by Paul Theroux
The inhabited world is fairly dirty. It did not seem to occur to Shiva that his pompous description said nothing about the world and everything about his squeamishness. Vidia’s horror of dirt was a legendary revelation of his anal compulsiveness, but when he wrote about it he sometimes made a larger point, about caste or culture. Shiva merely revealed himself as a timid fusspot.
Vidia, the true colonial, made a convincing case for his sense of alienation, although any reader could reply, “So what? We all have problems.” After all, he wasn’t writing about the human condition so much as the privileged life of a prosperous middle-aged and middle-class shuttler between Wiltshire and Kensington—himself and no one else. Shiva, the postcolonial sixties rebel and seventies conservative, was unconvincing in depicting himself as an exile and a wanderer. Anyway, what wanderer? He frankly hated travel. His idea of the Worst Journey in the World was a junket to a Chinese restaurant. His trips were very short. He had married into a family of distinguished journalists and lived well in London, where he was known as a partygoer.
He went to parties alone and usually got tipsy, if not drunk, in a sad, giggly way. At his drunkest he indulged in weird confrontations with women in which he would compliment their beauty in a babu accent (“Goodness gracious, you are wery beautifool”), and with such insistence the women did not know whether they were being wooed or insulted.
Whatever Shiva happened to be writing was never going well. He paraphrased Vidia’s complaint about the difficulty of writing and made it into a form of boasting. “I haven’t written a word. It’s such a struggle.” What was the problem? He had wide recognition for his first book, a generous publisher, and hospitality in all the London papers.
I tried not to argue, for fear it would have seemed that I was minimizing his pain.
“A book is like an illness with me,” he said.
“Of course.”
“But you just churn them out, Paul.”
“You think so?”
That belittling word “churn” brought to mind a stick and a keg.
“What are you churning out now?”
That laugh of his, barking and too loud, was pure misery and perhaps was meant as another interruption, which kept me from replying.
“Writing’s easy for you,” he said.
This sort of insult I had begun to hear more and more in London—though not in the States—for envy gave the English a reckless confidence in giving offense. It had started with Shiva, probably as the result of his resentment of Vidia’s avuncular attention and pointed praise. My not complaining about the difficulty of writing was a sure sign I was second-rate; Shiva’s struggle was clear evidence of his genius.
“He drinks too much,” Vidia said. “The body is going. He is fat. Notice how puffy his face is? He gets no exercise. It is a lazy, selfish body.”
That was another aspect of Vidia’s sense of justice: you got the body you deserved. And in Vidia’s judgment people’s bodies told everything about them, even to the extent of bad skin making you a villain and obesity being like a moral fault. The fat characters in Vidia’s books were nearly always unreliable, if not outright crooks.
“I am very proud of having a beautiful physique,” Vidia had told an interviewer. “The body is the one thing we can control. It’s a kind of envelope that contains the soul.” In spite of this, several people had mentioned to me how Vidia, because of his small size and his asthma, had a deep sense of physical inferiority.
Anyone could see that Shiva was unhappy. I did not know why, but there had to be a connection with Vidia. I still felt that knowing Shiva better was a way of knowing Vidia, because—though Vidia might deny it—one brother was often the key to understanding the other. The paradox was that, more and more, Shiva and I were fraternal, in the feuding, wrong-footing mode, and our relationship was undermined by the nearest thing to sibling rivalry.
“Come to tea on Sunday,” Shiva said at a party one night. “Bring the family.”
That sounded all right. This was early on. Our wives and children had not met. Shiva was living in a house in Essex. On a map it seemed a straightforward drive, but on the day it was a three-hour slog in my small car because of rain and bad roads and the quaint and maddening bottlenecks of English villages (“This must be Gosfield”). All the way I had promised my little family that this visit would be worth it. We met Shiva’s father-in-law, a noted broadcaster. The house was crowded with people—Shiva was well connected. But he was on the telephone when we arrived, and when I managed to say hello, he smiled in exasperation.
