v.s. naipaul 774.nai.444 Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire

V.S. Naipaul, who won the Nobel Prize in literature in 2001, sometimes seems like a mandarin literary figure from another age, a novelist and outspoken social philosopher who makes high claims for his art and who fully expects to be regarded, by future generations, as a member of the literary pantheon, the Tolstoy of his time. He may indeed deserve such regard.

Reading "The World Is What It Is," Patrick French's exhaustive, tell-all biography, we are reminded, among other things, of Mr. Naipaul's startling bluntness, his willingness to make statements or pursue themes that run counter to current pieties -- his willingness to offend, sometimes in the name of principle.http://louis1j1sheehan.us

But we also learn, as never before, that in his life as well as in his writings Mr. Naipaul has been no respecter of persons. Among those who have come in for abuse at his hands -- both physical and psychological -- are his longtime first wife and a long-suffering mistress. One might even say that Mr. Naipaul himself, by authorizing such a biography, is visiting some sort of abuse on himself. Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire

Mr. Naipaul seems to be emulating the brutal honesty of Oliver Cromwell, who famously told an artist to paint his portrait "warts and all." He has not only given Mr. French access to his copious archive of manuscripts, letters and diaries but also spoken at length to him, on the record, about details of his private life that would have made anyone less brazen blush and hide. http://louis1j1sheehan.us The result is a book that reveals a great deal, sometimes inadvertently. http://louis1j1sheehan.us

The upside of such cooperation is a wealth of information: about Mr. Naipaul's ethnically Indian family, his upbringing and schooling in colonial Trinidad, his education at Oxford, his uneasy relationship with his adopted homeland of England, his peripatetic existence as traveler and observer, his scorn for many contemporary writers (including Derek Wolcott and his late friend Anthony Powell) and his admiration for dead white writers like Somerset Maugham, apparently a major influence.

It must also be said that Mr. French, while chronicling a brutal life in salacious detail, pays due attention to his subject's writings, which are after all the reason for such a biography in the first place. He notes that, with "Guerrillas" (1975), Mr. Naipaul captured the perils of radical chic by making a novel out of the real-life involvement of a radical-leaning British woman and a Third World thug. It was "A House for Mr. Biswas" (1961), a novel set in colonial Trinidad, and "A Bend in the River" (1979) that brought Mr. Naipaul to the attention of major critics and a larger public. Both books, in their way, take up what Mr. French calls "the paradox of civilization." "A Bend in the River," in particular, chronicles the grim despair and horror of central Africa and thus sounds a major theme in Mr. Naipaul's oeuvre: the barbarous behavior and seeming hopelessness of so much of the Third World. (Though Mr. Naipaul was fitfully critical of America, too, in 1989's "A Turn in the South.")
[VS Naipaul] Dept. of Spec. Coll./McFarlin Library/Univ. of Tulsa

V.S. Naipaul with his sisters Sati, Mira and Kamla in Trinidad.

In his later years, Mr. Naipaul, in addition to writing meditative travel books, has pushed the novel's form into nearly postmodern shapes. Mr. French writes of "The Enigma of Arrival" (1987) that it was "unlike any other book, a work of intermittent brilliance, a cross between a partially fictional autobiography and an essay and a slowly revealed study of the life of the mind, but billed as a novel."

But a determined refusal to fit into conventional or simplistic categories is a hallmark of Mr. Naipaul's distinctive brand of literature as well as a characteristic of his life as a whole -- his refusal to heed the dictates of political fashion or even of common politeness. Mr. French traces this propensity to a particular aspect of Caribbean parlance: "It was what Trinidadians call 'picong,' from the French 'piquant,' meaning sharp or cutting, where the boundary between good and bad taste is deliberately blurred, and the listener sent reeling."

Mr. Naipaul's "picong" remarks range from silly putdowns -- such as when he said of one of Queen Elizabeth's grandchildren that she had the face of a criminal -- to snippy but revelatory show-off remarks, like his comment that the fatwa against Salman Rushdie for "The Satanic Verses" was an extreme form of literary criticism.

Sometimes his comments contain a judgment as valuable as it is politically incorrect: for instance, his plague-on-both-houses dismissal of Africa's twin curses of racist white colonial settlers and corrupt, undemocratic post-independence governments. Although Mr. French can be harshly critical of his subject -- he finds Mr. Naipaul both vicious and self- centered -- he tends to fall into the role of apologist. He prefers to explain away remarks of Mr. Naipaul's that offend liberal nostrums -- offering excuses and noting extenuating circumstances -- instead defending them or valuing their verity.

