VS Naipaul in 2001, the year he was awarded the Nobel prize for literature
Did VS Naipaul set out to cause offence, or did it happen by accident? Few would take issue with the Nobel prizewinner’s immense talent as an author, yet he also succeeded in getting up the noses of almost everyone he encountered, becoming English literature’s greatest postcolonial writer and a pariah to the postcolonial literary world, who no doubt felt that he had taken on the values of the old colonial masters.
For many his best book was A House for Mr Biswas (1961), which tells the story of one man’s lifelong struggle to create meaning and permanence out of poverty and insignificance. He never made any secret of the fact that the story was based on the experience of his father and his conflict with a large clan of Hindu relations ranging from landowners to labourers.
Like Naipaul Sr, who raised seven children with as much integrity as he could muster while never entirely letting go of his writing ambitions, Biswas somehow survives the outrageous philistinism of Trinidadian society until he falls victim to a premature illness. “Of all my books, this is the one that is closest to me,” Naipaul wrote in a foreword to the second edition, published when he was 50. “It is the most personal, created out of what I saw and felt as a child. It also contains, I believe, some of my funniest writing. I began as a comic writer and still consider myself one.”
In Wiltshire in 1978GETTY IMAGES
That humour would soon evaporate. In the early 1960s Naipaul set off from Britain to explore the Caribbean of his childhood, the first of many travels that would produce nonfiction on the West Indies (The Middle Passage, The Loss for El Dorado), on India (An Area of Darkness, A Wounded Civilisation, A MillionMutinies Now), on the Islamic world (Among the Believers, Beyond Belief), and on Africa, the American South and Argentina.
As he remarked in The Crocodiles of Yamoussoukro, an essay on Ivory Coast published in The New Yorker in 1984: “I travel to discover other states of mind. And if for this intellectual adventure I go to places where people live restricted lives, it is because my curiosity is still dictated in part by my colonial Trinidad background . . . When my curiosity has been satisfied, when there are no more surprises, the intellectual adventure is over and I become anxious to leave.”
Such rootlessness was unsurprising — he was born in Trinidad of Indian extraction and spent much of his life in Britain, the colonial master of both, where he was educated at Oxford — and revealed itself in the strange love-hate relationship that he had with himself, those close to him and the world in general. Although the intuition that guided him was sometimes faulty and he often tried too hard to be provocative, Naipaul was among the first commentators to grasp the rage against the West that underlies Islamic fundamentalism, the social and economic awakening of India, and the corruption and degradation of black Africa after the end of empire — the “suppressed histories” of his Nobel prize citation.
All Naipaul’s books are readable, containing passages that would be the envy of any travel writer, including Paul Theroux, his one-time friend. They met in Uganda in 1966, travelling, working and visiting brothels together, yet more than 30 years later Theroux would turn against the older man. The dispute was precipitated by Naipaul having a clear-out of old books. One, inscribed to him by Theroux, turned up in a bookseller’s catalogue. Theroux was furious. In his fascinating memoir, Sir Vidia’s Shadow (1998), Theroux drew a savage portrait of Naipaul as a depressive, skinflint misogynist, and it would be many years before they were reconciled.
If Naipaul struggled to articulate what he did like, he had no such problem attacking those whom he did not. Jane Austen was “sentimental”, Charles Dickens died of “self parody”, and EM Forster knew little about India, “just . . . the garden boys whom he wished to seduce”. He was no less forgiving to the living. He gave Iris Murdoch a dressing down while they were dining with Margaret Thatcher at No 10, greeted George Lucas with the remark “I don’t know Star Wars” and described the Iranian fatwa against Salman Rushdie as “an extreme kind of literary criticism”.
His experience of Oxford and then defending his work in liberal universities turned him into one of academia’s harshest critics, calling for all English departments to be closed. “Academics are bad,” he complained in curmudgeonly style. “They publish the books for these courses, and it gives an illusion of great popularity, of ideas sweeping the world. But they’re not. They’re just grubby little textbooks that are stuffed in students’ bags.”
Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul was born in 1932 in the insular Hindu community of Chaguanas, a town in Trinidad, the second of seven children. His father, Seepersad, and his mother, Droapatie (née Capildeo), were also from Trinidad, but their parents had been born in rural north India and had come to the Caribbean as indentured labourers to work on the empire’s sugar plantations, filling the jobs vacated by freed slaves.
Seepersad, an ill-paid journalist in erratic employment, was a would-be writer whose literary ambitions were thwarted by the need to provide for his large family (some of his stories were later published, with an introduction by his son). “I come from a people who were immemorially poor, immemorially without a voice,” said Naipaul, explaining his ambivalence towards the poor, especially the poverty of his ancestral India — and an emotion that he would explore in many of his books. His youngest brother, Shiva Naipaul (obituary, August 16, 1985), was also a writer.
His attitude towards Trinidad was one of contempt. In 1962, as the country joined the Commonwealth, he noted cuttingly: “Like monkeys pleading for evolution, each claiming to be whiter than the other, Indians and Negroes appeal to the unacknowledged white audience to see how much they despise one another. They despise one another by reference to the whites; and the irony is that their antagonism should have reached its peak today, when white prejudices have ceased to matter.” In the 1970s he withdrew a novel about Trinidad from a publisher whose catalogue described him as “West Indian” and when he received the Nobel prize in 2001 he insisted on being described as a “British writer, born in Trinidad”.
Even as a schoolboy at Queen’s Royal College, the most English school in Port of Spain, he was desperate to get away. He wrote a vow on an endpaper of his Latin primer to leave within five years. By 1950, and armed with a much sought-after scholarship, he was on his way to read English at University College, Oxford, but was so suspicious of the food on the boat that he ate hardly anything but ice cream. He worked hard, reading voraciously, and producing student journalism and a novel that would be abandoned. Yet he made few friends and in his second year he attempted suicide. He put his head in an oven, but the gas ran out and he had no more coins to feed the meter.
Receiving the Nobel prize from Sweden's King Carl Gustaf in 2001GETTY IMAGES
The solicitous letters from his father in Trinidad and his own irregular replies, published four decades later, show him to have been precocious and driven. After his father’s death from a heart attack while deeply in debt, he told his mother in 1954: “Oxford is perhaps the best university in the world from many points of view. At the same time it is a treacherous place that insulates you from the world around. You forget that people outside are perhaps even stupider than Oxford people, and incredibly coarser.”
While this might sound arrogant, the young Vidia, an outstanding student from a tiny colony, already had a lot of pride and it was bound to lead to abrasion with an Oxford where imperial certainties were still rife. Peter Bayley, his tutor, said many years later that Naipaul “had not quite forgiven us for giving him a second-class degree”.
When he graduated in 1954 Naipaul found that no one would give him a job, probably for racist reasons, and he was “utterly destitute”. A slightly older cousin who was studying law put him up in his squalid basement flat, a first precarious foothold in London. Looking back in the 1980s, Naipaul wrote: “I can easily make present again the anxiety of that time: to have found no talent, to have written no book, to be null and unprotected in the busy world. It is that anxiety — the fear of destitution in all its forms, the vision of the abyss — that lies below the comedy of A House for Mr Biswas.”
He contributed to the BBC’s Caribbean Service, earning eight guineas a week, while the New Statesman took him on as a book reviewer. At the same time short stories were accumulating. The first line of his first story had come to him (as he described in Finding the Centre: Prologue to an Autobiography, 1984) on an old typewriter loaded with a sheet of “non-rustle” BBC script paper: “Every morning when he got up Hat would sit on the banister of his back verandah and shout across, ‘What happening there, Bogart?’” It was a childhood memory from Port of Spain.
Miguel Street, a collection of 16 short stories about largely feckless characters living in Port of Spain seen through the eyes of a fatherless boy, was taken on by André Deutsch, which would publish Naipaul for more than 25 years. Yet before releasing the book Deutsch decided to wait for him to complete two novels, The Mystic Masseur and The Suffrage of Elvira, which are also comic studies of Trinidadian life, which appeared in 1957 and 1958.
Not that there was any risk of him becoming a best-seller. The reviews may have been positive and awards were building up, but sales struggled to reach 3,000 copies. This would remain the case almost until he won the Nobel prize. He once joked that he was the kind of writer that people think other people are reading. Diana Athill, his editor, remembered an old friend who was keen on reading telling her apologetically: “I’m sure he’s very good, but I don’t feel he’s for me.”
