They met in Oxford – he an impoverished scholarship boy from Trinidad, she a
girl from Birmingham. More than most writers of his generation, V. S.
Naipaul’s great subjects and his life experience were inextricably linked
from the beginning. Doubly cut loose, first from Asia and then from the
Caribbean (his forebears had come to work as agricultural labourers in the
West Indies), Naipaul chronicled better than anyone the central
twentieth-century phenomenon: global deracination. His grand theme is that
we have all come adrift. With his gifts of observation, intuition, insight,
and his mesmeric prose style, he was born to be one of the great writers of
our time. Yet few could have predicted it. And this makes his wife Pat’s
belief in him all the more remarkable: that, in 1954, when he had published
nothing, and seemed to have no prospects, she could write: “I have absolute
faith in your ultimate ability to do something great. I am convinced that we
are going to be a distinguished couple”.
Pat’s modest family opposed her marriage. “Stress that I am a student at
Oxford”, Naipaul told her, “not a Negro going to play the fool in London.”
Contemplating the marriage of Jane and Thomas Carlyle, Pat wrote in her
diary in 1974, “Whatever the stress and suffering, it seems to me a perfect
marriage, in the sense of two people becoming one and indispensable to one
another, part of one another, almost exchanging personalities . . . . After
her death, Carlyle reproached himself with her unhappiness”.
The Sage of Cheyne Row did more than reproach himself. He authorized his
disciple J. A. Froude to write a “warts and all” biography which lays bare
all Carlyle’s selfishness, all his failures in love. Something similar may
have been at work when Naipaul authorized Patrick French to write his Life,
allowing him access to all his wife Pat’s diaries, now held in the archive
of the University of Tulsa. Just as Froude’s biography is really the last
volume of the works of Carlyle himself, and easily worthy to place beside
them, so French has written a book which is a completion of Naipaul’s own.
It is a prodigious achievement, a wonderful biography, a justification for
the art of biography itself.
Yet reactions to it have been adverse – and principally, it seems, because
critics have struggled to find in the great writer the material for a
clichéd idea of an ideal husband. How could such a masterly writer turn out
to be such a monster? No doubt it is upsetting when Naipaul admits to French
a scene of terrible violence with his Argentinian mistress, Margaret
Gooding, during which – having discovered that she had been unfaithful to
him, “I was very violent with her for two days; I was very violent with her
for two days with my hand; my hand began to hurt . . . . She didn’t mind it
at all. She thought of it in terms of my passion for her”. She stayed with
him for a quarter of a century.
No doubt Naipaul wanted this told – the violence and the infidelity. He claims
that he hastened his wife’s death by telling a journalist that in younger
days – when Pat had been supporting him in poverty by working as a teacher –
he had been “a great prostitutes man”. (Do we believe this bluff claim to be
one of the lads? How was it paid for at this period of abject indigence?
When he took up with Margaret Gooding in 1972, she complained about
premature ejaculation; he seemed all but inexperienced. In Magic Seeds,
2004, he wrote, “The fact is all sexual intimacy is distasteful to me. I’ve
always considered my low sexual energy as a kind of freedom”.) And although
he says that he has never read his wife’s painful diaries, with their aching
sense of frustration and rejection, he obviously wanted them to become
public knowledge. “Doctored truth is not truth”, Naipaul said; “I think the
completeness of the record is what matters.”
Naipaul, like Tolstoy and Evelyn Waugh, has made the self-protective decision
to turn himself into a monster. Of course, the women suffered. And of course
Naipaul has always gone in for saying and writing calculatedly offensive
things. “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” (The Middle Passage); “I
am beginning to feel more and more that women are trivial-minded, incapable
of analysing or even seeing their motives”. Nor was this habit of frankness
solely attributable to old-man grumpiness. As an undergraduate, condemned to
lodge in what he considered a slum with some cousins during an Oxford
vacation, he wrote, “I am years and ages away from these people . . . . I
find their English coarse and acidulous”.
Any biography of this man was bound to contain accounts of bad behaviour,
arrogance and self-pity. There is an absurd moment, when typing out A House
for Mr Biswas, when he wound tape around his fingers – “So painful, the
typing”. There used, in those days, to be little rubber thimbles,
purchasable for a few pence, to guard against this hazard of the typist’s
life, but he preferred to murmur, Job-like, “So painful, the typing”. Many
will gasp at his persistent verbal cruelties – “You have no skill”, he
snarls at the long-suffering Pat who is retyping his horrifying novel
Guerrillas: “You don’t behave like a writer’s wife. You behave like the wife
of a clerk who has risen above his station”.
