Sunrise with Seamonsters

by Paul Theroux

  Nowadays, people my age are asked: Where were you in the 'sixties? Americans went various ways. They clung to universities, or "dropped-out" and became part of the counterculture; or they were sent to Vietnam. Some, like me, spent the 'sixties in the Third World—it was a way of virtuously dropping out and delicately circumventing Vietnam. I was in my twenties in the 'sixties, and I think this novel is very much of its time. Many African countries had just then become independent; colonialists were going home; volunteer teachers—and insurance agents and revolutionaries—were arriving and wondering what would happen next. No one realized that the darkness they found was the long shadow of Africa's past.

  A number of things interest me in this novel. A very minor character, Wilbur Parsons, I used later in a short story, and a professor who writes about Parsons' poetry I used in yet another story. Several times in the novel, the vice-president of the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company is mentioned. This man is of course the most literary insurance man America has produced: Wallace Stevens. While I was writing the novel, the Singapore government was in the throes of renaming things—streets, parks, squares, buildings. I began to see that naming is the great passion of all new governments and that, in history, often only names change and all else remains the same. So this novel is full of street names. In Malawi they have been changed, but they were once as strange and English as Henderson and Fotheringham.

  When I went to Malawi in 1963 it was called the Nyasaland Protectorate and was administered by Britain. In rural areas, women and children often dropped to their knees, out of respect, when a white person drove past in a Landrover. African men merely bowed. The country became independent in July, 1964, and four months later there was an attempted coup d'état—sackings, shootings, resignations. The President-for-life, Doctor Banda, had spent much of his working life in Britain and did not speak any African language well enough to give speeches in anything but English. He had an interpreter for talking to his people. It was, some months, very cold in the country—I had expected Africa to be hot. Most Africans I met were rather pious members of the Church of Scotland, but they also believed in ghosts and witches. There were rural redneck Portuguese on Malawi's long border with Mozambique. They had come out from Salazar's Portugal to be barbers and shopkeepers in the African bush. There were stubborn, mustached English settlers who said they would never leave Africa; and nuns, lepers, guerrillas, and runaways. Malawi had a once-a-week newspaper and a terrible radio station: it was a country of constant rumors. Many of the Africans spoke English with a Scottish accent, because their teachers were Scots, following in the steps of the great Scottish explorer, David Livingstone. In the deep south of the country the Africans often went stark naked; in the north they wore English flannels. I tried to put some of this oddness into my novel.

  Dead Man Leading

  [1984]

  V. S. Pritchett, a master of the short story, once wrote, "The masters of the short story have rarely been good novelists." But Dead Man Leading is an extremely good novel. It has an intensity, a passionate strangeness, that sets it apart from Pritchett's other novels, and except for its vivid language it has little in common with his short stories. In setting and mood it is wholly original. It is certainly the best of the five novels Pritchett has written (though I am an admirer of Mr Beluncle), and yet it is practically an unknown book. It was published in 1937. "This novel was more imaginative than my earlier ones," Pritchett wrote in Midnight Oil, "but it came out not long before the war started and that killed it."

  When I read it the first time I was immediately reminded of Brazilian Adventure, by Peter Fleming, which appeared in 1933. Pritchett told me that he had been influenced by that travel book—the search for the explorer Fawcett who went missing in Brazil in the 1920s—but that he had also thought of his fellow writers, the restless novelists who, in the 'thirties, poked around the world inviting privation. He explained in his autobiography that he had read the lives of the African explorers and the accounts of missionaries' experiences ("Missionaries always write down the practical detail") and he found a common characteristic to be an "almost comical masochism." It was Green Hell, and Stephen Gwynn's biography of Scott of the Antarctic (1929) and—he told me—"memories of childhood fancy" that heartened him to begin writing. He summed up his intention in the novel by saying, "I attempted a psychology of exploration."*

  It is that and more, and is especially remarkable for having been written before Pritchett went to Brazil. He says he knew the literature of the Amazon and he created his own Amazon: "I constructed a small model of my bit of the river in the garden of the cottage we had rented in Hampshire." I am usually doubtful about the novels written by people who have never traveled in their setting. "And he'd never set foot in Africa!" readers say of the author of Henderson the Rain King, but no one who has been to Africa has to be told that; and internal evidence in the Tarzan stories show their author to have been similarly handicapped. This is another reason Dead Man Leading is exceptional. Apart from the orangutan with its gulping Lear-like laugh in Chapter Fourteen—the mostly silent pongo pygmaeus lives ten thousand miles from the Amazon—the novel is completely convincing. And of course Pritchett himself is a great traveler; he eventually went to Brazil and was able to confirm that he had invented the truth.

  The narrative is not hard to summarize: it is the account of an expedition in search of a man who disappeared in the jungle seventeen years before. "The Johnson mystery," it was called: what really happened? The question is not answered in a conventional or predictable way, because the men on the expedition are of such conflicting character. Indeed, the achievement of the novel is that it portrays an exquisitely physical landscape along with minutely detailed portraits of the inner life of the men lost in it. In one sense it is as concrete as can be, and yet it is also full of subtlety and suggestion.

