The public snob, the grand bastard, was much in evidence when I interviewed V. S. Naipaul in 1994, and this was exactly as expected. A pale woman, his secretary, showed me in to the sitting room of his London flat. Naipaul looked warily at me, offered a hand, and began an hour of scornful correction. I knew nothing, he said, about his birthplace, Trinidad; I possessed the usual liberal sentimentality. It was a plantation society. Did I know anything about his writing? He doubted it. The writing life had been desperately hard. But, I said, hadn’t his great novel, “A House for Mr. Biswas,” been acclaimed on its publication? “Look at the people’s choices for the best books of the sixties,” he said. “ ‘Biswas’ is not there.” His secretary brought coffee, and retired. Naipaul claimed that he had not even been published in America until the nineteen-seventies, “and then the reviews were awful—unlettered, illiterate, ignorant.” The phone rang, and kept ringing. “I am sorry,” Naipaul said in exasperation. “One is not well cared for here.” Only as the secretary showed me out, and novelist and servant briefly spoke to each other in the hall, did I realize that she was Naipaul’s wife.

A few days later, the phone rang: “It’s Vidia Naipaul. I have just read your . . . careful piece in the Guardian. Perhaps we can have lunch. Do you know the Bombay Brasserie? What about one o’clock tomorrow?” The Naipaul who took me to lunch that day was different from the horrid interviewee. Stern father had become milder uncle. “It’s a buffet system here. Don’t pile everything onto one plate. That is vulgar. Put one small thing onto a plate, and when you have finished it they will come and take it away.” I didn’t think that he was making amends for his earlier behavior, nor that he had so admired my piece that he was compelled to meet me off duty. I thought he was merely curious to talk to someone in his late twenties about writing, and that the habits of a lifetime—the habits of the brilliant noticer, the committed world-gatherer—were asserting themselves almost automatically: he was working. “If you want to write serious books,” he said to me, “you must be ready to break the forms, break the forms. Is it true that Anita Brookner writes exactly the same novel every year?” It is true, I said. “How awful, how awful.”

The Indian social theorist Ashis Nandy writes of the two voices in Kipling, which have been called the saxophone and the oboe. The first is the hard, militaristic, imperialist writer, and the second is the Kipling infused with Indianness, with admiration for the subcontinent’s cultures. Naipaul has a saxophone and an oboe, too, a hard sound and a softer one. These two sides could be called the Wounder and the Wounded. The Wounder is by now well known—the source of fascinated hatred in the literary world and postcolonial academic studies. He disdains the country he came from: “I was born there, yes. I thought it was a mistake.” When he won the Nobel Prize, in 2001, he said it was “a great tribute to both England, my home, and India, the home of my ancestors.” Asked why he had omitted Trinidad, he said that he feared it would “encumber the tribute.” He has written of the “barbarism” and “primitivism” of African societies, and has fixated, when writing about India, on public defecation. (“They defecate on the hills; they defecate on the riverbanks; they defecate on the streets.”) When asked for his favorite writers, he replies, “My father.” He is socially successful but deliberately friendless, an empire of one: “At school I had only admirers; I had no friends.”

The Wounder, we learn from Patrick French’s extraordinary biography of Naipaul, “The World Is What It Is” (Knopf; $30), used and used up his first wife, Patricia Hale, sometimes depending on her, at other times ignoring her, often berating and humiliating her. And French’s biography, published earlier this year in Britain, is already notorious for a revelation that can only enrich our luxury of loathing: in 1972, Naipaul began a long, tortured, sadomasochistic affair with an Anglo-Argentine woman, Margaret Gooding. It was an intensely sexual relationship, which enacted, on Naipaul’s side, fantasies of cruelty and domination. On one occasion, jealous because Margaret was with another man, he said that he was “very violent with her for two days with my hand. . . . Her face was bad. She couldn’t really appear in public.”

