I imagine that my daughter is fairly typical in her eagerness to divest herself of all traces of credulous innocence. She exhibits a precocious—if somewhat abstract—sophistication about what she refers to as “issues” (having mostly to do with sex), gleaned from her ardent watching of Dawson’s Creek and Ally McBeal. She also likes to watch Gilmore Girls, which follows the small-town adventures of a ditzy unwed mother and her sober, goal-oriented daughter. You would think that all this exposure to irregular domestic arrangements would have helped reconcile her to her own situation. And perhaps it has. But she is also a closet fan of 7th Heaven, in which a large, intact, and over-relating family have their misunderstandings but never forget that they love each other. For that matter, The Parent Trap has held up surprisingly well over the years, winning over an entirely new audience with the 1998 remake.
I don’t delude myself that the traumatic effect of the divorce on my daughter will ever entirely vanish. Children have long memories, and my daughter seems to have an elephantine retention of the details leading up to the breakup of my marriage. She was not yet four when my ex-husband and I separated, yet she insists that she can vividly recall climbing up on the black chaise in the living room of our old apartment to kiss her father good night during the transitional period when he and I were sleeping under the same roof but not in the same bed. Although the passage of time has weakened her hopes of a magical ending, and for months at a time it seems as though she has accepted the reality of our parting, she can become wistful at a moment’s notice.
What is hardest for her is being at family gatherings with my five siblings (none of whom is divorced, in defiance of the statistics) and her multitude of first cousins. A few months ago, on a Sunday night when we had come back from one such gathering, we lay on my bed talking. Somehow or other, she brought the conversation around to her father. He wasn’t really the business type, she mused; perhaps he should have remained in California and pursued his artistic calling instead of moving to New York to try his hand at the stock market. I pointed out that if he hadn’t moved to New York, he and I would never have met and we wouldn’t have had her, but she wasn’t buying my logic. Instead came her j’accuse: Why, she wanted to know, had I married her father in the first place? It wasn’t a demand so much as a plea for coherence. She listened patiently to my jumbled explanation, and I remember thinking that I sounded exactly like the mother on Gilmore Girls. Before falling asleep, she clutched at her old fantasy as though it were a stuffed animal she had outgrown but still occasionally needed to hold. Did I think, she inquired just as her eyes were closing, there was any chance that her father and I would get married to each other again?
BRILLIANT MONSTERS
(V. S. NAIPAUL)
2008
It is a truth insufficiently acknowledged that those whom the gods grant special gifts often also get stuck with neurotic difficulties up the kazoo. Behind many great men peek long-suffering wives or abused mistresses, and sometimes both at once. (Great women are generally no picnic, either.) The jagged relations between unusually talented men and the women in their lives are especially intriguing to us—if only because they tend to unspool like an extreme version of the power plays and shady maneuverings that go on in all intimate pairings. The discrepancies and imbalances in the weaknesses and strengths of the partners in these unions are easier to make out because their bond so often exists in a collusive—or, as the tired vernacular has it, codependent—form.
There is, in other words, an enduring symbiosis, a match of pathologies lying just beneath the surface. The uncomfortable truth is that victimizers need willing victims, and serial seducers who happen to be married (their name is legion) require wives or companions who bear up with two-timing or ill-treatment because of their own needs. The list of writers who have killed their wives softly while producing their art includes Charles Dickens, Thomas Carlyle, and Leo Tolstoy. There are many more cases where those came from, and each of them tells us in its own way about the compromises and bartering that go on in most marriages.
The revelations that appear in Patrick French’s superb authorized biography, The World Is What It Is, concerning the Nobel Prize–winning writer V. S. Naipaul’s often brutal behavior toward his wife and his mistress have aroused fascination and horror. But for anyone who has even sampled Naipaul’s prolific work (twenty-seven books in all) and is familiar with his dispassionate, witheringly judgmental, and adamantly politically incorrect views, the cold, hard facts don’t come as a total shock. In both his early fiction (A House for Mr. Biswas; The Mystic Masseur) and his innovative historical and global reportage (The Middle Passage; A Turn in the South), there has always been a cruel streak as well as a great melancholy. One has the sense that Naipaul writes with a wounded pen, as if his psychic life depends on it, and because the void—the “spiritual emptiness” he refers to in his most recent book, A Writer’s People—is never far off.
