Allan Massie
LIVING FOR LITERATURE
The World Is What It Is: The Authorized Biography Of V S Naipaul
By Patrick French (Picador 555pp £20)

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Patrick French has brought off something very difficult, so difficult indeed that I would have thought it impossible. He has written a biography of a living person that is every bit as honest, perceptive, compelling and plain good as if his subject was dead. It is a masterly performance, and if a better biography is published this year, I shall be astonished. That he has been able to achieve this owes much to the generosity, openness and fairness of his subject, Sir Vidia Naipaul, who has imposed no restrictions on him and has, for instance, allowed him to quote extensively from the diaries written by his first wife, Pat - diaries which, French tells us, Naipaul has not read himself. So we have a biography that is remarkably frank, warts and all. Given Sir Vidia's well-documented sensitivity, even touchiness, this is a mark of his high regard, even reverence, for Literature. A biography that is not honest is, he told French, no good at all.

The bare outline of the life is well known: the poor childhood in Trinidad, the influence of his father (a journalist and writer of short stories), the scholarship to Oxford, the depression and resentments from which he suffered, the early struggles and efforts to be published, the critical success of his first novels (a success not matched by their sales), and the blossoming of his reputation until we eventually arrive at Sir Vidia Naipaul, winner of pretty well every literary prize going, including the Nobel, and the most distinguished living writer of English.

Success of this sort takes more than talent. It is also an act of will, and Naipaul's will has been exceptionally powerful. He is a master writer because he has seen himself as the servant of Literature. Nothing has been allowed to stand in the way of his work and his achievement. Everyone in his life has been subordinated to his self-imposed duty. He has used people and cast them aside. 'I have no friends', he says, though French shows how many have felt friendship for him. He is the outsider who, courted by the Establishment, has taken what he wanted from it, and yet remained the outsider. The only comparable figure is Bernard Shaw, and, like Shaw, Naipaul has never lost the ability to irritate, provoke, anger and dismay. Like Shaw he has sometimes been abrupt in judgement and silly, but like Shaw, never belonging completely to any single culture, he has seen what others have preferred not to see. Compare, for instance, John Bull's Other Island with An Area of Darkness, The Return of Eva Perón and Among the Believers.

Naipaul is what the 1940s called a 'Displaced Person', displaced by History. Gravitating to the centre, he was able to view it with the same candid and unforgiving eye as he had trained on his native island. The title of the biography, The World Is What It Is, exemplifies his unflinching candour: no pretence, no sentimentality, contempt for self-proclaimed victims. If he has often delivered harsh judgements, it is because he sees it as a writer's duty to present things as they are, not as one might wish them to be.

French treats his private life scrupulously. He shows how much Naipaul owed to his first wife, Pat, whom he met when both were at Oxford. She helped him through a nervous breakdown, chivvied him with good advice, supported him from her earnings as a teacher in the first years of the marriage, organised his daily life, and remained his most devoted and admiring reader and adviser. But she could not satisfy him sexually; he had, as he confessed when already distinguished, frequent recourse to prostitutes, an addiction he found necessary but shameful. Then in Argentina he met a married woman, Margaret, who gave him for the first time in his life full sexual satisfaction.

He could not relinquish her; neither could he cast Pat aside. For some twenty years he ran them in tandem, often making both miserable. However, they reluctantly accepted the position. It sounds cruel. Often he was cruel. But would it have been any kinder to have left Pat for Margaret, or to have discarded his mistress? The one failure in this book is that French never quite brings Margaret to life, perhaps because his sympathies are with Pat, who became more shy and less sure of herself as Naipaul flourished. She sounds sweet. Naipaul's family all became fond of 'Auntie Pat' and resented Margaret.

The early novels won him esteem, but sales were disappointing. It was not until he changed agents and employed Gillon Aitken that things improved and he earned what he thought was his due. Some of the sums Aitken extracted from magazines like The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books and Sunday paper colour supplements here are staggering. Even more so are the advances he got Naipaul from publishers.

As a novelist, Naipaul had a weaker power of invention than many. He was also quite early aware that he might run out of material. So, as J M Coetzee put it, he 'pioneered an alternative, fluid, semi-fictional form', travel books in which he himself is at the centre investigating other cultures, those where his own distant roots lie (India) and others (Africa and the Muslim world) in confrontation with the West where Naipaul had found his lodging. Breaking this new ground brought him success, fame and wealth - while also provoking fierce criticism from those who felt disparaged or diminished by his insistence on standing for 'high civilization, individual rights and the rule of law'. It also led him to argue that the novel could no longer do what it had formerly done and that as a vehicle for creative energies it had reached its high point in the nineteenth century and was now in decline. He may be right. Yet I would wager that his best novels, such as The Mimic Men, A House for Mr Biswas, Guerrillas and A Bend in the River, will still be read when his travel books, for all their intelligence, have gathered dust and are of interest only to historians. The novels will remain fresh.

It is rare to wish that a biography running to over 500 pages was longer, but this is an exception. French stops in 1996 with Pat's death and Sir Vidia's second marriage, which followed so soon that had there been any funeral baked meats they might indeed have coldly furnished forth the marriage tables. One would have liked to know how the past ten years have gone, what changes there have been. But that is my only reservation. This is an excellent biography which does nothing to diminish one's respect for Sir Vidia and leaves one liking him much more than I had expected - a judgement he might himself dismiss as impertinent.