Sir Vidia's Shadow

by Paul Theroux

  How different we were. Cut off from him, I saw it clearly. I had always known that he dealt with strangers by trying to shock them, while my manner was ingratiating—just listening politely. His views of women ranged from offensive to silly, but also (as eccentricities do) revealed a lot about him: “My experience is that very few women have experienced true passion.” You had to smile at Vidia, of all people, considering himself a connoisseur of true passion. Much of the time, in these reported comments, he sounded very angry, but I read it as fear. This fear was in his soul. He was a man who, while a student at Oxford, had (as he put it) “fallen into a gloom” that had lasted twenty-one months.

  Long after, he attacked Oxford. He said he “hated” his college. He had nothing but bad memories, and “I was far more intelligent than most people there.” He said he had tried to gas himself at Oxford, but failed because “he ran out of coins to feed the gas meter.” After I had read this disclosure, it was hard to resist the gibe that it was only his parsimony that stood between life and death; had someone else paid, Vidia would probably have succeeded in doing himself in. But in the event, he spent nearly two years in a state of nervous collapse. “One was terrified of human beings, one didn’t wish to show oneself to them.”

  To be the guest of honor at a dinner party—that, for Vidia, was bliss, he said. This remark, made to another interviewer, rang true. He said he loved occasions “when one feels cherished.” To be cherished meant more than flattery and good food and vintage wines; it meant attentive listeners who paid the bill, as I knew. “He likes paying,” he said of any person who picked up a bill. “He wants to do it.” And was there any more tangible expression of being cherished than the bestowal of a knighthood? It was the dream of the wily pundit Ganesh Ramsumair, in The Mystic Masseur, to be transformed into the unapproachable Sir G. Ramsay Muir. Someone who builds a life on being pleasured by honors and flattery can only have known great rejection and insecurity and a yearning to belong. But then, hadn’t Vidia reminded me long ago that in order to understand him I had to know his past as “a barefoot colonial"?

  From my earliest attempts at writing, I had wanted security too. I knew when I had enough. “Don’t wish for too much” was my father’s lesson. And he always said, “Be kind.”

  Vidia’s temperament was a riddle. There seemed to me nothing lower than being beastly to book-tour escorts and nasty to secretaries, or to any underling who, out of nervousness, made gauche remarks. Did Vidia’s compulsion to intimidate such people arise from his having felt rejected himself? He did not make much of his experience of racism, but he acknowledged that he had known it in England. His cruelty could have been a case of monumental payback, though it was anyone’s guess why his victims were innocent Americans and English flunkies and earnest Hollanders.

  Vidia denied being Indian. He saw himself as “a new man.” But he behaved like an upper-caste Indian. And Vidia often assumed the insufferable do-you-know-who-I-am? posturing of a particular kind of Indian bureaucrat, which is always a sign of inferiority. It had taken me a long time to understand that Vidia was not in any sense English, not even Anglicized, but Indian to his core—caste conscious, race conscious, a food fanatic, precious in his fears from worrying about his body being “tainted.” Because he was an Indian from the West Indies—defensive, feeling his culture was under siege—his attitudes approached the level of self-parody.

  He was mistaken about so much. He made confused statements about Africa and seemed to regard the continent as starting in south London and extending to the Caribbean, the whole of it a jungle of jitterbugging “bush men.” These generalizations appeared to be no more than futile attempts to validate his novel A Bend in the River. It represented Vidia’s horror of the bush. But in the bush lay Africa’s essence, which Vidia never understood was more benign than wild.

  In three books, he had changed his mind about India with each one. And he was still wrong. I didn’t dispute his views. Challenge him and he was an enemy; treat him handsomely and there was a chance he would be kind. Cherish him and he was yours. Hadn’t I cherished him? So we had never quarreled.

  “To grow up in a large extended family was to acquire a lasting distaste for family life,” he told an interviewer in 1983. “It was to give me the desire never to have children of my own.” But he disliked children anyway. There are hardly any children in his books, and no happy ones.

