by Paul Theroux
If this does not seem too inconvenient, I would very much like to visit you and have a chat—as a sister.
I enclose a stamped envelope for your convenience.
Sincerely,
Victoria Ashby
There was no reply. A few months later I tried again.
5 Feb 1995
Dear Ms. Middleton,
Late last year I sent you the enclosed note. May I say that now that I have read even more of your writing I admire you even more! I would very much like to have an answer to my letter, so that I might begin planning a visit to you, at which time I would be pleased to show you some of my own writing.
Yours ever,
Nothing, no response, and for some reason I remembered the silly old song we used to sing in Africa:
Mary had a little lamb.
It was mzuri sana.
It stuck its nose
Up Mary's clothes
Until she cried, "Hapana!"
SIX
The Writer and His Reader
1
ANTHONY BURGESS enjoyed the story I told him of how the distinguished critic and poet William Empson, author of Seven Types of Ambiguity, interrupted himself while discussing an obscure metaphysical poet with a friend of mine and got onto his knees and said unambiguously, "I want to kiss your pretty little thing."
My friend, who was a great reader and who loved Empson's work, said no thanks in a stammering voice and helped the professor to his feet.
The poetry discussion continued for another hour, at which point Empson's charlady served them tea and cookies.
Empson said to her, "He won't let me kiss his pretty little thing."
The charlady laughed indulgently and poured the tea. She said, "These Yanks!"
Professor Empson, seventy-something, lumpish and elderly, with gray flesh and wild hair and bristly cheeks, wearing a shapeless woolen sweater, stared at my friend, his discolored teeth showing through his thin lips, smiling and "looking thirsty."
That was when my friend made for the door. He was shocked, and because it showed, Empson just laughed at him. Burgess laughed at him too when I told him the story in London, and I did not understand why until years later I read Burgess's autobiography and discovered that at various times during his first marriage he and his wife had experimented with a ménage à trois. "I've tried just about everything," Burgess wrote.
I told Sam Lettfish that story, too. It fell flat. "Empson isn't collected," he explained. So the story bored him. But, "I'm one of Burgess's greatest readers," he said. "I'm a book lover. Does that sound corny?"
No. Just American.
He said he had brought three boxes of Burgess's books for the author's signature.
"I keep doing these wacky things!"
This was at an event at the Festival Hall in London, a staged interview with me, where Burgess was the special guest and I prodded him with questions. Afterwards, members of the audience came forward with copies of books for Burgess to sign, and the one with the most books was this man Lettfish, who was told to stand at the back of the line because he had so many. Lettfish even had a man to carry his boxes. Lettfish was not happy about being made to wait.
That was when he made the remark about being one of Burgess's greatest readers, and he added, "I'm kind of a little Burgess myself."
We were standing near the line of people waiting for signatures. Burgess and I were being given lunch by the South Bank people, and I wanted Burgess to meet my older son, who had just begun to study Russian.
"He is the most articulate of modern novelists. I've been collecting him for years. There's tons of material." Lettfish was agitated. "I've got the largest Burgess archive in private hands. I'm as bad as he is!"
Modern Firsts—they were a passion of the early eighties, along with junk bonds and antique maps and Japanese netsukes. Good, clean collectibles. The books had to have dust jackets—"original wrappers"—no foxing or stains, nothing ex-library.
"You must have some Burgesses," Lettfish said, looking me over as though he had just realized that I might have some value. "I'm always searching for association copies."
That was another prized category in the Modern Firsts, an item such as Stephen Spender's own copy of Eliot's Four Quartets, "with some marginal comments in pencil and ballpoint in Spender's hand."
"Funny you should mention Empson. I've got William Empson's review copy of Burgess's Nothing Like the Sun. Bound galleys. Mint."
"I just read paperbacks and throw them away," I said, to tease him.
"Letters, notebooks, manuscripts," he was saying. "The corrected typescript of The Doctor Is Sick. I paid seven thousand for it. Listen, if you've got any Burgess material you want to sell, get in touch."
