Books

A Million Mutinies Within

No hagiography: 'He believed that a less than candid biography would be pointless, and his willingness to allow such a book to be published in his lifetime was at once an act of narcissism and humility.'

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A Million Mutinies Within
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Patrick French's authorised biography of V.S. Naipaul
(Picador India, 576 pp, Rs 595), is no hagiography.
On the contrary, it is a searingly honest and insightful portrait of a flawed and tormented genius. Reproduced below are three extracts-the first from French's illuminating
to the book; the second charting how Naipaul's views on India evolved and changed over 30 years; and the third from an extraordinary later chapter, in which Naipaul loses one wife and gains another, even as he discards his mistress.

When slavery was formally abolished across the British empire in 1834, cheap labour was still needed for the West Indian sugar plantations, and V.S. Naipaul's destitute forebears were shipped from northern India to the Caribbean as bonded labourers; it was slavery by another name, slavery with an expiry date. Vidia Naipaul, born in rural poverty in colonial Trinidad in 1932, would rise from this unpromising setting to become one of the great writers of the 20th century. This achievement does not mean that all his writing was good, or that his behaviour was exemplary, but rather that his cumulative accomplishment outstripped his contemporaries, and altered the way in which writers and readers perceived the world. His achievement was an act of will, in which every situation and relationship would be subordinated to his ambition. His public position as a novelist and chronicler was inflexible at a time of intellectual relativism: he stood for high civilisation, individual rights and the rule of law.

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This was not an unusual position for someone of his cultural background to be taking, but in Europe in the early 21st century it became extraordinary, aided by Naipaul's tendency to caricature himself in public, outside his books. He said, or was said to have said, that Africa had no future, Islam was a calamity, France was fraudulent and interviewers were monkeys. Rather than celebrate multiculturalism in its impractical English form, he denounced it as 'multi-culti', made malign jokes about people with darker skin than himself, blamed formerly oppressed nations for their continuing failure and attacked Prime Minister Tony Blair as a pirate who was imposing a plebeian culture on Britain. Naipaul's outrageous denunciations were less interesting than the books which preceded them. A parallel might be drawn with Albert Einstein, when he discoursed on socialism rather than concentrate on science.

Naipaul was initially unwilling to take the call from Stockholm, since he was cleaning his teeth. When the secretary of the Nobel committee got him on the line, he enquired, "You're not going to do a Sartre on us, and refuse the prize?" Naipaul accepted, and put out a statement that the Nobel was "a great tribute to both England, my home, and India, the home of my ancestors". India's politicians sent adulatory letters, with the President addressing his to 'Lord V.S. Naipaul' and Amitabh Bachchan sending a fax of congratulation from Los Angeles. There was no mention of Trinidad in Naipaul's statement. Asked why not, he said it might "encumber the tribute", which provoked the Barbadian writer George Lamming, an ancient rival, to suggest he was "playing ole mas", meaning he was masquerading or making trouble for his own entertainment, a Trinidadian trait. I noticed that when Naipaul was being rude or provocative in this way, he was full of glee. Creating tension, or insulting whole communities, left him in excellent spirits. He might for instance, on the basis of a photograph in the London Daily Mail, denounce Queen Elizabeth's granddaughter Zara Phillips for having a "criminal face", or say that a friend's daughter was "a fat girl, and she did what fat girls do, she married a Zulu", or accuse a journalist of "doing disreputable things like mixing with Bengalis—and other criminals". After I had visited Trinidad, I realised this style of conversation was not rare in the Caribbean. It was what Trinidadians call "picong", from the French "piquant", meaning sharp or cutting, where the boundary between good and bad taste is deliberately blurred, and the listener sent reeling.

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Around this time, I was asked to write V.S. Naipaul's biography. I was hesitant; I was finishing another book, and saw it would be a big and potentially fraught project, perhaps the last literary biography to be written from a complete paper archive. His notebooks, correspondence, handwritten manuscripts, financial papers, recordings, photographs, press cuttings and journals (and those of his first wife, Pat, which he had never read) had in 1993 been sold to the University of Tulsa in Oklahoma, a place famous for its hurricanes and the worst race riot in America's history. The archive ran to more than 50,000 pieces of paper. I told V.S. Naipaul that I would only want to write a biography if I could use material at Tulsa that was closed to public access, and quote from it freely. I would need to interview him at length. My intention was to end the biography in 1996 as he entered his 65th year, a few months after Pat's death, rather than come too close to the distorting lens of the present. There was silence; then some months later a letter of acceptance came, written as if unwillingly in a fast, cramped hand, in violet ink. Over the five years since that letter, Naipaul has stuck scrupulously to our agreement; I have had no direction or restriction from him. He had the opportunity to read the completed manuscript, but requested no changes. When he was in Tulsa in 1994, Naipaul said in a speech, "The lives of writers are a legitimate subject of inquiry; and the truth should not be skimped. It may well be, in fact, that a full account of a writer's life might in the end be more a work of literature and more illuminating—of a cultural or historical moment—than the writer's books."

If you reject the land that formed you, as Naipaul began to do actively only in his 30s, you become defined by that rejection. It provides you with a struggle. "You were born in Trinidad?" Bernard Levin asked in an interview in 1983. "I was born there, yes," came the reply, "I thought it was a great mistake." Naipaul's dismissal of his homeland became part of his persona, a persona he invented in order to realise his early ambition to escape the periphery for the centre, to leave the powerless for the powerful, and to make himself a great writer. I sometimes thought of him as a man running up a beach with the advancing tide behind him, managing to stay a bare step ahead of the water. In order to become what he wanted to be, he had to make himself someone else. He could not remain regional. His ambition was linked to fear, as it often is in an author or creative artist: fear of failure, fear of not being able to write, fear of disappearance, fear of mental or physical breakdown, fear that people were trying to do him down, fear of being faced down, fear of losing face, fear of being found out. Repeatedly he had to re-create or mask himself, clearing away his past, in order to become the apparently stateless, hyper-perceptive global observer who could, as a book reviewer once put it, look into the mad eye of history and not blink.

V.S. Naipaul's repeated attempts to separate himself from the consequences of his own behaviour, and to present himself not as a person but as solely "the writer", a figure who could in theory be studied objectively, was what made this biography possible. He once said to me, "I was not interested and I remain completely indifferent to how people think of me, because I was serving this thing called literature." This remark was, in one sense, true. Of all the people I spoke to while researching The World Is What It Is, he was outwardly the frankest. He believed that a less than candid biography would be pointless, and his willingness to allow such a book to be published in his lifetime was at once an act of narcissism and humility.

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