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" It is a truth insufficiently acknowledged that those whom the gods grant special gifts often also get stuck with neurotic difficulties up the gazoo. Behind every great man peeks a long--suffering wife or an abused mistress, and sometimes both at once. (Great women are generally no picnic, -either.) The jagged relations between unusually talented men and the women in their lives are especially intriguing to us -because they tend to unspool like an extreme version of the power plays and shady maneuverings that go on in all -intimate pairings. The discrepancies and imbalances in the weaknesses and strengths of the partners in these unions are easier to make out because their bond so often exists in a collusive\u2014or, as the tired vernacular has it, codependent\u2014form. There is, in other words, an enduring symbiosis, a match of pathol-ogies lying just beneath the surface. The uncomfortable truth is that victimizers need willing victims, and -serial seducers who -happen to be married (their name is legion) require that wives or companions bear up with two-timing or ill treatment because of their own needs. The list of writers who have killed their wives -softly whilst producing their art includes Charles Dickens, -Thomas Carlyle, and Leo Tolstoy. There are many more cases where those came from, and each of them tells us in its own way about the -compromises and bartering that go on in most marriages. The revelations that appear in Patrick French&amp;#039;s superb authorized biography, The World Is What It Is, concerning the Nobel prize-winning writer V. S. Naipaul&amp;#039;s often brutal behavior toward his wife and his mistress have aroused fascination and horror. But for anyone who has even sampled Naipaul&amp;#039;s prolific work (27 books in all) and is familiar with his dispassionate, witheringly judgmental, and ada-mantly politically incor-rect views, the cold, hard facts don&amp;#039;t come as a total shock. In both his early fiction (A House for Mr. Biswas; The Mystic Masseur) and his innovative historical and global reportage (The Middle -Passage; A Turn in the South), there has always been a cruel streak as well as a great melancholy. One has the sense that Naipaul writes with a wounded pen, as if his psychic life -depends on it, and because the void\u2014the &amp;quot;spiritual emptiness&amp;quot; he -refers to in his most recent book, A Writer&amp;#039;s People\u2014is never far off.  Naipaul transcends genres and fashions prose that is piercingly insightful and never effete; he has scant use for borrowed ideas or the clanking apparatus of theory, whether he is responding presciently to the rise of Islamic fundamentalism (Among the Believers; Beyond -Belief ) or the fate of newly independent African countries (A Bend in the River; In a Free State), preferring to rely -instead on a kaleidoscopic approach, a constantly shifting pattern of finely tuned responses. He has an unparalleled ability to imagine his way into other people&amp;#039;s shoes yet has always made a point of slashing at fools of every stripe without regard for their feelings. Indeed, his take on the world seems to alternate between bleak and bleaker, veering off for light relief into rage  It would be difficult, then, to imagine a man this complex, -intense, and solipsistic leading a happy home life with the wife and kids, inviting the relatives over for Christmas Eve dinner, or shoveling the snow. Still, the extent to which Naipaul&amp;#039;s exis-tence has been a tortured and torturing one, per French&amp;#039;s account, is eye-opening, moving us to wonder: Why do artistic gifts seem to come at such a high relational cost? When does playing the muse, the hovering and ever-facilitating female presence, mutate into something more psychologically disturbing? Does the proximity to fame compensate at all for the pain and humiliation of such relationships? Would Naipaul&amp;#039;s first wife or mistress have been happier had they never met him, or were they both in their own ways doomed to a downward trajectory? And, perhaps less -obviously, does a roller-coaster ride of intimate relations offer a life of excitement that may mask -deeper questions and qualms about oneself, one&amp;#039;s existence? Brilliant monster that he may be, it is all the more to Naipaul&amp;#039;s credit that he consented to sit for this shadow-filled portrait in the first place, providing access to his archives as well as talking -openly to his biographer. &amp;quot;Of all the people I spoke to for this book,&amp;quot; French notes, &amp;quot;he was outwardly the frankest,&amp;quot; adding that he had &amp;quot;no -direction or restriction&amp;quot; from his subject. Naipaul in turn read the manuscript and returned it without changes. Most writers go to great lengths to keep their images free of tarnish, either by hand--selecting a fawning biographer, as Philip Roth did, or by dismissing a too inquiring or critical investigator, as J. D. Salinger did with Ian Hamilton. It says a lot about Naipaul&amp;#039;s -passion for truth--telling\u2014as distinct from his much-commented-upon -passion for self--aggrandizement\u2014that he agreed to this enterprise. Vidyadhar Surajparashad Naipaul\u2014known as Vido as a boy and Vidia as an adult to those who were close to him, or who wished to be (such as Paul Theroux, who exhumed his long, unrequited affin-ity with Naipaul in Sir Vidia&amp;#039;s Shadow)\u2014is a pioneer of post-colonial writing. The second of seven children, he was born in 1932 into rural poverty on the polyglot island of Trinidad. His Hindu parents were in the wave of bonded Indian laborers brought to work on sugar plantations after slavery ended. (Naipaul would later claim to be of Brahmin -descent, but this point of pride has never been verified.) He grew up in a matriarchy: His powerful grandmother moved her offspring like chess pieces around the family compounds, none of them grand\u2014for a time, his family lived in servants&amp;#039; quarters with a roof of corrugated iron and branches\u2014and his strong, proud mother was determined that her children be properly edu-cated and rise above their beginnings.  