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The Genius

THE WORLD IS WHAT IT IS:
The Authorized Biography of V. S. Naipaul
By Patrick French
554 pp. Knopf $30.00

By Nigel Hamilton

Want to write? Anyone in your family or friends wanna write? This is the book for you—that’s to say, a book that will make you think twice and three times more before setting out on such a course! I’ve devoured a multitude of biographies of famous authors in my time (and written one, of Thomas Mann), but I have never, ever come across an accounting so relentlessly, remorselessly honest about the cost to one’s sanity, one’s spouse, one’s relations, one’s friends. . . . No, no, no, you want to cry out by the end: the toll is too terrible!

Of course I knew when starting to read The World Is What It Is that it wouldn’t be pretty. But since I’d once worked, after university, for the publisher Andre Deutsch, who “discovered” Naipaul and published all his early novels, stories and travel quests—including A House For Mr. Biswas and An Area of Darkness—I was intrigued. Naipaul was notoriously publicity-shy in those days (the mid-’60s), and Deutsch was a small independent company, without the clout to pitch a shy author—so what had been the glue? His editor, Diana Athill?

I didn’t like Diana—or perhaps it was the other way around. But Diana was legendary, the bespectacled literary doyenne of the publishing house as well as the former mistress of the publisher, and I rather kept out of her way. I did wonder, though, if she had a “non-literary” relationship with Naipaul, our “star” author. Well, now I know. She didn’t, French tells us—though she did with another author, the Boston-born ex-convict Hakim Jamal. Jamal not only bedded Jean Seberg, but took back to the Caribbean a white slave girl, Gale Benson, daughter of a British member of Parliament, who was then ritually murdered—a gruesome end, in black Trinidad, which was the dark heart of Naipaul’s life story, and one he begged Andre to commission him to write up, since it contained, according to Naipaul, “so many things in our world: race, perverted sex, boredom, communes, communal lunacy, conscience, fraudulent politics (black and white), liberalism, etc.”

How did Naipaul, an indentured East Indian laborer’s grandson from Trinidad, become one of the most distinguished writers of his generation (he is 76 now)? Moreover, how did he conquer the world of English fiction, and then non-fiction, too? Who were his contemporaries, his peers? What was the secret of his style, which finally won him the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2001?

If that’s what you’re interested in, this is not the book for you. French is (thankfully, perhaps) no literary scholar, or even cultural panoramiste, in the manner of, say, Humphrey Carpenter. Nor is he concerned with the psychology of the man who turned against his mother, his first wife, his brother, his sisters, his friends. He will not even judge the man, the monster, the mad Indian who could hardly wait for his white English wife to die before marrying, on a whim, a divorced Muslim Pakistani. No. French has eschewed deep interviews, literary comparisons, analyses, extensive quotations. Instead, having been granted free access to Naipaul’s archives at the University of Tulsa, he has chosen to chronicle, hypnotically, detail upon intricately researched detail, the inexorable rise to fame of “the Genius,” as his working-class but Oxford-educated wife began to call him in her diary, which she kept almost to the day she died—and which, after Naipaul had married his high-flying Pakistani pin-up, he did not even bother to read.

I thought the life of Evelyn Waugh, the greatest comic novelist of the twentieth century, but the most obnoxious of men to meet, made for sad reading. Naipaul’s is even more sickening, however, from the point of view of compassion, or even common decency. Everything, from childhood onwards, is sacrificed to his determination to be the grand homme de lettres. Everybody, from Port of Spain to Oxford, from the BBC’s Caribbean Voices to the English voices of lords and ladies, and a cottage in the country, is sacrificed to that end. He revels in being obnoxious, difficult, contrary—for wherever he goes he has X-ray eyes and a faultless photographic memory.

French never pauses to examine in depth Naipaul’s achievement. A book is published, a handful of quotes from book reviews, and we are off again to another continent, another source for Naipaul’s next work—all the while served further courses in Naipaul’s ever-worsening history of snobbery, conceitedness, cruelty, venom. His wife is sexually timid; he becomes a connoisseur of tarts, until he meets a tarty Argentine lady who takes his breath away by worshipping his penis. French’s book becomes a portrait in grotesqueness, unputdownable in its awfulness. We know, in advance, Naipaul’s success will be the literal as well as metaphorical death of his devoted, servant-like, long-suffering English spouse, Pat. We therefore wait while Naipaul’s Biswasian house of horrors rises, without humor or self-knowledge, higher and higher until it becomes a Tower of Babel. From penniless sponger Naipaul graduates to sponging off the rich and finally becoming rich himself, but still sponging. He seems to have no shame, no remorse, no generous self—only a certainty that, if he but works hard enough, travels far and wide enough, turns the pages of the human condition crisply enough, he will portray modern, misguided mankind as no other writer has ever done.

I longed to understand what the hell French is on about, what exactly is this tapestry Naipaul—the stateless, wandering post-Hindu—is forever weaving at such great cost to his health and everyone else’s? French doesn’t allow us to look into that magic lantern, which we must reserve for another time, when we revisit Naipaul’s books— Guerillas and A Bend in the River, especially. There are no beautiful passages to savor in French’s book—nothing like what our good American narrative biographers, from Caro to Morris, Kearns Goodwin to McCullough, would include with their rich descriptive powers and love of mythology. No, French isn’t going there—not even to seek out the personal interviews that might have lightened the tale and enlightened us. He stays relentlessly with the quotidian: the petty details that cumulatively create a Cyclops, a monster who believes he is, in a way, a new Hindu god, armed with the sharpened scimitar of the skeptic’s eye and the skilled word. It becomes, in its way, a portrait of the banality of evil—daily unkindnesses in the service of an unexplained, unexplored absolute we gauge to be, I suppose, greatness—greatness earned over a dead wife’s body.

The World Is What It Is ends with the re-marriage, and the scattering of his former wife’s ashes by his second wife. It is the banality of evil paraded as a life story, shocking in its coldness, its cruelty, its human damage. If this is the cost of greatness, its author seems to say, beware, ye of little faith! Paul Theroux, Shiva Naipaul (Naipaul’s dead brother), Antonia Fraser, Anthony Powell—all are painted as amiable buffoons beside the calculating misery-maker, the Genius, Vidia Naipaul.

Let’s make sure this book is mandatory reading in every English writing class. Caveat scriptor!

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Nigel Hamilton is a Fellow of the McCormack Graduate School of Policy Studies, UMass Boston. The second volume of his life of Bill Clinton, Bill Clinton: Mastering the Presidency, was published in 2007, and has just been issued in paperback (Public Affairs). The sequel to his Biography: A Brief History, titled How To Do Biography: A Primer, was published in the spring of 2008 by the Harvard University Press. He is currently working on a modern version of Suetonius’ classic work, The Lives of the Twelve Caesars, to be called American Caesars, recording the lives of the last twelve presidents from FDR to George W. Bush.

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