Monster talent

Published on Friday 11 April 2008 16:33

BOOK review

The World is What It Is: The Authorised Biography of VS Naipaul

by Patrick French

Picador, 576pp, 20

OVER HIS LONG AND ILLUSTRIOUS writing career, VS Naipaul made several stalled attempts at autobiography, each time abandoning the project in frustration. "The difficulty was that (Naipaul] was not willing or able to examine his own past behaviour, and had no wish to write a light book of anecdotes," Patrick French explains. "Vidia was not introspective …"

Reviewing Naipaul's 1984 book, Finding the Centre, which incorporated "Prologue to an Autobiography", Martin Amis noted: "One sees in the diffidence and difficulty of this essay how little of the self is present in Naipaul's work. In the novels a past is used but a self is not used. In the travel writing, a controlling intelligence is present, but the self remains inscrutable and undisclosed."

Naipaul it seems required the services of an authorised biographer. French got the job. The resulting book, at 500-plus pages – the tip of a mountain of painstaking digging through an archive of 50,000 pieces of paper and umpteen interviews – is primarily a service to the reader. French interviewed Naipaul many times.

"During these interviews, his replies alternated between statements of absolute self-belief and defensive emotional fragility. Of all the people I spoke to for this book, he was outwardly the frankest."

French makes clear in his introduction that a biography can never fully reveal the source of its subject. He is not seeking to find the key to Naipaul's life. That notwithstanding, this is not "a book of light anecdotes", nor is it the work of an armchair shrink.

There is no attempt to seek out the grail, unholy or not, of Naipaul's mechanics as a writer, or his motives as a man in the throes of intemperate or passionate relationships with others. French tells a tale that is not yet over. At 75, Sir Vidia lives in partial seclusion in rural Wiltshire. He read French's manuscript on its completion and returned it, requesting no changes.

Life, of course, is all-inclusive; but biography must be selective. You take on trust that the biographer's omissions will not miss-shape the graph of the life, for good or ill.

French's integrity impresses. At times his tacit disapproval of Naipaul's behaviour is almost palpable. For instance, when, the day after his first wife's funeral, Naipaul buys olives and installs his new wife-to-be in the marital home: "And the funeral green olives did coldly furnish forth the marriage tables," he writes, reading Naipaul's behaviour as clearly disrespectful, at best a chilling form of indifference, when in fact it may have been unabated fear – of sudden loneliness, of being unprotected – for throughout his life Naipaul has instinctively conditioned himself to the self-protective act.

The book's first image of Naipaul shows him refusing a sweet at the age of two, because he believed it might be glass. And the closing portrait – in what is a beautifully poised and lyrical finale – has him weeping as his wife's ashes make "a little smoke-like dust" and Naipaul's face becomes a riverbed of guilt, perhaps of remorse, or possibly gratitude (he claims it is the latter), as Lady Naipaul number two tips forth the remains. The scene is poignant but also charming, and French directs it on the page with a dramatist's skill.

From first to last the story is gripping, and sometimes repelling. Out of Trinidadian sunshine and early academic brilliance, Naipaul emerges into the struggle for recognition as a writer working in exile in post-war Britain. He suffers depression, meets Pat Hale, his wife to be, as an undergraduate at Oxford. French is marvellous in bringing Patricia to life. There are no small parts in this turbulent tale.

Then, Naipaul's lover for 25 years, the Anglo-Argentinian beauty Margaret Gooding, comes pressing her claim as a central presence; she is wooed and latterly brutalised by Naipaul, indefatigably present, scorching, enticing, ten years younger than her guru. He asked her to live with him. Did he mean it? He treats her barbarically, ignoring her when it suits him, physically beating her when he learns she has been unfaithful, until "my hand began to hurt", he confesses to French. "She didn't mind it at all … I have enormous sympathy for people who do strange things out of passion."

Gooding tells Naipaul that being with him is like being in a film. Naipaul stores this. "She ordered him to cherish the wounds on his arms as marks of great passion," we are told.

We see his appetite for detail. We read his notebooks, enter the world of Patricia's diaries, of Margaret's erotic correspondence. The servile figure of Paul Theroux takes its courtier's bow. Their infamous friendship, much later made public, threads through the book.

At the heart of it all sits Naipaul himself, a Hindu god, a gnomic sprite, a quixotic genius, at times behaving like a monster. His books parade before us in sequence, but are not dwelt upon as texts. They merge with the life from which they have emanated, elucidating that life and not vice-versa. By the end you have the sense of a man at odds with himself, alone, a splendid tragedy of existence, his achievements as consolations and mighty expressions of a great talent.

French has produced a magnificent read. It will be one of the Books of the Year. Those seeking Naipaul, the man of solitude and withdrawal, should go to the novels: Mr Biswas, A Bend in the River. Those books are his truth; they are where he lives. In the meantime, The World is What It Is is a serious read that is more than worthy of its subject. And beautifully made.