by Paul Theroux
"I'd love to read that book."
"Couldn't do it. After about two weeks I saw that everything I had written was rubbish," he said. "But I'll tell you something. I read your book, Railway Bazaar, once a year."
That was a Burgess compliment, and typically grand, but I knew he liked the book and now I had an inkling of why he liked me. I had written something that he had not managed himself. He had become my reader, too. But it was also the reason I admired him, and many other writers, because I saw myself as incapable of writing what they had. Not knowing exactly how a writer wrote a book, yet being fully aware of a brilliant writer's ability to enter the reader's soul: that was the key. How did they do it?
A reader might admire a writer, but only another writer saw the magic. I sometimes felt I was Burgess's only reader. That was why I was puzzled and amused by Lettfish, who because he collected Burgess's books felt he owned a piece of him. It offended me that Lettfish did not see the misery in a bright page of print. The presumption in his expression "I collect him" gave me the creeps.
I was in awe of all fine writers' achievements and was still trying to understand the mystery of their lives. I knew what few readers knew, that you had to be that particular writer in order to write that particular book. My admiration for their work grew out of my puzzlement: I could not imagine how they had done it. Such writers inspired me by first proving I was stupid, and then making me feel wise. A person reading a wonderful book is overwhelmed by feelings of inspiration and ignorance, bafflement and belief, and becomes a sort of dogged, dazzled apostle, limping after the priestly figure of the writer.
I knew how ordinary writers had produced their books. It was no secret. There was a fine carpentry, obvious to another writer, that was woodwork but not art; you knew all this joinery and how it was hinged. Nonwriters often recommended books to me. I would mention New York City and they'd say, "You should read..." and they named a current book. There was no way that I could explain to a nonwriter that such books might be energetic and newsworthy but that they were uninspired and overpraised. I looked at them and knew just how they were made. I did not mock, but I felt I could do the same—indeed, I had done it.
But so many other writers were brilliant that it made me love the act of writing and hope to be inspired and not intimidated. I never compared our work; I often compared our lives. I did not know a single writer who was any good who had had it easy.
Burgess had been hard up like me. The struggle had made him cranky and large-hearted and it had energized his books and made them live. His writing might look artless but it had vitality. He loved language too much for his books not to seem somewhat mannered, yet I saw that this extravagant wordplay was a handicap; not eloquence but clumsiness, more like an endearing speech defect, a lovable lisp.
I loved his work because it was not brilliant, and yet it disturbed me and seemed to defy gravity and, hovering, giving the illusion of concreteness, it contained enormous ambiguity, a floating pillow stuffed with impartial paradoxes—Burgess especially mingled good and evil. He was one of the handful of writers whose work I admired because, although I could not duplicate it, I saw how it was attainable. He had talent but not genius; that was another reason I read him closely, because I could understand and learn. These writers inspired me not to be like them but to be myself. They filled me with a desire to write my own fiction.
Burgess at last stayed abroad, for tax reasons, though he made Joycean noises about art and exile. Lettfish pursued me more than ever and became strident in his invitations, about half of which I accepted—for lunch, for drinks. It bothered me that I did not reciprocate. It did not bother him—rather, he seemed to enjoy the idea of my indebtedness. I wondered why I put up with him, and I decided that his collecting fascinated me, the appetite it showed, the eye for detail, the patience, the need to acquire, most of all the wealth it illustrated.
It was another of Lettfish's expressions of power that he included in his collection insignificant and high-priced articles of Burgess's life because they were so scarce. Lettfish owned one of Burgess's old passports, a pewter mug from Kota Bharu presented by the Sultan to Burgess, a leather satchel once owned by Burgess, a paper napkin Burgess had doodled on—not words or sketches but notes and lines of music—a Russian-English dictionary with Burgess's bookplate, an airline ticket (London—New York) in Burgess's name.
