Sir Vidia's Shadow

by Paul Theroux

  “I wonder if you’d be interested in buying the archives of V.S. Naipaul,” I said.

  “I know that name,” the librarian said. “He wrote The Man-Eater of Malgudi.”

  “That was R. K. Narayan,” I said. So I was right: this clean, clear-eyed man was really thick. I listed Vidia’s book tides, none of which rang a bell, though the man kept smiling.

  “What is he selling?”

  “Everything. Every piece of paper he has. Letters, books, manuscripts, pictures, the lot.”

  “Would he have any interesting letters from well-known writers? Those are usually pretty valuable.”

  I felt this conversation was not going well, and I was glad that Vidia was being spared the indignity of explaining that he was not R. K. Narayan.

  “I’m sure he has lots of letters of that kind. Anthony Powell is one of his closest friends.”

  The librarian smiled, but not with pleasure. It was the uneasy smile that indicates incomprehension, as if I had slipped unconsciously into a foreign language.

  “What sort of figure does he have in mind?”

  “Forty thousand pounds.”

  “How much is that in real money?”

  “Maybe ninety grand.”

  “You’re joking.”

  I said nothing. The librarian clamped his jaw shut and bit on his teeth. The university didn’t have that kind of money, he said. I sensed his triumphant smile grimly heating my back as I left his office.

  Surely other libraries or universities would be interested. I wrote letters. I made phone calls. Sometimes I mentioned the price, other times I solicited a price. There were no takers. Many people I spoke to were only dimly aware of the name Naipaul. How was this possible? It did not surprise me that Vidia was little known in the United States; it was the reason I had written my book about his work. But I was astounded that academics and librarians were so clueless.

  I broke the news gently to Vidia, but perhaps it was my delicacy and tact that made it obvious I had been rebuffed. Sensitive to rejection, Vidia took it badly. He sent a brief note and lapsed into silence.

  Judging from my classes at the University of Virginia, American universities were vastly inferior to Makerere University and the University of Singapore. My Charlottesville students had read little—hardly any of them had read the short stories of Joyce or Chekhov, but they wanted to write short stories themselves. Sometimes they handed in work they had done the previous year, for another course. Usually they handed in nothing. They were pleasant but intellectually lazy. Some were graduate students. When I gave them low marks they objected.

  “Hey, Paul. You don’t get it. I need a B in this course,” one grad student said to me.

  I told him that his C was generosity on my part. He was in the master’s program. He had done very little work.

  “Look, I need a B,” he said in the snarling voice of someone demanding my wallet.

  This was new to me: teachers who did not read, students who could not write. One semester of this was enough. I took my savings and went back to London.

  We moved from west London to south London. We had a whole house in Catford, but the area was much grimmer than Ealing. It was full of lawbreakers—petty burglars, pickpockets, car thieves, bag boosters, second-story men, muggers, and hoisters of all description. But Catford was so poor these villains had to take a train to other boroughs or up to the West End, the more salubrious parts of London where the pickings were better, to commit their crimes.

  In the spring of 1973, having finished The Black House, I cycled to Waterloo, put my bike on the train, and went to Salisbury, cycling from there to Wilsford Manor. Vidia could see that my finances were as miserable as ever, but I told him why I had left the University of Virginia.

  “You had said you’d never teach again,” Vidia said. “You broke your own rule. If you make a rule, keep to it.”

  We walked to Stonehenge, through the fields, and he explained the water meadows once more.

  “You’d like Virginia,” I said. “The countryside is beautiful—rolling hills and meadows.”

  “I’m afraid that America is not for me. I don’t think I could live in a rural setting.”

  “In some ways it’s a bit like this.”

  But I was thinking: It is much more beautiful than this funny fenced-off part of Salisbury Plain, with a highway running alongside this weird ancient monument, belittling it.

  “I have to stick with what I have,” Vidia said. “It’s too late for me to transfer to another country.”

  We kept walking towards the big biscuit-colored cromlech that lay on the other side of the whizzing cars on the motorway.

