NEW DELHI: For British author Patrick French, writing his tell-all biography of author V.S. Naipaul was “like being a detective” as he explored the darker side of the acclaimed Nobel laureate’s personality.
French, the bookies’ favourite to win on July 15 Britain’s $60,000 Samuel Johnson prize the world’s richest in non-fiction spent five years researching Naipaul’s life.
But he says he never got bored writing about Trinidad-born Naipaul, who laid bare to French in searingly frank interviews all his worst aspects his cruelty to those closest, rudeness, narcissism, arrogance and selfishness.
“He’s the most remarkable writer of the late 20th century. His life story fascinated me,” said French, who recently visited New Delhi as part of a launch tour for “The World Is What It Is: The Authorized Biography Of V.S. Naipaul”. But writing the account which one British reviewer said “must be the frankest authorised biography of anyone alive and in possession of their senses” – was “a tightrope walk”, French said in an interview.
He worried Naipaul, 75, who won the 2001 Nobel Prize in Literature for works such as his semi-autobiographical novel “A House for Mr Biswas”, might drop the project given his mercurial temperament and reputation for cutting people out of his life.
Naipaul famously fell out with US travel writer Paul Theroux, who later wrote a bitter, no-holds-barred memoir of their long association.
But French’s fears that Naipaul, who had asked him to undertake the biography, might abandon the venture never materialised.
“He did not refuse to answer a single question,” French said, noting Naipaul once said “the truth should not be skimped” in biographies.
“He knew I had to tackle everything.” French said it was “like being a detective”. Spending months “reading someone’s letters and journals, you develop an instinct about what is significant”, he said.
French said he tried to steer clear of making any judgements about the Indian-origin Naipaul, who concedes in the book that his “cruelty” to his first wife Patricia as she fought cancer may have hastened her death.
His wife was in remission when he told a magazine in 1994 he frequented prostitutes.
The admission “consumed her. I think she had all the relapses and everything after that... It could be said that I had killed her,” Naipaul says in the book.
Patricia, whom he had belittled for four decades telling her she was too dull to take to parties, died two years later.
The day after her cremation he brought home not the Argentinian mistress with whom he had a quarter-century, sometimes violent, affair, but a fiery Pakistani journalist 20 years his junior and the opposite of the self-effacing Patricia, who had been his constant literary support.
Naipaul, knighted in 1990, asked Nadira Alvi to be the next “Lady Naipaul” while his wife was dying.
“Readers can judge a character, just like they can in a novel,” said French, 42, who first won acclaim with his biography of the dashing explorer and soldier Francis Younghusband.
“I didn’t feel the need to do moral signposting or put a health warning on the book,” said French, who writes Naipaul’s decision to have the book published in his lifetime was “at once an act of narcissism and humility”.
He said he believes there are explanations why Naipaul, grandson of an indentured slave, has behaved as badly as he has to many and paints him as a writer who overcame huge hurdles to become one of world’s literary giants.
Readers of Naipaul’s biography will get a “new understanding of his novels” and the “personal trauma” behind them, French said.—AFP
