Fresh Air Fiend

by Paul Theroux

  After that, from the shore, where junked trucks sat rusting, I could see the two surf breaks—one just off London, the other near Cook Island, where in season there were great rideable waves and surfers on them. London was obviously hard up, but it had a blessed serenity and a palpable sense of peace.

  That changed overnight. I returned to London on the day a cruise ship, the Crown Princess, fresh from Maui, was anchored offshore. Boat day! The whole somnolent place had come alive, though the cruise passengers, many hundreds of them, squinted in skepticism at the low tin-roofed buildings of the improvised town and tried to avoid stepping on the torn-open corned beef cans. But the most surprising thing was that the children I had seen a week earlier, frolicking in the schoolyard or at Father Bermond's church hall, were now circulating among the cruise passengers, begging like lepers. "Give me money!" And the little girls were no longer in school uniforms but were dressed in tremulous grass skirts and seductive makeup, with shell necklaces and flowers plaited in their hair. They sidled up to the visitors and winked and had their pictures taken—Christmas Island coquettes—and they asked for money too.

  Islanders hawked shell bowls and shell necklaces, palm leaf hats and shark jaws, postcards, sea urchin and giant clam shells. The post office in town had closed for the day and become another stall at the boat dock, where Kiribati stamps depicting birds and butterflies were being sold for twice their value. Bulky islanders danced the explosive Wantarawa, the comic travesty of what was originally a war dance. A semicircle of hunkered-down men were harmonizing. Each group of performers brandished a plastic bucket, soliciting donations.

  "There was no begging before the cruise ships," Kim Andersen told me. He is the island's only American, and runs a well-equipped diving and offshore-fishing outfit, Dive Kiribati. Having operated similar businesses off the Turks and Caicos, as well as in Panama and Mexico, Kim said that diving off Christmas Island is world class.

  The island's pioneer European, a Kiribati-speaking Scotsman named John Bryden, said, "The cruise ship visits are important to the island. They definitely inject money into the economy and they get people busy."

  Few of the visiting passengers got farther than the edge of town. I heard one woman say to her companion, "I don't think there's much on the island to see."

  Their hour on shore was up. They headed back to the ship. You couldn't blame them. But it was a pity, for even in the half day they had, they could have gone fifteen miles or so past the town line, where habitation ends and the richness of the island begins. The wild birds, the lagoon fringe, the million coconut palms, the great windy emptiness, the storm-free weather and silky air—here was the serene epitome of nature, so safe and unthreatening that birds such as the golden plover and ruddy turnstone flew thousands of miles from Alaska to winter here. This place was so perfect in its way, a place that had hardly known humans—it was even spared the Pacific war—that British and American scientists, and ambitious soldiers, were encouraged to come here and deliver the ultimate Christmas present by exploding thirty-four nuclear bombs.

  It says something for the tenacity of nature that even after this massive insult, the island's larger, unpeopled portion is still thriving in its eccentric way.

  Part Six

  Books of Travel

  My Own

  The Edge of the Great Rift: Three African Novels

  THERE IS A CRACK in the earth which extends from the Sea of Galilee to the coast of Mozambique, and I am living on the edge of it, in Nyasaland." I was writing in blue ink on a sheet of school foolscap, in my little house in the bush near Soche Hill. It thrilled me to be so far from home, and to be able to make a statement like that. It was the hot season, known locally as the Suicide Month, because of the suffocating and depressing heat. But that was a settler expression, and most of the white settlers had bolted from the country when the Africans took power.

  "The crack is the Great Rift Valley," I went on. "It seems to be swallowing most of East Africa. In Nyasaland it is replacing the fishing villages, the flowers, and the anthills with a nearly bottomless lake, and it shows itself in rough escarpments and troughs up and down this huge continent. It is thought that this valley was torn amid great volcanic activity. The period of volcanism has not ended in Africa. It shows not only in the Great Rift Valley itself, but in the people, burning, the lava of the masses, the turbulence of the humans themselves who live in the Great Rift."