Naturally, as Naipaul grew older, the bad behaviour grew to crescendos. But
there is often a lordliness about it which some, such as I, may find redeems
it. Two examples, one minor and one major: the minor – when he was first
introduced to Auberon Waugh and was asked, “May I call you Vidia?”. His
reply, worthy of Evelyn Waugh himself was: “No, as we’ve just met, I would
rather you called me Mr Naipaul”; the second, which would win a prize for
bad behaviour, but is also hugely comic, was his inability to inform
Margaret, his mistress of long standing, that he had decided to remarry when
Pat died of cancer. He sent his tall, mysterious literary agent, “Gillon
Aitken to sort out the mess, taking the concept of agency to new lengths”.
But there is a paradox about the biography, and about the life as a whole. By
releasing all this into the public domain, Naipaul was plainly doing his
best to write himself down as a total monster, and yet the playful, witty,
often outrageous Vidia Naipaul does not in the end emerge from this book
particularly badly; he is certainly not in the same league of monstrosity
as, say, Nabokov or Tolstoy. As Pat Naipaul saw in her often anguished
diaries, the writing life puts an extraordinary strain on anyone who is
attempting to share it. There are two sorts of marriage for writers: the
ones such as Pat Naipaul’s or Vera Nabokov’s, where the wife enters, almost
sentence by sentence into the writer’s composing life; and the other sort,
where only by keeping her distance can the writer’s partner survive. (“Keep
your hearts together and your tents separate”, was the well-turned motto of
Mrs R. S. Thomas, Elsi Eldridge.) Pat Naipaul wanted, from the beginning, to
be not only the wife, but also the secret sharer. This does not justify the
cruelty which French describes, but it should place it in perspective.
Naipaul’s impressive life follows a three-part strand. He began as a comic
novelist, making use, in The Mystic Masseur (1957) and A House for Mr Biswas
(1961), of his early experiences of Trinidad. At the time they were well
received and they still have their admirers. Next came the journalism.
Naipaul lived during a golden age of journalism and he was one of its best
journalists. His travels across the face of the globe led him to record what
was happening, at first in the postcolonial world of the former British
Empire, and then, more controversially, when he began to notice what was
happening in the world of Islam. Among the Believers: An Islamic journey,
published in 1981, made him enemies. His first book about India, An Area of
Darkness (1964), is a Swiftian cry of disappointment. When she was dying,
and they sat together in their Wiltshire cottage, Pat Naipaul told her
husband he had been “very hard on India”. Naturally, the Indians thought so
too, especially for pieces of Churchillian parody such as: “Indians defecate
everywhere. They defecate, mostly, beside the railway tracks. They defecate
on the beaches; they defecate on the hills; they defecate on the river
banks; they defecate on the streets; they never look for cover . . . . The
truth is that Indians do not see these squatters and might even, with
complete sincerity, deny that they exist”. Naipaul’s role as a journalist
was to write about what was obvious, but unsayable. His book about the West
Indies, The Middle Passage (1962), caused similar expressions of outrage. In
1978, on the BBC, Gordon Woolford accused him of “savaging” Trinidad. “There
wasn’t any kind remark.” Naipaul responded (ferociously) “Was it untrue?
Anything false? Anything proved wrong in sixteen years? Or everything proved
right?”.
French rightly says that Evelyn Waugh, who praised The Middle Passage in the
Jesuit periodical The Month, “was the first of a parade of reactionaries who
would seek to appropriate Naipaul’s writings, stripping them of their
ambiguities to make a political point”. This is a nicely nuanced
observation, and it is true – especially among the reactionaries of India
and of America. But one of Naipaul’s closest affinities is not to Evelyn
Waugh, whose travel literature and journalism was always a side issue to his
main business of post-Firbankian fiction. Naipaul is much closer in spirit
to his friend Auberon Waugh, Evelyn’s son, whose saeva indignatio was mixed
up with a terrible pity for the human condition. Naipaul expressed the view
to me, when Auberon Waugh lay dying, that his friend was not dying of
whatever the doctor said. It was the writing, Naipaul told me in an
agonized, almost mystical tone, which had killed him. He had given out too
much.
