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“But I don’t think that’s fair”. The press has caught Ruth Padel redhanded in the “smear” campaign against Derek Walcott. (”Smear” may be a misnomer: as Katy Evans-Bush notes on the Guardian website, a “smear” is a “slanderous untruth“, and Walcott himself admitted that some of the allegations against him are true.) According to the Times, Padel sent an e-mail to journalists last month in which she said:

Some [of my] supporters add that what [Derek Walcott] does for students can be found in a book called The Lecherous Professor, reporting one of his two recorded cases of sexual harassment and that Obama is rumoured to have turned him down for his inauguration poem because of the sexual period. But I don’t think that’s fair.

Padel, who resigned from the position this week, acknowledges that she sent the e-mails, though she defended herself in a message to the Guardian. The problem for her is that even if she had nothing to do with the anonymous packages that appeared in Oxford dons’ mailboxes with photocopied passages from The Lecherous Professor, she is herself a lying professor. The Times dredges up a 12 May quote in which Padel said: “Neither they [my campaign managers] nor I mentioned Walcott’s harassment record and had nothing to do with any behind-doors operation.” Her disclaimer about “any behind-doors operation” might be true, but she clearly did mention Walcott’s harassment record.

If Walcott is looking for solace, he might find it in an homage by Clive James. James–perhaps inspired by the New York Times‘ lament on the “lost art of reading aloud“–reads his poetic paean to Walcott on the website of the Guardian and at this month’s Hay Literary Festival in Wales. (Sidenote: James’s reference to “railway station porters [who] with one impatient word rape teenage daughters” does seem like a strange way of paying tribute to a man who stands accused of sexual harrassment.) Meanwhile, Walcott does not stand alone as the honoree of an homage by a prominent poet: Douglas Hogg, who in recent weeks has also had his named dragged through the mud (or, more precisely, through the moat) is the subject of a new couplet by the recently elected poet laureate Carol Ann Duffy:

What did we do with the trust of your vote?

Hired a flunky to flush out the moat.

Duffy isn’t the first poet laureate to tackle a timely topic. Her predecessor Andrew Motion recently wrote five sonnets about climate change that will function as the libretto for Sir Peter Maxwell Davies’s new symphony, slated to debut at King’s College Cambridge on 13 June. Meanwhile, the Times Literary Supplement takes a look at Motion’s new collection of poems, The Cinder Path; reviewer Peter McDonald suggests that the collection borders on bathos, but by Motion’s standards, that counts as a warm reception. When he was named poet laureate in 1999 (a position that entitles him to a “butt of sack“), one anonymous critic compared Motion’s life work to a sack of something else.

The Horrors of Train Travel. A world away from Clive James’s “railway station porters”, FT columnist Matthew Engel analyses the lesser evils of rail transport in his new book Eleven Minutes Late. The Guardian reviews Engel’s book and pines for the days when the bar on The Flying Scotsman featured 32 cocktails. (Now, its menu merely offers a “selection of Schweppes mixers”.)

The High-Flying Welshman. Meanwhile, Matthew Engel himself travels to Wales for the Hay Festival (though he doesn’t say what mode of transport he used for the journey). Engel seeks to explain how a town of 2,000 became home to 30 second-hand bookstores and an international literary festival that Bill Clinton christened as the “Woodstock of the Mind“. The story revolves around Richard Booth, who graduated from Oxford in 1961, set up a store in his family’s Welsh hometown, and soon tranformed Hay into a booklovers’ mecca. Along the way, he crowned himself king of the independent state of Hay-on-Wye and–more recently–launched a long-shot bid for European Parliament on the Socialist Labour line.

Not Feeling the Festive Spirit? The other major literary festival this past weekend was Calabash in Jamaica, and last year’s headliner (Walcott) was not in attendance. Indeed, he almost certainly wasn’t invited back. The poet who allegedly sought to seduce his female students made no attempt to seduce his Caribbean colleagues in 2008; rather, he used the occasion to lash out at the Trinidadian Nobel laureate VS Naipaul:

I have been bitten, I must avoid infection

Or else I’ll be as dead as Naipaul’s fiction.