Lettfish did not boast about these items. "I'm always buying these crazy things!" If he had been a collector and no more than that, I would not have agreed to see him. But he was a reader. He had read everything that Burgess had written. Knowing the work was as important to him as owning it. He could quote whole paragraphs verbatim, he could repeat dialogue, he knew the characters, what they ate, how they dressed, their reactions. We were in a restaurant where the service was slow. "I know what Victor Crabbe would say at a moment like this." In a pub, Lettfish turned and said of the barman, "He looks like Paul Hussey," naming another Burgess character. It pleased me when Lettfish said that Burgess's work gave him a sensitivity to language and a feel for geography—the Russia of Honey for the Bears, the England of Enderby, the Malaya of The Long Day Wanes.
"Does the Africa of Devil of a State ring true?" Lettfish asked me. "You've lived there."
"It's all made up. Burgess set the novel in Africa so that he wouldn't be sued for libel. It's really about Brunei."
"Mind not doing that?"
I was puffing my pipe. I palmed it, inwardly raging, insulted at having to carry out his order.
"What was I talking about?" Lettfish asked.
"I haven't the slightest idea." I stared at him.
Lettfish sniffed and said, "So that country Dunia doesn't exist?"
"Dunia means 'the world' in Malay and, I think, in Arabic."
Such trivia made me seem knowledgeable, and so he ended up valuing me.
I'm kind of a little Burgess myself, Lettfish had said when we first met. What did he mean by that? I supposed that he identified with the Burgess antihero, how he was always victimized by women, and drank too much, and complained of ill health, and was overcharged and snubbed. Burgess's men were in constant physical discomfort, they were romantics, they tended to be well read, they always wore badly fitting dentures. They felt out of place in big cities, especially American cities. They were frightened by crime, by young thugs, they traveled a great deal, yet they hated it. They were morally strong, often indignant, but they were physical cowards. They ended up disabled and broke rather than dramatically dead. They were self-mocking. Even the dimmest of them were able to speak several languages.
They were, in short, all of them Anthony Burgess.
Burgess's books were Lettfish's education. They simplified his adjustment to living in England, and because Burgess was expert at describing the discomforts of London and his uneasy sense of Englishness—a provincial, a Catholic, who had earned his literary stripes in the colonies—Lettfish was vindicated in his own London uneasiness.
At one of our lunches, Lettfish—who was always the host—asked me how I liked living in London. I told him the truth: I was happy here. Afterwards I pondered the happiness, the way that sometimes on a tube train I looked at the face of a lovely woman, scrutinizing her nose, her eyes, her hair, her skin, her lips, her legs: what element, or combination of them, accounted for this beauty?
My London happiness was my big brick house, the quiet street, the way my desk faced Victorian windows, the giant sycamore outside, the backwater of south London. It was my family most of all. I hardly thought about living in London. The city was outside the window, beyond the sycamore and the garden wall: the glimpses of wet roof slates, the black streets, red buses—and everything in the foreground was private, personal, safe, lighted with love and warmth, fragrant with flowers and food. That was my London—my house.
Burgess's books helped Lettfish like England better. They gave him a certain style—that is, he saw that his own style was quite good enough. Burgess's characters were flawed
human beings, like the writer himself. And beneath the surface of Burgess's writing, where mockery became fondness, was an affection for Americans and a resentment of England. Burgess was one of those class-hating and reluctant Englishmen who was happier among Americans, because they were generous and didn't judge, and yet perversely he kept a sneering stiff upper lip only when he was talking to Americans.
Lettfish's vocabulary was crammed with Burgess words. Who else said "proleptic" or "pelagic"? Lettfish also used the words "hali-totic" and "lexeme" correctly. He sometimes overdid it with something like "brachycephalic." I had the sense that Lettfish was a better man for knowing Burgess's work; and reading the books that Burgess reviewed, he was better read, better able to cope in London, funnier, more conversational. Burgess, a relentless pedagogue (so many of his fictional characters were English teachers), was Lettfish's teacher.
