Sir Vidia's Shadow

by Paul Theroux

  “This is a bijou flat,” Vidia said. “This is my luck.”

  He liked it for the neighborhood and, perhaps, for its odd shape and size. It was one small, incomplete room—a roomette—that was interrupted by half a wall and an entryway. One more step and you were in the kitchen, a one-person nook. The bedroom was up four stairs in a kind of loft that was filled by the bed. That was it: so small that, inside, you had to assume all sorts of economical postures, sitting compactly, standing with caution, no abrupt moves or you’d hit something. A russet Hokusai print on one wall, some small shelves, a bronze dancing Shiva. Everything had been chosen for its small size; everything fitted. But two people filled the sitting area. Out the one north-facing window were the backs of houses.

  Vidia could be the greatest enthusiast. He was often depressed or low, but he was capable—as he said—of enormous happiness. When he had something he liked or had longed for, he was delightful to be with.

  “You’ll have to dress fashionably here,” I said. “You’ll really have to change your name to V. S. Nye-Powell.”

  “V.S. Nye-Powell, OBE,” he said, and laughed.

  Having this home made him hopeful and confident. He said that his spirits were high when he was in the flat—it was his nest, as I saw it, and the way he described it suggested that he saw it that way too. It may have been small, but it was high and hidden. He felt protected. It was quiet. For a writer, any house or apartment is judged by how suitable it is for work. Certain places seem perfect for their silence and their light and for the harder-to-define elements of their feng shui.

  “I see myself doing good work here. Something big, something important.”

  Meanwhile, I was sitting on a chair so low my knees were under my chin, my hands folded. I was afraid that if I moved suddenly I would knock something over.

  “Later, in a few years, if the market moves up as it has done, I will get something bigger.”

  Happiness helped him imagine another flat—larger, roomier, just as fashionable—although “fashionable” was a word that always made me smile, because fashion was something the writer (irrational, rebellious, manipulative, innovative, as I saw myself and Vidia) turned his back on, or even attacked, for being the enemy of the creative imagination.

  Vidia did not see being fashionable as conformist; he saw it as something else that put him out of reach. Being out of reach—“unassailable” was his word for it—was the most desirable position. He disliked being visible and proximate, within shouting distance. It eased his mind to be remote, a little mysterious and detached, while at the same time remaining at the center of things. It was obviously the reason he had rejected Montana in favor of Kensington. This was not a literary part of London. He knew no one here. That was a plus. It was disconcerting, if not vulgar, to be in a place where he could accidentally bump into people he knew: he had the manipulator’s horror of the sudden and the unplanned.

  “I see Patsy giving lunches.” He was still talking about the larger flat he envisioned when he traded up, the one with many rooms. “And I am in my study, working.”

  He was setting the scene, which was some years away. He is working on an important book in this big flat, and guests are assembling in the lounge while the table is being laid (by a devoted old woman in mob cap and smock, Wickett, an absolute treasure). Pat is in the kitchen supervising, or is she in the parlor pouring drinks? In any case, it is lunchtime, and Vidia is working in his book-lined study.

  “And then”—he made a two-armed gesture of double doors opening, swinging apart, as he buttoned his jacket and made his entrance—“I go through to lunch.”

  I wish he had been smiling, but he wasn’t. Nor was I, though at the back of my smiling mind I saw the master summoned from his study to a roomful of expectant and admiring lunch guests. It was the kind of scene I associated with Tennyson at Freshwater, or Henry James at Lamb House, or Maugham at the Villa Mauresque, the category of writer whom Larkin satirized as “the shit in the shuttered château.”

  Because of this flat, I saw Vidia more often. That pleased me, because I had so few other friends in London. At the end of my writing day it was pleasant to get out of the house—my arms ached, my back was kinked, my legs were knotted from sitting too long. I rode my bike over Battersea Bridge and kept going north through Chelsea and Fulham to Kensington, where I chained my bike to the black railing outside Vidia’s white apartment block and listened for his voice on the squawk box: “Yes, yes.”