No matter how assiduous Mr. French tries to be about examining Mr. Naipaul's writings and blunt pronouncements, it is the life that galvanizes our attention, and little wonder. Mr. Naipaul's conduct, as presented in "The World Is What It Is," is shocking, and the sordid revelations are endless.

We read about the many abortions Mr. Naipaul demanded of his mistress, an Anglo-Argentinian woman named Margaret (whom he saw throughout his 41-year marriage to Patricia Hale and whom he threw aside, with a cash payment, upon Pat's death in 1996); their sado-masochistic sexual obsessions; their bouts of Dionysian frenzy, which included his beating her so badly that she could not appear in public. We read about his constant recourse to prostitutes; his seeming eagerness to subject his first wife to humiliation and contempt, throwing into her face both his infidelity and his low opinion of her. In episode after episode, seemingly without provocation, Mr. Naipaul is rude and nasty and supercilious to the women in his life, to friends and would-be friends, and to mere acquaintances.
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V.S. Naipaul with his mistress, Margaret Gooding.

None of this ugliness, it should be said, helps us to understand Mr. Naipaul's novels, nor does Mr. French really try to make such a connection. Mr. Naipaul himself says, at one point, that his sexual adventures have been a necessary part of his effort to seek a subject as a writer. If such was the reason, the effort appears to have been a failure: How many of us read Mr. Naipaul for his sexual realism?

Even more shocking than certain details of Mr. Naipaul's life is his willingness to share them. By giving Mr. French access to so much damaging material, including his first wife Pat's written accounts of her misery, Mr. Naipaul seems to be lashing himself into an orgy of public remorse, resembling nothing so much as an evangelist confessing his sins before his congregation.

Is such remorse, in this case, a genuine attempt at atonement? Or is it one more way of abusing a hapless wife and mistress? Laying bare so much cruelty seems to rub salt into their wounds as well. Their humiliation, so painstakingly laid bare in these pages, seems boundless.

And what about the biographer's role in this psychodrama (or soap opera)? If Mr. Naipaul's supposed self-abasement is going to really hurt, isn't it necessary for there to be someone else to lay on the whip? Certainly Mr. French is not shy about characterizing Mr. Naipaul's conduct or quoting other people's harsh judgments of it. And yet and yet. Is he not functioning as an enabler for the continuing abuse of Mr. Naipaul's victims?

It is notable, in this regard, that "The World Is What It Is" breaks off 12 years ago, in 1996, with the death of Mr. Naipaul's first wife and his marriage, two months later, to his second. There are apparently limits to Mr. Naipaul's honesty and fearless revelations. It is a parlous proposition to write a biography of a living figure -- one way or another he will dictate boundaries. Was this then the bargain: no holds barred about Pat and Margaret but lay off the current life and marriage?

“A voyage across the oceans and a stint as a bonded or indentured labourer was an alternative to destitution.” Read an excerpt from "The World Is What It Is" http://louis1j1sheehan.us

Yet when it suits the enterprise, Mr. French will range beyond 1996. Take the fraught matter of "Sir Vidia's Shadow," Paul Theroux's outraged memoir of a friendship gone sour. Although it appeared in 2003, well after the biography's purview, Mr. French devotes five pages of his text to an analysis of it. Correctly calling it "an act of vengeance, but also an act of homage," he then proceeds to demolish the book, picking holes in the narrative and finding other people to quibble about minor details. And at the end of his discussion, he quotes from one of his interviews with Mr. Naipaul, in which Sir Vidia (as he is often called, in knighthood) gets his own back with a judgment on his former friend that is much more devastating -- and magisterial -- than anything Mr. Theroux has said of him.

In the end, one is left with a queasy feeling that, after all, Mr. French is acting as Mr. Naipaul's instrument. Whatever else he is, Mr. Naipaul is no fool, and he has probably gotten exactly what he wants from this project: kudos for his honesty, more attention than ever, and a chance to act out his hostility, yet again, against choice targets who cannot or will not defend themselves, and all on his own terms. Is there a Nobel Prize for audacity?

Mr. Rubin is a writer in Pasadena, Calif.