I hate the "great author, awful human being" formulation. These are not separate things; the terms of Naipaul's canonization as "great" were precisely the set of ideological positions that made his work conducive to the powers that were during his lifetime.
I'm pretty sure my piece tried to show how the two were connected.
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Oh, sure! But I just don't accept it. "Civilization, he felt, was a small clearing in a forest, a fragile haven that was always on the verge of reverting to the wild." He was really wrong! And was related intimately to his racism; Africa as abyss into which "we" risked falling.
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I reject it the way an atheist rejects a religious allegory, I suppose; you just can't call something great when it rests on this kind of foundation of belief, I would say.
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