Four years ago, I fulfilled a dream: I met Sir Vidya Naipaul. I didn't just meet him, I spoke to him. And he even spoke back...twice. But for the readers of this column who remember the incident, it wasn't without incident. Naipaul, my idol, was defensive with me. His wife, the unequalled Lady Nadira, defended him from me...physically. But it was not to be the last time he spoke to me, or rather about me.When one engages Naipaul, one risks losing face; if his wife is involved, perhaps also an eyeball or testicle. Even as the detached journalist, his words sting, no matter who they're about.In the past month, Naipaul's name has been splashed in newspapers from The Times in London to The Times in New York. In an interview, the 2001 Nobel laureate had said: "I read a piece of writing and within a paragraph or two I know whether it is by a woman or not. I think (it is) unequal to me."
He criticised women authors for their "sentimentality" and "narrow view of the world," since "a woman is not a complete master of a house". He went on to reject even Jane Austen for her "sentimental ambitions" and his own former editor Diana Athill for writing "feminine tosh".The backlash from proud women writers at Naipaul's prejudice was stern and swift. "Misogynist p----, slug, monkey" they called him, while dismissing both his recent works as obsolete and his character as pathetic.
'Give it to some n-----'
Of course, Jane Austin and women writers everywhere are not the first to be vilified by Naipaul: EM Forster is a homosexual exploiter of the powerless; James Joyce; Charles Dickens; W Somerset Maugham; even Derek Walcott's "talent had been all but strangled by his colonial setting".He's done the same to public figures: Princess Anne's daughter "has a criminal face" and Tony Blair is a "plebeian".He's done the same to entire peoples: "Italians make cheese out of dirt." "Africans need to be kicked-that's the only thing they understand." Forty years ago, people in India were not intellectual enough to read his books. Islam had a "calamitous effect" on the world. And, of course, West Indians are "slaves".
With unparalleled sting, Naipaul scorns "negroes at (Princess Diana's) shrines, weeping openly." On Sir Viv Richards and his Indian wife having a baby: "How could she have a child by that n-----?" And on possibly winning the Nobel prize in 1988: "They'll give it to some n----- or other."He's done the same in his personal life. To his loving former protégé Paul Theroux, who became critical of his work, Naipaul refused to acknowledge him while they shared a stage at the Hay Arts Festival.
And to his first wife, Pat, he openly cheated, visited prostitutes and kept a mistress he violently beat. He married Nadira two months after Pat's death, legitimising an affair he had carried on as Pat was dying from breast cancer.That's Naipaul the man, the 79-year-old man who's called the greatest living writer in English prose. And this would be all well and good except for one thing.
The importance of the 'turd'
While in Trinidad in 2007, the year I met him, he said: "A writer is not the man, but the myth." Indeed, when we think of writers of yore, their legends are what come to mind, not how many cats they had. Think of Ernest Hemingway, and you think not of the man, but of the heavy-drinking, bullfighting-loving daredevil who had a file with the FBI.
With his cute, squinting eyes, Naipaul spoke calmly at UWI 2007, apologising in advance for anything "offensive". He smiled a lot, shook many hands and appeared rather gracious. He seemed to be trying to ameliorate his own damaged reputation of the bitter, arrogant, "misogynist p----".Even as he openly dissed me to my face and in front of reporters and cameras from the world over, there was the nuance of compassion, assuaging the blow to my ego. I felt, at the time, that his greatness licensed him to say what he did.
It wasn't until a year later at the T&T Film Festival when Naipaul spoke to me again. In Arena: The Strange Luck of VS Naipaul, almost a year to the day we met, the film showed, of all the footage taken from his landmark visit to Trinidad, only his encounter with me. And Naipaul spoke. "...here was this young fellow, who was probably 25 while I was 75, trying to put me in my place. What a turd, an absolute turd..."Today, in 2011, I have finally reconciled with my encounter with Naipaul. That an unimportant 25-year-old in Trinidad could impact him to such an extent showed that, for all of his greatness, he is just a man.
It appears as though he already lives not as the man but as his own myth. But that myth is still being fashioned, and this he must remember. Because for all the greatness he attributes to himself, today and tomorrow are the judges of that myth. And, by all possible indications, the myth that history will attribute to Naipaul is not the myth he clearly attributes to himself.
