A writer is in the end not his books, but his myth

Patrick French reveals enough devil in Naipaul, the autocrat and the alchemist- Sunil Khilnani

"A writer is in the end not his books, but his myth,"

V.S. Naipaul once wrote, a myth that is ultimately in the keeping of others. Yet Naipaul has worked hard in recent decades to retain control over his personal story—producing numerous autobiographical essays and fragments, ever tucking himself into the folds of his writing. His books have set abroad the story of a poor sensitive youth of high-caste origin who wrenched himself out of a dissipated colonial-dominated black culture and, through sheer hard effort and dedication to his craft, clambered on to the ark of civilisation. He kept his helmsman's position there, in the myth, by his clear-eyed willingness to tell the truth.

Naipaul's tactic to appear helpless, get others to do his bidding, make them feel inadequate fails here. Patrick French is in control.

Notoriously secretive and controlling, Naipaul has seemed unwilling to cede to anyone else the authority to tell his life. So what could have possessed Patrick French to agree to write a life of Naipaul, authorised by his subject? French knew that an archive existed, largely closed to scholars and boxed away in the wilds of Oklahoma (the university at Tulsa had paid some half a million dollars for it). French told Naipaul he would only want to take on the project if he had access to all the available archival material, could quote freely, interview him at length, and retain full control over the book—which he proposed to take up to 1996. That year, Naipaul's first wife died, he sacked his Argentine mistress of 24 years, and married Nadira Alvi. Naipaul agreed to French's terms and, French notes, "stuck scrupulously to our agreement".

The result is gripping, magnificent—a triumph of the biographer's art. Patrick French's book peers unblinkingly at the dark, destructive energies that have sustained Naipaul's creativity. It counts and counts again the human—womanly—cost of Naipaul's drive to make himself and his work, and yet fully accords him, as a writer, his due.

It is not easy to make sense of Naipaul's life and work. Sprawled across four continents (the Caribbean and South America, England, India, Africa) it spans the eras of colonial rule, the struggle against that rule, the early decades of nationalist hopes and the brutal subsequent betrayals. What is so striking about Naipaul is how, out of this unprecedented diversity of experience, he has created and sustained a cohesive vision of the world—turning himself in the process from a 'regional' novelist of Caribbean street life to a maker of 'global' literature. On what authority did he ground his grand perspective—the fearless dissections of anti-colonialism, the future of Africa, the Muslim world—of civilisation itself? By labouring, in his own version, to be a disciplined writer, he proclaimed his fidelity to one enterprise: pen, pad, desk; nothing else.

French, through mastery over his materials and sources, restores to the purist tableau the messy stirring life—the mess that made the myth, and the books, possible. French weaves his myth-puncturing subtly into the narrative, knocking off Naipaul's poses one by one. Here, more crudely than French would want to note them, are at least half dozen that he addresses.

Naipaul's Brahminic origins and its lasting effects, part of his own self-image, have become a trope by which he and others have explained his mannerisms and attitudes. Paul Theroux made much of this in his vicious homage to his master. But as French delves into the lineages and history of the Naipaul family (an excellent portrait of the family—large, cantankerous, chippy, given to violence and habitually on the make), he sheds doubt on the idea that Naipaul's father, Seepersad, had Brahmin origins.

Naipaul has always stressed his devotion to his father—by all accounts a man of some charm, bookish, moody and severely impractical. As French suggests, he sentimentalised and idolised his father. Only very recently, to French, has he spoken of feeling 'great rage' at Seepersad's paternal incompetence. But even as a young man at Oxford, Naipaul often chose to ignore his father's requests—especially to help Seepersad fulfil his own writerly ambitions. Conversely, Naipaul distanced himself from his mother, erasing her from his self-creation myth (originally doting, she later more or less disowned him). Yet it was his mother and her rough-hewn family who dominated the Naipaul household—and made it practically possible for him to advance.

Another integral strand of Naipaul's auto-mythology was his rejection of his Caribbean origins, his denial that Trinidad shaped him in lasting ways (he refused any mention of Trinidad in his Nobel acceptance). Yet French is perceptive and convincing on just how profoundly he was shaped by Trinidadian culture. The rich dialect (which even later in life, in the company of fellow islanders, he could slip into), the styles of humour, and most significantly the ease with which the culture encouraged people to reinvent themselves without feeling any sense of lost authenticity. Naipaul adopted the idea of masquerade, 'playing ole Mas'; the persona of the Trinidadian 'smart man', a clever, stylish deceiver. He also perfected what French terms 'Trinidadian street style', 'picong' or piquant humour—an oracular outrageousness.

