by Paul Theroux
Slowly, it happens, a phrase, a sentence, a paragraph. Nothing comes out right the first time, and you are not so much writing as learning a language, inching along in what seems at times like another tongue. A characteristic of writing in the tropics is this recopying, rewriting, beginning again, and understanding that it will take a long time, whatever you write: it has taken me a week to get this far with this little essay. It is not impossible to finish, just hard, because many things have to be in your favor: it can't be too hot, it must be quiet, two or three hours have to be totally free of interruption; your health must be good and your mood fairly bright—a late night, an argument or a hangover means a lost day.
But the fact of being in a foreign place has made you small. You are not a public figure (public figures who are habitually vocal are deported), simply an English teacher. The bookstores do not stock your novels, or anyone's. No one is going to ask you to lecture at the National Library on "The Future of the Novel"; the worst that can happen, if it is known you are a writer, is that you'll be asked to edit the church newsletter. You are unaware of any sense of celebrity or reputation. That happened last year, in another country, when your novel appeared; and there hasn't been a murmur since. Everything has to be proven anew, and if you need humility, look at the bookshelf behind you where your novels, even last year's, have become mildewed and discolored in the humidity: they could be the books of a dead man. No one where you live has the slightest idea of what you are doing. To write you have withdrawn, like any conscientious hobbyist; and ceasing to live in the place you may be lonelier: your world is your house, your family, your desk; abroad is a bar.
It is a form of eccentricity, but in the tropics the eccentric is common, and far from being held in contempt, he is regarded as rather special and left alone. At Makerere University in Uganda, one head of department was never seen. He didn't teach his classes; he was never sober; he was said to be a great character. He had many defenders. There was a professor of philosophy in Singapore who used to saunter down the street in his pajamas, reading difficult books. This was his uniqueness. He was watched but never pestered. Expatriates by the very fact of their having come to the tropics are considered by the locals to be somewhat crazed, and the expatriate who fails to be a person in any subtle sense can still, with a little effort, succeed as "a character". This requires a specific obsession, a singular tic of personality. Your distinguishing mark might be your continual absence ("Oh, him— he's never around"), and if not doing your job is your affectation, then you may proceed with other things. What does it matter if anyone sees this as dereliction? You are an expatriate on contract, not an exile; you intend to go home eventually. Gain a modest reputation for being unreliable and you will never be asked to do a thing. The students will become used to receiving their essays late.
The students demand less than American ones; the system, Oxbridge in equatorial decline, forces them to work alone. They are as insular as their parents and subservient to the government; their civic-mindedness takes the form of fashion shows for charity. They are intelligent, nervous, inexperienced and poorly read. Many would like to emigrate to Australia (Singaporeans talk reverently about Australia, the way people from Massachusetts used to talk about California: "Plenty of opportunities there, and a really nice climate"). Like students in developing countries everywhere their speech is a mixture of the bookish and the political ("whilst we go from strength to strength", "timorous Claudio is part and parcel..."). Some in essays sound like Jacobeans. One discovers Irving Ribner and tears him to shreds; another who has never heard of the First World War writes about Wilfred Owen. There is no American literature. "Richard Cory" is said to be an old English ballad, and Herman Woo and Heidi Chin think the eponymous hero's name "ridiculous and comic". Except for the archaic phrases the students write clearly, in mission school copperplate; they speak less well, and in a tutorial sometimes spell out the word they want to say. Lady Macbeth is "roofless" or "rootless", and Dickens is very good at "crating a crackter". It is easy to laugh at such lapses, until one reminds oneself of the emigré scientists in the States—brilliant men in their fields—pronouncing their original sentences all wrong. Chinese students are plagued by glottal stops and certain consonants, and they always speak very fast. In a tutorial a girl holding a leatherbound book reads aloud to prove a point she has just made:
Must dow esplain da ting I hate most on erf,
Da treason, da shame, da assident of my berf!
