by Paul Theroux
"How can I get in touch with Chisiza?"
Mr Chisiza had told me his alias ("Ali Abdullah") and his box number in Dar es Salaam. I remembered the alias because it was so different from his real name, and the box number was easy because it was a historical date. I told the Greek.
"Do me a favor," said the Greek.
"Sorry," I said.
"Write to him and tell him I can't deliver the goods," said the Greek. "I got a wife and three kids. I got a business to worry about. The CID are watching me—they know I helped those guys get out of the country last year."
I refused. But I wonder what I would have done if the Greek had been an African? I think I might have helped him out; I might have pitied him. Though it wasn't pity that made me help Mr Rubadiri. He was an important man, a United Nations delegate, and his request pushed me to do something which I could construe as humane. The same went for the German articles: I was clarifying the African position; I was a kind of nationalist. My little helps were consistent with the mood of that decade in Africa, of engaging oneself and being available for the purpose of national development. The image of the Azania-like joke republic committing farcical outrages upon itself was temporarily antiquated then; it was a time when the admission to the United Nations of a country like Gambia (which is a riverbank) or Rwanda (half a dozen volcanoes) would not raise a smile.
That decade is over; what was engagement is now detachment, a prevailing spirit of passionate disregard. And no less for the Africans themselves. I find it hard to believe that a German magazine at present would look for its contributors among the European section of a community in Africa. More frankness would be found among Africans. And now a delegate to the United Nations would not know a school teacher in his country: the time has passed when diplomats are picked from a nation's headmasters. And a black guerrilla fighter asking a white American to pass messages for him? Such things don't happen today: Azania reasserted itself at the close of the 'sixties—not in the European mind, but, much more significantly, in the African one. The next Black Mischief, if not the next Evelyn Waugh, will be wholly African.
The Greek asked a favor. I had no trouble refusing. My refusal was racial: he didn't count. I said, "I told you I don't want to get involved. I was supposed to give you this message. It's between you and him. It's not my affair."
"But you're in touch with him," said the Greek. "I'm not. I didn't know he was in Dar. They said he was in China."
"I'm not in touch with him," I said. "I happened to see him at the airport in Dar, that's all."
"You haven't ever written to him?"
"No," I said, "and I don't intend to."
"How do you spell your name?" asked the Greek.
Which made me suspicious. So I gave him a wrong spelling. Mine is an easy name to misspell.
A week later he invited me out to eat. But I had to turn him down. I had a new problem.
The Germans, in reply to my interview with Mr Rubadiri, had written me the strangest note. It was in an opaque envelope, of the sort used by Swiss banks, with no return address. The large sheet of notepaper was not headed. The message read as follows:
"I wish to thank you most sincerely for your letter of August 21st and for Item No. 17 which can be considered as being particularly interesting. This kind of 'poetry' is of special importance both for me and for all members of the redaction staff. If you could go along this line with your poetry it could be tremendously interesting for all of us over here. Thanks a lot."
I happened to know the German Ambassador to Malawi. His daughter was to marry one of my good friends. I asked him about the magazine.
He had never heard of it. "A German magazine about African affairs, you say?" He was somewhat angry that he had never been sent a copy, because he was supposed to be up-to-date on such publications. He said he would check on it.
In the weeks that followed a further problem cropped up: The Migraine. The long-delayed issue with my editorial about Vietnam had come out only to be seized and confiscated by the American Ambassador, Sam P. Gilstrap. The full text of my editorial was cabled to the State Department. And in due course the Peace Corps' representative, Mr Michael McCone, was sent back to Washington for what was considered a lack of judgment.
Nothing was done to me. The editorial board of The Migraine was summoned to the Embassy.
"I wrote that editorial," I said. "If anyone should be sent home it should be me, don't you think?"
"You didn't know what you were doing," said Ambassador Gilstrap. "But McCone should have known better." And then he blustered: How could I have written that? What possessed me? How could I be so stupid?
"Any human being would write what I did," I said, though I saw how feeble this justification was.
"I don't agree with you," said Ambassador Gilstrap.
"May I ask why?"