Auden on Screen…and Auden on Screen. An Oxford professor of poetry maligning a highly respected colleague? History repeats itself, as History Boys veteran Alan Bennett notes. Bennett’s “The Habit of the Art” explores the tempestuous relationship between WH Auden (a onetime holder of Padel’s new post) and composer Benjamin Britten: after a productive collaboration in the 1930s, Auden was “crudely disparaging” of Britten’s later work. (One hopes that the aforementioned collaboration between poet Motion and composer Davies ends on a more positive note.) This week, Variety reports that the National Theatre will bring the Auden-Britten drama to cinemas across Britain as part of its NT Live programme.

Speaking of poetic homages to questionable characters, the Times Literary Supplement reveals that in the mid-1930s, Auden wrote three “peasant folk songs eulogizing [Lenin] and promoting Stalin as his political heir“. The songs were for a Russian propaganda film commissioned by Stalin to mark the tenth anniversary of Lenin’s death. The British Film Institute will present the movie and the accompanying Auden poems at an 8 June event on its Southbank stage.

Spies Like Mom? MI5 sought to prove that Auden aided Soviet spies but could never close the case. Meanwhile, two children growing up on the English countryside in the 1960s seek to determine whether their mother was a Soviet spy in Georgina Harding’s newest novel, reviewed in this week’s New York Times. In the Washington Times, David Chambers has no qualms about admitting that his grandfather was a Soviet spy, but he laments the fact that Susan Jacoby, author of Alger Hiss and the Battle for History, won’t acknowledge that new findings from the Soviet archives “seal the coffin…on Mr. Hiss’ guilt”. (ORB excoriated Jacoby for other omissions in last week’s edition.) The New Haven Independent offers an overview of the controversy sparked by Spies: The Rise and Fall of KGB in America, which claims the legendary left/liberal journalist IF Stone was in cahoots with the Kremlin. (The authors of the book—one of whom is ex-KGB himself—also present their findings in the current issue of Commentary.) Eric Alterman, writing in the Daily Beast, says that it all depends on what the definition of a “spy” is: Stone helped the KGB identify potential recruits, but he didn’t pass along secret information. Alterman looks the word up in the dictionary and decides that Stone doesn’t qualify.

A Short Dictionary of Nearly Everything. Bill Bryson, the American-born author and “accidental chancellor” of Durham University, is selling a new edition of his Dictionary for Writers and Editors. (It’s actually called Bryson’s Dictionary for Writers and Editors: the author has named it for himself. An American might say that Bryson has named it after himself, but as the Daily Mail notes, the “after” would be improprer on the British Isles.) While the Daily Mail mulls Bryson’s dictionary, the Guardian examines a fictional Daily Mail Dictionary: Guardian readers are defined as “empty-headed leftie liberal morons who don’t understand anything“.

Meanwhile, as the Guardian celebrates the silver anniversary of its media section (and celebrates the fact that it was the only quality title in the UK to increase its sales numbers last month), the New Statesman facilitates a journalistic ménage à trois like none other. Evening Standard correspondent Gideon Spanier takes out a column in the Statesman and takes up Independent managing director Simon Kelner’s charge that the Guardian uses its media section “purposely to damage their biggest commercial rival”. (The Guardian has spread speculation that the cash-strapped Indie is trying to sell itself to the Daily Mail and General Trust.) Guardian exec Emily Bell admires the Indie MD for having “the balls to be very explicit” (though as Bell knows well, media execs do not need male gonads in order to be very explicit).

A Recipe for Failure. There are two days left in the London Times‘ “Recipe Exchange“: Gordon Ramsay will pick the five best entries next week. One early entrant is historian and all-around public intellectual Simon Schama, who contributes a cheese soufflé. The Wall Street Journal takes no position on Schama’s gruyère-parmesan mixture but says that Schama’s new book, America’s Future, “is to be savored“. But the NYT’s David Brooks says that Schama has cooked up a “gopping goo of pure pretension“. According to Brooks, Schama’s attempt at reportage is—like a soufflé gone awry—thin. Instead of getting down and dirty with the nitty gritty of modern American life, Schama ensconces himself in “the realm of enlightened High Thinking that exists where The New York Review of Books reaches out and air-­kisses The London Review of Books“.

