So it seems that the Nobel laureate and knight of the realm, VS Naipaul, views orgasms much like other people view omelettes (if you're going to make a good one you have to crack a few heads) and helped kill his own wife with his cruelty: "It could be said ... I feel a little bit that way." According to a new biography by Patrick French, alongside beating his mistress to a pulp in order to get off better, Sir Vidia frequented prostitutes and practised a "species of soul murder" on those closest to him, while spending half a century being rude and racist. Paul Theroux is triumphant, penning a limited edition tissue wrapped version of "I told you so" in the Sunday Times - in which he sums up his former friend "as an excellent candidate for anger management classes, sensitivity training, psychotherapy, marriage guidance, grief counselling and driving lessons - none of which he pursued".
If only he had, perhaps Yasmin Alibhai-Brown would not now feel compelled to cast out her copy of A House for Mr Biswas in righteous indignation.
"I'll read no more books by this monster," she declares, before presumably going back to her bookcase and chucking off anything else by a great writer with repulsive proclivities: Chaucer (rapist); Tolstoy, Shakespeare, Wilkie Collins (wife cruelty); Doris Lessing, Muriel Spark (child abandoners); Ernest Hemmingway (animal cruelty); Flaubert, Maupassant (failing to act as safe sex role models for impressionable young people) ...
Leaving aside the issue that no one has seemed to mention - that, if Naipaul was really so appalling to be around, his wives and lovers could have left him to get on with abusing himself (plenty more bastards in the sea and all that, and not all of them into "gruesome sex") - it could be argued that Naipaul's behaviour is not so much a reason to abandon his books as to dig them up with fresh relish. Genius is so often the preserve of life's genuinely nasty pieces of work.
Evelyn Waugh was a monstrous egotist from cradle to grave. As a child he whiled away many a merry Saturday torturing the family cat and did his level best to destroy everyone's fun with his sarcastic repartee: "We all disliked him heartily," a neighbour recalled. "We were thankful when he was at school and could not join in our cheerful activities."
But at school he had also instituted his reign of terror early. Cecil Beaton's effete curls made him a prime victim: "Evelyn is a very sinister character, and I have been secretly frightened of him ever since my first morning at my first school when he came up at break and started to bully me," he recalled. Other pupils formed an anti-Waugh society.
Fresh from university, Waugh dealt with being rejected by socialite Olivia Plunkett-Greene by extinguishing a lit cigarette on her bare arm. In the early thirties he was an enthusiastic flag waver for Mussolini and wrote a novel utterly devoted to sending up Haile Selassie. He claimed to loathe his own children, and certainly despised his father. And this was an Evelyn reined in with the belt of religion. Caught absently shredding a French intellectual into tiny little pieces at a dinner party, his host demanded to know how he could be so vile and still call himself a Catholic: "You have no idea how much nastier I would be if I was not Catholic. Without supernatural aid I would hardly be a human being."
But the bad human made a brilliant writer. And his brilliance, in many ways, could be said to stem from his brutality. Decline and Fall, with its tale of the pederast, Grimes, the public school man always in the soup, and always getting back out of it - through sheer virtue of being a public school man - nailed the English class system to the wall, far more effectively than a thousand well meaning pamphlets on equality - and let's not pretend he cared, it was funny. His jokes are sharpened on cruelty and not dulled by any consideration for the feelings of those he manipulated in print.
The short story, Mr Loveday's Little Outing, and the character of Prendergast in Decline and Fall both owe much to Waugh's father, Arthur, whose absurdities, rampant emotionalism and fetish for young ladies on bicycles were all meat and veg to be chewed up and spat out by his son with consummate disgust. A Handful of Dust does much the same for his first wife - as Brenda Last who could easily carry off gold in the race to be ribboned the 20th century's greatest literary witch.
And it's not just Waugh and Sir Vidia who we'd have to consign to the literary boycott bin on the grounds of despicable morals. Kingsley Amis drove his first wife, Hilly, to the brink of suicide with his serial infidelities, yet Lucky Jim could make a person sick with laughter. Even books about Kingsley Amis are landmarks in brilliance: Martin Amis' Experience and Zachary Leader's Life of Kingsley Amis bask in Kingers' technicolor grotesquery.
Graham Greene would also have to go. The novelist indulged in a lifetime of nasty behaviour, which included preventing his heavily pregnant wife from going to her own mother's funeral before bolting off from the cremation himself to have sex with a prostitute in Piccadilly.
Greene went on to make his own goddaughter his mistress, with whom he "engaged in violent adulterous copulation behind Italian church altars". Later he provided same mistress with a helpful list of the 47 prostitutes he frequented, complete with nicknames.
No one in their right mind would want to live with Greene, Amis, Waugh or Naipaul - but only a weak mind could cull their craft from the bookshelves.
