Ten years ago I published Sir Vidia’s Shadow, depicting V S Naipaul as a grouch, a skinflint, tantrum-prone, with race on the brain. He was then, and continued to be, an excellent candidate for anger management classes, sensitivity training, psychotherapy, marriage guidance, grief counselling and driving lessons – none of which he pursued. Now French’s biography amply demonstrates everything I said and more. It is not a pretty story; it will probably destroy Naipaul’s reputation for ever, this chronicle of his pretensions, his whoremongering, his treatment of a sad, sick wife and disposable mistress, his evasions, his meanness, his cruelty amounting to sadism, his race baiting. Then there is the “gruesome sex”, the blame shifting, the paranoia, the disloyalty, the nasty cracks and the whining, the ingratitude, the mood swings, the unloving and destructive personality. Author Paul Theroux served as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Malawi in the 1960's.
Paul Theroux claims new biography reveals the true monster in V S Naipaul
Paul Theroux claims new biography reveals the true monster in V S Naipaul
When the bestselling travel writer Paul Theroux fell out with his old mentor VS Naipaul he produced a damning memoir. But a new biography of the Nobel laureate makes him think he pulled his punches
Ten years ago I published Sir Vidia’s Shadow, depicting V S Naipaul as a grouch, a skinflint, tantrum-prone, with race on the brain. He was then, and continued to be, an excellent candidate for anger management classes, sensitivity training, psychotherapy, marriage guidance, grief counselling and driving lessons – none of which he pursued.
Now comes Patrick French’s authorised biography of the man, The World Is What It Is, which makes all these points and many more. It seems that I didn’t know the half of all the horrors.
When the lawyers were shown the type-script of my own book, they were all over me. “Look at this – ‘violent, unstable, depressive’ – Naipaul could prove malice!” And the trump card of the QC, with his lists of deletions and revisions: “Do you know what it will cost you if he sues you?”
I was allowed only to quote snippets from his letters to me. Permission was not granted to see the letters I had written to him over the course of 30 years, now in an Oklahoma library. In other words, I was denied access to my own letters.
I did the best I could. I have an excellent memory. But I’ll admit I took a few liberties with geography, made a Malaysian dinner guest into a Kiwi and gave her a funny hat, omitted that I’d won an airgun competition at Naipaul’s house, dressed Lady Antonia Fraser in a more fetching outfit. And, because of the persistent lawyers, I blurred or omitted examples of Naipaul’s outrageous behaviour.
I wanted to write about his cruelty to his wife, his crazed domination of his mistress that lasted almost 25 years, his screaming fits, his depressions, his absurd contention that he was the greatest writer in the English language (he first made this claim in Mombasa at the age of 34). “I am a new man,” he assured me once, “as Montaigne was a new man.” But did Montaigne frequent prostitutes, insult waiters and beat his mistress?
Slash, change; slash, change. Even so, when my book appeared the reviewers howled at me for my audacity. “An unfair portrait”, “a betrayal” and the usual jibes – all of them portraying me as an envious upstart. Just a few weeks ago, in a sycophantic piece about Naipaul by a rival newspaper, my book was described as an example of “literary pique” because I had suggested that Naipaul was a monstrous egotist.
Now French’s biography amply demonstrates everything I said and more. It is not a pretty story; it will probably destroy Naipaul’s reputation for ever, this chronicle of his pretensions, his whoremongering, his treatment of a sad, sick wife and disposable mistress, his evasions, his meanness, his cruelty amounting to sadism, his race baiting. Then there is the “gruesome sex”, the blame shifting, the paranoia, the disloyalty, the nasty cracks and the whining, the ingratitude, the mood swings, the unloving and destructive personality.
It is not strange that he has a title and wealth and a Nobel prize – there have been other Nobel laureates as twisted as Naipaul. Kipling, for example, had a similarly dysfunctional childhood, similar views on warfare and on lesser breeds. He was also just as free and easy with the word “nigger”; but he wasn’t cruel.
French’s story is told with such completeness that it is less a strictly literary biography than a case study in narcissism. And Naipaul’s pathology is central to the tale; his writing peripheral.
Normally an author’s biography offers a reading list of influences and favourite books or writers. What do we have here? Naipaul’s father Seepersad is his favourite writer, some of Conrad passes muster, Flaubert is a one-book wonder; and all the rest he dismisses or disparages – James Joyce, Dickens, E M Forster, Maugham, Keynes, Jane Austen, Anthony Powell, Derek Walcott and many others, including me. I am “a rather common fellow”, who writes “tourist books for the lower classes”. I am also a bore and as a pedagogue “in Africa, teaching the negroes”, I clearly did the unpardonable.
For all its revelations the biography may be the proof that Naipaul is, as he claims, indifferent to what is said about him. Perhaps neither husband nor wife has read it (French says the new Lady Naipaul is dyslexic). Or perhaps French had such an ironclad guarantee of authorial independence that – faced with the book’s unflattering details – Naipaul simply turned his back on it, as he turned his back on so much in his life.
All is scrupulously well documented. Naipaul is only 75, so some of his teachers are still living, most of his schoolmates, many of his enemies and acquaintances. His Oxford tutor was consulted and reported: “He wanted to be an Englishman.” Most of the wit-nesses, the cast-off friends, the offended relatives (plenty of those howling: “He used us!”), the rejected publishers and editors, and many other victims of Naipaul’s wrath are still alive.
To the people who first knew him in Britain or India, he is an odd fish – severe, manic, “very tightfisted”, a worrier. To the West Indians he is the epitome of a smart- mouthed Trinidadian, practising “picong” (from piquant) – a vicious sort of verbal life, her reactions, the conversations, the abuse? Her voice comes from beyond the grave in the form of 24 notebooks, which she humour intended to unsettle the hearer.
