The Whole Truth about V.S.Naipaul

What is worse, after he had ‘killed’ one and dumped the other of this pair of utterly devoted and adoring sati-savitris, he promptly installed in their place a younger third woman. Oddly for an alleged Hindutva sympathizer, he now chose a feisty Pakistani journalist, Nadira Khanum Alvi, whom he brought home the very day after his first wife was cremated and whom he married a couple of months afterwards. This act of unseemly and indecent haste inspires the biographer Patrick French to attempt one of his few high literary allusions, to the cold meats of a funeral furnishing forth a marriage table, as in Hamlet.

But that is an uncharacteristic flourish from a biographer who sustains his credibility by employing a brisk and even brusque narrative tone throughout. In the early parts of the book, French seems a little anxious to be seen as standing at some distance from his subject and sounds even off-hand at times; it is as if he feared that if he were to delve into Naipaul’s psychology, he might be quickly sucked in. But as the biography progresses, it is lifted from being just chronologically busy and anthropologically bustling by an unsuspected and even unfashionable depth of emotion.

This depth is often fenced in by inverted commas, for it comes mostly from Naipaul’s own retrospective reflections and regrets. French allows his protagonist to speak for himself in his own voice, and he accords the same indulgence to most of his closer relatives and friends. As the biographer chosen by Naipaul himself (over such other contenders as Jeffrey Myers and Ian Buruma), French had of course a run of the extensive Naipaul archives at the University of Tulsa in Oklahoma. But even better, he went around doing a fair bit of global leg-work, recording half a million words of interview with a large number of key informants in Trinidad, Jamaica, Britain, USA, Canada, Argentina and India. This book thus has a rare spontaneity, immediacy and polyvocal resonance.

We see and hear Naipaul’s parents, his ‘Nanie’ (maternal grandmother), his numerous Hindi-speaking mausas and mausies (once spelt ‘mousies’ though they were apparently anything but that), his six siblings and even more numerous cousins—all of whom inhabited for long years the same house which under its capacious roof slept over forty persons. This was the Lion House, which Naipaul in his semi-autobiographical masterpiece A House for Mr Biswas called the Hanuman House and rendered with amazing fidelity and feeling. French quotes me in his book as having said that the Hindu joint family has hardly been described with such authenticity even in all of Hindi literature, and I would have said that with even greater force had I seen earlier a photograph printed here showing the grand matriarch (the ‘Mrs Tulsi’ of fiction) seated in the middle of her big brood of nine daughters, all stern and unsmiling and dressed in austere white saris. This is the clinching visual image of the stifling domestic ambience in which little Vidia grew up.

His father, Seepersad Naipaul, was a bumptious journalist but a pioneering diasporic fiction writer who remains Vidia’s hero and all-time favourite author. He tried to break out of the demeaning rule of his in-laws by finally buying a house of his own, as does Mr Biswas in the novel. Vidia himself, more ambitiously, broke off from his motherland altogether in a quest to find his true centre, a place he could belong to and identify with as he never could with tiny Trinidad, where the global movement of cheap labour engineered by the British Raj had brought his poor forbears and left them stranded in a cultural limbo, amidst racial hostility from the recently emancipated black slaves. The ‘Negroes’ have remained Naipaul’s abiding bete noire. In 1989, when asked if he would ever win the Nobel prize, Naipaul replied: ‘Of course I won’t get it, they’ll give it to some nigger or other.’ (And they did too—to Derek Walcott in 1996—some years before it went to Naipaul!) England, where Naipaul arrived at the age of eighteen on a scholarship to Oxford, proved an enduring enigma if not an outright delusion. Having obtained a second class degree in English literature, Naipaul was rejected twenty-six times for a whole variety of jobs because he was the wrong colour. Apparently, the blood of race proved thicker than the water (or even wine) of Oxford. The sheer humiliation and the grinding poverty of those early years nearly destroyed Naipaul. Deeply disheartened, he was left a little hardened and seemingly heartless, and grew a less vulnerable and prickly carapace. Even later, living in England, where ‘people are very proud of being very stupid,’ was for him ‘a kind of castration really’.

The next stop in his quest for home was ancestral India, where he spent nine months with his wife in 1962-63, not only touring extensively but actually living in one place for five months and writing a whole novel. His father had entertained the fond hope that after Oxford, Vidia might want to join the Indian Foreign Service—as if the migration to Trinidad had never occurred or was a passing aberration in their God-given and ever abiding Indianness. Kamla, the eldest, prettiest and most caring of Vidia’s siblings (and also the most perceptive, judging by the excerpts cited here from her unpublished memoir) had already spent a couple of years at the Banaras Hindu University on a Government of India scholarship. The chapter in this book describing this extended first sojourn by the Naipauls in India is pointedly titled ‘The Homecoming’.

But that was not to be. What turned out to be wrong with India was that it was not modern enough or decolonized enough, and utterly blind to and callously accepting of all its problems. What was wrong with Naipaul, in this notorious mismatch, was that, like a fond son returning home, he probably expected too much on every count. Pat, who came with no preconceptions, ‘loved India’, Naipaul now tells us. ‘She saw dignity and beauty and things like that; I saw the calamity.’ In An Area of Darkness (1964), the book of the tour, Naipaul had given us no clue that besides his own emotionally invested and lacerating view of his ancestral land, there co-existed another saner and more balanced view of the matter such as that of his wife, whom he had all but airbrushed off his narrative. The main attraction and value of this biography is that he now tells the multifaceted truth, his own as well as other people’s. He recognizes that the world is as it is, and no two persons see it the same way—not even the young Naipaul and the old Naipaul.

Modern literary biographies often tend to be too much about the man and not enough about the work which made the man biographable in the first place. In the case of Naipaul, what French calls ‘the seeming gap’ between the man and the author was problematized early, in a review of A House for Mr Biswas by Derek Walcott who said, ‘But the books are almost a contradiction of the man’. We have so far had the books, but the great achievement of this biography is that it also gives us the man to round off the picture. Indeed, this book seems in some ways to be the autobiography that Naipaul more than once girded up to write but never eventually managed to wrench out of himself.

In the twilight of his life, here he is, now boldly confessing and now defensively justifying what he felt and did during many critical moments of his far-flung, variegated and fragmented life. It is he, and he alone, who says, indeed claims, that he might have killed Pat—a statement that is to be read not as a judicial confession but rather as excessive self-reproach and contrition. After he had revealed in an interview to The New Yorker in 1994 that he had earlier in life gone to prostitutes, Pat (Naipaul now tells us) had a relapse of her cancer. ‘It could be said that I had killed her. It could be said. I felt a little bit that way.’ Well, not many readers would say that what Naipaul says could actually be said, objectively speaking; they may, on the other hand, be moved by Naipaul feeling that way. If he killed her at all, it must have been in the wider and paradoxical sense that (in Oscar Wilde’s words), ‘. . . each man kills the thing he loves’—whether with ‘a kind word’ or with ‘a sword’.

To conclude with a metatextual reflection, perhaps the most remarkable thing about this biography, written as French claims ‘with ruthless clarity’, is that Naipaul should have allowed it to be published without feeling the need to read it before publication, or apparently even afterwards. He has always had the reputation of being an uncompromising and unflinching truth-teller about the whole wide world and, in turn, he seems to have resolved that the whole truth should be told about him too, with he himself doing much of the most poignant telling. Like many of his best books, this authorized biography too is a testimony to Naipaul’s courage, wisdom and integrity.

Harish Trivedi teaches English at the University of Delhi, Delhi.