| This week, as Patrick French's biography of V S Naipaul came out, news headlines verged on the surreal. "My cruelty killed first wife, admits Sir Vidia." "Naipaul a womanizer, claims biography." French, a scrupulous researcher and historian, has meticulously detailed the painful marital history of Patricia, Naipaul's first wife, as she struggled with his coldness, the revelation that he had visited prostitutes, and with his affair with Margaret Gooding. |
| This is what Naipaul told French: "She suffered. It could be said that I had killed her. It could be said. I feel a little bit that way." In the black-and-white world of news, Naipaul's nuanced, and sorrowing, revelation has been condensed to the bald statement that he "tortured" Pat. |
| Like many Indian readers, I have a troubled relationship with Naipaul's work. The early novels "" The Mystic Masseur, Miguel Street, A House for Mr Biswas "" are as fresh today, as filled with illumination and humour, as when he first wrote them. I may not agree with his vision of history, but I admire the way he took his personal bitterness and insecurities and fashioned them into a deep and abiding curiosity about the world. In a Free State, India: A Wounded Civilisation, A Bend in the River, The Loss of El Dorado "" you may argue with his views, but you cannot help but respect his honesty, and love the clarity and precision of his language. |
| Guerrillas, the book that drove a rift between Naipaul and his faithful publishers, Diana Athill and Andre Deutsche, repels me as much as it repelled Athill. But he still had decades of brilliant work before him "" and then came the later work. Half a Life and Magic Seeds are anaemic, passionless novels, reeking of authorial weariness. To read A Writer's People, years after the fiercely brilliant Finding the Centre, is to be dismayed by the constant peevish whine emanating from his arguments. |
| But the real tragedy of Naipaul is not that he's produced middling work in his later years "" this happens, all too often, to even the best of writers, and his earlier works will continue to find an audience. It's that Naipaul has been overtaken by the banality he has so often condemned. |
| The flurry of sensational headlines in the wake of French's biography will die down soon, and may yield to more thoughtful evaluations of Naipaul's life and work. In the public imagination, however, the writer has long since been subsumed by his alter ego, the Naipaul who is celebrated not for his work but for his irritability, whose personal peccadilloes are currently more interesting than his writing. He's been reduced to a collection of attitudes: Naipaul slams Henry James, Naipaul dislikes Harry Potter, Naipaul can't stand Britain, Naipaul complains about this, Naipaul complains about that. |
| French is not to blame: he has merely shone the same spotlight onto Naipaul's relationships as he has done on the work. That is his job, as biographer. It's the weight we give to the more personal revelations that troubles me. Does it matter to me as a reader that Naipaul may have been a cold and sometimes cruel husband and friend? It doesn't change the way I read The Enigma of Arrival or A Way in the World. But does it matter to me that Naipaul's grasp of history is incorrect? Yes, it does, very much: it changes the way I read India: A Wounded Civilisation and forces me to accept that Naipaul is not an unbiased witness to history. |
| The cruelest legacy of the 21st century is that it turns everything "" the messiness and intricacy of an individual life "" into slabs of gossip. I am oddly grateful that I read Naipaul, especially the early works, at a time when he was just a name on the spine of a book. I knew nothing of his life, then; I had not read his letters to his father, or Paul Theroux's analysis of a friendship gone sour. There was only the work, and the reader, and nothing in between. The writer is chief editor, Westland/ Tranquebar. The views expressed here are personal |
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