Dispatches From The Realm of Enlightened High Thinking That Exists Where The New York Review of Books Reaches Out and Air-Kisses The London Review of Books. In the NYRB, Hussein Agha (of St. Antony’s College) and Robert Malley (formerly of the Clinton administration) call for a “new language” to address Israeli-Palestinian conflict: the two-state solution may be wise, but the phrase “two-state solution” is tainted…Gary Willis looks at Lincoln’s efforts to give new meaning to the language of the Declaration. Willis concludes that Lincoln misinterpreted Jefferson, but that’s not such a bad thing after all: “Thank you, Mr. Lincoln, for doing us the favor of fruitfully being wrong

Colm Tóibín traces the fortunes of the two James brothers who followed Lincoln’s call to arms (Wilkie and Bob) and the two who did not (William and Henry). The two Alices—the spinster sister as well as William’s wife—figure prominently as well…Across the pond at the LRB, John Lanchester traces the fortunes of the Royal Bank of Scotland…RBS banknotes, he helpfully points out, are not legal tender in England and Wales…Wales (Jimmy) is the subject of the LRB’s other lead article this week: the Wikipedia founder who once said that “the real struggle is not between the right and the left but between the party of the thoughtful and the party of the jerks” is himself a partisan of Ayn Rand, the philosopher-cum-novelist noted for her hostility toward philanthropy. According to LRB reviewer David Runciman (and according to Wales’s own Wikipedia page), Wales takes Rand’s objectivist philosophy quite seriously:

His first wife, Pam, was quoted in a September 2008 W magazine article as saying that Wales, because he believed altruism was evil, discouraged her from pursuing a nursing degree when they were married.

Hot-Selling Classics, and Hot-Selling Clerics. Although Ayn Rand sales are surging (The Economist attributes the spike to the recession), the Boston Globe notes that even amid Rand-a-mania, last week’s Simpsons episode—which followed the plot line of Rand’s Atlas Shrugged (and which featured Jodie Foster as Maggie)—was “the least watched in Simpsons history” …And while Atlas Shrugged flies off the bookshelves in the US, a book titled Sex As You Don’t Know It is flying off the bookshelves in Poland. That might not be so surprising…except for the fact that the author has taken a vow of celibacy. (He is a Catholic priest.)

Meanwhile, The Sun summarises a new book that condenses the classics into 140-character tweets. Atlas Shrugged doesn’t make the cut (even though an online poll by Random House rated it the best novel of all time), but Ulysses (which a Random House survey of experts rated as the best novel of all time) does. The Twitter version: “Man walks around Dublin. We follow every minute detail of his day. He’s probably overtweeting.”

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University Challenge (Primary School Edition)… Young contestants with remarkable memories in high-pressure, high-stakes, televised tournaments? In the footsteps of Gail Trimble, Slumdog Millionaire and Nupur Lala (of Spellbound fame) comes an even younger, even cuter cast of competitors (ranging in age from seven to eleven), and they’re coming to a theatre near you. The Sheldonian Theatre, that is. The Sunday Times previews “Off the Heart”, the competitive poetry recital scheduled for the last day of this year’s Oxford Literary Festival (5 April 2009). The Times and the BBC sponsored contests in 1,500 schools across the UK and have winnowed the field down to a dozen declaimers. A ten-year-old boy from Iran who spent two years inside a refugee camp will recite TS Eliot’s “Macavity: The Mystery Cat.” Evidently, criminal animals are all the rage. The most oft-recited poem was Roald Dahl’s “The Pig”, which tells the story of a swine who eats a hog farmer for lunch.

Hog Farmers Are Being Eaten Alive… not by their pigs, but by competitive pressures. Chef Jamie Oliver  says that UK pork farmers are an endangered species. So it’s a surprise to see that hog farmers are well-represented on the books pages of British newspapers this weekend. The Guardian reviews Solace of the Road, the story of a fourteen-year-old girl who lifts a ride from a hog farmer and heads westward along the A40. It is the second posthumous publication by Siobhan Dowd, a writer of young-adult fiction who died of cancer in 2007.

Posthumous Literature is the Life of the Book World… so far in 2009. Last week, we reported that the posthumous publication of David Foster Wallace’s unfinished novel was generating controversy in critics’ circles. This week, Roberto Bolaño’s posthumously published novel 2666 wins the (US) National Book Critics Circle award for fiction. (The best biography award goes to Patrick French for The World Is What It Was: The Authorized Biography of VS Naipaul—which the Oxonian Review’s Jonathan Gharraie assessed last spring.)