In a lecture on Tamburlaine I repeat the line, "Holla, ye pampered jades of Asia!" They smile earnestly in recognition. What will become of them? It is a foreigner's question. Their parents have saluted four different flags, some more; in twenty-five years, when these students are middle-aged, what flag will be flying over the Singapore City Hall? It is futile to speculate, but not less worrying for the person who has spent three years among them, who knows many as friends and who has come to understand that the student who says, "Must dow esplain ..." is no fool.
I never traveled much in the United States, but I remember my two older brothers making a train journey from Boston to Ohio when I was seven or eight—in the late 'forties. Somehow we had the idea that people in Ohio suffered from a lack of iodine because of the scarcity of fish. The Ohioans were afflicted by goiters, and people walked around Cleveland with bulbous growths on their necks. I was too young to go to Ohio, but I remember my brothers' stories: about their meal on the train, how the waiter brought their change back on a plate (a plate!), the flatness of Ohio, and they had seen some people with goiters, and one elderly lady called my brothers "Yankees". They had their rolls of film developed; the results were blurred and banal, every one was a disappointment: Ohio, which sounded so foreign, looked like Massachusetts.
Growing up, I mistrusted anyone who had not traveled. I thought of becoming a White Father, not out of any piety but from a desire to be sent to Africa. I thought of becoming a doctor: then I could have a useful occupation overseas. When I was nineteen or twenty I applied for a job in a Lebanese university, and having fabricated much of the application, was called for an interview in a Boston hotel. The interviewer was kind, asked me my age, then smiled and said I wouldn't do: Beirut was a rough city, and "there is always some kind of trouble in the Arab quarter". I finally left in the spring of 1963, and I have not been back in the States for more than a few weeks at a time, a total of about four months in nine years. Now I want to go back for good, not because it is too difficult to live abroad—only writing is hard in the tropics—but perhaps because it is too easy. Africa, for all its mystery and strangeness, unquote, is really a very simple place to live. Africans are candid and hospitable, and make it easy for you to live among them. The Chinese in Singapore appear not to see you; the students do not greet you or each other. Anonymity is simple.
Living among strangers in a foreign place I am like an unexpected guest waiting in a tropical parlor. My mind is especially alert to differences of smell and sound, the shape of objects, and I am apprehensive about what is going to happen next. I sit with my knees together in the heat, observing the surfaces of things. At the same time, the place is so different I can indulge myself in long unbroken reflections, for the moments of observation are still enough to allow the mind to travel in two directions: recording mentally the highly-colored things one sees is simple; the mind then wanders. The reflection may be a reminiscence of early youth, a piecing-together of an episode out of the distant past; it is not contradicted or interrupted by anything near. In a foreign country I can live in two zones of time, the immediate and apprehensible, and in that vaguer zone I thought I had forgotten. Since I do not write autobiographically, I am able to see the past more clearly; I haven't altered it in fiction. That detail of the goiters in Ohio, the forsythia bush behind our Medford house, our large family; slowly, in a foreign place, the memory whirrs and gives back the past. It is momentarily a reassurance, the delay of any daydream, but juxtaposed with the vivid present it is an acute reminder
of my estrangement.
And it may be wasteful and near senility, this reaching back that living abroad allows. Certainly trivial details can be strongly visualized: twenty-five years ago I pulled myself up the side of my grandfather's rainbarrel and looked in and saw mosquito larvae twitching near the surface like tiny seahorses. I had not thought of it until yesterday, in a suburb of Singapore. I wonder at its importance.
Most of a writer's life is spent in pure idleness, not writing a thing. Up to now I have used this idleness to poke in places with bewitching names, Sicily, the Congo, Malaya, Burma, Singapore, Java; this distraction could be a form of indulgence, but I can't think what else I should have done. I know it is a mistake to stay away from home too long, and it is foolish if one calls oneself a writer to go on teaching. The professions are separate; I admire the people who can write love-scenes after work. I can't, and it is unprofitable to pose as if I can. I told a colleague I was leaving. She was concerned. She believes my subjects are little countries. She said, "But if you live in Europe or America, what will you write about?" We'll see.
