his wife would suffer the same fate? It is this. The weakness of character of Dickens, Larkin and Naipaul comes from the same source that drives their art (in contrast to Cheever's alcoholism and priapism does not). What drove the three writers to punish - to hurt quite a few people who were close to Dickens and (if French and Naipaul are right) virtually everyone who came within reach of Naipaul - drove them to their desk every day. Without Naipaul's ruthlessness about using others as means not ends, there would be no Naipaul. And Dickens? He gave an interview in 1862 to a young Russian journalist named Fyodor Dostoevsky which Slater guesses Dickens thought would never see the light of day:
"He told me that all the good simple people in his novels [like Little Nell:] are what he wanted to have been, and his villains were what he was (or rather, what he found in himself), his cruelty, his attacks of causeless enmity towards those who were helpless and looked to him for comfort, his shrinking from those whom he ought to live, being used up in what he wrote. There were two people in him, he told me: one who feels as he ought to feel and one who feels the opposite. From the one who feels the opposite I make my evil characters, from the one who feels as a man ought to feel I try to live my life."
This self-knowledge does not excuse Dickens - or Naipaul - for how they seem to have treated others. But if we can't be good - and it seems that we can't - then it's not a bad thing to try to make something out of what is missing in us, or at least to see how others do it. And if we readers are complicitous - well, that's not a bad thing either. So I intend to read Naipaul's "Mimic Men" next, as an exercise in shedding my own more superfluous illusions.
Goodish Writers, Bad-ish Men.
We have many goodish writers in this country, but few great ones, and V.S. Naipaul is a great writer." - A.N. Wilson
Everyone knows one thing about the life of Charles Dickens: the trauma of his childhood stung him into bestsellerdom. The 12-year-old boy whose parents were imprisoned for debt and who toiled in Warren's Blacking Factory is father to the man who wrote David Copperfield. But I was ashamed to learn only now, in Michael Slater's new biography, Charles Dickens, that the autobiographical background of David Copperfield was completely unknown to Dickens's huge contemporary fan base - hundreds of thousands of people who bought his novels in their serial form, subscribed to the magazines he published for twenty years, attended the marvelous public readings he gave of his own works, and bought his Christmas books for their friends. More than a year passed after Dickens's death in 1870 at the age of 58 before the first volume of John Forster's Life of Dickens was published, and the facts of Dickens's childhood became known. Slater says that it is hard for us "to register just how sensational all this was to the vast majority of Dickens's readers, so many of whom felt themselves to be on terms of personal friendship with him." Hundreds of thousands learned for the first time that when Copperfield labored in Murdstone & Grimby's warehouse, it was Dickens who wept, and that Dickens's Micawberesque father was the cheerful resident of King's Bench Prison.
That Dickens's contemporary audience, still mourning his death, found this knowledge sensational is sensational. I could almost feel sorry for his readers, knowing what I know, as if their ignorance denied them some pleasure In his work. But that's absurd. A vast public managed nevertheless to love Dickens, to feel kinship with him, and esteem him rightly, believing (as he did himself) that he was entitled to a grave in Westminster Abbey among his peers Milton, Shakespeare, and, since last week, Ted Hughes.
Of course Dickens concealed other private facts about his life, including one act so low that he never honored it with even a character in his novels. At the age of 45, he decided that his wife no longer deserved his love, and he made her leave their home--her youngest children were then 9 and 6. "To think of the poor matron after 22 years of marriage going away out of her house!" said Thackeray at the time. The chattering classes probably knew about it, but Dickens continued to write his books celebrating the healing of families, the love of young sweethearts and the creation of new homes - while his discarded wife tried to preserve her early letters from her husband in order to prove to the children he tried to estrange from her that there was indeed a time when her husband had loved her.
A great majority of us have done discreditable, even cruel things in our lives, even after we have ceased to be children. And the great majority of that majority find it in our hearts to forgive ourselves, and to think more about how we have been injured than the injuries we have made. But it seems to matter more when a writer or artist behaves badly. Why should it? If my dentist loves one of his daughters more than any of his other children, or a Boeing engineer is having an affair with her best friend's husband, it is cruel. But their cruelties don't impair the quality of my bridgework or disturb my tendency to sleep peacefully through take-offs and landings. Why does the bad character of a writer or artist matters so much more? And how does "mattering" work?
Big biographies of major authors tend to raise or lower their subjects in the esteem of their publics: Flannery O'Connor, up; John Cheever, not so much. But when there is a big revelation - especially a revelation of weakness or worse - there is a stimulus effect. The reputation of Philip Larkin has never recovered from his friend Andrew Motion's biography, which pointed out repeatedly that he, Motion, though a pretty dreadful poet, is a far better human being than Larkin was. Readers knew about John Cheever's alcoholism and his bisexual priapism from his journals, first published in the same magazine which published his beautiful short stories and from the complaining memoirs of his daughter before Brad Bailey's Cheever biography of last year. The big shock of the year, however, was the "authorized biography" of V.S. Naipaul, by Patrick French: "The World Is What it is."
French's book shocked only partly because of the story it told, the real surprise was that Naipaul collaborated so completely with its telling. Readers like me expected the story of the grandson of self-proclaimed Brahmins who had come to Trinidad as indentured laborers in the 1870s; how the failure of his father and the fear of being trapped on a small island drove him to excel in school and win a rare scholarship to an English university; how young Naipaul then struggled to become a self-supporting literary man in 1950s racially super-conscious Britain. Knowing his novels, readers were more delighted than surprised to hear anecdotes of the life behind them - a colonial outsider with talent sufficient to outdo the natives, but with a racial and a caste identity that makes him feel at the same time superior and inferior to those who posses clear title to a world that he yearns for. After graduation from Oxford, he was on the phone with a prospective landlady with a flat to let in London. When she asked him if he was "colored," he answered, "hopelessly!"
We are not surprised to see a lot of evidence for his attitude of superiority to the third-world places he visits - India is filthy, his native West Indies are trapped in a contest between groups of former slaves and near-slaves to imitate their former masters. Patrick French is at the ready with the testimony of one left-of-center reader after another to prove Naipual's sympathy with the poor and oppressed despite his reactionary tone: Irving Howe, Joe Klein, Karl Miller and Harold Pinter.
But his romantic life! Naipaul reluctantly marries Patricia Brent, his undergraduate girlfriend, and has a long, cold, selfish marriage with her. Almost as soon as he meets her, he forced her to give up her undergraduate acting: she contents herself by imagining the children they are going to have, but never do. He finds what feeble pleasure he can by purchasing sex outside his marriage - he has no "faculty" for seduction - but at the age of 40, discovers passion for the first time with an Anglo-Argentine woman called Margaret Murray.
For the next 20 years, he remains married to Pat, while he and his mistress share occasional Elinor-Glyn-style sauna-baths of exotic travel combined with the infliction of pain upon one another and upon the wife left at home. At the age of 50, the Naipauls separated, but when the writer needed the wife - as he did to help him dictate the entire text of his masterpiece, "The Bend in the River" - she came. The day after he dictated the last page of the book to Pat, he decided to move to America with Margaret. But she too is abandoned in time, and someone else, a younger Pakistani woman whom he had known for a few weeks, becomes the "second Lady Naipaul," and has the privilege of helping a sobbing Naipaul scatter Pat's ashes in a wood after she dies of cancer.
For me, the effect of reading French's book - controlled, as it was, by Naipaul himself - was unexpectedly to stop me from being able to read him. When French's book was published, I had been reading the better part of Naipual's travel books for the first time. And what I learned from French about Naipaul's private life, and how it impinged on, yet been expunged from his writing, took the pleasure away from me. What mattered to me was not his estrangement from his wife, or how he treated his wife and the Indians he met on their long stay in India, but to find out too much about his artifice. I could no longer enjoy in ignorance what as a reader I thought was my right in his work. What I had just read before the biography was the magnificently funny and vivid Kashmir section of "An Area of Darkness," in which the writer sojourns (by himself!) in a Kashmiri Fawlty Towers on the shimmering lake, with all its humor, mystery and complexity. It now seemed meager compared to the reality that went into its making, which included Naipaul's - and Pat's - entire story up to 1962, his 31st year, when he first went to India, the land of his ancestors.
Knowing the truth about how he had made it - the way that he had partially to abandon mother, sisters, country, in order to make his career as a writer, how he had to determine that in order to succeed at the literary ambition that had defeated his father that he had to overcome his father - it made it impossible to go on with his autobiographical novels as well. Patrick French had taken me backstage and showed me the machinery, and I could not recapture the illusion. And more: it annoyed me to learn I had not been an attentive enough reader to realize that something undisclosed that was going on in Naipaul's real life. Should I not have known? It was little comfort to know that I was not alone. Hilary Spurling, the distinguished biographer of a number of artists and writers, told French that Naipaul's "strange character and stranger career, coupled with rumors about his triangular private life, mystified people who knew him almost as much as people who didn't."
