Diana Athill on VS Naipaul: ‘I worked very hard at keeping affection for him'

I remember the night Vidia won the Booker prize for In a Free State in 1971. He’d always behave as if things like this were a bore, and he said he wouldn’t go. I very rarely scolded him, but at this point I said: “You will bloody well come. How can we go on publishing you if you won’t collaborate?” He behaved reasonably well. He didn’t walk out, which he often did. I don’t think he ever thanked anyone for anything, but he rather grudgingly went up and got his cheque.

By that stage I was working very hard at keeping affection for him. I’d liked him very much when he was young because he was so clever and funny. I remember our first meeting in a coffee shop in Soho, near my office. He was this little, very shy person and I was delighted by his stories. Francis Wyndham loved them too, but André Deutsch was doubtful – he wondered who was going to buy these stories about someone talking in a Trinidadian way about things that nobody in England cared about. André said he had to write a novel first and if that was successful we’d publish the stories. Fortunately he was just finishing his first novel. The Mystic Masseur was quickly followed by The Suffrage of Elvira. But the stories – Miguel Street, published in 1959 – are very good and they add up to a wonderful picture of Trinidad.

I admired him enormously. What was wonderful was that he’d made himself – he’d set out to be a writer and he had done it. He must have had an instinct for it, but it was very deliberate. And of course I always liked his work but I began to dislike him more and more as a person, because of how he was about his wife, Pat. She might not have existed. She once said to me: “Vidia doesn’t like me coming to parties because I’m so boring.” She went on being his wife even when he’d been with Margaret, his Argentinian lover, for a long time. He, foolish man, had never read Pat’s diaries and handed them over to his biographer, Patrick French, saying write as you find, which Patrick bravely did. There was a lot in those diaries that was very chilling.

I’d never disliked anything in his books until Guerrillas, in 1975. It was based on people I knew and he’d got the woman completely wrong. I said he might perhaps rethink things and he went quite still and then said: “I’m sorry, I did the best I could”, and walked out of the room. I thought, now what? “Now what” was his agent ringing to say he was leaving. He came back, but Vidia and I were much more businesslike after that. We never had lunch together or talked about anything except the books.

The first time he left, I remember saying to André: “It’s such a relief I don’t have to make myself like him any more.” André roared with laughter and I realised he felt just the same. He was so moody and depressive. You only had to look at his face to see that he was genuinely suffering a lot of the time.

The end of our publishing relationship was quite sober. I stopped caring and it was much easier. He was easily the most difficult writer I’ve ever worked with. After we stopped working together I never saw him again. His last wife would say: “Oh you must come and see him,” but I never did. When I heard he’d won the Nobel prize in 2001 I was very pleased. I think I sent him a congratulatory letter. You don’t have to be a good person to be a good writer.

He was never our biggest selling writer. We hung on to him because in those days we could afford to, if we admired someone’s writing. If it was today, I doubt he would have had a career like that, because publishers can’t support writers who don’t sell. Those were nicer days. And the wonderful thing is that A House for Mr Biswas – which I think is his greatest novel – has never been out of print.