Sir Vidia's Shadow

by Paul Theroux

  “Do you know anyone there I might meet?”

  “There are so many fraudulent people there,” he said. “Stay away from the ones that wear white shoes. And the ones who wear wristwatches that light up.”

  “I was thinking of particular people I might call on.”

  He thought hard. At last he said, “No. No.” And he stood up. Tea was over, the visit was at an end. He said with a trace of bitterness, “You’ll be all right, Paul. You’ll be all right.”

  I took my Patagonia trip. I wrote my book. He took his trip. He wrote his Congolese pieces—journalism. After a time, he wrote a novel, A Bend in the River, set in Africa, about an Indian there who has a passionate affair with a married woman. And he wrote something else. I saw it listed in a bookseller’s catalogue, a privately printed book called Congo Diary: “In a limited edition of 330 copies. Three hundred are numbered, twenty-six lettered, and four bear the printed name of a recipient.”

  Mine was not one of the printed names. I bought copy number 46 for $200. It was signed by Vidia. The dedication was “M. M.”

  13

  Death Is the Motif

  BROTHERS are versions of each other, a suggestion implicit in the word itself, the “other” in “brother.” Seeing Shiva Naipaul was always an oblique encounter with Vidia, as though I had bumped into someone similar, not an identical twin; the rough draft, not the finished article.

  Brothers are like that. The wit in one is craziness in another; one is an original sculptor, another is “good with his hands,” a third is a klutz who drops things, and a fourth might be a brutish criminal, even a destroyer. Three or four flawed prototypes for the man of achievement. You discern the thin one in the fat one, the artist in the con man. What are the roots of this variety, so many exotic blossoms on the same stem? No one knows their past; and the brothers resent the blurring of these convergent echoes and resemblances, because such resemblances can be so misleading.

  The history of scribbling brothers is full of conflict, which ranges from hurt feelings and petty grumbling (“Why does he get all the attention?”) to vicious attempts at literary fratricide (“Take that, you bastard!”). One of the brothers is always the other’s inferior. Look at the brothers William and Henry James, Oscar and Willie Wilde, James and Stanislaus Joyce, Thomas and Heinrich Mann, Anton and Nikolai Chekhov, Lawrence and Gerald Durrell—there are no intellectual equals here, and, being writers, they are borderline nutcases.

  Such brothers are often fratricidal from birth and babyish in their battling, for there are nearly always aspects of lingering infantilism in sibling rivalry. When brothers fight, family secrets are revealed and the shaming revelations often make forgiveness irrelevant—the damage is done. In the literature of sibling rivalry, an enthralling spectator sport but pure hell on the fraternal rivals, the cry is usually “He hit me first!” or “Choose me!” It is also typical for one sibling to feign an utter lack of interest in the other; inevitably you end up admiring one and pitying the other. The larger family—the cause of it all—winces and tries not to choose sides. The nicer-seeming brother is not necessarily the better writer, nor even necessarily nicer.

  Shiva Naipaul never had news of his brother, and was insulted if you asked: they seldom met. In the way of a brother, Shiva’s presence rang bells like mad and was full of reminders of Vidia—turns of speech, Trinidadian eccentricities, Hindu fastidiousness, and chance remarks that at times added to my understanding of Vidia; but in the impatient and rivalrous manner of a brother, Shiva more often obscured it, even undermined those insights.

  Meanwhile, Shiva protested his love for Vidia, yet he said his brother had hurt him. “I had vulnerabilities he did not always find easy to understand,” Shiva wrote in an essay, “My Brother and I.” “For a long time there was mutual distress.” That was putting it mildly, and “distress” was a Vidia word, an understatement he used often to indicate outrage or fury. There was anger on Shiva’s part, indifference—or disparagement—on Vidia’s.

  “Shiva was raised by women,” Vidia had said. He repeated this formula often, shaking his head at the imagined damage from female attention.

  More softly and with feeling Vidia had also said, “When my father had his heart attack, Shiva found him alone. My father was dead. Shiva just stood there, frozen, mute. He could not speak.”

