I read Paul Theroux's book Sir Vidia's Shadow many years ago. It was just one person's account and point of view of course, but it was pretty damning as I recall.
I've read them both and Naipaul is the much better writer. Perhaps that always rankled. Anyway they "buried the hatchet" in 2011.
The arc of their relationship was quite a thing to follow in real-time. Having been familiar it through both of their accounts and allusions, over years, the fact of their falling out was a mystery until this came out—and helped shore the foundation for just how disappointing humans are.
Interesting. I just finished A Way In the World yesterday and there's more than one instance in that novel of an older man giving the narrator's work some harsh criticism; "You have passed a stool" was one remark.
Great essay. Naipaul's greatest talent aside from his incredible writing was how well he could communicate and project self-loathing, although from reading this essay I'm not sure if he realized it.
Reminder:
"I wanted to write about his cruelty to his wife, his crazed domination of his mistress that lasted almost 25 years, his screaming fits, his depressions, his absurd contention that he was the greatest writer in the English language (he first made this claim in Mombasa at the age of 34). "I am a new man," he assured me once, "as Montaigne was a new man." But did Montaigne frequent prostitutes, insult waiters and beat his mistress?"
-- from an article on NPR
"....financial precarity (his income through the 1970s averaged £7,600 a year)"
£100000 in today's money in 1970. £35000 in today's money in 1979. Minimum wage today about £23000.
The academic pedagogy of the fine arts is absolutely useless. The teaching that purports to be about technique is actually about aesthetics, and the teaching that purports to be about aesthetics is actually about technique. At the level that Naipaul and this article's author are working at, everything is unique and irreproducible, and standards can only be defined by exception: the only statement that can be made is "this is not good enough", and the struggle to specify "this", and why exactly it is not good enough, never ends. I could wish to have had criticism of this kind, but it is an extremely time-intensive process if it is not be (as it usually is) a series of isolated pinprick insights.
Part of being well read is being able to define what the 'this' you mention is and to articulate why you think 'this' is not good enough or is sublime either by using well defined terms and concepts (like control of time, narrative flow, definition of characters, the evocation of the Sanskrit 'rasa') or dipping into one's own inventive abilities to define a new concept for what you're trying to describe, something very common in philosophy.
My field is music, in which your reductions do not apply, but I will not insult literature by assuming that they apply there either. "Well defined" is the original mirage.