Patrick French
Authority on India and Tibet who became best known for his explosive biography of VS Naipaul
PATRICK FRENCH, who has died of cancer aged 56, was a brilliant writer with a mischievous sense of humour and a keen eye for the absurd; he was particularly known for his studies of India and Tibet, though he was also responsible for possibly the most astonishing authorised biography ever published – that of the novelist Sir Vidia Naipaul, better known as VS Naipaul.
The author of acclaimed novels such A House for Mr Biswas, A Bend in the River and Guerrillas, and winner of the Booker and the Nobel Prize for Literature, Naipaul was, and by many still is, regarded as one of the most sublime novelists of his age.
But French’s acclaimed 2008 biography, The World Is What It Is (which won the Hawthornden Prize and the US National Book Critics Circle Award and was shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize), portrayed a bigoted, selfish and self-pitying genius who tormented his first wife Pat for decades, visited prostitutes, and for 24 years had a sadomasochistic relationship with his mistress, Margaret Gooding, who left her husband and two children for him.
He eventually abandoned Margaret to marry another woman – to whom he proposed while Pat was dying of cancer.
The book was written with the full co-operation of its subject who, in passages shocking in both their candour and coldbloodedness, told his biographer that his mental cruelty towards Pat may have killed her. Married to Naipaul in 1955, she only learnt that her husband regularly saw prostitutes when he boasted about it in an interview in 1994 – at a time when she was recovering from a mastectomy and was in remission from cancer.
“I think she had all the relapses and everything after that,” Naipaul remarked. “She suffered. It could be said that I killed her. It could be said. I feel a little bit that way.”
Nor was Margaret spared, Naipaul telling French that on one occasion he beat her so severely that his hand hurt, while her face was too damaged for her to appear in public. Then in 1996, as Pat lay dying, Naipaul ended their affair: “I feel that… Margaret was very badly treated. But you know there is nothing I can do. I stayed with Margaret until she became middle-aged, almost an old lady.’’
Naipaul had already earned a reputation for rudeness that had lost him many friends in the literary world, and, following French’s biography, critical opinion was divided as to whether his literary reputation should be reassessed.
“Does any of this make any difference to Sir Vidia’s standing as an author?” asked Melanie Mcdonagh in The Sunday Telegraph. “No. His novels, especially the early ones, his journalism and his extraordinarily astute travel writing mark him as a great man, not his home life. The news that he was, and probably still is, a bastard is neither here nor there.”
But others disagreed. “Naipaul’s very being is exposed in French’s biography with total, embarrassing candour,” observed William Boyd in the Times Literary Supplement. “We know too much about VS Naipaul now, we have too much information: Naipaul’s work – past, present and future – is irrevocably transformed by the ‘French Effect’ … all of Naipaul’s work must now be read through the filter of the revelations that French detailed.”
Patrick Rollo French was born on May 28 1966, the oldest of four children of Major Maurice
Aloysius French, a Korean War veteran, and his second wife, Lavinia, née Burke. He was educated at Ampleforth, where he became a lifelong friend of the historian of India William Dalrymple.
Though Patrick had no family connection to India, he became fascinated by the country as a boy, making the first of many visits as a 19-year-old university student – and also by Tibet, after the Dalai Lama paid a visit to Ampleforth when French was 16. After taking a degree in English and American Literature at Edinburgh University he stayed on to do a PHD in South Asian Studies.
Aged 25, French set off on a trail across Central Asia to retrace the steps of Francis Younghusband, the British soldier, explorer and mystic who in 1903-04 led a pseudo-diplomatic (in reality a military) expedition into Tibet. This resulted in the publication, in 1994, of French’s highly-praised first book, Younghusband: The Last Great Imperial Adventurer, which won the Somerset Maugham Award and the Royal Society of Literature’s WH Heinemann Prize.
French soon became involved in networking with the Tibetan government in exile, and as the 1990s saw an upsurge in sympathy
for the plight of Tibetans under the Chinese, he became a director of the Free Tibet campaign, calling for international pressure to be applied to persuade the Chinese to withdraw from the country.
Over time, however, he developed what he described as “a gradual nervousness that the western idea of Tibet, particularly the views of Tibet campaigners, was becoming too detached from the reality of what Tibet was like.” In 1999 he embarked on a long journey through the country with “a sense that the practicalities of daily life were being drowned out by Communist restriction and the white noise of foreign sympathy”.
This resulted in the publication in 2003 of Tibet, Tibet: A Personal History of a Lost Land, in which, without condoning the cruelties and cultural desecration visited on Tibetans by the Chinese, he qualified the popular myth of old Tibet as a non-violent paradise and expressed his disquiet at the realisation that international pressure on China could be having an adverse impact.
One elderly Tibetan told him, referring to his exiled compatriots: “If you want independence for Tibet, why don’t you come here and make a protest and see how far it gets you? It may make them feel good, but for us, it makes life worse. It makes the Chinese create more controls over us.”
During the 1992 general election, French stood unsuccessfully as a Green Party candidate, but he spent many years in India, where he was appointed inaugural Dean of the School of Arts and Sciences at Ahmedabad University in 2017.
In Liberty or Death: India’s Journey to Independence and Division (1997), his reassessment of the roles of Mahatma Gandhi and Muhammad Ali Jinnah in the Indian Independence movement proved contentious among some nationalists in India, but won widespread critical praise and became a bestseller in India, winning French the Sunday Times Young Author of the Year award.
His last book, India: A Portrait
(2011), was a wide-ranging survey of the country from Partition to the present day, placing India’s spectacular transformation from creaking socialist economy to economic powerhouse in the context of its cultural traditions. The book won universally enthusiastic reviews, David Gilmour in The Spectator
observing: “Mr French could not pen a boring passage if he tried.”
His cast of characters included the mafia godfather running for parliament from his prison cell; a gay rent boy turned pimp and devotee of Krishna; the ear-cleaners of Delhi; the dabbawallas
(lunchbox delivery men) of Mumbai, and the entrepreneur who rode India’s mobile phone explosion to an $8 billion fortune.
The most hopeful fact about India, French once observed, “is that it goes on functioning”.
He contributed many articles and reviews to the Telegraph and other publications, and was a fellow of the Royal Geographical Society. In 2003 he politely declined the offer of an OBE “because I doubted the honours system and wanted to keep my distance from Downing Street and the great house of Babylon”.
French stepped down from his post at Ahmedabad University in 2022 to work on a biography of Doris Lessing, expected to be published next year.
Patrick French’s first marriage, to Abigail Ashton-johnson, was dissolved and he married, secondly, Meru Gokhale, formerly editor in chief at Penguin Random House India. She survives him with their son, and with two sons and a daughter from his first marriage. Patrick French, born May 28 1966, died March 16 2023