Maybe that was because there was rarely any compassion in his work. “Compassion is a political word, isn’t it?” he would grimace. “A word of literary criticism like ‘well-crafted’ and ‘honed’. Whenever someone talks about something being crafted or honed, and full of compassion, you know you must stay away.” No wonder Derek Walcott, Naipaul’s fellow Nobel laureate, called him “VS Nightfall, our finest writer of the English sentence whose beautiful prose is scarred by scrofula . . .”
After Mr Biswas there was a darkening of tone. The Mimic Men (1967) focused on the corruption of West Indian politics seen through the life of a disgraced politician exiled to London, while Guerrillas (1975), based on the life of Michael X, the civil rights activist, was so violent that readers flinched with disgust.
The Africa of In a Free State, which won the Booker prize in 1971, was a place of menace and futility, as it was in A Bend in the River, set in Congo, a Naipaulian tribute to Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. Later novels, A Way in the Worldand Half a Life, which strove to integrate lives in Europe, the New World, Africa and Asia, were equally disillusioned with the world, if perhaps less preoccupied with the breakdown of civilisation. Only The Enigma of Arrival (1987) showed signs of hope.
Apart from Mr Stone and the Knights Companion, an early work that he partly disowned, The Enigma was Naipaul’s only novel set largely in Britain. Its autobiographical elements, involving the decaying Edwardian country estate outside Salisbury where he lived for many years with his black-and-white cat, Augustus, led some critics to wonder if it should be called a novel, especially given Naipaul’s statements that the novel as a form had outlived its usefulness. Many found it almost incomprehensible, but others were persuaded that this profound meditation on roots, time and death was his finest work since Mr Biswas.
Soon afterwards Naipaul remarked that he was becoming more Hindu as he got older, closer to “the idea of life being an illusion”. He added: “For many years I have sent myself to sleep with the idea of death, which is an aspect of this feeling that life is an illusion. Very violent pictures of death, I must say. I used to think of my head being cut off-with two strokes of the axe, rather than one, as in an execution. Nowadays I sleep with the idea of a bullet being put in the back of my head. It comforts me.”
To live with such a man must have verged on the impossible. His one close friend at Oxford had been Patricia Hale, a quiet, supportive and well-read fellow student whom he married in 1955. She supported him financially in the early years and they stuck with each other until her death from cancer in 1996. Although their relationship was full of bickering, strain and violence, Pat was the first person to read all his writing and he regarded her as a “marvellous critic”. He could not countenance the idea of having a family. “I love solitude, I love space, I love privacy,” he said. “That’s why I was determined never to have children.” By his own account he was also “a big prostitute man”.
Naipaul with his second wife, Nadira, in 2010GETTY IMAGES
In 1972 he began a sadomasochistic affair with Margaret Murray, an Anglo-Argentinian woman whom Pat called his “lady love”. She became his travelling companion, attending to his sexual needs, while Pat remained in England, looking after his practical ones. On one occasion Margaret turned up unexpectedly in Wiltshire. “I was very violent with her for two days with my hand,” he explained of his domestic abuse. “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.” (She later told The New York Review of Books: “I certainly did mind.”)
Within a year of Pat’s death he had abandoned Margaret and married Nadira Khannum Alvi, a divorced Pakistani journalist who had approached him at a reception in Pakistan and asked: “Can I kiss you?” She became his gatekeeper and amanuensis. She survives him, as does her daughter, Maleeha, whom he adopted.
The writing continued with novels such as Half a Life (2001) and its sequel Magic Seeds (2004), as well as A Writer’s People (2007), a discussion of how his work had been affected by the work of others that AN Wilson dismissed as “a selection of rambles around very familiar themes”.
A strict and picky vegetarian who could be obstinate to a fault, Naipaul was possibly thinking of Pat when he remarked of his mother, who also irritated him greatly: “You could examine her behaviour and you would find that it was impeccable.” This could never be said of Naipaul. Watever the state of the man, his writing remains. For as he once said: “Writers live when they’re writing; the other side of them is probably not as important as this other life during the writing, in the writing.”
