Sir Vidia's Shadow

by Paul Theroux

  He was ignoring the waiter who hovered near him. The man was making me nervous.

  My finger was on Truite Grillée ou aux Amandes. I said, “I’ll have the grilled trout.”

  “Something to start with?”

  “Bisque d’Homard.”

  As the waiter noted this, Vidia said, “That’s a nice idea. I will also have the bisque, followed by Quenelles d’Haddock Monte-Carlo.”

  “Any vegetables? Shall I make up a selection?”

  “That will be lovely,” Vidia said. He sipped some more wine, sucked it past his gums, and said, “For a writer like yourself, even an American, there is a kind of recruitment, and you will be part of it. You will be coopted. I think it has started already for you. Your name is growing. What happens next is up to you.”

  “Did that happen to Robert Lowell?”

  “I think Lowell is fraudulent, don’t you?”

  This was not the moment to mention that he had been Lowell’s houseguest in New York; Lowell’s was the return address on a number of Vidia’s letters to me. And Vidia had interviewed him for The Listener. In researching my book I had read the interview.

  “His poems are very good,” I said. “Lord Weary’s Castle. Life Studies.”

  “I am sure I am a very bad judge of American poetry,” Vidia said, which was his way of saying he disliked Lowell’s poems. But he had not said so in his interview.

  Our lobster bisque was served. Swallowing some, I said, “But Lowell’s crazy, isn’t he?”

  “That’s the one thing he’s not.”

  “You think it’s a con.”

  “Total con, total con.” Vidia was concentrating on his soup, which he ate neatly, his spoon at a studied angle.

  I said, “He goes to mental hospitals, gibbering.”

  “He’s playing,” Vidia said. “Hospitals are wonderful places for people to act out their fantasies of infantilism. I think Lowell adores being in a hospital.”

  “His hospital poems are pretty scary.”

  “I don’t know them. Should I read them?”

  “It’s up to you. What about his wife, Lady Caroline?”

  Vidia rested his spoon, leaned over, and said, “I was sitting next to her a month ago at a dinner.” He made his disgusted face, and his features were so distorted it looked like a Kali mask. “She pongs!”

  I laughed out loud, but Vidia was still frowning and sniffing.

  “The title means a lot to Lowell,” he said. “What is it about titles? Americans are so glamoured by titles.”

  “That’s because we don’t have them,” I said. “Anyway, it’s a big deal, isn’t it?”

  “A title is nothing,” Vidia said.

  The waiter was listening, and it was hard to tell whether he approved. He was obviously torn because, being a flunky in such a classy place, he had been trained to admire something that was for him unattainable.

  “Careful, gentlemen, the plates are very hot,” he said, positioning my trout in front of me and serving Vidia his quenelles. He then made a business of serving us four different vegetables, working two spoons in his fingers like tongs.

  When he was gone, Vidia began eating. I waited for him to say something about the food. He said nothing.

  “I have the idea that they should sell titles at the post office,” he said. “You’d pay for it the way you’d pay for a television license. You go in, buy some stamps, and paste them into a little book. Save up. Buy some more stamps. Fill up books. Three books of stamps would get you an MBE. Six for an OBE. A dozen books of stamps would be worth a knighthood.”

  “That’s what it’s worth?”

  “That’s what it’s worth.”

  We went on eating and Vidia went on denouncing the Honours List over the food-splashed table.

  The waiter returned to whisk our plates away and hand us the dessert menu, which was also Frenchified: Pêche Melba, Glaces, Framboises, and a selection of Fromages.

  “I won’t,” Vidia said.

  “Coffee?”

  “Black,” Vidia said.

  A child began to cry in the foyer, the cries diminishing as the child descended the staircase in someone’s arms. I was touched by hearing a child’s wailing amid all this pomposity.

  “God,” Vidia said, “who would bring a child here?”

  “In Italy they bring children to restaurants.”

  “A low peasant habit,” Vidia said, and he ranted. But I knew this rant, about all the articles that were written about children. Why didn’t someone write a piece about people who, like Vidia, had made a conscious decision never to have children?

