Sir Vidia’s brutal honesty and his perceptions

A WRITER’S PEOPLE: WAYS OF LOOKING AND FEELING

By V.S. Naipaul

Alfred A. Knopf, $24.95, 208 pages

REVIEWED BY JAMES BOWMAN

Since this book came out in the UK last year, its author has been the subject of what, as one reviewer put it, “must be the frankest authorised biography of anyone alive and in possession of their senses.” The publication of “The World Is What It Is: The Authorized Biography of V. S. Naipaul” by Patrick French in March made headline news in Britain for its sensational revelations not just of its subject’s sex life but also of his apparent complicity in making public what almost anyone else would have suppressed by any means necessary.

His first wife, Patricia, had been recovering from breast cancer when he revealed in a magazine interview that he had had frequent recourse to prostitutes. “I think that consumed her,” he told Mr. French. “I think she had all the relapses and everything after that. She suffered. It could be said that I killed her. It could be said. I feel a little bit that way.”

At the time of her death, he had been carrying on a 24-year affair with a married woman which he had told Pat about from the beginning. “I was liberated. She was destroyed. It was inevitable.”

Within days of his wife’s death, he dumped the mistress, Margaret, and took up with a new, much younger woman to whom he is now married. “I feel that in all of this Margaret was very badly treated,” he told Mr. French. “But you know there is nothing I can do. I stayed with Margaret until she became middle-aged, almost an old lady.”

This way of talking about his own actions as if they were something over which he had no control, though disconcerting, is also typical of “A Writer’s People.” At one point he tells of conducting a broadcast interview with an author whose book he described to his face as “wretched.” The interview had to be scrapped.

The second of the book’s five “essays,” a trashing of the work of the English novelist Anthony Powell, a man with whom he enjoyed a 40-year friendship, begins: “This will not be an easy chapter to do.” Why do it then? The answer seems to be that Sir Vidia, as he has been known since being knighted in 1990, has decided that his authorial stock-in-trade is the sort of brutal honesty whose brutality is meant to be the proof of its honesty.

What he is being true to, however, is his own feelings and perceptions — hence the book’s subtitle — which thus take on, perhaps, an exaggerated importance. Not that “A Writer’s People” doesn’t have much to impart. On almost every page there is something to be learned, some reminder of the sharpness of observation that won him the Nobel Prize (in 2001) for such novels as “A House for Mr Biswas,” “The Mimic Men,” “Guerrillas” and “A Bend in the River.”

There are also, in addition to Anthony Powell, several other writers who afford an opportunity for shrewd critical insights, including Derek Walcott, Virgil, Flaubert, Gandhi, Nirad Chaudhuri (“The Autobiography of an Unknown Indian”) and various Caribbean writers who are now mostly forgotten but who were important to his own formation as a writer — including his father.

About Seepersad Naipaul, his son writes: “There was no tradition of Indian writing or colonial writing or confessional writing into which my father might have been received. And all the pain of his early life, the material that in another society might have been his making as a writer, remained locked away.”

This is a characteristic lament and a characteristic feeling: a sort of patronizing compassion. Here is what he has to say about his attempts to satisfy his curiosity about India, whence his grandfather had come to Trinidad as an indentured servant, by interviewing a Hindi-speaking mattress-maker employed by his grandmother in her home in Port of Spain when he was a boy of 12 or 13. “At last he understood what I wanted; but, eternally busy with his needle and ticking and coconut fibre, he was not interested. I tried to make my questions as small as possible. I asked what he remembered most about India. He thought about it for some time and said, ’There was a railway station.’ That was all I could get out of him.”

Typically, this striking detail produces a generalization. “He didn’t have the analytical faculty; life and the world, so to speak, constantly went in one eye and out of the other. And I feel sure it would have been the same with other old India-born people whom we failed to question about the past. India, the past with these people, had been wiped out, just as the present, Trinidad, was being wiped out. “There was a railway station.” There wouldn’t have been much more to say.”

This kind of thing goes down so well with the Nobel committee and others because it chimes so well with the assumptions of post-colonial studies, which otherwise, I imagine, V.S. Naipaul would have little time for. He is forever lamenting the loss of a past. It is principally his own past, and his family’s — and his respect for that may be what nerves him to be so open about his life — but it can stand for that of whole populations who are conventionally supposed to have been permanently traumatized, culturally, by the experience of colonialism.

This is a view to which Sir Vidia is only intermittently sympathetic, but at least it provides him with the thing his father lacked: A tradition of writing and thought and feeling within which his writing can be understood. But it is also very good writing as writing, quite apart from its excellence as post-colonial rumination, and this is what, for many, will redeem this book, if not its author’s personal life or reputation.

James Bowman is the author of “Media Madness: The Corruption of Our Political Culture” and a resident scholar at the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, D.C.