The Wounded Naipaul is the writer who returns obsessively to the struggle, shame, and impoverished fragility of his early life in Trinidad; to the unlikely journey he made from the colonial rim of the British Empire to its metropolitan center; and to the precariousness, as he sees it, of his long life in England—“a stranger here, with the nerves of the stranger,” as he puts it in “The Enigma of Arrival” (1987). Again and again, his sense of aggrieved encirclement expands to encompass others, and he manages, with neither vanity nor condescension, to blend his woundedness with theirs: the empire of one is colonized by his characters. They range from the major to the minor, from the educated to the almost illiterate, from the real to the fictional, but they are united by their homelessness. They are the men in “Miguel Street” (1959), a book of linked stories rich in comedy and dialect, based on the street in Port of Spain, the capital of Trinidad, where Naipaul spent his formative years. Elias, for instance, dreams of being a doctor. “And Elias waved his small hands, and we thought we could see the Cadillac and the black bag and the tube-thing that Elias was going to have.” To become a doctor, Elias must sit for a British exam. A friend comments excitedly, “Everything Elias write not remaining here, you know. Every word that boy write going to England.” Elias fails the exam, and sits for it again. “Is the English and litritcher that does beat me,” he confesses. He fails it again. He decides to become a sanitary inspector. He fails that exam. He ends up as a cart driver, “one of the street aristocrats.” And there is Santosh, who narrates “One Out of Many,” the first story in “In a Free State” (1971). A servant from Bombay who accompanies his master to Washington, D.C., Santosh is quite lost, away from his old home. He wanders the American streets, sees some Hare Krishna singers, and for a moment thinks that they are Indians. And his mind yearns for his old life:

How nice it would be if the people in Hindu costumes in the circle were real. Then I might have joined them. We would have taken to the road; at midday we would have halted in the shade of big trees; in the late afternoon the sinking sun would have turned the dust clouds to gold; and every evening at some village there would have been welcome, water, food, a fire in the night. But that was the dream of another life.

Instead, as an Indian-restaurant owner tells Santosh, “This isn’t Bombay. Nobody looks at you when you walk down the street. Nobody cares what you do.” He means it consolingly—that Santosh is free to do whatever he likes. But Naipaul is alert to Santosh’s negative freedom, in which nobody in America cares what he does because nobody cares who he is. Santosh leaves his master, marries an American, becomes a citizen. He is now “in a free state,” but ends his tale like this: “All that my freedom has brought me is the knowledge that I have a face and have a body, that I must feed this body and clothe this body for a certain number of years. Then it will be over.”

Above all, there is Mohun Biswas, the protagonist of Naipaul’s greatest novel, “A House for Mr. Biswas,” who is born into poverty in Trinidad, begins his professional life as a sign writer (“IDLERS KEEP OUT BY ORDER” is his first commission), miraculously becomes a journalist in Port of Spain, and ends his life at the age of forty-six, lolling on his Slumberking bed reading Marcus Aurelius. He is a homeowner, but barely housed: “He had no money. . . . On the house in Sikkim Street Mr Biswas owed, and had been owing for four years, three thousand dollars. . . . Two children were at school. The two older children, on whom Mr Biswas might have depended, were both abroad on scholarships.” Naipaul ends the short prologue to that novel with a deep autobiographical shudder. Imagine if Mr. Biswas had not owned this poor house, he suggests to his comfortable readers: “How terrible it would have been, at this time, to be without it . . . to have lived without even attempting to lay claim to one’s portion of the earth; to have lived and died as one had been born, unnecessary and unaccommodated.” How much land does a man need? Tolstoy asks in a fierce late tale. Six feet, just enough to be buried in, is that story’s reply. Mr. Biswas had a little more than that; but he had so narrowly avoided being the “unaccommodated man,” the naked savage, found on the heath in “King Lear.”

