Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Reviewed:
1.
that allow him to pin people down, like butterflies in the expert hands
of a lepidopterist. These observations are filtered through a mind that
is alert, never sentimental, and deeply suspicious of romantic cant.
The lives of writers are a legitimate subject of inquiry; and the truth
should not be skimped. It may well be, in fact, that a full account of a
writer’s life might in the end be more a work of literature and more
illuminating—of a cultural or historical moment—than the writer’s books.
https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2008/11/20/the-lessons-of-the-master/?printpage=true 2/11
6/14/2021 The Lessons of the Master | by Ian Buruma | The New York Review of Books
2.
The public image of V.S. Naipaul, distilled from interviews with the
writer and anecdotes passed on by people who have met him, is of an
angry man, quick to take offense, capable of extraordinary and
gratuitous acts of rudeness, obsessed with his status as a great writer,
willfully shocking in his views, and incapable of suffering fools, or
anyone really, including those nearest to him, gladly. This, by the way,
is not the Naipaul I knew. I found him amusing, courteous, even a little
diffident. But I could see flashes of the other Naipaul, the man who
loves to outrage. The source of this love is one of the fascinating
themes running through the biography.
Some people who have felt Naipaul’s verbal lashes see him as a bigot
who turned on his own Caribbean background by taking on the worst
prejudices of the Indian Brahmin and the British colonial Blimp.2
Although bitterness about the way black politicians in Trinidad went
after the Indian minority in the 1950s certainly affected Naipaul’s
views of his native island, and his harsh comments on African cultural
and political life suggest a less than friendly attitude toward black
people, Naipaul is too complex a figure to be dismissed as a racist. For
in fact he has written about Africans, as well as Asians, with more
intimacy and sympathy than many hand-wringing leftists who take a
more abstract view of humanity.
There was such a crowd of immigrant type West Indians on the boat-train
platform at Waterloo that I was glad I was travelling first class to the West-
Indies.
His eyes are drawn by “a very tall and ill-made Negro,” whose
“grotesque” features he describes with horrified relish.
I’m being very mischievous…. I’d be allowed to say things like that among
the West Indians who were doing that Caribbean programme. We made
those kind of jokes. I wasn’t aware that an English reader might worry
about where I was positioning myself.
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6/14/2021 The Lessons of the Master | by Ian Buruma | The New York Review of Books
All these little Trinidadian smart-man things: the way he would sing
calypso and whistle, the way he would take the mickey out of people,
provoking them. Naipaul expects the responses that he’s going to get; I’d
say that it’s second nature to him, performing in that way.
https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2008/11/20/the-lessons-of-the-master/?printpage=true 4/11
6/14/2021 The Lessons of the Master | by Ian Buruma | The New York Review of Books
Naipaul cannot even be sure of his family name. There are doubts, too,
about the Brahminical caste status to which his family lays claim,
especially the maternal side of his family, which felt superior to his
father’s. Masquerading has been a feature of Naipaul’s work, from the
early comic novels, Miguel Street and The Mimic Men, to his later
literary journeys through Asia, Africa, and Latin America. In his own
life, he personifies the trickster—the theatrical Oxford drawl, the
shocking statements, the Blimpish behavior—but he is at the same
time hypersensitive to any form of fraudulence, which he associates
not only with colonial society but, it seems, with all human relations.
“It is important not to trust people too much,” he told his biographer.
“Friendship might be turned against you in a foolish way…. I
profoundly feel that people are letting you down all the time.”
devotion. When both were still in their twenties, Naipaul wrote to Pat
—whom he’d met when they were at Oxford—that he was a spectator
with no desire to reform the human race, a man without loyalties,
interested in nothing but writing the truth as he saw it. French takes
him at his word:
3.
This was clearly not entirely truthful. Still, to feel shame about one’s
deepest compulsions is a common human trait, as is the need to cover
it up. This, in itself, does not make Naipaul special. The issue is how
the sex life affected his work.
Less than ten years after the Profumo affair, Naipaul flew to Buenos
Aires to write an article for The New York Review. He had just spent
some time in Trinidad, attending a sensational murder trial. Followers
of Michael X, a sinister revolutionary figure briefly lionized in
fashionable London, had hacked an English girl to death with a
machete. The daughter of a Tory MP, she had been the besotted slave
of a powerful thug named Hakim Jamal, who had also had some kind
of relationship in London with Naipaul’s then editor, Diana Athill.
This case of sexual slavery, revolutionary posturing, and black
brutality fascinated Naipaul, and would result in a brilliant article, as
well as a novel, entitled Guerrillas.
I wished to possess her as soon as I saw her…. I loved her eyes. I loved her
mouth. I loved everything about her and I have never stopped loving her,
actually. What a panic it was for me to win her because I had no seducing
talent at all. And somehow the need was so great that I did do it.
