Naipaul on the grounds of his Wiltshire house, in 1978. Photograph by Terry Smith / Time Life / Getty

The public snob, the grand bastard, was much in evidence when I interviewed V. S. Naipaul in 1994, and this was exactly as expected. A pale woman, his secretary, showed me in to the sitting room of his London flat. Naipaul looked warily at me, offered a hand, and began an hour of scornful correction. I knew nothing, he said, about his birthplace, Trinidad; I possessed the usual liberal sentimentality. It was a plantation society. Did I know anything about his writing? He doubted it. The writing life had been desperately hard. But, I said, hadn’t his great novel, “A House for Mr. Biswas,” been acclaimed on its publication? “Look at the people’s choices for the best books of the sixties,” he said. “ ‘Biswas’ is not there.” His secretary brought coffee, and retired. Naipaul claimed that he had not even been published in America until the nineteen-seventies, “and then the reviews were awful—unlettered, illiterate, ignorant.” The phone rang, and kept ringing. “I am sorry,” Naipaul said in exasperation. “One is not well cared for here.” Only as the secretary showed me out, and novelist and servant briefly spoke to each other in the hall, did I realize that she was Naipaul’s wife.

A few days later, the phone rang: “It’s Vidia Naipaul. I have just read your . . . careful piece in the Guardian. Perhaps we can have lunch. Do you know the Bombay Brasserie? What about one o’clock tomorrow?” The Naipaul who took me to lunch that day was different from the horrid interviewee. Stern father had become milder uncle. “It’s a buffet system here. Don’t pile everything onto one plate. That is vulgar. Put one small thing onto a plate, and when you have finished it they will come and take it away.” I didn’t think that he was making amends for his earlier behavior, nor that he had so admired my piece that he was compelled to meet me off duty. I thought he was merely curious to talk to someone in his late twenties about writing, and that the habits of a lifetime—the habits of the brilliant noticer, the committed world-gatherer—were asserting themselves almost automatically: he was working. “If you want to write serious books,” he said to me, “you must be ready to break the forms, break the forms. Is it true that Anita Brookner writes exactly the same novel every year?” It is true, I said. “How awful, how awful.”

The Indian social theorist Ashis Nandy writes of the two voices in Kipling, which have been called the saxophone and the oboe. The first is the hard, militaristic, imperialist writer, and the second is the Kipling infused with Indianness, with admiration for the subcontinent’s cultures. Naipaul has a saxophone and an oboe, too, a hard sound and a softer one. These two sides could be called the Wounder and the Wounded. The Wounder is by now well known—the source of fascinated hatred in the literary world and postcolonial academic studies. He disdains the country he came from: “I was born there, yes. I thought it was a mistake.” When he won the Nobel Prize, in 2001, he said it was “a great tribute to both England, my home, and India, the home of my ancestors.” Asked why he had omitted Trinidad, he said that he feared it would “encumber the tribute.” He has written of the “barbarism” and “primitivism” of African societies, and has fixated, when writing about India, on public defecation. (“They defecate on the hills; they defecate on the riverbanks; they defecate on the streets.”) When asked for his favorite writers, he replies, “My father.” He is socially successful but deliberately friendless, an empire of one: “At school I had only admirers; I had no friends.”

The Wounder, we learn from Patrick French’s extraordinary biography of Naipaul, “The World Is What It Is” (Knopf; $30), used and used up his first wife, Patricia Hale, sometimes depending on her, at other times ignoring her, often berating and humiliating her. And French’s biography, published earlier this year in Britain, is already notorious for a revelation that can only enrich our luxury of loathing: in 1972, Naipaul began a long, tortured, sadomasochistic affair with an Anglo-Argentine woman, Margaret Gooding. It was an intensely sexual relationship, which enacted, on Naipaul’s side, fantasies of cruelty and domination. On one occasion, jealous because Margaret was with another man, he said that he was “very violent with her for two days with my hand. . . . Her face was bad. She couldn’t really appear in public.”

The Wounded Naipaul is the writer who returns obsessively to the struggle, shame, and impoverished fragility of his early life in Trinidad; to the unlikely journey he made from the colonial rim of the British Empire to its metropolitan center; and to the precariousness, as he sees it, of his long life in England—“a stranger here, with the nerves of the stranger,” as he puts it in “The Enigma of Arrival” (1987). Again and again, his sense of aggrieved encirclement expands to encompass others, and he manages, with neither vanity nor condescension, to blend his woundedness with theirs: the empire of one is colonized by his characters. They range from the major to the minor, from the educated to the almost illiterate, from the real to the fictional, but they are united by their homelessness. They are the men in “Miguel Street” (1959), a book of linked stories rich in comedy and dialect, based on the street in Port of Spain, the capital of Trinidad, where Naipaul spent his formative years. Elias, for instance, dreams of being a doctor. “And Elias waved his small hands, and we thought we could see the Cadillac and the black bag and the tube-thing that Elias was going to have.” To become a doctor, Elias must sit for a British exam. A friend comments excitedly, “Everything Elias write not remaining here, you know. Every word that boy write going to England.” Elias fails the exam, and sits for it again. “Is the English and litritcher that does beat me,” he confesses. He fails it again. He decides to become a sanitary inspector. He fails that exam. He ends up as a cart driver, “one of the street aristocrats.” And there is Santosh, who narrates “One Out of Many,” the first story in “In a Free State” (1971). A servant from Bombay who accompanies his master to Washington, D.C., Santosh is quite lost, away from his old home. He wanders the American streets, sees some Hare Krishna singers, and for a moment thinks that they are Indians. And his mind yearns for his old life: