Lives of the Novelists: A History of Fiction in 294 Lives (134 page)

Literary achievement, and that biggest of prizes (the Nobel), warranted full biography, but what outraged readers were the moral monstrosities laid bare by the biography which ensued. Naipaul’s unashamed depiction of himself, for example, as a ‘prostitute man’. Why? Because, he confided, his wife Patricia, who had loyally supported him for four decades, ‘did not attract me sexually at all’. She was, he coolly declared, ‘the only woman I know who has no skill’. Readers of
Guerrillas
(1975) will recall Jane’s description of her husband: ‘He was excited only by prostitutes, swiftly bought and had; with Jane he was finished in a second, preferring more usually to be “tossed off”.’ If this is self-revelation, it is not something many novelists would divulge to a prurient world. Unless, that is, you despised the prurient hordes. Naipaul, we learn, knew many women. His long-serving mistress, Margaret Gooding, was both sexually attractive and – to employ his word – skilled. Her relationship with Vidia, however, ruined her life. He seems, if we credit his authorised biographer, not to have cared. Her utility for him was that he could ‘mistreat’ her. ‘Many of the gruesome sexual depictions in the novels,’ French records, ‘were not the work of imagination, but drawn from his life with Margaret.’ Field work. Pat, the wife, died lingeringly of cancer in 1996, aware she was unloved and betrayed. ‘On the day after he cremated his wife,’ French bleakly notes, ‘V. S. Naipaul invited a new woman into her house.’ It was a prospective second wife – but not Margaret, the long-serving mistress: she was, we are told, cast off.

If there were a Nobel Prize for rudeness, Naipaul would win outright. Indian by genetic origin, he sees the subcontinent as one great, uncleaned, lavatory (‘Indians defecate everywhere’). Trinidadian by birthplace, he rarely mentions the West Indian island other than to insult it. Asked why he left, he says ‘to join civilisation’. Africa? ‘Black men assuming the lies of white men’ (a disgusted authorial aside in
A Bend in the River
, 1979). Not that civilised England escapes his lash. Observing on a wall the graffiti ‘Keep Britain White’, he would, he blandly joked, insert a comma after ‘Britain’ and add an ‘s’ to ‘White’. The jest, bitter as it is, reminds one that Naipaul is a wit in the Oscar class, as well as the word which rhymes with ‘wit’ – king-sized. He is also, one concedes, a supremely great novelist.

But which, then, are Naipaul’s great novels? The verdict among his admirers would probably be split between
A Bend in the River
(1979),
In a Free State
(1971) and
Guerrillas
(1975). The last is the most complex of the three and, following the
rules of Naipaul’s unusual literary game, the most successful. Like much of his fiction, it has a hard kernel of historical fact, laced with acidic contempt. The self-named ‘Michael X’ (in imitation of the American Malcolm X) was born Michael de Freitas, of mixed race, in Trinidad. Another of his self-awarded names was the Muslim ‘Abdul Malik’. After fleecing various rich
bien pensant
dupes in the UK (John Lennon, famously), and falling foul of the law, Michael X fled back to Trinidad as a quasi-revolutionary leader. Among the ‘commune’ he set up there was an English convert, Gale Benson, the daughter of a Tory MP. She was murdered, hacked to death like a side of beef. De Freitas was convicted of the crime and hanged in 1975. By the contortions of West Indian jurisprudence, it was the British legal authorities that mandated the execution. A fascinated Naipaul wrote a long essay on the subject, ‘Michael X and the Black Power Killings in Trinidad’ (1980), and used him as a central character, Jimmy Ahmed, in
Guerrillas
.

