The World Is What It Is The Authorized Biography of VS Naipaul by Patrick French
April 1st, 2008, 6:21 am Hobbies Ideas
The biggest surprise in Patrick French’s colourful biography of Sir Vidia
Naipaul is that its biographee should have allowed it to be published. For
it exposes him as an egotist, a domestic tyrant and a sadist to a degree
that would be farcical if it were not for the consequent distress suffered
over many years by his first wife, Pat. The book is, in large part, Pat’s
tragedy. They met at Oxford, and their early letters are touchingly
innocent, frank and hopeful. She defied her family in marrying him, but
things soon started to go wrong. It was partly, it seems, that he was too
fastidious to commit himself wholly to another person. He would not give her
a wedding ring, though she pleaded for one and eventually bought one
herself. But it was also that she did not attract him sexually. He felt
sexual desire to be shameful, and could not associate it with love. They
were both too embarrassed to discuss his problem, and he began to consort
with prostitutes, while Pat saw her hopes of motherhood fade.
Then, in 1972, he met an Anglo-Argentinian woman, Margaret Murray, and felt an
instant attraction. They soon found that what French calls the kinks in
their personalities matched. She enjoyed being his slave and victim, while
he was aroused by mistreating and dominating her. It gave him, he said,
carnal pleasure for the first time in his life. Being ignorant and not very
bright (he estimated that her vocabulary was limited to 50 words), she was
of no interest to him except as a sex object. When they were apart he did
not bother to read, or even open, her letters. But, for the next 20 years,
they would meet in locations around the world to do things that, Murray
said, it would have made her sick to do with anyone else, though she longed
to do them again with him. She cherished the wounds he inflicted as signs of
his passion. On one occasion he beat her, on and off, for two days, until
his hand became painfully swollen and her face was too disfigured for her to
appear in public.
She left her husband and three children, in hopes that he would marry her. But
he still needed Pat to guide, support and mother him, so he shuttled between
the two women, repeatedly threatening each that he would put an end to their
relationship. It destroyed Pat. The effect of his hating and abusing her,
her diaries record, was to convince her of her own revoltingness and
folly. He would reduce her to tears in front of guests, yet demand to be
cosseted like a child. When he told her of his affair, he expected her to
comfort him for being apart from Murray, and she did. Her love and
admiration seem to have been limitless. In her diaries she refers to him as
the Genius.
Murray became pregnant three times during their relationship. On the first
occasion, Naipaul sent a cheque to cover the termination. I was quite happy
for it to be aborted, he explains. I would have had to give up so much.
The other two times he paid no heed, and left her to arrange what she called
her little murders herself. This was typical of his undeviating
self-concern, which French traces to the humiliations of his early life.
Descended from destitute Indian labourers sent to Trinidad to cut sugar
cane, he was made to feel inferior even within his own extended family by
the failures and mental breakdowns of his beloved father, whom he was to
commemorate in A House for Mr Biswas. By dint of heroic swotting, he won a
scholarship and escaped to Oxford. But beneath its affability, 1950s Oxford
was a maze of invisible barriers that he felt, rightly, had been erected to
stop people like him succeeding. He tried to gas himself, but the
coin-in-the-slot meter gave out while he was still conscious. Post-Oxford
London was even worse. Nobody wanted to employ small, asthmatic Indians. He
applied for and failed to get 26 jobs, and came close to starvation, living
on boiled potatoes and handouts from Pat, who was working as a
schoolteacher.
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