Sir Vidiadhar Naipaul, author, was born on August 17, 1932. He died from undisclosed causes on August 11, 2018, aged 85
Sir V S Naipaul, who has died aged 85, was often cited as the greatest living writer in the English language and won almost every possible literary prize including, in 2001, the Nobel. A Trinidadian Indian, he had lived in England since he first came to the country to study at Oxford University in 1950.
He will probably be best remembered for his fourth (and most autobiographical) novel A House for Mr Biswas, with its Trinidadian setting and its themes, typical of all his work: self-determination, exile, identity and the gradual disintegration of a post-colonial society. In latter years his personal reputation took a battering when an authorised biography was unstinting in its depiction of his failings.
He was born Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul at Chaguanas in Trinidad and Tobago on August 17 1932, the grandson of a Brahmin who came to Trinidad from Uttar Pradesh in India. His father, Seepersad Naipaul, who he adored, was a frustrated journalist on the Trinidad Guardian whose disappointment with life eventually led to a nervous breakdown.
Along with five sisters, Vidia, as he was known, had one brother, Shiva, who was 12 years younger. He also became a well-known novelist but died in 1985 at the age of 40. Though the pair were not close, Naipaul having left Trinidad when his brother was five years old, he often said that this bereavement marked his emotional life permanently and that he measured all subsequent events by the date of his brother’s death.
Born a committed atheist but growing up in the midst of a devout and closely-knit Hindu family, Naipaul found his home life anachronistic and embarrassing. He attended Queen’s Royal College in Port of Spain and, filled with distaste for the squalor and inertia which surrounded him, he dreamt of escaping as soon as he was able, and turned to writing for solace. From an early age, he practised “memory drill” and kept a notebook in turquoise ink in which he wrote voraciously, trying hard to remember the exact words and gestures of everyone he encountered.
A House For Mr Biswas, the 1961 novel that established Naipaul's reputation
He left Trinidad on a scholarship to read English at University College, Oxford, in 1950, but was unhappy and lonely there and tried to commit suicide in his second year. Eventually graduating, he moved to a two-roomed bedsit in Kilburn, London, and began freelancing for the BBC Caribbean Service while writing his first novel on borrowed BBC “non-rustle” paper.
At Oxford he met Patricia Ann Hale, and in 1955 they married, though his personal aversion to “titillation” and “trivia” meant that, though much of his work was autobiographical, his wife never merited a mention. In 1957, he began reviewing books for the New Statesman magazine, where he gained a reputation for being the most brutal of critics. For 10 weeks that year, he also held down his only full-time job, writing press releases for a company which manufactured concrete.
He wrote slowly and carefully and his first novel was sent to a publisher in 1955. Having heard nothing for three months, he went to the firm personally to ask for the manuscript back, and the bitterness of this, and other such humiliations, stayed with him all his life.
His first published novel, The Mystic Masseur, appeared in 1957 and gained immediate acclaim, winning him the John Llewellyn Rhys Memorial Prize. Drawing much inspiration from the work of the Indian writer, R K Narayan, the novel featured a humble schoolteacher who, quite accidentally, becomes a mystic guru. This tale of the “little man” who struggles against life, and whose successes and failures seem almost unrelated to his efforts, became characteristic of much of Naipaul’s work.
Though it contained a critique of the unstable roots of political power in Trinidad, it was considered a comic and benevolent novel and was soon followed by The Suffrage of Elvira (1958), and Miguel Street (1959), which won him the Somerset Maugham Award. Both of these novels still featured the quaint and idiosyncratic characters who populate a small area of Trinidad and, though critically successful, they did not achieve popular success; he made a total of £300 from his first three novels.
This situation was eventually altered for good with the publication of A House for Mr Biswas (1961), far and away his most successful novel. In it he told the tale of Mohun Biswas, a small-time Trinidadian Asian who is, in large part, a description of Naipaul’s own father. From his unlucky birth (with six fingers) to his unlamented death, all that Mr Biswas desires is a home, a fixed place of his own in which to feel secure and on which to stamp his identity. In a caricature style reminiscent of both Narayan and Dickens (one of Naipaul’s favourite authors), Mr Biswas eventually overcomes life’s obstacles, only to experience a pyrrhic victory.