Princess Anne’s daughter “has a criminal face”, Naipaul says. And as you frown, as you’re supposed to, he speaks of someone else – “A fat girl and she did what fat girls do, she married a Zulu.” I remember him saying, “The Italians make cheese out of dirt – but you knew that, didn’t you?”
Or of a great cricketer who’d made a political statement: “He’s South African negro and is saying that because he’s a slave.”
“Africans need to be kicked – that’s the only thing they understand,” he said in Uganda. “Whip them” was also a frequent Naipaul rejoinder.
Is it West Indian waggishness when he speaks of “negroes at [Princess Diana’s] shrines, weeping openly”, or “little negro children running up and down the street [in London], causing me distress”. Or consider his reaction to the news that the cricketer Viv Richards and his Indian wife have had a baby: “How could she have a child by that nigger?” Or this comment on the Nobel prize (1988): “Of course I won’t get it – they’ll give it to some nigger or other.”
To Naipaul, West Indians are “slaves” and Indians have a “slave mentality”. The word trips off his tongue. But I see these cruel and vulgar remarks as an expression of hostility: a Caliban-like way of saying, “Keep away from me.”
Heightened racial anxiety runs right through the biography. “Well, this is one thing I am begging you not to do, don’t marry a white girl, please don’t,” his mother writes. Yet he does marry the white Patricia Hale, who is from a humble home in Birmingham. He makes her an amanuensis, a cook, a stay-at-home drudge and finally a drug-taker.
After years of using prostitutes, the turning point in Naipaul’s life comes in 1972 when he finds a woman he desires: Margaret, whom he has met in Buenos Aires. She apparently refused to be interviewed for the book, but her archived love letters supply the missing narrative. They are rapturous, despairing, pleading, speaking of “his cruel sexual desires”. She acknowledges that he is her black master, that he regards his penis as a god, that she will worship it, abase herself.
This word “master”, used often in the letters, is interesting. It is a slave word. In role playing – and most of these love letters refer to highly eroticised power games – the master is regarded as dominant; but, paradoxically, it is usually the submissive person, the masochist, who has the ultimate power – maddening for the sadist.
Here is one instance. Margaret shows up unexpectedly in Wiltshire. Naipaul is displeased with her. He 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. Her face was bad. She couldn’t appear really in public. My hand was swollen.”
“Margaret was Vidia’s ideal woman,” French writes. “He could string her along and mistreat her with her abject consent.” He later writes, in paraphrase, “She said she had done things to Vido that would have made her sick with anybody else, and yet she longed for the time when she could do them again.” It is no exaggeration to describe the relationship between Naipaul and Margaret as a version of The Story of O.
Eventually Naipaul told his wife Pat about the relationship, divulging some details and showing her intimate photographs. She was devastated but stayed with him and he was reluctant to offer a divorce. He gave her literary jobs to do, went on reading his rough drafts of his fiction to her – in which the sex scenes were based on the rough sex he enjoyed with Margaret.
In one of the many ironies of this astonishing biography, Pat is hired to find expressive love letters for Lady Antonia Fraser’s collection, Love Letters. And so, in the months that Pat spends at the London Library collecting these love letters, Vidia is in Wiltshire receiving love letters of a different stripe – expressions of abasement from Margaret in Argentina, who is reporting her three abortions, yet begging to be degraded, for any attention at all, even the punitive attention to which he had habituated her.
I should say that I know Margaret to be a decent woman who was not just ill-used by Naipaul but subjected to a species of soul-murder.
How do we know so much of Pat’s awful obsessively kept from 1972 to 1995,when writing was her solace.“You are the only woman I knowwho has no skill,” Naipaul told her.“You behave like the wife of a clerk who has risen above her station.” As though to prove him wrong, Pat bitterly referred to Naipaul as “the genius” in her covert diary. French believes that Naipaul never read it, although he sold it with his papers for a hefty price. In terms of telling Pat’s story, it does this poor woman complete justice. Let us not forget that much-reported admission when Naipaul said, almost swanking, “It could be said that I had killed her . . . I feel a little bit that way.”
For most of the time French writes about Naipaul with little comment, allowing the bald statements to create their own effect. Then, at first obliquely, he underscores Naipaul’s behaviour, saying he is “increasingly cranky and infantilised” or “ill-equipped, emotionally and practically, to look after himself”, a “tricky customer”.
At last the biographer seems to tire of ironising and turns sarcastic, as in this summary of Naipaul’s reaction to feeling underpaid by The New York Review of Books: “Never one to forgive a past favour, the man without loyalties threatened to break his links.” Throughout, Naipaul wins prizes, is paid enormous sums in spite of his poor book sales, and is knighted. He is still publishing, becoming even more of a scold and a drama queen, but much of the time he complains of writer’s block.
The end is eventful. Dissatisfied with Margaret, annoyed with Pat for having cancer (“He felt angry that [Pat] was dying and angry that she was not dying fast enough”), he meets a Pakistani divorcee in Lahore and very soon afterwards asks her, “Will you consider one day being Lady Naipaul?”
He dumps Margaret without explanation. Pat (so as not to be a nuisance) forgoes more chemotherapy and dies miserably. Six days later, before the worms can pierce Pat’s winding sheet, the Pakistani woman has moved into the house. There the story ends, a powerful lesson in karma as the sour and much-shrunken figure marries this peculiar stranger.
The Nobel is still to come, more money, greater fame. But none of it enough to satisfy the unforgiving man with a “lasting emotional incapacity”, the ultimate Caliban with a college degree and a knighthood casting no shadow.
© Paul Theroux 2008