  I shrugged, but I felt like a coward for not telling him how fiercely I loved my children. Just before I had left The Forge, Marcel, my older son, had said, “Buy me a Ladybird book in London!” and his brother, Louis, had echoed him, “Book!” Just thinking about them in the restaurant, I felt a pang. I missed them.

  “A workman came the other day.” Vidia was smiling at the thought of what he was about to say. “He told me that when he is at work he misses his children. Can you believe that?”

  “Yes. I miss my children now.”

  “Really.”

  While he had been talking, the waiter had approached and put a white plate on the edge of the table. On this white plate was the bill, folded in half. It now lay between us. Vidia’s “Really” had produced a silence—such apparent interest on his part always indicated its opposite: disbelief, incomprehension, boredom—and in that silence I poked at the bill with my fingers and tweaked it open.

  Seeing me looking at it, Vidia became preoccupied. He sat back, his expression altered to a glow of serenity. He was lost in his thoughts.

  “Seventeen pounds and sixty-four pence,” I said.

  Vidia was smiling. He was deaf. He heard an American at a nearby table saying, “I’d be happy to pay you for it. It’s just that my wife saves menus from all the foreign places we eat, especially when we’re traveling in Yerp.”

  “You see? One of your fellow countrymen.”

  I took out four five-pound notes from my wallet. Only two one-pound notes remained.

  “Oh, good,” Vidia said.

  “What about the tip?”

  “That’s plenty,” he said, meaning that the twenty would cover it. “That will make him very happy. Anthony Burgess is frightened of waiters and tips them extravagantly. Taxi drivers, too.”

  My twenty pounds was carried away on the plate by the now deferential waiter. I had bus fare and enough left over for a pint of Double Diamond on the train. But dinner was out of the question, and so was the Ladybird book.

  “Shall we go?” Vidia said.

  We walked through Berkeley Square to Piccadilly, talking about books some more. I listened without hearing or understanding. I felt that peculiar weakness, almost a frailty, familiar to me whenever I lost a bet or discovered an overdraft. This time it was the effect of having spent all my money on lunch. Vidia was sprightly, for the opposite reason: I was broke, but he was restored. He was actually energized, and it was almost worth what it had cost me to see him so bright and to hear him.

  “Don’t worry about your book,” he said. He was chatty and encouraging. “You won’t know what it is about until you finish it.”

  He was jaunty, but this was also his old intense teaching method, which had helped me in Africa. He was well fed, he had drunk most of the white burgundy, it had cost him nothing. His chatter was a form of gratitude.

  “Each day you will make breakthroughs as you write. You’ll make discoveries all along the way. When you finish you’ll be amazed to see where you’ve got to—you’ll probably have to go back and fix the first part of your book, because you’ll have discovered what your subject really is.”

  At Duke Street, near Fortnum & Mason, he turned and urged me to go partway down the hill, where an art dealer had two Indian prints in his shop window.

  “I want you to come back here sometime and look at these pictures. Buy some when you have
the money. They are Daniells, aquatints of India. Aren’t they delicious?”

  But I could not concentrate. I still felt weaker, lamer, frailer, even slightly deaf, the loss of twenty pounds like an amputation.

  “What are your plans, Vidia?”

  “I am going to the London Library. It’s just round the corner in St. James’s Square.”

  “I mean future.”

  “Trinidad,” he said. “Queen-beeing it there. Then South America. Argentina.”

  He went glum and uncertain, looking ahead, seeing nothing discernible in the mist.

  “I would like to write nothing. I feel I have said all I wished to say.”

  Taxis clattered down Duke Street as we stood on the narrow sidewalk. An auction had just ended at Christie’s down the street, Vidia said, and there was a commotion, like an audience leaving a theater, a sudden mob, dressed alike.

  “I may fall silent,” Vidia said.

  He looked at the pair of aquatints. One showed the Union Jack flying in an Indian landscape: a handsome building, like a pavilion, with Indians, Europeans, and horses around it. The Assembly Rooms on the Race Grounds, Near Madras.