Naipaul receives the 1971 Booker Prize from Frank Kermode for his novel In A Free State
Though extremely successful in England, the novel was unpopular with other Caribbean writers, who considered it patronising and colonial. Of the son in the book, who is clearly the Naipaul character, the author wrote that “his satirical sense kept him aloof … it led to inadequacies, to self-awareness and a lasting loneliness. But it made him unassailable.” This autobiographical quote was to haunt him in interviews for many years to come since most critics considered it the closest Naipaul ever came to self-description.
In September 1960 he returned to the West Indies on a travel scholarship from the government of Trinidad and Tobago, whose prime minister had suggested the writing of The Middle Passage (1962), which became the first of his many travel books and which described his impressions of five different local societies. His conclusions were scathing, including the sentence “the West Indies are Hell”, and the book, and much of his later travel writing, though critically appreciated, were often condemned as reactionary, misanthropic and misogynistic.
By 1962 Naipaul was world famous and was often asked to appear on television interviews, during one of which he stormed off set, declaring that the interviewer was underprepared. “Things matter only when they are done well,” he said. Mr Stone and the Knights Companion (1963), which won the Hawthornden Prize, was his first novel to be set outside the West Indies and dealt with the humdrum, suburban life of a minor civil servant in London.
In A Free State, Naipaul's Booker Prize-winner
An Area of Darkness (1964) became an account of the journey he made across India and towards his roots. In a remorselessly depressing work he included long descriptions of the subcontinent’s grotesque poverty and thereby caused considerable controversy. In his by now habitual rebarbative manner he greeted all such criticism with contempt for those “first-world types who find drastic poverty enchanting”.
In 1966 he made another foreign journey, this time to Kampala University, Uganda, where he had been offered the post of visiting lecturer in English Literature. He never deigned actually to give a lecture and, on being asked to judge a creative writing award, announced that none of the entries were good enough and that he was, therefore, going to award the winner only the third prize. “I’m sure your gifts lie in another direction,” he told her, “but you have wonderful handwriting.”
From the late 1960s his novels grew more political and darker still, dealing with totalitarian oppression and systematic despair. The Mimic Men (1967) is narrated by a deposed Indian politician who lives on an imaginary Caribbean island whose culture Naipaul describes as a mere “mimicry” of others. This novel, which won the W H Smith Award, is almost totally despairing, despite the odd moment of human comedy.
By 1970 he was a relatively wealthy man and he bought a cottage in Wiltshire, to which he moved with his wife. For many years he maintained a mistress, Margaret Gooding, with whom he claimed to have discovered real sexual passion – a discovery that “it would have been terrible to have died without”.
Less comic and substantially bleaker in outlook, his next major work, In a Free State (1971), won that year’s Booker Prize with its two stories about racism in the West and one novella about even worse racism in the developing world.
Naipaul and Margaret Gooding, with whom he had a relationship for many years; he later confessed to having been physically abusive towards her CREDIT: PRIVATE COLLECTION
The absolute hopelessness of his world-view reached its acme in Guerrillas (1975), which describes a chaotic, crumbling Trinidad filled with crime and racial hatred, culminating in the utterly pointless murder of the central character’s white girlfriend. It was a bitter indictment of a disintegrating society and left no room for redemption.
In 1979 he published A Bend in the River, which was set in a “new” African country, emerging from a colonial hell only to become a totalitarian nightmare zone. In 1984 he published Finding the Centre, part memoir, part travelogue, in which he described his motivation as a legacy of his father’s “fear of extinction”, a fear which drove him to write compulsively. Though he appeared to have become more tolerant of others’ failings, his prose style became harder to penetrate. Readers who presumed to criticise this development were summarily dismissed as “lacking in concentration”.
For most of the 1980s Naipaul wrote no fiction and led a secluded life, moving between his flat in South Kensington and the cottage near Salisbury where he did all his writing. He was notorious for replying to dinner invitations with strict instructions as to his dietary requirements and, more often than not, specifically requesting the wine which was to accompany the meal. A keen wine enthusiast, he once waived his fees in exchange for a case of Château Pichon Lalande ’86, though he remained a strict vegetarian throughout his life.