V. S. Naipaul
[1971 and 1982]
I had been in Africa for a little over three years, writing every day; I was full of ideas, full of books and plans. This was in Uganda. I was a lecturer in the Department of Extra-Mural Studies at Makerere University. We ran weekend courses for adults in upcountry towns (now, most of those adults are dead and their towns burned to the ground). One day in 1966, a man on the English Department said, "V. S. Naipaul is coming next week. He's joining the department. He'll be with us for about six months."
He never gave a lecture; I don't think he set foot in the department, and towards the end of his term he moved into a hotel in western Kenya. He hated the house he had been given. "Everybody gets those houses," a woman told him. He said, "I'm not everybody." He refused to put a nameboard on his house; and then he had an idea: "I'll have a sign saying 'Teas' and as you go up the road past the houses you'll see 'Smith,' 'Jones,' 'Brown,' 'Teas!'" He was asked to judge a literary competition. None of the entries was good enough for first or second prize: the single winner got third prize. He had some writing students; he invited them to his house and, one by one, urged them not to write. He gave the university's name a Scottish pronunciation, something like MacArayray. He said African names baffled him. "Mah-boya" he said for Mboya, "Nah-googy" for Ngugi, and an Englishman named Cook he called "Mah-Cook," because the man wore an African shirt and was full of enthusiasm for bad African poems. Naipaul bought a floppy military hat and a walking stick. He walked around Kampala, frowning. "See how they make paths everywhere—every park is crisscrossed with paths!" he said. "They do exactly as they please, that's why they're so happy," he said of the Africans. "But the English here are shameless. They're inferior, you know. Most of the men are buggers. That's why they're here." He liked referring to Ghana as "The Gold Coast" and Tanzania as "Tanganyika" and towards the end of his stay in East Africa, when Indians were being persecuted in Kenya and Uganda, he advised the Indian High Commissioner to cable his government urging a punitive mission. "Anchor a few battleships off Mombasa. Shell the coast. Mah-boya will change his tune."
I had never met anyone like him. We were introduced at one of Mah-Cook's poetry sessions. Afterwards, Naipaul asked me casually what I had thought of it. "Awful," I said, and from that moment we were friends. I told him how much I enjoyed his books. This pleased him, and if I gave him a line I liked he could give me the next one. He knew his books by heart, having copied them out in longhand two or three times—that was his writing method. He was impressed that I had read so many of his books—no one else in Kampala had. "No one reads here," he said. "They're all inferior. Obote puts a bronze plaque of his face over the Parliament Building and everyone thinks it's wonderful. He's a dictator! This country is slowly turning back into bush!"
He said he found writing torture. This surprised me, because his books were humorous and full of ease; the imagery was precise and vivid, the characters completely human. I did not know then that to write well one went slowly, often backwards, and some days nothing at all happened. "Writing should be transparent," Naipaul said. But it took great strength and imagination to make light shine through it. I had read An Area of Darkness, The Mystic Masseur and Mr. Stone and the Knights Companion and A House for Mr Biswas. I admired them and reread them, feeling only discouragement for myself, dismay at seeing my own writing.
I wondered what Naipaul read himself. He showed me his books—two of them, Martial in Latin and The Holy Bible. He tapped the Bible and said, "It's frightfully good!"
One day he asked me what I was writing. It was an essay, I said, on cowardice. "It explains why I feel cowardly." He looked at it, scrutinized it, asked me why I used this word and not that word, challenged me and suggested I rewrite it. I rewrote it four times. When I was finished he said, "You should publish it. Send it to a good magazine—forget these little magazines. Don't be a 'little-magazine' person. And write something else. Why don't you write something about this dreadful place?"
