In his introduction to The World Is What It Is: The Authorised Biography of VS Naipaul (2008), Patrick French wrote, “My approach to writing biography is what it was when I began my first book. I wrote then that the aim of the biographer should not be to sit in judgement, but to expose the subject with ruthless clarity to the calm eye of the reader… Sometimes, a critic or biographer can see things that an author cannot.” As many writers have attested, the art of the biography is notoriously difficult to pin down. There’s a thin line that separates a good biography from a hagiography, a discretion at the disposal of only the most discerning of biographers.
It requires skill and wit, but also imagination — an ability to distance oneself from a subject just enough to be able to do justice to the story of the person’s life. It was an art that came naturally to French, the English writer and historian who passed away after a long battle with cancer on Thursday. French, 56, was known for biographies such as that of British Army officer Sir Francis Edward Younghusband, Younghusband: The Last Great Imperial Adventurer (1994) and The World Is What It Is, as well as works of history such as Liberty Or Death: India’s Journey to Independence and Division (1997).
If patience and curiosity were his strengths as a writer, French also had a generosity of spirit that made no room for malice in his criticism or scholarship. He wore his erudition with humility and with a commitment to nurturing a younger generation of writers and scholars — both in his personal capacity and during his tenure as the inaugural dean at the School of Arts and Sciences at Ahmedabad University between 2017 and 2021. French will be missed, for the depth and luminosity of his scholarship and writing, and for the books he will write no more.