Naipaul was a keen wine lover, and once waived his fees in exchange for a case of Château Pichon Lalande ’86
His other interests included cricket and callisthenics, and in 1987 he published his most successful book for a decade, The Enigma of Arrival, which painted an evocative picture of his rural life and drew subtle links between this and the patterns of Caribbean and Indian culture.
Dedicated to the memory of his dead brother, Shiva, it contains an obsessively detailed account of his Wiltshire neighbours’ eccentricities and appearances – though he never once mentions his own – and, lingering on the descriptions, he arrives at an intuitive understanding of his own predicament, and “the enigma of arrival”, with its concomitant sense of death, decay and the absolute temporariness of any sense of place in life.
In 1990 he was knighted, and received Trinidad’s highest literary medal, the Trinity Cross. This award was significant since his relationship with his former home had always been ambivalent. The same could be said of his attitude to women, who appeared to sink in his esteem as he grew older, sexual passion in his novels often degenerating into contempt and even repulsion. He returned to India in 1990 with India: A Million Mutinies Now, though, once again, he insisted on bucking the trend and concluded that India’s fortunes were looking up, whereas most general opinion was that the country had gone downhill since he had first written about it.
Naipaul with Paul Theroux, who after their friendship ended wrote a score-settling memoir, Sir Vidia's Shadow; they were later reconciled
Despite his many prizes, he remained constantly distrustful of literary handouts and disliked the notion of social dependence in any form. This scruple did not prevent him accepting the first David Cohen Prize of £30,000 in 1993, given in recognition of “a lifetime’s achievement by a living British writer”. He said he regarded this accolade as a reward for endurance.
His personal correspondence was sold to the University of Tulsa in Oklahoma and in 1994 he published A Way in the World, designed as a record of the post-colonial experience. Layers of imagined historical narratives involving such figures from South American history as Columbus and Raleigh were interwoven with personal reminiscence, and it was left to the reader to draw the connections. Marking another stage in his drift away from the conventional novel, it was not universally well-received.
Bitterness seems, at times, to have ruled his life and, being brutally intolerant of any noise and disturbance, he determined at an early age never to have children. As he grew older, he grew increasingly deaf and developed a strange habit of repeating the end of each of his sentences twice.
In his novel, My Secret History (1989), Naipaul’s close friend, Paul Theroux, wrote an account of a character called S Prasad based, as even Naipaul would admit, on himself. Prasad is a miserable figure who wanders about in his pyjamas being weird about sex and making unfunny jokes with racist overtones. Naipaul, asked about this description of himself, was heard to remark that the view was “too kind, too kind.”
After several years of deterioration their friendship ended, according to Theroux, because he had found offered in a rare books catalogue copies of his books he had given to Naipaul with affectionate inscriptions. In his bitter, score-settling memoir Sir Vidia’s Shadow (1998), Theroux depicted an arrogant, demanding and bigoted man. They were, however, reconciled in 2011 at the Hay Festival.
Patrick French's authorised biography of Naipaul, of which the Telegraph reviewer remarked: 'Naipaul enjoys presenting himself as a monster'
Glimpses into Naipaul’s private life were often unedifying, even those he provided himself: in 1994 he admitted to the New Yorker that he had been “a great prostitute man” during his first marriage, and for Patrick French’s 2008 authorised biography The World Is What It Is he gave a series of searingly frank interviews in which he admitted, among other transgressions, to have treated his first wife appallingly and to have badly beaten Margaret Gooding. “Naipaul enjoys presenting himself as a monster,” the Telegraph reviewer observed.
In 2001 he was awarded the Nobel Prize, the citation noting that “he transforms rage into precision and allows events to speak with their own inherent irony.”
That year his novel Half a Life, a study of exile amid post-colonial chaos, was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize, and in 2004 came his final novel, Magic Seeds, its sequel. His last book was The Masque of Africa: Glimpses of African Belief (2010).
VS Naipaul’s first wife, Patricia Ann Hale, died in 1996, and soon after he married Nadira Khannum Alvi, a Pakistani journalist. She survives him along with her daughter, who Naipaul adopted in 2003.
VS Naipaul, born August 17 1932, died August 11 2018
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