Sir Vidia's Shadow

by Paul Theroux

  That was his greatest strength, his unwavering belief that writing was fair—that a good book cannot fail, that it will ultimately be recognized as good; that a bad book will eventually be seen as junk, no matter what happens in the short run. Only the long run mattered. There was justice in writing. If you failed, you deserved to fail. You had to accept your failure.

  This belief was both armor and a sword, and by repetition he instilled this belief in me and made me strong. It was a little early to tell whether we would be rewarded for our work. The external signs were still ambiguous. He was living in a room at his sister’s house, in 3 Woodlands Road, Valsayn Park, Port of Spain, Trinidad; and I inhabited, with my family of four, a pair of narrow rooms in 80 Gordon Road, Ealing, West London, with someone’s radio playing and a child crying upstairs. It helped that I believed in my writing, and it helped as much—perhaps more—that he believed in me.

  Even his asking favors was a form of giving me confidence. He wondered whether I would be willing to look over the proofs of his collection of articles. If anything dismayed me, I should tell him. This was the book I had suggested to him after I read all his magazine pieces in Singapore. I had made a list. He used some from the list but in the end did not include any of the book reviews I had found. That was another lesson. He said that book reviews served their purpose but had no lasting value, except for the jokes. “Too bad we can’t keep the jokes and get rid of the rest.” He chose long, solid pieces. He had put enormous effort into his journalism, bringing to it the intensity of fiction writing. In this period, as he put it, no novel offered itself to him.

  He had no ideas for a novel. “Creatively, I continue barren.” He was healthier than he had felt for a while, but he feared the future. He maintained that my most productive years and best work were ahead of me—I had that to look forward to. That promise excited me. As for himself, “At forty, I have the sickening sensation that my work is behind me.”

  The very sight of his books irritated him. He hated talking about them. He felt like a fraud. He was pretty gloomy, he said. “In this profession, is satisfaction ever attained?”

  The words were harsher than the tone he used in the rest of the letter. He seemed energetic, like a mountaineer cheerfully grumbling about the steepness of the ascent as he skipped from ledge to ledge. He even sounded hopeful. “If I write again, though, I think it will be a new man writing.” Up till then, writing had been his “therapy.” It had given him confidence, he said. Now he suggested that he was starting over.

  Already he seemed like a new man. No novel, true, but he had pieces to write and travel plans. And he was full of insights. He said that a girl he had met in Argentina had copied two pages from a Thomas Hardy novel in which a heroine reflects on the melancholy of her life and situation. One of the Hardy lines, “meanest kisses were at famine prices,” was frightening, Vidia said, commenting on the shocking juxtaposition of “famine” and “prices” and “kisses.”

  He did not quote more than this, and he gave me only the tide of the novel, The Return of the Native, but I found the pages and, moved by what I read, marked several paragraphs with a red pen.

  To be loved to madness—such was her great desire. Love was the one cordial which could drive away the eating loneliness of her days. And she seemed to long for the abstraction called passionate love more than for any particular lover.

  She could show a most reproachful look at times, but it was directed less against human beings than against certain creatures of her mind, the chief of these being Destiny, through whose interference she dimly fancied it arose that love alighted only on gliding youth—that any love she might win would sink simultaneously with the sand in the glass. She thought of it with an ever-growing consciousness of cruelty, which tended to breed actions of reckless unconventionality, framed to snatch a year’s, a week’s, even an hour’s passion from anywhere while it could be won. Through want of it she had sung without being merry, possessed without enjoying, outshone without triumphing. Her loneliness deepened her desire. On Egdon, coldest and meanest kisses were at famine prices; and where was a mouth matching hers to be found?

  Fidelity in love for fidelity’s sake had less attraction for her than for most women: fidelity because of love’s grip had much. A blaze of love, and extinction, was better than a lantern glimmer of the same which should last long years. On this head she knew by prevision what most women learn only by experience: she had mentally walked round love, told the towers thereof, considered its palaces; and concluded that love was but a doleful joy. Yet she desired it, as one in a desert would be thankful for brackish water.

  She often repeated her prayers; not at particular times, but, like the unaffected devout, when she desired to pray. Her prayer was always spontaneous, and often ran thus, “O deliver my heart from this fearful gloom and loneliness: send me great love from somewhere, else I shall die.”

  “So I feel about love and writing,” Vidia wrote to me. Waxing uncharacteristically lyrical, he said he needed passion and comedy and relief from the past. If he were not vitalized, he feared he would die at a time when he was capable of writing brilliantly.

  This astonished me—the sudden outburst, the yearning, the passion, the appeal. It sounded like the fear of unrequited love. He then quoted some lines from Derek Walcott. He had quoted Walcott before; the man was a neighbor islander, a man close to his own age. He said the words had scared him in 1954 when he had first read them: “But my talent grew bad and my wit turned stale /—but I sprang from my mind—”

  I reread the lines. I reread the Hardy: “meanest kisses.” Vidia closed, saying, “See how this jolly letter has turned out. Strange things happen when a writer sits down on an off day to write to a friend.”

