Obituary - VS Naipaul, Nobel prize-winning novelist

Died: August 11, 2018

VS NAIPAUL, who has died aged 85, was a Nobel prize-winning novelist who combined fiction with travel writing, autobiography and an attempt to explain the connections between these forms which are normally kept on different sides of an imaginary line and labelled “fiction” and “non-fiction”.

That Naipaul drew radically on his own past was perhaps most obvious from his early comic novels, which glow with affection for his native Trinidad and Tobago. But it became clear that his deeper commitment was to darker narratives and when Naipaul was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2001, the citation made reference to his “incorruptible scrutiny” and willingness to force us to witness “suppressed histories”.

That unflinching vision made him many enemies. In later years, Naipaul was accused of racism, hypothetical fascism and a profound misogyny. Norman Mailer, who was also accused of similar things, said of Naipaul that he was the kind of writer who is prepared to put his hand into a brimming toilet bowl to get at the truth. He was, nonetheless, a romantic, a man almost obsessively concerned with the gap between the ideal and the real.

Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul (known as “Vidia”, or after his knighthood, as “Sir Vidia”) was born in Chaguanas, Trinidad and Tobago, the second child of Seepersad Naipaul and Droapatie Capildeo. His grandparents had come from India on indentures and worked as labourers. He credited his father for giving him a profound reverence for the written word. A younger brother Shivadhar, born in 1945, also became a writer, known as Shiva Naipaul. He died suddenly in 1985.

When Vidia reached school age, the family moved to Port of Spain and he was enrolled at Queen’s Royal College, which he described as an English public school with palm trees. He was a successful student and won a scholarship to Oxford, where he studied at University College. But he found the environment threatening and, even though he had been born a British citizen, he was made painfully aware of his ethnic difference. He underwent some kind of emotional collapse and fled England for Spain.

He was nursed back to health by a friend, Patricia Ann Hale, who became his first wife. They moved to London in 1954, a year before their marriage, and Naipaul continued to experiment with fictional memories of his native region. Appearing on the BBC Home Service, he contributed to Caribbean Voices on the BBC Home Service, slowly compiling the narratives that became his third book Miguel Street. Publishers were losing interest in collections of short fiction at the time, and Andre Deutsch sent him off to write a novel. Naipaul wrote The Mystic Masseur quickly, “too quickly”, he later admitted, but it was well received and he felt launched.

Returning to Trinidad a year or so later, he sent home to Pat tenderly funny sketches of characters he met. These became the cast of a second novel The Suffrage of Elvira and later for The Mimic Men and the delightful A House For Mr Biswas. Naipaul acknowledged that not even critical success opened doors to the society that he craved and it was not until Antonia Fraser and Emma Tennant, both well-born Establishment figures, befriended him, lent him money (in Tennant’s case) and began to widen his social circle that he began to feel at ease. Too much at ease in the eyes of those who felt he adopted absurd airs.

Meeting Sir Vidia in later years very much felt like being introduced into a Presence. He remained loyal to Pat, though sexually unfaithful and kept up a decades-long affair with Margaret Gooding, who he met in Argentina in 1972. After Pat died in 1996, he ended the affair and married the widowed Pakistani journalist Nadira Alvi, who was more than 20 years younger than him.

Sometimes commercial projects can lead to profound changes in a writer’s style. Writing a script for an unproduced film to be called A Flag On The Island led Naipaul into a darker and more dangerous narrative style. He also wrote a non-fiction account of Port of Spain that helped develop his parallel reputation as a travel writer.

In his mature period, from the mid-1970s onward, and often drawing on the tense African experience that is dramatized in In A Free State, he created a body of work of Conradian depth and seriousness, and in the process a world as distinctive and disturbing as “Greene-land”, the morally fraught universe of Graham Greene’s novels.

The first of these was Guerrillas, published in 1975, followed four years later by perhaps his masterpiece A Bend In The River, which was set in an unnamed African country in the mid-20th century. It was widely discussed and admired but also considered problematic in its treatment of Africans, as The Mimic Men had been considered problematic in its treatment of West Indians.

In 1987, Naipaul surveyed his life in fictional form in The Enigma of Arrival, but by this stage he had become better known as an observer, often laceratingly honest, sometimes curiously superior and detached, of the world’s varying cultures. He wrote about Islam in Among the Believers, a book that reads ever more presciently with the passing years, and about his ancestral India in A Million Mutinies Now. Naipaul’s vision was unique and uniquely disturbing. Taken all in all, and with no excessive regard for what was “fiction” and what was “non-“, he created the 20th century’s post-colonial epic.

He is survived by his wife and their daughter.

BRIAN MORTON