Roberto Bolaño once said that the word “posthumous” sounded like a Roman gladiator. With the late Heath Ledger winning an Oscar for Dark Night, and with works by Nabokov and Kerouac on the way, it’s a word we’re hearing often. Indeed, too often for footballer Eddie Turnbull, who won a posthumous award from a church in Leith, Scotland earlier this year. Turnbull is alive—and upset that he was not invited to the ceremony: “I would have been there but, because I was dead, obviously no one told me about it.”

An Irish Wake… Until 1962, if a dead body was carried through the door of a pub in Ireland, the proprietor was legally required to store it in his cellar alongside his beer kegs until the coroner could hold an inquest. Today, pub owners in Ireland are pleased to see anybody coming through their doors—even if the body has no pulse. This week, the New York Times raises its glass to writer Bill Barich and his new book A Pint of Plain: Tradition, Change, and the Fate of the Irish Pub. As the Times notes, the nation of Nigeria now drinks more stout than Ireland (though as the Times fails to note, Nigeria also has thirty-three times as many people. While the “Celtic Tiger” economy roared ahead, the Irish retreated into their homes: they went from drinking 70 percent of their alcohol in pubs at the beginning of the decade to 47 percent in 2007. Barich chalks up the change to—among other factors—tougher drunk-driving laws…Meanwhile, in the Wall Street Journal, County Cork native William Birdthistle proposes that the pub in Ireland may not be as doomed as these statistics suggest. Ending his review on a note as bittersweet as a pint of Murphy’s, Birdthistle writes: “With the wings of Ireland’s economy so badly singed, one wonders whether the treasured pub will return with poverty as it fled with wealth….”

One Irish-style pub that will not survive is Oxford’s own Rosie O’Grady’s on Park End Street. The Oxford Mail reports this week that the pub’s new owner, a native of County Down, is “completely gutting it” and “turning it back into a traditional English pub format”. He tells the Mail: “the days of Irish bars have passed”.

The Best Bar Near Naples is at the rail station in Pompeii, says Cambridge classicist Mary Beard, who in this week’s Guardian takes us on a tour of the city where she spent a decade researching her new book. Harvard University Press has “sexed up” the title for American audiences: it was called Pompeii: The Life of a Roman Town when it appeared in the UK last year; now it’s The Fires of Vesuvius. This week, the New York Times hails it as “engrossingly mischievous“. Beard meanders through the lurid, louche life of the Latins (”There seem to be phalluses everywhere”). There seem to be pubs everywhere too: by one estimate, Pompeii was home to 158 bars—in a city with a total population of 12,000 to 15,000.

A Posthumous Pub Crawl…Speaking of hog farms, and posthumous publications, and perishing pubs, the Times republishes George Orwell’s 1946 essay on the “ten qualities that the perfect pub should have“. Elsewhere, the Times worries that at the current rate of closure, the last pub in Britain will close in 2037.

“Some People Are More Equal than Others”… We would be thinner, healthier, and happier if incomes were distributed more equally. That’s the (paraphrased) argument of Snowball in Orwell’s Animal Farm—and of epidemiologists Richard Wilkinson (University of Nottingham) and Kate Pickett (University of York). In a new book, The Spirit Level, Wilkinson and Pickett argue that the social ills of the UK and US can largely be attributed to income inequality. Consistent with the egalitarian ethos of their argument, Wilkinson and Pickett have posted their evidence for all to see—for free—on their website, EqualityTrust.org.uk. The Guardian and the New Statesman (unsurprisingly) are convinced; the Economist (unsurprisingly) is not. Admittedly, the charts and graphs are compelling—although the argument brings to mind a popular cartoon about correlation and causation. Is it possible that in countries where mental illness and drug abuse are endemic, efforts to improve the lives of the lower classes are less likely to succeed? France, for example, has higher tax rates than any of the Scandinavian nations, but it also has higher inequality—and more social problems. Wilkinson and Pickett suggest that inequality is a cause of social ills, but could it instead be a consequence?

