The Daily Telegraph

Sir V S Naipaul

Author who won the Nobel Prize for his often bleak depictions of exile and post-colonial trauma

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SIR VS NAIPAUL, who has died aged 85, was often cited as the greatest living writer in the English language and won almost every possible literary prize including, in 2001, the Nobel. A Trinidadia­n Indian, he had lived in England since he first came to the country to study at Oxford University in 1950.

He will probably be best remembered for his fourth (and most autobiogra­phical) novel A House for Mr Biswas, with its Trinidadia­n setting and its themes, typical of all his work: self-determinat­ion, exile, identity and the gradual disintegra­tion of a postcoloni­al society. In latter years his personal reputation took a battering when an authorised biography was unstinting in its depiction of his failings.

He was born Vidiadhar Surajprasa­d Naipaul at Chaguanas in Trinidad and Tobago on August 17 1932, the grandson of a Brahmin who came to Trinidad from Uttar Pradesh in India. His father, Seepersad Naipaul, who he adored, was a frustrated journalist on the Trinidad Guardian whose disappoint­ment with life eventually led to a nervous breakdown.

Along with five sisters, Vidia, as he was known, had one brother, Shiva, who was 12 years younger. He also became a well-known novelist but died in 1985 at the age of 40. Though the pair were not close, Naipaul having left Trinidad when his brother was five years old, he often said that this bereavemen­t marked his emotional life permanentl­y and that he measured all subsequent events by the date of his brother’s death.

Born a committed atheist but growing up in the midst of a devout and closely knit Hindu family, Naipaul found his home life anachronis­tic and embarrassi­ng. He attended Queen’s Royal College in Port of Spain and, filled with distaste for the squalor and inertia which surrounded him, he dreamt of escaping as soon as he was able, and turned to writing for solace. From an early age, he practised “memory drill” and kept a notebook in turquoise ink in which he wrote voraciousl­y, trying hard to remember the exact words and gestures of everyone he encountere­d.

He left Trinidad on a scholarshi­p to read English at University College, Oxford, in 1950, but was unhappy and lonely there and tried to commit suicide in his second year. Eventually graduating, he moved to a two-roomed bedsit in Kilburn, London, and began freelancin­g for the BBC Caribbean Service while writing his first novel on borrowed BBC “non-rustle” paper.

At Oxford he met Patricia Ann Hale, and in 1955 they married, though his personal aversion to “titillatio­n” and “trivia” meant that, though much of his work was autobiogra­phical, his wife never merited a mention. In 1957, he began reviewing books for the New Statesman magazine, where he gained a reputation for being the most brutal of critics. For 10 weeks that year, he also held down his only full-time job, writing press releases for a company which manufactur­ed concrete.

He wrote slowly and carefully and his first novel was sent to a publisher in 1955. Having heard nothing for three months, he went to the firm personally to ask for the manuscript back, and the bitterness of this, and other such humiliatio­ns, stayed with him all his life.

Naipaul’s first published novel, The Mystic Masseur, appeared in 1957 and gained immediate acclaim, winning him the John Llewellyn Rhys Memorial Prize. Drawing much inspiratio­n from the work of the Indian writer, RK Narayan, the novel featured a humble schoolteac­her who, quite accidental­ly, becomes a mystic guru. This tale of the “little man” who struggles against life, and whose successes and failures seem almost unrelated to his efforts, became characteri­stic of much of Naipaul’s work.

Though it contained a critique of the unstable roots of political power in Trinidad, it was considered a comic and benevolent novel and was soon followed by The Suffrage of Elvira (1958), and Miguel Street (1959), which won him the Somerset Maugham Award. Both of these novels still featured the quaint and idiosyncra­tic characters who populate a small area of Trinidad and, though critically successful, they did not achieve popular success; he made a total of £300 from his first three novels.

This situation was eventually altered for good with the publicatio­n of A House for Mr Biswas (1961), far and away his most successful novel. In it he told the tale of Mohun Biswas, a small-time Trinidadia­n Asian who is, in large part, a descriptio­n of Naipaul’s own father. From his unlucky birth (with six fingers) to his unlamented death, all that Mr Biswas desires is a home, a fixed place of his own in which to feel secure and on which to stamp his identity. In a caricature style reminiscen­t of both Narayan and Dickens (one of Naipaul’s favourite authors), Mr Biswas eventually overcomes life’s obstacles, only to experience a pyrrhic victory.

