In 1998 Paul Theroux published “Sir Vidia’s Shadow,” a memoir about the crumbling of his long friendship with V. S. Naipaul, the great Trinidad-born novelist.
Mr. Theroux’s book was a potent, carefully mixed cocktail, served ice cold. It laid bare Mr. Naipaul’s racism, misogyny, vanity, stinginess and (most distressingly) his emotional cruelty to Patricia, his first wife.
Now, 10 years later, comes “The World Is What It Is,” Patrick French’s authorized biography of Mr. Naipaul. It’s a handsome volume, jacketed in silver and black, with a disarming cover photograph of Mr. Naipaul stooping, with a gap-toothed grin, to tie a loose shoelace.
Flip Mr. French’s book over, however, and you confront this Voldemortian clump of words from Mr. Naipaul’s old nemesis, Mr. Theroux: “It seems I didn’t know half of all the horrors.” Cue the scary organ music.
Well, the reader thinks, here we go: Mr. French’s 550-page biography will be a long string of bummers, a forced march through the life of a startlingly original writer with an ugly, remote personality.
The good news is that Mr. French, a young British journalist, is certainly unafraid to face unpleasant facts about his subject. But the better news about “The World Is What It Is” is this: it’s one of the sprightliest, most gripping, most intellectually curious and, well, funniest biographies of a living writer (Mr. Naipaul is 76) to come along in years.
Mr. French is a relative rarity among biographers, a real writer, and at his best he sounds like a combination of that wily bohemian Geoff Dyer and that wittily matter-of-factual cyborg Michael Kinsley.
Even the cameos in Mr. French’s biography are crazily vivid. Here is his hole-in-one description of the editor Francis Wyndham: “Popular, gentle, solitary and eccentric, Wyndham lived with his mother, wore heavy glasses and high-waisted trousers, gave off random murmurs and squeaks and moved with an amphibian gait.”
It is to Mr. Naipaul’s credit that this crafty and inquisitive book exists. “He believed that a less than candid biography would be pointless,” Mr. French writes, “and his willingness to allow such a book to be published in his lifetime was at once an act of narcissism and humility.”
Mr. Naipaul gave Mr. French access to his archives , including journals of his first wife that he’d not yet read. Mr. Naipaul was allowed to examine the completed manuscript but requested no changes.
Mr. French indicates, early on, that he is not playing softball. On his book’s second page we read that Mr. Naipaul “said, or was said to have said, that Africa had no future, Islam was a calamity, France was fraudulent, and interviewers were monkeys. If Zadie Smith of ‘White Teeth’ fame — optimistic and presentable — was a white liberal’s dream, V. S. Naipaul was the nightmare. Rather than celebrate multiculturalism, he denounced it as ‘multi-culti,’ made malign jokes about people with darker skin than himself, blamed formerly oppressed nations for their continuing failure.”
“For a successful immigrant writer to take such a position,” Mr. French continues, “was seen as a special kind of treason.”
But Mr. French quickly and adroitly steps back to give us a wide-angled and morally complicated view of how Mr. Naipaul, knighted in 1990 and named a Nobel laureate in 2001, made his way in the world, how his greatest books were conceived and composed, how he became what he became: genius, loner, sexual obsessive, ogre, snob, provocateur and profoundly influential and controversial thinker on subjects like colonialism and belief and unbelief.
Born into an Indian family in Trinidad in 1932, Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul was raised in relative poverty. His hapless father, a sign painter and occasional journalist, was the inspiration for what may be Mr. Naipaul’s signal work of fiction, “A House for Mr. Biswas” (1961). Mr. Naipaul’s more animated mother, Mr. French suggests, inspired his literary voice: “bright, certain, robust, slightly mocking.”
A scholarship took Mr. Naipaul, at 18, to University College, Oxford, and he has lived in England ever since. When Mr. Naipaul’s first novel, “The Mystic Masseur,” was published in 1957, Mr. French notes, in typically vivid prose: “Like a tiger cub bringing home his first kill, he copied out extracts for his mother from the reviews.”
Mr. Naipaul’s dealings with women make up a good part of “The World Is What It Is.” You will often wish to cover your eyes. After a fumbling sexual encounter that reads like an outtake from Ian Mac Ewan’s “On Chesil Beach,” Mr. Naipaul proposed to Patricia Hale, an aspiring young actress. They would remain married until her death in 1996, but it was often a twisted, withered, tenuous relationship. Mr. Naipaul criticized her remorselessly and regularly visited prostitutes; he also carried on a decades-long affair with a younger woman, Margaret Murray, whom he sometimes violently beat. For her part, Ms. Murray liked to entertain Mr. Naipaul by mailing him life-size drawings “of his erect penis, done in dark brown felt-tip; the penis wore sunglasses and a lime green cowboy hat.”
Though Patricia Naipaul frequently came along with her husband when he researched his travel books, she is rarely mentioned in them; she floated behind, a kind of ghost in his life. Later, when she was dying of breast cancer, he was angry she did not perish quickly enough. He wished to marry his current wife, Nadira.
Mr. French writes with wit and feeling about Mr. Naipaul’s books, and about Mr. Naipaul’s sense of his career. He was grimly determined not to be seen as merely a West Indian writer. “Like Ralph Ellison after the publication of ‘Invisible Man,’ he maintained that he was in a category all of his own.”
Mr. Naipaul was capable of racism. And his success sometimes brought it out in others. Evelyn Waugh, in a 1963 letter to Nancy Mitford, noted that Mr. Naipaul had won yet another literary prize: “Oh for a black face,” he wrote.
Mr. French details the off-and-on animosity between Mr. Naipaul and the Caribbean poet and fellow Nobelist Derek Walcott. Would people still praise Mr. Naipaul’s “nasty little sneers” against black people, Mr. Walcott has asked, if those sneers were turned on Jews?
The final sections of Mr. French’s biography grow a bit deflated and sad; the book becomes a list of awards and obligations, and a compendium of Mr. Naipaul’s boorish behavior. (He dressed down Iris Murdoch while both were dining with Margaret Thatcher at 10 Downing Street; he soured an evening at Francis Ford Coppola’s Napa Valley estate by disapproving of the food and by sneering at George Lucas: “I don’t know ‘Star Wars,’ I am not interested in films.”)
“A writer is in the end not his books, but his myth,” Mr. Naipaul has written. “And that myth is in the keeping of others.” Mr. Naipaul was brave to allow this complicated parsing of his own myth into the world. You will finish “The World Is What It Is” wishing to reread Mr. Naipaul’s best books immediately. You will also be glad he is not your friend, neighbor, sibling, landlord or barista.
But what of it? Bad people write good books. And as Mr. Naipaul pointedly says here, “I remain completely indifferent to how people think of me.”
No comments:
Post a Comment