V.S. NAIPAUL REVEALED: Darkness in the Heart
Narcissist. Snob. Genius. And, a Great Prostitute Man.
The World Is What It Is: The Authorized Biography of V.S. Naipaul,
by Patrick French (Picador), 2008
In September 1952, V.S. Naipaul described his future wife, Patricia Hale, to his family in St. James: “She is … not unintelligent, nor altogether unattractive”. Appreciation for Pat was confined to a peroration in pained double negatives but the narcissistic Vidia was as complimentary as he could.
Pa (Seepersad Naipaul) warned about mixed marriage: “See if she understands Trinidad’s reaction to mixed marriages. No one is happy at your marrying any but an Indian.”
Ma did not mince words: “I am begging you, don’t marry a white girl”.
Vidia’s future father-in-law, Mr. Hale, threatened drastic steps to prevent the marriage, giving an ultimatum to his daughter: ‘Indians or University – You can’t have both!’
The virgins – Vidia and Pat – consummated their relationship, after which the tortured and insecure Vidia exhibited feelings of guilt, jealously and self-justification alongside promises of love, honour, and devotion. The solution was a marriage, on January 10, 1955 – without a ring and unknown to both families – that ended when Pat died of cancer in 1996 after forty-one years of anguish, pain and suffering. Pa, Ma, and Mr. Hale were right.
Patrick French’s brilliant biography exposes the narcissistic, snobbish, and at times, sadistic nature of Sir Vidia Naipaul, with startling and shocking revelations of the distress and misery in the tragic love triangle of Sir Vidia, Lady Patricia, and his Anglo-Argentinean masochistic mistress, Margaret Gooding. Much of French’s biography has already been narrated by Vidia in some of his previous essays and books: Prologue to an Autobiography, Finding the Centre, Literary Occasions, Between Father and Son: Family Letters, Enigma of Arrival, and the semi-autobiographical novel, A House for Mr. Biswas.
As Martin Amiss observes, in much of Naipaul’s work, little of the self is present. In the novels, a past is used, but a self is not used; the self remains inscrutable and undisclosed. Naipaul wanted to be the spectator, the flaneur par excellence, free of emancipatory fire. In The World Is What It Is, Patrick French traces with a sympathetic brilliance and devastating insight the roots of V.S. Naipaul’s unparallel gift, exposing Naipaul with ruthless clarity to the calm eye of the reader.
Taking the book’s name from the terrifying opening sentence of Naipaul’s greatest novel, A BEND IN THE RIVER: “The world is what it is: men who are nothing, who allow themselves to become nothing, have no place in it”, French tells the story of a third-generation indentured East Indian in Trinidad conquering the world of Literature, and acclaimed as the greatest living writer of English. Naipaul was driven by fear: fear of not belonging, of being nothing, of failure, of not being able to write, of mental or physical breakdown, of people were trying to do him down, of being faced down, of losing face, of being found out. Realizing that writing was a great gift but all had, he sacrificed family, wife, mistress, and friends, and with sheer will and ambition he achieved the highest honours.
But he and his loved ones paid a terrible price. In the ‘starving writer’ phase of his life, before marriage, he lived in a basement in a London slum, supported by his fiancé, Pat. Stricken with asthma, unsure of this future, immersed in poverty and consumed in self-doubt after being rejected by 26 employers, the depressed Vidia wallowed in self-pity: “No fire in my room for two days and only tea & toast in my stomach. That is what the whole policy of the Free World amounts to. Naipaul, poor wog, literally starving, and very cold.”
Lady Naipaul treated him with great reverence, referring to her husband as The Genius. It was almost like appreciating a deity. It was an unusual kind of relationship for an Englishwoman: she was a very Indian wife – more Indian than the traditional pre-Generation X Indian wife who sacrifices her own life for her husband.
Theirs was a loveless, almost sexless marriage with Vidia telling Pat he had not enjoyed making love to her since 1967. In the summer of 1958, turning imagination into reality, he started to have sex with prostitutes. Long before French’s authorized biography, Naipaul – in the words of Salim in A Bend in the River, and in other semi-autobiographical pieces – described sadistic whore mongering fantasies: brothel fantasies of conquest and degradation, with the woman as the willing victim, the accomplice in her own degradation, with brute physical acts full of deliberate brutality.