Despite the fact that Vido&amp;#039;s father, Seepersad, was largely absent for the first six years of the boy&amp;#039;s life, he was the biggest influence on his son&amp;#039;s identity. Having -escaped the fate of a rural laborer in India, Seepersad had taught himself to read and write\u2014he was an admirer of O. Henry and Somerset Maugham\u2014and became a -reporter for The Trinidad Guardian. &amp;quot;Pa and Vido,&amp;quot; French tells us, &amp;quot;positioned themselves in an ordered fantasy world -derived from European literature, far from the noise, squalor, and their own powerlessness in Petit Valley.&amp;quot; As fragile as his wife was tough, Seepersad suffered a breakdown when he was criticized for writ-ing about the superstitions of rural Indians. Naipaul -recalls his -mother&amp;#039;s explanation of his -father&amp;#039;s condition: &amp;quot;He looked in the mirror one day and couldn&amp;#039;t see himself. And he began to scream.&amp;quot; Seepersad eventually recovered enough to write an accomplished story -collection, and Vido drew on the memory and passion of his -father, who died in 1953, to will himself into becoming a writer; his breakthrough novel, A House for Mr. Biswas, was a tribute to him.  In 1950, having won a scholarship to Oxford, Naipaul set out for a country &amp;quot;that had been presented to him as the epicenter of civilization.&amp;quot; -Although he did well academically, he suffered from loneliness, penury, and a palpable sense of the racial prejudice lurking in the &amp;quot;cliquey, smirking undergraduate atmosphere.&amp;quot; Adrift and -depressed, Naipaul met a slim, pretty undergraduate, Patricia Hale, who was reading his-tory at a women&amp;#039;s college. She, too, was from a humble background and had reached -Oxford on scholarship. Both of them were ardently literary, manifestly shy, and sex-ually -repressed. They slept to-gether for the first time seven months after they met; Vidia -assessed their early sexual -encounters as &amp;quot;fumbling and awful for both of us. Pat was very nervous. I wasn&amp;#039;t trained enough or skilled enough or talented enough to calm her nerves, probably because I didn&amp;#039;t want to calm her nerves. It didn&amp;#039;t work.&amp;quot; Sex between them would never work\u2014not through 40 years of a troubled and faithless (on Naipaul&amp;#039;s side) union, in which Pat played nursemaid and amanuensis while he failed to so much as -acknowledge her existence in even his most -personal writings, such as his autobiographical novel The Enigma of Arrival. Although Pat envisioned a shining future before the two 22-year-olds were married in January 1955\u2014&amp;quot;I am -con-vinced that we are going to be a distinguished couple&amp;quot;\u2014the auguries were evident -before they tied the knot. Within months of their meeting, Naipaul, ever the snob, -patronizingly quizzed Pat, who had taken elocution lessons to get rid of her Midlands accent, on her pronunciation of the word &amp;quot;bourgeois&amp;quot; and -inquired as to whether she might have it in her to lend her correspondence a touch of eroticism. &amp;quot;I do wish,&amp;quot; he wrote, &amp;quot;you could make your letters -really `lurid.&amp;#039;&amp;quot; The chances for bawdiness were next to none, given that Pat refer-red to a bra as &amp;quot;the garment I dislike mentioning.&amp;quot;  The pattern for their marriage was set when Vidia failed to -produce a wedding ring, an oversight Pat piteously protested months later: &amp;quot;I do feel the lack of a ring very acutely,&amp;quot; she wrote him. &amp;quot;You did promise, and I will think you don&amp;#039;t quite realize how `odd&amp;#039; it seems to people.&amp;quot; (She ended up buying herself a plain gold band, which went mostly unworn.) When he wasn&amp;#039;t ignor-ing her, leaving her with little money as he journeyed alone\u2014or, -eventually, with his longtime mistress\u2014he was irked by Pat&amp;#039;s self-abnegating presence. &amp;quot;Don&amp;#039;t shout at me,&amp;quot; she once told him. &amp;quot;There is no one in the whole world besides me who takes you -really -seriously.&amp;quot; -Naipaul began visiting prostitutes in 1958, which was one of the few seamy secrets he kept from Pat. Later, he would readily confide in her about his stormy affair with Margaret Gooding, a married Anglo--Argentine woman 10 years his junior, seemingly unaware of the pain he was causing Pat: &amp;quot;She was so good: She tried to comfort me,&amp;quot; he commented in his journal. &amp;quot;I was so full of grief myself that in a way I expected her to -respond to my grief, and she did.&amp;quot;  The question that nags as one reads French&amp;#039;s biography is why Pat didn&amp;#039;t have it in her to leave Naipaul. She had been cap-able early on of standing up to his -demands of &amp;quot;one-sided submission,&amp;quot; as she described them. Indeed, it took a great deal of nerve on her part to stick with Vidia, since her -father was adamantly against her -marrying a &amp;quot;wog.