He passed me his business card and signaled for his book-box carrier to join him in line. And when it was his turn, he stacked up his Firsts and Burgess put his elegant and easily readable signature on the half-title page of each one, while Lettfish pressed him with questions.
'"You're nuts,' people say to me. I don't care. I'm as bad as you are!"
Burgess was hunched over the books, perspiring, working his pen; he heard nothing. I examined Lettfish's card. He was an attorney, with an office, Littler and Lettfish, in New York City and another in Lincoln's Inn Fields.
The signing over, Burgess got up and stretched and clawed at his hair, and turned his back on Lettfish and the rest of his readers.
"I'm rather peckish," he said to them as they closed in on him. "You will excuse me, won't you?"
"You know, that last man, with all the books, is a real collector of yours," I told Burgess at lunch. "He owns the largest Burgess archive in private hands."
"What man?"
"Lettfish. He believes you to be the most articulate of modern novelists."
"Ballocks."
After that, I began hearing from Sam Lettfish, polite but persistent notes and phone calls. He invited me for lunch, and he asked me again whether I had anything to sell—letters or postcards from Burgess. Lettfish sought me out because I was friendly with Burgess, and Burgess was rarely in London. I resisted his invitations at first, but then in a moment of weakness I asked Lettfish's help. He gave me legal counsel and quickly solved for me what could have become a terrible tax problem. Lettfish refused payment. I was so grateful I made him a gift of a Burgess postcard to me, written half in Malay, in Jawi script.
This exchange of favors between Lettfish and me put us in touch and kept me respectful.
"That was one great momento," Lettfish said—it was his usual pronunciation of the word. "Hey, you're worse than I am."
My instinct was to be courteous and not alienate bankers or tycoons like Lettfish, because they were well connected, and who did I know? The fact that they did not mention their power only made me feel weaker. I saw Lettfish occasionally, but I felt he had no interest in me. "Do you mind not smoking?" he said to me one day after lunch as we sat drinking coffee. He was the host, so I put my pipe away. Then we resumed our conversation. Our talk was nearly always about Burgess. Talking about him excited Lettfish, but it made me miss him.
I valued my friendship with Burgess because I felt that I somewhat resembled him. We had both been raised Catholic, in the age of the Latin mass, and as the liturgy had become folksy and English-speaking, playing show tunes after the Consecration instead of the Agnus Dei, all that hugging and hand holding, he had lapsed and so had I. But the Church had done its work, my conscience was like a black maggot in my mind, and we went on, still regarding our souls as stained indelibly with sin.
The young sinner from the provinces, escaping from a large messy family, is a familiar literary figure in a great tradition, as both a writer and a central character. That was Burgess in Manchester, and I in Medford. But instead of finding our fortunes in the metropolis (London in his case, New York in mine), we had expatriated ourselves and headed for distant parts of the globe—Europe and then the equatorial world. His first good work was done in the trop
ics, and that work had inspired me to do mine, in a similar sort of place. I remember the rainy Saturday afternoon in 1964 on which I bought the Penguin edition of Time for a Tiger: in Nyasaland, at the Limbe Trading Company, three shillings and sixpence.
Reading it, I felt vindicated in my decision to have gone as far away from home as possible, and I was heartened that he had found a subject in his remote place. His book convinced me that I could do the same—write about the postcolonial world of a small, newly independent country. At that time few writers had done it, just Burgess and V'S. Naipaul. I needed the encouragement of their example. I was alone; I knew that from 1963 until 1965, when I left, I was the only person in the central African country of Nyasaland writing a novel, and then I was the only person in Uganda doing it.
Burgess was prolific, impatient, funny, modest, self-mocking, with a gift for mimicry. He wrote everything; he wrote with both hands. I was not the linguist he was, and I knew nothing of music, yet his example gave me heart. He was a traveler, a teacher, a natural expatriate; he was a perceptive and witty critic; he had no literary circle. He was old enough to be my father. That was crucial. I admired him for the way he had made himself a grand absentee.