The novel complicates things beyond the historical record, however. It is set on an unnamed West Indian Island, manifestly Trinidad, polluted – atmospherically and socially – by a multinational bauxite mining company. The three principals are a white South African intellectual, exiled for his black-liberation sympathies; his mistress, an upper-class white woman, Jane; and Jimmy Ahmed, on the run from the UK, where he is wanted for rape. The title –
Guerrillas
– is ironic: these are not freedom fighters – they are degenerates. The irony permeating the whole novel is implicit in the first sentence: ‘After lunch Jane and Roche left their house on the Ridge to drive to Thrushcross Grange.’ The allusion is mischievously obvious. Jane [Eyre] and Roche[ster] leave for the house which represents civilisation (as opposed to the savagery of Heathcliff’s house in
Wuthering Heights
). The first Mrs Rochester, we recall, originated in the West Indies. Unlike Charlotte Brontë’s Jane, Naipaul’s Jane will end up anally raped and murdered by her super-potent lover. Everything, every value – moral, spiritual, ideological – is decayed. Naipaul contrives a landscape which breathes irremediable corruption:

The cleared land had been ridged and furrowed from end to end. The furrows were full of shiny green weeds; and the ridges, one or two of which showed haphazard, failed planting, were light brown and looked as dry as bone.

Looking at it through the car window, Jane says: ‘I used to think that England was in a state of decay.’ Roche replies, ‘Decayed from what?’

The rules of the Nobel Prize decree that the prize shall be given for literature of an ‘idealistic’ nature. Wherein lies the idealism in Naipaul? Not, clearly, in any political, religious or social system, but in the quality of his prose. In ‘Literature’ itself. It is both a noble, and a profoundly dispiriting, verdict on the human condition.

Dying
Is an art, like everything else.
I do it exceptionally well.

Plath’s short life has been subjected to more biography than any other Anglo-American writer of the period. Literary interest focuses principally on her poetry, but in the days before her suicide she published a novel,
The Bell Jar
(1963). Tepid reviews, it is suggested, may have been one factor in her decision to destroy herself. Plath was born in New England. Her father, Otto, was an immigrant to the US; her mother Aurelia’s parents had emigrated from Austria. Germanic ancestry, and war guilt, would haunt their daughter. It is expressed most brutally in the poem ‘Daddy’ (1962), in which Otto is transmuted into an SS officer. The heroine of
The Bell Jar
also has a vaguely Jewish name, Esther Greenwood (an Anglicisation of ‘Grünbaum’).

Otto Plath did well in his new country. An entomologist, with a particular interest in the bee, he taught at Boston University. For wholly neurotic reasons – he was convinced he had lung cancer – he neglected to have his fatal diabetes treated and died when Sylvia was eight. It was a kind of suicide by self-neglect. He left two children and a wife poorly provided for. Her father’s death devastated Sylvia. She would, she famously declared, ‘never speak to God again’. About the same time she published her first poem. Outstandingly clever, she sailed through high school and won a full scholarship to Smith College in 1950 where she continued her prize-winning way. She was determined to write – whether poetry, fiction or journalism was, at this stage, immaterial.

While still an undergraduate, she had stories picked up by leading magazines and in her junior year (1953) she won the nationwide competition for an intern editorship with
Mademoiselle
magazine in New York. This would supply the kernel episode for
The Bell Jar
. She had, at this point, an eminently suitable boyfriend. During this summer, for reasons which have always been in dispute, things fell apart. She wrote in her journal 6 July 1953: ‘Right now you are sick in your head … Stop thinking
selfishly of razors & self-wounds & going out and ending it all. Your room is not your prison. You are.’ Plath took a hard knock when she was – uniquely for her – rejected by Harvard’s creative writing programme: they may have been unimpressed by the
Mademoiselle
connection. She suffered a full-blown mental breakdown and, as was routine at that period, was subjected to electroconvulsive therapy. Suicidal episodes and intensive psychotherapy followed.

She was patched together sufficiently well (like a ‘retread’ car tyre, she said) to finish her studies at Smith,
summa cum laude
, dyed her hair ash blonde, and picked up a Fulbright scholarship to study for two years at Newnham College in Cambridge. Here she met Ted Hughes, a fellow student. Their violent first encounter, at a party, is chronicled in a later published short story:

Leonard bent to his last supper. She waited. Waited, sighting the whiteness of his cheek with its verdigris stain, moving by her mouth.

Teeth gouged. And held. Salt, warm salt, laving the tastebuds of her tongue.

The couple were married barely a year later, in June 1956, with only the revenue of a poet’s garret to look forward to. Things looked up with the applauded publication of Ted’s collection,
The Hawk in the Rain
, in 1957. She too was moving towards poetry as her principal outlet and, like him, picking up prestigious prizes. Both were evolving fast as writers – something that took a toll on their relationship.