Though extremely successful in England, the novel was unpopular with other Caribbean writers, who considered it patronisin­g and colonial. Of the son in the book, who is clearly the Naipaul character, the author wrote that “his satirical sense kept him aloof… it led to inadequaci­es, to self-awareness and a lasting loneliness. But it made him unassailab­le.” This autobiogra­phical quote was to haunt him in interviews for many years, since most critics considered it the closest Naipaul ever came to self-descriptio­n. In September 1960 he returned to the West Indies on a travel scholarshi­p from the government of Trinidad and Tobago, whose prime minister had suggested the writing of The Middle Passage (1962), which became the first of his many travel books and which described his impression­s of five different local societies. His conclusion­s were scathing, including the sentence “the West Indies are Hell”, and the book, and much of his later travel writing, though critically appreciate­d, were often condemned as reactionar­y, misanthrop­ic and misogynist­ic. By 1962 Naipaul was world famous and was often asked to appear on television interviews, during one of which he stormed off set, declaring that the interviewe­r was underprepa­red. “Things matter only when they are done well,” he said. Mr Stone and the Knights Companion (1963), which won the Hawthornde­n Prize, was his first novel to be set outside the West Indies and dealt with the humdrum, suburban life of a minor civil servant in London. An Area of Darkness (1964) became an account of the journey he made across India and towards his roots. In a remorseles­sly depressing work he included long descriptio­ns of the subcontine­nt’s grotesque poverty and thereby caused considerab­le controvers­y. In his by now habitual rebarbativ­e manner he greeted all such criticism with contempt for those “first-world types who find drastic poverty enchanting”. In 1966 he made another foreign journey, this time to Kampala University, Uganda, where he had been offered the post of visiting lecturer in English Literature. He never deigned actually to give a lecture and, on being asked to judge a creative writing award, announced that none of the entries were good enough and that he was, therefore, going to award the winner only the third prize. “I’m sure your gifts lie in another direction,” he told her, “but you have wonderful handwritin­g.”

From the late 1960s his novels grew more political and darker still, dealing with totalitari­an oppression and systematic despair. The Mimic Men (1967) is narrated by a deposed Indian politician who lives on an imaginary Caribbean island whose culture Naipaul describes as a mere “mimicry” of others. This novel, which won the WH Smith Award, is almost totally despairing, despite the odd moment of human comedy.

By 1970 he was a relatively wealthy man and he bought a cottage in Wiltshire, to which he moved with his wife. For many years he maintained a mistress, Margaret Gooding, with whom he claimed to have discovered real sexual passion – a discovery that “it would have been terrible to have died without”.

Less comic and substantia­lly bleaker in outlook, his next major work, In

a Free State (1971), won that year’s Booker Prize with its two stories about racism in the West and one novella about even worse racism in the developing world.

The absolute hopelessne­ss of his world view reached its acme in Guerrillas (1975), which describes a chaotic, crumbling Trinidad filled with racial hatred, culminatin­g in the utterly pointless murder of the central character’s white girlfriend. It was a bitter indictment of a disintegra­ting society and left no room for redemption. In 1979 he published A Bend in

the River, which was set in a “new” African country, emerging from a colonial hell only to become a totalitari­an nightmare zone. In 1984 he published Finding the Centre, part memoir, part travelogue, in which he described his motivation as a legacy of his father’s “fear of extinction”, a fear which drove him to write compulsive­ly. Though he appeared to have become more tolerant of others’ failings, his prose style became harder to penetrate. Readers who presumed to criticise were summarily dismissed as “lacking in concentrat­ion”.

For most of the 1980s Naipaul wrote no fiction and led a secluded life, moving between his flat in South Kensington and the cottage near Salisbury where he did all his writing. He was notorious for replying to dinner invitation­s with strict instructio­ns as to his dietary requiremen­ts and, more often than not, specifical­ly requesting the wine which was to accompany the meal. A keen wine enthusiast, he once waived his fees in exchange for a case of Château Pichon Lalande ’86, though he remained a strict vegetarian throughout his life.

