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| VS Naipul |
Naipaul And His Three Women
'I knew Pat was dying and Margaret was finished.... It was not that I was trying to displace a dying woman and an old floozy': Nadira
PATRICK FRENCH
31 MARCH 2008
As he approached the age of retirement, V.S. Naipaul felt compelled to go on writing. By early 1995, unable to find the spark for a work of fiction, Vidia decided to loop back on himself once more and write a reprise of Among the Believers, his prescient early study of Islamic extremism. In a new global political climate, he would return to Iran, Indonesia, Malaysia and Pakistan to look at the future of Islamist ideology through the fate of the places and personalities he had encountered in 1979. Once again, he would make a forceful rejection of the late 20th century academic convention that all cultures, peoples and belief systems are different but equal. On July 25, 1995, Vidia flew out of Heathrow airport to Jakarta. As on his previous trips, he asked other people to aid him, and in most cases they fell over themselves to do so. His Anglo-Argentine mistress of 23 years' standing, Margaret Gooding, jumped on an aeroplane and travelled loyally with him through Indonesia, being permitted to collect and file useful press cuttings. Publishers' staff in London and New York provided contacts and helpers. Ian Buruma recommended the journalist Ahmed Rashid in Pakistan, who produced a string of names and invited Vidia to stay at his house in Lahore. The editor of the New York Review of Books Bob Silvers found regional experts and their telephone numbers. The publisher Harry Evans sent a gigantic list of possibly interesting people. The journalist Rahul Singh located politicians in Jakarta. Once Vidia arrived in the relevant country, diplomats would arrange dinners and foreign correspondents would open their contacts books to him. When he left for Indonesia, he knew his wife Pat was seriously ill with a recurrence of breast cancer. A month earlier, in a chilling letter to his accountant, Vidia had written: "Pat's personal papers (an important element of the archive) will be shipped on her death." A fortnight after he left England she was admitted to Chalybeate Hospital, and he sent her a fax with "tremendous and enduring love". After 40 years, Vidia was again feeling the sort of intense emotion he had felt during their early courtship. He wrote to Pat: "Very grieved to hear about so many things. Please let me know what you think I can do. With v. great love and gratitude for all that you are. V." And Pat, being Pat, suggested there was nothing her husband should do except continue with his work. So he travelled to Bandung, telling her that the material was shaping up. "I was visibly moved by the Fax," wrote Pat, who had to rest for long stretches each morning and evening. "I read it like lightning. It answered every need. You asked what you could do and that was it."