After he had moved to London, though, Naipaul took pride in keeping his fellow West Indian writers at arm's length. He saw early that if he was to achieve the success he was after, he must escape the trap of being a 'regional', Caribbean writer. Yet French, in his reconstruction of the lower reaches of London literary life in the early and mid-1950s, shows how close Naipaul was with other black and colonial writers—George Lamming, Sam Selvon, Edward Braithwaite, Jan Carew and others—and how much he learned from them about what it was to be a writer.

Here, French gives a more general correction to the founding myth of Naipaul and—his scrupulous self-reliance. It's a conceit most thoroughly undermined by the story of Naipaul's first wife, Patricia Hale. Her story becomes a biography within a biography, and French is able to tell this through letters and some 28 volumes of diaries left at her death. Naipaul met Pat while at Oxford, and after crushing her ambitions to be an actress, he manipulated her into abject dependence. Pat understood his methods: "If I'm unhappy you just say you can't bear other people being miserable and that I'm more or less driving you to drink"; but she was docile, and in awe (he became, in her diaries, 'The Genius'). French is able to show that Pat actually helped Naipaul in his writing—not just as a transcribing sounding board, but more substantively.

Finally, Naipaul cultivated the pose of the highly cerebral, reflective intellectual, aware of his history and circumstances, and willing to take responsibility for his actions. The unthinking, instinctual attitudes he claims to find in many parts of the world have evoked his deepest contempt. And yet: French shows again and again Naipaul's own surrender to instinctual urges, his inability to pursue introspection, and his unwillingness to take responsibility for his own actions. (One could argue that this biography is an attempt at rigorous self-accounting—but alas he had to commission someone else to do it for him.)

Deception and self-justification defined his relations with women. French writes about these relations—with Pat, prostitutes, Naipaul's mistress Margaret, and the 'second Lady Naipaul', Nadira—with delicacy but spares no one. On the basis of Pat's diaries and letters, French judges her to be on "par with other great, tragic, literary spouses such as Sonia Tolstoy, Jane Carlyle and Leonard Woolf", without denying her own psychological errors. The diaries, he observes, are also "a record of a kind of blankness", evasive and self-deluding about the degree to which Naipaul's writing drew on life and especially his life with Margaret.

French pays considerable attention to Naipaul's liaison with Margaret, the central sexual relationship of his life. Asked how it started, Naipaul would say: "It was not a meeting of minds"; or, as French puts it, "A kink in his personality met a kink in hers, and snagged". Paraphrasing her letters, French reveals a sado-masochistic relationship—summoned to accompany him on his writing journeys, they would have several weeks together during which he would beat and sexually degrade her, before he would tire of her and despatch her back to Argentina or London. Again she would be called, again she returned, explaining her infatuation thus: "Being with you is like always being in a film." One wonders a little just what was being shown in the film houses of Buenos Aires.

Naipaul abused all the women close to him. French notes that when Naipaul recalled how he told Pat of his involvement with Margaret, Naipaul "characteristically, recalled the disclosure of infidelity in terms of his own suffering". He made Pat comfort him for what he had been doing. With Margaret, he asserted that he as much as she was the victim of his violence—he had been somehow forced to it. And, in a scene which is particularly macabre and perverse, French describes how, after Pat's death, Naipaul made his new fiance, Nadira, collect Pat's ashes, carry them in a gray plastic bag, and then scatter them in the Wiltshire woodland.

Naipaul came to perfect this stance: controlling a situation by appearing helpless, then getting others to do his bidding—while making them feel that they were doing it inadequately. In this biography, however, this method has failed him. This may be an authorised biography, but it is firmly and in every sense in Patrick French's control—and he has written a superb account of the life, as what it is. Now, knowing the myth, having read the life, one goes back to the work. That is Naipaul's monument. We are many, who lead less than exemplary lives; but very few are able to turn the matter of their lives into great work. Naipaul, as Patrick French lets us still better see, is one of them. 

Book Reviewed- 'The World Is What It Is: The Authorised Biography of VS Naipaul' by Patrick French, Picador, Pages: 576; Rs. 595. In Outlook Magazine | Apr 21, 2008