The greatest writer of his time?
V.S. Naipaul, who has died aged 85, was “often cited as the greatest living writer in the English language”, said The Daily Telegraph. A master storyteller with a unique grasp of style and structure, the author won almost every literary prize going, including the Nobel. His work – which explored Caribbean life, the themes of exile and self-determination, and the disintegration of post-colonial societies – was hailed around the world for its piercing insight and subtle comedy. Yet Naipaul’s undeniable talent for writing was matched by his almost preternatural ability to get up people’s noses. Irascible and curmudgeonly, he took great pleasure in offending anyone and everyone, be it female writers (“unequal to me”), India (“no other country was more fitted to welcome a conqueror”), and even his native Trinidad (“unimportant, uncreative, cynical”). Perennially accused of bigotry, racism and much else besides, Naipaul was stridently unapologetic. “If a writer doesn’t generate hostility,” he declared, “he is dead.”
The second of seven children, Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul was born in 1932 into a devout Hindu family in Chaguanas. His father, the son of an Indian immigrant labourer, was a journalist and aspiring writer; his mother came from a once-wealthy landowning family. Naipaul hated his childhood. He said he had been molested by a cousin, and detested the feuding between his parents’ families. Inspired by his father, who read Dickens and other classics to him, he set his sights on becoming a writer. After attending Queen’s Royal College in Port of Spain, he won a scholarship to read English at University College Oxford; there, he worked hard, but made few friends. Lonely and depressed, he tried to commit suicide by putting his head in an oven – an attempt thwarted when the gas ran out and he had no money to feed the meter.
His first novel, The Mystic Masseur, was published in 1957, three years after he graduated. Like all his early work, it was set in Trinidad. “To become a writer, I had thought it necessary to leave,” he said. “Actually to write, it was necessary to go back.” To pay the bills, Naipaul made radio shows for the BBC’S Caribbean Service and wrote (generally scathing) book reviews for the New Statesman. “I was,” he said, “an accomplished hack.” But that all changed with the 1961 release of his fourth book, A House for Mr Biswas, said BBC News online. A “sprawling, Dickensian” tale of a Trinidadian man dreaming of success – a character inspired by his father – the novel was a “masterpiece”, and it made his name. “Of all my books, this is the one that is closest to me,” he later wrote. “It is the most personal, created out of what I saw and felt as a child.” Despite his new-found fame, Naipaul moved away from fiction and spent the next few years travelling the Caribbean, India and Africa. The result was a series of travel books in which he powerfully examined his own sense of rootlessness, and cast fierce judgements on the former colonies he visited. “History is built around achievement and creation,” he wrote in The Middle Passage (1962), “and nothing was ever created in the West Indies.” India, he declared, was a “wounded civilisation”. But Naipaul reserved special scorn for Africa, which inspired his Booker-winning In a Free State (1971), and A Bend in the River (1979), a picture of an African state spiralling into hell, which begins: “The world is what it is; men who are nothing, who allow themselves to become nothing, have no place in it.” Asked what he thought of African literature, he replied: “Does it exist?” When judging a creative writing prize at Kampala University in Uganda, he decided that none of the entrants should win first prize. “I’m sure your gifts lie in another direction,” he assured one student, “but you have wonderful handwriting.”
“Always attuned to the tides of history,” Naipaul travelled to Iran, Pakistan and Malaysia in the late 1970s to witness the rise of Islamic fundamentalism, said The New York Times. His conclusion was typically blunt: Islamic societies, he said, inevitably led to tyranny because the religion “offered no political or practical solution. It offered only the faith.” In 1970, he had settled in Wiltshire, which is the starting point for his finest late work, The Enigma of Arrival (1987), part fiction, part autobiography, part meditation. Naipaul won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2001, and wrote until 2010. But he “lamented the limitations of fiction”, arguing that the novel had peaked in the 19th century.
His final years were marked by an epic spat with Paul Theroux, his former travelling companion, which began when the latter found copies of his own work, which he had given to his friend, for sale in a rare books catalogue. Naipaul also “gave fuel to his critics” with the interviews he gave to Patrick French for his 2008 biography, said The Guardian. The author admitted to being unfaithful to his first wife, Patricia – he had, he had previously said, been a “big prostitute man” – during a long affair with an Anglo-argentinian woman named Margaret Gooding. He told French he’d once beaten Gooding to the point that “she couldn’t really appear in public” – but insisted she “didn’t mind at all”. Within two months of Patricia’s death in 1996, he had, however, ditched Gooding and married Nadira Khannum Alvi, the Pakistani journalist. Naipaul insisted he should be judged by his books, not his actions. As he said in his Nobel lecture: “I am the sum of my books.”
“His final years were marked by an epic spat with his former travelling companion, Paul Theroux”