Sir Vidia's Shadow

by Paul Theroux

  “I was just wondering, regarding this question of an audience,” I said. “When did you develop this sense of people reading your work?”

  “I don’t have that sense at all. I’ve seldom met people who have,” he said, and there was laughter. “I’ve met an awful lot of people who come and bluff their way through interviews with me.” There was more laughter, and silence when the laughter died down. In that silence Vidia smirked and said, “But again, I don’t want to stump the conversation.”

  “No, you’re not stumping it.”

  “Oh, good.”

  “But circumstances of writing do change,” I said.

  It was obvious that he had no questions for me. So I was obliged to assume the humble position of interviewer and petition him with questions. Once again his shadow fell across me. Did I mind? Not at all, for here we were, occupying a stage in front of an attentive audience of readers. Yet I had a vibration—yes, a vibration—that Vidia objected to sharing the stage.

  “Now, you said once that writing Mr. Biswas was your Eden,” I said. “I just imagine a kind of paradise—in quotation marks. I think I know what you mean, but would you explain that?”

  Vidia frowned and said, “Well, great anxiety. Great poverty. Extraordinarily squalid conditions in London, especially for people like myself. Very hard to get accommodation.”

  The audience became very attentive at hearing Vidia refer to racism in Britain as personally affecting him. Vidia was usually seen to be the snob, the excluder, the mutterer.

  “Miraculously, in 1958, I found a lady in Streatham Hill who let me have the top part of her house,” he said. “She worked all day, so I had the house to myself. This was a wonderful experience for me. I was in the second year of this book, and I began to feel the strength in myself as a writer. I was extremely happy. It didn’t matter to me what was said about the book afterwards.”

  He seemed happy saying this, speaking about the work of writing and its satisfaction to him almost forty years ago. I sat back and listened and tried to think of a new question.

  “And it was an Eden,” he said, “because there was a kind of innocence about the purity of that dedication and that happiness. And in those days—you know, people have probably forgotten—in those days when you published a book, nothing happened. There were no interviews. There was no radio. No television. Books were published—they made their way. That was a thing in many ways. There wasn’t this element of the show about it. That was a kind of purity.”

  “Were you aware that you were writing a very ambitious book?” I asked.

  “Yes, I knew that I was writing an immensely ambitious work, and the knowledge of this grew on me. The book began simply in conception and developed as I wrote it.”

  I said, “I’d like to pursue this a bit, because I read all the early reviews of A House for Mr. Biswas, and this is the first time I have heard you say that reviews would not have mattered to you. The reviews were good, but they weren’t ecstatic. They welcomed the book. The New Statesman—”

  “Bad review! Bad review in the Statesman. My own paper!”

  “How did you feel?”

  “Didn’t mind!” Vidia crowed. “I knew it was going to be all right. I had to comfort my editors. I used to say, ‘Forget it—it’s going to be all right.’” He laughed at the thought of consoling his editors. “Certainly in the United States I had to comfort a series of broken editors. ‘It will be all right! It will be all right!’ And they were in tears, if they were women, and saying, ‘We should be doing this for you, and here you are comforting me.’”

  “Not too long after that you went to India,” I said.

  He nodded and awaited my question. Now I was firmly in the position of pedestrian interviewer, and Vidia was the immensely famous interviewee, the focal point of this event. It was better this way: he was happier, I was happier. He did not want to listen to me, or anyone, talk about writing. It bored him. But he had become animated talking about Biswas.

  “You have written three books about India, directly about experiences of living and traveling in India. Most people write about a place once, then go away and don’t come back.”

  “Paul, you were one of the people I consulted. I said, ‘Should I do it?’ It was an idea from another source. I asked you, and you said, ‘They’re thirteen years apart. You should do the book.’”

  I had no recollection of saying that. But if I had, then I suppose I could take some credit for his return to India and his writing A Wounded Civilization.

  “It was an entirely different book,” he said. “The first book was personal. It was—you know, our family had left India in the 1880s. We were really ragged dirt-poor people from the eastern Uttar Pradesh, Bihar area, wretched after the Mutiny and everything else. India was a subject full of nerves. Nerves was the subject of the first book. The second book was more analytical, so there’s always more distance, and I just wanted to go and write another kind of book. In the third book, I had arrived at this new way of writing, the travel books, which would make the word ‘travel’ a little odd. Exploring civilizations not through what one thought of them but through what the people had lived through, and making a pattern of that.”

  I said, “To me, the most interesting thing one can do is to go back to a country, to look at it again, write it again.”

  “The world has changed, I have changed,” Vidia said. “I wish to add new knowledge to the old. I don’t wish to do a repeat. I would like every book to be different from the ones that have gone before. I’m not stirred to write a book unless it is different from the ones that have gone before. This thing about travel books—I find what I do very interesting, taking human narratives and sticking to the truth as far as possible. It seems to me preferable to taking an adventure which you stumbled upon and falsifying it in fiction, to do a Maugham sort of novel.”