  At the center of the expedition (but the resonant word "quest" would be more accurate) is Harry Johnson—it was his father, Alexander Johnson the missionary, who vanished. Rev. Johnson had often been away for long periods. He had four sons. They were proud of their courageous father and dutiful towards their mother. Harry says that his mother brought them up to hate women, and "It was necessary for each of them to be the missing father—to be immaculate, her husband." Harry is only in his thirties, but already he is an explorer-hero who has mapped Greenland, the Arctic, the tropics; he is the subject of admiring anecdotes. He has a stubborn and solitary nature. "I think I may be very different from other people," he says to Lucy in an early chapter, and soon after, she has an equally tantalizing but more specific perception of him: "The frightening thing was the closed door in his heart and the fanatic behind it."

  Lucy is a fascinating person, and fully human—her decent fear of setting sail in a terrible wind shows just how dangerous Harry's masochism is. The whole of Chapter Three is brilliantly done, a passionate battle of wills in what is less a love affair than a struggle for supremacy. Although Lucy does not go on the expedition her presence is continually felt, and she is often referred to. Harry is as obsessed by her as he is by his father.

  What is surprising in the novel is how closely connected the characters are. Even that marvelous reprobate, Calcott, claims a relationship with Harry's father. It is a novel of the jungle, but it is not a novel of savagery—no cannibalism, no blowguns, no shrunken heads. Indeed, it sometimes seems like a version of English society feverishly disintegrating in the tropics.

  The leader of the expedition, Charles Wright, is Lucy's stepfather. But Wright was first attracted to Lucy and only afterwards married her widowed mother. So Wright is a potential father-in-law to Harry. Gilbert Phillips, the journalist who goes along on the expedition, is a friend of both Harry and Lucy—and Lucy was his lover before she chose Harry. In the course of the search for the missing explorer these facts, and others, are revealed. It would not be fair to the reader to state everything baldly here, except to say that where relationships exist there is passion and desir
e; and Pritchett sees the explorer as something of a sexual misfit.

  For Wright, the Brazilian jungle has the enticement of a woman, and the treetops have for him the look of "fantastic millinery." He had seen the Johnson country—"he would remember the sun upon the wall of trees like the light on a woman's dress"—and regarded it as his own, something virgin and private: "He had seen its face and its dress. He longed to be in its body. The talk of the missionary's country and the mystery of his disappearance was talk of a rival and an attempt to enhance her attraction which he could admire as a connoisseur of discovery and adventure but which ... made him alert for any sign of betrayal."

  The novel is full of rivalries, and it may also be said that nearly every character in this account of an expedition is traveling in a different direction, mingling flight with pursuit, and usually suffering the satisfactions and frustrations that we associate with lovers. This is another reason Calcott is so welcome. He is a necessary element in the Englishness of it all—not a bloody gentleman, as he says. And he is also full-blooded and funny, unreliable, boasting, and populating the Amazonian town with his dusky children. I am inclined to think that it is the inclusion of Calcott that gives this novel its greatness, for otherwise it would be too intense and too sad; and it does not become truly tragic until this odd clown enters the narrative. The seance in which Calcott figures is one of Pritchett's triumphs as a writer.

  One reads Dead Man Leading and one is struck again and again by how easy it is to imagine this remote landscape. The men and their obsessions seem much odder than their setting. It is one of Pritchett's most visual pieces of fiction, and it is visual in a particular way. It is not merely the clarity and strength of the images; it is, most of all, their familiarity. He speaks of the brown water of the river resembling strong tea, and a sky like a huge blue house; the forest is faint, like "a distant fence", and the jungle at another point is bedraggled and broken, "as if a lorry had crashed into it"; there is a creek "like a sewage ditch" and some birds rising up "like two bits of charred paper" and a bad rainstorm making "the intolerable whine of machines" and a forest odor "like the smell of spirits gone sour on the breath." It is what English explorers would see—either a kind of tempting purity and allure in the liquefaction of the jungle's clothes, or else a way of discovering memories and establishing among all these relationships that the imagery of the Amazon is the imagery of England. This is emphatic in the last paragraph:

  He went with her to the door. Nothing could have been more like the river and the jungle and the sudden squawk of birds to his unaccustomed sight and ear, than the street light-daubed in the rain, the impenetrable forest of lives of people in the houses and the weird hoot and flash of the cars. He went back to his room, wishing for a friend.

  It is impossible in a short introduction to do full justice to this novel. It has real excitements—the desertions, the chance meetings, the overwhelming hardships; and it has pleasures—the byplay between Calcott and Silva, the glimpse of the jaguar in Chapter Ten, the rainstorm in Sixteen, the surprising but surely inevitable ending of the quest. And there are the numerous perceptions, almost casually noted, but so telling: "He spoke abruptly and hastily to Silva, treating him with that laconic contempt which conceals the gratitude one feels to an accomplice" and when Wright lies dying and Johnson watches, "There enters with the handling of the sick a kind of hatred, a rising of life to repel the assault of evil." It is an extraordinary book, in all respects precise and wise.