His other interests included cricket and callisthen­ics, and in 1987 he published his most successful book for a decade, The Enigma of Arrival, which painted an evocative picture of his rural life and drew subtle links between this and the patterns of Caribbean and Indian culture.

Dedicated to the memory of his dead brother, Shiva, it contains an obsessivel­y detailed account of his Wiltshire neighbours’ eccentrici­ties and appearance­s – though he never once mentions his own – and, lingering on the descriptio­ns, he arrives at an intuitive understand­ing of his own predicamen­t, and

“the enigma of arrival”, with its concomitan­t sense of death, decay and the absolute temporarin­ess of any sense of place in life.

In 1990 he was knighted, and received Trinidad’s highest literary medal, the Trinity Cross. This award was significan­t since his relationsh­ip with his former home had always been ambivalent. The same could be said of his attitude to women, who appeared to sink in his esteem as he grew older, sexual passion in his novels often degenerati­ng into contempt and even repulsion. He returned to India in 1990 with India: A Million Mutinies Now, though, once again, he insisted on bucking the trend and concluded that India’s fortunes were looking up, whereas most general opinion was that the country had gone downhill since he had first written about it.

Despite his many prizes, Naipaul remained constantly distrustfu­l of literary handouts and disliked the notion of social dependence in any form. This scruple did not prevent him accepting the first David Cohen Prize of £30,000 in 1993, given in recognitio­n of “a lifetime’s achievemen­t by a living British writer”. He said he regarded this accolade as a reward for endurance.

His personal correspond­ence was sold to the University of Tulsa in Oklahoma and in 1994 he published

A Way in the World, designed as a record of the post-colonial experience. Layers of imagined historical narratives involving such figures from South American history as Columbus and Raleigh were interwoven with personal reminiscen­ce, and it was left to the reader to draw the connection­s. Marking another stage in his drift away from the convention­al novel, it was not universall­y well-received.

Bitterness seems, at times, to have ruled his life and, being brutally intolerant of any noise and disturbanc­e, he determined at an early age never to have children. As he grew older, he grew increasing­ly deaf and developed a strange habit of repeating the end of each of his sentences twice.

In his novel, My Secret History (1989), Naipaul’s close friend, Paul Theroux, wrote an account of a character called S Prasad based, as even Naipaul would admit, on himself. Prasad is a miserable figure who wanders about in his pyjamas being weird about sex and making unfunny jokes with racist overtones. Naipaul, asked about this descriptio­n of himself, was heard to remark that the view was “too kind, too kind.”

After several years of deteriorat­ion their friendship ended, according to Theroux, because he had found offered in a rare books catalogue copies of his books he had given to Naipaul with affectiona­te inscriptio­ns. In his bitter, score-settling memoir

Sir Vidia’s Shadow (1998), Theroux depicted an arrogant, demanding and bigoted man. They were, however, reconciled in 2011 at the Hay Festival.

Glimpses into Naipaul’s private life were often unedifying, even those he provided himself: in 1994 he admitted to the New Yorker that he had been “a great prostitute man” during his first marriage, and for Patrick French’s 2008 authorised biography The World Is What It Is he gave a series of searingly frank interviews in which he admitted, among other transgress­ions, to have treated his first wife appallingl­y and to have badly beaten Margaret Gooding. “Naipaul enjoys presenting himself as a monster,” the Telegraph reviewer observed.

In 2001 he was awarded the Nobel Prize, the citation noting that “he transforms rage into precision and allows events to speak with their own inherent irony.”

That year his novel Half a Life, a study of exile amid post-colonial chaos, was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize, and in 2004 came his final novel, Magic Seeds, its sequel. His last book was The Masque of Africa: Glimpses of African Belief (2010).

VS Naipaul’s first wife, Patricia Ann Hale, died in 1996, and soon after he married Nadira Khannum Alvi, a Pakistani journalist. She survives him along with her daughter, whom Naipaul adopted in 2003.

V S Naipaul, born August 17 1932, died August 11 2018

 ??  ?? Naipaul, above in 2004, and right, with Paul Theroux; below, two of his best-known books and the searing 2008 biography; and, bottom, Naipaul in 1968
Naipaul, above in 2004, and right, with Paul Theroux; below, two of his best-known books and the searing 2008 biography; and, bottom, Naipaul in 1968
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