IN THE MAIL TODAY 5th June 2011

WHY BE NICE WHEN YOU CAN BE NASTY?


  At the Hay festival last weekend, the green room was abuzz with writers trying to get complimentary tickets to hear V.S Naipaul in conversation with Alexander Waugh, grandson of Evelyn and son of Auberon who was himself a friend of Naipaul’s. It was the kind of pairing that Hay organizers, with their enviable literary clout, specialize in. However, seeing me walk in the opposite direction to the thronging venue, a friend enquired, ‘Aren’t you coming to hear Sir Vidia?’
  ‘I heard him quite recently,’ I replied. Then I added with a laugh, ‘It was at the Royal Society where he was incredibly rude to people who dared ask him questions. So undeservingly too as they were perfectly reasonable questions, asked by fellows of the RSA, not pushovers themselves. So, in short, no, I don’t think I can bear to spend another hour cringing like that again.’
  My friend dropped her voice, ‘Well isn’t it his boorishness that makes it fun? Just think, I could dine out for years on my I-was-there-when-Naipaul-said-it story.’
  We were both being light-hearted, of course, and my friend went off clutching her ticket while I enjoyed a leisurely lunch. But our conversation oddly sums up the tragi-comedy that Naipaul has become, whether by design or default.
  Despite the man’s well-charted propensity for depression, I wonder whether Naipaul sees himself as a tragic figure. But how wretched to watch such a superb talent being turned into a force that damages more than it nurtures. Yes, it’s naïve to imagine all gifted people directing their faculties into helping disadvantaged people. Most don’t, I know, and more often than not we hear of drug-driven/drink-addled rock stars holing themselves up in their mansions awaiting death as though that were preferable to the paranoid nightmares that their lives have become.
  But a man who works with word and thought? Described, rightly, as the finest prose writer of our times and who would naturally be accustomed to having his wisdom and insight sought on a variety of subjects?  One who is a Booker Prize winner, a Nobel laureate? What possesses such a man to relentlessly rebuff and offend even if – as his supporters may claim – Naipaul’s intellectual snobbery is akin to the kind of self-protection followed by other gifted writers such as Salinger and Tolstoy and Evelyn Waugh? The waste is doubled when the world loses and the man does too, all respect and relevance diminished with every unthinking utterance till he is finally reduced to nothing more than a dinner-party joke.
  Not that Naipaul would care; in his view I’d be a ‘chit of a girl’ or worse. But what does that matter when he has just dismissed Austen and Attwood and Mantel and Gordimer, all writers, in fact, who happen to be women and are therefore ‘unequal’ to him. I examined that word carefully when I read it in the newspaper. Perhaps he meant different, I thought, hoping foolishly. Clearly foolishly, given that the man also once said: ‘I am beginning to feel more and more that women are trivial-minded, incapable of analysing or even seeing their motives.’ Or that he went on to deride the ‘sentimental tosh’ churned out by women and, worse, attribute it to the idea that women – the poor dears – are not ‘masters of their house’. Which world is Naipaul living in? Certainly not mine, which is peopled by a plethora of strong women, including my 80-year-old doctor mother-in-law who is currently helping to start up a rural health practice in Mukhteshwar.
  It was reassuring to see Diana Athill respond robustly to Naipaul’s dismissiveness of her writing. She had not only been his editor for years but recently wrote a best-selling book on growing old which accepted this inevitable fact with the kind of grace and good humour that Naipaul could never aspire to. Unsurprisingly, however, I gathered that, like a lot of Naipaul’s old acquaintances, Athill too has fallen out with her old protégé. People are generally not masochistic when it comes to their friendships.  
  Patrick French’s finely nuanced biography on Naipaul reveals how even loyal wives and mistresses were not spared the man’s viciousness. ‘You have no skill’, Naipaul reputedly snarled at the long-suffering Pat Naipaul, who worked as a schoolteacher to keep her struggling writer husband out of penury and retyped his novels when his fingers hurt. There was more: ‘You don’t behave like a writer’s wife. You behave like the wife of a clerk who has risen above his station.’ Margaret Gooding, the mistress who had stayed loyal for twenty four years, eventually fared as badly, swiftly dropped on Pat’s death so that Naipaul could replace her with a younger woman he had just met.
  Curiously, however, Naipaul subsequently made disarmingly honest admissions regarding the women he let down so pitilessly, such as acknowledging that Pat probably died of heartbreak when he made his reliance on prostitutes throughout their marriage public in an interview. Further, his decision to give his biographer unlimited access to Pat’s diaries would seem to run contrary to an egoistical man, although it does chime with one who not only refuses to court good opinion but appears to take pleasure in shunning it. Deliberate or not, what Naipaul has done is provide his observers with a compelling and complex study of misogyny that will keep people analyzing his motives and his writings well past his own life. Well, that’s one way to remain unforgettable. Niceness, as we all know, does not make for good copy.
   My only face-to-face meeting with Naipaul reveals one of his rare nice moments. It took place ten years ago – in the house of Khushwant Singh, a man who is no stranger himself to both adulation and controversy but whose humanity is elevated by indisputable kindness. Khushwant’s invitation to me was typically generous: a senior writer extending the hand of friendship to an ingénue one-novel writer new to Delhi. I was introduced to a small and select group of Delhi’s literati and among them was Lord Naipaul who was passing through the city with his wife. Blissfully unaware at the time of Naipaul’s fearsome reputation, I engaged him in cheery conversation. And, to do him credit, Naipaul was about as cheery as he is probably capable of being, congratulating me on getting published. Apart from advising me against allowing anyone to turn my books into films, he had nothing negative to say. Not about books or writing or even daring to do so despite my gender ... alas, it would have been so much easier to dine out on a nasty Naipaul story, and perhaps that’s exactly why he does it.