  As a father, I was angered that he actively disliked children, because any parent has an animal awareness of that hostility. It made me protective. I also saw that the man who dislikes children and doesn’t have any of his own is probably himself childish, and sees other children as a threat. Vidia was the neediest person I have ever known. He fretted incessantly, couldn’t cook, never cleaned, wouldn’t drive, demanded help, had to be the center of attention.

  Now, away from his influence, I saw all this—not that I dared utter it, or think it through as an indictment. I saw him as deeply flawed, and as a friend—our friendship was the consequence of his imperfections, for character flaws seem to inspire the sympathy that lies at the very foundation of friendship. I knew this but kept it to myself, and when I dared to think about it, I inverted it.

  To maintain my self-respect and to defend Vidia, I often called him generous when I found him to be mean, and said he was eccentric when I felt he had been cruel. My obituary of Pat was a rosy picture of an adversarial marriage. I did this not to spare Vidia but to spare myself. I was ashamed to say that he treated people badly and that he was casual and presumptuous with me. Had I not repressed this, I would have had to admit that I was weak. But from the beginning I had known that I was a bit afraid of him. It is impossible to see a friend lose his temper with someone and not imagine that same fury turned on you.

  I had admired his talent. After a while I admired nothing else. Finally I began to wonder about his talent, seriously to wonder, and doubted it when I found myself skipping pages in his more recent books. In the past I would have said the fault was mine. Now I knew that he could be the monomaniac in print that he was in person.

  I did not want to think about any of this. That was why I never contemplated writing about him, because writing meant scrutinizing character and giving voice to feelings of disappointment and being truthful. It was much simpler to overlook Vidia’s faults. Let someone else be Boswell and write the biography.

  But there was that face. Some things I could not overlook, because they loomed too large and were too twisted. His personality dominated his face, which was forever contorted, twisted down in disapproval and misery and suffering, and his nose was thickened with anger. Seeing that face for the first time, Saul Bellow said, “After one look from him, I could skip Yom Kippur.” The years had given Vidia a fixed and unimpressed mask, scored with the crow’s feet of skepticism. He had the blinkless gaze of a raptor. You never wanted to see that face turned against yours. In another person, Vidia would have called it an ugly face.

  Once an interviewer mentioned to Vidia that I had said he was compassionate. Vidia rejected the description. He said it was a “political” word. It is not political at all, of course. But Vidia was right to deflect the word. I had said it in my eagerness to cover myself, because in my heart I felt he lacked compassion.

  His books had been part of my education, and were a broader education for showing what was good and what was lame—sometimes on the same page. Some of his books are excellent, even prophetic and wise, and others are unreadable and silly. Critics had used the infantile words “genius” and “masterpiece” in connection with Vidia and his work, perhaps for the same reason I had called him compassionate, because his recent books were just odd and insufficient. He took down the laborious monologues of people, and these lengthy interviews were presented as documentary almost without any intervention by Vidia. Long ago he had impressed me by observing that Columbus never mentioned that it was hot in the New World. In Vidia’s India: A Million Mutinies Now there is little landscape and hardly any weathe
r. There is no smell, no heat or dust, no sweating men, no lisping saris, no honking traffic, nothing except the sound of yakking Indians. The same is true of the Islam books, with the additional handicap of Vidia’s naive grasp of Islam and his ignorance of Arabic, which kept him from understanding the Koran.

  He was undeterred. “I hate the word ‘novel,’” he told an interviewer. He had always ridiculed the word “story.” He strongly implied that the novel was dead. I had never in my life heard an intelligent person state this opinion, only academic hacks who knew nothing of fiction. Perhaps his sort of novel was dead. Fair enough, but as always, in generalizing, he spoke for the world. When Vidia changed his mind, you changed yours, or else.

