You don’t have to be nice to be great...

VS Naipaul, the “great prostitute man”, died last week. He was a great writer too, I am told, a Nobel Prize winner, but it’s still hard to get past the “great prostitute man” bit — especially as those are his own words, describing his state of being while he was married to his first wife. He didn’t seem to rate women in general (Jane Austen was “too trivial”) but then he didn’t rate most of the human race. He had no great love for his native Trinidad, nor did much of Africa or India please him. His “conservative politics” were disgraceful. Sir Vidia Naipaul was not a nice guy. He was not a good bloke. But we must look at ourselves too. If VS Naipaul was a massively unreasonable person, it can be argued that we too are being just as unreasonable in this demand that the artist must not only be sublimely talented, he must also be a decent fellow.

Personally I know quite a few decent fellows, but I wouldn’t want to read their books.

In fact, I know quite a few decent fellows who are writers, and I wouldn’t want to read their books either.

If I have learned anything in this life, it is that decency and genius have absolutely nothing to do with each other, and that it is totally ridiculous to be expecting anything else from a writer or a musician who has already given you whatever good is in them.

This is perhaps better understood in rock’n’roll, where we could observe Bob Dylan in the film Don’t Look Back being horrible to Donovan, which somehow never put us off any of Dylan’s 500 great songs.

I think of a line by his old pal from The Band, Robbie Robertson, who seemed like a nice guy when I interviewed him, not that it matters: “You take what you need and leave the rest.”