I read everything of his that I could find, about a dozen novels. I kept traveling, and I went on writing. After I married Alison and we moved to Southeast Asia, I finally met Burgess with some of my colleagues from the English department in 1969, in a Chinese restaurant in Singapore. He was passing through on his way to Australia. His jet lag gave him the sleepless, puffy face of someone on medication, and he was slightly drunk and dyspeptic, but indignant on our behalf because the Singapore government was leaning on us, saying that the study of English was useless.
"English literature is probably the greatest the world has ever known," Burgess said that night, drinking gin in a towkay's shop, rocking on a wooden stool under a croaky ceiling fan, among the strung-up air-dried ducks and the trays of chicken feet. "And since literature is all about morality, it is the most civilized discipline imaginable. That's why the politicians are against you."
"I don't care," I said. "I want to become a novelist."
"I know your work," he said. "You are already a novelist."
"I mean, make a living at it."
"Just keep away from Hollywood. 'Never any luck with movies,' Scott Fitzgerald said. 'Stick to your last, boy.' Look at me. My relationship with Hollywood is a case of unrequited love," he said. "And I only made about fifteen thousand Straits dollars on A Clockwork Orange."
"I want to leave here," I said to him in a confidential way.
"Stay in Singapore as long as you are able to write. Try to avoid getting sandfly fever. That turned my first wife into a dipso and eventually killed her. You'll know when it's time to leave."
Soon after, I resigned my university job to give Harry Lazard poetry lessons, a leap in the dark that brought me to London like a refugee, where I carried a green resident-alien card for a year and then was granted permission to live there with Alison and our two sons.
Five years passed. There was the night of the staged interview with Burgess and my first meeting with Sam Lettfish. Afterwards, at one of our lunches, I mentioned Singapore. Lettfish said, "I like the Singapore parts of Burgess's Malayan trilogy," and then, "I had a friend in Singapore, Harry Lazard."
"I knew him," I said.
"I represented him in a very big case involving apparently forged end-user certificates in the sale of military hardware."
"I gave him poetry lessons," I said.
"Fayette, did you meet her?"
"Sure," I said, and I wondered what more I dared to say.
"She had a steamy affair with President Sukarno of Indonesia in the sixties," Lettfish said.
I tried to imagine the big blond woman taking on the dictator known to his people as the Great Bung.
"She's as bad as I am," Lettfish said. "Worse." And he added, "Something like that can make a woman's husband very insecure."
"He introduced me to Nathan Leopold, the murderer," I said.
"Harry's as crazy as me."
"I wonder where Harry Lazard is now."
"Israel, I imagine," Lettfish said. "He was pretty broken up after Fayette left him. Did you say poetry lessons?"
"Yes," I said, and I explained.
"He's worse than I am!"
But I was thinking how I did not know Lettfish, nor had I really known Harry Lazard, nor his ex-wife. Lettfish knew me superficially, I hardly knew Burgess, Lettfish did not know Burgess at all. Yet we were paddling on in this shallow pool of names and acquaintances and trivia and pretending it was reality.
Burgess was still in England then. I thought that he was living in Fulham or Putney, somewhere in the riverine suburbs of west London. We were fellow reviewers in London literary journalism, appearing in the weeklies and Sundays and selling our review copies at Gaston's. But after Lettfish inquired (he badly wanted to meet Burgess privately), I discovered that Burgess lived in Brighton, "in the gull-clawed air."
"It must be Hove," Lettfish said. "Enderby lived in Hove"—naming a character from Burgess's novels. "Remember when Vesta Bainbridge visited him?"
It seemed to me that Lettfish was once again confusing art with life, but it turned out that he was right. I asked Burgess the next time I saw him at Gaston's, and he confirmed that he was indeed living in Hove on the south coast, but that he was planning to leave pretty soon.
