Joseph Bottum in the Weekly Standard on “The World Is What It Is: The Authorized Biography of V.S. Naipaul” by Patrick French [via 3quarksdaily]:
Sir Vidia and Lady Naipaul in 2003. Naipaul married Nadira Khannum Alvi shortly after Pat died.
During a brief remission in his wife’s cancer, the Nobel Prize-winning novelist V.S. Naipaul casually explained to a journalist that he had always been “a great prostitute man,” mongering among the whores from the early days of his marriage.
The publicity that followed from the remark “consumed” his wife, he later admitted to his biographer, Patrick French. “She had all the relapses and everything after that. She suffered. It could be said that I killed her. . . . I feel a little bit that way.” Unfortunately, he didn’t feel “that way” enough to think it inappropriate to move into his house, the day after he cremated his wife, his new mistress, a Pakistani journalist he’d just met (and would, in short order, marry).
Even before the whoring revelations, Naipaul’s first wife, a middle-class woman named Patricia Hale whom he’d met while he was a student on scholarship to England, had known about a prior mistress–but only because Naipaul himself decided one day to tell her, explaining the violent acts he enjoyed with the woman, some of them memorialized in photographs he brought along to aid the explanation.
The woman’s name was Margaret Gooding, and Naipaul met her in 1972 in Buenos Aires. French’s new biography of Naipaul, The World Is What It Is, quotes extensively from her letters: unbearable scrawls that read like clinical case studies drawn from the pages of Leopold von Sacher-Masoch. She begs, moans, despairs, and pleads for Naipaul’s “cruel sexual desires.” She calls him her “god,” her “black master.” Her multiple abortions of his children sicken her, but she offers them up to him as proof of her love and abasement.
Previously in AW:
- The lessons of the master: Ian Buruma in the New York Review of Books
- Letter to the editor: V.S. Naipaul’s ex-mistress, Margaret Gooding dashes off a letter to the editor of the Times Literary Supplement:
- Theroux on Naipaul: In the Sunday Times, Paul Theroux on his one-time mentor
- Two lives, two memoirs: by Namita Bhandare
- Sex, truth and Vidia: Many reviews of the book
Similar Posts:
- Letter to the editor
- Nobel Naipaul and his many enemies
- Theroux on Naipaul
- Two lives, two memoirs
- Paul Theroux: out of the shadows
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