What Naipaul's essay, Grief, reveals

Let's not speak ill of the dead, but can anyone read the late V.S. Naipaul's essay in the current NYer, Grief, and not draw some conclusions about VSN's personality. No doubt there was much spoken and written in his lifetime about his cantankerous, at best, personality - yet for those who knew him only by his writings there was so much to appreciate, enjoy, absorb, and learn from that we could put aside any reservations about what he'd be like as a person/friend/neighbor/mentor. And of all his writings, probably none is as accessible and warm-hearted as his debut work, a tribute to her father who struggled over his lifetime to break out as a writer (he was a successful journalist, but in the smallest of small local newspapers in the Caribbean); he was a comic figure to be sure, but as we read A House for Mr. Biswas we can help but compare his desultory and eccentric career with the hard-earned success of his son VSN, fighting over his lifetime to succeed in England despite the condescension and distrust the established institutions displayed against a young, Caribbean writer. And this was a battle that VSN seemed to fight over his whole lifetime; he was a man who could hold a grudge. So as to this posthumously published essay, the first few pages, as we'd expect, depict VSN's grief at the death of his father, while VSN himself was struggling to make his way in Oxford and London; who are we to judge another's emotions, but we can't help but feel that VSN is confessing that he felt little emotion about his father, or at least expressed little emotion, as if his father's death was an interruption in his own struggle for literary recognition; he makes much of a some ridiculous vase his father had sent him and his visit to family friends in London to retrieve the vase. Some feels terribly displaced here. Then he moves on to describe the death of his younger brother, also a writer, about which he seems to have no kind feeling whatsoever (and in passing he mentions the death of a sister - I guess she doesn't really count, as she was not a writer). BTW - the ritual of mourning plays a much larger role in one of VSN's best novels, The Enigma of Arrival, to which this essay appears to be a counterweight. In the second half of this essay - actually, it probably comprises about 2/3 of the piece, VSN recounts his (or his partner, not wife) rescue of an abandoned kitten, his caring for the kitten over several years, and the ultimate death and burial of the cat - and it's only in this section that VSN comes close to describing what most of us would recognize as grief and sorrow. For a cat! He (or his estate) must have realized that this essay presents VSN as peculiar and unfeeling, in tears about a cat, cold and indifferent about his family members - and perhaps that this essay once and for all draws a demarcation between VSN and his family members. He didn't need them. He didn't need love or friendship, at least unless he could set all the terms. He was a major talent who provided the world with many great books - add to the list A Bend in the River - but he was most likely a miserable person, in both senses of the word "miserable."