Still the question remains. What does it matter that Larkin sneered in his letters and conversation (fearfully and fretfully, it seems to me) about foreigners and women, that Naipaul made selfish use of people from the beginning of his life, and no doubt continues to do so now? What does it matter that Dickens knew what it was like to be dependent and abandoned as a boy, but made sure that his wife would suffer the same fate? It is this. The weakness of character of Dickens, Larkin and Naipaul comes from the same source that drives their art (in contrast to Cheever's alcoholism and priapism does not). What drove the three writers to punish - to hurt quite a few people who were close to Dickens and (if French and Naipaul are right) virtually everyone who came within reach of Naipaul - drove them to their desk every day. Without Naipaul's ruthlessness about using others as means not ends, there would be no Naipaul. And Dickens? He gave an interview in 1862 to a young Russian journalist named Fyodor Dostoevsky which Slater guesses Dickens thought would never see the light of day:
"He told me that all the good simple people in his novels [like Little Nell:] are what he wanted to have been, and his villains were what he was (or rather, what he found in himself), his cruelty, his attacks of causeless enmity towards those who were helpless and looked to him for comfort, his shrinking from those whom he ought to live, being used up in what he wrote. There were two people in him, he told me: one who feels as he ought to feel and one who feels the opposite. From the one who feels the opposite I make my evil characters, from the one who feels as a man ought to feel I try to live my life."
This self-knowledge does not excuse Dickens - or Naipaul - for how they seem to have treated others. But if we can't be good - and it seems that we can't - then it's not a bad thing to try to make something out of what is missing in us, or at least to see how others do it. And if we readers are complicitous - well, that's not a bad thing either. So I intend to read Naipaul's "Mimic Men" next, as an exercise in shedding my own more superfluous illusions.
March 1, 2019
Of late I have become quite infatuated with the books of V.S. Naipaul. I feel that it can be said without hyperbole that the man was a genius, despite the unconcealed shortcomings in his personal life. As such I have been curious to discover what I can about where he came from and the influences that shaped him. This book is about as detailed as a biography as can be created of any single human being. Patrick French had years of access to Naipaul and those who knew him, as well as the voluminous private written correspondence that people used to leave behind before the digital age.
The picture it paints is unsurprising to me. Naipaul was a depressed, arrogant, anxious and grandiose man. He was a misogynist who had ill racial feelings towards blacks and Muslims. He turned his back on the humble, culturally claustrophobic island that raised him in search of something more grand. His romantic relationships with women were abysmal. What he was concerned with above all else was becoming "the writer" that he had dreamed about becoming as a young man in Trinidad.
I had read Naipaul's own biographical novel about himself before reading this more detailed, objective account. In a way, all Naipaul's works were to some degree the story of where he came from. The stories from his own books are much straightforward and uncomplicated. They report what he wanted to share and discuss the broad topics that he is capable of providing wisdom about. Those books did not delve into the messy details that pervade any public persons inner life. To me that seems better. Although it may not be in style today, I actually prefer to read about ideal types. I was neither surprised or impressed to learn that of the complexity of what Naipaul's real life was like. Although in a sense it is nice to know what is behind the curtain — to confirm what one had easily suspected — I didn't find it to be so revelatory or useful. He was a genius with bad social skills and many personal torments. This is not so unheard of.
By far the best parts of the book were the passages where Naipaul himself speaks on the underlying issue that he had spent his life writing about: the painful failures of developing countries. It was interesting to learn how much racism he experienced in England as well, including from people far less accomplished than him in the English language. Once he overcame that though he didn't seem to hold a grudge, nor did he have much sympathy for those who struggled to rise after him. What I found even more amazing in the book was the story of his father. Of Brahmin extraction, he found himself an illiterate laborer in Trinidad. Somehow he managed to teach himself to read and write, rising to become a journalist and even publishing a worthwhile novel. His dreams and talents were ultimately hemmed in by his circumstances. His son reached the heights that fate had denied him. If anything in this book gives a clue as to where Naipaul's genius came from, the story of his father was it.
As biographies go, none can be more thorough than this. Although this was a capably written and heroically researched book about a person I am deeply interested in, for some reason I found the level of detail to actually be excessive. Maybe there isn't that much worth saying or remembering about any individual life.
The picture it paints is unsurprising to me. Naipaul was a depressed, arrogant, anxious and grandiose man. He was a misogynist who had ill racial feelings towards blacks and Muslims. He turned his back on the humble, culturally claustrophobic island that raised him in search of something more grand. His romantic relationships with women were abysmal. What he was concerned with above all else was becoming "the writer" that he had dreamed about becoming as a young man in Trinidad.
I had read Naipaul's own biographical novel about himself before reading this more detailed, objective account. In a way, all Naipaul's works were to some degree the story of where he came from. The stories from his own books are much straightforward and uncomplicated. They report what he wanted to share and discuss the broad topics that he is capable of providing wisdom about. Those books did not delve into the messy details that pervade any public persons inner life. To me that seems better. Although it may not be in style today, I actually prefer to read about ideal types. I was neither surprised or impressed to learn that of the complexity of what Naipaul's real life was like. Although in a sense it is nice to know what is behind the curtain — to confirm what one had easily suspected — I didn't find it to be so revelatory or useful. He was a genius with bad social skills and many personal torments. This is not so unheard of.
By far the best parts of the book were the passages where Naipaul himself speaks on the underlying issue that he had spent his life writing about: the painful failures of developing countries. It was interesting to learn how much racism he experienced in England as well, including from people far less accomplished than him in the English language. Once he overcame that though he didn't seem to hold a grudge, nor did he have much sympathy for those who struggled to rise after him. What I found even more amazing in the book was the story of his father. Of Brahmin extraction, he found himself an illiterate laborer in Trinidad. Somehow he managed to teach himself to read and write, rising to become a journalist and even publishing a worthwhile novel. His dreams and talents were ultimately hemmed in by his circumstances. His son reached the heights that fate had denied him. If anything in this book gives a clue as to where Naipaul's genius came from, the story of his father was it.
As biographies go, none can be more thorough than this. Although this was a capably written and heroically researched book about a person I am deeply interested in, for some reason I found the level of detail to actually be excessive. Maybe there isn't that much worth saying or remembering about any individual life.
Read
April 6, 2022Rabindranath Tagore was the first Asiatic ever to win the Noble, in 1913, for his "beautiful verse" and the assiduous expertise in translating his Bengali poems into English, thereby making them "a part of the literature of the West." Gurudev was the first and the last Indian to be honoured so.
Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul comes close. He wasn't an Indian citizen. Born in Trinidad to children of indentured Indians, he adopted a British nationality long before winning the Nobel in literature in 2001. Indians yet were elated, unperturbed by the fact that Naipaul was a grandchild of emigrants, and had been hostile in his writings about India. The then Vajpayee government felicitated him. He was pleased by the gesture. This book documents his life till a few years before that.
Naipaul had an immense self-awareness of being 'the writer', an author and an artist. It was his life long ambition, an inheritance from his father, to create literature, at the altar of which there were to be several sacrifices, the greatest being that of his wife Patricia Hale. Poor Patsy. My hand is forced to write of her because this book is as much her own biography as it is her husband's. Pitiful Pat. It is her life, juxtaposed against Sir Naipaul's that brings to view his complete personality, piercing through the artist's aura.
He was a horrid husband, cruel in an unheeding manner, mean to strangers, miserly with every penny, unfaithful to both his wife and mistress, loyal to no one but himself. His egocentric selfishness springs out of the pages, striking the reader, evident in his singular tendency to take from everyone, demand as a right and extract all that he could. But his purpose according to him was pure: the pursuit of truth in the service of literature. The intensity of his self-absorbed rapacity is only matched by his intellectual acuity, scrutinous observations and the empathy of expression in his writing. It was as if Naipaul needed to be a reprehensible son, the worst of husbands, an unjust lover, a treacherous friend, and a poisonous person in general, to become the author that he was.
The process of creation, literature in Naipaul's case, is often accompanied by destruction. It is not the artist alone who is tormented, but all those around him suffer as well. Having read several of his works, I find it very difficult to sympathize with him, even as I bow to the mastery of his craft. I ask myself if the cost of elegant writing, books that are pedantic as well as pleasurable to read, too high a cost? Must he destroy all in his quest to be the writer he dreamt to be? Wasn't settling for less ever an option? Was it all really worth it? You can arrive at Naipaul's answers to these questions by reading this book.
Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul comes close. He wasn't an Indian citizen. Born in Trinidad to children of indentured Indians, he adopted a British nationality long before winning the Nobel in literature in 2001. Indians yet were elated, unperturbed by the fact that Naipaul was a grandchild of emigrants, and had been hostile in his writings about India. The then Vajpayee government felicitated him. He was pleased by the gesture. This book documents his life till a few years before that.
Naipaul had an immense self-awareness of being 'the writer', an author and an artist. It was his life long ambition, an inheritance from his father, to create literature, at the altar of which there were to be several sacrifices, the greatest being that of his wife Patricia Hale. Poor Patsy. My hand is forced to write of her because this book is as much her own biography as it is her husband's. Pitiful Pat. It is her life, juxtaposed against Sir Naipaul's that brings to view his complete personality, piercing through the artist's aura.
He was a horrid husband, cruel in an unheeding manner, mean to strangers, miserly with every penny, unfaithful to both his wife and mistress, loyal to no one but himself. His egocentric selfishness springs out of the pages, striking the reader, evident in his singular tendency to take from everyone, demand as a right and extract all that he could. But his purpose according to him was pure: the pursuit of truth in the service of literature. The intensity of his self-absorbed rapacity is only matched by his intellectual acuity, scrutinous observations and the empathy of expression in his writing. It was as if Naipaul needed to be a reprehensible son, the worst of husbands, an unjust lover, a treacherous friend, and a poisonous person in general, to become the author that he was.
The process of creation, literature in Naipaul's case, is often accompanied by destruction. It is not the artist alone who is tormented, but all those around him suffer as well. Having read several of his works, I find it very difficult to sympathize with him, even as I bow to the mastery of his craft. I ask myself if the cost of elegant writing, books that are pedantic as well as pleasurable to read, too high a cost? Must he destroy all in his quest to be the writer he dreamt to be? Wasn't settling for less ever an option? Was it all really worth it? You can arrive at Naipaul's answers to these questions by reading this book.
April 11, 2010
A lot has been made of how frank this biography is. It’s certainly true that V.S. Naipaul gave his biographer Patrick French access to a huge amount of material, including things that other people would have tried to keep quiet about. For example the racism, the bigotry, the use of prostitutes, the affairs, the betrayals, the occasional violence, the perpetual cruelty. Yes, this is a very frank biography.
But what impressed me most about the book is how French succeeded in making Naipaul into a consistent, understandable character. It doesn’t mean that I like him or approve of the things he did, but it means that I understand how he came to be the way he was. French’s depiction of Naipaul’s life is so complete that I feel as if I know the man now.
Naipaul’s main motivation is established early on in the book. His family life is chaotic, with his whole extended family sharing one large house and constant bickering between the various uncles and aunts. He feels he has to get out of Trinidad, and to do so he devotes all his energy to winning a rare scholarship to study at Oxford. He wins it, moves to England and meets with racism, which intensifies his obsession with working, harder and harder, to show people he’s the best, he’s V.S. Naipaul the writer, not just the wog that they see.
The pattern continues throughout the rest of the book, as Naipaul puts his writing above everything else. He betrays his wife, his family, his friends, the people who help him — he will sacrifice anything to become a great writer. The result is tremendous success, but also extreme loneliness. It’s amazing how, throughout the whole book, there are almost no genuine friendships. Naipaul seems to have lots of connections and acquaintances, but no real friends. He works the literary circles of London, befriending aristocrats and using their spare country houses to get the isolation he needs to work on his books, but when he needs to confide in someone he has no options.
One of the most astonishing passages in the book was when Naipaul was having problems with his long-term mistress, Margaret, and the person he went to for support and advice was his wife Pat! She was the only person he could confide in, and the other astonishing thing was that she let him do it. She knew about Margaret for something like 20 years, and yet she let him run off to Argentina to be with her for a few months, and then come back to her when he needed her again. As with Naipaul himself, Pat’s life became a pattern. Early on, soon after they met at Oxford, Naipaul had a nervous breakdown and it was Pat who supported him and saved him. From that point on, Naipaul controlled her completely, not by force but by using his own frailty as an excuse. He stopped her from pursuing her dream of acting because of his own insecurities, and she let him do it. It’s a fascinating and quite disturbing relationship. Naipaul is both dominant and helpless, using his apparent helplessness to lock Pat into a manipulative relationship. At one point he leaves her, but then returns a few months later saying he needs her help, and yet again she lets him come back. She seems to be willing to do anything to support him and especially, as he has more and more success, his writing. In the diary extracts that French quotes, there’s often a sense that she knows her life is being ruined, but that she has come to share her husband’s view that his writing is so important that everything else must be sacrificed to support what she calls his “Genius”.
There are plenty of examples in this book of pronouncements from V.S. Naipaul that hardly seem worthy of the label “genius”. For instance, writing to his editor Diana Athill, “Lunacy and servility: they remain the ingredients of the Negro character. I wonder why this isn’t written about, why the Negro writers continue to be so sentimental about themselves.” Or talking about the effect of his affair with Margaret on his wife Pat: “I was liberated. She was destroyed. It was inevitable.”
The racism French tries to explain as provocation: Naipaul liking to take extreme positions to provoke a reaction. Some of this is plausible – for example in public appearances or at dinner parties he might want to take on this persona, deliberately aggravating people purely for effect. But there’s no reason to do that in private letters, so I think there’s something more going on. I think it’s bound up with the reason he left Trinidad, the hatred he had learned to feel for the island and, by extension, the majority black population. His family made it clear to him that he should associate with Indians only – one of his cousins recalls the grandmother saying “You can’t associate with niggers.” When Naipaul went to England later, he was anxious to distinguish himself from other Caribbean writers like Sam Selvon and George Lamming. And when Pat tried to help him get a job by appealing to someone in government who helped West Indian immigrants, he said he “would not involve himself with Mr Davies, a latter-day protector of immigrants, nor would he be classified alongside people who climbed off banana boats wearing zoot-suits and wanted jobs in factories. He was V.S. Naipaul, the writer.”
The emotional incapacity is astonishing, too. When Margaret gets pregnant, Naipaul just stops answering her letters. She writes to him in distress, asking for his support, and he does nothing. This happens a couple of times. Later, when Pat is dying of cancer, he is faced with the prospect of being with Margaret finally, and dumps her. He then proposes to Nadira, a woman he met in Pakistan. The day after Pat is cremated, Nadira moves into the house Pat and Naipaul had shared for decades. In his day-to-day life, it’s Pat who has to deal with anything unpleasant, while Naipaul just hides, abdicating responsibility.
It’s interesting, and a little depressing, that Naipaul did not make much money as a writer for a very long time. Even in the 1970s, when he was already a big name and had won the Booker Prize and was writing columns and appearing on TV, he was still only making £7,600 a year, and for many years Pat was supporting him with her teaching work. In the 1980s, partly due to a new agent, his average income jumped to £143,600, and then of course winning the Nobel Prize made him a very rich man. But for a long, long time, even when he was famous, he wasn’t making that much money.
I was surprised that the book ended slightly abruptly, just after Pat’s death in 1996. This also coincides with his marriage to Nadira, so made me wonder if the biography was, in this respect, not completely frank. Perhaps either Naipaul or Nadira refused access to this latest chapter. Or maybe there will be another volume covering his later years – the last word in the book is “Enough”, with a footnote saying “For the moment.”
But what impressed me most about the book is how French succeeded in making Naipaul into a consistent, understandable character. It doesn’t mean that I like him or approve of the things he did, but it means that I understand how he came to be the way he was. French’s depiction of Naipaul’s life is so complete that I feel as if I know the man now.
Naipaul’s main motivation is established early on in the book. His family life is chaotic, with his whole extended family sharing one large house and constant bickering between the various uncles and aunts. He feels he has to get out of Trinidad, and to do so he devotes all his energy to winning a rare scholarship to study at Oxford. He wins it, moves to England and meets with racism, which intensifies his obsession with working, harder and harder, to show people he’s the best, he’s V.S. Naipaul the writer, not just the wog that they see.
The pattern continues throughout the rest of the book, as Naipaul puts his writing above everything else. He betrays his wife, his family, his friends, the people who help him — he will sacrifice anything to become a great writer. The result is tremendous success, but also extreme loneliness. It’s amazing how, throughout the whole book, there are almost no genuine friendships. Naipaul seems to have lots of connections and acquaintances, but no real friends. He works the literary circles of London, befriending aristocrats and using their spare country houses to get the isolation he needs to work on his books, but when he needs to confide in someone he has no options.