  “So what’s the plan?”

  “I’m still looking for money,” he said.

  “Are you serious about buying a place in London?”

  “Yes. I think it’s just what I need.”

  “I’m sure you could get something for less than forty thousand.”

  He said, “No. I want something uncompromisingly fashionable.”

  He said this while looking at the sky.

  A few days after I returned to London, my editor at The Bodley Head, a cigar-smoking Scotsman and sometime poet named James Michie, invited me to lunch at the Chez Victor. He said he wanted to discuss The Black House. He was very friendly when I met him, but it seemed ominous that we had finished the first course and most of the bottle of wine before he mentioned my book, and then he told me he did not like it at all.

  “I’m afraid I can’t publish it,” Michie said.

  “You mean you’re turning it down?” I could not believe this.

  “It will hurt your reputation,” he said.

  “I have no reputation.”

  “I think if you reread the book you will agree with me,” he said.

  “I don’t have to reread the book. I wrote the book. If I thought it was no good I wouldn’t have submitted it.”

  My voice was shrill, and I think that surprised him. I was hurt and angry. Probably he thought he was softening the blow, because Londoners are such eager lunchers, but it seemed callous to turn lunch into an occasion for such a rejection. And why was I being rejected? The novel was good, surely?

  “I let William Trevor look at it. He agreed with me.”

  Trevor was one of his authors, a talented one, I thought.

  I said, “My last novel got great reviews. You paid me two hundred and fifty pounds. I assumed you’d give me the same for this. You’d be getting it for a pittance.”

  “It’s the principle of the thing,” he said. He had lit a cigar and, feeling defensive, he had stopped eating. “I don’t believe in the book. I can’t publish something I don’t believe in.”

  “You publish lots of crappy books,” I said.

  I guessed he saw the truth of this, because he hesitated, at least looked uncertain.

  I said, “If you turn this down you’ll lose me as an author. I’ll go to another publisher. I’ll never let you publish another book of mine. And all it’s costing you is two hundred and fifty quid. This lunch is costing you thirty!”

  Michie was bald but he had a hank of hair that grew from the side of his head that he arranged over his pate to give the semblance of hair. This damp, fussed-with strand had slipped down and hung by the side of his ear like a strange Hassidic sidecurl. It made him look desperate.

  “If you twist my arm, I’ll publish it,” he said.

  “That’s it, then. That’s all. Forget it—I want my manuscript back.”

  Feeling ill, I finished my meal and walked back to his office, wishing the whole way I could push him in the path of a car. He gave me the typescript and still seemed surprised and somewhat embarrassed by my anger.

  I found another publisher, but in the meantime seriously wondered how I would ever make a living as a writer. I told Vidia. He invited me to tea at the Charing Cross Hotel.

  “You should have shown the book to me. Why didn’t you?” he said.

  “I didn’t wan
t to bother you with my problems.”

  “That’s what friends are for,” Vidia said.

  He could not have said anything truer or kinder. After eight years he was still on my side, still a well-wisher.

  “He gave it to William Trevor to read. Apparently Trevor didn’t like it either.”

  “Who is William Trevor?”

  That was what I needed, the old corrosive contempt.

  “He is no one,” Vidia said coldly. “Something similar happened to me when I was starting out. Deutsch told me to put the book aside. It was Miguel Street. He didn’t know what to do with it. And one still gets the odd foolish remark about one’s work.”

  “Why do they do it?”

  “They do it because they are common, lying, low class, and foolish. That is why they do it.”

  He was so angry he could not continue the conversation. He sipped his tea, looking around at the other tables. He saw a heavily pregnant woman moving slowly across the shabby room, bracing herself by resting on chairs and with one hand pressed for balance on the small of her back.

  “To me, one of the ugliest sights on earth is a pregnant woman.”

  This astonished me. I did not know what to say. He turned away from the woman.

  “I have an idea for a book,” I said.

  “Tell me.”