  I went on writing, describing my school, my students, the villages nearby. It was a letter from a distant place where I felt I had arrived, and I knew I was happy. When I published this "Letter from Africa" in an American newspaper, I had a distinct sense that I had fully embarked on a writing career.

  At the age of twenty-two, hoping to avoid being drafted into the U.S. Army, but also wishing to see the world, I joined the Peace Corps. When I went to Malawi in 1963 it was called the Nyasaland Protectorate and was administered by Britain. In rural areas, women and children dropped to their knees, out of respect, when a white person went by in a Land Rover. African men merely bowed. The country became independent in July 1964, and four months later there was an attempted coup d'etat—sackings, shootings, resignations. People were arrested for repeating rumors, charged with "creating alarm and despondency"—how I loved that expression. The president-for-life, Dr. Hastings 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 wore three-piece pinstriped suits and a Homburg and had an interpreter for talking to his people. It was, for some months anyway, very cold in the country. Many Africans I met were pious members of the Church of Scotland, but they also believed in ghosts and witches. There were stubborn mustached English settlers who said they would never leave Africa. There were nuns, lepers, guerrillas, and runaways. Malawi had a once-a-week newspaper and a terrible railwaystation and steam locomotives. It was a land of constant rumors. In the deep south of the country, the Africans often went naked; in the north they wore English flannels. This was not the Africa I had expected. I think my contemplating its oddness from my isolation at the edge of the Great Rift helped make me a writer.

  I remember a particular day in Mozambique, in a terrible little town, getting a haircut from a Portuguese barber. He had come to the African bush from rural Portugal to ply his trade. It went without saying that he would cut the hair of white people only. Mozambique had been a colony for hundreds of years; the Portuguese first claimed it in 1489. This barber did not speak English, and I did not speak Portuguese, yet when I addressed his African servant in Chinyanja, his own language, the Portuguese man said, in Portuguese, "Ask the bwana what his Africans are like." That was how we held a conversation: the barber speaking Portuguese to the African, who translated it into Chinyanja for me; and I replied in Chinyanja, which the African translated into Portuguese for the barber. The barber kept saying—and the African kept translating—things like, "I can't stand the blacks—they're so stupid and bad-tempered. But there's no work for me in Portugal." It was grotesque; it was outrageous; it was the shabbiest, darkest kind of imperialism. I could not believe my good luck. In many parts of Africa in the early 1960s, it was the nineteenth century, and I was filled with the urgency to write about it.

  After my two years in Malawi, I went to Uganda and signed a four-year contract to teach at Makerere University, at the time considered to be one of the best universities in Africa. Uganda was a green wilderness of great beauty. I was self-sufficient, and I had fallen in love with the English woman whom I was to marry. I felt different from everyone I knew, and yet I had found a place for myself in Uganda. In this mood, I began writing about the Chinese man who ran the grocery store around the corner from where I lived in Kampala. This neighborhood was famous for the thousands of bats that hung in the tree branches and took off in a black cloud at sunset to hunt for insects. The Chinese man, his grocery store, his Indian competitors, his African customers—these were my characters in Fong and the Indians. I
had written two novels before this, but Fong was the first piece of fiction that satisfied me.

  My future wife taught at a girls' school in Kenya. While I was writing this novel, I courted her by driving hundreds of miles on rutted roads, from Kampala to her bush school north of Nairobi. Kenya had been heavily colonized by unsubtle and presumptuous white people with distinct snobberies; this atmosphere—so different from Uganda—interested me, and a girls' school seemed to contain all the contradictions and snobberies and class distinctions of imperialism. My writing method, then as now, was to write a book in notebooks (first draft), copy it out in longhand on sheets of lined paper (second draft), then type it myself (third draft) before correcting it and turning it over to be retyped by someone else (fourth draft). I was typing Fong when I began to write the first chapters of Girls at Play.