  “Yes, I may fall silent.”

  “I’ll be in Dorset,” I said. My fists were jammed into my empty pockets.

  “You’re going to be all right, Paul.”

  “If I don’t see you...”

  I put out my hand, but Vidia was preoccupied with the possibility of falling silent. Anyway, he seldom shook hands, and when he did his grip was limp and reluctant, as though fearing a taint.

  “I’m going down this way,” he said.

  “I’ll hop a taxi to The Times.”

  That was bluster on my part—I didn’t have the money. I took a bus to Blackfriars and turned in my review, and then I walked from Blackfriars to Waterloo along the Thames, to save my bus fare. With no money for dinner, I took an early train to Dorset so that I could eat at home. It puzzled me that I had spent so much on lunch. I hated having to think about such things. That single lunch had cost me the equivalent of one month’s rent.

  Back to The Forge and my lovely clamoring family, back to my room upstairs, back to my novel. Vidia was right. I wanted to finish the book to discover what it was about.

  But that night, without the new Ladybird book, I lay between my children and read them a story from one of their older books of fairy tales, this one by Hans Christian Andersen. Outside, the wind from the sea at the end of the road tore at the bare boughs of our black oaks.

  With the children snuggled against me, I read, “‘You don’t understand the world, that’s what’s the matter with you. You ought to travel.’ And so they traveled, the shadow as master and the master as shadow, always side by side.”

  9

  “I Must Keep Some Secrets”

  VIDIA SPOKE about finding me, yet my conceit was that I had discovered him. Both could have been true. Friendship is often a case of mutual rescue. The previous year, in Singapore, I had written a book about his work because he was unknown in the United States. He had no American publisher; his American editions were out of print; there had never been paperbacks. I was grateful to him for his help in my writing, but I also thought he could use my help. And publishing my book in the States might bring both of us to the attention of readers. So V. S. Naipaul: An Introduction to His Work was a labor of love, done out of friendship, but like many gifts it was also self-serving.

  The book was accepted by Vidia’s publisher. The advance was small, surprisingly small—say, four lunches at the Connaught. I was counting on my novel Saint Jack to restore me to solvency.

  Writing to me at The Forge from Trinidad, Vidia expressed his pleasure that the book about him was to be published. In spite of the tiny advance, he said, his publisher would stand by the book. If it sold well I would benefit; if it was a good book, it would cause many things to happen. A worthy book made its own way, and a gifted author never failed to be rewarded. And, sometimes, miracles happened.

  I had complained to him that I was working too hard, combining work on my novel with writing book reviews. He said he understood my dilemma.

  “You need to appear more often in the English papers, to broaden the base of your reputation,” he said. Practical as always, sound advice. “But they do pay appallingly.”

  On the subject of drudging as a freelance, Vidia knew what he was talking about. He had trodden this same road, hacking away on Grub Street, twelve years before: the small rented house, tight money, the weekly review, hack work and honorariums. I knew from the bibliography I had made that he had reviewed many books while writing A House for Mr. Biswas. If he could write a masterpiece and review books at the same time, surely I could follow his example. He was sensitive to this burden, which was part of a writer’s independence. Writers in residence never faced it, salaried magazine staffers and writers on fat contracts were oblivious of it, but for the freelance writer it is a constant dilemma, because the freelancer hates to say no to any request, for fear that the requests will vanish. At the same time, the freelancer knows that the true meaning of “hack” is “workhorse.”

  A similar sort of problem had just arisen in Vidia’s writing life. He intended to go to South America, on assignment for The New York Review of Books. But its rates were low. He wanted to write about Argentina—and the Review would print anything he cared to write—yet he felt there was no profit in it. So he was inclined to remain in Trinidad, at his sister’s, queen-beeing it, so he said.

