A House for Mr. Naipaul

Patricia and V. S. Naipaul

I feel obliged to write a few passing words on the passing of V. S. Naipaul, who died on Saturday. I had known about him and knew some of his writing, though I am somewhat ashamed I hadn't read him much at all. I also knew Paul Theroux, American traveller and travel writer (though he writes novels, too, like The Mosquito Coast). When I checked out one of his books from my local (Des Moines) library, 1999's In Vidia's Shadow, I wasn't aware that Vidia was V. S. Naipaul's first name or that the book was the story of Theroux's long friendship with Naipaul. I don't imagine the friendship survived the book. I was astonished that Theroux had gone to such lengths to present to the reader such a negative account of a fellow writer, whom Theroux freely admits writes much better than he did. 

But upon finishing the book, I realized that it wasn't exactly Theroux who had lived in Naipaul's shadow. It was Naipaul's first wife, Patricia, "Pat," who had, for the 41 years of their marriage. She is the real subject of Theroux's book. Naipaul carried on an affair for 25 years quite openly with Margaret Gooding, and admitted in an interview that he frequented prostitutes. Patricia's health declined in the 90s, and after her death from cancer (Naipaul even complained about having to take her to the hospital because it took him away from his writing), he married a Pakistani jounalist just six days after Patricia was cremated.  In the authorized biography of Naipaul by Patrick French, Naipaul even admits that his cruelty may have killed her. "She suffered," he told French. "It could be said that I killed her. It could be said. I feel a little bit that way." Of his mistress, he told French, "“I feel that in all of this Margaret was badly treated. I feel this very much. But you know there is nothing I can do.... I stayed with Margaret until she became middle-aged, almost an old lady."

Naipaul was an unsurpassed master of English prose, as his great novel, dedicated to his father, A House for Mr. Biswas, makes movingly and abundantly clear. What is unclear, however, to so many of the admirers of his writing is how such beauty could've been produced by such an overpoweringly ugly man. Biography is now so pervasive, so inescapable, that it is virtually impossible for a writer to achieve fame without everyone knowing some embarrassing details about his life. And social media paving a broad avenue straight through everyone's privacy is making it far worse. We know the lurid and irrelevant details about the private lives of so many writers by now that it might persuade the more privately-inclined to hide behind a scrupulously defended pseudonym or not to write at all.  Robert Frost, one of the greatest and most beloved American poets, had to endure the first two volumes of a three-volume biography that tried - and failed - to destroy his reputation. As Clive James wrote in a review of a collection of Frost's letters: "Luckily not even America—still a puritan culture in which an artist’s integrity must be sufficiently unblemished to impress Oprah Winfrey—has proved entirely devoid of critics and academics who can handle the proposition that the creator of perfect art might be a less than perfect person."(1)

Well, Naipaul was, as everyone has been saying over the weekend, an appalling man. The man is gone. Will his personal nastiness affect how people in 50 or 100 years will read his novels? I hope not. Does that mean that biography is separate from an artist's work? I hope so. I never met Naipaul except in The Enigma of Arrival, The Middle Passage, and A Way in the World. What does it matter - what can it matter - to me what kind of a person he was?


(1) Clive James, "The Sound of Sense," Prospect Magazine, January 23 2014.