One of the most astonishing passages in the book was when Naipaul was having problems with his long-term mistress, Margaret, and the person he went to for support and advice was his wife Pat! She was the only person he could confide in, and the other astonishing thing was that she let him do it. She knew about Margaret for something like 20 years, and yet she let him run off to Argentina to be with her for a few months, and then come back to her when he needed her again. As with Naipaul himself, Pat’s life became a pattern. Early on, soon after they met at Oxford, Naipaul had a nervous breakdown and it was Pat who supported him and saved him. From that point on, Naipaul controlled her completely, not by force but by using his own frailty as an excuse. He stopped her from pursuing her dream of acting because of his own insecurities, and she let him do it. It’s a fascinating and quite disturbing relationship. Naipaul is both dominant and helpless, using his apparent helplessness to lock Pat into a manipulative relationship. At one point he leaves her, but then returns a few months later saying he needs her help, and yet again she lets him come back. She seems to be willing to do anything to support him and especially, as he has more and more success, his writing. In the diary extracts that French quotes, there’s often a sense that she knows her life is being ruined, but that she has come to share her husband’s view that his writing is so important that everything else must be sacrificed to support what she calls his “Genius”.
There are plenty of examples in this book of pronouncements from V.S. Naipaul that hardly seem worthy of the label “genius”. For instance, writing to his editor Diana Athill, “Lunacy and servility: they remain the ingredients of the Negro character. I wonder why this isn’t written about, why the Negro writers continue to be so sentimental about themselves.” Or talking about the effect of his affair with Margaret on his wife Pat: “I was liberated. She was destroyed. It was inevitable.”
The racism French tries to explain as provocation: Naipaul liking to take extreme positions to provoke a reaction. Some of this is plausible – for example in public appearances or at dinner parties he might want to take on this persona, deliberately aggravating people purely for effect. But there’s no reason to do that in private letters, so I think there’s something more going on. I think it’s bound up with the reason he left Trinidad, the hatred he had learned to feel for the island and, by extension, the majority black population. His family made it clear to him that he should associate with Indians only – one of his cousins recalls the grandmother saying “You can’t associate with niggers.” When Naipaul went to England later, he was anxious to distinguish himself from other Caribbean writers like Sam Selvon and George Lamming. And when Pat tried to help him get a job by appealing to someone in government who helped West Indian immigrants, he said he “would not involve himself with Mr Davies, a latter-day protector of immigrants, nor would he be classified alongside people who climbed off banana boats wearing zoot-suits and wanted jobs in factories. He was V.S. Naipaul, the writer.”
The emotional incapacity is astonishing, too. When Margaret gets pregnant, Naipaul just stops answering her letters. She writes to him in distress, asking for his support, and he does nothing. This happens a couple of times. Later, when Pat is dying of cancer, he is faced with the prospect of being with Margaret finally, and dumps her. He then proposes to Nadira, a woman he met in Pakistan. The day after Pat is cremated, Nadira moves into the house Pat and Naipaul had shared for decades. In his day-to-day life, it’s Pat who has to deal with anything unpleasant, while Naipaul just hides, abdicating responsibility.
It’s interesting, and a little depressing, that Naipaul did not make much money as a writer for a very long time. Even in the 1970s, when he was already a big name and had won the Booker Prize and was writing columns and appearing on TV, he was still only making £7,600 a year, and for many years Pat was supporting him with her teaching work. In the 1980s, partly due to a new agent, his average income jumped to £143,600, and then of course winning the Nobel Prize made him a very rich man. But for a long, long time, even when he was famous, he wasn’t making that much money.
I was surprised that the book ended slightly abruptly, just after Pat’s death in 1996. This also coincides with his marriage to Nadira, so made me wonder if the biography was, in this respect, not completely frank. Perhaps either Naipaul or Nadira refused access to this latest chapter. Or maybe there will be another volume covering his later years – the last word in the book is “Enough”, with a footnote saying “For the moment.”
August 11, 2009
It must be difficult to write the biography of a writer of V. S. Naipaul's caliber. No living writer in the English language surpasses him in sheer talent, and I am hard-pressed to think of an equal. A reader familiar with Naipaul's flawless prose and witheringly cruel personal observations will inevitably expect similar talent from the writer's biographer. And if Patrick French does not here deliver the impossible, he at least comes close.
The purely literary difficulties are compounded by the distasteful nature of the subject. No one without an iron stomach could so completely immerse himself in the life of the most personally loathsome literary figure alive today. I read several reviews of this book before reading it myself, and all of them have marveled at the level of access that Naipaul granted French. In the end he made no demands for changes, either.
As far as I can tell, this has been uniformly misinterpreted by the reviewers as courage on the part of Naipaul, or at least a disdain for what people think of him. What the reviewers don't understand -- and what should be obvious after nearly 500 pages -- is that Naipaul revels in his own infamy, and for the past several decades at least has cultivated it in a way that can only be judged deliberate. French is charitable in saying that "his willingness to allow such a book to be published in his lifetime was at once an act of narcissism and humility." This is a charming -- almost Naipaulian -- turn of phrase, but it is only half-true, and by that I mean to say that everything V. S. Naipaul does is an act of narcissism alone, because he does not have a molecule of humility in his body.
Indeed, reading this book is confirmation of why Naipaul's racism and colonial apologetics cannot be ascribed to "self-hatred." V.S. Naipaul may be afflicted with many things, but insufficient self-regard is not one of them. If he wanted to "escape" from Trinidad it is only because he regarded himself as so much better than everyone else there. Repeatedly, after lengthy and detail-rich discussions of the pain he caused other people -- more often than not those closest to him -- Naipaul's statements to French are full of self-pity, with pro forma concern for others tacked on in such a way that it is hard to escape the conclusion that Naipaul might be an outright sociopath.
The book has several faults:
(1) Indulgence of its subject's cranky politics, including his pretensions to "honesty." Edward Said was correct in saying of Naipaul's work that "what is seen as crucially informative and telling . . . - [e.g.,:] accounts of the Indian darkness or the Arab predicament - is precisely what is weakest about it: with reference to the actualities it is ignorant, illiterate, and cliché-ridden." Throughout the book French presents Naipaul as the foe of orthodoxy, and even slags off "political correctness," even though his ideas about Third World backwardness are the real, prevailing orthodoxy on the middlebrow opinion pages and in the State Departments and Foreign Services of the world's richest countries.
(2) Overattention to Naipaul's distasteful sex life. It is impossible to write a good biography without discussing his tortured first marriage to Patricia Hale; his long affair with Margaret Gooding; his unceremonious dumping of Gooding in favor of his current wife Nadira shortly after Patricia died (Margaret found out about the wedding from the papers); and even his frequent visits to prostitutes early in his marriage to Patricia (a fact he revealed only late in life, to the newspapers, while Patricia was dying of cancer -- another classic Naipaulian touch, that). The problem is that French gives a pass to -- or at least over-tolerates -- his subject's awful politics and petty bigotry, but makes up for it by documenting this aspect of his personal life in gruesome detail. And indeed no sane person could fail to be appalled, though we could all be spared the fact that, for example, V.S. Naipaul's airhead mistress -- at his instigation -- had taken to referring to the penis of the future Nobel laureate as a Hindu "god" and wrote that she wanted to worship at the temple. (And indeed, by the time you are finished reading this sentence you will know that she also once sent him "a 1:1 scale drawing of his erect penis, done in dark-brown felt-tip; the penis wore sunglasses and a lime-green cowboy hat." Patrick French is responsible for the fact that this image will never leave my head, and now I am responsible for the fact that it will never leave yours.)
But all of this is mixed in with rich discussion of the family life that birthed "A House for Mr. Biswas" and other treasures; a pathetic yet ultimately moving portrayal of Patricia Hale; well-done portraits of the others in Naipaul's life (Paul Theroux, author of the vengeful "Sir Vidia's Shadow," comes off more as a starstruck groupie than an actual friend of any kind); and an occasionally harrowing account of the creative process, particularly in the cases of "Guerrillas" and "A Bend In the River."
All told, if you're going to read a recent biography, this is the one.
The purely literary difficulties are compounded by the distasteful nature of the subject. No one without an iron stomach could so completely immerse himself in the life of the most personally loathsome literary figure alive today. I read several reviews of this book before reading it myself, and all of them have marveled at the level of access that Naipaul granted French. In the end he made no demands for changes, either.
As far as I can tell, this has been uniformly misinterpreted by the reviewers as courage on the part of Naipaul, or at least a disdain for what people think of him. What the reviewers don't understand -- and what should be obvious after nearly 500 pages -- is that Naipaul revels in his own infamy, and for the past several decades at least has cultivated it in a way that can only be judged deliberate. French is charitable in saying that "his willingness to allow such a book to be published in his lifetime was at once an act of narcissism and humility." This is a charming -- almost Naipaulian -- turn of phrase, but it is only half-true, and by that I mean to say that everything V. S. Naipaul does is an act of narcissism alone, because he does not have a molecule of humility in his body.
