I know it ought to be liberally wonderful to say it’s okay but I think it’s awful

I know it ought to be liberally wonderful to say it’s okay but I think it’s awful”. Awful is the word many people would apply to Naipaul as his latest rant goes beyond mere desire to provoke. What’s eating the man, and who does he think he is?Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul was born in Trinidad in 1932, son of Seepersad Naipaul, a sad and lovable journalist thwarted in his desire to become a writer and “pundit”. Family life was close, and feminine: Vidia had five sisters and one brother, Shiva, his junior by 12 years, also destined to become a brilliant writer before his miserably untimely death in 1985 at the age of 40. That the family were in Trinidad at all was thanks to a quirk of British imperial history.

Hungry for cheap labour, the British had exported indentured labourers – not exactly slaves, but not exactly free – hither and yon from central India in the 19th century, so that there would later be heard what Shiva Naipaul called “the desperate litany of place bred by our Indian diaspora”, from Natal to Guyana, Kenya to Malaya, Fiji to Trinidad.His native island had a profound importance for Vidia, as for his brother, not least in that, once they had left it, they were very keen indeed not to return. Trinidad was a strange and fascinating community, more mixed than any other Caribbean island, Chinese and Portuguese as well as east Indian and blacks or Afro-Caribbeans. Tension between the last two group was acute, with brown Trinidadians calling blacks “niggers” and being called “coolies” in return. All this sowed seeds of resentment and anger which would later grow like weeds through the cracks of Naipaul’s complex and prickly personality.For a very clever boy like Vidia, education was the means of escape, and from Queen’s Royal College in Port of Spain he won an “Island scholarship” to University College, Oxford, as Shiva would later.

He was awkward and lonely when he first arrived in England, attempting suicide more or less seriously and unburdening himself in wonderful letters to his father, whose death when Vidia was still an undergraduate deeply affected the son.At Oxford, Naipaul met an English girl, Patricia Hale, and married her in 1955. She died five years ago, after what, by his own account, was often a curious marriage over its 40 years. They were childless, of course – “I love solitude, I love space, I love privacy. That’s why I was determined never to have children” – and, in an interview while Patricia was still alive, Naipaul agonisingly explained how he had been “a prostitute man”, using call girls during his marriage in an attempt to increase his sexual self-confidence.They moved to London, with no money and “no talent”, as he characteristically says “Talent is something you develop. You can’t just go around saying, I have talent as a writer.” But nobody else who read his first novels could doubt that he had been born with a truly extraordinary gift, however hard he may have worked on it.Moreover, that gift was recognised immediately: Naipaul was never a writer who had to struggle in obscurity.

In successive years, still in his twenties, he published three stunning novels, The Mystic Masseur in 1957, The Suffrage of Elvira in 1958, and Miguel Street in 1959. The first of these won one prize for young novelists, the John Llewellyn Rhys Memorial Prize, the last another, the Somerset Maugham. Since that first spurt of prolificity, the pace may have slackened but the praise did not. After the delightful A House for Mr Biswas, with its unmistakable and moving portrait of his father, Mr Stone and the Knights Companion won the Hawthornden Prize in 1964, The Mimic Men the W H Smith Award in 1968, and In a Free State the Booker Prize in 1971 (it isn’t his best book, but then that’s the way of the Booker). As if that weren’t enough, his knighthood in 1990 was followed in 1993 by the very covetable David Cohen Prize for British Literature, an award for a lifetime’s achievement worth £30,000 topped up with another ten grand from the Arts Council. Whatever else, V S Naipaul cannot possibly complain that he has been neglected. Even he admitted after receiving the Cohen prize that it was “recognition of one’s literary.. well, devotion It is for sticking to the last, in a way.

One has been very touched, very touched.” But that hasn’t stopped him finding other things to complain about.Naipaul has been praised to the skies by critics and showered with prizes, and he says that “the idea of becoming a writer in order to hit the jackpot is awful,” and yet that elusive jackpot seems to rankle. His London publisher for many years was the late Andre Deutsch, about whom Naipaul is now vitriolically abusive, and his editor there was Diana Athill. In her sprightly little memoir Stet, published last year, she settled the score and put the other side of the story. By her account, Naipaul was the “difficult author” to end all difficult authors, endlessly whining about his publisher’s shortcomings, and embittered by his failure to reach best-seller status There were other kinds of bitterness. Despite his antipathy to the squalor and incompetence of hot places bred by his childhood, he began to travel to the tropics to write non-fiction, but what he found distressed him even more.