“Can’t you see I’ve got my hands full?”
And then that gloomy laugh.
We had our tea and left after an hour, because it was such a long way back to south London. He had hardly spoken to me.
“Which one was Shiva?” my wife said.
I mentioned this to Vidia, that we had gone all that way for tea but had felt unwelcome.
Vidia said, “He told me he gets depressed when he sees you.”
“I can’t imagine why. I never talk about my work. I just listen to him.”
“Perhaps that’s the reason.”
“That I listen?”
“That he hates himself.”
At another period, Shiva had a large apartment in Earls Court, over a bookstore. It seemed very stylish, his living in the middle of things, especially the raffish multiculturalism of Earls Court. We lived narrowly in distant, lifeless Catford, an hour across London. By now we were unwilling regulars at each other’s dinner parties.
The first time at dinner in his Earls Court flat, I noticed that Shiva was served a special meal: bigger, different, tastier-looking.
“What’s that?” I asked.
“Shiva’s a vegetarian,” his wife explained, as Shiva protected his full plate with his forearms.
“It looks like chicken to me,” someone said.
“It is chicken,” Shiva said. “It’s not as bad as beef.”
There was beef in our moussaka, and I felt at that moment all of us coveted Shiva’s special meal. Shiva explained that he had been raised eating certain foods. I gathered that chicken was regarded as a vegetable in the Naipaul household, and I was able to understand a bit better Vidia’s contradictory crankishness when it came to diet.
On another visit to Shiva’s, helping to clear up after the meal, I put some leftovers into the refrigerator and saw many stacked containers, all precisely labeled: Lunch Wednesday, Dinner Wednesday, Lunch Thursday, and so forth.
“You’re well organized,” I said to his wife, who was at the sink.
“Oh, that. I’m going away Tuesday.”
She explained that whenever she went away, she left meals for Shiva, all the meals he would need for the duration of her absence. They were all different, precooked, needing only to be heated up. Shiva was unable or unwilling to make a meal for himself, so this nannying—or mothering—was the elaborate answer.
Seeing me smile, his wife reacted defensively and said, “Vidia doesn’t cook either. He is waited on hand and foot by Pat.”
That was true, and it was a world away from my life and the lives of most of the people I knew. Was it that the Naipaul brothers’ lives were well organized or that they had submissive wives? It spoke volumes about the family home in Trinidad. Surely they had been indulged, and all that had done was to make them seem helpless, if not infantile.
Even if someone had offered me meals and nannying, I would have refused. In the balancing act of working on The Mosquito Coast, I was progressing with such steadiness that I became superstitious: I wanted nothing in my life to change. I stayed in London. I ate the same lunch every day, fish fingers. I meditated intensely on the implications of my story and on the characters. I felt that any change in my circumstances would upset my narrative.
The month I finished my novel, April of 1981, I wrote to Vidia, who immediately and enthusiastically replied, “That novel sounds terrific—just the kind of thing you would do very well. The idea
is at once simple and appetizing: the way good ideas should be.”
It was what I wanted to hear after almost two years of working on the book. Vidia had never been more generous.
“Your energy is amazing; you seem vitalized by all your many successes. I run across your name and your books everywhere and I always feel slightly proprietorial.”
After all these years he was still my friend and my booster. I rejoiced in pleasing him. He read the new novel.
He said, “This is a big book.”
Both Shiva and I had been shaken by the 1978 mass suicide, in Jonestown, Guyana, of members of the People’s Temple commune. To me it was one of the ghastliest events that had occurred in my lifetime. Paranoia could not take a more violent or nightmarish form. The transplanted messiah, Jim Jones, creating madness among his followers, was someone who had triggered my thinking about The Mosquito Coast, though my book was very different. Shiva wrote a book about Jonestown, Journey to Nowhere. He often alluded to the grisly nature of his experience, for he had arrived in Jonestown before all the more than nine hundred bodies had been bagged and taken away. He said that he had never seen anything worse. He was dispirited by the experience, and for a while it rendered him mute. He suffered something akin to a nervous breakdown during the writing of the book. I understood then that it was not conceit or vanity or childishness that kept him so insecure, but something fundamental: he had emptied the goblet and in tipping it up had seen fear lurking on the bottom, as in the horrific line from the play I used to teach: “I have drunk and seen the spider.”