  I saw Vidia occasionally, talked with him on the phone quite often, and corresponded. I bumped into Shiva all the time, never spoke on the phone, never wrote him a letter, nor did I ever receive one from him. This bumping into him characterized the randomness of his life. He said he didn’t make plans—that seemed a luxury to me. I felt I was overworked and stuck in a routine, but if I complained, it was dishonest of me—I liked the grind, I was happiest when I was writing, creation to me was pure joy. Shiva, echoing Vidia, said writing was misery. All the same, he could seem quite jolly.

  I had run into Shiva in the middle of my period of financial uncertainty, in 1973—“I’ll take a trip and find a book to write.” It was to be The Great Railway Bazaar. After leaving the Punjab in Pakistan, I went to New Delhi. I met Shiva by chance in a guesthouse there. He told me he had flown to India. I said I had come overland on trains from London.

  “God, how long did that take?”

  “About five weeks.” I thought I had made pretty good time.

  “Five weeks!” He sat like a pasha on cushions, smoking and drinking tea. His chubby cheeks shook as he laughed. “You’re a masochist.”

  “Some of it was fun,” I said. “The Orient Express. Some of the Turkish trains. The mosques in Herat, in Afghanistan. The Khyber Pass.”

  “Carry on, up the Khyber!” And he laughed again.

  His mockery made conversation futile. It was nothing new. I always felt there was envy in his jeering, and I knew that if I jeered at him, he would be furious.

  I smiled, defying him to mock. October in Delhi, twenty-five years ago. Two thirty-year-olds in a garden, each with a book in mind. He had a famous brother—he’d be all right. But if I didn’t bring home a book I was sunk.

  “Why are you putting yourself through this?”

  “A travel book,” I said.

  “I didn’t think you wrote travel books.”

  “It’s just an attempt. I need the money.”

  “So you’re going to write about India like everyone else?”

  “No. This is a whole trip. I’m going to Sri Lanka by train, via Madras. Then all over—Calcutta, Rangoon, Vietnam, Japan. And home on the Trans-Siberian.”

  I should not have told him this. He exploded with laughter, gagging and choking, smoke shooting out of his nostrils, his big face going red.

  “I think I’ll be home by Christmas.”

  He said, “I’ll be home on Wednesday.”

  Today was Monday. I wanted to go home. Feeling demoralized, I went to a hotel and tried to call my wife but got nothing, just the sound of surf and a feeble voice on the line. I was horribly homesick and could not sleep.

  Shiva and I met the next day, also by accident. He had one of the good rooms in the guesthouse, and I passed it on my way out. He called to me and ordered coffee. Among the papers on his coffee table was a telegram: CONGRATULATIONS ON THE HAWTHORNDEN. LONGING TO SEE YOU WEDNESDAY. LOVE, JENNY.

  He had won a literary prize. He was going home. His wife loved him. This was bliss—beyond bliss.

  “What do you think of India?” I asked.

  “I don’t think much!” He howled again.

  This was how he conversed. Was it aggressive? He made you ask the questions, and he would give an unhelpful answer and then laugh in a mirthless way.

  “This is paradise compared to some places I’ve been,” I said. “Iran. Kabul. Peshawar.”

  “This is the Turd World!”

  And that laugh again, like a form of punctuation, a jeering exclamation mark. I took it to be nervousness, or obstinacy. The young companion of my London Christmas long ago had become a rather prickly man.


  He had become very heavy, and in the heat of India his bulk made him slow and clumsy. He looked uncomfortable. He chain-smoked. He drank whiskey. Instead of a fat, contented drunkard, I had the impression of a dissatisfied sot, confused, unhappy, and angry. Nothing was angrier than his laughter.

  He lived in Vidia’s shadow, as I did, but no shadow is darker than a clever brother’s. Yet he had started his intellectual life idolizing Vidia, who left Trinidad in 1950, when Shiva was five, and who was always absent. Shiva became a devotee, and was so deeply influenced that his writing often looked like a parody of Vidia’s. Attempting subtlety, Shiva ended up sounding pompous and convoluted, though he was seen to be the “warmer” brother, in the shorthand of magazine profilers and portraitists. And there was that act of piety which even Vidia marveled at: the memorizing of The Mystic Masseur. Veneration could go no further than reciting the sacred texts by heart, but it was death for Shiva’s prose style. In spite of his mockery of me, it was impossible for me not to feel a bit sorry for him.

