Naipaul and Women

Published: 03/02/2008

Naipaul and His Women
Yasmin Alibhai-Brown

Patrick French has just published an incredibly honest account of the Nobel prize writer V.S Naipaul, who comes across as unpleasant and stuffed with conceit. That, I guess is true of many other authors too. But Naipaul is exceptionally malevolent, a man without grace or much humanity and sadistic to those who have dared to love him. His first wife Pat was devoted till she died horribly of cancer. He refused to make love to her and so she never could have children. He humiliated her by publicly confessing he used prostitutes. Now he admits: ‘It could be said that I killed her.’ Too late Sir. He treated his long term mistress Margaret Murray just as badly. She wasn’t very bright and let him beat her sometimes so badly that his own hand was swollen for days and her face was pulped beyond recognition. When she got pregnant three times, he told her to go off and ‘arrange the little murders’.

This year V.S. Naipaul went to Makerere University in Kampala for the Commonwealth book Prize. He was last there in the mid sixties, when the University where I studied literature, was among the best in the world. I saw him then, here and there with my lecturer Paul Theroux, extraordinary writers, but both congenitally dismal. Yet I loved both as writers. Naipaul’s A House for Mr Biswas was the first novel I had ever read on the lives of Diasporic Indians, people like my ancestors, taken from their homelands by the British to work fields, build railways and run small shops. His family ended up in Trinidad, mine in East Africa.

Since then, many of his biggest fans have become disillusioned. His books got increasingly bigoted and nasty; he was moved more by hate than love and an ugliness repeatedly broke through his beautifully written prose. The man and the writer are not as easily be separated as critics would have us believe. Writers don’t have to be saints but they do have to have empathy and live as civilized beings within the rules that apply to us all.

What, I wonder, would we do if we found out that Richard Branson beat up his mistress and drove his wife to death? Or if the Director General of the BBC spoke openly about his addiction to paid sex? Artists are part of our world and must be judged as others are. They cannot claim immunity from decency. I certainly will not buy another book by the egomaniac. The literary cabal can protest all it wants, the writer deserve the contempt many of us now feel for him.

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