A measure of Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul’s eminence in the realm of letters can be had from the fact that within 15 years of his writing life, his claim on the Nobel for literature was established. This, when his ways of literary inquiry were yet not fully known. Born to the descendents of Indian indentured workers in Trinidad in the early ’30s, Naipaul reached university in Oxford with just the contours of an ambition — that he would be a writer. What he would write and how were uncertain, and to answer these questions he looked within. And having written well-received books, he would look again, and again. It has been the most remarkable process. To look back at the makings of the ambition that came to him, and which he took farther bit by bit, was to, each time, reveal larger truths about migration, the metropolitan-colony distances and identity.Alas, Sir Vidia is now carrying this process too far, or he is bearing the consequences of using another man’s writing to tell a story he wrote so much better himself. Naipaul has given Patrick French rare access to his papers and memories for a biography due this month (The World Is What It Is: The Authorised Biography of V.S. Naipaul). In it, Naipaul has chosen to revisit the immense cruelties he inflicted on his first wife, Patricia, a fellow student at Oxford who sustained him through financial worries and mental breakdowns. The distancing of Pat for the comfort of other women is not unknown, having been recounted by estranged friends like the novelist Paul Theroux and in gossip stories. In fact, Naipaul himself has been transparent about his older anxieties and consequent meanness — for instance, by choosing to publish his correspondence with his father and sister Kamla.Naipaul is too canny not to have known how the tantalising tidbits on his first wife would be played out. How, for his sake, we wish he had told the story more gently — just as he may have done, had he written it himself.
