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The World is What it
is – The Authorised Biography of V.S. Naipaul
Naipaul’s personality, hidden in his books, emerges clearly in this biography and that is what makes Patrick French’s attempt hugely successful. But if his subject turns out to be a cruel, self-centred, insensitive, wife-abusing, supercilious person, it is because he has been brutally truthful in his account. Of course, allowance has to be made for the fact that Naipaul allowed his authorised biographer access to all his documents and gave him interviews that were at once free and frank. As French says in his Introduction to the book, when Naipaul received the Nobel in 2001, "each country responded in its own way". The responses ranged from the handwritten letter of congratulation he received from the President of Trinidad and Tobago to the strong denunciation for spreading venom and hatred from an Iranian newspaper. There is no choice but to love him or hate him as a writer. Born the grandson of a "bonded labourer" in Trinidad where the British practiced "slavery with a different name", long after it was abolished across the British empire thanks to the forceful interventions of such parliamentarians as William Wilberforce, Vidia’s constant companion those days was poverty. At school, he had "only admirers, not friends". His father Seepersad was an iconoclastic journalist, who made such powerful comments as: "A bull that has fallen by the wayside will be given quick aid, but a real colonial-born Indian will be shunned. A maze of conventions rule the heart of the Hindu". An agnostic, he wrote against the practice of sacrificial slaughter to propitiate Goddess Kali. The orthodox struck back forcing him to make a "sacrifice" at the threat of death. The surrender to the fundamentalists marked the end of his campaign for social reform and his career as a free thinker. Seepersad wanted to be a writer. The excerpts from his writings that French provides show that he had a way with the word. Vidia seems to have inherited the desire to be a writer from his father who could, however, never fulfill his own ambition. The scholarship that Vidia won to pursue higher studies in Great Britain was a turning point. It was the fulfillment of his desire to get away from Trinidad where the "pundits are more concerned with wearing sandalwood paste caste-marks than with learning how to read the scriptures." He set out for a country "that had been presented to him as the epicenter of civilization". Vidia got such gems of advice from his father in the aerogrammes that arrived regularly in London: "No harm in kissing a girl, so long as you do not become too prone for that sort of thing". Some sort of a skirt-chaser, Vidia got seriously involved with an undergraduate Patricia Hale. At a time when penury stared him in the face, when landlords were unwilling to take him as a tenant, when his vaulting ambition did not match the niggardly recognition he got, this white girl brought some stability into his life. She emerged as the quintessential wife, ever adoring and ever sacrificing. "It was a great depression verging on madness `85 Pat was a great solace to me at that period; probably I clung to her because of that depression". Vidia, who considered himself like a heaven-born and, therefore, wanted attention all the time, could not reciprocate Patricia’s love. Pray, he even forgot to present her a ring on their wedding day. Worse, he misplaced the wedding certificate. Patricia was emotionally devastated when the man for whom she sacrificed her familial relations and her own career admitted in an interview to the New Yorker that he used to go to prostitutes to satiate himself during the initial period of their married life. Vidia dumped her for all practical purposes when he fell for a gorgeous Argentinean woman. As he crisscrossed the world Among Believers and Wounded Civilization, his own mind was becoming An Area of Darkness and his conduct Beyond Belief. As he grew in literary stature, he shrunk as a person. While Patricia stood by him through thick and thin, it was mistress Margaret who accompanied him on his travels providing services, principally boastful, energetic and violent sex, outside the scope of his mute, sad, stay-at-home wife. Yet, he always returned to Patricia who slaved for him, listening to the passages he had written, even when she lay on her deathbed, and cooking for him. The husband was not wide of the mark when he admitted, "It could be said that I killed her". Vidia’s treatment of Margaret was no better. She was fed on hopes of a marriage that never happened. And when the time came, the mistress of 20 years had to accept alimony and get lost. By then Vidia had fallen in love with Nadira Alvi, a vivacious Pakistani journalist, 20 years younger to him. He regretted that Patricia, who was suffering from cancer, did not die "fast enough" so that he could announce to the world the arrival of a new Mrs Naipaul. The day after Patricia died and was given a parsimonious, impersonal funeral, Nadira stepped into his house as the rightful claimant of Naipaul, the great, successful writer. The book ends with a dramatic scene in which Nadira "walked further into the woods, alone". She "found a beautiful spot" where she scattered the ashes of Patricia with a Muslim prayer, the Fatiha, on her lips. What more could Patricia have expected from her worthless husband? French has succeeded in giving a mirror image of Vidia, though as Naipaul admits, "the biography of a writer will always have this incompleteness". For a lover of Naipaul’s writing, the book provides an insight into his books and the autobiographical strands in them. He will be able to appreciate his books like A House for Mr Biswas and A Bend In The River better after reading this tome. While a slimmer volume with lesser quotations would have served the purpose, it would not have measured up to what Patrick French claims, "It is perhaps the last time a literary biography will be written from a complete paper archive".
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BEFORE
you pick up this thick volume, you have to make a distinction between
the writer and his writing. Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul is one of the
greatest living writers who has won almost all literary awards,
including the Nobel. Anybody who has ever read any of his books, whether
fact or fiction, will be highly impressed by his distinctive style,
narrative skills and incisive comments. Naturally enough, he evokes
strong emotions.