Indeed, reading this book is confirmation of why Naipaul's racism and colonial apologetics cannot be ascribed to "self-hatred." V.S. Naipaul may be afflicted with many things, but insufficient self-regard is not one of them. If he wanted to "escape" from Trinidad it is only because he regarded himself as so much better than everyone else there. Repeatedly, after lengthy and detail-rich discussions of the pain he caused other people -- more often than not those closest to him -- Naipaul's statements to French are full of self-pity, with pro forma concern for others tacked on in such a way that it is hard to escape the conclusion that Naipaul might be an outright sociopath.
The book has several faults:
(1) Indulgence of its subject's cranky politics, including his pretensions to "honesty." Edward Said was correct in saying of Naipaul's work that "what is seen as crucially informative and telling . . . - [e.g.,:] accounts of the Indian darkness or the Arab predicament - is precisely what is weakest about it: with reference to the actualities it is ignorant, illiterate, and cliché-ridden." Throughout the book French presents Naipaul as the foe of orthodoxy, and even slags off "political correctness," even though his ideas about Third World backwardness are the real, prevailing orthodoxy on the middlebrow opinion pages and in the State Departments and Foreign Services of the world's richest countries.
(2) Overattention to Naipaul's distasteful sex life. It is impossible to write a good biography without discussing his tortured first marriage to Patricia Hale; his long affair with Margaret Gooding; his unceremonious dumping of Gooding in favor of his current wife Nadira shortly after Patricia died (Margaret found out about the wedding from the papers); and even his frequent visits to prostitutes early in his marriage to Patricia (a fact he revealed only late in life, to the newspapers, while Patricia was dying of cancer -- another classic Naipaulian touch, that). The problem is that French gives a pass to -- or at least over-tolerates -- his subject's awful politics and petty bigotry, but makes up for it by documenting this aspect of his personal life in gruesome detail. And indeed no sane person could fail to be appalled, though we could all be spared the fact that, for example, V.S. Naipaul's airhead mistress -- at his instigation -- had taken to referring to the penis of the future Nobel laureate as a Hindu "god" and wrote that she wanted to worship at the temple. (And indeed, by the time you are finished reading this sentence you will know that she also once sent him "a 1:1 scale drawing of his erect penis, done in dark-brown felt-tip; the penis wore sunglasses and a lime-green cowboy hat." Patrick French is responsible for the fact that this image will never leave my head, and now I am responsible for the fact that it will never leave yours.)
But all of this is mixed in with rich discussion of the family life that birthed "A House for Mr. Biswas" and other treasures; a pathetic yet ultimately moving portrayal of Patricia Hale; well-done portraits of the others in Naipaul's life (Paul Theroux, author of the vengeful "Sir Vidia's Shadow," comes off more as a starstruck groupie than an actual friend of any kind); and an occasionally harrowing account of the creative process, particularly in the cases of "Guerrillas" and "A Bend In the River."
All told, if you're going to read a recent biography, this is the one.
May 22, 2013
Author Patrick French has created a tour de force portrait of a great writer whose worldly success and emotional vulnerabilities eventually combined to push him off the deep end as a human being. I read this book for a chance to revisit the fine work that I remember admiring so much when I started to read Naipaul in college in the late 1970s (at the suggestion of a friend and fellow Duke student from Mexico City). A House for Mr. Biswas, A Bend in the River, The Return of Eva Peron--I still have all the dusty paperbacks, and eagerly pulled them open to compare the text with what was in the biography. It was extremely, even intensely interesting to see French reveal the nuts & bolts of Naipaul's writing techniques and find out how these perfectly crafted works were created. So that's where that line about the Argentinean death squads driving Ford Falcons came from! For that alone, French's book is one of the best portrayals of the writing process I have read.
I also remember the tone of pungent cruelty right under the surface of Naipaul's books. I remember tasting the same kind of barbed emotional aggression in Paul Theroux's books and the style went on to become very fashionable at the time. Now I understand how the many "follower" authors mimicked the leader. At the time, in the 1970s, many reviewers and established intellectuals welcomed the abrasiveness as authentic. I did not like the cruelty for its own sake, and never read Theroux's books for that reason. Nevertheless, Naipaul was irresistible in spite of his meanness--he was just so damn smart you had to find out what he had seen and how he would write about it.
Now about Naipaul's honesty--it's a twisted variety. He's honest in everything that is angry, cynical or critical. In our world, that is unfortunately a very long list, and this makes him look "good" as a truth teller. However, he is so profoundly dishonest about those places where goodness is real, that he destroyed his heart and soul in the process of reaching the apogee of his career. The book's title sums it all up--You have to be willing to sacrifice anything and anyone to get ahead in this world--that's the way the world is. That's the way Naipaul is. That's why he is famous. We should all think about that for a minute.
As to the gossipy part about the three-way marriage (in truth, something beyond your average adultery, more like polygamy jury-rigged for the monogamous west) French has dared to give dignity to a cuckolded literary wife and to her suffering. These women usually get tossed out with the dishwater by macho literary lions (who glorify the thrill of outside passion) and women critics (who can turn on their own kind and be very contemptuous of sensitive women who cannot protect themselves). Some of these characters appear right in the book making condescending observations about Pat Hale's suffering, or cheering on Naipaul's kinky and self-centered sexual preferences as an "awakening" necessary for his literary output.
I suspect that he was cruel to Pat because he was and still is profoundly insecure about his masculine pride and he could never forgive her for having witnessed his early weakness. The more I read, the more I was actually embarrassed for him. In the photo of him strutting for Margaret Gooding with one leg up on a railing, he looks like one of those cocky, insecure little guys who would drive a Honda Civic Pocket Rocket with a loud muffler and think he was impressing girls. Ouch.
I would suggest that this biography is a conscious, artistic coda for Naipaul's writing career in the same way that Picasso's final self-portrait captures his belated and horrified recognition of the toll his fame has taken on the people around him. Picasso finally let the guilt emerge and looked at the truth of his inner self-loathing. Those two horrible burning eyes stare back at the artist in inexorable recognition of the human wreckage left behind him in his life-long pursuit of dominance, sexual pleasure and fame. We're part of it too--after all, we bought his pictures and fed his glory. In that picture, Picasso's even gone beyond shame--it's only fear left in his future. Luckily for Naipaul, he never had children to torment into committing suicide as Picasso did, so he hasn't quite gotten to that level of horror yet...
I celebrate French's courage in letting the facts speak for themselves. At the end, he gives Naipaul and his next wife, Nadira, the rope, and lets them hang themselves. French loves the truth as much as Naipaul.
I also remember the tone of pungent cruelty right under the surface of Naipaul's books. I remember tasting the same kind of barbed emotional aggression in Paul Theroux's books and the style went on to become very fashionable at the time. Now I understand how the many "follower" authors mimicked the leader. At the time, in the 1970s, many reviewers and established intellectuals welcomed the abrasiveness as authentic. I did not like the cruelty for its own sake, and never read Theroux's books for that reason. Nevertheless, Naipaul was irresistible in spite of his meanness--he was just so damn smart you had to find out what he had seen and how he would write about it.
Now about Naipaul's honesty--it's a twisted variety. He's honest in everything that is angry, cynical or critical. In our world, that is unfortunately a very long list, and this makes him look "good" as a truth teller. However, he is so profoundly dishonest about those places where goodness is real, that he destroyed his heart and soul in the process of reaching the apogee of his career. The book's title sums it all up--You have to be willing to sacrifice anything and anyone to get ahead in this world--that's the way the world is. That's the way Naipaul is. That's why he is famous. We should all think about that for a minute.
As to the gossipy part about the three-way marriage (in truth, something beyond your average adultery, more like polygamy jury-rigged for the monogamous west) French has dared to give dignity to a cuckolded literary wife and to her suffering. These women usually get tossed out with the dishwater by macho literary lions (who glorify the thrill of outside passion) and women critics (who can turn on their own kind and be very contemptuous of sensitive women who cannot protect themselves). Some of these characters appear right in the book making condescending observations about Pat Hale's suffering, or cheering on Naipaul's kinky and self-centered sexual preferences as an "awakening" necessary for his literary output.
I suspect that he was cruel to Pat because he was and still is profoundly insecure about his masculine pride and he could never forgive her for having witnessed his early weakness. The more I read, the more I was actually embarrassed for him. In the photo of him strutting for Margaret Gooding with one leg up on a railing, he looks like one of those cocky, insecure little guys who would drive a Honda Civic Pocket Rocket with a loud muffler and think he was impressing girls. Ouch.