  It became clear to me that I was privileged to be living in an African world that had not been written about. This was not the Africa of Conrad, or Karen Blixen, or Hemingway, or even Laurens van der Post. No one had written about this particular Africa. That, I think, was my good luck. It was for me to describe this unknown time and place. There was a colonial hangover, and Africans were now being uncomfortably accommodated in the white clubs. But I was not a member of any club; I did not go on safari. I came to be fascinated by this Africa of hilarious dance halls and village feasts and bush schools. Crazed politicians ranted all over the countryside, and yet there was a power vacuum in which most Africans, rather enjoying the anarchy, felt free. In a cheerful, scribbling, self-deluded frame of mind, in this in-between period after colonialism and before politicians and soldiers tightened the screws, I felt safe.

  Jungle Lovers was the result of my departure from Africa. In 1968, after five years in Malawi and Uganda, my wife and I were attacked by rioting students in Kampala. After that, I lost my will to teach in Africa; my confidence was gone. I said to my African colleagues: You do it—I have no business here. I decided to leave for good and took a job teaching in Singapore. The Singapore authorities had gotten wind of the fact that I was a published author and, taking the philistine view that writers were troublemakers, they insisted that I sign a paper saying that I would not write or publish anything about Singapore while I was under contract. They also put me on the lowest salary scale. I wondered what they were trying to hide.

  I discovered: nothing—or very little. Singapore was a small, humid island-city that called itself a republic. It was dominated by puritanical overseas Chinese who were growing rich on the Vietnam War. My students said they wanted to emigrate to Australia. I taught courses in Jacobean literature. I questioned whether I was cut out to be a teacher in the tropics. Of course, I wasn't, and I saw writing as liberation.

  So, forbidden to write about Singapore, I wrote about Africa, in Jungle Lovers. The weather was very hot. I could work only at night or on weekends. I kept my writing secret from my employers, and in the middle of writing this novel I contracted dengue fever; it took more than two years to complete the book. When at last I finished it and sent it off, I left Singapore (and teaching) to write my Singapore novel, Saint Jack. I never took another salaried job.

  That was in 1971. Now, rereading Jungle Lovers, I am struck by its peculiar humor and violence. Some of it is farce and some tragedy. I suppose the insurance man and the revolutionary were the two opposing sides of my own personality. I had gone to Africa believing that political freedom would create social change. Five years did not change much, and now, more than twenty-five years later, this novel of futility and failed hopes seems truer than ever. That was my mood on leaving Africa. I was younger then. Now I should say that it takes a long time for change to come about, and change ought always to come from within. Outsiders, even the most well intentioned in Africa, are nearly always meddlers.

  Nowadays, people my age are asked, Where were you in the sixties? Americans went various ways. They clung to universities, dropped out and became part of the counterculture, or were sent to Vietnam. Some, like me, spent those years in the Third World—it was a way of virtuously dropping out and delicately circumventing Vietnam. I was in my twenties in the 1960s, and I think my African novels are very much of their time. Many African countries had just 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.

  The Black House

  WHEN I LEFT the tropics after working for almost nine years in hot countries, I went to England and experienced a great shock. It seemed to me to be one of the strangest places I had ever been (and I had lived in Uganda and traveled in the Congo and in upper Burma). This was Dorset. I was just about to write, "Hardy does not prepare you for Dorset." But of course he does. His work is very truthful to that county. I found the place dark and deeply rural, extremely beautiful, and often inexplicable. People did not seem so much to live there as to be holed up there. There was an uncertainty and a tribal mistrust of outsiders. And "outsider" did not necessarily mean an American. It might be someone from Yeovil or Salisbury. Everything I had expected to find in Africa I found on the edge of Marshwood Vale. I was fascinated, but also a little frightened. These are the emotions that produce fiction.

