Margaret Gooding and Naipaul
Sir, – As someone who has known Margaret Gooding for more than ten years, I
would like to comment on Patrick French’s authorized biography of V. S.
Naipaul, The World Is What It Is (reviewed by A. N. Wilson, May 23), in
which she is described almost solely in terms of the sexual aspect of her
twenty-four-year relationship with Naipaul. (Wilson describes her three
times in his review as “the Argentinian mistress”.) Gooding’s relationship
with Naipaul enriched his life. To reduce that very complex relationship to
salacious anecdotes is to demean it and the influence it had on his writing.
Many believe that Margaret Gooding was the love of Naipaul’s life, something
that only he can truly know.
When Naipaul met Margaret in Buenos Aires in 1972 through their mutual friend,
Norman di Giovanni, she was twenty-nine, tall, slim and beautiful, and
supremely self-confident. Her stepfather was Lawrence Smith, founder of a
prestigious literary agency in Buenos Aires, and Margaret’s world revolved
around the literary and social elite circles of Buenos Aires. Her mother,
whom I met at a book launch in Buenos Aires when she was in her late
eighties, some years before she died, was a gracious, elegant woman with an
upright bearing, who reminded one of old European aristocracy. One could
argue that perhaps the thirty-nine-year-old, unhappily married Naipaul fell
in love with Margaret’s world as much as he did with her. In any case,
Margaret and her world were not separable. It is what formed her. Their
attraction was mutual, and the magnetism between them was such that Margaret
left her husband, a quietly spoken Anglo-Argentine with whom she has three
children and with whom she remains on good terms.
Her letters to Naipaul have been sold to the University of Tulsa, while his to
her remain her private property. Understandably, the disclosures made so
publicly by the man she loved for almost a quarter of a century have been
painful, to say the least.
It is to be hoped that one day Margaret Gooding will break her silence and
will write her own version of her years with V. S. Naipaul. If she ever
does, it will give a more balanced account of that relationship than has
thus far been interpreted. As Naipaul is quoted as saying, “Doctored truth
is not truth. I think the completeness of the record is what matters”. Thus
far, the record is nowhere near complete.
SUSAN WILKINSON
21 Southwind Terrace, Oakville, Ontario.
Edward Said
Sir, – Mariam C. Said’s letter leaves no doubt that her husband Edward Said’s
spoken and reading knowledge of modern Arabic was good and I am grateful for
that clarification (Letters, May 30). But, in order to assess accurately the
quality of Antoine Isaac Sylvestre de Sacy’s work, a good knowledge of
classical Arabic would have been needed. I repeat that Edward Said produced
no evidence at all that Sylvestre de Sacy tampered with the documents he
worked on.
Alexander Drace-Francis (Letters, May 30) quotes Said in the original 1978
introduction to Orientalism as reproaching himself for neglecting to discuss
various named German Orientalists. But on the next page Said stated the
following: “What German Orientalism scholarship did was to refine and
elaborate techniques whose application was to texts, myths, ideas and
languages almost literally gathered from the orient by imperial Britain and
France”. This is false, but Said never retracted this or any other
misrepresentation of the Orientalists.
Then Drace-Francis claims that I have missed Said’s point “which was about
earlier German Orientalists and their dependence on the French and British
bringing manuscripts home in the context of imperial projects”. First, Said
did not say that. Second, even if he had, he would have been wrong. German
scholars did not sit around waiting for manuscript hand-outs from their
British and French colleagues. To take a few examples, the famous Austrian
Orientalist Josef von Hammer-Purgstall (1774– 1856) hunted for Arabic
manuscripts in Cairo and Istanbul (and these were the best places). Alfred
von Kremer (1828–99) was interpreter at the Austrian consulate in Alexandria
and then spent time in Istanbul, Aleppo and Damascus accumulating
manuscripts. Johann Gotfried Wetzstein (1815–1905), the consul in Damascus,
assembled a major collection of manuscripts which ended up in the
Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin. The Berlin library’s holdings of Arabic
manuscripts, most of which had been donated by German scholars, was vast.
Eventually, Wilhelm Ahlwardt produced the Verzeichnis der arabischen
Handschriften der königlichen Bibliothek zu Berlin in ten volumes (1887–99).
This was more than just a list of manuscripts. It was a superb work of
interpretative scholarship to which British scholars like myself have been
indebted. The holdings and catalogue of the library at Gotha are hardly less
impressive.
For further information about the Germans, their manuscripts and their
libraries, see Johann Fück, Die arabischen Studien in Europa (1955). I could
go on about the Germans and their libraries, full of Arabic manuscripts
which they had collected, but I hope I do not have to.
ROBERT IRWIN
39 Harleyford Road, London SE11.
Intractable divide
Sir, – According to Giuseppe Fumagalli’s Chi l’ha detto?: Tesoro di citazioni
italiane e straniere di origine letteraria e storica, the Italian
North–South divide (discussed in Adrian Lyttelton’s review of Christopher
Duggan’s book, June 6) and, more generally, the Questione meridionale (as
well as the Italians’ consolidated reputation for military cowardice and
treachery, which is traceable to the early Middle Ages) still reflect the
feelings of mutual hatred and contempt between Germanic tribal invaders and
the decadent Romans of Late Antiquity.
