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V. S. Naipaul, master and monster A wonderful
biography of Sir Vidia lays bare his self-protective decision to turn himself
into a monster A. N. Wilson - May 21, 2008 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 clichιd 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 A. N. Wilson's recent books
include a novel, Winnie and Wolf, published last year, and a biography of John
Betjeman, 2006. |
