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Tuesday 2 December 2008

The World Is What It Is

A mask that eats the face

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

But the metaphor is taken further when French interprets Naipaul’s self-conception as ‘the writer’ — aloof and unanswerable to anyone — as his own form of mask. Behind it, he convincingly suggests, Naipaul became fragile and brittle. Thus the writer’s persona became, writes French, a mask ‘that eats into the face’ (the phrase was coined, as I remember, by John Updike to describe celebrity).

The story of Naipaul’s long involvement with his first wife Patricia is heartrending. At least, it is at first. The book ends with her death in 1996, by which time one’s pity is exhausted and one can do little more than shake one’s head.

From the start, their sexual incompatability is clear. And yet many of the letters between them are full of love and hope. They met when Naipaul was at his lowest ebb. ‘He had moved beyond Wertherism,’ writes French; ‘he was going off the rails.’ Pat came to the rescue, as she would do repeatedly in the future. She helped him in every way she could. But in the long term her devotion to him simply was not reciprocated (unless dependency counts as devotion).

The letter she wrote to him, soon after their marriage, that includes the line ‘I do feel the lack of a ring acutely’ is a remarkable thing, not least because the lack is never corrected. The all-round pathos is only increased when Naipaul loses their marriage certificate and, later, starts sleeping with prostitutes.

The injuries at first seem evenly shared. Naipaul, always attracted to the idea of debauchery, seems to have suffered from their physical incompatibility and his own sexual inexperience far more than she did. But eventually it is Pat — unable to have children, verbally abused, betrayed, continually exploited, publicly humiliated and finally killed off by terminal breast cancer — who tips the scales of suffering her own way.

In the process of failing to leave her, Naipaul claimed to have discovered ‘the strength of the weak’. And indeed at times the two of them seem, in Saul Bellow’s memorable phrase, like ‘the knife and the wound aching for each other.’ ‘I should have left,’ he told French. ‘I didn’t have the brutality. Isn’t it strange? People would say that what I was doing was quite brutal.’

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