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Literary Review
Beyond belief
RUMINA SETHI
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The biography leaves us confronting the enormous contradiction: how could a man so gifted also be so depraved?
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The World is What It Is: The Authorised Biography of V. S. Naipaul, Patrick French, Picador, 2008, p.555, £ 20.
Nearly all Naipaul readers are aware of the animosity that exists between him and Theroux. Theroux, Naipaul’s one-time friend, would damage the latter’s reputation to a large extent with Sir Vidia’s Shadow, descri
bing the pettiness of one of the world’s greatest literary legends. Since then, everybody expects from Naipaul an in-your-face peevishness, a supreme confidence bordering on the unreasonable and a scathing wit or “picong” — as those in Trinidad call it — of the type that inspires fear and anxiety among his believers. As a subject, not many can match Naipaul’s effrontery when he states: “I have no enemies, no rivals, no masters; I fear no one.” And so, Patrick French’s biography would be an extremely “delicious” book since people always choose to read anecdotes containing scandal and debauchery. As Paul Theroux wrote recently in the Sunday Times: “Now French’s biography amply demonstrates everything I said and more. It is not a pretty story; it will probably destroy Naipaul’s reputation for ever, this chronicle of his pretensions…”
Predictable
French’s biography is thus extremely predictable; yet it could not have been otherwise. Wouldn’t we just expect that Naipaul, being invited to judge a literary contest, would only condescend to confer a third prize? On another occasion, the writer, when asked by Auberon Waugh whether he could call him “Vidia”, responds by saying, “No, as we’ve just met, I would rather you called me Mr. Naipaul.” A journalist who asked Naipaul for an interview was told: “Dear Mr.Bellacasa, nothing in your questions suggests any knowledge of my work. An interview would be a considerable waste of my time and energy.” It is not surprising that the biography gives a great deal of attention to Naipaul’s coldness towards Theroux. French gives an account of Theroux’s book on Naipaul, narrating Theroux’s eventual understanding of Naipaul’s meanness and rejection of him which came from the realization that he was taken to be only a filler, a sort of spot boy.
Since its publication a few weeks ago, the biography has acquired notoriety owing to the incriminating evidence it gives about Naipaul’s cruelty to his wife Pat, as well as his “abjectly consenting” mistress of 24 years, the Anglo-Argentine Margaret Gooding. Both women were to act as soothers to a great, indefatigable ego. Pat, whom Naipaul met at Oxford, was constantly abused by Naipaul which left her with an enormous sense of failure in that he chose to satisfy his sexual cravings with prostitutes. He would go on to tell her about Margaret and leave her editing his manuscripts while he cavorted around the world with his mistress. If Margaret gave him “sensual fulfilment”, Pat was the “cerebral equivalent”.
French’s account of Naipaul’s characteristically egotistic confession in an interview is worth quoting: “He told Pat about his other life with Margaret — and … recalled the disclosure of infidelity in terms of his own suffering: ‘I was full of grief. I went back to the bungalow and I told Pat, as I might have told my own mother. I was lying down in my little bed in my own little room and she wondered what was wrong with me and I told her. A very strange relationship I had with Pat. She was so good: she tried to comfort me… I was full of grief myself that in a way I expected her to respond to my grief, and she did’.” Margaret, who bore Naipaul’s sado-masochism willingly, would have dearly loved to marry him but he chose not to leave his wife, subjecting both women to a lifetime of misery and wretchedness in the process. While Pat was to never have children owing to Naipaul’s sexual abstinence from her, Margaret was forced to have three abortions when pregnant with his children. The day after Pat died, Naipaul brought a new woman into his life — Nadira — and was married to her in a couple of months. Little did Pat know that her husband had proposed to Nadira as she lay dying.
Painstaking research
The biography ends with Naipaul’s remarriage in 1996 while one is still asking for more. Beyond personal detail, Naipaul’s biography is also implicitly about the periphery moving (rather than meeting) the centre, the history of nations, the inevitable diasporic sensibility, the failures of migration and sensitivity to race matters. Without being judgmental, French weaves the warp and woof that makes up Naipaul, the person and the writer, through a painstaking research into diaries, archives, journal entries, interviews, letters and his subject’s friends. But many times, the reader will feel that the biographer’s preference is for the personal rather than the literary. There is plenty of gossip but very little about Naipaul’s world of fiction.
The biography finally leaves us confronting the enormous contradiction: how could a man so obviously gifted also be the one who could be so depraved? Yet the biography is testimony to the complex(ed) narcissist who let it be published uncensored without requesting any changes. V.S. Naipaul would be faithful to his 1994 speech at Tulsa: “The lives of writers are a legitimate subject of inquiry; and the truth should not be skimped. It may well be, in fact, that a full account of a writer’s life might in the end be more a work of literature and more illuminating — of a cultural to historical moment — than the writer’s books.”
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