The Try-Works

The latest in one of my favorite literary feuds.

Ten years ago I published Sir Vidia’s Shadow, depicting V S Naipaul as a grouch, a skinflint, tantrum-prone, with race on the brain. He was then, and continued to be, an excellent candidate for anger management classes, sensitivity training, psychotherapy, marriage guidance, grief counselling and driving lessons – none of which he pursued.

Now comes Patrick French’s authorised biography of the man, The World Is What It Is, which makes all these points and many more. It seems that I didn’t know the half of all the horrors.

When the lawyers were shown the type-script of my own book, they were all over me. “Look at this – ‘violent, unstable, depressive’ – Naipaul could prove malice!” And the trump card of the QC, with his lists of deletions and revisions: “Do you know what it will cost you if he sues you?”

I was allowed only to quote snippets from his letters to me. Permission was not granted to see the letters I had written to him over the course of 30 years, now in an Oklahoma library. In other words, I was denied access to my own letters.

I did the best I could. I have an excellent memory. But I’ll admit I took a few liberties with geography, made a Malaysian dinner guest into a Kiwi and gave her a funny hat, omitted that I’d won an airgun competition at Naipaul’s house, dressed Lady Antonia Fraser in a more fetching outfit. And, because of the persistent lawyers, I blurred or omitted examples of Naipaul’s outrageous behaviour.

I wanted to write about his cruelty to his wife, his crazed domination of his mistress that lasted almost 25 years, his screaming fits, his depressions, his absurd contention that he was the greatest writer in the English language (he first made this claim in Mombasa at the age of 34). “I am a new man,” he assured me once, “as Montaigne was a new man.” But did Montaigne frequent prostitutes, insult waiters and beat his mistress?

Slash, change; slash, change. Even so, when my book appeared the reviewers howled at me for my audacity. “An unfair portrait”, “a betrayal” and the usual jibes – all of them portraying me as an envious upstart. Just a few weeks ago, in a sycophantic piece about Naipaul by a rival newspaper, my book was described as an example of “literary pique” because I had suggested that Naipaul was a monstrous egotist.

Now French’s biography amply demonstrates everything I said and more. It is not a pretty story; it will probably destroy Naipaul’s reputation for ever, this chronicle of his pretensions, his whoremongering, his treatment of a sad, sick wife and disposable mistress, his evasions, his meanness, his cruelty amounting to sadism, his race baiting. Then there is the “gruesome sex”, the blame shifting, the paranoia, the disloyalty, the nasty cracks and the whining, the ingratitude, the mood swings, the unloving and destructive personality.

It is not strange that he has a title and wealth and a Nobel prize – there have been other Nobel laureates as twisted as Naipaul. Kipling, for example, had a similarly dysfunctional childhood, similar views on warfare and on lesser breeds. He was also just as free and easy with the word “nigger”; but he wasn’t cruel.

The rest.