"Because I don't think you're a human being, that's why!"
A moment later he apologized for this remark, but he added, "McCone is out, and as long as I'm the Ambassador here he's not coming back. This is a very serious matter. What if your article got into the hands of the Egyptians?"
The Egyptians?
"They'd use it for propaganda to prove we're not united."
"Who says we're united?" I asked. "Everyone knows there's a lot of opposition to the Vietnam war."
"Not here" said Ambassador Gilstrap. He sat forward and knotted his fingers and fixed me with a stare. "Boy, I'm going to tell you one thing and I want you to remember it. You're not in Nebraska now! If I read anything more like this I'm sending you home, too. I won't hesitate." He nodded and said, memorably, "I will prevail!"
"Today," said Dr Banda, "I am going to talk about the teaching of English..." It was October 12th, the opening of the new University of Malawi; as Chancellor of the University Dr Banda gave the opening address, which was in the form of a lecture.
He spoke about the importance of grammar; it was a long lecture in the course of which he mentioned that some months previous he was shown a typescript of a textbook with no English grammar in it. "Some people in Malawi," he said, were "masquerading as teachers" and "trying to fool my people!" McGuffey the grammarian might have applauded this speech, though there was little applause from the members of the diplomatic corps, the first-year students or the civil servants, who listened in great bewilderment. Toward the end of the speech Dr Banda said, "I am sure you all know Mendel. Mendel's example is one to follow. He had to work very hard to compose his Messiah and you will have to work like Mendel to learn English grammar."
This was my first indication that Dr Banda had a reasonably good memory; he had forgotten Handel's name, but I guessed he knew mine. He remembered the textbook, and I wondered if there would be any repercussions. I found little consolation in his closing remarks, which were to the effect that he planned to make personal visits to the English classes of all large schools to appraise the teaching of parsing and grammar. The psychology of dictators is unique in that in their determination to make people obey them they see treason in variation. It is an attitude they are trying to eliminate, rather than a single act. The man who refuses to teach English grammar is disaffected; his decision is political, he is traitorous.
It was a few days later that I saw the German Ambassador again. I went to his house with my friend Fred, who was engaged to his daughter.
The Ambassador was having dinner when I arrived. He rose from the table and beamed. "Ah, Paul! Come right in! Shall I call you brother?" He shook my hand. And he explained: for a year I had been working for the German equivalent of the CIA.
I was in suspense, but the suspense was not to last. On the 20th of October I was deported. Expelled is a better word, since it suggests speed. The only inconvenience I recall is of being unable to cram my traveler's checks into my pocket. I had several thousand dollars in fives and tens, and I couldn't fold the plastic wallet in half.
Because of the speed of the deportation, onward plane reservations were impossible. We wo
uld have to stay in Rhodesia a few days.
And it was in a Chinese restaurant in Salisbury that I learned why I had been deported from Malawi. Wes Leach, my escort—but he was also a friend—had been silent on the plane. There were times when I saw him eyeing me furtively, as if he believed I would make a desperate bid for freedom by leaping from the Dakota into Mozambique. I suppose I looked rather desperate, for I had been going over all the possible reasons for my deportation: was it the German secret service? Or had Sam P. Gilstrap prevailed? Or was it the textbook? Or, perhaps—but this was so complicated!—Mr M was really working for Dr Banda ... or perhaps the Greek?
Wes was reluctant at first to tell me. He said he did not know much. He urged me not to ask. I nagged him. He gave in. The American Embassy, he said, had received a call from Dr Banda's office saying that Dr Banda wanted to speak to the chargé d'affaires.
"What if I told you," said Dr Banda to the chargé, "that one of your Peace Corps chaps tried to kill me?"
The chargé winced, but said he didn't think it was likely.
"It is likely, and it is true," said Dr Banda. He showed the chargé a file.
In the file (it may have been marked Hastings Banda!Assassination Attempt) there were a number of letters: half were from Ali Abdullah in Dar es Salaam, and the rest were from me. The letters described the plot to kill Hastings Banda.