I would suggest that this biography is a conscious, artistic coda for Naipaul's writing career in the same way that Picasso's final self-portrait captures his belated and horrified recognition of the toll his fame has taken on the people around him. Picasso finally let the guilt emerge and looked at the truth of his inner self-loathing. Those two horrible burning eyes stare back at the artist in inexorable recognition of the human wreckage left behind him in his life-long pursuit of dominance, sexual pleasure and fame. We're part of it too--after all, we bought his pictures and fed his glory. In that picture, Picasso's even gone beyond shame--it's only fear left in his future. Luckily for Naipaul, he never had children to torment into committing suicide as Picasso did, so he hasn't quite gotten to that level of horror yet...
I celebrate French's courage in letting the facts speak for themselves. At the end, he gives Naipaul and his next wife, Nadira, the rope, and lets them hang themselves. French loves the truth as much as Naipaul.
February 28, 2025
Seriously one of the best books I’ve read in my life. Can’t speak more highly of it.
June 8, 2013
What a shitbag! Naipaul thrives on being a controversialist. This is sage. The author finds the soft areas in our hypocrisies about race and nation states. Naipaul exploits such. Quoting Mr. French, Naipaul's prose remains pellucid. His incorporation of these anxieties is an achievement. The Nobel Laureate's manipulation of such is well past the suspect.
I have yet to broach the personal life of Vidia. Not to wax sensationalist, I couldn’t make up this shit.
I have yet to broach the personal life of Vidia. Not to wax sensationalist, I couldn’t make up this shit.
April 8, 2011
This book is a brilliant tribute to one of the greatest writers in English of the past few decades. The narrative pace is good and it is gripping to read. When I finished the book, I thought it is a 'four star' book; but then on reflection, I felt that it was lacking in a few qualities and hence I ended up with one star less.
Vidia Naipaul emerges as a very complicated persona - narcissistic, intellectually brilliant, insensitive, original thinker, selfish and honest. In his own words, Naipaul writes to his wife, "..I am the spectator, free of the emancipatory fire, who has no wish to reform the human race..".
On the positive side, his fearless thinking and extraordinary abilities to write are well documented. His insight into the societies of the West Indies, Argentina, Africa and some of the Islamic nations in Asia is legendary and is shown through his non-fictional work. Contrary to the image created in the media, he was close to his father, brother, sisters and nephews and nieces. Like Indians from India, he felt the great responsibility and duty to support his sisters and mother through their lives, even though he didn't do it as well as his sisters did. But he was really close only to his sister Kamla. One can see his human side in his grief on the death of his sister Sati and brother Shiva.
On the other side, he was exploitative and cruel towards the women in his life - both his wife Pat and Margaret, his lover of two decades. He was depressed often and even attempted a suicide in his twenties. Prostitutes fascinated him and he continued visiting them even after his marriage. During his marriage, he carried on a twenty-year affair with Margaret with the full knowledge of his wife. He was highly class-conscious and had racial dislike for Blacks and Muslims. He was often rude, intolerant and parsimonious to the point of exploiting others. To cap it all, he starts an affair with a Pakistani woman even as his wife Pat was at death's door due to cancer.
Patrick French has produced an excellent book and he has done as good a job as one can in writing a biography of a living legend like Naipaul. But he has not thrown enough light on why a competent, ambitious and accomplished woman like Pat would be so servile towards Naipaul all her life. It looks as though Naipaul simply destroyed the self-esteem of any woman he lived with by his sheer brilliance. His lover Margaret also was abused physically and mentally but she still was crazy about him. She also comes off as someone whose self-esteem was in shambles during their relationship. French has not given much insight into the psychology behind these events. He hasn't blamed Naipaul's racism on his upper-caste Hindu origins like most people have done. But neither has he given much psychological insight into Naipaul's intense dislike for calling himself a 'West Indian'. Naipaul considered England his home and later on in life, made peace with India, the land of his ancestors. Also, it is not clear as to how Naipaul has been able to charm Margaret for twenty years through an intensely sexual relationship, even though Naipaul himself admits that he was poorly equipped at seduction and sex. It seems that it was his intellectual brilliance that made Pat, Margaret and even Nadira, his current wife, crazy about being with him.
The book contains many of Naipaul's remarks in passing. On the position of Indians in Trinidad, the author quotes Naipaul's father as : .."The difficulty lies in the fact that they are are too much of a majority to assimilate, too much of a minority to dominate..". This applies possibly today to many islamic minority groups in Europe.
On Trinidad, Naipaul makes this punishing comments: "..like monkeys pleading for evolution, each claiming to be whiter than the other, Indians and Negroes appeal to the unacknowledged white audience to see how much they despise each other.."
On Islam, he says, "..it is innately imperialist, requiring its followers to diminish their native culture.....each country has a quarrel with the modern world;and my own feeling is that Islam, in these countries, is as much looking away as looking back. Is it despair, a recognition of intellectual and scientific incapacity? Is it nihilism? Doesn't this kind of anti-intellectual movement...commit these countries to a continuing dependence on the technology and science of the West? Independence then, leads back to dependence.."
This book is a must read for all V.S. Naipaul fans. Those who haven't read Naipaul at all, perhaps should not read this to get an idea of the man.
Vidia Naipaul emerges as a very complicated persona - narcissistic, intellectually brilliant, insensitive, original thinker, selfish and honest. In his own words, Naipaul writes to his wife, "..I am the spectator, free of the emancipatory fire, who has no wish to reform the human race..".
On the positive side, his fearless thinking and extraordinary abilities to write are well documented. His insight into the societies of the West Indies, Argentina, Africa and some of the Islamic nations in Asia is legendary and is shown through his non-fictional work. Contrary to the image created in the media, he was close to his father, brother, sisters and nephews and nieces. Like Indians from India, he felt the great responsibility and duty to support his sisters and mother through their lives, even though he didn't do it as well as his sisters did. But he was really close only to his sister Kamla. One can see his human side in his grief on the death of his sister Sati and brother Shiva.
On the other side, he was exploitative and cruel towards the women in his life - both his wife Pat and Margaret, his lover of two decades. He was depressed often and even attempted a suicide in his twenties. Prostitutes fascinated him and he continued visiting them even after his marriage. During his marriage, he carried on a twenty-year affair with Margaret with the full knowledge of his wife. He was highly class-conscious and had racial dislike for Blacks and Muslims. He was often rude, intolerant and parsimonious to the point of exploiting others. To cap it all, he starts an affair with a Pakistani woman even as his wife Pat was at death's door due to cancer.
Patrick French has produced an excellent book and he has done as good a job as one can in writing a biography of a living legend like Naipaul. But he has not thrown enough light on why a competent, ambitious and accomplished woman like Pat would be so servile towards Naipaul all her life. It looks as though Naipaul simply destroyed the self-esteem of any woman he lived with by his sheer brilliance. His lover Margaret also was abused physically and mentally but she still was crazy about him. She also comes off as someone whose self-esteem was in shambles during their relationship. French has not given much insight into the psychology behind these events. He hasn't blamed Naipaul's racism on his upper-caste Hindu origins like most people have done. But neither has he given much psychological insight into Naipaul's intense dislike for calling himself a 'West Indian'. Naipaul considered England his home and later on in life, made peace with India, the land of his ancestors. Also, it is not clear as to how Naipaul has been able to charm Margaret for twenty years through an intensely sexual relationship, even though Naipaul himself admits that he was poorly equipped at seduction and sex. It seems that it was his intellectual brilliance that made Pat, Margaret and even Nadira, his current wife, crazy about being with him.
The book contains many of Naipaul's remarks in passing. On the position of Indians in Trinidad, the author quotes Naipaul's father as : .."The difficulty lies in the fact that they are are too much of a majority to assimilate, too much of a minority to dominate..". This applies possibly today to many islamic minority groups in Europe.
On Trinidad, Naipaul makes this punishing comments: "..like monkeys pleading for evolution, each claiming to be whiter than the other, Indians and Negroes appeal to the unacknowledged white audience to see how much they despise each other.."
On Islam, he says, "..it is innately imperialist, requiring its followers to diminish their native culture.....each country has a quarrel with the modern world;and my own feeling is that Islam, in these countries, is as much looking away as looking back. Is it despair, a recognition of intellectual and scientific incapacity? Is it nihilism? Doesn't this kind of anti-intellectual movement...commit these countries to a continuing dependence on the technology and science of the West? Independence then, leads back to dependence.."
This book is a must read for all V.S. Naipaul fans. Those who haven't read Naipaul at all, perhaps should not read this to get an idea of the man.
August 16, 2009
So far, engrossing. I love Naipaul's work and continue to be fascinated by his misanthropic behavior, apparent self-loathing and egotism, bigotry, and magic way with language.
August -- OK, I am still reading this. It's very rich and -- for me -- needs to be ingested in doses. Lots of heavy stuff about Naipaul's twisted relationship with the Argentina woman, sad stuff about his wife Pat (which makes me both frustrated about her and sympathetic), etc.