Naipaul transcends genres and fashions prose that is piercingly insightful and never effete; he has scant use for borrowed ideas or the clanking apparatus of theory, whether he is responding presciently to the rise of Islamic fundamentalism (Among the Believers; Beyond Belief) or the fate of newly independent African countries (A Bend in the River; In a Free State), preferring to rely instead on a kaleidoscopic approach, a constantly shifting pattern of finely tuned responses. He has an unparalleled ability to imagine his way into other people’s shoes yet has always made a point of slashing at fools of every stripe without regard for their feelings. Indeed, his take on the world seems to alternate between bleak and bleaker, veering off for light relief into rage.
It would be difficult, then, to imagine a man this complex, intense, and solipsistic leading a happy home life with the wife and kids, inviting the relatives over for Christmas Eve dinner, or shoveling the snow. Still, the extent to which Naipaul’s existence has been a tortured and torturing one, per French’s account, is eye-opening, moving us to wonder: Why do artistic gifts seem to come at such a high relational cost? When does playing the muse, the hovering and ever-facilitating female presence, mutate into something more psychologically disturbing? Does the proximity to fame compensate at all for the pain and humiliation of such relationships? Would Naipaul’s first wife and his mistress have been happier had they never met him, or were they both in their own ways doomed to a downward trajectory? And, perhaps less obviously, does a roller-coaster ride of intimate relations offer a life of excitement that may mask deeper questions and qualms about one’s existence?
Brilliant monster that he may be, it is all the more to Naipaul’s credit that he consented to sit for this shadow-filled portrait in the first place, providing access to his archives as well as talking openly to his biographer. “Of all the people I spoke to for this book,” French notes, “he was outwardly the frankest,” adding that he had “no direction or restriction” from his subject. Naipaul in turn read the manuscript and returned it without changes. Most writers go to great lengths to keep their images free from tarnish, either by hand selecting an authorized biographer, as Philip Roth did, or by dismissing a too inquiring or critical investigator, as J. D. Salinger did with Ian Hamilton. It says a lot about Naipaul’s passion for truth telling—as distinct from his much-commented-upon passion for self-aggrandizement—that he agreed to this enterprise.
Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul—known as Vido as a boy and Vidia as an adult to those who were close to him, or who wished to be (such as Paul Theroux, who exhumed his long, unrequited romance with Naipaul in Sir Vidia’s Shadow)—is a pioneer of postcolonial writing. The second of seven children, he was born in 1932 into rural poverty on the polyglot island of Trinidad. His Hindu parents were part of the wave of bonded Indian laborers brought to work on sugar plantations after slavery ended. (Naipaul would later claim to be of Brahman descent, but this point of pride has never been verified.) He grew up in a matriarchy: his powerful grandmother moved her offspring like chess pieces around the family compounds, none of the
m grand—for a time, his family lived in servants’ quarters with a roof of corrugated iron and branches—and his strong, proud mother was determined that her children be properly educated and rise above their beginnings.
Despite the fact that Vido’s father, Seepersad, was largely absent for the first six years of the boy’s life, he was the biggest influence on his son’s identity. Having escaped the fate of a rural laborer in India, Seepersad had taught himself to read and write—he was an admirer of O. Henry and Somerset Maugham—and became a reporter for the Trinidad Guardian. “Pa and Vido,” French tells us, “positioned themselves in an ordered fantasy world derived from European literature, far from the noise, squalor and their own powerlessness in Petit Valley.” As fragile as his wife was tough, Seepersad suffered a breakdown when he was criticized for writing about the superstitions of rural Indians. Naipaul recalls his mother’s explanation of his father’s condition: “He looked in the mirror one day and couldn’t see himself. And he began to scream.” Seepersad eventually recovered enough to write an accomplished story collection, and Naipaul drew on the memory and literary passion of his father, who died in 1953, to forge himself into becoming a writer; his breakthrough novel, A House for Mr. Biswas, was a tribute to him.
