The death of VS Naipaul seems to be generating a cascade of reappraisal — favorable on the whole, perhaps for reasons suggested, as we’ll see, by a great but not, astonishingly, late editor of his work. Forget the critics; almost every title except the really famous ones, such as A House for Mr Biswas, are “temporarily” out of stock at Amazon. Maybe they’ve been out of stock for a while — I hadn’t been paying attention. But I suspect that the handfuls of copies that the retailer stocked were snapped up at once by the curious. For my part, I’m going to re-read The Enigma of Arrival, and perhaps have a go at A Bend in the River, which I dropped after a few pages, possibly because it was all too Conrad for that particular moment. 

Via The Browser, I came across an enchanting memoir that appeared in Granta almost ten years ago, written by Diana Athill, now 101. Athill was Naipaul’s editor at André Deutsch, the publisher of his first book and many that followed. The tremendous thing about her is that she is at least as interesting as any of her writers, and her recollections of Naipaul don’t disappoint. It seems that she was unhappy with Guerillas — a book that Dwight Garner singles out for praise in an encomium in today’s Times — because, as it happens, she actually knew the true-crime individuals whom Naipaul, having merely read about a murder in the paper, transformed into fictional characters. When she expressed her reservations to the writer, he “flounced out in a fury,” withdrawing the manuscript and selling it overnight to Secker and Warburg. 

For at least two weeks I seethed . . . [sic] and then, in the third week, it suddenly occurred to me that never again would I have to listen to Vidia telling me how damaged he was, and it was as though the sun came out. I didn’t have to like Vidia any more! I could still like his work, I could still be sorry for his pain; but I no longer faced the task of fashioning affection out of these elements in order to deal as a good editor should with the exhausting, and finally tedious, task of listening to his woe. ‘Do you know what,’ I said to André, ‘I’ve begun to see that it’s a release.’ (Rather to my surprise, he laughed.) 

Writers should be read and not heard. Especially the men ones. 

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