Unnecessary, unaccommodated—and unnoticed, until Naipaul made him the hero of his book. The shudder is autobiographical because Mr. Biswas is essentially Vidia Naipaul’s father, Seepersad Naipaul, and the fictional house on Sikkim Street is the real house on Nepaul Street from which Vidia was launched, at nearly eighteen, on his journey to England—“a box,” Patrick French writes, “a hot, rickety, partitioned building near the end of the street, around 7 square metres on two floors with an external wooden staircase and a corrugated iron roof.” Seepersad’s father had been shipped from India to Trinidad in order to fill out the workforce on the sugarcane plantations. As French notes, indentured servitude differed from slavery in that it was “theoretically voluntary,” and families were allowed to stay together. After five or ten years, the laborer could return to India or stay and take a small plot of land. At the time of Vidia Naipaul’s birth, in 1932, the literacy rate among Trinidadian Indians (then about a third of the island’s population of four hundred thousand) was twenty-three per cent. For the entire island, there were four British government scholarships, which paid for study at a British university, and Vidia felt that this was his only chance to escape. He had won his first scholarship at the age of ten; he won his last in 1949, and left for Oxford the next year.

From this world, Seepersad Naipaul made a career as a reporter and columnist for the Trinidad Guardian and published a book of fictional stories about his community, written with a simplicity and comedy and attention to detail that his son would admire and emulate. It was a remarkable achievement, but, judged by wider standards, it was also a failure, because Seepersad never left the island, and had to live vicariously through his clever children, who did. (He died in 1953, aged forty-seven, while Vidia was still at Oxford.) That double assessment—pride and shame, compassion and alienation—is the stereoscopic vision of “A House for Mr. Biswas,” and, in a sense, of all Naipaul’s fiction, and it is why he is a writer who has a conservative vision but radical eyesight. The Wounded, radical Naipaul burns with rage at the cramped, colonial horizon of his father’s life, and seeks to defend his accomplishments against the colonist’s metropolitan sneers, but the conservative Wounder has got beyond the little prison of Trinidad, and now sees, with the colonist’s eye and no longer the colonial’s, the littleness of that imprisonment. Naipaul is enraging and puzzling, especially to those who themselves come from postcolonial societies, because his radicalism and his conservatism are so close to each other—each response is descended from the same productive shame. Naipaul plays the oboe and the saxophone with the same reed.

In his writing, Naipaul is simultaneously the colonized and the colonist, in part because he never seriously imagines that the colonized would ever want to be anything but the colonist, even as he uses each category to judge the other. Thus an English Oxford student of the early nineteen-fifties might have seen Seepersad’s achievement as absurdly minor, and Vidia Naipaul would certainly have agreed with him, but the bitterness of Seepersad’s struggle must also qualify that Oxonian complacency. This dialectic seems familiar because it may have less to do with race and empire than with class; it is the classic movement from province to metropolis, whereby the provincial, who has never wanted to be anywhere but the metropolis, nevertheless judges it with a provincial skepticism, while judging the provinces with a metropolitan superiority. In “A House for Mr. Biswas,” the Wounded and the Wounder are hard to disentangle, and Naipaul often adopts a kind of cool, summary omniscience that he uses to provoke our rebellious compassion. There is an arresting moment early in the book when he offers a flash-forward, and tells us that Mr. Biswas’s fate would probably be that of a laborer, working on the estates like his brother, Pratap, “illiterate all his days.” Pratap, he writes, would become “richer than Mr Biswas; he was to have a house of his own, a large, strong, well-built house, years before Mr Biswas.” And then he changes course:

But Mr Biswas never went to work on the estates. Events which were to occur presently led him away from that. They did not lead him to riches, but made it possible for him to console himself in later life with the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius, while he rested on the Slumberking bed in the one room which contained most of his possessions.

