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V.S. Naipaul: still tilting at the world

In a recent interview in the run-up to the publication of his authorised biography The World Is What It Is by Patrick French, V.S. Naipaul, at times, sounded curiously unlike himself, speaking in a deeply mellowed tone that comes with ripe age (he is 75) and first intimations of mortality.

Indeed, the interviewer, Robert McCrum of The Observer Magazine, a self-confessed admirer of Naipaul, remarked that the “hateful misanthrope who stalks through the pages of (Paul Theroux’s) Sir Vidia’s Shadow … seems to have morphed into someone much more mellow.”

At one point, Naipaul even confessed that he wanted to “call it a day.” Asked whether he felt at home in Wiltshire with his “lovely green and white garden, his dense shrubbery and the timeless Avon flowing peacefully at the end of the sloping lawn,” the Nobel Laureate protested that, no, it was all “provisional.” “It’s provisional; it’s provisional. Only age is beginning to make me feel perhaps I should settle down somewhere, call it a day, you know,” he said.

It was a rare confession of vulnerability from a man not known for suffering moments of weakness in public or displaying emotions. What if Naipaul really hung up his boots, one wondered. Who would then feed the “beast” — I mean Britain’s literary hacks who thrive on gossip and controversies about him? A whole industry has sprung up around tales of Naipaul’s famously bad temper, arrogance and boorishness. Theroux wrote a whole book about his bruising relationship with his one-time mentor, though we will come to that later because it has now emerged that this bible of Naipaul-bashers is riddled with factual inaccuracies. So what would happen to this industry if Naipaul decided to “settle down?”

But hold on. For as one reads the full interview and extracts from the biography, one discovers that the old bruiser has neither any intention of retreating into the shadows (soon, he will be off to Uganda to research his next book) nor has he mellowed. He has already fallen out with his biographer and made clear that he does not intend to read the book. This after personally commissioning Mr. French and providing him unprecedented access to his archives, including private papers of his first wife Patricia.

“I asked Patrick to do it, but I haven’t read a word … I don’t intend to read the book,” he told Mr. McCrum.

The buzz is that the reason he wants to have nothing to do with Mr. French or his book is it is less than flattering to him portraying him as “selfish” and “cruel.” It is particularly scathing of his treatment of Patricia whom he effectively abandoned for Margaret Gooding, an American-Argentinian socialite he met in 1972. Naipaul’s claim that Patricia accepted the situation is dismissed in the book by his sister Savi as “absolute rubbish.”

Naipaul admits, according to Mr. French, that some of his actions such as visiting prostitutes while Patricia was battling with cancer might have hastened her death. “I think that consumed her. I think she had all the relapses and everything after that. She suffered. It could be said that I killed her. It could be said that I feel a little bit that way,” he is quoted as telling his biographer.

The book also highlights how, eventually, Naipaul unceremoniously dumped Ms Gooding too after he met a younger woman — the Pakistani journalist, Nadira Khanum Alvi, his present wife. And he backs his claim with a quote from Naipaul who acknowledges that Ms Gooding was “badly treated.”

“I feel that in all this Margaret was badly treated. I feel this very much. But you know there’s nothing I can do … I stayed with Margaret until she became middle-aged, almost an old lady,” he says.

In the absence of any denial from Naipaul, there is no reason to doubt Mr. French’s account. Is Naipaul, then, regretting that he confessed too much? Was he hoping that Mr. French, the loyal hand-picked biographer, would suppress the more inconvenient bits? Or, indeed, did he try to steer Mr. French but failed, and hence the pique?

In his Observer interview, he gave no reason why he didn’t intend to read the book though he appeared to brush aside “rumours of discord over the manuscript.” Whatever be his reasons, judging from the extracts, it seems like a pretty balanced work that, for the first time, not only allows us to get Naipaul’s version of Theroux’s diatribe in Sir Vidia’s Shadow but, more significantly, reveals some shocking inaccuracies in the book.

Theroux became famous almost overnight on the back of Sir Vidia’s Shadow which since its publication more than a decade ago has become a standard text for Naipaul-baiters — and Theroux a star witness for the prosecution whenever Naipaul is in the dock.

To Naipaul’s credit, he has refused to be drawn into a slanging match and largely maintained a dignified silence simply saying that he has not bothered to read his book. Now, thanks to his biography, we know that Theroux’s account was not all that it claimed on the tin: a “truthful” version of his 30-year-old association (he calls it “friendship”) with Naipaul. It is said to be so full of factual errors that, according to Mr. French, it is difficult to disentangle truth from fiction. “Significantly inaccurate, even deliberately fictive,” is his withering verdict.

He says that all these years, Sir Vidia’s Shadow: A Friendship Across Five Continents has been presented as a “reliable, even essential account of the life and opinions of V.S. Naipaul” but points out that, in fact, it is a clever mix of facts, half-truths, and plain lies. “The material in Sir Vidia’s Shadow combines the accurate, the fictional and the appropriated and they merge to the point where they cannot be disentangled,” he writes giving examples of blatantly invented “facts.”

Just to give one example: Theroux devoted a full chapter to a lunch at Naipaul’s house in October 1974 — a “vivid and plausible account of a day in the country with the tetchy pompous V.S. Naipaul and his guests, with Paul Theroux as the perceptive observer,” in the words of Mr. French. Except that it is “some distance from the truth”: a result of an attempt to sex-up the account to show Naipaul and his friends in poor light.

Then there is his claim about meeting Naipaul’s future wife, Nadira, as a child in Nairobi in 1966. When confronted by Mr. French he gave this lame, contradictory and confused explanation: “It could have been Nadira because the age is exactly right (he was wrong by six years, and Nadira was living in Dar-es-Salaam at the time, says Mr. French). It wasn’t fictionalising because in my opinion it has poetic truth in it. I am not saying that was Nadira. Of course, it wasn’t Nadira. But it could have been her … to me it was true.”

Theroux comes through as someone who misunderstood the nature of his relationship with Naipaul and refused to take “no” for an answer even after “V.S.” bluntly told him to get off his back. Mr. French recalls how in February 1967 on his way to India, “Vidia sent Paul Theroux a sarcastic letter of dismissal on the crested writing paper of the Bristol Hotel in Beirut, a missive designed to brush off a more sensitive man. He attacked his use of language as inaccurate, claimed his classical knowledge was imperfect and that his editor Diana Athill’s decision to turn down Theroux’s novel was right.” But Theroux refused to take the hint and, as Naipaul later complained, “he pestered me, and pestered me, wrote me letters all the time.”

Mr. French concludes his view of Theroux by echoing Naipaul that he did not “fully understand the nature of his encounter with Naipaul … he failed to see that Naipaul had no loyalty to him, and regarded him primarily as an aide and entertainer, and that his final rejection was inevitable.”

Naipaul may have his own reasons for being miffed with his biographer but the more detached readers will find Mr. French as sympathetic to his subject as a biographer can be without being accused of writing a hagiography. The problem, however, is that over the years Naipaul has alienated so many people — fellow writers, critics, friends — that even the most sympathetic biography is unlikely to repair the damage. Already, knives are being sharpened as critics approach the book and for a taste of things to come consider this headline from Independent newspaper: “There’s a dark, twisted braid of resentment and superiority that runs through Naipaul’s make-up.” And this is followed by a commentary that deploys all the old clichés about Naipaul.

A new open season on Sir Vidia has just begun.

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