  One day I happened to have a paperback jammed into my pocket. He noticed it and asked me what it was.

  “The Go-Between. I’ve never read it before.”

  Vidia suddenly remembered something ironic. I could see it in the set of his lips and in his eyes.

  “Hartley was mad about the Queen,” he said. “Absolutely adored her. Then the day came—he is offered an OBE. He accepts it at once. His chance to meet the Queen.”

  We were drinking tea. Vidia swallowed and smiled at the same time.

  “All his preparations are made. He is in Bath. He hires a car and is driven to London in his morning suit—tails, top hat. Filled with excitement. Big day. His work recognized at last. The Queen awaits.”

  Now Vidia was nodding, teacup in hand, and his posture suggested this was a moral tale.

  “Hartley is at the palace. He is in the queue of people accepting their honors. The Queen approaches. Hartley is very nervous, but grateful. At last he has the Queen’s approval. She stands before him and glances at her note cards and says, ‘Hartley, yes. And what do you do, Mr. Hartley?"’

  Vidia put his teacup down and lowered his head and looked humble.

  ’"A writer, Your Majesty.’”

  And he laughed at the absurdity of it.

  “As you say, Vidia, people should get their knighthoods and OBEs at the post office.”

  “Books of stamps. Buy some each time and stick them into the book.” He made licking and sticking gestures. “Hartley was crushed, and I imagine it was a very long trip back to Bath.”

  On another bike ride to Vidia’s flat, a few days after a riot in Clapham, I passed through Clapham Junction and saw boarded-up shop windows and looted shops; there was shattered glass in the street and dented cars. It was much worse than I had been told. The riot had started as a racial incident in Brixton and had spread up the High Road and across the Common to the Junction, where the rioters had converged and spent hours breaking windows and vandalizing cars.

  I described the scene to Vidia when I got to his flat.

  “That was not a riot,” he said. “That was a disturbance. Frightening, I grant you. But not a riot.”

  “Hundreds of people. Angry West Indians.”

  “Not angry,” he said. “Why would they be angry? They were jubilant. They wanted witnesses, and people took notice. They succeeded in destroying something. Windows, whatever. I suppose they stole some television sets.”

  “It looked serious.”

  “It’s all for show.”

  “If that’s not a riot, what would you call it?”

  “High spirits,” Vidia said.

  He was afraid of mobs, he avoided large crowds, he did not use public transportation. But his general feeling was that it had all been done for cameras and publicity. If no one had taken any notice, nothing would have happened.

  But when the riots—for they were riots and not high spirits—continued, Vidia was asked by a BBC news program to comment on the violence. He said all right, he had been thinking about it. The BBC would provide a car to take him to the studio, but Vidia said that such a trip was out of the question. With great reluctance, the producer agreed to come to Vidia’s flat with a camera crew.

  I was at Vidia’s the next day while, smiling, he told me what had happened.

  “There were three of them,” he said. “I must say, it was rather crowded. They wanted to get started immediately, and of course I had prepared my remarks. I wanted to talk about the excitement of this sort of affair, how
it stirs people to see destruction and makes them spirited. I was going to quote from that lovely Louis MacNeice poem ‘Brother Fire.’ Do you know it? ‘When our Brother Fire was having his dog’s day / Jumping the London streets ...’ It’s about London being blitzed by German bombs, the perverse thrill of someone watching it. It is perfect for what is happening now.

  ’"Shall we get started?’ the producer said.

  “I said, ‘You haven’t mentioned money.’

  “This clearly threw him. Money? But I told him I do not work for nothing, and that I must be paid. He asked me what I wanted. I said, ‘What you would pay a world-class doctor or lawyer.’

  “‘I’ll telephone my department,’ he said. At the end of a very long call he said, ‘I can offer you three hundred pounds.’

  ’"Out of the question,’ I said.

  ’"It’s the best we can do.’

  “I simply turned my back on him. I noticed that one of the crew was looking at my bronze of Shiva. I said, ‘Do you know how each arm is positioned in a particular upraised way and the whole figure gives the dynamic impression of movement?’”