He implored me to arrange a dinner for him and Burgess. He had been asking me to do this for some time, but—as I told him—I hardly saw Burgess in London. Once he had left England I saw him only a few times. He came unannounced and was hard to pin down and furtive in a way I associated with most writers, and he always left in a hurry. I did not really want to have dinner with him. We could never be close friends. I wanted simply to know him and to go on being his reader.
It was about this time that I stopped reading my day's work to Alison in the evenings. With both children away at school during the week, our lives changed. We both worked later than usual—dinnertime could be flexible, there was only the two of us. The evening had once been long and eventful, beginning with the children's dinner, ending after our meal, as I sat reading the two pages or so I had written that day. Now it was different, emptier, Alison's workday was longer, we sometimes ate separately, and now and then I went to bed alone, or she did. Though she always read the finished typescript, I had stopped reading to her. I sensed that something important was ending between us but I could not say what it was.
Lonelier, more susceptible to offers of hospitality, I saw more of Lettfish, and he reminded me each time that he was eager to have dinner with Burgess. I was willing to arrange it—I owed it to Lettfish, I felt. But it was not possible because Burgess was unavailable; that is to say, in Italy, or else in Los Angeles.
And I reminded Lettfish—who paid no attention—that Burgess was not a close friend but an acquaintance, whom I had known ten years, having met him in 1969 in Singapore. It was now 1981. I had no friends in England, I had numerous acquaintances. I had no friends anywhere. For Burgess it was the same thing. Friendship in any intimate sense, implying sacrifice and love and an unquestioning willingness to confide, is almost impossible for a writer. My writer acquaintances—Ian Musprat, for example—did not have any friends either.
Still, Sam Lettfish, the collector, the lawyer, the version of Burgess, wanted to meet his favorite writer. I said I would try to fix it. Then one afternoon I was asked to appear with Burgess on a TV program to discuss Graham Greene's work—the occasion was a new novel of Greene's. Burgess flew in from Monaco. The taping was done at the BBC in White City in the afternoon, and while we sat in the fake library set of the studio waiting to begin, I said to him, "Are you and Liana free for dinner tonight?"
He said he was free, but that Liana was back in Monaco, laid up with a broken ankle—she had slipped on a hotel step in Monte Carlo. A horrible business, he said. He had sought compensation, the poor woman had not been able to work; but not only had he not received any money, Liana and he had been persecuted by the hotel's lawyer.
"Come to my house. You can forget all about it."
"That is very kind of you."
And after the taping I phoned Lettfish. "I apologize for the short notice, but can you come to dinner tonight?"
"Sorry," he said. "I have an important meeting with a client who has just flown in from Geneva on a tax matter."
"What a shame. Burgess is coming. I knew it was crazy, inviting you at such a late hour."
Was that a challenge? The earpiece of the receiver seemed to crackle and glow, as though charged with a jolt of electricity.
"I'll be there," Lettfish said.
2
As the host bringing together Burgess and Lettfish, the writer and his reader, I felt an apprehension that a marriage broker must know intensely when making an introduction, because even when prospective marriage partners might seem equal, one does most of the speaking, the other the listening. It was the physical business of the meeting that puzzled me most, because I always imagined the writer and the reader as separate people, not two big men in the same room. Perhaps that was why I had done nothing to arrange it in the preceding years, and had been not lazy but afraid.
I called Alison's office from the studio where we were taping the Greene program. This was just minutes after Lettfish told me that he was coming. Alison made a sound that indicated exasperation, unwillingness, resentment, a sudden gust of impatience that the telephone wires made even harsher. It was just a sigh, a syllable, intelligible only to a spouse and only after years of marriage. A long-married couple have the perfect ear for such uncooperative murmurs.
"What's wrong?" I said, because I knew this sound was a serious objection.
"Does it have to be tonight?"
"Yes." There was so much to explain. All the months and years that had passed since I first met Lettfish had led to this moment. "Shall I tell you why?"
