Sir Vidia's Shadow

by Paul Theroux

  After all his travels and all his work, he had insomnia again. His life was a monotony. He welcomed the birds’ singing in the morning. Sleeping pills made him asthmatic. He had lost weight—he was down to 120 pounds. This suffering was an omen: “It is time I set up house in another country.”

  He had started his Port of Spain book, a history, which he would eventually title The Loss of El Dorado. Doing research, reading everything on the subject, he stumbled across oddities of scholarship, such as the Spaniard who had devoted his life to proving that Columbus, Cervantes, and Saint Theresa were Jewish.

  In an aside in one letter he mentioned that I seemed very happy. That was astute of him. I was happy. I had fallen in love. This was about three months after returning to Uganda. I told Vidia about it and that I planned to get married to this woman, a teacher in Kenya whom I had met in Kampala. She was from London. He congratulated me, said he was delighted. He was also pleased to hear that his magazine pieces about India—the journalism—had been reprinted in Nairobi. I admired his confidence in saying, “It was a good piece of work, and I think one of the best things I have written.” He was putting India aside for good. He had no interest in writing about it ever again, he said.

  To cheer himself up, he took a trip to Denmark. But the place depressed him—all the conformity, and the prison cells of houses, the high taxes. Vidia found Danes to be bored and lonely and solitary. To lighten their hearts they drank themselves silly on booze cruises, called “spirit boats,” but ended up more depressed. The saddest expression of Danish solitude was their pornography, which was mere exhibitionism, without innovation: women with “legs wide apart” or men sitting naked on steps “so that the genitals hang visibly down.” He now hated the very word “Scandinavian” as “full of ice and death and sullen coitus.”

  A brilliant phrase like “sullen coitus” made me glad I knew him, and also glad to be in Africa, where coitus was never sullen. By the way, Vidia said, the Carib Indians worshiped a devil god called Mah-boya, who probably resembled his namesake, the Kenyan politician Tom Mboya, whose name Vidia always mispronounced.

  Still collecting gossip and hearsay for my study of rumors in Africa (their strangeness and their speed of travel), I reported to Vidia a story that involved Tom Mboya. A year before, Mboya’s infant son had mysteriously died. The death was mentioned in the newspapers, but without giving any details. According to the rumor, Mboya had murdered his own son because he had discovered the baby to be half white, the love child of Mrs. Mboya and the U.S. ambassador, William Attwood. This rumor, totally false, was circulating in the British expatriate community in Nairobi.

  Any day now, Vidia said, he was going to fly to the West Indies and the United States, to finish his book. But he did not go. His book continued slowly. The next time I heard from him, six weeks later, he was still in London. All his plans had changed.

  I had to promise, he insisted, that I would say nothing about a scoop he had just been offered by a magazine that had assigned him to do a profile-interview, in utmost secrecy, with Jacques Soustelle, a French intellectual and political renegade. I had never heard of the man. I had finished my Chinese-grocer novel and had started another; I was now spending all my free time in Embu, in upcountry Kenya, with my fiancée, who taught in an African school. I knew no one who was interested in Vidia’s secret.

  I wondered what to make of the journalism he was doing. He had told me once that he did such work for the money. His assignments meant foreign travel. They meant breaking off work on his book—a hard thing to do. I was teaching every day and also working on a novel, so it consoled me to hear about his interruptions.

  He asked in one letter whether he should call his West Indian history The Quest and the Question. The book was about two related stories separated by many years: the quest for El Dorado, the golden land, and the question of torture involving a notorious case in Trinidad. I timidly suggested that it seemed a weak and mechanical title and that El Dorado was such an evocative name, couldn’t that be part of it? To ingratiate myself, I told him I was also having a title problem with my new novel.

  He was scrapping his tide, he said in reply, and was glad to hear about my novel. Returning to his role of teacher, he asked me whether my novel had arisen out of “a still centre.”

