London: Noble laureate and Booker Prize winner V S Naipaul's new biography The World Is What It Is contains his own admission that the mental cruelty he meted out to his first wife Patricia might have claimed her life.
Authored by Patrick French, the book may worsen Naipaul's reputation as an arrogant and rude novelist, something that has already cost him many friends in the literary world.
It is said that Naipaul tormented Patricia for four decades, visited prostitutes, and kept a mistress for 24 years before he suddenly abandoned his wife to marry yet another woman.
French writes in his book that Patricia knew about her husband's long-standing mistress Margaret Gooding, which caused her to suffer almost a quarter of a century trapped in the triangle.
The book, however, suggests that Patricia came to know about her husband's visits to prostitutes only after he himself boasted about it in a magazine interview in 1994, the time when Patricia had just a had mastectomy and was in remission from cancer.
According to the book, the disclosure upset Patricia, and she died two years later.
"I think that consumed her. I think she had all the relapses and everything after that. She suffered. It could be said that I killed her. It could be said. I feel a little bit that way," the Telegraph quoted Naipaul as admitting in the biography.
Naipaul himself entrusted the task of producing his biography to French, and did not place any restriction on him.
French was afforded free access to all of Naipual's papers.
He is also the first person ever to read Lady Patricia's 24 volumes of diaries, kept under lock and key at the University of Tulsa since Naipaul sold his archive for 620,000 dollars.
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