Critics have field day with VS Naipaul biog

The Trinidadian-born man of letters VS Naipaul has been recognised as one of the most arrogant men in London literary circles for donkey's years. Now an authorised biography by fellow writer Patrick French exposes the novelist and travel writer's character in all its horror, and the book reviewers are having a field day.

John Carey, writing in the Sunday Times, said of French's biography, The World Is What It Is: "It exposes him as an egotist, a domestic tyrant and a sadist to a degree that would be farcical if it were not for the consequent distress suffered over many years by his first wife, Pat."

Problems with his wife began soon after their marriage in 1955, when, unable to find her sexually attractive, he began using prostitutes. He then began an affair with an Anglo-Argentine woman called Margaret Murray which lasted more than 20 years. "She enjoyed being his slave and victim, while he was aroused by mistreating and dominating her," writes Carey. "It gave him, he said, carnal pleasure for the first time in his life."

Being Naipaul, of course, Murray was not nearly good enough for her in other departments. His estimation of her intelligence was so low that when they were apart he did not bother to read or even open her letters. Although she left her husband and children, he refused to marry her. And on the three occasions she became pregnant he "left her to arrange what she called her 'little murders' herself."

What made Vidia Naipaul feel so superior, even before he made his name with A House for Mr Biswas and long before he won the Booker Prize in 1971 (for In a Free State) and then the Nobel three decades later?

The son of poor Indians who went to Trinidad to cut sugar cane, he won a scholarship to Oxford "by dint of heroic swotting". But life after Oxford was hard: "Nobody wanted to employ small, asthmatic Indians. He applied for and failed to get 26 jobs and came close to starvation, living on boiled potatoes and handouts from Pat, who was working as a schoolteacher."

Naipaul survived these setbacks, according to French's biography, by clinging to his belief in his inherent superiority. This was down to his maternal grandmother, who always insisted the family were Brahmins. "Whether this was true or note, pride in caste became for Naipaul a vital distinction, requiring him to be served special food and granted special privileges... Even straightening the duvet on his bed was beneath his Brahminical dignity."

Patrick French agreed to write the biography on condition that Naipaul should impose no direction or restrictions. As John Carey puts it: "He has chosen to submit himself to the truth-telling and ruthless objectivity that have always characterised his own work. In this respect, approving the publication, and asking for no changes in the typescript, may be seen as an act of self-lacerating honesty. And an act of remorse."

According to the biography, Naipaul accepts the fact that his affair with Murray 'undid Pat's life' and that his admission in a 1994 magazine interview that he had once been a 'great prostitute man' devastated Pat, who had just had a mastectomy, and contributed to her death in 1996.

Two months after Pat's funeral, he married Nadira Khannum Alvi (pictured), a journalist for the Pakistani newspaper, The Nation.