  What Maisie Knew

  [1984]

  If it were not for Henry James's art—his subtlety, his grace, his handy euphemisms—this very modern story about aimless lives and messy marriages would be practically untellable. Even so, and for all its unexpected humor, it is painful and at times pathetic. In these pages are many instances of characters blushing at something said or glimpsed—he (or she) "coloured a little," is the usual expression. They have a great deal to color about. The antique word "sordid" suits much of the action perfectly. It is a novel about the aftermath of a bitter divorce. Self-interest, battle and greed figure in most of the characters' motives, and so there are many pairings-off, many quarrels and partings. These people do not think they have enough love, sex, money or happiness. It is no wonder they "colour." They "throb," too. And they make noises suggestive of smoldering, like the fumbling sounds rising up a staircase, "the deepening rustle of more elaborate advances." It is a novel of thrusting hands.

  It is most of all a novel about a small unselfish girl and the ways in which she is passionately victimized by adults. Maisie is a factor in her parents' divorce settlement. Each of her child-hating parents, in an arrangement made out of pure spite, agree to keep her for six months at a time and then toss her back to the other. It is not the keeping but the tossing back that pleases them. Maisie is very young—five when it begins. The parents take lovers; each parent remarries; the new spouses take an interest in their step-daughter and then in each other, and finally, in a sexual tangle that may be unique in English fiction, the separate stepfather and step-mother become lovers. The natural parents have gone on to new attachments. Meanwhile, Maisie watches each move closely. "Her little world was phantasmagoric"—like a magic lantern show—"strange shadows dancing on a sheet." She is at last compelled to choose her future.

  The novel is highly patterned and orderly. It has been compared to a stately dance. As if that is not off-putting enough, it has also been compared to a bedroom farce. Yet there are no bedrooms in the James novel—certainly no beds. It makes for a certain archness in this book, fames himself called it an "ugly little comedy." He implies in many places in the text that Maisie is incorruptible. But she grows, she changes, and in the course of this novel we witness "the death of her childhood."

  The idea came to James, as so many others did, at a dinner party, when one of the guests described an unusual divorce settlement. James set it out fully in his notebook: "The court, for some reason, didn't as it might have done, give the child exclusively to either parent, but decreed that it was to spend its time equally with each—that is alternately. Each parent married again, and the child went to them a month, or three months, about—finding with the one a new mother and the other a new father. Might not something be done with the idea ...?" He proceeded to invent complications and consequences, and he finished his synopsis, "with the innocent child in the midst."

  It was his innocent-child phase. It was the period of The Turn of the Screw (1898), with its pair of terrified tots. There are blameless kiddies in The Other House (1896), and one each in The Pupil (1890) and In the Cage (1898), and the anxious virgins of An Awkward Age (1899). James's biographer saw a peculiar symmetry in this: at a harrowing time in his career (his play Guy Domville had been a humiliating failure late in 1895), James began to write about childhood, and he depicted all its stages, from roughly the age of four through puberty and adolescence, finishing with the threshold of adulthood, Nanda at eighteen. Professor Edel sees a great deal of James in Maisie: "Maisie's bewilderment and isolation is James's ... but the world's cruelty and hostility are recreated into a comic vision of benign childish curiosity." It is true James is nearly always complimentary in describing the child, and though he says in his Preface that Maisie resembles other small children in being inarticulate, he insists on the numerous perceptions and rich visions of her childhood.

  That same highly receptive mind acquires experience through the "immense sensibility" that James attributes to fiction-writers in his essay, "The Art of Fiction." It is not difficult to imagine Maisie (or James himself) in those same terms, with "a kind of huge spider's-web of the finest silken threads suspended in the chamber of consciousness, catching every air-borne particle in its tissue. It is the very atmosphere of the mind; and when the mind is imaginative—much more when it happens to be a man of genius—it takes to itself the faintest hints of life, it converts the very pulses of the air into revelations."

  Maisie begins as a parrot, and is entirely innocen
t of the physical implications of the affairs around her; but she grows in the novel, and though she is still young when the novel ends she has come into flower. I don't think of Maisie as one of James's little lisping waifs, but rather as a girl whom circumstances have forced to behave like a woman. Sir Claude says, near the end, "One would think you were about sixty—" Most critics seem to think of the novel's action taking place over two or three years. I think it is more, perhaps six or seven, filling out Maisie's body and giving her desires of her own. James wanted time in the book to be fluid. "I must handle freely and handsomely the years," he wrote in his notebooks, "be superior, I mean, on the question of time."

  He noted his first idea in 1892. A year later he returned to his notebook and elaborated a bit. He had earlier wondered whether Maisie's parents should die so that Maisie could go her own way with new parents. He now decided that his killing them off would mean evading more interesting consequences; he would let them live, he asserted, for the sake of irony and complication. He had named the parents "Hurter", as unambiguously as if he were labeling a humor, and he thought it would be a story of about five thousand words.