A Period Is Not Just a Punctuation Mark… In April 2006, the book world went wild after it was revealed that a second-year student at Harvard had published a novel that plagiarised passages from bestselling chick-lit writer Megan McCafferty. Now, a soon-to-be first-year at Yale is reprinting McCafferty’s writing word-for-word! The twist: she has McCafferty’s permission. McCafferty is one of 92 female writers who have shared stories of their first menstrual experiences in My Little Red Book, an anthology edited by 18 year-old Rachel Kauder Nalebuff. Nalebuff says she “wanted to evoke Mao’s Little Red Book, the manifesto distributed to all Chinese citizens during the Cultural Revolution”. We’re not so sure about the allusion: menstruation may be traumatic, but the Cultural Revolution (20 million dead) was rather worse. Still, the Chicago Tribune calls it “charming”, and the New York Times loves it so much that it reviews the book twice. The first review is more fawning (Abigail Zuger predicts that the book will “sell briskly for centuries to come”) but the second review has a better title: “There Will Be Blood”.

Although he will never be short of admirers, V.S. Naipaul can probably claim the distinction of being the least liked man in English literature. Naipaul was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2001; his fiction and travel writing has helped broaden the cultural scope of the novel in English. Yet surely no figure in contemporary literature has been so reviled. Over the years, he has provoked the ire of Salman Rushdie, Derek Walcott, George Lamming, and Edward Said, mostly over political disagreements. But if the exact dimensions and contours of the personal ground covered by Sir Vidia’s shadow are unclear, we already have some idea of the harsh and bitterly inhospitable climate. Former friends and acquaintances such as Paul Theroux and Diana Athill have written at length to prove that V.S. Naipaul is not a very nice man. To stay the distance with Naipaul you clearly need to keep your distance. When the truth itself is a hatchet-job, it takes the cooler, more proportionate scrutiny of a skilled biographer to properly order our understanding of the man and his art.

To illuminate this area of darkness, Naipaul has called upon the services of the distinguished young travel writer Patrick French. Given special authorization to sift through and quote from his subject’s personal archive at the University of Oklahoma, which includes the previously unread diaries of his first wife, Pat, and the correspondence of his long-term mistress, Margaret Gooding, French has produced a stylish and comprehensive volume that has nonetheless let off the biggest stink in English letters since Andrew Motion’s biography of Philip Larkin. This is hardly French’s fault. The details must have caught even him by surprise. The World Is What It Is, bearing a title that suggests a somewhat resigned and down-at-the-heel James Bond flick, demystifies the sad story of a man who could hardly be described as a successful womaniser. With typically sober clarity, French confirms that we are dealing with a brutishly determined man. ‘Vidia had a view of the world that he would do anything to maintain, just as he would sacrifice anything or anybody that stood in the way of his central purpose, to be “the writer”.’ From his wife Pat, he derived vital encouragement and sound literary advice; from his mistress Margaret, sexual fulfilment. In return for their gifts, they were neglected and abused, and the unhappy situation only expired when Pat did, after a long and harrowing struggle with breast cancer in 1996. Just weeks after this sad demise, he married the present Lady Naipaul, Nadira Alvi, a woman with whom he finally appears to have found something approaching contentment. The book ends at this juncture, with a huge sigh of relief from French (the final, exasperated one-word sentence is ‘Enough’), which is understandable. Against the odds, French has succeeded in producing a remarkably dignified portrait of a very troubled man who somehow managed to channel his numerous resentments into genuinely great literature.

But the potentially lurid material can’t have been the only challenge facing French. Nakedly incorporating events and people from his life into his writing and perpetually toying with the confessional properties of various narrative forms, Naipaul has quietly expanded the personal frontiers of literature and made the biographer’s task all the more demanding. Strangely, Naipaul’s will-to-candour has never actually resulted in a full-length memoir; the closest he has come to that is the ‘Prologue to an Autobiography’ which takes up the first half of Finding the Centre (1983). A Writer’s People: Ways of Looking and Feeling, the latest of these attempts at memoir, brings together the best and the worst of Naipaul’s accomplishments. In this quaint oddity, ostensibly a reflection on those writers and public figures that have influenced him most, he muses that ‘a rise to achievement makes a better narrative than random decay’. This might seem a strange comment from the author of A Bend in the River and Guerrillas, novels that chart the fungal rot of newly independent post-colonial states, but it serves as an accurate description of his own trajectory. Born in Trinidad in 1932, the descendent of indentured Indian labourers, he won the island’s scholarship to study at Oxford. He then became something of a giant.