  “A long railway trip.”

  I explained how, in Virginia, I had read Mark Twain’s Following the Equator, an obscure and out-of-print travel book, but lovable for its geographical non sequiturs and incidental mishaps. I liked the spirited jokes and the long journey. It was about nothing but his trip. A lot of it was dialogue. Twain did not pretend to be knowledgeable about the countries he passed through—Australia, India, and South Africa, among many others.

  “I checked the maps,” I said. “I can leave Victoria Station and go to Paris, to Istanbul—to the border of Afghanistan. Then there’s the Khyber Pass, and trains all through India. Burma has railways, so does Thailand. Even Vietnam has trains. I would travel around Japan and come home on the Trans-Siberian, and then write about it.”

  “That’s a lovely idea,” Vidia said. He was seriously concentrating on it, looking for a flaw or something suspect. But it was too simple an idea to have a flaw. Taking trains from London to Japan and back: it was surprising that no one had done it before.

  “I’m thinking of leaving in September,” I said. “I would be in India in October. What’s the weather like then?”

  “Delicious.”

  He seemed distracted; he was still thinking about my book, my trip. He saw something I did not see—I could tell from his reaction. He knew it was a good idea, but he saw something more. He saw a hugely successful book.

  “Who do you think I should visit in India?”

  He thought a moment. He frowned. “You’ll find your way.”

  For the first time in the years I had known him, I sensed a reluctance on his part to help me. Only a few minutes before he had said, “That’s what friends are for.”

  “Isn’t there anyone you could introduce me to?”

  He had been to India six or seven times recently and had lived there for a year. He had written about it many times. It was his obsessive subject. He knew India intimately.

  “I don’t know. You might see Mrs. Jhabvala when you’re in Delhi.”

  As he was speaking, giving me the name with such reluctance, I vowed that I would not visit Ruth Prawer Jhabvala.

  “You’ll be all right,” he said. But this time the statement was tinged with self-pity, almost resentment, a feeling I had never detected in him before. It was as though I were abandoning him. And why? This train-riding idea I had conceived out of sheer desperation, in the urgency to have a book to write and money from a publisher.

  The bill was brought. I paid it, I left the tip. Vidia had not seen it. He did not see bills even when they were brought on the most expensive china and folded like origami and presented to him. It was one of his survival skills that a bill could come and go without ever being visible. Still, he looked disgusted.

  “This hotel used to be quite grand,” he said in his pained voice. Perhaps the pain was due to the idea I had just divulged. “Having tea here was once something special. One was glamoured by it.” He made a face. “No longer.”

  I took the trip. I left London on September 19, 1973, on the train to Paris. I changed trains and went to Istanbul, changed again for Ankara, for Tehran, and for the holy city of fanatics, Meshed. And onward, through Afghanistan (by bus, no trains) and down the Khyber, up to Simla, down to Madras and to Sri Lanka, on the train and on the ferry. To Burma and Thailand and Singapore, along the coast of Vietnam (heavily bombed and still smoking), up and down Japan, a boat to Nakhodka, and the Trans-Siberian home. My heart was in my mouth the whole time. Out of fear I wrote everything down; in my misery I mocked myself, and a febrile humor crept into the narrative. In January of the following year I returned to London, still feeling miserable. I had missed Christmas. Everyone howled at me, “Where have you been?” I propped up my notebooks and wrote the book, made a single narrative out of all those train trips. The title came from a road in Kanpur: the Railway Bazaar.

  Sometimes miracles happen to a writer, Vidia had said. The Great Railway Bazaar was a small miracle. I was not prepared for it. While I was working on it, The Black House was published—the reviews were respectful—and I started The Family Arsenal after I finished the travel book. Even before publication, The Great Railway Bazaar was reprinted three times, to accommodate bookstore demand. It was an immediate bestseller. It was my tenth book. I had known Vidia for ten years. In that time I had published about a million words.

  “An agonizing profession,” Vidia said. “But there are rewards.”

