VS Naipaul's tortured kinkiness has finally been revealed in a new book by Patrick French. Though it's hardly an autobiography, The World Is What It Is manages to raise a lot of questions about memoirists.
As a daughter of Trinidadian migrants, I grew up with the usual stereotypes, based on visits to family back home. Trinidadian males were viewed as dirty old men, sometimes in training. The lewdness of a male cousin would inspire girlish eye-rolling, while men of Naipaul's generation were seen as quaint lechers. My concept of ancestral sexuality - amoral yet amiable - owes a lot to the droll qualities of calypso. Naipaul's confession - his hand sometimes hurt from hitting his mistress - comes as a total shocker, for I never imagined that a West Indian male could be such a thoroughgoing freak.
Sir Naipaul really did go native.
When I finally recovered from the shock, my first thought was: Could he have made it all up? It seems preposterous, but with all the fabricated memoirs out there - A Million Little Pieces, Love and Consequences - I can't help wondering.
If Naipaul had turned himself into a mistress-bashing sadist to make himself more interesting to his biographer, would we be relieved or ticked off? Where do the bigger moral problems arise? In lying about your life story or beating your girlfriend until she's black and blue? I was brought up to believe it would be the latter, but increasingly, we're getting the message that lying is the worst thing an author can do.
There has been a lot of eyebrow-wiggling over Naipaul's brahmin status. For years, my older relatives smiled indulgently at readers (like Mel Gussow of the New York Times) who took all this brahmin business too seriously. If we look at "brahmin" as a metaphor for entitlement, Naipaul has much in common with a middle-class American who calls herself a "princess".
Why do some authors engineer a caste upgrade, while others - like Margaret Jones, posing as a gang member to write Love and Consequences - yearn for street cred? Earlier this year, I was amused when a Los Angeles "Blood" was profiled in the New York Times Home & Garden section, but I remember saying to myself "interesting if true" and finding some details implausible. The uproar when Jones was exposed as a dissembler from cushy Sherman Oaks seemed excessive.
The way she was caught - by older sister Cyndi Hoffman - resonates with Mitfordian echoes. Remember how Nancy Mitford urged her government to imprison her sister Diana during the second world war? For Mitford, who thought England might lose to Germany, the stakes were high in ways they couldn't be for Hoffman. Or so you'd think. What primal enmity prevents Hoffman from winking at a sibling's literary prank and letting it go? Perhaps she'll treat us one day to a grisly memoir about sisterly love.
The assumption, when a memoir gets debunked, is that readers have been horribly betrayed, and authorship "tainted". Fabricated memoirs make readers "cynical", argues the novelist (and blogger) Jennifer Weiner, but I see cynicism as evidence of literacy - true literacy. Should we expect a guarantee from each book labelled non-fiction? "Memoir" is a term used by booksellers, like "self-help" or "literature", to organise their wares so readers can find what they're looking for. Just as readers might argue about whether a book is "literature" or "trash" - or whether a "self-help" guide is helpful to anyone, much less one's self - we should be capable of asking whether a memoir is truthful, exaggerated, compromised by omission or completely made up.
Reading is about discerning, deciding what you believe, what's known or unknowable. Learning is not a passive activity. As a reader you aren't entitled to truth in the way that you'd be entitled to a dozen free-range eggs just because the carton says so. Are we no longer taught to read between the lines, question every "truth", and ask what motives a narrator has for telling a particular story? The history of book publishing always takes us back to the Bible. Some read the Old Testament literally, warier types read it critically. Both kinds of readers are literate, but the former are only technically so, which I find tragic.
The most important book in our culture is filled with agenda-driven tales, poetic turns, outmoded etiquette and (if you happen to be reading the King James) excellent one-liners, but many of its greatest fans don't believe a word of it. Fortunately, it's not about to be recalled by its various publishers.
The line between memoir and novel has been blurred ever since Moll Flanders. Bear in mind that the book so often described as our first English novel is written in the voice of a memoirist. Readers are stubbornly attached to this 300-year-old trend. Having published a series of novels with a first person narrator, I know first-hand. Perverse readers, in love with the memoir form, often address me as though I were this fictional character.
What is a dissembling memoirist really up to? Lying, embroidering, reshaping your past is one way of "controlling your life". You can also control your personal history by telling very little of it. That's what journalistic writers often do, focusing on other people, places and things, sometimes revealing nothing about themselves. But when the person, place or thing you write about is you, it's impossible to be objective. And don't we all see our life stories as our own special property? If you can renovate your home, why not your past? Why do other people tell you what you may or may not do with your own history?
I put these questions to a government archivist from Canada who was visiting the International Centre of Photography in New York. "It's like having a heritage easement on your past," he told me. In the publishing world, he said, "there's a lien against altering your life, but here's an exhibit that treats imaginary biography as an art form, a trend."
Misha Defonseca, who said she "felt Jewish" and claimed to have been nurtured by wolves in a bestselling memoir about the second world war, has rubbed a few people the wrong way - for the wrong reasons. Daniel Mendelsohn, whose writing is usually more thoughtful, was moved to declare that identity is "precisely that quality in a person, or group, that cannot be appropriated by others".
He points out that Defonseca is really Catholic, not seeming to realise that this is one of the best examples of how imprecise and up-for-grabs identity can be. Did Defonseca's scam turn Mendelsohn into an "identity fundamentalist"? It's dangerous to view identity as sacred or unchangeable, for identity is highly invented, not always by ourselves. The point of discussing Defonseca's tall tale isn't that she stole somebody else's Jewish identity. It's that Jewish identity, like any other, can be imposed on one person, while another tries to adopt it voluntarily. It's already difficult to define who is authentically Jewish or what being Jewish means - something Mendelsohn should know - and that's why non-Jews can sometimes identify with Jews. In her own crude way, Defonseca may have been alluding to this - but the wolves in her story don't help us to see that.
What, finally, is up with all those wolves? Fortunately for American memoirist Augusten Burroughs, A Wolf at the Table is not meant to be taken literally. His next memoir, about his philosophy professor dad, will be out next week.