  Realizing that I needed to prod him with a question, I said, “There was something I was going to ask you. Yesterday when I was in London, I went to the Christie’s preview of ‘Visions of India’ and someone said that I had just missed you.”

  “Oh, my God. My secrets given away,” Vidia said, and I knew it was a mistake to begin that way. But I kept on. “I wanted to ask you about pictures and writing. How is your imagination fed by images and a love of the pictorial and your writing?”

  Sounding stubborn and doubtful, Vidia said, “I don’t think there’s any relation. I think words and the pictures of words are quite different. And the thoughts of words and the things that occur in the brain are different from the pictorial impressions. The talents are entirely different. I don’t think I’m a judge of art.”

  “I think you’re being modest. You are a good judge of art. You’ve bought it, you have it on your walls. So?”

  “But I don’t think it’s related, Paul.”

  He was stumping me again, but I could not understand why he denied his pictorial gift. I said, “The images in your books are made out of words, but they begin as observations—describing someone’s shadow, the texture of skin, hair, sunlight, color, the shapes of things. Obviously the talent is different: Landseer could draw fur, but you can describe fur.”

  “I think it is an intensity for observation with which I was born,” he said, admitting this. “I remember being aware of it when I was very young. Studying a face very carefully, for what it said. Studying hands and the shape of bodies, the parts of people.”

  “Isn’t that what painters do?”

  “I don’t know. I like the line in a painting. I like Hokusai’s invention. Velazquez, the way he handles paint. It’s quite different from writing a sentence or shaping a narrative.”

  “But how can you write if you can’t observe? The gift of observation is transformed into writing.”

  “You must observe,” he said, at last agreeing with what I had been hinting at all along. “I’ll tell you a story of the observing gift. One of the earliest memories I have, probably when I was about six or seven. I was at m
y grandmother’s house in a country town in Trinidad during the school holidays. And there’s a teacher, an Indian teacher from the school, and he’s moving his possessions in a box cart. My father stops him and they exchange a few words. And the teacher says, ‘I’m not like some people who will show off and get a proper cart or get a van to move my goods. I will move them and let people look at me and let them laugh!’ And I thought, ‘That is how the poor behave.’ A boy of six made this sad observation. ‘He’s like this because he’s a poor man. He’s a teacher whom one respects, but really he’s a poor man.’ So, it’s deep inside one. And it’s also related, perhaps, to my feeling for handwriting. You know, one judges people by their handwriting, or their parents, or the way you look, the way you walk, the way you talk. The whole person. No mysteries for me.”

  “Aren’t those surfaces you’re talking about?” I asked.

  “No, not surfaces, because we carry our life in our face. We carry our experiences in our face.”

  “But they are surfaces—surfaces that reveal inner states?”

  “Yes, we make ourselves.”

  More confident over the flow of talk that had developed, something like a conversation, even if it was all made of my impatient questions and his reluctant answers, I said, “I want to ask you about universities. You once said that you were disappointed at Oxford. How do you think you would fare at a university these days?”

  “I think they’re calamitous, these English courses,” Vidia said angrily. He shifted in his chair, looking combative, shooting from the hip. “They’re actively destructive of civilization and thought. When I was at Oxford in 1950, I think we all knew that English was not a serious subject for study, not worth a serious degree, not worth a physics degree. It was not worth a man doing medical research.”

  The audience was restless, suspecting heresy but half agreeing with it, as Vidia warmed to his theme. Obviously I had struck a nerve.

  “We knew that this business of doing English was a very soft option, an extension of the divinity courses of the last century. But that was what people went to Oxford for, to learn to hunt and to live this great social life, and later, endless divinity people were produced. Probably a hundred years ago or less, Professor Sweet—you know, who is the origin of Professor Higgins in the Shaw play” (he meant Henry Sweet, 1845–1912, phonetician and philologist)—“he and some other people established this English course, a form of idleness for simple people. So it was a kind of imperial statement about English literature, like English history, so it was a brand-new study. In 1950 the study stopped at 1830, people weren’t encouraged to go beyond that, and very few wanted to. They were content with the shallows of the eighteenth century.”

  Vidia sat very erect, folded his arms again, and his voice became almost a shout.

  “So that now what has happened is that this non-course, this non-subject, has been taken over by politically motivated people. Universities have become places where free thinking is not allowed, where your tutor does not ask for an original thought about a work. But it’s a political line! We were told at Oxford in 1950 that the best thing that happened to you occurred in the holidays. That’s when you did a lot of reading. The point of this course was that it allowed you to do an infinite amount of reading. Nowadays people read very, very little, and they have elaborate theories. And there have emerged whole generations from the universities who can’t think and who just parrot the phrases.”

  There was applause from several sections of the audience. Who had ever heard English departments being attacked or subjects being evaluated this way? Physics more important than English—indeed, English study vastly inferior to all others.

  “This has particularly damaged the newer countries, the lesser cultures, who at great cost have produced intellectuals. They send them to Oxford, Cambridge, they send them to American universities, and they come back parroting dreadful political tripe. They’re corrupt!”