  I said, “What about the BBC?”

  “They stood around for a while and then went away. I won’t work for three hundred pounds. The figure I had in mind was a thousand.”

  “I wonder why they wouldn’t pay more.”

  “Because they hold a writer in contempt.”

  “But why did the man come all the way over, thinking you would do it?”

  “Because he was a common, lying, low-class boy.”

  “What about the others?”

  “Epicene young men.”

  He knew I was baiting him. He did not mind. He was glad to have a chance to vent his feelings. Pat tended to sigh or become fearful when Vidia fumed, but his anger was a loud broadcast of what was on his mind.

  A writer must not let himself be presumed upon, he said. The TV crew had come and unpacked; the TV crew was sent away, having filmed nothing. A weaker person might have said (I am sure I would have said), “Since you’ve come all this way, we might as well do it. But this will be the last time.”

  To relent in that way, Vidia would have had to break one of his cardinal rules, which was: Never allow yourself to be undervalued.

  “Do lawyers allow it?” he said. “I say to these presumptuous people, ‘What would you pay a lawyer? What would you pay an architect, or a doctor at the height of his profession?’” On this subject he was unshakable. “An architect or a doctor would command thousands of pounds for a consultation. That is my fee. I am at the frontier of my profession as a writer. My fee must be no different from a doctor’s, or a scientist’s, or a lawyer’s. Anything less is an insult.”

  Around this time, the first year of his little flat, the Public Lending Right movement had gained a following in London. The moving force was one person, the writer Brigid Brophy. The campaign called for a parliamentary bill to establish a government department that would determine, on the basis of random sampling, the number of times a writer’s books had been loaned from libraries. Using a formula, an amount would be worked out, and the writer would be sent an annual check. There would be a ceiling of about £2,500. Public Lending Right—authors compensated for library borrowings—was an enlightened scheme for which I became a strong advocate. In its early stages, signatures were needed to bring the idea to the attention of the minister for the arts. I pedaled up to Vidia’s for a signature.

  “No,” he said. Never mind that it was a worthy cause. He hated petitions. And he could not bear to see his name on something he had not written. “I sign nothing.”

  The push of his dignity, the force of his friendship, made me think of him vividly whenever I wrote anything. He hovered over my desk; he was the reader over my shoulder. His criticism had nothing to do with friendship. He might approve, but he was almost impossible to impress. Now and then he quoted a poem, but these were single lines. Really, there was not a living writer he praised, nor any dead ones he acknowledged as exemplars. I had mentioned his uniqueness, the apparent absence of influences, in my book about him, and was criticized for this by scholars and other writers. Perhaps I should have said his influences were minimal, and internalized to the point of their being untraceable. After a time, Vidia acknowledged his father’s writing as a strong influence. But he always said: You’re on your own.

  Even knowing that he probably would not read what I had written, still he was the reader I had in mind whenever I framed a sentence. It gave me confidence to have his approval, but his approval was anything but casual. He hated inattention and intellectual laziness and received opinion. In conversation, he often said sharply, “What do you mean by that?” to the most offhand remark. When we were together I had his full attention, which was a demanding scrutiny. Usually I listened: I was Boswell, he was Johnson. I was still learning. I knew that I had to be at my best whenever I was with him, and that I got much more out of him as a listener than when I interrupted to argue with something he said. Challenge only infuriated him, so what was the use? He could be uncannily prescient, if not psychic, in some matters; at other times he was wrong and unfair and frighteningly intolerant.

  Vidia tended to have something on his mind, always. While in England, as a householder, he did not get out much or see many people. He hardly talked on the phone. He ruminated when he was not working. World events and public people nagged at his solitary mind. In any encounter, he first fretted and explained what he had been thinking, whatever pent-up issue he had been worrying over during his long nights of insomnia. “This nonsense about South Africa,” he would say, and after that, with the matter ventilated, he could talk more easily. In his presence, my concentration was complete. Working alone, I was also intensely aware of his intelligence, and did not write a word without wondering what he would say about it, nor a paragraph without imagining his pen point striking through it (“I’m brutal, you know”)—even now, this one for example, ragged as it is.