The Greek, in order to clear himself for having helped the rebel ministers initially, informed the Criminal Investigation Department after I delivered the message about the bread van. Using my name, a correspondence was struck up with Mr Chisiza who was assured that it would all be smooth sailing. A dozen gunmen were dispatched from Tanzania; the bread van they expected to take them to Zomba was waiting on the road, in the appointed place. But behind the bread van were a score of soldiers from the Malawi army. The gunmen were ambushed and all were killed.
Dr Banda said to the chargé, "If you don't remove this chap I will have him imprisoned."
In Washington, I had long talks with the Peace Corps ("How could you do this to us?") and with the State Department ("When," they asked expectantly, "is the lid going to blow off Malawi?"). I thought my passport might be taken away, but my brother, who is a lawyer, said, "Let them try." The Peace Corps fined me for "six months' unsatisfactory service" and made me pay my air fare from Blantyre to Washington; the State Department men simply raised their eyes to the ceiling and whistled at the end of my tale—my abridged tale: I didn't mention grammar or Germans—and one said, "You can consider yourself a very lucky fellow."
Others were not so lucky. Mr McCone was sent to Sarawak, Mr Chisiza was shot and killed trying to enter Malawi a year later, Mr Rubadiri is still in Uganda. Some of the former ministers got scholarships from the CIA to study in American universities; the rebel soldiers still live in Dar es Salaam, and from time to time they save enough money to make a raid in Malawi. Mr M disappeared, and the Greek was eventually deported.
Hastings Banda is alive and well. They say his facial tic worsened after 1965. Last year I read in a Singapore newspaper that Banda gave a speech in which he said that after this year he wants no more Peace Corps volunteers in his country. That piece of news didn't surprise me in the least.
This is a little lesson in restraint. I didn't have very much then, but I might have learned some since. For example, I've waited half a dozen years to explain this complicated story. Sometimes it seems as if it happened longer ago than that, and to another person.
Lord of the Ring
[1971]
Ernest Hemingway imagined himself, as all his admirers now do, a heavy-weight, a literary hard puncher and even physically a formidable opponent. He valued the attributes that the American male (and the Karamojong warrior) value. His biographer shares the attitude and the metaphor: "He ... dealt, almost singlehanded, a permanent blow against the affected, the namby-pamby..." He took enormous pleasure in flooring a muscular Negro with his bare fists, and delivering a manuscript he could say, "I'll defend the title again against all the good young new ones." He spoke of the discipline needed for writing as similar to that for successful boxing; he was proud of his good health, doing exercises, running, swimming and rising early while he was engaged on a book; and he saw his writing career in terms of the ring: "I started out very quiet and I beat Mr Turgenev. Then I trained hard and I beat Mr de Maupassant. I've fought two draws with Mr Stendhal." He had the humility to add, "But nobody's going to get me in the ring with Mr Tolstoy..." His line was that he could lick practically any man in the house.
He was a destroyer and so are many of his characters: even the gentle Santiago recalls a triumphant arm-wrestling match (with a muscular Negro); others of his characters are fighters, inclined towards pugilism. One sees the glamor: his destroyers come in pairs and all eyes are on them; it is one big man against another, and implies competition, ultimately a winner and a loser. We are to admire the winner (Hemingway, not Turgenev; Santiago, not the Negro). But the very reverent biographer concedes bullying: "Throughout the month of May, Ernest's behaviour was often that of a bully." Professor Carlos Baker is referring to Hemingway ruining his friend's catch of a large marlin by firing a tommy-gun at some circling sharks which, maddened by the taste of their own spilt blood, devour most of the marlin. Later in that same month Hemingway beats up Joseph Knapp, a New York publisher. Both of these incidents, tidied up to make the gunner heroic and the fight with the rich intruder a justly-deserved victory, are retold in Islands in the Stream, with the envoi, black calypso singers immortalising the fist-fight with a song as in 1935, they "celebrated Ernest's victory with an extemporaneous song about the 'big slob' from Key West."