Whatever the truth of this, Naipaul has always been retentive, costive, in his
reluctance to waste any experience. His story is an extraordinary one, and
he has rehearsed it repeatedly, both in the novels, and in the later work.
The Enigma of Arrival (1987) begins with echoes of his friend Anthony
Powell’s novel-sequence A Dance to the Music of Time, in a sodden English
water-meadow. “If I say it was winter when I arrived at that house in the
river valley, it was because I remembered the mist.” (Compare this with
Powell’s, “As winter advanced in that river valley, mist used to rise in
late afternoon and spread over the flooded grass”.) Like Powell, Naipaul
uses the title of a painting for his book – in Powell’s case from the
Poussin in the Wallace Collection, in Naipaul’s, from the work of Giorgio de
Chirico. Powell himself actually turns up in The Enigma. Glimpsing the
gardener of the big house, “Tony” – “a middle-aged English writer, a friend
of many years” – asks, “Is that your landlord?”. And on being told that it
is Mr Pitton, and not the landlord (who was Stephen Tennant), said, “It
proves something I’ve long held. People get to look like their employees”.
In his old age, perhaps in imitation of Auberon Waugh, Naipaul has chosen to
vilify his early champion Powell, claiming that it was because he had
finally got round to reading A Dance to the Music of Time and thought little
of it. Another reason could have been that he was irritated by the figure in
Powell’s sequence who is obviously based on Naipaul himself. Gibson
Delavacquerie has achieved literary fame, “fame, that is, over and above
what he himself always called his ‘colonial’ affiliations”. In Powell’s
version, Delavacquerie is a Caribbean not of Indian, but of French origins,
but when introduced – “small, very dark” – he seems to bear an unmistakable
resemblance to Naipaul, especially when he “talked in a quick, harsh, oddly
attractive voice”. He is an outsider – “I didn’t know London at all well. I
wanted to explore all its possibilities – and of course meet writers”. There
is an almost identical paragraph in The Enigma of Arrival, where Naipaul
describes being lonely and adrift in 1950s London, in which he becomes aware
that, in a boarding house, “I had found myself at the beginning of a great
movement of peoples after the war, a great shaking up of the world, a great
shaking up of old cultures and old ideas”.
The Enigma of Arrival is a masterpiece. Almost nothing happens in it. “The
writer” sits in his Wiltshire cottage. He is alone. The women – the wife at
his side, the Argentinian mistress whose story Patrick French relates, and
to whom he dedicates this biography – are absent. One suspects this is less
because Naipaul was being discreet than that, brutally, they had nothing to
do with the story, Naipaul’s story, the central story. Such women, who feel
so important to a writer, are as important to him as his pencils and pens,
but as easily forgotten and discarded. The Enigma of Arrival is a haunting,
beautiful book – in which the exile, in common with the mysterious
inhabitants of the land he has come to inhabit – is being cut loose from his
roots. In A Dance to the Music of Time, the 1960s hippie characters perform
strange rites around the Avebury stones. Naipaul, in Wiltshire, meditates on
history. He remembers his world travels. His sister’s death in Trinidad, his
loss of family ties, makes him acutely aware of “our sacred world . . . the
sacred places of our childhood”. And “every generation now was to take us
further from those sanctities”. These “sanctities” are in the process of
being lost, for all of us. Not to see this is humbug, which is why Naipaul
becomes so abrasive when, in place of the true sanctities, we are fed
platitudes. I wonder if, as he drew to a close, and finished his melancholy
but admirable task, Patrick French read J. A. Froude’s words about his no
less difficult task of writing the Life of Carlyle: “His faults which in his
late remorse he exaggerated . . . were the effects of temperament . . . and
of absorption in his work . . . . Such faults were but as the vapours which
hang about a mountain, inseparable from the nature of the man. They have to
be told, because without them his character cannot be understood . . . . But
they do not blemish the essential greatness of his character”.
Patrick French
THE WORLD IS WHAT IT IS
The authorised biography of V. S. Naipaul
576pp. Picador. £20.
978 0 330 43350 1
A. N. Wilson's recent books include a novel, Winnie and Wolf, published
last year, and a biography of John Betjeman, 2006.
