The Exile With Attitude

The Age

Saturday May 31, 2008

Robert Dessaix

The inflated reputation of V.S. Naipaul has obscured what it is about the exile from Trinidad that makes him such a great writer, writes Robert Dessaix.

The World Is What It Is: The Authorised Biography of V. S. Naipaul

By Patrick French

Picador, $32.95

THERE IS SOMETHING TROUBLING about the V.S. Naipaul phenomenon. As in the case of Patrick White, his celebrity status and licence to behave appallingly seem out of kilter with his actual achievements. At some level, Patrick French's exhaustive, meticulously documented biography exacerbates the problem.

Ironically, it is Naipaul himself who may have put his finger on the nub of the problem. He observed cuttingly, and with remarkable insight, of Jorge Luis Borges that the reputation of this "blind and elderly Argentine, the writer of a very few, very short and very mysterious stories, is so inflated and bogus that it obscures his greatness".

Thirty-five years later, much the same thing could surely be said of Naipaul himself. Under the welter of honorary degrees, awards and other tributes to his talent (including both the Booker and Nobel prizes and a knighthood), it is all too easy to lose sight of what is distinctive about his real literary accomplishment.

For four decades Naipaul wrote with ringing clarity about ordinary lives amid the wreckage of empire - this is what is valuable. It could even be claimed that his early novel, A House for Mr Biswas, launched the post-colonial literature project.

His books about India (such as An Area of Darkness and A Million Mutinies Now) were at the time unprecedented in their sweep and unabashed clear-sightedness. Novels such as In a Free State and A Bend in the River, both set in Africa (that "obscene continent, fit only for second-rate people", according to Naipaul), are disturbingly brilliant.

To read anything at all by Naipaul, from his earliest, half-forgotten travel writing to complex fictions such as The Enigma of Arrival, is to lay yourself open to being changed.

But to call him the greatest living writer in the English language, as critics such as V.S. Pritchett and Francis Wyndham once did, or even "Britain's greatest living writer", as French is happy to do in this bracing, if protracted, biography, is both meaningless and harmful.

It risks diminishing what is most admirable about his writing: his singular viewpoint, uncluttered by considerations of fashion, cultural theory, personal loyalties or even basic good manners. A "pristine talent", is how French puts it. Needless to say, there is no such thing but if there were it might well sound very like the voice of V.S. Naipaul: robustly oracular.

The aggrieved pomposity French documents in such merciless detail in The World Is What It Is began early. Once he left Trinidad (where it was his "mistake" to have been born) for Oxford in 1950, the "clever little nigger Naipaul", as Evelyn Waugh once felt comfortable calling him, immediately set about reinventing himself as an exile with attitude.

The self-contempt of the colonial, as we Australians know all too well, is easily recast in exile as a kind of self-pitying arrogance. On the one hand, "home" is boring, second-rate and irredeemably peripheral - and the young Naipaul never failed to comment on the "ignorance and stupidity" of any Trinidadians he met in England - while the denizens of the great metropolis we have settled in can be so infuriatingly full of themselves that they fail to notice how clever we really are.

If you are a Brahmin to boot, as Naipaul imagines he is (without any evidence), the need to distinguish yourself from the yobbish herd, Indian, West Indian or British, becomes practically a divinely ordained duty. Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul rose to the occasion with alacrity. He put on a bit of a show. Gradually it became his life.

By the time he was 30, he was an Oxford graduate, a prize-winning writer, a regular reviewer in The New Statesman, a BBC radio personality and a television pundit known for his spiky views. (He dismissed Jane Austen, for instance, as the sort of writer who today would be a "leading contributor to women's papers". It's the "leading" that is so typical of Naipaul's wit.)

He was bored by Hardy, Conrad and Henry James, while the Modernists in general got short shrift - including Joyce, T.S. Eliot and Virginia Woolf, whose work "drew attention to itself".

Warming to the role of pompous buffoon, he dismissed the farmers and workers of Britain as "the nearest things to pure animals" he'd come across, declared the lower classes "an absolute menace, animals eating far more than they deserve" and dismissed women as "trivial-minded (longing) for witnesses to their pleasure or distress".

Mixing with people such as Antonia Fraser, who once rejected the advances of "the ill-favoured Australian humorist Clive James" on the grounds that she only slept with the First Eleven, he found his pomposity pleasingly pandered to.

ABOUT to turn 30, on the eve of the first of several marvellously fruitful journeys to India, he was also an unhappily married man with an addiction to prostitutes. By the time he was 40 he had a fiery Argentinian mistress. Both women showed an apparently infinite willingness to indulge the great writer's emotional, and even physical, brutality as if he were the incarnation of some vengeful Hindu god.

There is a detachment from the narratives of others - of whole peoples sometimes - as they themselves would present them that is perturbing in a novelist. Naipaul seems to celebrate it as a refined ability to observe, to pose as the passing flaneur.

While the unanchored state undoubtedly gives his writing its idiosyncratic colouring, it can make it hard to warm to his books. It certainly makes life difficult for a biographer. One of the main pleasures of a good biography, after all, lies in the way it captures the flavour of an epoch or place, not just an individual. Except in the early pages about Vidia's rich, if often squalid, childhood in Trinidad, all French can do is document V. S. Naipaul.

He makes up for this difficulty by the sheer volume of documentary evidence. He was given unfettered access to Sir Vidia's papers and to the man himself. The mass of minutiae he has unearthed is staggering. All the same, does anybody apart from the odd academic need to know how many pairs of underpants he packed to go to India or the details of how he paid for the operation to his lower spine?

"I'm the kind of writer that people think other people are reading," he once said of himself. Nowadays he's probably not even quite that. He has been outstripped in his ability to chronicle with a fresh eye this rapidly changing world. There is no shame in that - few writers soar for more than 20 years or so. Perhaps he is not introspective enough for present-day tastes, as a traveller or novelist. Perhaps, as he noted himself, traditional forms are no longer equal to the task of describing the wreckage of empire, now that it's global.

"The late 20th century," he wrote in 1999 with refreshing candour, "surfeited with news, culturally far more confused, threatening again to be as full of tribal or folk movement as during the centuries of the Roman Empire, needs another kind of interpretation."

Perhaps petulant deities are simply out of fashion. Good biographies, however, are not, and The World Is What It Is, given the awkwardness of its subject, is quite a triumph.

Robert Dessaix's Arabesques: A Tale of Double Lives will be published by Picador in October.

© 2008 The Age

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