&amp;quot; But over the decades, Pat&amp;#039;s life turned into one long, heartrendingly servile performance: &amp;quot;Pat treated him with great reverence,&amp;quot; noted one of their few mutual friends. &amp;quot;It was -almost like appreciating a deity. She was awed by him, and I think it made it -difficult for her -because she was aware that she had to do her bit to encourage the flowering of his talents.... She was a very -Indian wife in many -respects\u2014more Indian than most Indian wives.&amp;quot; Naipaul would go on to become the great man Pat had always taken him to be (in her notebooks she called him &amp;quot;The Genius&amp;quot;), becoming ever more &amp;quot;tetchy and -pompous,&amp;quot; gaining a prize--bedecked reputation in England and then a more international one as his books were translated into Greek, Serbo-Croatian, and -Hebrew, culminating in his Nobel Prize for literature in 2001.  Naipaul&amp;#039;s first real carnal pleasure came when he was 40, with Margaret; their relationship was passionate but rapidly -became sadomasochistic. &amp;quot;The cruelty was part of the attraction,&amp;quot; French writes, &amp;quot;which had the effect of stepping up the cruelty.&amp;quot; At one point, as Naipul -recalled, Margaret &amp;quot;was having a relationship with a banker to get to me.... I was extremely upset.... I was very violent with her for two days with my hand; my hand began to hurt.... She didn&amp;#039;t mind it at all. She thought of it in terms of my -passion for her. Her face was bad. She couldn&amp;#039;t -appear, really, in public. My hand was -swollen. I was utterly helpless.&amp;quot;   The triangle continued for two decades. Naipaul toyed with leaving his wife, but in the end, though Margaret left her husband and children for him, he remained married to Pat. The couple had long since retreated to separate bedrooms, and Pat scrambled to find a place for herself, liter-ally and meta-phorically. When they moved in February 1982, Pat &amp;quot;recorded her tentative, shamed -efforts to carve out a space for herself in Vidia&amp;#039;s new house. `He asked: Would I be moving out again soon?... I made a bedroom for myself in the little pink room, Vidia settled himself in the red.&amp;#039;&amp;quot; Pat dabbled in journalism, -researched A Treasury of Great Love Letters (irony of -ironies) for Antonia Fraser, duti-fully took -dictation from Naipaul, and accompanied him on trips that he &amp;quot;summoned&amp;quot; her to be on &amp;quot;in imperative terms&amp;quot; to take Margaret&amp;#039;s place. Naipaul treated both Pat and Margaret more like schoolgirls than like grown women; they were always being &amp;quot;dismissed&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;sent away&amp;quot; by him when they transgressed or simply got on his delicate nerves. &amp;quot;I have behaved foolishly all day,&amp;quot; Pat remarked in her notebook, -enthralled by her own abjection, &amp;quot;and have ruined every last relationship I have. I have agreed to go back to London after the weekend. Vidia says he can&amp;#039;t stand my eccentricity any more and I will destroy him.&amp;quot; The human wreckage in this judicious and keenly observant biography keeps -piling up, with the three damaged people at its center suggesting just how right the poet W. H. Auden was when he described the desires of the heart as being &amp;quot;crooked as corkscrews.&amp;quot; In 1994, Naipaul&amp;#039;s predilection for engaging with prostitutes when he was younger was -revealed in an interview in The New Yorker. This having been the one malfeasance he had not discussed cozily with the all--accepting Pat, she\u2014already ill with breast cancer\u2014received this further &amp;quot;insult to her status as a loving wife&amp;quot; very badly. In 1995, Naipaul, leaving a seriously ill Pat behind, flew to South Asia to start Beyond Belief, his second look at the rise of Islamist ideology. While in Pakistan, he met a brash 42-year-old newspaper columnist who wrote under the byline &amp;quot;Nadira.&amp;quot; They clicked immediately, and before he left\u2014Pat not yet dead and Margaret crossed off the list without being informed\u2014-Naipaul asked Nadira if she would one day consider becoming &amp;quot;Lady Naipaul.&amp;quot;  Pat, who had largely disappeared into herself, tranquilized and disconnected, died on February 3, 1996, at age 63, leaving Naipaul at a loss: &amp;quot;Having spent a lifetime shunning friends, he had no network of support.&amp;quot; Her cremation was attended by a small group of mourners, with no readings, music, or -addresses. Naipaul married -Nadira that April in a tiny ceremony; -Margaret would learn of her existence from the newspapers.  One Saturday in October 1996, Vidia and -Nadira scattered Pat&amp;#039;s ashes in the countryside near their home. Nadira walked into the woods, alone, and said a Muslim prayer for Pat. French&amp;#039;s biography closes on a wrenching note, the -anguish seeping out between the carefully composed sentences: &amp;quot;Nadira walked back out of the woods. V. S. -Naipaul, the writer, Vid-yadhar, the boy, Vidia, the man, was leaning against the car, tears streaming down his face, lost for words.&amp;quot; Perhaps Naipaul has -finally met his -narcissistic match in this strong-willed woman and that -opportunity rather than opportunism has finally struck. At any rate, let&amp;#039;s hope so. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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