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Photo: V. Sudershan

Meet the author Patrick French, biographer of V.S. Naipaul, in New Delhi

But while simultaneous projects, such as his research for the 60th anniversary of the Partition of India and Pakistan, may have helped him retain the balance, French protests he found Naipaul “often quite cheery” and consistently “personable” during his interviews for the biography, “The World is What it Is”. Naipaul can be funny and entertaining too, though often cruelly so.

Even as he explains that the Nobel laureate’s caustic style — his demolishing of authors from Dickens to Austen and Hardy to Hemingway is only one example — is “in a way a disguise,” behind which the real writer can get on with writing, French himself displays a large quota of compassion. Not only was Naipaul but a few generations away from “the wound of indentured labour,” he was also alone in his literary genre. “There was no post-colonial literature then,” he explains, suggesting Naipaul had to “cling on to this” feeling of not belonging anywhere to “write these global, detached, post-colonial books.”

Compassion is not ordinarily associated with a rugged journalist whose research leads him across Asia and the world and has produced some bestselling books. In writing on historical events that have impacted the world today, he offers “some pretty strong opinions.” (French’s “Liberty or Death: India’s Journey to Independence and Division” was not well received here.)

“But when you are writing about something as complex as someone’s life, to be opinionated as a biographer is the wrong way of going about it.” Likening the process to novel writing, where readers respond differently to the various characters, he says, “I tried to make the reader work. I was thinking, the reader can make the decisions.” Conceding the “filmic qualities” of the subject, he remarks, “The strange thing is, there is a creativity to writing non-fiction.” Saying he “always wanted it to read like a novel,” he admits dealing with facts makes this approach more challenging. Parts of the research were “very disturbing,” such as reading Patricia Naipaul’s diary, but he has tried to “show as many snapshots as possible” of Naipaul, who is “so multifaceted, so secretive, so contradictory.”

Naipaul’s treatment of Paul Theroux, a much younger writer, makes one cringe. Almost wincing, French notes, “I think it’s to Paul’s credit that he let me use those letters.” Yet today Theroux’s interviews read as acerbically as Naipaul’s. French feels that meeting Naipaul at such a formative age made it inevitable Theroux would emulate the older, more successful writer.

With writers’ personal lives scrutinised more closely than their literary merit, can today’s authors hope for the literary attention Naipaul’s generation received? French, disappointed at the largely “tabloid hack” style in which this biography was reviewed, feels standards are going “down and down and down” and says in Britain “the literary culture is largely dead”. Then again, jargon-infested reviews are “worse than hack journalism”.

Whether entertainment or literary reading, the biography is out, documenting Naipaul till 1996 — to avoid what French calls the “distorting lens of the present.” A sequel is planned. And for now? “Now I’m going to write a sequel to ‘Liberty or Death’.”

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