  He went on, “Every good book suggests that the writer, however painful its subject, has arrived at some inward peace about it, some inner resolution, even of anger and despair, even though this peace and resolution is purely temporary. So that you know where a man stands.”

  That perception had come from the magazine work he was doing. He was opinionated, he had a strong personality, and magazine editors liked this kind of writer. He was being given many assignments. He also wrote pieces for American magazines. One was entitled, “What’s Wrong with Being a Snob?” In it, he made a case for the snob, as though snobs were a victimized minority.

  I had never met a snob who was not also a liar, and that was what was wrong about snobbery. But I did not say so to Vidia. His snobbery, like his article (which he never reprinted), seemed to be harmless posturing and pulling rank and, as I had seen, fueled mostly by fear.

  I got married in Kampala at the end of 1967. Vidia wrote to congratulate me and mentioned that he himself had been married for thirteen years. In closing, he asked me to buy him an ivory cigarette holder (elephants were still being recycled into such items then). And how about a big yellow meerschaum pipe? Could he have one of those too?

  Vidia was in the midst of change. He had decided to sell his house—the house he seemed so fond of. He was selling it for £12,000 to Tristram Powell, whom I had met at the dinner party at Vidia’s. It was actually worth £14,000, but this way Vidia would not need to pay an agent’s commission or have to deal with delays.

  He wanted to go to the United States. He wondered whether my older brother, Eugene, could help him find a house to rent in order for him to finish his book. After his book was done, he would be a journalist for a while, just for the money. When he had some money he would start a new book. He suggested that he had an idea for one.

  My writing about Africa stimulated him, he said. He too had been thinking of writing about Africa. He sent his love.

  In the middle of 1968, in his tiniest handwriting, an effect of concentrated writing and worry, he reflected on the paradoxes of being a writer. He was in Scotland, a houseguest at a baronial mansion. He complimented me on my letters to him.* They reminded him of Scott Fitzgerald’s, which he had been reading. Fitzgerald had written many letters to his daughter, Vidia said, all about writing. It was the sort of obsession that writers developed about their art. The origin of this was that we all started by wishing to be writers and by mimicking what we had read. Through work we eventually arrived at another level, doing a sort of writing we didn’t really understand. We became lost and questioned the point of writing. It was a problem both the schoolboy and the older writer had to solve.

  There was a strong, almost Buddhist element in writing, he said, in that good writing canceled out what had existed before. Even the second half of a book canceled out the first half, and each book canceled out the previous one and existed as a reincarnation of the earlier work.

  In this meditation in the Scottish mansion, Vidia reflected on the vanity of fame and posterity, because all the books in the library there seemed so dated. They no longer mattered; fame was nothing. Writers were steadily canceling themselves out, the new replacing the old. The paradox was that the better they were, the more likely they were to be rejected, for they created a standard that would be revised and superseded. That was the saddest part. “Really how unfair we are today to writers who educated us when we were young and sharpened our minds and gave us a new way of looking at the world and made us want to be writers.”

  Maugham was almost unreadable now, Vidia said, yet Maugham had once been important in shaping his sensibility. The worst aspect of the study of literature was that it dealt with the past, because lit
erature was alive and mattered, or else it was nothing.

  He urged me to consider the notion of time and tradition in relation to two prodigies of nineteenth-century English writing, Charles Dickens and Rudyard Kipling. They had each been immensely successful, yet in their writing they had described a much older version of their culture. This version had been ignored because lesser writers—copycats, missing the point—had simply gone on working in a literary tradition. For example, Kipling wrote about an India that was twenty years out of date, but Kipling’s contemporaries were still imitating Dickens, who himself had set his own books in an earlier period.

  With this wise lesson in literature, Vidia sent his love.

  I was encouraged to have him as a friend, and what he said was helpful to me, because I felt cut off in my house in Uganda, writing my third novel. The implication I drew from his air letter was that he saw me as a promising modernist, at a frontier in Africa, writing about what I knew. He was encouraging me; he wanted me to understand the paradoxes.