  The response, as his voice broke on the word “corrupt,” was tumultuous applause from every side of the circus tent. At last they had a performance worthy of such a tent, a raging novelist in full cry, an Indian performing an authentic rope trick.

  “And I think that an English course ought to be recognized as a silly course!” he called out. “Not worth a physics course, or a medical research course, or astronomy! And there should be no support for it, and all the professors and all the lecturers should be withdrawn from that kind of work and put into some other job. I wonder what work they’ll do? What work will they do! In the old days we’d say, ‘Get them on the buses!’ But now we know that conducting a bus is a form of idleness.”

  There was no point in my saying anything now. I waited for the laughter and applause to die down and then crept into his shadow once again and asked, “So you think that literature courses should be disbanded?”

  “I think literature should be read privately,” Vidia said. “Literature is not for the young. Literature is for the old, the experienced, the wounded, the damaged, who read literature to find echoes of their own experience and balm of a certain sort.”

  “The old and the damaged,” I said.

  Vidia had begun to laugh in a triumphant way. “Contented tribal societies don’t need literature. They pound their yams and they’re quite happy!”

  “But people can’t abandon literacy, can they?”

  “No, you can’t go back. You can’t pretend, you can’t unlearn what you’ve learned.”

  “A moment earlier you sounded like Chairman Mao.”

  Laughing, relaxing a bit after having delivered his tirade, Vidia said, “When did I sound like Chairman Mao? You mean ‘Get them on the buses’?”

  “Learning by doing,” I said. “It’s one of his thoughts.”

  “Like Mr. Squeers.”

  “And also: Go into the countryside and learn how to pound yams.”

  Vidia said, in a reasonable voice, “Literature will look after itself. People will have to read it. Now, apart from the universities you have the dreadful pressures of the prizes, which are a dreadful kind of corruption of publishing. As I said, when my first books were published there were no interviews, nothing, and books just trickled down and made their own way. If there had been all these prizes, and my books hadn’t got the prizes I would have been run out of town by the publishers.”

  “But that is part of the selling mechanism,” I said. “Interestingly, universities are also a business.”

  “And part of the contraction of the reading habit, because of certain approved texts,” Vidia said. “I am told that Francis Parkman is no longer taught, no longer approved in America. People are no longer encouraged to read his work. He’s a great writer. The Oregon Trail is a great work. But he’s not there, not available, because he is politically unacceptable. There is a kind of tyranny which this bogus English course has imposed on whole civilizations.”

  “So reading should be a private activity.”

  “Yes. A private activity. And your friends will tell you to read a book. And you’ll read it quietly. You don’t want people telling you what to think.”

  “But if you went back to Oxford now, what would you study?”

  “I would have to do something equally idle,” Vidia said, laughing softly, sounding West Indian again. “The whole point of doing English was a form of idleness, you know. It was a way of spending time—it wasn’t serious. So we need a place as a kind of decompression chamber, from adolescence to adulthood.”

  I said, “But it was a crucial period for you as a writer.”

  “No. No. No. It was not. Except if you consider what perhaps are the effects of solitude, or long solitude, or long unhappiness, but that probably would have occurred elsewhere.”

  “You didn’t need to go to Oxford for that?”

  “Didn’t need to go to Oxford for that, to be unhappy, or to be poor.”

  Buford had been sitting by, laughing and occasionally looking shocked. He said, “You said something earlier which I
found interesting, when you described travel writing as somehow more authentic than some fiction. Do you find your nonfiction now more honest or more satisfying to write?”

  “Yes. I’d have a lot of trouble writing straight fiction now, because I’ve done my fiction,” Vidia said. “And I’ve been writing for forty years. I’ve handled my experience as best as I can. I can’t go back to doing this thing which I now reject, because I want to know why one should falsify a perfectly valid experience. Why, for the sake of drama, should one dress it up? In the last century, things moved quickly because of this swift modification that occurred, writer by writer, book by book, and the forms developed quickly. I think now that if your material is so varied, so many cultures meet, and the novel works best when you’re dealing with a monoculture—one culture with a set of norms that everyone can appreciate, almost like Jane Austen. It’s easier to write fiction like that. But when the world is moving together in all kinds of ways, that form doesn’t absolutely answer, and the ability to lie is so immense. When I read books from Southeast Asia, I worry about it. I think, ‘Where is this lie from? Why is this a lie?’ It’s like reading an autobiography, where you think, ‘What is being left out? What is being distorted?’”

  I said, “So your response to this need for a new form is The Enigma of Arrival and A Way in the World!”

  He said, “All great writing has its own new form. Montaigne’s essays—completely new. He began writing classical essays, and then it develops, he writes about himself, he writes about the war around him, he writes about cruelty, he writes about the discoveries of the world, and he writes in his mocking way about himself as well, this new modern man—absolutely new. That is why Montaigne is Montaigne. All great writers are new. They are not like other people.”

  I liked this observation, not only for what it said about great writers but for what it revealed of Vidia’s own conceit about himself. He saw himself as one of these new men, and now I saw his reason: his role model was Michel Eyquem de Montaigne (1533–1592).