Calling it like It Is

In the foreword to Life is What It is, Patrick French refers to his biography of V.S. Naipaul as perhaps the last of its genre compiled entirely from paper documents (biographies will henceforth be gleaned from Facebook, emails, and other electronic paper trails). He goes on to write an unsparing account of an ingenious writer shadowed by a callous man. French's patchwork is painstaking. Perhaps in realizing that, in his own words, "there can be no doctored truth", Naipaul allowed his biographer unhindered access to his archives and the diaries of his deceased wife. It was a remarkable opening up for a man who, at an obscenely young age, declared friendship superfluous and treated relationships as grist for his ego.

French is right to subtitle his book “the authorized biography of VSN”; Naipaul has garnered a lifetime of snubbed protégés, many of whom have spilt vindictive ink in Sir Vidia’s direction. It pained me to read of Naipaul's dismissal of Paul Theroux, an author whom I greatly admire, as a fatuous travel writer. When Theroux finally realized the extent to which Naipaul had accessorized him, the former wrote an impassioned memoir, Sir Vidia’s Shadow. While Mr. French draws on Theroux’s outtakes from a friendship gone sour, it is the biographer's dispassionate narrative that allows the reader to hand a more damning verdict to Naipaul than Theroux could have hoped for.

The irony of Naipaul's outbursts provides bits of levity in the story. Naipaul had long disavowed the role of his alma mater, Oxford, in his literary achievements; when an editor has the audacity to critique his punctuation, Sir Vidia pistol-whips him with his degree. Another scene that allows the reader to chortle at an otherwise frightening man: upon returning to Buenos Aires, Naipaul runs madly through the airport and hops a fence out of fear of a confrontation with his mistress's husband. The man's idiosyncracies take a slight edge off the most abrasive of personalities.

After pages of ghastly revelations on the private life of the Nobel laureate, I was surprised to read A.N. Wilson’s judgment that Tolstoy was more of a “monster” than Naipaul. Wilson is more qualified than anyone to judge a character contest between the two curmudgeons, but I beg to differ. I can only recall a few of the lurid equivalents to Naipaul’s “monstrosities” in Wilson’s biography of Tolstoy. Yes, both men were unraveled by sexual guilt and both were gallingly ungrateful for their wives’ help in the literary process. Both men drove their spouses to insanity and left them to rot in the mad house. But Naipaul’s narcissism inflicted more damage. He is, by his own admission, guilty of negligent homicide in carrying on a twenty-five year affair and frequenting prostitutes while his wife toiled for his dreams. Pat Naipaul seemed to stomach her husband’s affair until she found out via the newspapers that Vidia was "a great prostitute man". The revelation may have triggered a psychosomatic break and a precipitous descent for her health. Naipaul’s ex post facto remorse is too laden with self-pity to gain any moral capita with the reader. It is a great relief that we can keep the man in one corner and the writer in another, for despite making himself a caricature of insensitivity and prejudice, Naipaul wrote profound and evocative accounts of post-colonial struggle. His societal insight is, according to French, unrivaled.

Perhaps A.N. Wilson’s impartiality should be questioned. When Naipaul was caught driving drunk in 1993, Wilson groveled that the famous writer should be tucked into bed rather than brought to court. And in Wilson’s review of Life is What it Is, he avoids moral accountability for Naipaul. Titling your review “Master and Monster" obliges you to be as brutally honest as French was in writing the biography. And what if Tolstoy were alive? Might Wilson’s verdict read differently?

If there was a point to this post I've strayed from it. Naipaul forged his literary persona by freeing himself from the inconveniences of reciprocal relationships and camping out as a displaced observer among the displaced peoples of the 20th century. The collateral damage from the molding of an artist was a necessary sacrifice in Naipaul's eyes, one dutifully accepted by his first wife. It is fascinating to learn of the creative destruction that infuses a writer's work, even if the reader is among the urchins swallowed by the tide of the writer's gaze.