  I needed the help. It was June 1968. My first novel, Waldo, had gotten good reviews. Fong and the Indians was about to appear. I was at work on another novel with an African setting, Girls at Play. My first child, a son, had just been born. I had resigned from my job in Uganda and had been hired to teach in Singapore. I was flying by the seat of my pants.

  Departing from the blue Chinese-style air-letter forms, Vidia wrote across two sheets of note paper to congratulate us on our new baby. He also congratulated me on leaving Africa after more than five years. He frankly disapproved of the fact that I was going to Singapore to teach English literature, and he claimed never to have heard of the course I was to teach: Jacobean literature—Shakespeare’s contemporaries in the age of James I. But—and here came a Naipaul curve ball—“perhaps you might get me out there as a visiting idler.”

  It was just like Vidia to scorn the job I had taken in desperation, and to repeat his contempt for the study of literature, but at the same time to ask me to find him a slot as a visiting writer of the sort he had been, disastrously, in Uganda. It was a paradox he himself admitted. He tried to be high-minded, yet he was the first to confess his contradictions. The example of his candor was his greatest lesson.

  Knowing that I needed to establish myself in England, he suggested to the literary editor of The Times that I become a regular reviewer. The money was not the point—I would get £10 for each review—it was, rather, the chance to become part of the London reviewing and writing coterie. I had to be seen as someone who was serious, who had judgment and wit, who was not above reviewing books.

  Vidia said that he was traveling, leaving London, but not sure where he was going. He had sold his house. He still wanted to go to the United States. He repeated his request for my brother to find him a house, somewhere in rural America. He still had some journalism to do.

  My wife and I moved from Uganda to Singapore with our baby son. This was in the autumn of 1968. I resumed teaching. I wrote some short stories and published them. I began reviewing books for The Times. My third novel was done, and I had an idea for another, more ambitious novel, about life in an African dictatorship. I still had no money. But it was not only poverty that kept me from returning to the States; it was also my curiosity about Southeast Asia—the echo of the gunfire from Vietnam, the effects of the war on nearby countries. And I found that I could teach and write. Teaching was not difficult; I found Shakespeare’s contemporaries illuminating and undemanding, and the violent vengefulness in the plays made sense to my Chinese students, some of whom were ardent supporters of the Cultural Revolution.

  Even in Singapore I had regular air letters from my friend Naipaul, who believed in me.

  “What lovely Bongo-Wongo addresses you are picking up on the way!” he wrote in a letter with my exotic Singapore street address. A Trinidad stamp on that letter looked equally exotic to me.

  In the past, when he was feeling frail from having worked hard, he said, “I feel like a bird with a broken wing.” Now his broken wing was healing, he said. He was in Port of Spain. He had finished his historical narrative, pleased with it for being so contemporary. Even Pat had liked it. He implied that she was often one of his worst detractors. After two years, The Loss of El Dorado was done, and when it appeared it would explain a great deal about the modern world, in which race and class were primary issues. “The book is good.”

  From Trinidad, he was embarking on some journalistic assignments in the United States. Needing a visa, he had gone to the U.S. consulate in Port of Spain and been treated with lavish courtesy and deference. He said to me, “Guilt will make my hand shake if I ever write an unkind word about the U.S.”

  He had been greeted at the consulate as an important writer. He was granted two visas: one to enter the country, the other to work as a journalist for four years—he underlined the four. The visas had been presented with style, the consul-general emerging from his office to extend his congratulations, the whole consulate staff beaming. “The natives goggling on their benches.”

  It mattered a lot to him that he had been singled out from the other islanders and treated with respect. He did not take it for granted. He said he left the consulate feeling weak.

  He reported that the literary editor of The Times liked my work and was using the reviews regularly, in spite of having to send the books all the way to Singapore. But the Washington Post was doing the same thing. What with my teaching and my short stories and the novel I had started, I had never worked so hard for so little money. My wife got a job at the Chinese university to keep us afloat, but still we had no savings.