The boxer recalls his famous matches, the novelist his novels; a boxer is bigger than any of his fights and though writing is hardly a competitive art, much less a sport, the novelist postured deliberately to be bigger than any of his novels. The question of "style", a favourite boxing word, is fundamental to a discussion of Hemingway's work; not style as a literary value but style as a posture, emphasising the face, the voice, the stance. Hemingway blamed the bad reviews of Across the River and into the Trees on his photograph that appeared on the dust jacket ("Makes me look like a cat-eating Zombie"); the voice is familiar ("You got very hungry when you did not eat enough in Paris ..."); and the stance? Always the boxer's: "Am trying to knock Mr Shakespeare on his ass."
The reputation is all, and counts for more than the writing. Asked who is the most popular American writer in the Soviet Union, the Russian journalist says, "Papa." The note of friendly intimacy is common: it is the man that matters. The American writer produces a good book and acquires a reputation. The reputation displaces the idea of literary quality: the idea of the author is much more important than the ideas in the work. Interesting, the number of academics who care so deeply about the man's adventures and leave the work unread, or see blasphemy in a low evaluation of it. Hemingway claimed to dislike academics, but those who flattered him were welcomed at his haunts and in his house; he yarned them, feeding them lines, took them on his boat, and wrote them candid letters. In the letter refusing Carlos Baker permission to write a biography, Hemingway mentions ("with almost bewildering frankness") how he practised coitus interruptus with his second wife. (The fact appears in Professor Baker's recent biography, Ernest Hemingway—A Life Story.)
Since the aggressive narcissism of commerce and the vanity of money are the driving forces of reputation-making, the progress of the reputation is best described in the language of the stock-exchange. A writer appears on the market; he has considerable long-term upside potential; he gets a divorce and hits a slump, his plane crashes in a jungle and this is a technical rally; he tumbles and bottoms out, he meets resistance at the buyer level, then rallies again and inflates and firms up and meets a negative critical flow, and so forth. This does not have much to do with writing, but Hemingway's reputation grew without much reference to his work, and in the years since his death, aided by the urgent whisperings
of fact-finders and anecdotalists, it has rallied and consolidated sideways. Now a "new" novel has been found; it was written twenty years ago and apparently abandoned by the author. It is technically his last novel and its publication is a triumph for those obsessed with the man.
The novel has no literary importance, but its personal candour is essential. This is of course the basest motive for reading; contemptuous of the art of fiction, the reader is interested in the book only in so far as it gives access to the author: "This is just a story but Ernest Hemingway is writing it..." The satisfactions are finding out how Hemingway drank and handled a boat, and spoke, and made love, and treated his friends. These revelations are considered important, for once the reputation is made and the novel is a study rather than a pleasure (or a bore), the hero of the novel is its author. Fortunately for Hemingway his life began to be studied before he failed as a novelist, so it was never acceptable to say, "This novel is bad." The novels were aspects of the man, and the man's heroism was never questioned.
Islands in the Stream is divided into three parts. In 1951 Hemingway said that parts 2 and 3 were "in shape to publish", but he did not publish them. The novel (to use the publisher's term; it is really nothing of the kind) is set in the Caribbean and seems originally to have been intended as a study of the sea. Previous titles of the sections were The Sea When Young, The Sea when Absent, and The Sea in Being, retitled in the present edition as "Bimini", "Cuba" and "At Sea." The sections are loosely linked by the common subject of the sea and by the main character, Thomas Hudson, who is "in appearance, manner, and personal history... clearly based on Ernest himself" (according to Professor Baker). There was a fourth section, and Thomas Hudson was not the hero of it. This was the story of an old man, Santiago, who caught a marlin and battled to save it; it was published (Hemingway had some reservations about its length) as The Old Man and the Sea. Professor Baker reports that Hemingway was very enthusiastic about the unpublished parts of the book he was calling The Island and the Stream, but rather than publish it he turned from it and wrote A Moveable Feast, his last book, parts of which are prefigured in the reminiscences of Thomas Hudson. Hudson, in his youth, also lived with his wife and small child over a sawmill in Paris in the 1920s, and had a cat named F Puss and liked the bicycle races and drank in cafés with James Joyce and Ezra Pound.