  His usual discursive medical report was appended to this letter. He tended to go into minute detail when the subject was money or health. He anatomized insomnia, and his dealings on the stock market were another sort of fever chart. Writing exhausted him. Each time he finished a book he was close to collapse. He said he had been working steadily from 1965 to 1971, and he felt depleted by The Mimic Men, The Loss of El Dorado, and In a Free State, as well as by all the journalism—enough to fill another book. The potted history of his physical effort was just the inspiration I needed, though I was alarmed by the consequences he described: extreme torpor, fatigue, dizzy spells in public places, frayed nerves—“the mind, rather than the body, calling for rest and still more rest.”

  In this burned-out state he stopped writing, and I remembered his saying, “I may fall silent.” I still wrote to him in Trinidad. I had more time now. I had finished Saint Jack and sold it to The Bodley Head in London. It had not solved my problems. My English advance was £250, half on signature, half on publication. For my year’s work on the novel I now had £125, minus the agent’s ten percent—five meals at the Connaught. “We wish it were more,” my editor had said. So did I.

  All these tiddly, trifling numbers—but they mattered to me at the time because my life depended on them.

  “And you say you don’t want me to get a job?” my wife said. But she did not recriminate; she was gentle. This was a delicate subject.

  She got a job with the BBC and we moved to London, wrenched from Dorset in the clammy English spring, with a damp summer looming. Instead of rural poverty, which I found bearable for its downrightness and sufficiently dignified for the amount of space we had—a whole house, the surrounding woods and meadows—we were now plunged into a dreary inner suburb, in a small apartment. It was nasty and uncomfortable, narrow, dirty, mean, and noisy. It smelled, it was cold. The seedy grumbling neighbors, the big cars flashing loudly past on the main road—every bit of it was like a reminder of failure.

  I wanted to start another novel. I had a good idea, based on a ghost story I had been told in Dorset by an old man in the Gollop Arms. My first impression of Dorset was of a weird landscape. I wanted to write about that, a place darker and stranger than anything I had known in Africa. Beyond the ghost story, the germ of my idea was of an English anthropologist who has thrived in Africa and then retires and returns home to this haunted place.

  But in London I had no place to work. We lived in two rooms in a noisy, much subdivided house. I
tried to write on a table in the bedroom but was disturbed by all the ambiguous memories and associations: a bedroom is charged with dreams and slumber and sex, and this one had all the residue of its previous tenants. It stank, too, as bedrooms in rented houses often do.

  It was at ground level, and from where I sat, with my back to the room, I could see beyond the weedy front yard to Gordon Road, Ealing, under a gray sky. My two children were in the other room, staring at the rented television set. I could not work. I felt idle. I complained of this idleness to Vidia. His response was friendly and wise.

  “The essence of the freelance life is freedom,” he wrote. And he spoke of indolence as an aspect of freedom, one that I should accept. He said that any freelancer needed the confidence to believe that in spite of occasional setbacks, everything was going to be fine in the end. But of course that was a problem. “This faith your friends cannot give you: it is something you have to discover in yourself.”

  He went on to speak approvingly of my wife’s job with the BBC World Service, which he listened to all the time. This second letter from Trinidad was more allusive than any I had received from him lately. He seemed refreshed by his trip to Argentina—he had taken the assignment after all. He had been back in Port of Spain for only two days and he was making plans. He would first write his pieces, one on the Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges, the other on Argentina itself, Evita and Peronism figuring strongly. After that, he had to choose whether to go to Brazil (for £400) or New Zealand (for £500), or head straight back to The Bungalow. He had recently turned down trips to Canada and Nigeria.

  Perversely, being in demand reminded him of rejection. The very fact of this friendly attention and the many invitations gave him a gloomy vision of his future, when he would get no attention, nor any invitations. He could not contemplate acceptance without anticipating his being superfluous. In this mood he regarded goodwill as a curse and praise as the Evil Eye.

  Preparing the collection of pieces that he was planning to call The Overcrowded Barracoon and Other Articles, he was opposed by Pat on his intention to include his pieces about India. She said that no one would be interested in them. The reviewers would use those pieces to attack the book for its monotonous insistence on Indian subjects, Indian elections, Indian deficiencies. Pat was correct, India was his obsessive subject, but the act of writing was obsessive and often irrational. So he resisted. He felt that in the end he would be all right. He often said so.