Reviewed:
The World Is What It Is: The Authorized Biography of V.S. Naipaul by Patrick French
Outliers: The Story of Success by Malcolm Gladwell
A Writer’s People: Ways of Looking and Feeling by V.S. Naipaul

Part One: “Ego and Circumstance”
Part Three: “A Life of Extraordinary Callousness”
Part Four: “I Went Out And Achieved Anyway”
Part Five: “Africa Has No Future”
Part Six: “Indians Defecate Everywhere”
Part Seven: “Autonomy, Complexity, Effort, And Reward”

Part Two: “About the Author”

Gladwell’s conclusion raises an interesting question: if acting is so subordinate to circumstances, then why bother in the first place? This tension between the power of personal agency and the immutability of circumstances – the individual’s desire to make something of himself against the setting that, in the overwhelming majority of cases, seeks to cramp his style – is a common literary trope; it is an outline of any dime novel by Horatio Alger (whom Gladwell mentions and dismisses), and a reduction of the bildungsroman. Ultimately, these protagonists succeed not by “beating” society, but by joining it. A protagonist at war against primitivism and poverty has also often been at the center of postcolonial works.

V.S. Naipaul, who has written of such men in such settings, at first seems himself to be one of them. I have on my desk a new edition of A House for Mr Biswas, Naipaul’s scintillating prose epic that catapulted him to international prominence at the Collins-esque age of 28. Mr Biswas was published in 1961; my edition was printed 40 years later, in 2001. Here is the “About the Author” blurb, from the first page:

V.S. Naipaul was born in Trinidad in 1932. He went to England on a scholarship in 1950. After four years at Oxford he began to write, and since then he has followed no other profession. He is the author of more than twenty books of fiction and nonfiction and the recipient of numerous honors, including the Nobel Prize in 2001, the Booker Prize in 1971, and a knighthood for services to literature in 1990. He lives in Wiltshire, England.

This blurb is more than a blurb, it is a subtle masterpiece of self-mythology; and this subtle masterpiece of self-mythology is the same in all of my new Naipaul books from the same publisher and print run – An Area of Darkness, India: A Wounded Civilization, and so on. If Naipaul didn’t write it himself, he definitely had some control over its style and content; how one sees oneself, how one presents oneself to others, is of paramount importance. And how Naipaul seems to see and present himself in 2001 – I think these Vintage editions must have been printed in the wake of renewed public interest, following his Nobel Prize – how he presents himself is this: born on Trinidad (at the squalid periphery of the crumbling British empire); escaped via his own wits and cunning; began to write; critical and commercial success, fame and fortune, the complete fulfillment of potential, the attaining of status as an outlier.

The whole narrative follows an uninterrupted and smooth trajectory; there is a peak, but no troph; triumphs follow the only tragedy, the circumstances of his birth. It is the selfsame Horatio Alger story, a bildungsroman without reconciliation and reintegration, what Gladwell calls the old and tired myth of the “self-made man.”

Now, thanks to Patrick French’s towering biography, The World Is What It Is, the casual reader can see how oversimplified – if not outright false – it is. The gaps between those opening sentences are filled in, each to the tune of 100 pages of prose, and the smooth section of sine wave becomes an upward-sloping EKG. Trinidad was uncommonly terrible, but Naipaul’s pedigree was uncommonly promising: his father, Seepersad, was a very smart man, a sometime journalist and a would-be fiction writer; his mother was a strong personality who held the family together; for Gladwell, who argues that “practical intelligence” of the kind Mrs. Naipaul had, and who estimates the heritability of IQ at fifty percent, there could scarcely be better parentage for a writer. Seepersad is a major character in the first part of the book: in the style of Gladwell’s Jewish immigrants turned successful entrepreneurs and parents of lawyers, he works tirelessly and selflessly to inculcate within his son not only the kinds of ambitions that his circumstances prohibit him from fulfilling, but also the means of fulfilling them. Young Vidia goes off to Queen’s Royal College, Trinidad’s simulacrum of Lakeside or Eton; Seepersad continues to sacrifice for his family; Vidia wins one of the very few scholarships from Trinidad to Oxford, and departs for England with more trepidation than triumph.

The rest, of course, is just as complicated. Until the deus ex machina of his first steady job, offered by an uncommonly high-ranking, kind, proactive and perceptive BBC don, Naipaul lives a life marked by solitude, desperation, and depression that dips dangerously close to the suicidal in its severity. After moving to make it big, Naipaul is at his most vulnerable: you can see how easy it would have been – in the absence of a Gladwellian catalyst or two – to ruin him, which is what makes this early section the most exhilarating, though we already know the outcome. French’s portrait of Oxford is an understated and gloomy companion to the stultifying fifties redbrick in Lucky Jim: it has all the desolation of Brideshead Revisited, but none of the splendor; all the one-upmanship of A Portrait of An Artist as a Young Man’s final chapter, but few of the experiences that, examined with retrospective clarity, become formative. “I learned nothing from Oxford,” says Naipaul, but without it he would have been nothing.

This paradox is the nucleus of both French’s biography and Naipaul’s fiction. Once Naipaul graduates, he, like his one-time model Evelyn Waugh, is forced into writing by the lack of other opportunities; his past becomes a crippling barrier as he is rejected from job after job, but it’s also the only thing that he has. Similar contradictions and complexities abound: he is at once saved by a job broadcasting Caribbean literature over the BBC, and constricted by it. He leans on his first wife, Patricia Hale, and he abuses her; he writes her letters of impassioned love and unbridled contempt: you hate someone when you show yourself at your most vulnerable, he says, but in his earliest and most outward-looking fictional period this is exactly what Naipaul would do, culminating in A House for Mr Biswas – a book that tells you far more “about the author” than the blurb just behind front cover could ever obscure.