Yet A Writer’s People follows no such triumphal course. Writing sympathetically of Gandhi, Naipaul observes, ‘there was no completeness to him. He was full of bits and pieces he had picked up here and there.’ The same is true of Naipaul who, in this book, mentally traverses those times and places that have moulded his own view: the Caribbean, India, and literary London of the 1950s. The fragmentary tone is set in the opening chapter on Derek Walcott, where isolated images taken from Walcott’s first volume of poetry chink about like so much loose change without purchasing anything in the way of critical insight. But critical insight isn’t Naipaul’s goal. ‘My purpose in this book is not literary criticism or biography […] I wish only, and in a personal way, to set out the writing to which I was exposed during my career. I say writing, but I mean more specifically vision, a way of seeing and feeling.’ At the beginning of his essay on Flaubert, he gives us more of a clue as to his method by explaining how he approached book reviewing for The New Statesman. ‘I found it helped if in a review I didn’t mention the names of the characters; in that way I got nearer to a book’s essence; certain books condemned themselves. I had no further reviewing scheme.’ Reader, you will forgive me if I avail myself of a slightly more rigorous model. This dogged pursuit of ‘essence’ does not tell us much about Naipaul’s ways of seeing and feeling (about what they involve and to whom they belong) or define that frustratingly bland word ‘vision’. The result is that too often throughout the book the prose slumps into the very quality that Naipaul has spent his entire career guarding against. Although we are told what he felt at the time, how he read and what he remembers now, it is all too vaguely presented: choice morsels glimpsed through a fogged shop window.

Ungenerous readers (and there are those who might suggest that Naipaul hardly deserves any other kind) will describe A Writer’s People as the withered fruit of a creative senescence. Indeed there are times when the narrative reads as a sort of rambling, off-the-record fireside chat at the gentleman’s club: A Writer’s People is garrulous in spirit, if not always in style. The problem becomes most obvious in the now notorious chapter devoted to his former mentor Antony Powell. In the late 1950s, Powell let ‘Viddy’ loose on Grub Street, securing for him a regular job as reviewer with The New Statesman and offering him friendship and support. In the chapter, Viddy repays him by savaging the achievement of the extraordinary 12-volume novel A Dance to the Music of Time, which took Powell several decades to compose, even going so far as to suggest that their relationship wouldn’t have lasted had he read the book while his old friend was still alive. In fairness to Naipaul, it should be recognised that he pays uncharacteristically warm tribute to Powell’s generosity and writes appreciatively of his criticism. But ineptitude rather than ingratitude is the problem here, and in dispatching the life’s work of the friend who helped him to find his place among London’s literary milieu, Naipaul dilutes the signature precision of his sentences. ‘There was less and less care in the writing; everything was over-explained,’ he opines before going on to claim, ‘there was no narrative skill, perhaps no thought for narrative.’ We might not have expected a close reading, but these stern remarks require some supplementary quotations if they are to appear as anything other than invective. Powell is probably performing indignant cartwheels in the grave: it is likely that he would be more disappointed by Viddy’s sloppy want of discretion than by the opinions themselves.

But Naipaul does not entirely forsake the many virtues of his prose. He really can write about literature, even if he reads another author’s work largely to confront his own anxieties and ambitions. The essay ‘Conrad’s Darkness’ from the non-fiction miscellany, The Return of Eva Peron, is a compelling example. Here, he describes his earliest encounters with Conrad’s short stories and provides his readers with valuable insights into the development of a creative writer’s standards. In A Writer’s People, he most fully reveals himself in considering the achievements of Flaubert and the historians and poets of antiquity. Naipaul’s vivid renditions of various people and landscapes have been distinguished by the deliberate economy of his style, and at their best, his observations on literature impart a similar substance and vigour to a writer’s specific imaginative vision. Contemplating Madame Bovary and the comparative failure of Salammbo, he evokes his own proclivity for la mot juste by writing with firm lucidity and enthusiasm. Attention to detail is fine, we gather, so long as it is itself strictly controlled; this seems a balanced assessment of what has been the presiding principle of Naipaul’s own style. It has been insufficiently acknowledged that, more than almost any other writer of the last half-century, he has recorded the painful severity of literary application as well as the great rewards of such discipline. This process was movingly characterised in Finding the Centre. ‘To write was to learn. Beginning a book, I always felt I was in possession of all the facts about myself; at the end I was always surprised.’ The most convincing passages from A Writer’s People are those where one suspects Naipaul is unwittingly describing his own travails, learning more about the peculiar obligations of his craft as he analyses others’ struggles to make themselves understood or heard.