Their life took a fresh turn with her getting a teaching post at Smith. Hughes got an adjunct position at a nearby Boston college. Robert Lowell’s poems, later collected as
Life Studies
, had indicated ways in which psychic fracture could be fused into new forms. In 1959 she sat in on Lowell’s classes at Boston University: it was, she later recorded, a breakthrough.

But Plath was again on the verge of breakdown. The return to Boston had awoken demons associated with the death of her father. By this point she was pregnant with Frieda, the first of the couple’s two children, and well on the way to completing her first poetry collection,
The Colossus
(1960). In 1960 they moved back to London, where both their reputations were steadily growing. But just as steadily, they were growing apart. They moved to a spacious house in Devon for the birth of their second child. Like her father, Plath could now keep bees (the subject of some of her finest poems). She was, at this point, starting work on
The Bell Jar
– principally, she later said, to ‘exorcise’ her painful past. The theme, she wrote in her journal, was that the ‘modern woman demands as much experience as the man’.

The marriage was being subjected to intolerable pressures as Hughes was involved in an intense affair. Sylvia and Ted separated in mid-1962 and the crisis of this period feeds into the remarkable poems written over the last few months of
her life, later collected as
Ariel
(1965). She was at the same time completing
The Bell Jar
. In December 1962 she moved back to London with her children to endure what would be a historically bitter winter.
The Bell Jar
was published in the last week of January 1963. Two weeks later she committed suicide by gassing herself – making sure, before she did so, that her children were tucked up and safe.

The subsequent history of
The Bell Jar
was fraught. Published in Britain by Heinemann under the bland pseudonym ‘Victoria Lucas’, it would not appear in America until 1967, where it was suppressed on the grounds of its manifest libels and, nearer home, its cruel representation of Aurelia Plath and Sylvia’s 1953 boyfriend. It was judged too close to the bone. In the intervening four years, the Woman’s Movement took off with the formation of the National Organisation of Women and Betty Friedan’s trail-blazing
The Feminine Mystique
(1963).
The Bell Jar
was custom-made for its moment. In a peculiarly misjudged review in the
TLS
, the anonymous reviewer had pronounced it ‘promising’, but instructed that the writer must learn to ‘control’ her material. As well say that ‘Daddy’ would be better written in heroic couplets. The novel opens with some of the most gripping prose Plath ever wrote:

It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn’t know what I was doing in New York. I’m stupid about executions. The idea of being electrocuted makes me sick, and that’s all there was to read about in the papers – goggle- eyed headlines staring up at me on every street corner and at the fusty, peanut-smelling mouth of every subway. It had nothing to do with me, but I couldn’t help wondering what it would be like, being burned alive all along your nerves.

Apparently casual, it is prophetic: Esther too will be electrocuted. After her ECT she wonders, forlornly, ‘what terrible thing it was that I had done’.

The novel opens with a public event. As the pages turn, what strikes one is the claustrophobic indifference to the outside world. Ethel Rosenberg, dubiously convicted with her husband Julius, should not have been executed: the injustice passes Greenwood/Plath totally by. America is at war: although Esther sleeps with a translator at the UN (under whose auspices America was fighting), Korea gets not a mention. Nothing is visible outside the glass walls of Esther’s bell jar. The other striking feature is the downright spitefulness of the depictions in the novel, which is a close transcript of Plath’s deadly summer, 1953, when she won her
Mademoiselle
internship and fell apart. To take one example, ‘Philomena Guinea’ is transparently based on Plath’s well-meaning patron, Olive Higgins Prouty, who had funded the scholarship (‘for promising young writers’) which enabled her to study at Smith
College. Prouty’s depiction in
The Bell Jar
is as malicious as the fictional name is absurd. To rub it in, the novel’s opening paragraph is a mocking parody of Prouty’s opening paragraph in her most famous novel,
Now, Voyager
(1941), nowadays more famous for the Bette Davis film, the story of a heroine ‘reborn’ to love and full womanhood by psychotherapy. Prouty lived to read
The Bell Jar
. It may not have persuaded her that her money had been well spent on this ‘promising young writer’.