Review: "The World Is What It Is" - The destinies of V. S. Naipaul

Patrick French’s biography of V. S. Naipaul takes its fatalistic title from the opening of A Bend in the River: “The world is what it is; men who are nothing, who allow themselves to become nothing, have no place in it.” In that book, the narrator Salim watches his country twist and bend through a series of rapid changes, with all the helplessness of the classic postcolonial victim. Victimhood and helplessness seem implicit, in fact, in that very first phrase, and in Mr. French’s biography, they also seem implicit in Mr. Naipaul’s conception of himself.

The World Is What It Is sifts largely through Mr. Naipaul’s personal relations and his life until 1996. Born in Trinidad & Tobago and descended from Indian immigrant laborers, Mr. Naipaul felt doubly trapped in his identity, and throughout his life and literature, he would rail against those perceived postcolonial fetters. When he was 17, he escaped, to use his word, to England on a scholarship. Although he would subsequently traverse the world, mining it for his books, he would never live permanently anywhere else; yet, with his chronic dissatisfaction, he would express disgust and anger at England’s society and its racial relations.

Mr. Naipaul felt similarly trapped in the complexities of his personal life, even though they were entirely of his own creation. In 1955, he married Patricia Hale, a relationship of enormously unequal proportions, in which he dominated and broke her already brittle spirit. But when he met Margaret Murray, in 1972, and began a fiercely sexual affair with her for the next two decades, he would inexplicably again feel a victim of circumstance. Describing to Mr. French how he told his wife about the affair, Mr. Naipaul “characteristically recalled the disclosure of infidelity in terms of his own suffering.”

There are more such admissions in The World Is What It Is, including the now-famous acknowledgement that, by publicly announcing his unfaithfulness when Patricia was ill with breast cancer, he may have hastened her demise. “It could be said that I had killed her… I feel a little bit that way.” That unnerving degree of intimacy is a regular feature of this astonishingly definitive biography. Mr. French enjoyed the confidence of his subject, conducted exhaustive interviews with Mr. Naipaul’s friends and associates, and most importantly, squeezed every drop of information from the official Naipaul archives at the University of Tulsa in Oklahoma – the voluminous paper trail of a man who knew he had a legacy to leave.

Mr. Naipaul’s bond with his two homelands – the land of his birth, and the land of his ancestors – is more intangible, not easily revealed even in the mountains of paper in Oklahoma. His early books reveal some affection for Trinidad & Tobago, and for the charms of the Port of Spain he grew up in. At the same time, though, he would write to his wife about its “philistine” atmosphere and claim, on a BBC show in 1978, that he had “washed [his] hands” of Trinidad. He would claim, in the very next sentence, the same about India, but that was to be much less true.

Mr. Naipaul first visited India in 1962, found a vast country that was flailing to fulfill the promises of its independence movement, and promptly wrote a devastating account of his trip, An Area of Darkness. His publishers anticipated anger, and they were right. An Area of Darkness put many Indian readers off Mr. Naipaul for good; the book seemed, for a long time, to be a wedge that had been permanently driven between author and country.

But Mr. Naipaul was to return, mellower and more forgiving. After a visit in 1975, during Indira Gandhi’s Emergency, he wrote India: A Wounded Civilization – still sardonic and critical, but an attempt at some sort of deeper understanding. With India: A Million Mutinies Now, published in 1992, Mr. Naipaul “saw beyond the corruption and violence to something original and redemptive,” Mr. French writes. Auberon Waugh, in his review of the book for the Sunday Telegraph, wrote: “He has become a gentler, kinder, infinitely more tolerant person. His sympathies extend to everyone.” Soon after that, Mr. Naipaul engaged even more closely with India, publicly supporting Hindu revivalist movements in the country.

Mr. French calls the third book a “personal homecoming,” and that is an astute observation. In a way, through his lifetime, Mr. Naipaul had followed his ancestors back home – from Trinidad & Tobago; through England, whose colonizers had shipped his ancestors to the West Indies as laborers; and thus back to his Hindu Brahmin roots in India.

I saw Mr. Naipaul once in person, at an Indian launch of Magic Seeds in 2004. His audience, it was evident, had come in search of bombast and brimstone. But they sat not with the sullen hostility of the readers of An Area of Darkness, 40 years before, but brightly, confident that their shining India was enough rebuttal for even Mr. Naipaul’s worst cynicism.

They were to be disappointed. Mr. Naipaul, then 72, seemed to be plagued by age; he sat without a flicker of reaction through a reading of his work, and refused any bait dangled before him. During a question-and-answer session, he played a card few knew he had: diplomacy. “I’ve let myself go once or twice about my political views, and I don’t think I’ll do it again,” he said.

Later, asked about his views on India now, Mr. Naipaul played another unexpected trump: guarded optimism. “You're well on your way now with democratic practices,” he said. “It will be messy from now. There’ll be no peace and order, and always a crisis, but great civilizations are perpetually in crisis.” Soon after, he left the room, walking slowly and gingerly, assisted by his wife. The world, of course, will not always be what it is.

Published in the Far Eastern Economic Review, May 2008

(Categories: Books and Literature)