French

London, March 22: Patrick French, the authorised biographer of V.S. Naipaul, will be in Calcutta in early May to discuss the Nobel Prize-winning author’s complex engagement with India and Indians.

He follows in the footsteps of Paul Theroux who wrote an anti-Naipaul book.

French, a highly regarded historian, will be on a promotional tour of India following publication by Picador of his not entirely unsympathetic biography of Naipaul, The World Is What It is.

Perhaps it would have been more appropriate to have called the book Naipaul Is What He Is, or even Naipaul Isn’t As Nasty As He Is Made Out To Be (Shobaa De, among many, doesn’t care for him, though).

Extracts which have started appearing in The Daily Telegraph in the UK have focussed on his first long but tortured marriage to Patricia Hale, “a slim, small undergraduate with a kind, pretty face” he met at Oxford in the 1950s when Naipaul arrived as a poor scholarship student from Trinidad.

They were both inexperienced virgins when they had sex for the first time after which Naipaul felt obliged to offer her marriage though her lower-middle-class father from a run-down area in Birmingham was against the idea.

The extracts have also dealt with his friendship and spectacular falling out with his protégé, Theroux, and his second marriage to the Pakistani journalist, Nadira Khannum Alvi, who, as Lady Naipaul, now lives with Sir Vidia Naipaul at their country residence in deepest Wiltshire.

The portrait that emerges of a man considered by many to be the greatest living writer in the English language is not always flattering. That he visited prostitutes for many years is not exactly a revelation since Naipaul himself confessed to doing so while describing the soul destroying nature of bought sex.

His wife supported him loyally through decades as he built his writing career but he was often cruel to her, openly maintaining a warmer personal relationship with his Anglo-Argentine mistress, Margaret Gooding, for 24 years. In the end, Gooding got dumped for Nadira, who was welcomed into Naipaul’s Wiltshire residence within days of Patricia’s death from cancer and her swift cremation. Naipaul even admits his callousness towards Patricia may have hastened her death.

How close French is now to his 75-year-old subject must be a matter for speculation. It is known that French felt obliged to send his manuscript to Naipaul but the latter did not respond or seek changes. It is not even known if Naipaul has bothered to read his own biography.

French, born in 1966, had a difficult job: he was picked by Naipaul to be his official biographer. However, if he was to retain his credibility, he had to deal honestly with his subject’s troubled sex life and his long and increasingly sterile marriage to Patricia, his wife for 41 years from 1955 until her death.

French has had access to all of Naipaul’s papers, including 24 volumes of Patricia’s diaries, which were sold to the University of Tulsa for $620,000.

Patricia once summed up the pain of her loveless marriage in a candid entry in her diary: “Vidia told me he had not enjoyed making love to me since 1967.”

The book says that in the summer of 1958, barely three years after his marriage to Patricia, “he started to have sex with prostitutes. He would find their telephone numbers in local newspapers and visit them in the afternoon in secret while Pat was at work as a school teacher”.

Today, Naipaul may be a wealthy man (though his Indian friends claim he is not above expecting Air India to upgrade his economy class tickets flying to Mumbai or Delhi). However, after leaving Oxford he suffered both racism and poverty in 1950s London. There was a time when tea and toast were all he could afford in his dismal, bitterly cold rooms which he could not afford to heat.

French has also shed new light on Naipaul’s 31-year friendship with the travel writer Theroux, whom he first met in Uganda. Theroux has recently been in Calcutta promoting Sir Vidia’s Shadow: A Friendship Across Five Continents, his account of his relationship with Naipaul, but French has got him to admit that not everything in the book is the truth.

For example, although Theroux says he met Nadira when growing up in Nairobi, such a meeting never took place.

Naipaul claims he has not taken the trouble to read the book but he has had this to say about Theroux: “In the 19th century, there were serious travellers who went to unknown places and did reports on it. Travel has become a plebeian, everyday matter, it has become a lower-class adventure, and there are books now written for lower-class travellers. I think Theroux belonged to that category: he wrote tourist books for the lower classes.”