Naipaul is here communicating, almost esoterically, with his presumed non-Trinidadian audience: you are the sort of people, he seems to say, who might disdain Mr. Biswas, but you are also the kind of people who know that Pratap’s riches are not as important as Biswas’s riches, that Marcus Aurelius on a Slumberking bed, small as it is, is better than a Slumberking bed without Marcus Aurelius.

Nowadays, V. S. Naipaul spends so much time being disagreeable and superior, is so masked and armored, that it can be hard to remember the young writer’s woundedness. The letters he sent from Oxford to Trinidad, preternaturally confident, occasionally show a chink, as when he writes, “I want to come top of my group. I have got to show these people that I can beat them at their own language.” Patrick French shrewdly dips into the Oxford student magazine Isis to give us an idea of “these people,” and so of the world Naipaul had to join and beat. It offered portraits of such “Americans-and-Colonials” as the Indian undergraduate Ramesh Divecha: “This fine specimen of Hindu manhood is equally at home theorising on the secrets of his successes in Vincent’s or fingering his native chapattis in the Taj . . . He returns to the jungle in August to study for his Bar Finals.”

Naipaul had a breakdown at Oxford, and the years immediately after his graduation, as he looked for work in London, were intensely difficult. The hardship was softened by his relationship with Patricia Hale, whom he had met at Oxford in 1952. They were in some ways well matched. Like him, she was from modest circumstances—her father was a clerk in a lawyer’s office, and the family lived in a two-bedroom flat in a suburb of Birmingham. She was the only girl at her school to win a state scholarship to Oxford. They were both twenty-two when they married, and neither family was notified. But, whereas Naipaul careered from confidence to anxiety (a year after meeting Pat, he told her that “from a purely selfish point of view you are the ideal wife for a future G.O.M.”—Grand Old Man—“of letters”), Pat was stable, supportive, a willing helpmeet. Years later, in one of this biography’s many devastating moments, Naipaul reread his early correspondence with Pat and made notes. Characteristically, he did not spare himself. He had got too quickly involved with Pat, he wrote; he had been in too deep and could not get out. It would have been better if he had married someone else. Pat “did not attract me sexually at all.” He decided that the relationship, on his side, “was more than half a lie. Based really on need. The letters are shallow & disingenuous.”

Pat sometimes seems to have aspired to the condition of the Athenian women adjured by Pericles, in his funeral oration, to “think it your greatest commendation not to be talked of one way or other.” Her presence in this biography is a hush around Vidia’s noise; her job is merely to hold the big drum of his ego in the right position, the better for him to strike the vital life rhythm. “I am not much good to anyone and Vidia is probably, almost certainly, right when he says I have nothing to offer him,” she wrote in her diary, many years on in their marriage. Unassertive, Englishly reticent, a little milky and bland, she became steadily obsessed with his writing—even as she would half-mockingly call him “the Genius” in private—and enjoyed being his spur and amanuensis. In a biography full of intimate and moving revelations, there are seven thrilling pages in which French, with the help of Pat’s diaries, shows us the genesis and progress of Naipaul’s novel “A Bend in the River” (1979), probably the only rival to “Biswas.” One evening, in the fall of 1977, after watching television, he informed his wife that he wanted “to be alone with my thoughts.” Half an hour later, she entered his room, and he told her that the novel would begin with these lines: “My family come from the east coast. Africa was at our backs. We are Indian ocean people.” Then he outlined for her the story and the main characters. Over the next months, he said, pleadingly, that he could not write the book without her presence, and her diary documents its swift, difficult passage. Sometimes he read to her, and sometimes he dictated to her, calling her in to his bedroom, like Churchill with his secretaries, at one o’clock in the morning. The novel moved fast, and in May, 1978, he asked her to come into his room, at twelve-thirty at night, and “spoke the end of the book. It took an hour to an hour and a half.”