  All windfalls are relative. I did not become rich with that book, but at last I was making a living. I paid my debts. I had enough to support me in my next book. I was out from under. I never again worried about money—that freedom from worry was wealth to me. No more drudging. I was free. I was thirty-two.

  And at last I understood what Vidia meant when he had written, “I have never had to work for hire; I made a vow at an early age never to work, never to become involved with people in that way. That has given me a freedom from people, from entanglements, from rivalries, from competition. I have no enemies, no rivals, no masters; I fear no one.”

  10

  Lunch Party

  “I CAN SEE it all now,” my wife said in a fantasizing voice, though she was not looking at anything except a loose sock on the floor. She snatched at it. “The boys talking about their books. The girls talking about cooking.”

  It was Saturday. She was busy with the week’s laundry, moving through the house while I followed her. It was one of those maddening married people’s conversations, one spouse chasing the other with questions, the dialogue shifting from room to room. We had moved to a much bigger house; we had many rooms now. Why didn’t she want to go to Vidia’s lunch party with me?

  “Sunday is my only free day. Besides, he’s really your friend.”

  Such a discussion was supposed to end when one of the parties stopped pursuing, or the other, pretending to be too busy, hid.

  “Hey, I often socialize with your friends.”

  Dodging me, dodging the question, seeking more laundry, she said, “I specifically asked whether we could bring the boys. Pat said that Hugh and Antonia Fraser will be there and are not bringing their kids. I took the hint.”

  “We can go alone. It’s a lunch party. It might be fun.”

  “I don’t think he likes me one bit.” She was shaking out clothes to be washed. “But I don’t take it personally. I doubt that he likes any women.”

  “That’s unfair.”

  “Look at the women in his books. They disgust him. They’re awful. He’s the man who wrote ‘wife is a terrible word.’”

  I laughed at her and said, “There’s a nice woman in The Mimic Men. Lady Stella. Remember sex and fairy tales? �
��Goosey-goosey Gander’?”

  “You might know that the only decent woman would be posh ... Oh, do go,” she said, looking hardworking and virtuous, burdened with an armload of laundry. “Enjoy yourself. But please don’t ask me to go with you. He won’t miss me. I’ll bet he won’t even ask about me.”

  The children, hearing us, crept to the upstairs landing to listen.

  “You can take the train,” she said. She called up to the boys. “Dad likes trains, doesn’t he?”

  “Dad likes trains!”

  Trines, they said, a consequence of our living in London.

  The empty ones on Sunday morning going west out of London were the trains I liked best. The Salisbury train from Waterloo racketed through Clapham Junction without stopping, past the very houses and back gardens I had looked at with horror when I first came to London, asking myself, Who could possibly live among these black bricks and broken chimneys and dim lights and gleaming slate roofs and grim gates and the sootiness that crept into the nostrils? The answer was me. I lived in one of those houses. All of them looked dismal except my own.

  To the triphammer sound of the train wheels as they tapped the joints of the rails, I read the Sunday papers, looking up from time to time to rest my eyes on the green meadows and the trees, some bare and others with yellowing leaves. The leaves flew up singly like startled birds when the wind strengthened. Autumn made me thoughtful. Four years ago, in just this season, I had arrived and seen the trees like this, the fields sodden and green, mist on ponds, and dead leaves stuck flat to wet roads.

  “I’ll send a car for you,” Vidia had said, and he had given me the name of the driver. It was Walters. He was outside Salisbury station, waiting beside his car.

  “You must be Mr, Furrow,” he said.

  “That’s me.”

  We drove to Wilsford in silence down roads with dense drifts and piles of leaves while I reflected on Vidia’s thoughtfulness in sending a car. At The Bungalow, Walters opened the door for me, chauffeur fashion, and said, “That will be four pounds.”

  The gravel driveway announced every car with a rolling crunch like a chain being drawn on a pulley. Vidia came out and greeted me. Behind him was a small elfin-faced man wearing tight velvet trousers and a red and gold waistcoat.