  That was like a poem (“See how...”). Vidia’s lines were more mellifluous and rhythmic and meaningful than Walcott’s, with its weak second line. Once again, by his using the word “friend” and his affirmation of friendship, I was bucked up. That same day, in spite of the radio and the squawking child and my debts, I had the confidence to work. I began plotting my next novel, The Black House.

  One other thing I noticed. His letter had been tampered with. He had done the tampering, had torn off half a page. He explained it in a teasing parenthesis: “Last half of that first page censored. I must keep some secrets.”

  When Pat wrote a month later from Trinidad to say that she liked my book about Vidia’s work, I was pleased; and she added, “Vidia cannot be detached from it. He read with great absorption and smiled or laughed often,” which delighted me.

  Yet I continued to worry about what was to become of me. My strategy had been to write and survive that way; my strategy was not working. A novel, a book of criticism, scores of book reviews, a collection of short stories—this in less than a year had produced such a paltry income that I was grateful to my wife for getting a job. Now I was at work on my seventh novel, and still doing journalism, and it did not seem as though I could make a living. All this in spite of burning the midnight oil and getting wonderful reviews.

  In this profession, is satisfaction ever attained?

  I thought, Yes. I was satisfied, but I had no money. It was all the more important that I had Vidia as a friend.

  Pat said she saw the love and understanding in my book V. S. Naipaul, and the depth of this feeling had given me unusual insights into Vidia’s work. She confessed that she had thought of writing something personal about Vidia. During the writing of In a Free State, he had read a biography of Tolstoy and a book about Dorothy Wordsworth and other writers’ lives. Literary biography was something Vidia often read, as if peering through a window to compare his life with the lives of fellow sufferers. Listening to him read aloud from the diaries of Dorothy Wordsworth and Sonya Tolstoy, Pat Naipaul marveled at the perceptions, and she thought she might do something similar.

  She began making notes, describing Vidia’s progress on his book, keeping a diary, writing down his comments. But she lost heart. She h
ad never been strong, and it was hard to write in a household where the central figure was V.S. Naipaul. She felt she lacked profundity and passion; she suspected that she was trivial. There was something wrong about her—Vidia’s wife—using him as the subject for a candid or intimate portrait. It was intrusive and bordered on vulgarity.

  That was why, she said, my book meant so much to her, because I expressed many of her own feelings about Vidia’s work. She said she was delighted I had done the book, since she was so similarly affected by his writing.

  Another success, another good review, but I had no income. I was angry and bewildered. I had not asked for much, only a simple living. I did not dare think about getting rich. I wanted to get by, nothing more.

  In the midst of my bewilderment, a letter was pushed through the letter slot of this rented place, asking me if I would consider being a writer in residence at the University of Virginia, starting in two months. I said yes. If I went alone and lived like a monk, I could finish my novel and pocket most of my salary. I would be away four months, the first semester.

  My wife said, “I’ll miss you.”

  She understood. She was happy working at the BBC, and this fulfillment made her sympathetic about my frustration. But there was something especially galling about returning to a university a year after quitting my Singapore job and saying I would never teach again. I should have been consoled by my grandiose job title, writer in residence, but it mocked me. A writer was supposed to be free of any employer—Vidia had said so.

  In Virginia, living my monkish life, I received a letter from Vidia describing his trip to New Zealand. He was back at The Bungalow. He had passed through Trinidad again, visited Argentina again, finished writing his pieces. He had read my book and wanted to reread it, because he had been distracted by work. He had also felt self-conscious, being written about. He was his usual paradoxical self: “But I don’t think it matters what I think (and I don’t know what I think),”

  He wanted to meet, to talk about England and how I was adapting. Was I disappointed? After my eight years in the tropics, what did I think of this “industrial reality"?

  Africa was on his mind, because the Indians had been thrown out of Uganda by Idi Amin. As he had predicted so often, he said, Uganda was turning into a jungle. He blamed the white expatriates, who would take no responsibility for Amin—yet they had created the situation that had produced Amin. In the end they would go away and allow Uganda to become a forgotten horror.

  I had not heard Vidia denounce a situation so thoroughly for years, but his anger was doubtless deepened by the fact that all his dire warnings had been fulfilled. He had predicted the rise of the dictatorship, the expulsion of the Indians, the bolting of the whites, the decline of Kampala into bush.

  “It is an obscene continent, fit only for second-rate people. Second-rate whites with second-rate ambitions, who are prepared, as in South Africa, to indulge in the obscenity of disciplining Africans.” You either stayed away or you remained, with a whip in your hand. Uganda proved that the only survivors in Africa were second-raters and savages, masters and slaves.

  This was the most severe condemnation he had ever made. He was raging as eighty thousand Indians—men, women, and children—were being loaded onto planes, their valuables being snatched from them by African soldiers. They were losing homes and land and businesses, and in many cases their life savings. Most were allowed into Britain, but they really did not want to live in a cold and hostile climate. They had few defenders in Britain and the United States; they had none in Africa. Africans heckled them, and the white expatriates, as Vidia had said, stood by and watched.