  He insisted he was correct: that writing had to be one thing—his thing; that John Updike, who can be very funny and whose elegant sentences give pleasure for their sinuous intelligence—that Updike, whom he singled out, was somehow passé. “Golden sentences” was Vidia’s way of belittling Updike’s prose. He felt the same about Nabokov. No shining prose for Vidia, no excursions into the lapidary. “I don’t want [the reader] ever to say, ‘Oh my goodness, how nicely written this is.’ That would be a failure.” He commended only a style he termed “brambly.” He offered the Victorian Richard Jefferies, an obscure Wiltshire naturalist, as a model. Vidia’s insistence made me doubt him: I had become wary of his dogmatism.

  We write as we can, not as we wish. Updike writes as Updike is able, and I am doing the best I can. I can’t choose to be “brambly” if, say, in describing Yomo’s sensuality, I am so sweetened by the mood of reminiscence that I write, “When she and Julian made love, which was often and always by the light of candles, she howled eagerly in the ecstasy of sex like an addict injected, and her eyes rolled up in her skull and she stared, still howling, with big white eyes like a blind zombie that sees everything. Her howls and her thrashing body made the candle flames do a smoky dance. Afterwards, limp and sleepy, stupefied by sex, she draped over Julian like a snake and pleaded for a child.” Let Vidia be brambly. He stopped trying to please the reader. He lost his humor, he blunted his descriptive gift, he denounced universities (as Richard Jefferies had done), he bemoaned readers, he tried to hold a funeral and bury the novel. But like the soothsayer who sees only evil because he is a miserable grouch, Vidia was not to be taken seriously.

  He never denied that he was a crank, yet he elevated crankishness as the proof of his artistic temperament, which is irritating for anyone else who has to work for a living. It was a sorry excuse—and from someone who never tolerated excuses for an instant. He admitted being difficult, but instead of seeing this as a weakness, he implied that his difficult nature was a virtue, an aspect of his being special. It is no virtue at all.

  I did not mind his contradictions. It is human to be contradictory. He had once claimed that England was second-rate; he spoke of crooked aristocrats and “bum politicians.” Then he accepted a knighthood. Was he acting logically, by hypocritically joining an establishment renowned for its hypocrisy?

  I had found England narrow but far more benign. Vidia had not learned in forty years that the English are not blamers and are not a cruel people—indeed, the traits of passivity, shyness, and modesty predominate. Liking order, the English deplored people who groused—“whinged” was their wonderful word. “Mustn’t grumble,” they murmured when the going was hard. Vidia was the opposite of phlegmatic: he was an excitable Asiatic—his own word—the more volatile and wounded for his colonial experience, his being slighted by English landladies, and all the postcolonial humiliation a Trinidadian Indian must feel when rejected by blacks on the island.

  It made him a blamer. He blamed society. He blamed the educational system. He blamed “stupid and common people,” people in general. He indulged himself in being fawned over and flattered. He became a regular at dinner parties and powerful American embassies.

  This was the fierce-faced friend I saw now, but it was a mute vision. I neither wrote nor spoke about it: Vidia remained a vaguely menacing blur. But the world to me was clearer. Without his response—he didn’t answer my letters, he didn’t call, I was too far away to provide him any help—I was better able to understand my progress, from being his student to becoming his equal. In my heart, I suspected he was now much weaker and needier than me, which was why he valued my friendship.

  Though I did not look into the future, I recalled his saying, “To all relations, every encounter, there’s always a time to call them off. And you call them off.”

  After twenty-nine years he had left his publisher, André Deutsch. It is not unusual to change publishers, but it is rare to leave without some sort of farewell. He said nothing to Deutsch, who complained, “Not even a postcard!” And that was much more than an author-publisher relationship. It was a close collaboration and a friendship. Vidia told me he admired Deutsch for being tough, intelligent, and entrepreneurial, and for having the panache to send suspected dud bottles of wine back in restaurants. After the break with Deutsch, Vidia talked about him very differently.

  And speaking of “you call them off,” what of the mysterious Margaret, who had dropped from view? She and Vidia had met in 1972. I had been introduced to her in 1977, and saw her again in 1979. Vidia had publicly celebrated their love affair and professed his ardor in The New Yorker in 1994. Pat had been upset, if not desolated, by Vidia’s enthusiastic candor and his telling the world of a sexual relationship that was, after two decades, still crackling away.

