Patrick French's brilliant and candid The World Is What It Is lays bare the demons that drove one of our greatest - and most controversial - writers, says Hilary Spurling
Richard Rogers, Sunday April 13, 2008. The Observer
Photograph: Eamonn McCabe
The World Is What It Is: The Authorised Biography of VS Naipaul
by Patrick French
Picador £20, pp400
'I would take poison rather than do this for a living,' said VS Naipaul after teaching a creative-writing course to American students who divided into those who thought him by far the most brilliant teacher on campus and those for whom he was a bigot ('He was simply the worst, most closed-minded, inconsiderate, uninteresting and incompetent professor I have ever met').Over the past 50 years, the London literary world has been split along similar lines. For a reclusive literary ascetic with patrician attitudes and a Miltonic sense of destiny, Naipaul has maintained a consistently high gossip quotient, trading public provocation and personal insults, pursuing and pursued to this day by private vendettas vigorously conducted in print with ex-friends and once faithful supporters. His strange character and stranger career, coupled with rumours about his triangular private life, mystified people who knew him almost as much as people who didn't.
Naipaul and his English wife met as fellow undergraduates at Oxford, married almost at once and dedicated themselves ever after exclusively to his writing. Patricia Hale gave up everything - her family, her future, her faith in herself - to marry a scholarship boy with no prospects, contacts or money at a time when the racial prejudice endemic at every level of British society prevented him getting a job or even renting a room in London. Naipaul's uncles in Trinidad were 'Hindi-speaking cane-cutters'. His grandfather had been shipped out of India as indentured labour ('slavery with an expiry date', as Patrick French puts it). In the half a century after he first landed in England, Naipaul rose up the ranks of wealth, fame and privilege to collect every available worldly honour, including a knighthood and the Nobel Prize for literature... [article continues]
Naipaul's life
Born
17 August 1932 in Chaguanas, Trinidad and Tobago.
Educated
University College, Oxford, where he read English.
Married
Patricia Hale, 1955; Nadira Khannum Alvi, 1996.
Career
1957 The Mystic Masseur, his first novel, published.
1961 Miguel Street wins Somerset Maugham Award.
1971 In a Free State wins Booker Prize.
1979 A Bend in the River, Naipaul's masterpiece, shortlisted for the Booker.
2001 Awarded Nobel Prize for literature.
He says: 'I am the kind of writer people think other people are reading.'
They say: 'His level of perception is of the highest and his prose has become the perfect instrument for realising those perceptions on the page.' - Martin Amis
Η βιογραφία του Ινδού Νομπελίστα συγγραφέα σερ Β.Σ. Νάιπολ από τον Πάτρικ Φρεντς είναι το φαβορί ανάμεσα στους έξι φετινούς υποψήφιους (Μαρκ Κόκερ, Ορλάντο Φάιγκς, Κέιτ Σάμερσκεϊλ, Αλεξ Ρος και Τιμ Μπούτσερ) για το βρετανικό βραβείο «Σάμιουελ Τζόνσον» των 30.000 λιρών. Η βιογραφία «Τhe world is what it is» απεικονίζει τον Νάιπολ υπερόπτη, εγωιστή και σκληρό, παρότι ο συγγραφέας της ήταν εξουσιοδοτημένος. Ο συγγραφέας Πολ Θερό λέει για τη βιογραφία: «Δεν είναι μια χαριτωμένη ιστορία. Πιθανότατα θα καταστρέψει τη φήμη του Νάιπολ για πάντα».
The World Is What It Is, by Patrick French
The enigma of survival
Reviewed by Aamer Hussein
The Independent, Friday, 4 April 2008
The story ends with a death and a wedding. And a scattering of ashes – of the bridegroom's previous wife, in the company of her replacement. He recites a prayer or two, one from the Qu'ran; he cries. He's a celebrated Nobel-winning author, and also a controversialist, now less famous for his recent novels than for his crusty pronouncements about the world in which we live.
This scene, worthy of the subjects's novels, is one of the most intimate moments in Patrick French's copiously detailed and largely sympathetic authorised biography of VS Naipaul: the man who, perhaps more than any of his contemporaries, has been castigated by fellow-writers for the opinions expressed in his anti-Caribbean, anti-Islamic, pro-Hindu revivalist travelogues. In his Nobel lecture, Naipaul said that a writer's biography can never fully reveal the source of his books. "The biography – or even the autobiography – will always have this incompleteness." In the incompleteness of Naipaul's own autobiographical mode – unforgettably employed in The Enigma of Arrival – he situates a troubled and deracinated subjectivity at the centre of elliptical, fragmented narratives that refuse to be judged by conventional standards.
This biography attempts what its subject's novels and essays deliberately evade: to work in the ellipses of the life, and locate the sources of the work. French's method is phenomenological: he presents the evidence as he finds it, in his subject's words or the words of those who knew him, keeping psychological analysis to a minimum, and intervening only occasionally to add his discreet opinions.
In spite of Naipaul's rejection of his Caribbean roots, French returns to his Trinidadian childhood, attempting to retrieve the moments that inform the fiction, and to validate them as inspiration. This disrupts the chronological flow by darting forward disconcertingly to the later novels, though this is not a major caveat in a work that does not purport to be a critical biography. There is, however, a panoply of detail to enrich the legend.
Naipaul's maternal grandmother was a Catholic; his father may not even have been a Brahmin; his sister had a fling with Sam Selvon, another contender for immortality in the post-colonial canon. There is also the writing father, to whose stories French, like his hero, refers to with respect.
Although French's portrayal of Trinidadian life is fascinating, the number of pages devoted to Naipaul's childhood is perhaps somewhat excessive for all but the most loyal fans. French takes 219 pages to reach Naipaul's 29th year. He does, however, turn the stories of those years – particularly Naipaul's English apprenticeship – into a parable of the post-colonial writer's journey from periphery to, and struggle at, the centre. The story of Naipaul's breakthrough into the literary mainstream – at least as a reviewer and commentator – is familiar. More compelling is the welter of his rejected and abandoned manuscripts, through which French diligently wades... [article continues]
Exclusive from the Literary Review print edition.
Patrick French has brought off something very difficult, so difficult indeed that I would have thought it impossible. He has written a biography of a living person that is every bit as honest, perceptive, compelling and plain good as if his subject was dead. It is a masterly performance, and if a better biography is published this year, I shall be astonished. That he has been able to achieve this owes much to the generosity, openness and fairness of his subject, Sir Vidia Naipaul, who has imposed no restrictions on him and has, for instance, allowed him to quote extensively from the diaries written by his first wife, Pat - diaries which, French tells us, Naipaul has not read himself. So we have a biography that is remarkably frank, warts and all. Given Sir Vidia's well-documented sensitivity, even touchiness, this is a mark of his high regard, even reverence, for Literature. A biography that is not honest is, he told French, no good at all.
The bare outline of the life is well known: the poor childhood in Trinidad, the influence of his father (a journalist and writer of short stories), the scholarship to Oxford, the depression and resentments from which he suffered, the early struggles and efforts to be published, the critical success of his first novels (a success not matched by their sales), and the blossoming of his reputation until we eventually arrive at Sir Vidia Naipaul, winner of pretty well every literary prize going, including the Nobel, and the most distinguished living writer of English... [
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