In an interview with Der Spiegel, Vidia admitted that when he was young he was a great frequenter of prostitutes and found them intensely stimulating. In 1994, he went further, confiding to the New Yorker, that he ‘became a great prostitute man’.
For Vidia it was embarrassing; for Lady Naipaul, it was devastating, and an insult to her status as a loving wife. Vidia had been a great prostitute man and the world knew about it – it was the idea of her husband having plentiful, degraded sex with prostitutes, whores, hookers, tarts, that fed her imagination, and horrified her. Pat’s cancer was back and would not go away. Vidia had to live with the responsibility of what he had done, and bear the blame for the rest of his days. ‘She suffered. It could be said that I killed her. It could be said. I feel a little bit that way.’
In 1972, in Buenos Aires, Vidia began a twenty-year affair with Margaret Gooding. She was Vidia’s ideal woman in his fantasy life: he could string her along and mistreat her, with abject consent. Revealing the existence of his mistress to Lady Naipaul, he said: “I was liberated. She was destroyed. It was inevitable.”
Naipaul’s bedroom scenes have been awkward, stilted, scripted, with rough sex, bordering on violence, sadism, and sadomasochism. In Guerillas, Vidia went further, with Jimmy’s anal rape of Jane, after which he and Bryant hacked her to death. Many of the gruesome sexual depictions in the novels were not the work of imagination, but drawn from his life with Margaret.
In Bend in the River, Salim hit Yvette so hard and so often about the face, even through raised, protecting arms, that she staggered back and allowed herself to fall on the floor. Bone struck against bone again; my hand ached at every blow. When Margaret shows up unexpectedly in Wiltshire, a displeased Naipaul beats her and afterwards explains, “I was very violent with her for two days with my hand; my hand began to hurt . . . She didn’t mind at all. She thought of it in terms of my passion for her.
With most of his fellow Trinidadians, Naipaul was gruff and abrupt, if not totally disrespectful. He gave passing attention to Selwyn R. Cudjoe of Wellesley College, who had spent ten years writing a book about his books and wished to talk of Barthes and Bakhtin; and took no notice of Marina Salandy-Brown of the BBC, who tried to wrong-foot him by saying that since she was a ‘fellow Trinidadian’ he was sure to refuse her.
In 1971, at a meeting of Caribbean writers at UWI Jamaica, a librarian, Cliff Lashley, jumped up from the audience and said that Naipaul ought to be killed, preferably shot. Kenneth Ramchand thought the situation was handled badly while Vidia blamed a former colleague for organizing a ‘racial ambush’. Though he vowed never to come back, Vidia enjoyed his visits to Trinidad; French describes a Cedros jaunt with Sam Selvon and Ken Ramchand, after which they went out to Soldado Rock where the three jumped into the sea, swimming around the boat in jockey shorts.
Naipaul believed a less than candid biography would be pointless, and his willingness to allow such a book to be published in his lifetime was at once an act of narcissism and humility. Naipaul may also have wanted to let it out while he is alive, thus preventing salacious posthumous biographies. French refutes claims that Naipaul was upset with the book: “I don’t think so, he never had any objections, he remained detached from the publishing process, but he allowed me free reign, access to his archives and he stuck to that all through five years of my research and writing.”
In more than half a century of writing, V.S. Naipaul has over 30 books to his name – brilliant combinations of travel, fiction, history, politics, literary criticism and autobiography. It is a body of work of astonishing scope and subtlety, giving him a deserved claim of the greatest living writer in the English Language; ‘for sheer abundance of talent, there can hardly be a writer alive who surpasses V.S. Naipaul,’ wrote Irving Howe in the New York Times.
There is candour to his writing, a constant precision at its heart. It is this quality of integrity – the close analysis of human conduct – that enables Naipaul’s work to transcend the peculiarity of his general theories and the darker side of his persona, as revealed in French’s no-holds-barred biography.
Deosaran Bisnath
May 5 2008
