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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

What he did to his lover Margaret Gooding, who transformed his life and his writing in the 1970s, was not just emotionally brutal. Of their most tempestuous period together he told French: ‘I was very violent with her for two days. I was very violent with her for two days with my hand. My hand began to hurt … She didn’t mind it at all.’

Sex — urgent, plentiful, and tending toward the sadomasochistic — was the foundation of their relationship, and French is neither shy nor euphemistic about saying so. Its affect, in Naipaul’s own words, was ‘staggering’: ‘I will never run it down,’ he said.

But as the debauch dwindles, to be replaced by shameless two-timing and bullying, even French’s sympathy snaps. Margaret, he testily writes, ‘was Vidia’s ideal woman: he could string her along and mistreat her, with her abject consent.’

French is good on the books, remaining measured and trustworthy even when plainly excited by works of special importance, such as A House for Mr Biswas, An Area of Darkness and A Bend in the River. His accounts of Naipaul’s relationships with publishers, agents, supporters and fellow writers make for some of the most interesting passages. Francis Wyndham, a long-term supporter, and Diana Athill, Naipaul’s editor at André Deutsch, feature prominently. Deutsch himself, says Wyndham, did not offer the kind of backing Naipaul deserved, and as with Naipaul’s sexual life, early starvation led to certain compensatory drives later on. Thus, French’s accounts of the various deals with publishers and magazine editors in the post-Deutsch era have their own entertainment value.

Paul Theroux, who wrote two books about Naipaul and for a long time regarded him as a mentor, is treated with barely disguised contempt. Ample justification is given — Theroux does seem like a creep — but French’s irritability is hard to miss, and reads suspiciously like irritation on his subject’s behalf.

The accounts of Naipaul’s various travels, his information-gathering techniques, and his methods for converting research into writing are never less than fascinating. One marvels at his ability to extract favours from people, and learns amusing things such as what it is he likes about hotels: ‘the temporariness, the mercenary services, the absence of responsibility, the anonymity, the scope for complaint.’