  Yet at that moment in India I envied him his swift return to London. I cursed my luck at being on this long trip alone. The phones didn’t work. I got no mail. I was like an old out-of-touch explorer. True, it was the reason I saw so much, and the reason I was changed by the experience. But if someone had said, “Here’s ten thousand dollars, scrap the trip,” I would not have hesitated to join Shiva on the London-bound plane.

  There was a young Indian woman who hung around the guesthouse. She stared at me. Why? Indian women never did that. She touched my arm. “Hey, I’ve been to the States.” She took my hand and squeezed it. In Indian terms, this was as if she had said, “Take me, I’m yours.” She looked me straight in the eye.

  “I won’t bite you,” she said. Her powdered face and red lips and kohl-darkened eyes gave her a lecherous mask that made me desire her and fear her at the same time.

  “You are afraid of me,” she said.

  “Right.”

  Her red betel-stained teeth were straight out of a “Kali, Goddess of Destruction” picture. She plucked at her sari and laughed again. I was not afraid of making love to her—I sensed she was wild; I was afraid of everything that would come after—indignant relatives with swords and daggers, my goolies in great danger. Everything in India had a price, and pleasure usually had a penalty.

  That night, having a farewell drink with Shiva, I saw the Kali woman again in the courtyard.

  “See that girl?” Shiva said. “I slept with her this morning.” His laughter was more ambiguous than ever. “She’s crazy. I mean, really crazy.”

  In the morning he left for London to collect his literary prize and resume his life—lucky dog. That same day I took a train to Nagpur. I put “the Turd World” into my diary, and the remark found its way into my book, without Shiva’s name attached to it. After Madras in southern India, I went to Sri Lanka and beyond, way beyond: Burma, Vietnam, Japan—onward, going slowly into the unknown.

  Christmas came. I was in Siberia, it was winter. I was still on my goddamn trip! I battled on. At last, around the New Year, I returned home. I wrote my book and it was published a year later. I paid my bills.

  And I saw Shiva at parties.

  “Taking any more trains, Paul? Ha! Ha! Ha!”

  Now I was sure it was envy, and I pitied him, and his laughter defied interpretation.

  Vidia’s image of himself as a struggler against the odds and of Shiva as an overprotected child of privilege might have been accurate, but it made their relationship touchy. I knew little about their childhoods. It was clear that Shiva had had a smoother ride at Oxford, and when he decided to make a living as a writer, he was welcomed by publishers. His older brother was a writer, so surely he too had to have talent. Shiva hated that sort of reasoning but profited by it nevertheless.

  “He’s a complainer, always making excuses. My father was like that,” Vidia said.

  The father, Seepersad, was an enigma to me, but the fact that the fictional Mr. Biswas had been modeled on him helped to understand the man. Some of those Biswas traits were recognizable in the Naipaul brothers. Mostly I saw Shiva as a suffering parody of a much younger Vidia—prickly and slow, hating the shadow that had been cast over him by his famous and formidable brother, who could be so bluntly present or silently absent.

  Taking Vidia’s cue that writing was an ordeal, each sentence a hideous labor (I always wanted to jeer at them and say, “Isn’t it much worse for men at sea?”), Shiva went Vidia one further and did no writing at all for long periods. He used his inactivity as an example of the uniqueness of his gift, yet the writing he did manage to scratch off, while perhaps the result of extraordinary labor, did not seem so extraordinary in itself. He just talked more about it. Vidia said he was lazy and drank too much. He said Shiva’s fatness was self-indulgence. If I winced at his description, Vidia admitted he was being brutal. Wasn’t it simpler than this, that Shiva found it very hard to write? But who finds it easy?

  “In Vidia’s eyes, Shiva couldn’t do anything right,” Vidia’s long-time editor, Diana Athill, said some time later. “He had this picture in his mind that Shiva was going utterly to disgrace himself and the family and that he was going to become a drug addict, was going to be useless. It was intense anxiety. He was cruel to the boy, really cruel, telling him he was a fool whenever he said anything or did anything, really, to a point where Shiva was sitting there not daring to speak, because if he said anything, he was snipped at.”