August -- OK, I am still reading this. It's very rich and -- for me -- needs to be ingested in doses. Lots of heavy stuff about Naipaul's twisted relationship with the Argentina woman, sad stuff about his wife Pat (which makes me both frustrated about her and sympathetic), etc.
January 20, 2019
I am a big fan of Naipaul and I was therefore keen on learning more about his development as a writer. This biography focuses too much on his personal life and too little on what really made him tic, intellectually.
September 2, 2023
Naipaul has a reputation that precedes him and this book does little to counter that reputation, if it set out to do that. French has authored the book with utmost honesty, something which Naipaul himself would admire if he ever cared to read it. The book almost feels like a repentance by Naipaul of his personal failings, numerous, spread throughout his life. However, even that view would feed into the persona grandiose of Naipaul and ultimately serve him in the end.
April 17, 2023
I’d say this book is over-written. The biographer seems bent on including almost every recorded detail of Naipaul’s life, to achieve an utterly comprehensive account. The main focus is on personal experiences, and far less on the social worlds that Naipaul explored, or how his works affected public perceptions. Like Naipaul’s own books, this biography is unstintingly honest, and it’s often painful. The way he treated the women in his life is almost a torture to read. When I’ve read Naipaul’s books, I felt stimulated by his perceptive curiosity. But this book left me sad. I hadn’t quite realized what the desperate need for respect and status can do to a man’s drive for achievement, and his capacity for friendship.
February 8, 2009
I don't generally read biographies, but this one I could not pass on. I am not a fan of V.S. Naipaul's writing. I could only manage to finish one book of his, "A House for Mr. Biswas". But when I read Paul Theroux's account of is friendship with Naipaul ("Sir Vidia's Shadow") I was intrigued. Naipaul was portrayed as selfish, brilliant, obstinate, proud, unfeeling, shocking, and more. How could you not want to know more about him? French charts Naipaul's personal life through all of its ups and downs, marriages and affairs, books and travels, and tells it with a cold-eyed objectivity that left me wanting to know more. I suspect the book practically wrote itself for with such a complex subject as Naipaul, there is a fantastic lode of richness to be mined, and much of it is right beneath the surface. All the time I was reading, my main interest was in tying the person to his work, or separating them. I didn't come away with a lot of insights, just that writers are all different, and one could be a less than upright character in the sense of personal morality, but could still be a respected writer.
January 26, 2009
Patrick French had full cooperation from Naipaul in writing this warts and all biography. Naipaul is a great writer and a famously difficult person ... that he would so liberally expose himself , his correspondence, as well as the diaries of his first wife underscores his unsentimental respect for evidence (for me the foundation of his non-fiction works). The Naipaul family, early education, Trinidadian and Indian (Hindu) antecedents make an engaging story ... the outcome (including a Nobel Prize in Literature) could not be predicted, but the book lays out the writer's ambition, perseverance, talent and intellect. I have never read any of his fiction ... but will do that now. I thought the book was a good read. I was prepared for a bumpy ride. Yes. His relationship with the Pat Hale, his first wife and his long-term mistress is disturbing, and may finish him off for some folks. Very quickly, after the death of Pat, he remarries. Although, it appears he is lovingly compatible with his second wife, a Pakistani journalist who is presented as a strong, confident personality, it doesn't make earlier relationships easier to digest.
January 27, 2009
This confirmed what I suspected from reading Naipaul all these years and that is that he is an extremely insecure and nervous person who is brilliant at critically picking everything apart. He is able to spot flaws and would be characterized as the teacher who groans with pleasure when finding a mistake on a paper, then feels deep but temporary satisfaction when the red pen makes a big check mark.
I feel sympathy for him, also. He is a skinny little black man who made his way in a big white man's city, all the time shaking in his threadbare socks and cheap shoes. One woman (Pat) accepted him so he was able to go on. Every other woman and most men probably averted their eyes when he was in view at Oxford.
So as a person he is one of those pitiful, mean, weak, troublemakers who are also difficult and disgusting to deal with, although he wrote brilliantly for a long time.
He is lucky to have found the woman from Pakistan! Or who knows how long he would have rattled around alone? Until he died?
I feel sympathy for him, also. He is a skinny little black man who made his way in a big white man's city, all the time shaking in his threadbare socks and cheap shoes. One woman (Pat) accepted him so he was able to go on. Every other woman and most men probably averted their eyes when he was in view at Oxford.
So as a person he is one of those pitiful, mean, weak, troublemakers who are also difficult and disgusting to deal with, although he wrote brilliantly for a long time.
He is lucky to have found the woman from Pakistan! Or who knows how long he would have rattled around alone? Until he died?
February 5, 2009
Reviewers were mostly astounded that such a good writer as V. S. Naipaul could be such a horrible person. Though he has always been known as prickly, critics seemed to compete for new adjectives to describe the man who emerges in this book. Michael Dirda's list: "whiney, narcissistic, insulting, needy, callous, impolite, cruel, vengeful, indecisive, miserly, exploitative, snobbish, sadistic, self-pitying and ungrateful." Patrick French, by contrast, earned quite positive labels for his well-written, warts-and-all biography. Yet critics agreed that Naipaul, despite the portrait of him that emerges here, has one remaining virtue. As the New York Times's Dwight Garner put it, Naipaul "was brave to allow this complicated parsing of his own myth into the world."
This is an excerpt from a review published in Bookmarks magazine.
December 1, 2018
Would do six stars if I could. A literary masterpiece perhaps even outshining its magisterial and peerless subject: V.S. Naipaul, a writer described by the Nobel Committee as "Conrad's heir, and about whom much has been written (even if his books are under-read by today's intelligentsia and students); the writer of Indian ancestry from "the plantation colony of Trinidad," who, across his twenty-five-some books, was able to tell a kind of post-colonial truth no writer had told before, and who created a wholly new literary form in the process, a blend of autobiography, social commentary, history, and travel. Every sentence in this book feels necessary.
January 3, 2009
An extraordinary account of the life of an extraordinary author. You won't like Naipaul anybody for having read French's insightful study of his life and work. If, as the Modern Lovers used to say, nobody ever called Pablo Picasso an asshole; the same cannot be said of Naipaul.
Check my Austin Chronicle review here:
Check my Austin Chronicle review here:
September 29, 2014
What an unpleasant man. What a pity given how well he writes and the broad nature of his literary tastes. It might have been better not to know quite so much about the man. Paul Theroux comes off even worse. This book was purchased in Pashigat, Arunachul Pradesh, a tiny and remote town. Who would think they had a dozen book stands. It proved a great filler for the down time there always is when traveling.
June 16, 2015
A portrait of V.S. Naipaul, by an author who had access to the letters and papers previous authors did not. Not sure how it was received by Vidia, but it paints a picture of a type of original genius and clarity which is rare and certainly of benefit to the understanding of post-colonialism, migration, history and religion. Taken alongside the biography by Paul Theroux, also a great supplement to help you understand how writers relate to other writers.
March 30, 2010
One of the most brilliant biography of an extra-ordinary writer of our time
June 16, 2010
Vidiadhar Surajprasad (V.S.) Naipaul (1932-), the winner of the 2001 Nobel Prize for Literature, is one of the most highly regarded authors of the 20th century. He was born in Trinidad, and his ancestors were part of the Indian migration to this Caribbean island in the 19th century. He was awarded a scholarship to Oxford in 1950, where he met his wife, the former Patricia Hale. After his graduation he dedicated his life to becoming a writer, and was financially supported by Pat during his early years of struggle and poverty. He met with critical success starting with his first two novels, The Mystic Masseur (1957) and Miguel Street (1959), and he received international acclaim for A House for Mr. Biswas, his 1961 novel which is arguably his best. All of these novels were based in the Indian community of Trinidad that was familiar to him from childhood, and Mr. Biswas is a fictionalized representation of his father.
In the early 1960s, due to disillusionment with life in England, he began to travel abroad, and his later fiction, travelogues, and historical accounts were based in these countries, which included Trinidad and other Caribbean nations, India, Argentina, Uganda and Kenya. He cast a critical and unblinking eye upon the developing world; his books and magazine articles were applauded in Europe and the US, but former friends and colleagues from these lands viewed his work with disdain and a sense of betrayal. His notable later works in this middle period include In a Free State, the winner of the 1971 Booker Prize, India: A Wounded Civilization (1977), A Bend in the River (1979), and Among the Believers: An Islamic Journey (1981).
He finally achieved financial success in the 1980s, and he continued to be a productive and controversial writer in this later period. His most notable works were The Enigma of Arrival (1987) and India: A Million Mutinies Now (1990).
