VS Naipaul, who has died aged 85, exemplified a very current preoccupation: whether an author’s personality can be separated from his or her reputation as an artist. The writer, who won the Booker prize in 1971 for his novel In a Free State, and the Nobel prize for literature 30 years later, has delighted and beguiled readers with works such as The Mystic Masseur (1957), A House for Mr Biswas (1961) and A Bend in the River (1979). Drawing on his own life of deracination – a man of Indian family born in Trinidad who studied at Oxford and worked for the BBC before starting to write fiction – Naipaul made picaresque novels that glint with precisely cut sentences and are shaped into a thrillingly original architecture. His formal invention earned him a place as one of the very greatest writers of the past century. He was in the vanguard of a generation of Commonwealth writers who utterly reshaped the meaning of “English literature”.
Nevertheless, Naipaul’s particular point of view on the travails of colonialism and post-colonialism – both in his novels and in travel books such as Among the Believers (1981) – earned him severe criticism. The Palestinian intellectual Edward Said found his picture of Islam unforgivably ignorant and cliched, and accused him of absorbing and repeating pernicious and misleading colonialist mythologies. As a man, Naipaul’s sheer naked honesty about his own unpleasant, sometimes violent behaviour was bracing, and threatened at times to overwhelm his purely literary reputation. He told his biographer, Patrick French, for example, about how he had beaten his lover, Margaret Gooding, so badly around the face that she was unable to appear in public. He did not seek to hide the endless humiliation he visited upon his first wife, Patricia Hale. Lesser sins included being magisterially hypocritical about fellow authors, revering Anthony Powell, for example, to his face while deprecating him in private; and an overwhelming arrogance about his own gifts that, while justified, was not exactly attractive.
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