French cannot hope to compete with the guileless authenticity of these revelations, but this is not to detract from his achievement. There are elements of the creative process that Naipaul himself cannot hope to explain. After all, A Writer’s People is the story of the previously unfelt presences that indelibly shaped Naipaul’s work. Given the enormous influence that she had on his writing, Naipaul’s wife Pat might seem an obvious choice to include in A Writer’s People; and yet inclusion has never been an emotional technique available to Naipaul. His callous neglect of her was interrupted only by the occasional recognition that she was among the most astute readers of his work. French unflinchingly presents Pat’s emotional suffering, which was now and again coloured by the awareness that maybe Vidia had not earned her abject devotion, and in so doing French allows us to see that Pat was a woman of independent taste and judgement. Her ‘soft left’ opinions might not have prevented her husband from holding increasingly reactionary positions, but they were sufficiently strong to mould those positions by contrast. Margaret, on the other hand, ‘was addicted to Vidia’ and ‘liked to be dominated by him’. But she misunderstood the rival claims of his literary vocation and, in her turn, was cruelly shunted aside.

Those who feared a warts-and-all account may be surprised to discover that French’s biography is far from being all warts. Although Naipaul emerges as a capricious and often extremely unfeeling man, French’s penetrating and sympathetic assessment of his literary achievement makes us understand how Naipaul’s attraction to disappointment, taken by many as the token of a pitiless conservatism, belies a vast fund of frustrated compassion. In case we had forgotten, he points out that Naipaul’s ‘chosen subject was the powerless: those who, although in the majority in the world, had appeared in European literature only as peripheral characters, or at best as Man Friday’. French perhaps underestimates the extent to which Naipaul’s early criticisms of post-colonial societies proceeded in part from his powerful inclination towards self-betterment, which as we learn in Finding the Centre, led Naipaul to think of writing as ‘a fantasy of nobility’. This urge impels several of his protagonists, but Naipaul was also aware that this fantasy could slide into a sterile mimicry of the colonial master—a sad process that had been effectively satirised in his very first novel, The Mystic Masseur, and later in the figure of Indar from A Bend in the River. Whether or not this made Naipaul’s judgements on the post-colonial world accurate is another matter altogether. French acknowledges that there were those who were too willing to incorporate Naipaul into their own ultra-reactionary perspectives. Evelyn Waugh was one and although he privately moaned to Nancy Mitford about ‘that clever little nigger Naipaul’ winning yet another literary prize, he saw in The Middle Passage incontrovertible proof that the struggle for independence in the Caribbean and elsewhere was doomed. Discussing Naipaul’s contentious book on Islamic societies, Among the Believers, French persuasively maintains that Naipaul never really occupied the role of mandarin intellectual in which Said and others cast him. He was much too willful, too reliant on ‘close observation’ of his immediate surroundings to slot into any grand neo-colonial schemes. If anything, Naipaul’s work advances a misconceived notion of cultural authenticity, and French justly sees his recent advocacy of extremist Hindu nationalism in India as a worrying example of that.

There are those who would find in French’s book enough material for a damning indictment of Naipaul’s place as an elder statesman of contemporary prose. His misogyny, his ill-tempered dismissals of what he once called the ‘half-made societies’ of the developing world, as well as the appalling treatment meted out to people intimately connected to his work are all too plain to see. Without the undeniable fact of his achievements in fiction and travel writing, however, we would scarcely be interested in the baroque contortions of his private life. Naipaul’s more critical readers become stunned when they recognise that his elegantly organised and often very sensitive writing can harbour a vicious disregard for other people’s and other culture’s ways of looking and feeling. But a writer’s personality is never given to us unfiltered through his or her writing; indeed, artists themselves will always be taken aback by what they find in their own work. Naipaul’s most recent novels, Half a Life and Magic Seeds, represent no attenuation of his strengths, and mark the latest stage of this process of self-discovery. Over half a century since his debut, V.S. Naipaul is still standing. Most disturbing of all, he deserves to be.

Jonathan Gharraie is a DPhil student at St. Catherine’s College working on D.H. Lawrence and exile.