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The World Is What It Is

A mask that eats the face

Patrick French
Macmillan, 20pp, £400,

Sebastian Smee

Tuesday, 1st April 2008

Sebastien Smee on Patrick French's biography of V.S. Naipaul

A man whose personal life contains as many potentially unflattering episodes as V. S. Naipaul might easily have been resistant to the idea of biographical scrutiny. In fact, however, Naipaul has shown himself remarkably hospitable to the idea. In 1994 he went so far as to say: ‘A full account of a writer’s life might in the end be more of a work of literature and more illuminating — of a cultural or historical moment — than the writer’s books.’

Writing in the introduction to his authorised biography of Naipaul, Patrick French makes use of this (surely disingenuous) statement to legitimate his project. But he also makes it clear that he is not fooled: into Naipaul’s willingness to co-operate with him he reads as much narcissism as humility.

Believing his book to be ‘perhaps the last literary biography to be written from a complete paper archive,’ French wallows a little too indulgently in his sources. At times the narrative reads like a collage of quotations. And yet this remains a brilliant biography: exemplary in its thoroughness, sympathetic but tough in tone. Against Naipaul’s own increasing ‘tendency to caricature himself in public’, and against the distortions peddled by snubbed friends and ideological enemies, French has set down a complex and credible portrait. Reading it, I was enthralled — and frequently amused (how incredibly funny Naipaul can be!). I was also continually aware of a great and unrelenting pressure on the developing writer; it suffuses the book like suspense.

A gifted boy in colonial Trinidad, V. S. Naipaul was indulged in a predominantly female household. But his crowded home life was disputatious and squalid. The circumstances of his upbringing, described by Naipaul himself with a level of insight French cannot hope to improve on, affected him profoundly.

One cannot help but be moved by the boy’s achievement in winning a scholarship to Oxford: so much was made to depend on it. Equally moving — indeed, distressing — is the story of his father Seepersad’s humiliation. A journalist, proudly rationalist and fired with reforming zeal, Seepersad had written articles dismissing Hindu superstition as ‘bunkum’. Offended local Hindus threatened his life in retaliation, and he was forced to atone by participating in an animal sacrifice. The story made international news. Seepersad never recovered his bearings.

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