"Don't bother. If you want to have these people over, fine. But I can't help you. We've had one crisis after another all day here. I was hoping I could go home and put my feet up. Have an early night."
"I wasn't asking for your help."
She made another noise, just air, that was like the beginning of a howl.
"Please," I said, and I meant: Give me a break, yell at me tomorrow, swallow your anger, play along and don't embarrass me.
"It's a weeknight."
"I have to do this."
She said, "All right," and though there was a reluctance tucked into her intonation, saying yes under protest, she was relenting. She knew desperation when she heard it.
After I thanked her, she said, "Why are you doing this to me?" And before I could reply to that, she said, "It's your dinner," and hung up.
Those responses were part of that dispute. They were lines. In marriage many conversations are the same conversation. We had been having this one more often lately, especially after I had stopped reading my daily pages to her. That part of the evening had been important when, as a writer, reading to her, I made her my reader.
Your dinner: that was fine with me. I had started the event in motion and I had to see it through. And now I knew that at a certain point tonight, probably just after dinner, when I was taking orders for coffee, Alison would say, "Now I am going to be very rude and uncivilized. I have to get up early tomorrow. I'm not even going to ask you to forgive me. Good night."
Early on, I had the sense the dinner was going to be a failure. The conversation with Alison confirmed this fear.
We rarely entertained. I have already mentioned that I had no friends in London. My London door was always locked. No one ever dropped in. No strangers entered the house. I had not had any friends since I had gotten married. In my peculiar temperament, which the passing years intensified, I regarded other people as intrusions and placed a special value on being alone.
I was reflecting on this as I made the dinner. Because Burgess had mentioned curry with approval in his Malayan novels, I decided to cook a prawn curry with channa dal. I bought two pounds of prawns at the fishmonger's in Clapham Junction on my way home from the Greene program and walked back through the rain.
The Malayan touch was coconut milk. I found a large can of it at a Jamaican grocery on Northcote Road. Back home, I put on the rice, peeled the prawns, chopped the garlic and onions and green pepper, sauteed them, then made a flour and curry powder paste, added water and vegetable stock, and thickened it. This gave me a half gallon of curry sauce. Half of it I wou
ld use for the prawns, adding coconut milk to it; the rest was for the dal, to which I added red pepper and two chopped tomatoes and some crushed cardamom pods, along with three cans of chickpeas.
While the sauce simmered, I chopped a cucumber for the yogurt raita and made a plate of sambals, garnishes that Burgess would recognize from his days in Kota Bharu. It was almost seven. If we ate at eight-thirty or thereabouts, there would be enough time for the dal to simmer and reduce. It was simple cooking but its strong flavor made it seem ambitious. The thing to avoid was overcooking the prawns. I intended to put them into the sauce just before the meal, so they wouldn't curl and toughen and become flavorless.
Alison came into the kitchen just as I finished the last of the chopping. She poured herself a glass of wine and said, "What are you going to give them to drink?"
"There's wine and beer."
"What if they want whiskey?"
"They can have wine instead."
"Oh, God."
"All right, will you go out and buy some whiskey?"
"This isn't my dinner party!" Alison said, and the note of hysteria in her voice made me fearful.
I said, "You're right. I should have some whiskey. I'll go get some from the off-license."
"I'm so tired."
She spoke in a persecuted way. That was a definite signal that she would go to bed early, leaving me to handle the guests.
Rain in London had a sooty quality that soaked the city in its own smoky odor. I walked quickly through the drizzle. The corner shop—the Paki store, as it was known, though the owners were Indians, Hindus from Gujarat—was open all hours, and sold groceries and tobacco and newspapers and overpriced liquor, as well as renting TV sets. They were young, with a fat, squally infant and a slavering guard dog: England's new nation of shopkeepers. I bought a bottle of Scotch and, passing the Fishmonger's Arms, I glanced in and wished that I could be sitting there irresponsibly reading the evening paper over a pint of draft Guinness.