Writer who was hated and adored
Sir V S Naipaul Nobel Prize-winning author BORN AUGUST 17, 1932 - DIED AUGUST 11, 2018, AGED 85
IF A writer doesn’t generate hostility, he is dead,” 2001 Nobel Prize-winner Sir V S Naipaul once said. And the Trinidadianborn author practised what he preached in a writing career that produced more than 30 books, which attracted both praise and condemnation for his outspoken views on religion, politics and women.
Blasted for being misogynistic, racist and Islamophobic in his outlook, Naipaul infamously once said: “Africans need to be kicked, it’s the only thing they understand.” And women who wore bindis – the coloured dots often worn by Hindu women on their forehead – signified their heads were “empty”.
Despite this track record he expressed few regrets and, having been knighted in 1990 for his contribution to literature, was one of the most decorated writers of the second half of the 20th century.
Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul was born into a large devout Hindu family in rural Trinidad. His father was a journalist at the Trinidad Guardian and his mother was from a high-caste landowning family that had lost much of its fortune.
As a staunch atheist, Naipaul would regularly clash with his family over religious beliefs as he was growing up and dreamt of escaping from Trinidad. But he found solace in the works of Molière, Aesop and Bergerac. He was educated in Trinidad’s capital Port of Spain at Queen’s Royal College and was thrown the lifeline he so yearned for when he won a scholarship to study English at Oxford University.
But the reality proved something of a disappointment and, povertystricken and wracked by loneliness, he tried to commit suicide in his second year of study after he ran out of money for the gas meter.
It was a romance with fellow student Patricia Hale – who went on to become his first wife – that helped him recover and when he graduated in 1953 he moved to Kilburn, north London, and began to freelance for the BBC Caribbean Service.
Two years later he sent his first novel to a publisher but feeling humiliated after hearing nothing for three months, he went there to ask for the manuscript back in person.
But he persevered and in 1957 his first novel The Mystic Masseur was an immediate hit, winning the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize. He continued his winning streak with The Suffrage Of Elvira published in 1958 and Miguel Street won the Somerset Maugham Award in 1961.
In the same year he published his greatest novel A House For Mr Biswas, whose protagonist was based loosely on his own father.
As time went on his writings became increasingly dark, political and sometimes even offensive in their views, especially about Islam and India. All the while Naipaul continued to publish novels such as WH Smith Award winner The Mimic Men in 1967 and the winner of the 1971 Booker Prize, In A Free State.
While Naipaul was hailed by even his most fierce rivals as “the finest writer of the English sentence”, his private life was far less savoury.
In 1998 a shocking memoir revealed Naipaul continually had subjected Patricia, whom he married in 1955, to misery and humiliation and had an appetite for prostitutes.
He also embarked on a 24-year affair with an Anglo-Argentine woman Margaret Gooding whom he admitted he once beat so badly she was unable to leave the house.
After Patricia’s death from breast cancer in 1996, within two months Naipaul had cruelly ended his affair with his mistress, only staying with her “until she became middle-aged, almost an old lady”.
Shortly afterwards he married his second wife, Nadira Alvi, a Pakistani journalist. Naipaul spent his later years living quietly, dividing his time between a duplex in Chelsea and a rented country cottage in Wiltshire. Nadira survives him.