In Calcutta 20 years ago I used to know a nuclear scientist, though not very well. He came, as everyone said, from a ‘good family” and had a big, old villa in an unlikely part of the city that had more recently been given over to blocks of flats and offices, probably built on land that his ancestors had owned.
One morning he phoned with an invitation, which came out in a rush. ‘VS Naipaul is in town and somehow I’ve asked him to supper. I don’t know why I did, but now I have to have guests. Please come. You’re British and you’ll be punctual. In fact, come early, the earlier the better. I want someone else to be there when Naipaul arrives and you know about us Bengalis, we’re never on time.”
When I got to the house in its dark garden, the host was lit up with nerves. He had not met Naipaul and neither had I, but his reputation played in our conversation like a crude Hollywood trailer. His fastidiousness about food and drink, his vanity, his prickliness, his arrogance — the rumours suggested we weren’t in for a picnic.
The cook was at work preparing a variety of Bengali and European dishes, including a fish called bekti, known as ‘the Englishman’s fish” because it was a colonial favourite, as soft and white as sole. The scientist’s car, meanwhile, had gone to the Grand Hotel to pick up the chief guest.
The scientist laughed when he said: ‘I told my driver, ‘He’s a famous man but don’t worry — he’s a Bihari just like you’.” It was a good joke in its way because Biharis still formed the labouring class of Calcutta just as they had once formed the indentured labour of Trinidad’s plantations and it suddenly put Naipaul in a different light, trapping him low inside a prism of Indian snobbery when he enjoyed the idea of dancing on top of an English one.
My host was right about his other guests. None had arrived by the time the car returned. Naipaul came in smiling with a woman we recognised as his ‘Argentinian mistress” (a phrase of misleading exoticism) at his side.
Naipaul wore a tweed jacket and brogues and went around looking at pictures, sometimes exclaiming in triplicate, ‘very fine, very fine, very fine”.
We sat and French wine was offered. I asked Naipaul’s companion, Margaret, who seemed reassuringly normal, how she was finding Calcutta. She said she had seen almost nothing of it apart from their hotel room and the tennis courts at the Tollygunge Club. ‘Vidia says I mustn’t go out — it’s too dangerous,” she said and when I mildly disagreed I could see in Naipaul’s look that disagreement was not what he was here for.
Naipaul was researching a book that turned out to be his last great book about India, A Million Mutinies Now. The book would mark Naipaul’s change of heart about his ancestral civilisation: India, doomed in his earlier work, was at last finding a way forward. But none of us knew that then. When one or two other guests eventually turned up, the man they faced, so far as they knew, was the writer who had given the world its most distinct impression of modern India, an impression that in the view of many Indians was hopelessly flawed and both insulting and wrong. So why did they turn up and risk exposure as half-formed people in his new book? Because they were curious and, like me, wanted to see the phenomenon in the flesh — the genius, as his wife Pat referred to him in her diaries, quoted in Patrick French’s new The Authorised Biography of VS Naipaul (Picador) .
Naipaul’s self-certainty didn’t disappoint. He talked about his recent stay in Madras, how the city had become a filthy mess since he was first there in the early 1960s, how anti-Brahmin politics were responsible. But surely, somebody said, it was economic development that was to blame, smashing down and building up and poisoning the rivers? ‘No,” Naipaul said, with an impatient tapping of his brogue, ‘negritude, negritude, negritude.”
Food was announced and we went to the buffet. ‘Bekti — they used to call it the Englishman’s fish,” the scientist said proudly, nervously, and perhaps a little ironically, as a subterranean dig at his guest’s Anglophilia. Naipaul nibbled from several plates and sometimes pronounced the food ‘sweet” or ‘interesting”. Then it was time for Naipaul and Margaret to return to their hotel and for the tension to leave the room, allowing the rest of us to stay behind for a few minutes reflecting that it hadn’t been at all bad and that Margaret seemed nice but did his wife know?
In the past half-century thousands of people in Europe, the Indian subcontinent, South America, Indonesia, the United States, the Caribbean, Iran and Africa must have encountered Naipaul in a similar way. A man who started out on his travels knowing nobody had became a majestic presence wherever he landed, putting all kinds of people — hotel clerks, the local intelligentsia — into varying degrees of prostration and funk. Like servants gossiping below stairs, we all have our stories of his rudeness and hauteur, his mad self-esteem and his social cruelty — and now suddenly the fun has been sucked from the telling of them. I, for instance, was fond of repeating his words to me at a publishing party: ‘All Germans are liars They lie, they lie, they lie.”
But compared with the contents of French’s biography, written with Naipaul’s cooperation and blessing, this is nothing, just a way of Naipaul amusing himself over a glass of wine. ‘Will you consider one day being Lady Naipaul?” Naipaul asks Nadira, a woman he has just met in Pakistan when his wife Pat is dying of cancer in England and Margaret is elsewhere. Nadira consents; the mistress of more than 20 years is given the shove; and, a week after Pat dies, Nadira is ensconced in his house in Wiltshire, in the west of England.
Naipaul gave French access to everything, including Pat’s diaries (which Naipaul sold to an American university without having read them) and the biography must be the frankest authorised biography of anyone alive and in possession of their senses. Thanks to the New Yorker, we knew about the prostitutes; now we learn about the sexual violence. We are none of us straight pieces of timber but the woodshed usually has locks; it isn’t the things disclosed but the uninhibited disclosure that is so bewildering.
French writes that Naipaul’s willingness to have the book published in his lifetime was ‘at once an act of narcissism and humility”, but perhaps there was also another motive — to have all this disseminated so that the public’s curiosity is sated, pre-empting posthumous biographies and allowing his readers, in the years before he dies, to return to the importance of his work.
He has his knighthood and his Nobel and only in flashes does he write as he used to. Publication of the biography was followed by a 90-minute documentary on BBC TV. Well worth reading and watching, but having done both I feel no need to know any more.
‘Never meet a famous author if you like their work” is not a bad maxim. I am glad to have met him, but reading him is the worthwhile thing to do.
Be grateful, if you must, remember his shuddersome life that so much selfishness has given us such great books. —