In 1950, having won a scholarship to Oxford, Naipaul set out for a country “that had been presented to him as the epicentre of civilization.” Although he did well academically, he suffered from loneliness, penury, and a palpable sense of the racial prejudice lurking in the “cliquey, smirking, undergraduate atmosphere.” Adrift and depressed, Naipaul met a slim, pretty undergraduate, Patricia Hale, who was reading history at a women’s college. She, too, was from a humble background and had reached Oxford on scholarship. Both of them were ardently literary, manifestly shy, and sexually repressed. They slept together for the first time seven months after they met; Naipaul assessed their early sexual encounters as “fumbling and awful for both of us. Pat was very nervous. I wasn’t trained enough or skilled enough or talented enough to calm her nerves, probably because I didn’t want to calm her nerves. It didn’t work.”
Sex between them would never work—not through forty years of a troubled and faithless (on Naipaul’s side) union, in which Pat played nursemaid and amanuensis while he failed to so much as acknowledge her existence in even his most personal writings, such as his autobiographical novel The Enigma of Arrival. Although Pat envisioned a shining future before the two twenty-two-year-olds were married in January 1955—“I am convinced that we are going to be a distinguished couple”—the auguries were there before they tied the knot. Within months of their meeting, Naipaul, ever the snob, patronizingly quizzed Pat, who had taken elocution lessons to get rid of her Midlands accent, on her pronunciation of the word “bourgeois” and inquired as to whether she might have it in her to lend her correspondence a touch of eroticism. “I do wish,” he wrote, “you could make your letters really ‘lurid.’” The chances for bawdiness were next to none, given that Pat referred to a bra as “the garment I dislike mentioning.”
The pattern for their marriage was set when Naipaul failed to produce a wedding ring, an oversight Pat piteously protested months later. “I do feel the lack of a ring very acutely,” she wrote to him. “You did promise & I will think you don’t quite realise how ‘odd’ it seems to people.” (She ended up buying herself a plain gold band, which went mostly unworn.) When he wasn’t ignoring her, leaving her with little money as he journeyed alone—or, eventually, with his longtime mistress—Naipaul was irked by Pat’s self-abnegating presence. “Don’t shout at me,” she once told him. “There is no one in the whole world besides me who takes you really seriously.” He began visiting prostitutes in 1958, which was one of the few seamy secrets he kept from Pat. Later, he would readily confide in her about his stormy affair with Margaret Gooding, a married Anglo-Argentine woman ten years his junior, seemingly unaware of the pain he was causing his wife. “She was so good: she tried to comfort me,” he commented in his journal. “I was so full of grief myself that in a way I expected her to respond to my grief, and she did.”
The question that nags as one reads French’s biography is why Pat didn’t have it in her to leave Naipaul. She had been capable early on of standing up to his demands of “one-sided submission,” as she described them. Indeed, it took a great deal of nerve on her part to stick with Vidia, since her father was adamantly against her marrying a “wog.” But over the decades, Pat’s life turned into one long, heartrendingly servile performance. “Pat treated him with great reverence,” noted one of their few mutual friends. “It was almost like appreciating a deity. She was awed by him, and I think it made it difficult for her because she was aware that she had to do her bit to encourage the flowering of his talents … She was a very Indian wife in many respects—more Indian than most Indian wives.”
Naipaul would go on to bear the aura of the great man Pat had always taken him to be (in her notebooks she called him “the Genius”), becoming ever more “tetchy” and “pompous” in the process. He gained a prize-bedecked reputation in England and then a more international one as his books were translated into Greek, Serbo-Croatian, and Hebrew, culminating in his Nobel Prize in Literature in 2001.
Naipaul’s first real carnal pleasure came when he was forty, with Margaret Gooding; their relationship was passionate but rapidly became sadomasochistic. “The cruelty was part of the attraction,” French writes, “which had the effect of stepping up the cruelty.” At one point, as Naipaul recalled, Margaret “was having a relationship with [a] banker for the means to get to me … I was extremely upset … I was very violent with her for two days with my hand; my hand began to hurt … She didn’t mind it at all. She thought of it in terms of my passion for her. Her face was bad. She couldn’t appear really in public. My hand was swollen. I was utterly helpless.”