Pat died of breast cancer in 1996, and very soon afterward he married Nadira, a journalist from Pakistan that he met while Pat was terminally ill. His literary output since Patricia's death has been meager and mediocre, and he wrote his last novel, Magic Seeds, in 2004.
Patrick French, an award winning historian and biographer, was given full access to Mr. Naipaul and his papers and those of his first wife, and this extensively researched biography is the result. It follows 10 years after Paul Theroux's memoir Sir Vidia's Shadow, but French's book is more historically accurate and less personal than Theroux's work.
French describes Naipaul as a man who is a citizen of the world, but one who is lost in the places that he has called home. He was a member of the Indian minority in Trinidad, which became isolated from and polarized against its black majority, particularly after Eric Williams became the country's first prime minister after independence, and his relationships with his parents and siblings were distant and strained. He appeared to be most comfortable in England, but racism, a growing anti-immigrant sentiment and financial difficulty deeply affected and wounded him. He was even less comfortable in India, as he was unable to see the country's beauty and opportunity in the face of its crushing poverty and filth, a pattern that would be repeated in subsequent journeys to other countries. This is described in the first portion of the book, as French effectively portrays Naipaul as a sympathetic but difficult man, and demonstrates how this influenced his writing.
In keeping with his upbringing and rootlessness he was irascible and confrontational, and those closest to him, especially Pat, bore the brunt of his frequent tirades. Naipaul's career would not have been possible without Patricia, who tirelessly served him as a personal aide, confidant, and unpaid editor. However, he was not sexually attracted to her, and he began to seek satisfaction elsewhere, initially with prostitutes, and then in a long standing affair with Margaret Gooding, that destroyed Patricia's spirit once she became aware of it. French provides frequent examples of his dalliances and his difficult relationships throughout the second half of the book. Unfortunately, much of this section becomes gossipy and overly personal, and too many pages are spent in the description of Naipaul's affair.
The biography ends with Patricia's death in 1996, as Nadira moves in with Naipaul the day after the funeral.
The World Is What it Is is a richly detailed biography of Mr. Naipaul, as an author and a deeply flawed human being. The overemphasis on Naipaul's affairs and scandalous personal behavior in the second half of the book was a distraction, which added little to our understanding of the man. I would highly recommend this for those who are interested in Naipaul, but only marginally for everyone else.
In the early 1960s, due to disillusionment with life in England, he began to travel abroad, and his later fiction, travelogues, and historical accounts were based in these countries, which included Trinidad and other Caribbean nations, India, Argentina, Uganda and Kenya. He cast a critical and unblinking eye upon the developing world; his books and magazine articles were applauded in Europe and the US, but former friends and colleagues from these lands viewed his work with disdain and a sense of betrayal. His notable later works in this middle period include In a Free State, the winner of the 1971 Booker Prize, India: A Wounded Civilization (1977), A Bend in the River (1979), and Among the Believers: An Islamic Journey (1981).
He finally achieved financial success in the 1980s, and he continued to be a productive and controversial writer in this later period. His most notable works were The Enigma of Arrival (1987) and India: A Million Mutinies Now (1990).
Pat died of breast cancer in 1996, and very soon afterward he married Nadira, a journalist from Pakistan that he met while Pat was terminally ill. His literary output since Patricia's death has been meager and mediocre, and he wrote his last novel, Magic Seeds, in 2004.
Patrick French, an award winning historian and biographer, was given full access to Mr. Naipaul and his papers and those of his first wife, and this extensively researched biography is the result. It follows 10 years after Paul Theroux's memoir Sir Vidia's Shadow, but French's book is more historically accurate and less personal than Theroux's work.
French describes Naipaul as a man who is a citizen of the world, but one who is lost in the places that he has called home. He was a member of the Indian minority in Trinidad, which became isolated from and polarized against its black majority, particularly after Eric Williams became the country's first prime minister after independence, and his relationships with his parents and siblings were distant and strained. He appeared to be most comfortable in England, but racism, a growing anti-immigrant sentiment and financial difficulty deeply affected and wounded him. He was even less comfortable in India, as he was unable to see the country's beauty and opportunity in the face of its crushing poverty and filth, a pattern that would be repeated in subsequent journeys to other countries. This is described in the first portion of the book, as French effectively portrays Naipaul as a sympathetic but difficult man, and demonstrates how this influenced his writing.
In keeping with his upbringing and rootlessness he was irascible and confrontational, and those closest to him, especially Pat, bore the brunt of his frequent tirades. Naipaul's career would not have been possible without Patricia, who tirelessly served him as a personal aide, confidant, and unpaid editor. However, he was not sexually attracted to her, and he began to seek satisfaction elsewhere, initially with prostitutes, and then in a long standing affair with Margaret Gooding, that destroyed Patricia's spirit once she became aware of it. French provides frequent examples of his dalliances and his difficult relationships throughout the second half of the book. Unfortunately, much of this section becomes gossipy and overly personal, and too many pages are spent in the description of Naipaul's affair.
The biography ends with Patricia's death in 1996, as Nadira moves in with Naipaul the day after the funeral.
The World Is What it Is is a richly detailed biography of Mr. Naipaul, as an author and a deeply flawed human being. The overemphasis on Naipaul's affairs and scandalous personal behavior in the second half of the book was a distraction, which added little to our understanding of the man. I would highly recommend this for those who are interested in Naipaul, but only marginally for everyone else.
January 7, 2015
A writer is what he is
The writer has laboured much to bring out the biography of a writer who has written autobiographical fiction besides his travel books all his life. Naipaul seem to have always lived a life of poverty, as given in this book too. He is often bailed out by BBC or other British institution when he was about to sink financially, once he is out of Oxford. Spendthrift and whore-monger, he is in trouble perpetually. So he worked in close association with British establishment, it also seems.
Very often he meets good Samaritans in Britain or elsewhere, who pay him in advance to write about Argentine, just before the Falkland war; for an example. And he finds all the connections there to guide him besides a free accommodation and a lover as well. And he does a kind of writing which rubbishes every place he goes to and celebrates the Britain and British.
The Sepoy mutiny of India, which terrorised colonials for nearly a century until they left India in 1947, as noted by E M Forster in 1917 in "A PASSAGE TO INDIA'; Naipaul describes as the proof of British resistance.
In the Islamic journeys he became more notorious to see a war of religion in the days coming. It was a time when USSR troops occupied Afghanistan and CIA was building Mujjahiddins to fight them and Iranian revolution has taken place. The clash of civilization and settling the score of history is an old theme. The British establishment wanted that kind of books from him at that time. And he wrote what was expected of him. Now the world is only blaming Tony Blair for the war against terrorism which is going wrong and which is looking to escalate by the day.
What is really astonishing is, never in this book, Patrick French questions the motives of Naipaul to do this kind of writing after beginning with an innocuous book like Miguel street. Also, he celebrates the Booker prize `In a free state' won, which is a collection of very ordinary stories, later rejected by all the British editors who read it without the name of Naipaul and its title. But questioning the genius of Naipaul might bring the question about writing his biography as well.
So Naipaul, with his average talent and much ambition, played into the hands of the vested interests.
His writing was not appreciated much by wider audience except for his earliest work. But he found a strong supporter in the British establishment and went on to write the things which see a clash of civilization and a larger war. Time and again Naipaul has felt exasperation for not having become enough British in his work. Paul Theroux mentions him calling the Dutch `the potato eaters'.
Understandably, writing life is hard and penurious. And Naipaul minds rendering any other service besides producing words. This is a great weakness in a writer, for it spares him or her the banality of daily life and taking part in activities of the life which reveals a great deal about the people and the society. Without knowing them first hand, and writing out of rage and anger will produce a work which tries to contemplate a war of civilization. Also it calls for financial troubles, which will cripple the independence of the work.
His British wife works hard to make connection with upper class British people, who will bail out them often. So a very unlikely literary career becomes viable.
Naipaul says he is a man of the new world. He has no clue of the rise of China, however, anywhere in his work, which has over taken the USA as the largest economy of the world. And Nobel Academy mentioned his `prophetic journalism' to award him with The impression one gets from this book is that the myth called Naipaul was the best writer of the last century, though he also was the most despicable man who ever moved on this earth. Both these assumptions have been actively promoted by certain people all these years.
Literature at times no more remains an intellectual quest to find the larger truth. It often reduces to become an exercise like the faked orgasm of a prostitute simulated to satisfy the worst sexual anxieties of a wealthy customer.
The question comes to mind who this soft-spoken and erudite writer is. He is an aspiring British politician who belongs to an extreme right-wing party. It reduces greatly his risks as a writer, besides elucidating a lot about his subject matter and his writing in this book.one. So the failings are multiple, of Naipaul and the world.
A writer is what he is; the world is ever shifting, therefore.
Krishna bhatt
author
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