  Margaret, his shadow wife, had accompanied him on trips while Pat stayed home. “His lady love,” Pat once said sadly, with a lump in her throat, of Margaret, who went to parties with Vidia. Margaret kept him company on his literary quests. I had not seen her for years, but I heard about her all the time. Because Vidia stayed on the American diplomatic circuit, I was always being told of his appearances. “Saw your friend Naipaul the other evening,” a diplomat would say. “We gave a little party for him.” And usually, “His friend Margaret was with him.”

  That was the oddest part. I had heard this talk when he was writing his second Islam book, Beyond Belief. Twenty-four years later and he was apparently still passionate, still traveling with Margaret. Then he met Nadira: no more talk about Margaret. I had no idea how that had ended, except that it had to have been swift, and it must have been recent. Pat died. Margaret vanished. Vidia married Nadira. Margaret was in the shadows. An Indian friend of Vidia’s, Rahul Singh, wrote in an Indian magazine that Margaret was “an Argentinian companion” who “was devastated when he married Nadira.”

  To all relations ... there’s always a time to call them off. I took “all” to be his usual hyperbole for everyone but me. We were still friends. As for his silence, well, he was famous for his silences. All that had happened was that I had received a crazy letter from his excitable new wife. He probably knew nothing about it.

  One thing in Nadira’s letter puzzled me: her mention of Vidia’s forthcoming biography. This as an imminent possibility had never occurred to me. I knew that Vidia had interviewed several prospective biographers but that nothing was settled. The project seemed inauspicious, for who but a masochist would take on the thankless and unrewarding job of being anyone’s official biographer? Access to letters had entertainment value—they had, to use a Vidia phrase, “horror interest.” But that sort of book always verges on hagiography.

  The subtext of her letter was: Don’t write about him. This offended me. I had become a writer to be a free man, in Vidia’s own terms, not to take direction. And yet, when people asked me to write about him, I said no. I had no enthusiasm to write a biography. Until I received Nadira’s letter I had not even considered using Vidia as the subject of a book. I would pass my memories and letters to the designated Boswell and let that person do the work. Vidia was my friend. A book about such a friendship was an attractive idea, but it was impossible. Friendship had its rules.

  And there was no model: such a portrait had never been done. In literary history no b
ooks that I knew about detailed this sort of friendship—say, young Samuel Beckett writing a book about his years with the older James Joyce. The subject of protégés and apprenticeship was one that had fascinated me since my earliest days with Vidia in Uganda. Henry James had written of his friendship with Turgenev in Partial Portraits, in the course of which he mentioned Flaubert in a way that brought Vidia to mind.

  “But there was something ungenerous in his genius,” James wrote. “He was cold, and he would have given everything he had to be able to glow ... Flaubert yearned, with all the accumulations of his vocabulary, to touch the chord of pathos. There were some parts of his mind that did not ‘give,’ that did not render a sound. He had had too much of some sorts of experience and not enough of others. And yet this failure of an organ, if I may call it, inspired those who knew him with a kindness. If Flaubert was powerful and limited, there is something human, after all, and even rather august in a strong man who has not been able to express himself.”

  Young Gorky, also something of a protégé, wrote about old Tolstoy, saying, “Although I admire him, I do not like him ... He is exaggeratedly preoccupied, he sees nothing and knows nothing outside himself.”

  So, speaking strictly of writers, such a book had never been done. Anyway, how could one write a book about a friendship in progress? One of Vidia’s acquaintances urged me to, saying, “Not the authorized book, but a shadow biography.” I said no. As friends, our story was incomplete. Vidia himself had said, “One must write every book as though it is the final work, the summing up.”

  “I would never write a book about Vidia,” I said. “He is my friend. It is impossible to write about him and remain in touch. Vidia himself said that a book must be written from a position of strength. A book celebrates an ending, a finale. When the friend, or the friendship, is dead. It needs a conclusion. It needs a death. I haven’t got one.”