The triangle continued for two decades. Naipaul toyed with leaving his wife, but in the end, although Margaret left her husband and children for him, he remained married to Pat. The couple had long since retreated to separate bedrooms, and Pat scrambled to find a place for herself, literally and metaphorically. When they moved in February 1982, Pat “recorded her tentative, shamed efforts to carve out a space for herself in Naipaul’s new house. ‘He asked: Would I be moving out again soon?… I made a bedroom for myself in the little pink room, Vidia settled himself in the red.’”
Pat dabbled in journalism, researched Love Letters: An Anthology (irony of ironies) for Antonia Fraser, dutifully took dictation from Naipaul, and accompanied him on trips that he “summoned” her to be on “in imperative terms” to take Margaret’s place. Naipaul treated both Pat and Margaret more like schoolgirls than like grown women; they were always being “dismissed” or “sent away” by him when they transgressed or simply got on his delicate nerves. “I have behaved foolishly all day,” Pat remarked in her notebook, enthralled by her own abjection, “and have ruined every last relationship I have. I have agreed to go back to London after the weekend. Vidia says he can’t stand my eccentricity any more and I will destroy him.”
The human wreckage in this judicious and keenly observant biography keeps piling up, with the three damaged people at its center suggesting just how right the poet W. H. Auden was when he described the desires of the heart as being “crooked as corkscrews.” In 1994, Naipaul’s predilection for engaging with prostitutes when he was younger was revealed in an interview in The New Yorker. This having been the one malfeasance he had not discussed cozily with the all-accepting Pat, she—already ill with breast cancer—received this further “insult to her status as his loving wife” very badly. In 1995, Naipaul, leaving a seriously ill Pat behind, flew to South Asia to start Beyond Belief, his second look at the rise of Islamist ideology. While in Pakistan, he met a brash forty-two-year-old newspaper columnist who wrote under the byline Nadira. They clicked immediately, and before he left—Pat not yet dead and Margaret crossed off the list without being informed—Naipaul asked Nadira if she wou
ld one day consider becoming “Lady Naipaul.”
Pat, who had largely disappeared into herself, tranquilized and disconnected, died on February 3, 1996, at age sixty-three, leaving Naipaul at a loss: “Having spent a lifetime shunning friends, he had no network of support.” Her cremation was attended by a small group of mourners, with no readings, music, or addresses. Naipaul married Nadira that April in a tiny ceremony; Margaret would learn of her existence from the newspapers. On a Saturday in October 1996, Naipaul and Nadira scattered Pat’s ashes in the countryside near their home. Nadira walked into the woods, alone, and said a Muslim prayer for Pat. French’s biography closes on a wrenching note, the anguish seeping out between the carefully composed sentences: “Nadira walked back, out of the woods. V. S. Naipaul, the writer, Vidyadhar, the boy, Vidia, the man, was leaning against the car, tears streaming down his face, lost for words.”
DO I OWN YOU NOW?
2011
Girls in their summer dresses we all know about, but what about boys in their summer bathing trunks? Him, in particular, his long-legged body, not hideously six-packed in the current style, but elegantly constructed—beautiful even, in an antelope kind of way. His smooth olive-toned skin tanned to an almost non-Caucasian pitch, and my own much lighter skin burnished to a red brown by incessant and patient exposure. He always wore the plainest of suits, black or navy, not a man to take sartorial chances—or risks of any sort, really, except in bed, where he kept leading me forward, closer to the precipice, that moment where you drop off the boundary of your own precarious identity and into someone else’s terrain.
“Do I own you now?” he used to ask me breathlessly after some particularly entwined bout of lovemaking. Neither of us tended to speak much during sex, except for his habit of punctuating the silence with cursory yet infinitely flattering statements like “Someone should bottle you” after he rose up from nuzzling me below. So the ownership question came out with the force of a mission statement, one I signed off on. That summer at least, he owned me. What was the point in pretending otherwise?
The Fame Lunches Page 41