  “He’s not happy,” Vidia said. “And why?”

  What kept Vidia most serene was his often stated belief that there is justice in all things—in human effort as in nature and art: nothing arbitrary or random but always an elemental fairness. The good you did was rewarded, and you were improved by your act. Good writing always succeeded, dishonest writing was always found out—though with all writing, time was a factor; it might take a while for the work to rise or fall. If an apparently inferior writer made a hit, there was always a reason. Vidia did not dismiss popular novelists. He said, “Perhaps there’s something there.” He meant an illumination or a truth, however crudely expressed. He felt George Wallace’s remark about “pointy-headed intellectuals” expressed an essential truth about the corruption in academic life, and he took satisfaction in taunting Americans by quoting Wallace with approval. Evelyn Waugh had managed to infuriate many Americans in a similar way by saying, “Erie Stanley Gardner is your finest novelist.”

  But Vidia was only half teasing. He believed there were few real accidents in life. What you took to be an accident was undoubtedly well deserved, a kind of karma. Vidia was the first person I had ever heard use that word, as he was the first in my experience to use “vibration” to mean intimation. He also believed that some people’s inner disturbance and confusion made them magnets for ill fortune; others simply begged for it. Things not going well? Vidia was seldom sympathetic to anyone’s moaning. It had to be your own fault. Literary fellowships and free money and patronage did not get books written; writers did, and a good writer was dauntless. It was not an expression of fatalism or pitiless indifference but rather a belief in cosmic harmony on Vidia’s part when he repeated that in life people got pretty much what they deserved.

  Shiva did complain, as Vidia said. Vidia didn’t listen. He saw the complaints as unjustified, merely Shiva’s indulging himself. “He is seeking attention. It’s theater. Stop listening and he’ll stop complaining.”

  It did not help that Vidia praised me, and did so for the same reason. It was not by luck or accident that I was doing well, he said. It was application, hard work. “And you see, Paul, you have something to say.” I did not usually complain, but really, what had I to complain about? Even before my books sold in any numbers, I had found a way of making a living as a writer: publish a book a year and never say no to a magazine assignment. And, out of a horror of destitution, I lived within my means.

  The irony was that I saw Shiva much more often than I saw Vidia. We were nearer i
n age—he was about four years younger than me—so we had more in common and knew many of the same people—Jonathan Raban, for example, who said he found Shiva Bunterish and nervous and inexplicably giggly. Shiva was not as strong as Vidia, but it was his fate, as the younger brother of a distinguished writer, to have his path to publication smoothed. Understandably, Shiva wanted to be judged separately from his brother, to be seen clearly, without that obscuring fraternal shadow. Yet he seemed self-destructive in his choice of subjects, which served only to make the brothers more intensely like versions of each other, alike in their concerns. Both of them wrote about colonialism as outrageous farce, the futility of African travel, the corruption of power in the Caribbean, the dead end of the Third World, the stagnating complexities of India, and, relentlessly, the question of alienation: where do I belong? And in this they were each deluded in believing that anyone cared.

  Some of Shiva’s literary obsessions verged on mimicry. Shiva’s attack on calypso sounded like a parody of Vidia. There was a definite resemblance in their prose styles, even in the adoption by Shiva of some of Vidia’s favorite words—“tainted,” “fantasy,” “distress,” “loss,” “fraudulence”—and even the same fastidiousness, expressed in an almost identical way, calling attention to its similarity by the use of exaggeration.

  Here is Shiva Naipaul having lunch in a Chinese restaurant in Sri Lanka, not an unusual event for a traveler anywhere. He is in the seaside town of Galle, a pretty little place. But for Shiva it is a disgusting experience of unimaginable uncleanness:

  “I ate sparingly and nervously, avoiding the thumb-printed tumbler of water that had been brought me. Now, walking across the vacated Green, with the taint of sewage rising from the seashore, it was hard not to be apprehensive, not to recall, with rising alarm, the abandon with which carelessly tended hands had soiled my plate, my knife, my fork.”