  “The melancholy thing about the world is that it is full of stupid and common people; and the world is run for the benefit of the stupid and the common.”

  As for plans, Vidia had none. He had been back in England for only four days, and he felt he was living through an uncertain, purgatorial period. He spoke of his four years without a house. He feared a stock market crash. He wanted to write a book but had no ideas. It was his old feeling of emptiness and insecurity, of his life’s being over, the dusty intimation of the scrap heap.

  He was low and feeling adrift. It was his alienated mood of What country? What passport? He was placeless in The Bungalow and this was another reason he wanted to talk about England with me. He wanted to find out what I liked and didn’t like. He saw me as another wanderer.

  But I was in Virginia, dreaming of my wife and two children, like a sailor in a storm at sea, vowing that I would never do this again. Vidia spoke of going back to Trinidad to cover the violent murders that had taken place at a Black Power commune.

  His verdict on my book about his work was just what I wanted. He said he had read it “with amazement, delight and great humility. It seems marvelously responsive and humane; it reminds me and informs me of things that I had forgotten and perhaps had never realized.” He spoke of my generosity and thoroughness. Reflecting on so much labor in the past (“gone, gone”), he became apprehensive about the future. He was sad and fearful, he said.

  He had won the John Llewelyn Rhys Memorial Prize, the Somerset Maugham Award, the Hawthornden Prize, the W. H. Smith Award, and, with In a Free State, the Booker Prize. Already he was being spoken of as the greatest living writer in the English language. Yet it was little comfort to him to know that his reputation was formidable. He pined for better sales and more money.

  While he regarded his life as over, mine had, I felt, hardly begun. He made a few corrections in my book, small ones, all of them factual. He talked about In a Free State, how “tightly constructed” it was. He wrote about a dream the main character had that he decided to leave out. “I dreamed all the dreams myself, for him, during the writing.” The book had possessed him; he had been “deeply immersed—almost to the point of neurosis” in it.

  I had felt so close to In a Free State that I could not evaluate it. In the book I recognized Haji Hallsmith and the besieged African king; I knew some of the Africans; Vidia’s Colonel was the Major of the Kaptagat Arms—the same man, the same shouting; the waiters were his waiters, and, as Vidia had remarked at the time, “The boy was big and he moved briskly, creating little turbulences of stink.” The roads were the roads we had traveled down; the well-marked sign the same Beware of Fallen Rocks; the coming-of-age boys I had seen myself. I had been frightened by those same dogs barking. Much of it was our safari in Rwanda, but made into a quilt: I saw the stitches, and what another reader would see as a large, harmonious design seemed to me a mass of patches. But that is what happens when you have a writer for a friend and you travel the same road.

  He said, “I do hope that your book will show you some reward for your great sensitivity, labor and love.”

  My reward was his saying that. I had begun the book as a labor of love, a favor to him, a lesson for me. I learned a great deal in the writing, but there was no material gain. Perhaps it interested some people in his work and found him new readers. But I suspected that in many ways Vidia’s life was even more interesting than his work. He had made this observation about Somerset Maugham, how Maugham’s life was complex and rich, even though the old man always denied it. As for V. S. Naipaul: An Introduction to His Work, it hardly sold and was not reprinted. Twenty-five years later it was still out of print. The advance was spent the day I received it. There were no royalties in twenty-five years, nor did I ever get a sales statement from the publisher. I never discovered how many copies were printed. A few thousand, perhaps. It met the worst fate that can befall a book: it became a collector’s item, pretty much unread and uncirculated, celebrated only for its scarcity.

  Vidia also needed money at this time, so he said. He had no assets apart from his manuscripts and papers, an entire record of his career to date. He had gone to the British Museum and discussed the matter, mentioning a figure of £40,000, which would include letters, manuscripts, pictures, mementos, maps, sketches, notebooks, everything in his paper-rich life. It was quite a
large stack, for he had told me he was superstitious and never threw away a piece of paper with his handwriting on it, as one might keep nail parings or locks of hair. It was possible that after his gathering up all his papers, the British Museum would change its mind and not pay even the agreed-upon minimum. He needed a backup plan.

  Would I please, therefore, spread the word that he was thinking of selling his archives? An American university would be convenient because he wished to consult them in the future. In a cardboard box in Trinidad he had found letters and notes he had written in the distant past: “penciled notes I made in the PAA aeroplane as soon as I got off the ground in July, 1950.” Rereading the many letters had suggested to him that he might write an autobiography. But what if the papers were destroyed in a riot (“not unlikely in Trinidad”)? He needed them to be in a safe place.

  Also, the money. He wanted to convert the papers into a flat in central London.

  The chairman of the English Department at the University of Virginia was also a friend. He was the man who had offered me the writer-in-residence job. I asked his advice. He said I should see the university’s librarian. The librarian was the assiduously orderly sort of person—more orderly than intellectual—you find running libraries. He had the peculiar baldness that went with an orderly disposition; he was close-shaven, with pink cheeks, and so tidy and well turned out that I doubted he was much of a reader.