"I hate the light here," Burgess said. "I need more sunlight. I can't work in this inspissated darkness."
He also hated paying English taxes. "I've been a fool long enough." He contemplated living in Ireland, but he was too Irish himself to be happy there. He left England for Malta, found it repressive and priest-ridden, moved to Monaco, then Italy, and traveled a great deal, teaching and lecturing in the United States with the reels of A Clockwork Orange in his luggage, which he showed to impress or amuse his audiences.
After Burgess left England Lettfish sought me out more often, precisely because Burgess was not around. I sometimes had a drink with Burgess when he passed through London, I occasionally bumped into him in New York, and once we presented a joint lecture in Strasbourg. By then our age difference did not matter. I had never been his protégé, only his acquaintance. He was a man with no intimates.
One of the characteristics of English writers was that they all spent time on Grub Street and many went on living there. They were generally hard-working and unsnobbish and entirely democratic and uncompetitive. A writer's life was harder but simpler there since writing was classless and essentially unprofitable. We read each other, we wrote about each other; even the grandest hacked at reviews. Everything was fine until an English writer struck it rich with a bestseller in America, or a movie; and then his money set him apart, and he was sneered at and envied and sniped at, and he became "the shit in the shuttered chateau," despised for having a good income and a life of ease.
Burgess was kind to me but he could be irascible, and the way he puffed his foul-smelling Schimmelpennick or held it in his trembly fingers like a smoldering pencil made my eyes water. He loathed the English middle class and grew very cross at what he took to be manifestations of philistinism. Even in casual conversation he used his writing words—"vatic," "idiolect," "thaumaturge," "claudicate." He insisted on staying in the best hotels, always Claridges in London; and he pleaded poverty, perhaps because he was self-conscious about his hard work and his prolific output. Though he tried to be frugal, he was a lavish tipper, as people from humble origins often are, out of fear and sympathy, understanding the people who serve them, knowing how weak and envious they can be, the big tip a clumsy attempt to placate them.
"Does he drink?" Lettfish asked me. Lettfish was a cautious drinker—overalert, nursing his half pint of beer, always mistakenly calling it "bitters."
"A certain amount."
"I'll bet he's as bad as I am," Lettfish said. "I'm always swigging something."
In fact Burges
s drank a great deal, but he was not a drunk. He was far too dedicated to his writing to coarsen or belittle it with booze. It was only after his day's work was done that he guzzled gin, swilled wine, hoisted glasses of beer. "Are you leaving that?" he once said to me in a London restaurant as I put down a glass of wine I could not finish. And then he drained it in a single gulp. He was a marvel to me, with an active mind. Alcohol gave him back his Irishness and made him forgivable. The few times I had seen him drunk he had a look of vulnerability and pathos that you see on the faces of some people who equate drunkenness with shame, a look of suffering and guilty surprise.
I never knew any writer who worked harder or was more generous. Of course he had his pick of the best of the week's books, while upstarts like Ian Musprat and I rummaged among his leavings. But it was only Burgess who was intellectually equipped and had the style and the confidence to review a new edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica or the Oxford English Dictionary or, as the sequence was published, the eleven volumes of Pepys's Diary. He still made time for students, for aspiring writers. He wrote an introduction to the French translation of a novel of mine, Les Conspirateurs, and as a joke signed himself "Antoine Bourgeois."
He kept at it, writing, and composing music. "As for writing assignments, I accept all reasonable offers," he said, adding, "and many unreasonable ones." He was perhaps too restless and prodigious and impatient to be a great writer, but then greatness did not matter to him; he wished only to write well and be original. He was never cruel. There was wisdom in his generosity. I saw that as his greatest gift. That he could stand apart and see the value in someone else's effort.
"I tried to write a travel book once," he said. "We took a trip in our Bedford Dormobile to southern Italy—Calabria, actually. It was great fun, the food was wonderful, and every day I sat down and wrote about it."