Margaret left her husband and children, and for the next twenty years
would be at the beck and call of her master, who was finally able to do
all the things that had horrified and fascinated him before. French
gives us some idea about their taste for sadomasochism. The more
Naipaul abused Margaret, the more she came back for more. She
wrote him letters, paraphrased by French, about worshiping at the
shrine of the master’s penis, about “Vido” as a horrible black man
with hideous powers over her. Her letters were often left unopened,
and certainly unanswered, adding to her sense of submission.
According to Naipaul, he beat her so severely on one occasion that his
hand hurt, and her face was so badly disfigured that she couldn’t
appear in public (the hurt hand seems to have been of greater
concern). But Naipaul said, “She didn’t mind at all. She thought of it in
terms of my passion for her.” And then there was the mutual passion
for anal sex, or as Margaret put it (paraphrased by French), “visiting
the very special place of love.”
https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2008/11/20/the-lessons-of-the-master/?printpage=true 7/11
6/14/2021 The Lessons of the Master | by Ian Buruma | The New York Review of Books
Meeting Margaret made Naipaul feel sexually happy for the first time
in his life. A heavy price was paid, notably by Pat, back in England,
whom Naipaul felt unable to leave and treated as a kind of slavish
mother figure; she continued to take care of all his needs, bore his
endless verbal abuse, read his manuscripts, and listened to his
confessions about Margaret. As Naipaul mused, much later, after Pat
had died of cancer: “I was liberated. She was destroyed. It was
inevitable.”
Well, maybe not entirely unlike him. In 1962, Naipaul set off for India
for the first time, with Pat, to write a book he had long planned,
“about these damned people and the wretched country of theirs,
exposing their detestable traits.” He wrote this to his elder sister,
Kamla, possibly in his Trinidadian trickster mode. The book that came
out of it, An Area of Darkness, is brilliant reportage. But there are signs
that he did not always avoid cutting the cloth to fit his preconceived
patterns.
A small lapse, but a telling one. More interesting is Naipaul’s old habit
of slipping between lust and rage. After the publication of Guerrillas,
which Joe Klein, reviewing the book in Mother Jones, said could “best
be described as a literature of buggery: his main purpose seems to be
the desecration of his audience,” Naipaul wrote an evocative article
about Argentina for The New York Review. Entitled “The Brothels
Behind the Graveyard,” the essay explains the corrupt and brutal
nature of Argentina’s politics through the image of brothels in Buenos
Aires, near the funerary monuments at Recoleta. Every schoolgirl,
Naipaul writes, knows that she may end up there, “among the colored
lights and mirrors,” for this is “a society still ruled by degenerate
machismo, which decrees that a woman’s place is essentially in the
brothel.” Not just that, but they will be subjected to that typical act of
Argentinian male brutishness, anal penetration: “The act of straight
sex, easily bought, is of no great moment to the macho. His conquest
of a woman is complete only when he has buggered her.”
At the time, the Argentinians were not pleased with this analysis,
which does not mean that Naipaul was wrong. Perhaps his own
predilections had sharpened his sensitivity to something in the
atmosphere of Argentina under the dictators. Yet one can’t help feeling
that the article, beautifully and passionately written, tells us at least as
much about the author as about his subject.
4.
https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2008/11/20/the-lessons-of-the-master/?printpage=true 9/11
6/14/2021 The Lessons of the Master | by Ian Buruma | The New York Review of Books
After years of waiting for phone calls, which came when it suited her
on-and-off lover, or letters, which rarely came at all, Margaret was
eventually dumped after Naipaul ran into the last of his devoted
women. Nadira Khannum Alvi, a Pakistani journalist and divorced
mother of two, spotted Naipaul at a party in Lahore in October 1995,
and asked if she could kiss him as “a tribute to you, a tribute to you.”
Pat, at that time, was dying of cancer in England. Before setting off on
his Asian journey, to Indonesia and Pakistan, Naipaul had arranged,
with his accountant, for her letters and diaries to be shipped to his
archive at the University of Tulsa on her death.
A sad waning then of a brilliant writer’s life. Except that it is not yet
over. Naipaul continues to write books, some of them too thin, some
too long, but still, at their best, redeemed not only by his lucid prose
but with a quality that graces the work of a supreme egotist: the
willingness and ability to listen. Not many distinguished Nobel
laureates would be prepared to travel to remote parts of Pakistan or
the Congo (his latest venture) to hear the stories of unknown people.
Naipaul is. And this is a sign of great modesty, for in the lives of the
humblest Indonesian, the most undistinguished Pakistani, or the
poorest African, he is still able to see traces of his own.
Letters:
Paul Theroux
On V.S. Naipaul: An Exchange
January 15, 2009
Ian Buruma
Ian Buruma is the author of numerous books, including Murder in Amsterdam: The
Death of Theo Van Gogh and the Limits of Tolerance, Year Zero: A History of 1945,
and, most recently, A Tokyo Romance.
https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2008/11/20/the-lessons-of-the-master/?printpage=true 10/11
6/14/2021 The Lessons of the Master | by Ian Buruma | The New York Review of Books
1. This is not quite the way Patrick French relates the story of my
brief involvement. Which just goes to show how the same events
can leave different memories. ↩
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