In his depression Shiva’s writing became turgid and verbose. Parties were “revelries,” speeches were “orations.” He would write, “Machines had subverted the bondage of mass muscular exertion,” when he could have written, “Machines had taken the place of workers.”
Speaking of Trinidadians, he wrote, “We acknowledged, with unspoken candor, our humble status in the imperial dispensation,” a pretentious way of saying, “We felt we didn’t matter much in the British empire.”
When truth broke through pastiche the effect was vulgar, and what he attempted as style was forced and unrewarding. He admitted as much. He said he was frustrated. Now nearly everything he wrote was a form of fault-finding.
“I sit at my desk all day,” he told me. “I do nothing. I try to write. It won’t come.”
This was not the lazy artistic boast of ten years before, but a more imploring anguish. It was also fear.
“Sometimes I can’t do anything until five o’clock. Sometimes there’s nothing.”
With no one else listening, he didn’t mock me, didn’t giggle; he was solemn, and he looked terrible: pasty, swollen, almost deranged, holding a drink in one hand, a cigarette in the other.
“My brother thinks I’m lazy.”
Weariness was in his voice. He was a man burdened, and now I knew it was not an act. He seemed on the point of resignation. When Indira Gandhi was killed, in 1984, he flew to India and wrote an angry, grieving piece. As though evading the serious commitment of the book he had started, he wrote more articles: about the Third World—denying that such a place existed; about Australia—hating the whole country; about himself and his brother—wishing for his confusion to be understood and admitting that perhaps Vidia was the only person on earth who understood him.
After the least exertion, he became short of breath. He said, “I get so tired,” and the way he said it convinced me something was truly wrong. I asked Vidia whether there was anything we might do to help. But he only repeated that Shiva had brought this misery on himself. He said it with sympathy, helplessly, not knowing what the remedy was.
And really, a man of thirty-nine or forty, when he speaks of fatigue you don’t think that he is ill so much as overworked or even exaggerating—too many late nights, he must be neglecting himself. You never imagine that such a person is deathly ill. Yet Shiva was.
He was working on a section of his Australia book, writing about a comical Sinhalese named Tissa, who spoke to him about the futility of male ambition in Sri Lanka. Shiva wrote Tissa’s question, “Is it like that on your island as well?” and then he died.
His heart had been weak. It explained everything he said and did, everything he felt. It had taken away his strength; it had made him tired. It was why he panted and perspired, why he was often winded, why everything was so hard for him.
He was found slumped at his desk by his son, just as thirty-three years before, Shiva had found his own father dead.
I wrote to Vidia as tenderly as I could. He wrote back, saying, “I am melancholy in a clinical, helpless kind of way. I get, or am attacked by, these bad dreams just before waking up. In fact they wake me up.”
And he ended the letter, “How nice, in the middle of this, to get your hand of friendship.”
It was as though I were the brother who had survived. But Vidia went on mourning, and when he wrote The Enigma of Arrival and dedicated it to Shiva, he said of the book, “Death is the motif.”
14
Tainted Vegetables
“AT OXFORD CIRCUS, walk north until you come to the church with a spire like a sharpened pencil,” Vidia said, directing me in his precise way to the Indian restaurant where we were to have lunch. But I knew the church.
I was, as always, eager to see him. I needed to know what was on his mind, because he questioned everything, took nothing on faith, saw things differently from anyone else. His talk was unexpected and original. He was contrary and he was often right.