“A Bend in the River” is narrated by Salim, a Muslim Indian merchant who has moved to a trading town, on the bend of a great river, in a newly independent African country. In 1966, Naipaul had spent time in Uganda, Kenya, and Tanzania, and in 1975 he travelled to Mobutu’s Zaire. In Kisangani, he encountered a young Indian businessman, whose deracination was striking. The essence of his novel, he said, is: “What is this man doing here?” Like so many of Naipaul’s characters, Salim feels his status to be precarious: “I was also worried for us. Because, so far as power went, there was no difference between the Arabs and ourselves. We were both small groups living under a European flag at the edge of the continent.” An old friend of Salim’s, named Indar, who has been educated at a British university, arrives to lecture at the town polytechnic. Indar tells Salim about his journey to England, and once again Naipaul returns to the two beguilingly traumatic stories he has never escaped—the abbreviated, short story of his father’s journey, and the arpeggiated, long story of his own journey. (Indar “will be me,” he told Pat.)

“When we land at a place like London Airport we are concerned only not to appear foolish,” Indar says to Salim. After university, Indar tries to get a job with the Indian diplomatic service, but is humiliated at the Indian High Commission in London. The officials there seem to him cringing, minor pomposities, yet one of them is bold enough to ask Indar how he could possibly represent India when he came from Africa: “How can we have a man of divided loyalties?” Indar tells Salim, “For the first time in my life I was filled with a colonial rage. And this wasn’t only a rage with London or England; it was also a rage with the people who had allowed themselves to be corralled into a foreign fantasy.” He decides, in London, that he will be a Naipauline empire of one. He realizes that he is homeless, that he cannot go home, that he must stay in a place like London, that “I belonged to myself alone.” Yet he consoles himself: “I’m a lucky man. I carry the world within me. You see, Salim, in this world beggars are the only people who can be choosers. Everyone else has his side chosen for him. I can choose. . . . But now I want to win and win and win.”

Yet, near the end of the book, Salim hears that Indar has not exactly won and won and won. He lost his academic gig when the Americans pulled the funding. Now “he does the lowest kind of job. He knows he is equipped for better things, but he doesn’t want to do them. . . . He doesn’t want to risk anything again.”

The Naipaul who wrote Indar’s incandescent monologue is the Naipaul who, many years earlier, had written this fierce letter to Pat:

Put yourself in my place for a minute . . . If my father had 1/20 of the opportunity laid before the good people of British stock, he would not have died a broken, frustrated man without any achievement. But, like me, he had the opportunity—to starve. He was ghettoed—in a sense more cruel than that in which Hitler ghettoed the Jews. But there was an element of rude honesty in the Nazi approach; and they at any rate killed swiftly. The approach of the Free World is infinitely subtler and more refined. You cannot say to a foreign country: I suffer from political persecution. That wouldn’t be true . . . But I suffer from something worse, an insidious spiritual persecution. These people want to break my spirit. They want me to forget my dignity as a human being. They want me to know my place.

