Even before the whoring revelations, Naipaul's first wife, a middle-class woman named Patricia Hale whom he'd met while he was a student on scholarship to England, had known about a prior mistress--but only because Naipaul himself decided one day to tell her, explaining the violent acts he enjoyed with the woman, some of them memorialized in photographs he brought along to aid the explanation.
The woman's name was Margaret Gooding, and Naipaul met her in 1972 in Buenos Aires. French's new biography of Naipaul, The World Is What It Is, quotes extensively from her letters: unbearable scrawls that read like clinical case studies drawn from the pages of Leopold von Sacher-Masoch. She begs, moans, despairs, and pleads for Naipaul's "cruel sexual desires." She calls him her "god," her "black master." Her multiple abortions of his children sicken her, but she offers them up to him as proof of her love and abasement.
5 comments:
Nellie goes young, gives Jackson a break in a 115-98 loss in Sacramento.
yea, sure glad I missed that stinker
my back is completely out again- i have no feeling in my left foot- i blame the fucking Tiki Room
I'm not allowed to do anything but gently change sitting positions- let me give you some perspective on how bad it is- today, I read Their Eyes Were Watching God in full.
I sought redemption in Old School, which just finished and gave me some hope for humanity. Read about the 49ers debacle and silently chuckled. What will Singletary drop tonight? Who will feel the brunt of Rowell's axe? Can Al fire three coaches in a single year?
Instead, watch real professional sports in the pretend community of San Jose on Thursday night. I'll be the guy walking back and forth up the aisles with the look of a man slowly sucking prune juice after a weekend at Alameda County.
jesus, sir- you're reduced to copying and pasting from Arts and Letters?
Not even a paraphrase?
it's kinda perfect...
upon John Leonard's death, from Salon-
He went on, in that inimitable style, "The books we love, love us back. In gratitude, we should promise not to cheat on them -- not to pretend we're better than they are; not to use them as target practice, agitprop, trampolines, photo ops or stalking horses; not to sell out scruple to that scratch-and-sniff infotainment racket in which we posture in front of experience instead of engaging it, and fidget in our cynical opportunism for an angle, a spin, or a take, instead of consulting compass points of principle, and strike attitudes like matches, to admire our wiseguy profiles in the mirrors of the slicks. We are reading for our lives, not performing like seals for some fresh fish."
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