Literary heroes as real-life heroes?

Well-known author Patrick French has written an authorised biography titled The World Is What It Is of writer V S Naipaul, which is full of searingly honest personal details about Naipaul. The book, which is yet to be released, has stirred controversy and debate among the chattering classes. Naipaul's almost brutal treatment of his first wife Patricia and then his mistress Margaret Gooding has led many to ask the question: Should literary heroes bear the burden of being heroes in real life as well? Or does excellence in one field preclude the necessity of showing any humanity in one's personal life?

Biographies of great people serve an important function. They take the reader into the minds and lives of people who achieve great things. The reader's interest is often not just cursory, it wants to see if there are nuggets of information, insights that can help unravel what makes one person a genius.

Sir Vidia Naipaul is one of English literature's great craftsmen. His impact on literature has been tremendous. Hence when Patrick French, no mean writer himself, started work on Naipaul's biography, many thought that this would give us clues as to what made this man such a colossal writer.

But what the biography has done is raise many uncomfortable questions. Naipaul comes across as so self-centred and self-serving in all his relationships, even more so in his personal relationships, be they with his first wife Pat or his mistress Margaret Gooding, that it would seem that his mastery over his craft seems diminished by comparison. Did his writing require this level of cruelty to those who loved and supported him?

The answer to that can only be "No". No amount of greatness in any field can allow for this kind of behaviour, and more so for a writer who is by definition a chronicler of the human condition. And that a great writer like Naipaul, who ought to have a deeper understanding of human situations, should make this kind of wanton display of chronic apathy towards the women in his life, shows his writing to be a great big sham. In the end, Naipaul reveals a fatal flaw that is often central to tragic literary heroes. But in real life it isn't an edifying picture.

Greatness isn't something that should be restricted to a small area in one's life. The great writer has to be supplemented with the great person, and should have at least a nodding acquaintance with civility in his closest relationships. Otherwise, a life like Naipaul's is an area of darkness that leaves his most devoted reader feeling as cheated as the two women in his life did, and left asking the question: how could a man so cold and self-centred manage to write novels like A House for Mr Biswas with such sensitivity?

Writing, more than any other creative endeavour, requires that those practising it be able to lead if not exemplary lives, at least lives of some sensitivity. How can rich characters emerge from an imagination that is flaccid with its own selfishness? French's biography is both a milestone and a millstone around the necks of those who have revered Naipaul's talent for many long years: how can we pray at the altar of a false god?

Literary heroes can be handed a few concessions to make their mistakes as they go along in life, but in Naipaul's case it is one mistake too many. And this divergence of literary and real-life heroism is something even Naipaul's most ardent admirers will find hard to digest.

---

The literary hero is an exotic rarity, no matter what the papers say. Selling a hundred million copies doesn't cut it "" the true hero changes the way we look at words and language, and does more with them than we thought possible. He gives words to impulse, speaks with the voice of history, contributes to the collective imagination, enriches the intellectual republic. And so on and so forth. It's a tall order.

It is also very hard work. Patrick French shows how V S Naipaul "" without doubt a literary hero "" neglected and undermined his first wife Patricia, even while she lay dying. But Diana Athill, for many years Naipaul's editor at his publisher Andre Deutsch, first knew him as a stern and remarkably productive young man. Of her belated discovery that Naipaul was in fact married, she writes "I had taken it for granted that he lived in industrious loneliness."

Athill goes on to say that, while Naipaul's indifference and dismissiveness towards his wife was certainly brutal, Patricia herself struck her as "negative and depressing, someone who enjoyed being squashed". In such a sexless, loveless (for him) marriage, Naipaul too "probably deserved commiseration".

By his own admission, ambition drove Naipaul, especially in those early years. "Men who are nothing," he wrote, "who allow themselves to become nothing, have no place in [the world]." But the other side of ambition is fear, as French observes, "fear of failure, fear of not being able to write, fear of disappearance, fear of mental or physical breakdown, fear that people were trying to do him down, fear of being faced down, fear of losing face, fear of being found out".

And behind it all was Naipaul's lack of belonging "" he didn't belong in his Trinidadian family, in England, or in India. This "triple exile" left him at home nowhere but in his own mind, in his writing, according to Athill "a great gift but all he had". No wonder he was difficult and demanding.

Literary and intellectual giants especially receive great deference and inspire timidity. After a few years of this, it's hardly to be held against Naipaul that he became selfish and self-important. We create our own heroes, in effect, and then they outgrow our estimation.

Much has also been made of Naipaul's rude and provocative comments on other people and cultures. If you look at them closely, however, they seem deliberately designed to annoy. Moreover, many of these offending statements are quite true; some are actually prescient. Truth is a good defence for rudeness, among literary heroes at least. One can readily see Naipaul chuckling his famous chuckle at others' fury and dismay, even when it results in harsh revelations about his own life. Just don't belittle his work...

Perhaps we shouldn't be looking to writers "" or artists of any stripe "" for heroes. They are great because their monstrous talent has consumed their lives; it has to feed on something, after all.

Rrishi Raote