Naipaul in this letter resembles no writer so much as Frantz Fanon, the radical analyst of the “insidious spiritual persecution” wrought by colonialism on the colonized. The colonized subject, Fanon writes in “The Wretched of the Earth” (1961), “is constantly on his guard: confused by the myriad signs of the colonial world, he never knows whether he is out of line. Confronted with a world configured by the colonizer, the colonized subject is always presumed guilty. The colonized does not accept his guilt, but rather considers it a kind of curse, a sword of Damocles.” Fanon believed in violent revolution, but Naipaul’s radical pessimism meets Fanon’s radical optimism at that point where the cut of colonial guilt, angrily resisted by both men, is converted into the wound of colonial shame—“a kind of curse.” Fanon had argued, “The colonist is an exhibitionist. His safety concerns lead him to remind the colonized out loud: ‘Here I am the master.’ The colonist keeps the colonized in a state of rage, which he prevents from boiling over.” And the title novella of “In a Free State” is practically a working demonstration—spare, bleak, and burning—of that argument. Bobby and Linda, a white Englishman and woman, are driving through an African country resembling Uganda. The man is an administrative officer in a government department. In the course of their journey, they perpetrate, and also witness, flamboyant acts of colonial rage on black Africans, acts whose raison d’être seems to be white self-reassurance. Impotent exhibitionists, in Fanon’s sense, these white intruders are at once predatory and fearful, constantly supplicating an assumed black “rage” that they themselves constantly provoke. In a bar, Bobby, wearing a “native” shirt (but made in Holland), tries to pick up a black man, a Zulu. “If I come into the world again I want to come with your colour,” Bobby says, and puts his hand on the Zulu’s. The Zulu, without moving his hand or changing his expression, spits in Bobby’s face. At a decrepit hotel, an old English colonel humiliates Peter, a black assistant, while his white visitors look on. One day, he warns Peter, you will come to my room to kill me, but “I’ll be waiting. I’ll say, ‘It’s Peter. Peter hates me.’ And you won’t come past that door. I’ll kill you. I’ll shoot you dead.” The title novella shifts its perspectives and allegiances, now white, now black, just as the whole collection does: in addition to Bobby and Linda’s journey in Africa, there is the story of Santosh, the Bombay servant uprooted in Washington D.C.; a story narrated by a West Indian immigrant trying desperately to survive in England; and two extracts from a reportorial journal apparently kept by the author. Naipaul’s publisher wanted to discard everything but the novella. Naipaul, the breaker of forms, demurred, insisting that he had written “a sequence.”

Naipaul’s sympathy for the political and emotional fragility of his characters did not extend, alas, to his wife. His brutally fulfilling affair with Margaret Gooding—“I wished to possess her as soon as I saw her,” he tells his biographer—gradually voided a passionless marriage. In the mid-nineteen-seventies, husband and wife began to spend more and more time apart, as Naipaul travelled on ceaseless journalistic assignments. Naipaul’s sister Savi suggests that once Pat realized that she would not have children, and that her husband was committedly unfaithful, she lost her confidence as a woman. This is an extraordinary biography because Patrick French has had access both to Pat’s diaries and to searching interviews with Naipaul, whose candor is formidable: as always, one feels that while Naipaul may often be wrong, he is rarely untruthful, and, indeed, that he is likely to uncover twenty truths on the path to error. Pat’s diaries make for painful reading: “I felt assaulted but I could not defend myself.” “He has been increasingly frenzied and sadly, from my point of view, hating and abusing me.” Pat died of breast cancer in 1996. “It could be said that I had killed her,” Naipaul tells French. “It could be said. I feel a little bit that way.”

The day after Pat’s cremation, Nadira Alvi, the well-heeled daughter of a Pakistani banker, soon to be the novelist’s second wife, arrived in Wiltshire, at the house so recently vacated by her predecessor, and Naipaul wrote to his literary agent, “She is part of my luck, and I would like you to meet her.” This is where French’s masterly, mournful book ends, and it seems hideously just, in a life story so consumed by social and racial anxieties, and so transcendent of them, too, that we should see V. S. Naipaul ending up with a haughty woman who tells French that her husband’s relatives are “jumped-up peasantry,” and that her father “would be shocked that I found happiness with an indentured labourer’s grandson.”

In “The Enigma of Arrival,” the long book that Naipaul wrote about the Wiltshire countryside in which he has lived, intermittently, since 1971, there is a searing parenthesis in which he tells us about two derelict cottages he has been converting into a new home. One day, an old lady was brought by her grandson to look at the cottage where she once spent a summer, and, confused by Naipaul’s renovations, thought she had come to the wrong place. Naipaul was “ashamed,” he writes, and so “I pretended I didn’t live there.” But what is the source of the shame? Is it his building project or his very presence in the English countryside? He lives there but is ashamed to live there; the house for Mr. Naipaul in England, as for Mr. Biswas in Trinidad, is a homeless house. The man is still unaccommodated. 

James Wood | 1 December 2008 | The New Yorker