He was the first good writer I had ever met and he was then, in 1966, working on one of his best books, The Mimic Men. It is almost impossible for me to overestimate the importance of Naipaul's friendship then. I was 25, he was 34. He said he felt very old; he seemed very old. "I'm not interested in meeting any new people," he said. "I should never have come here to this bush place. You've been here for three years—you see how writing keeps you sane? If you hadn't been writing you'd have become an infy"—it was his word for inferior—"like the rest of them."
His praise mattered, and when he gave advice I took it. He demanded that I look at punctuation, at the shape of a paragraph. "And you need to be calm to write well. Be detached—detachment is very important. It's not indifference—far from it!"
It was like private tuition—as if, at this crucial time in my life (I had just finished my first novel), he had come all the way to Africa to remind me of what writing really was and to make me aware of what a difficult path I was setting out on. When we were together he was very sensible and exact, and he could be terribly severe: Never do this, never do that. "Never give a person a second chance," he said. "If someone lets you down once, he'll do it again." He talked often about writing, the pleasures and pains. He was proud of the fact that he had never had another job. The American Farfield Foundation had financed this Uganda trip, but Naipaul said he was losing money by staying.
"At this stage of your life your writing will change from week to week. Just let it—keep writing. Style doesn't matter—it's the vision that's important, and writing from a position of strength." He was right. I began to notice an improvement, a greater certainty in my writing. It was Naipaul who showed me that Africa was more comedy than tragedy, and that perhaps I should spend more time writing and less time organizing extra-mural classes. He said, "Never take people more seriously than they take themselves."
With me he was a generous, rational teacher. But in Kampala his reputation as a crank was growing. "I hate music," he said. "African music is frightful. Listen to them." He went around saying that Africans were wasteful and unresourceful: "Look at the Italians—they can make cheese out of dirt." Every now and then he shocked a room full of people by describing in detail his punitive mission of Indian gunboats. He claimed that there were very few African writers who were not in some way plagiarists; and several were exposed, though not by Naipaul.
"Those are the ones that frighten me," I heard him say one day to a Makerere lecturer. He pointed to a long-legged African walking on flapping sandals under the blue-gum trees.
"What about him?" the lecturer asked.
"He's carrying a book," Naipaul said. "The ones that carry books scare the hell out of me, man."
He asked me to take him to a brothel. He sat on the veranda, drinking banana gin and smiling in refusal when a girl came near. He said, "I see perfect integration here."
When he finished his novel, he wanted to travel
. "Let's go to Rwanda," he said. Naipaul had a car, and even a driver, but his driver had let him down in some way and, in a kind of vengeance, Naipaul did the driving and the African driver sat in the back seat, scowling in remorse. In the event, we took my car to Rwanda, and I did the driving. One day we made a wrong turn and ended up in the Congo. Border guards detained us. They wore colorful shirts and they carried guns. When they sent us away, Naipaul said, "Did you see their uniforms? Did you hear their bad French? Let's get out of here."
We went to Goma, on Lake Kivu. There were a few Indian shopkeepers there. Naipaul talked to them, asking them about business, the future, and were their children going to school? Afterwards, he said, "They're all dead men." The hotels were empty except for the large Belgian families which ran them and ate enormous meals, quarreling and shouting the whole time. Rwanda was still a colonial place, with decaying villas and savage guard dogs. A dog snarled at us one night as we were out walking. Naipaul said calmly, "What that dog wants is a good kick."
In Kigali, the dusty capital, the hotels were full. I inquired at the American Embassy and was told that Naipaul and I could use the embassy guest house. This brought from him a melancholy reflection. "Look what it means to come from a big powerful country—you Americans are lucky," he said. "But I come from a ridiculous little island."
We had one argument on the trip. I picked up an African who was hitchhiking. Naipaul had said, "Let him walk." But the African was in the bush; there was no transport at all. I sometimes hitchhiked myself. Naipaul was very angry; the African was a lazy, sponging, good-for-nothing, preying on the conscience of an expatriate. But it was my car.