  Money was on Vidia’s mind. He complained of high taxes and low standards in Trinidad. He would soon be leaving for New York City. A few months later, in March 1969, he wrote me from the New York apartment of Robert Lowell, where he was a houseguest. Lowell, he said, was the only writer in New York who had read his work. One of his bits of journalism was an interview with Lowell.

  Vidia felt awkward being in New York, where no one cared about his work. He said. “It makes me feel an intruder.”

  He was out of sympathy with the writers and intellectuals he met in New York: Baldwin, Bellow, Roth, Trilling. He had no patience with their views. He saw them as obsessed and, ultimately, trivial- minded. Half the time he had no idea what they were writing about. They were publicity seekers, he said; their writing was Teutonically wordy. It was better to grow slowly as a writer and to build a reputation book by book. He meant himself, and I guessed it was also a hint to me.

  There were aspects of New York that he liked. The wine was good and inexpensive. The city had energy. He envisioned making a life in New York, buying an apartment and spending part of every year there. Indians—not “dot Indians” but “feather Indians”—were on his mind. “I alternate between great happiness and great rage at the violence done to the American Indians,” he said. “I feel the land very much as theirs at dusk, the sky high above Central Park.”

  I had told him that I was getting on in Singapore; in spite of the financial narrowness, it was a new place with new people, and it gave me the chance to travel in Burma and Indonesia. I had begun to write Jungle Lovers. Fong had appeared—a small advance, good reviews, but no steady income. I said to myself, If I write a book every year for the next ten years, I am sure I can make a living. I could not think beyond ten years.

  Vidia wrote back from New York to wish me well. He said he had been thinking fondly about my wife and son. That touched me at a time when I felt burdened and overworked. I lived in a small, hot semidetached house and wrote in an airless upstairs room. I could write only after my lectures had been delivered, my papers marked, and my wife and child were contented. After eight months in Singapore I had settled into a routine, but this, I swore, would be my last job. I fantasized about quitting, but I had no place to go. I had no plans, except that I was embarked on my fourth novel. My third, Girls at Play, was about to be published in England.

  Vidia had pl
ans, he said. He had written a piece for the Telegraph in London and another for The New York Review of Books, about Anguilla. He was planning to spend the spring and summer in the United States and then travel back to London in September, when The Loss of El Dorado came out—not return for his own sake but to give some moral support to his publishers. Then, after London, perhaps Spain, to work on a book—he did not say what he had in mind—because Spain would be inexpensive.

  He took an oblique and somewhat credulous interest in astrology and palmistry. The lines on my palm had impressed him. In New York he had met an astrologer who, noting that Vidia was a Leo, gave him a reading and predicted unending travel, both mental and physical. Vidia welcomed the prophecy. He was eager for a phone call that would send him abroad. The astrologer had said that no sooner would Vidia put his suitcase down than he would pick it up again.

  Accompanying Norman Mailer in his campaign to be mayor of New York had occupied some weeks of Vidia’s time. That was another piece of journalism. Vidia found Mailer energetic and attractive. He was reading Mailer’s book about the political conventions, Miami and the Siege of Chicago. Mailer had called it “a bazaar of metaphors.” Vidia corrected this: surely Mailer meant similes. Nevertheless, Vidia liked the book, and he liked Mailer. It was strange to hear Vidia praising a living writer and a new book. I had never heard him do this before.

  By the way, he wondered, had I read Henry James’s study of Hawthorne? I immediately got it out of the library and read it with pleasure. I wrote back, thanking him for the suggestion. He was still my teacher, my friend.

  A month later, he read my new novel and praised me extravagantly. This was the middle of 1969. The book had just appeared in London, but a copy had been sent to Vidia in New York. Girls at Play was a dark book, set in a girls’ school in upcountry Kenya. Though I denied the fact for legal reasons, the school was based on the one where my then fiancée had taught in Embu, in the bush about eighty miles northeast of Nairobi.