  “I am an exile,” he always said. In his own prim little flat in Queen’s Gate Terrace he said it more often, as though the flat were visible proof of the absurd delusion—and the settled belief of many foreigners in England—that owning property was the same as belonging. The more he became a householder, the stronger his sense of alienation.

  Living precariously in rented places, his earthly possessions in a warehouse, he did not speak so often of exile; and traveling in India, the United States, the Caribbean, and frequently to Argentina, he did not seem to have the time to mention exile, either. He was on the move. But with a tidy and secure place in central London, and some of his goods at last out of storage—favorite prints and books, comfy chair, dancing Shiva—he said with more force and greater solemnity, “I have no country to call my own. I am placeless.”

  Out of politeness, I did not mention that he was the one with the British passport, while I carried an Alien Registration Card. I drank my tea and encouraged him to go on.

  “Exile is not a figure of speech to me. It is something real. I am an exile.”

  After tea we sometimes went over to the V and A, a ten-minute walk, to look at the Mogul paintings. Vidia pointed out how some of those small lozenge-shaped portraits looked like the miniatures of Nicholas Hilliard.

  I still visited him in the country, at The Bungalow. One day he showed me an estate agent’s flier: a tiny snapshot of a brick house, some specifications (“in need of modernization”), and “To be sold at auction.” It was not far away, in Salterton, on the way to Old Sarum, nearer Salisbury, and seemed from the picture to be no more than a semi-derelict cottage.

  “Pat’s going to bid on it.”

  Auctions made Vidia anxious, even the picture auctions in London. I liked them for their surprising bargains. In his mind they were frenzied free-for-alls; the intensity unnerved him. It was so easy in bidding to get in over your head. Someone else always did the bidding for him.

  But he did not want to talk about the house auction fo
r another reason. Talk might jinx his chances.

  Pat went and bid and was successful, getting the place for a relatively modest price. A long period followed during which the house was renovated. This was a real house, set in a sloping meadow. Vidia added a brick terrace with a balustraded stone wall, gave it a new tiled roof, a garage, a wine cellar, and new windows, double glazed so that he would never hear the cows mooing in the meadow or the overflying jets from the RAF base on Salisbury Plain. He landscaped it, enclosed it in high hedges, gave it a gravel drive and a steel gate. It was late Victorian, possibly Edwardian, very pretty, and because it was not at all grand, it looked like a home. It was called Dairy Cottage.

  “People use the term ‘exile’ all the time,” Vidia said. ‘"Robert Lowell is an exile.’ But Robert Lowell is not an exile. The airfare from London to New York is a few hundred pounds. He is an American. He has a substantial house in New York. What does ‘exile’ mean in a world of cheap airfares? He can go home!”

  Vidia was sitting on his sofa at Dairy Cottage, his legs crossed, smoking his pipe, the sun streaming through the windows. Crows in the sky were framed by the windows, an Emperor Jahangir portrait on one wall, another wall of books, a Hockney etching of a hairy naked man in bed.

  “But I can’t go home,” Vidia said. “I have no home.”

  India I understood to be an area of darkness for him, and England—well, no one became English, though they might acquire a British passport. But what about Trinidad?

  “Trinidad, man—Trinidad!”

  He had recently been there to write a series of articles about the trial of Michael X, a Black Power advocate convicted of murdering a number of members of his motley commune, including his white girlfriend. The plot was violent, race-driven, full of deception and sexual ambiguity and double-crossing.

  “Cuffy has taken over Trinidad. Cuffy doesn’t want me.” He puffed his pipe. “But does Cuffy really know what he wants?”

  This “Cuffy” was a curious word, obsolete, found in the older travel books in which blacks were in the background, and based on the name Kofi, a Ghanaian (Akan) word for Friday, given to a male child born on that day.