Long before, I had been with him while he listened to Indians in Uganda boasting of their wealth and security. “They are dead men” was Vidia’s verdict. Now most of London’s newsagents and sub-post offices were run by those same Indians, refugees from Uganda. They comprised almost a whole shopkeeping class in the south of England.
Three years before Shiva died, in 1985, Vidia had been upbeat and funny. “Intellectual pressure” was making his hair fall out, he said. But he was busy and happy. “One seems to be extraordinarily full of affairs.” He was only fifty. He accurately predicted the outcome of the Falklands war, in a characteristic paradox. The Argentines had sworn they would fight to the end.
“When the Argentines say they will fight to the last drop of blood,” he said, “it means they are on the point of surrender.”
And that happened, too. But with Shiva’s death he grew sad. He sorrowed quietly; his grieving showed in his writing, in his choice of subject. He wrote of death and dying—his sister had also recently died; intimations of mortality and a sadness crept into his prose, the tones of deeper isolation, because there is a note of loneliness in all elegies—beyond the death, something of departure, a sense that he was being left behind.
It made us firmer friends. Now, after almost twenty years, we depended on one another—each of us could count on the other to listen and be sympathetic. We were chastened by Shiva’s death. I realized how precious life was, how brief, how each day mattered.
If we were saddened, we were also vitalized, seeing what a waste it was not to live all we could. Vidia traveled more, but we were able to pick up the thread of friendship after weeks or even months of silence.
That was how I came to be rising from the Oxford Circus tube station to walk north on Upper Regent Street, towards the church with the pencil-like spire that I knew to be All Souls. We met on the sidewalk.
“Yes, yes, yes, Paul.”
Vidia placed a high value on physical characteristics, and especially on radical change. If someone had gotten very fat, or very thin, or pale or pimply, or had begun sporting a silly hat, Vidia took it as a danger sign, a mental lapse, depression, folly, vanity, something deeply wrong.
Watching him size me up swiftly, I could see that he was pleased I had not changed. Nor had he, I told him.
“I’m still doing my exercises every night,” he said.
In the Indian restaurant, the Gaylord, on Mortimer Street, Vidia began staring at the Indian waiter, a bespectacle
d young man, following him with his eyes around the room as though he had recognized him and was trying to think of his name. At last Vidia raised his hand and called him over.
“Do you know that you look like me?”
The waiter shook his cheeks and squinted, murmuring the question in disbelief. “I am not knowing, sir.”
In his twenties, with crusted sleepless eyes, dark jowls, thick untidy hair, horn-rimmed glasses, and a scowling smile, he had that fatigued and impatient look of many Indian waiters in London. The news Vidia gave him seemed to unsettle him. It was clear that no one had ever made such an observation to the waiter before. He glanced at Vidia and appeared to be so disturbed by what he saw that he turned away and laughed in a chattering way, his mouth wide, his eyes dead.
“Yes, I look like you,” Vidia said.
He studied the young man’s face closely and with such intensity the waiter backed away, giggling in anguish.
“Maybe, sir.”
“But you don’t really think so.”
“No, sir.”
“And yet it’s true. You look like me.”
This peculiar conversation bothered the waiter but was highly illuminating to Vidia, who seemed to see his younger self before him. The waiter was nervous, contemplating his face as represented by this fiftyish man grinning in satisfaction at him.
“Look in the mirror,” Vidia said. “Go on, you’ll see.”
The waiter, who could never have taken much pleasure in staring at his own reflection, waggled his head, Indian fashion, to mean yes he would. But I could tell that any resemblance was the last thing on which he wanted positive confirmation.
And it was all in Vidia’s mind. I didn’t see much of a likeness.
“All right,” Vidia said. “We’ll order, then.”
Over lunch Vidia told me that he had received his first Public Lending Right check, about £1,500. Mine was about the same, and the more popular authors got quite a bit more. This great scheme for compensating authors on the basis of library loans had finally been introduced in Britain. I had asked Vidia to sign a petition to support the PLR bill some years before. He had refused. I sign nothing. Now he was crowing over his check.