I’m learning a lot about the art of book criticism this semester, from reading and (hopefully soon) from doing. It’s remarkable to me how much the reviewer’s preconceptions can infect their work. Take for example these two reviews of the new biography of the novelist and Nobel laureate V. S. Naipaul, Patrick French’s The World Is What It Is.

First this one, in Literary Review, from Allan Massie:

That he has been able to achieve this owes much to the generosity, openness and fairness of his subject, Sir Vidia Naipaul…Success of this sort takes more than talent. It is also an act of will, and Naipaul’s will has been exceptionally powerful. He is a master writer because he has seen himself as the servant of Literature. Nothing has been allowed to stand in the way of his work and his achievement…This is an excellent biography which does nothing to diminish one’s respect for Sir Vidia and leaves one liking him much more than I had expected…

Then this one in the Times:

It is not a pretty story; it will probably destroy Naipaul’s reputation for ever, this chronicle of his pretensions, his whoremongering, his treatment of a sad, sick wife and disposable mistress, his evasions, his meanness, his cruelty amounting to sadism, his race baiting. Then there is the “gruesome sex”, the blame shifting, the paranoia, the disloyalty, the nasty cracks and the whining, the ingratitude, the mood swings, the unloving and destructive personality…

The second is from Paul Theroux, the American travel writer who has a very public falling-out with Naipaul some years back. But the Theroux version of Naipaul is the broadly accepted p.o.v. from what I can tell, and the details in the two reviews seem to back up the Naipaul-as-colossal-asshole theory.

Take their differing takes on Naipaul’s relationships with women. He was married to Pat Hale for 41 years, but carried on a very public decades-long affair with an Anglo-Argentine woman named Margaret Gooding. Now remember, these two reviewers read the same biography of Naipaul. First Massie:

[Pat] helped him through a nervous breakdown, chivvied him with good advice, supported him from her earnings as a teacher in the first years of the marriage, organised his daily life, and remained his most devoted and admiring reader and adviser. But she could not satisfy him sexually; he had, as he confessed when already distinguished, frequent recourse to prostitutes, an addiction he found necessary but shameful. Then in Argentina he met a married woman, Margaret, who gave him for the first time in his life full sexual satisfaction. He could not relinquish her; neither could he cast Pat aside. For some twenty years he ran them in tandem, often making both miserable. However, they reluctantly accepted the position. It sounds cruel. Often he was cruel. But would it have been any kinder to have left Pat for Margaret, or to have discarded his mistress?

What a wonderful spirit of justification! Should I ever cheat on a wife, I hope I have an Allan Massie at the ready to shift the blame to her sexual unsatisfactoriness. How cruel it would have been to sleep with only one woman at a time!

Reading the same book, Theroux gives a slightly different take, a sadist having finally found his masochist:

[Margaret] apparently refused to be interviewed for the book, but her archived love letters supply the missing narrative. They are rapturous, despairing, pleading, speaking of “his cruel sexual desires”. She acknowledges that he is her black master, that he regards his penis as a god, that she will worship it, abase herself…Margaret shows up unexpectedly in Wiltshire. Naipaul is displeased with her. He beats her and afterwards explains, “I was very violent with her for two days with my hand; my hand began to hurt…She didn’t mind at all. She thought of it in terms of my passion for her. Her face was bad. She couldn’t appear really in public. My hand was swollen”…Eventually Naipaul told his wife Pat about the relationship, divulging some details and showing her intimate photographs. She was devastated but stayed with him and he was reluctant to offer a divorce. He gave her literary jobs to do, went on reading his rough drafts of his fiction to her — in which the sex scenes were based on the rough sex he enjoyed with Margaret.

So he liked a bit of kink. But how did he treat his long-suffering wife? More Theroux, starting with excerpts from Pat’s diaries:

“You are the only woman I know who has no skill,” Naipaul told her. “You behave like the wife of a clerk who has risen above her station.” As though to prove him wrong, Pat bitterly referred to Naipaul as “the genius” in her covert diary. French believes that Naipaul never read it, although he sold it with his papers for a hefty price. In terms of telling Pat’s story, it does this poor woman complete justice. Let us not forget that much-reported admission when Naipaul said, almost swanking, “It could be said that I had killed her…I feel a little bit that way.”

And the grand sexual finale:

Dissatisfied with Margaret, annoyed with Pat for having cancer (“He felt angry that [Pat] was dying and angry that she was not dying fast enough”), he meets a Pakistani divorcee in Lahore and very soon afterwards asks her, “Will you consider one day being Lady Naipaul?” He dumps Margaret without explanation. Pat (so as not to be a nuisance) forgoes more chemotherapy and dies miserably. Six days later, before the worms can pierce Pat’s winding sheet, the Pakistani woman has moved into the house. There the story ends, a powerful lesson in karma as the sour and much-shrunken figure marries this peculiar stranger.

Still more remarkable details in this Telegraph story about the biography. I recognize the need to separate the writer from the written, but I have to say that Naipaul’s cruel streak has deadened whatever pleasures A House for Mr. Biswas may have provided — you can feel the barbarousness on every page, even if it’s directed at targets different (the poor, the uneducated, the non-white) from poor old Pat.

07 April 2008

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