CARLO CRISTOFORI
Via San Lazzaro, 8 Cividale del Friuli.
Welsh journals
Sir, – Andrew Green (Letters, May 30) states that “99.5 per cent of the
authors agree that Welsh Journals Online is wholly in the interest of the
public and of authors”. Has the National Library of Wales contacted the many
international contributors to Welsh journals, and traced the relatives of
those writers no longer living, or is his figure merely a piece of rhetoric?
As for his assertion that “additional visibility” is worth far more to authors
“than the pennies they would receive from any conceivable payment scheme” –
surely no man but a blockhead ever wrote for additional visibility.
STEPHEN KNIGHT
15 Gould Road, Twickenham.
Koestler’s camps
Sir, – Patrick McGrath draws attention (Commentary, June 6) to Arthur
Koestler’s 1943 novel Arrival and Departure as containing “one of the first
literary descriptions” of what would later become known as the Holocaust or
the Shoah, namely a scene of Jews “being packed off in a gas truck for
extermination”. The gas truck, as we know, was the precursor of the gas
chambers.
In the same year as Koestler’s novel, Louis Aragon’s poem “Le Musée Grevin”
was published clandestinely under the nom de guerre of François la Colère.
It contains a stanza about Auschwitz which begins: “Auschwitz Auschwitz oh
bloody syllables”. It is no surprise that a significant member of the
communist resistance knew what was going on in the East.
Earlier, in March 1942, a member of the non-communist resistance, Pierre
Emmanuel, published a poem entitled “camps de concentration” in his book
Jour de colère. The title but not the poem itself was censored by the Vichy
regime in Algiers, where the publisher was based.
Part of the poem is reprinted facsimile in Claude Vigée’s book Être poète pour
que vive les hommes (2006), with the title, in Emmanuel’s own hand, written
on the page when he presented his fellow poet with the book in July 1942.
Vigée, a junior member of the Jewish resistance, tells me that he and his
friends (based in Toulouse) knew about mass murders of Jews by mid-1941 and
about gassings by autumn 1942.
I would be grateful if readers could come up with other literary descriptions
of, or allusions to, these terrible events and places – from 1943 or
earlier, in any language.
ANTHONY RUDOLF
8 The Oaks, Woodside Avenue, London N12.
Brighton and Hove
Sir, – Keith Miller (Arts, May 30) asserts that Hove is Brighton’s “perennial
poor relation”. In fact, before the towns’ purported unification into a
cod-city, Hove produced a municipal surplus. This was swiftly lost by a
hard-pressed unitary authority which, four years ago, tried to close down
Hove’s Grade ll*-listed Library (it has the country’s second-largest
collection of Henry James manuscripts). Helped by Julie Burchill and the
late George Painter, residents prevented that, and the elegant building,
donated by Andrew Carnegie, now celebrates its centenary.
Is it sufficiently “site-specific” (grim phrase) to inspire a festival play
akin to those mentioned by Mr Miller? There is, however, a greater need than
such one-off productions. Miller claims that, in Brighton, one can catch
“some fancied theatre, any day of the week”. For a place with a theatrical
reputation, it is sadly, puzzlingly lacking in theatres – even Sussex
University lost its Gardner Theatre recently. Theatre is uniquely thrilling.
Brighton needs more of it, as do many other places in England – even Hove.
CHRISTOPHER HAWTREE
38 Westbourne Gardens, Hove.
David Daiches
Sir, – Margaret Drabble’s piece on David Daiches brought back a flood of
memories. In 1939 my husband-to-be and I were students at the University of
Chicago and we took many classes together. We particularly enjoyed “Bacon,
Browne and Hobbes”, given by David Daiches. Though I am now an
eighty-nine-year-old widow, I was back in the classroom with my best friend,
with whom I stayed married for sixty years, feeling a sparkle and excitement
I can still recapture. I took out my old copy of Two Worlds to reread. He
was often an inspired teacher, at least for us.
HARRIET PAINE HAHN
370 Walnut Street, Winnetka, Illinois 60093.
Byron’s dog
Sir, –J. C. quotes (NB, June 6) Byron’s epitaph on his dog Boatswain.
According to Leslie A. Marchand’s Byron (1957), this was not written by
Byron but by his friend John Cam Hobhouse, who thought Byron’s original
absurd and composed the lines as a joke. Byron’s actual epitaph was the
twenty-six-line “Inscription on the Monument of a Newfoundland Dog”
(Newstead Abbey, November 30, 1808), which concluded: “Ye! who perchance
behold this simple urn, / Pass on – it honours none you wish to mourn: / To
mark a friend’s remains these stones arise; / I never knew but one, – and
here he lies”.
ADRIAN ROOM
12 High Street, St Martin’s, Stamford.
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