Naipaul, like Tolstoy and Evelyn Waugh, has made the self-protective decision to turn himself into a monster. Of course, the women suffered. And of course Naipaul has always gone in for saying and writing calculatedly offensive things. “Like monkeys pleading for evolution, each claiming to be whiter than the other, Indians and Negroes appeal to the unacknowledged white audience to see how much they despise each other” (The Middle Passage)…
Among the Believers: An Islamic journey, published in 1981, made him enemies. His first book about India, An Area of Darkness (1964), is a Swiftian cry of disappointment. When she was dying, and they sat together in their Wiltshire cottage, Pat Naipaul told her husband he had been “very hard on India”. Naturally, the Indians thought so too, especially for pieces of Churchillian parody such as: “Indians defecate everywhere. They defecate, mostly, beside the railway tracks. They defecate on the beaches; they defecate on the hills; they defecate on the river banks; they defecate on the streets; they never look for cover . . . . The truth is that Indians do not see these squatters and might even, with complete sincerity, deny that they exist”. Naipaul’s role as a journalist was to write about what was obvious, but unsayable. His book about the West Indies, The Middle Passage (1962), caused similar expressions of outrage. In 1978, on the BBC, Gordon Woolford accused him of “savaging” Trinidad. “There wasn’t any kind remark.” Naipaul responded (ferociously) “Was it untrue? Anything false? Anything proved wrong in sixteen years? Or everything proved right?”.