  This was in the winter of 1971–72. Because of a miners' strike, there were power cuts. Some nights the whole of west Dorset was lit by candles and oil lamps, and the publican at the Gollop Arms wore a miner's hat with a light in front when he served drinks in the darkened bar. It was around the time they discovered oil in the North Sea—and they found oil in Dorset, too, a great controversy. It was the time of Bloody Sunday. The papers were full of Ulster violence—dead Catholics, ambushed soldiers, and a picture that is still printed on my mind, of an Irish girl who had been tarred and feathered and tied to a lamppost for fraternizing with a British soldier.

  There was the church and the pub, and it was a mile to the nearest shop. You needed the experience of Africa to survive here, I felt. And I should say that I was feeling insecure, because I had given up teaching and had no regular income. I was working on a novel, Saint Jack, and doing book reviews. There was no money in book reviews, and not much in novels either. My payment for Saint Jack was £250. It did not seem quite enough for six months' work. I always intended to go for walks in the afternoon, but before I could get my boots on, darkness had fallen, and the wind tore through the oaks and made a moan in the chimney. My young children found the house confining. My wife began to inquire how much longer my novel might take.

  I had the impression the house was haunted, and one day, returning from a walk, I saw a woman in a blue dress at an upstairs window, looking down at me. My wife was in the kitchen. She said, "There's no one upstairs."

  I had never felt more alien or more uncomprehending in a place. I said I wanted to stay through the summer, but I was secretly pleased when my wife got a job with the BBC and we moved to London. In London I would be able to think hard about Dorset, and the house we lived in, which I thought of as the Black House.

  When I wrote my novel, it seemed to come from the deepest part of my unconscious mind. I was often very surprised, and I was sometimes frightened. It seemed to be about fear and desire, death and love. I always believed it was a ghost story. It is also oddly comic and contains an episode that greatly pleases me, of a visit by an African to a Dorset village. His host, Alfred Munday, the central character, is an anthropologist.

  I did not question the narrative. I needed to go on writing to discover what it was about. It amazed me. It remains a favorite of mine. And it changed my life. When I was finished, my publisher told me it would do immense harm to my reputation. I said, "I have no reputation!" He said he would publish it if I twisted his arm. I told him he was making a big mistake, and I went to a new publisher, where I have been ever since. The day I delivered the final manuscript of The Black House, I set off for Istanbul, intending to make my way by train to
Tokyo. I would have preferred to write another novel, but I couldn't for the moment—there was no money in it. I wondered whether there would be any in a travel book called The Great Railway Bazaar.

  The Great Railway Bazaar

  I HAD BEEN TRAVELING for more than ten years—in Europe, Asia, and Africa—and it had not occurred to me to write a travel book. I had always somewhat disliked travel books; they seemed self-indulgent, unfunny, and rather selective. I suspected that the travel writer left a great deal out of his book and put all the wrong things in. I hated sightseeing, and yet that was what constituted much of the travel writer's material: the Pyramids, the Taj Mahal, the Vatican, the paintings here, the mosaics there. In an age of mass tourism, everyone set off to see the same things, and that was what travel writing seemed to be about. I am speaking of the 1960s and the early 1970s.

  The travel book was a bore. A bore wrote it and bores read it. It annoyed me that a traveler would suppress his or her moments of desperation or fear or lust. Or the time he or she screamed at the taxi driver or mocked the oily tycoon. And what did they eat, what books did they read to kill time, and what were the toilets like? I had done enough traveling to know that half of travel was delay or nuisance—buses breaking down, hotel clerks being rude, market peddlers being rapacious. The truth of travel was interesting and off-key, and few people ever wrote about it.

  Now and then one would meet the real thing in a book: Evelyn Waugh being mistaken for his brother Alec in Labels; the good intentions and bad temper in parts of V. S. Naipaul's An Area of Darkness, a superbly structured book, deeply personal, imaginative, and informative; and in a fragment like this, from Anthony Trollope's The West Indies and the Spanish Main: