Fresh Air Fiend

by Paul Theroux

  I imagined these castaways to be a family fleeing the United States, and I associated them with various missionaries and priests I kept meeting. The defrocked priest in Ecuador was an ideal model, a sort of spiritual castaway living a secret life far from home. But I had vowed that I would be truthful in my travel book, and include everything and everyone who was interesting; once I wrote about the priest, I knew I could not return to him and re-create him in fiction. Yet I also knew that when I had finished this book I would begin to think seriously about a novel of castaways on the Mosquito Coast.

  I reached Patagonia, then returned to London and wrote the book. I regretted not visiting Nicaragua—I was advised not to, because of the guerrilla war that had overwhelmed the country; I regretted that I had to fly from Panama to Baranquilla, and from Guayaquil to Lima. I dislike planes, and whenever I am in one—suffering the deafening drone and the chilly airlessness that is peculiar to planes—I always suspect that the land we are overflying is rich and wonderful and that I am missing it all. Air travel is very simple and annoying and a cause of anxiety. It is like being at the dentist's; even the chairs are like dentist's chairs. Overland travel is slow and a great deal more trouble, but it is uncomfortable in a way that is completely human and often reassuring. I also regretted missing out on Brazil. That is another book.

  The mood of The Old Patagonian Express, which is at times somber, was the result of my knowing Spanish. It was easy for me to be light-hearted when I traveled to write Railway Bazaar. I had little idea of what people were saying in Japanese and Hindi. But speaking to people in their own language—hearing their timid turns of phrase, or the violence of their anger, or the idioms of their hopelessness—could be distressing. I was to have a similar experience eight years later, traveling in China and hearing people worrying in Chinese.

  A book like this—or any book I have written—is not a problem for a reader to study and annotate. It is something I wrote to give pleasure, something to enjoy. As you read it, you should be able to see the people and places, to hear them and smell them. Of course, some of it is painful, but travel—its very motion—ought to suggest hope. Despair is the armchair; it is indifference and glazed, incurious eyes. I think travelers are essentially optimists, or else they would never go anywhere. A travel book ought to reflect that same optimism.

  When I was done with The Old Patagonian Express, I began making notes for my next novel, The Mosquito Coast. Before I began, however, I returned to Central America, traveling through the hinterland of Honduras. I made notes, but I carefully avoided using them in an article or a story. They become a repository of everything I knew about that distant shore of Mosquitia. It became the landscape of my novel, and writing that book was not glorified reportage but an almost indescribable transformation, which is what fiction is.

  The Making of The Mosquito Coast

  WHEN I BEGAN my novel The Mosquito Coast, I thought it was about the son, Charlie Fox, who is the narrator and sufferer of his father's adventure. But after a while—and like Charlie—I became possessed by the father, Allie, who was always yapping, bursting with ideas, the greatest of which was to create a brilliant ice-making society in the Honduran jungle. He was a good inspiration. I often heard him thinking out loud. I knew his opinions, his reactions to most things. He was the sort of Yankee I had known my whole life, someone who says, "If you can't find it on the beach and it's not in the Sears catalogue, you probably don't need it." I wrote the book in an Allie Fox mood. After he died, the story was over. I had planned more: a long voyage of the remaining members of the family in Part Five. But it was not possible with the man gone. Part Five is only two pages long. When I picked up the novel after it was published, I felt somewhat detached from it. It was an affectionate detachment: a book goes its own way, and if it is a good book, it is indestructible.

  Readers still write to me to say that Allie was like their father, their uncle, or especially their husband. I have received hundreds of husband letters, always from ex-wives who last saw the crazy bastard swinging an ax in some wilderness: he was wacko, he had this thing about fresh air, he wouldn't stop talking; there were times when I wanted to kill him, but you had to admire the guy.

  The effect that The Mosquito Coast had on me when I was writing it seemed to be repeated in other people. What one might call the Allie Factor is strong among those who are supporters of the book. Just the other day, a local man asked me about my new novel O-Zone and said, "Is it as good as The Mosquito Coast?" I thought, What a question to ask me! Then he started talking admiringly about Allie Fox and sort of bullying me in an Allie-like way. It was another reminder that as soon as the book appeared, it ceased to belong to me.

  Shortly after the book was published in the United States, in 1982, the Allie Factor became evident again. The film rights were sold, not as an option or a development deal, but as an outright sale, Jerome Hellman putting all his money down, the way Allie bought Jeronimo. Soon Hellman (the producer of Midnight Cowboy and Coming Home) began to exhibit Allie characteristics: he raved a little, became very stubborn and embattled. When it was suggested by a studio that the movie might be made in Mexico or Jamaica, Hellman insisted that it had to be shot, no matter what the cost, on the actual Mosquito Coast. Off his own bat, Hellman hired Paul Schrader to write the script. It was the most faithful script I had ever read—and I thought that was its weakness. When I made a few suggestions, declaring my reluctance to influence him, Schrader said in an Allie-like way, "I'm not influenceable." I said, Isn't the whole point of a good movie that it takes liberties? No movie can be very faithful to the meandering complexities of a long novel, and so it must be good on its own terms—a movie has to be true to itself.

  Peter Weir, who had been hired as director, agreed with me, and he rewrote the script, indefatigably tinkering. That was one of his Allie qualities. He assumed others. He was inventive and self-assured, and in a quiet way his hot-eyed concentration indicated that he had fire in his belly. I had let go of the book, but it kept reappearing: it stiffened the resolve of these people, and it was constantly being quoted at me. Peter Weir's copy of the novel was so heavily annotated you would have thought he was preparing the Norton Lectures at Harvard.

  Meanwhile, the Allie Factor was animating Jerry Hellman. He flew from country to country, raising money. He kept saying, "We're going to do it right. We're going to make this picture without cutting any corners." He went to Belize and found the right spot in the jungle, and observers saw him bushwhacking and gesturing hopefully. Several deals collapsed at the eleventh hour, however, forcing Hellman to look elsewhere for money and allowing Peter Weir to make Witness, starring Harrison Ford. But they kept The Mosquito Coast alive, and there was never any question of their abandoning it. When backers promised millions for them to turn Allie into a kind of Dr. Do little, they laughed and walked away. To change Allie into someone, shall we say, less Promethean was not merely bad judgment, it was to them a personal insult.

  Two and a half years passed. I continued to speak to Hellman and Weir, sometimes to clarify lines, sometimes to listen to their interpretations. Meanwhile, I had moved on to other things—another novel, a script for Nicholas Roeg. For me, Allie was gone. But they had a firm grasp of The Mosquito Coast; they had Allie's single-mindedness. They often reminded me of things I had forgotten: "But Allie says here..." Hellman had hired a graduate student to anthologize the observations and opinions of Allie, and this resulted in a fifty-two-page pamphlet of Selected Thoughts: what Allie thought of God, America, inventions, sleep, junk food, war, ice, jungles, and so forth.

  "How much money are you looking for?" I asked Hellman one day.

  "Not that much. Listen, the average car-chase picture costs twenty million! Isn't that disgusting? Doesn't that turn your stomach?"

  I kept myself from saying, Yes, Allie.

  When the 1985 Oscars were awarded, and Amadeus won eight of them, the producer Saul Zaentz began exhibiting Allie Fox symptoms. He too became a man wit
h a mission. He said he would bankroll the movie and make it soon. Many actors had been mentioned for the part of Allie, notably Jack Nicholson and Robert De Niro, but it was Zaentz's idea to cast Harrison Ford.

  It was not merely that Ford had proven himself in Witness to be a fine and subtle actor; it was also the fact that to play Allie in the jungles of Belize would take physical and emotional strength. Harrison Ford had it all, even the quietly smoldering gaze and the serious grin. Notably, he had started out as a carpenter and builder ("Carpenter to the Stars" had been the slogan on his business card when he had remodeled houses in Hollywood). If things slackened on the set, he could while away his time countersinking screws. He was Allie to his fingertips.

  Belize was hot, buggy, poverty-stricken, and down on its luck. Perfect, as Allie would say.

  Peter Weir and Harrison Ford had gone down to look at the jungle, and Ford himself had ended up clearing a piece of land with a huge machete, leading a work gang of Belizeans. It was a good start, and everyone connected with the film was enthusiastic about the location. But when I saw it, I found it hard to believe that anyone unused to jungle conditions would willingly live there for the six or seven months it would take to shoot the picture. Everything that made it perfect for the setting also made it impractical.

  And then it seemed to me that you had to become the man Allie himself in order to make the movie.

  Hellman had been first, then Schrader and Weir, and then Saul Zaentz. Harrison Ford was the latest incarnation. The crew also had a spirited and visionary look. It was a movie set without any tensions. From the point of view of handiwork, it was more like imperialism, Allie Fox style, than moviemaking. The construction crew built roads and bridges, they built houses and a pair of villages, they had boats, and they had their own water supply. It seemed that the movie had swallowed the country and become its sole industry. What the burnoose is to a Bedouin, the T-shirt is to a Belizean, and every T-shirt in Belize was lettered Mosquito Coast.

  "What you doing in Belize?" the customs man said at the airport outside Belize City.

  " Mosquito Coast," I began.

  "The magic words," the man said, and waved me through.

  The fictional Jeronimo had become a real place, an entire settlement in which there were crops and houses and water wheels, all the necessities of life. People lived there; it had been built to last. After the picture was finished, some of these buildings became community centers and others were taken over by homeless people.

  For the traveler who thinks he has seen everything, I would suggest a season in Belize, where the bumper stickers say You Better Belize It! Most of Belize City is seven feet off the ground, on stilts, because of tidal waves and regular swamping; over the years hurricanes have come close to wiping it out (which is why the capital, Belmopan, is inland). It is a small wooden town of tall, tottering houses, lame-looking shacks, and a few solid villas. There are vultures in the sky and slavering dogs in the streets and hawksbill turtles in the river that runs through town. The population is multiracial. There is no Belize face. There are Indians and mestizos, undiluted Chinese and freckle-faced brown people, purplish blacks who wear woolen bags on their heads, and yellow women and Rastas and barefoot kids with hair like Velcro. You get the impression that everyone sings a great deal, though times have been hard, not to say desperate. The sugar price collapsed four years ago. People started growing marijuana, and planes began arriving with such regularity on the long straight roads that the government put up iron pylons on the roadside every few hundred yards to frustrate landings. Yet it is said that Belize is still the second-largest grower of dope in the Western Hemisphere—after the Guajira in Colombia, which is legendary. Before writing my novel I traveled in Honduras, but now Honduras has been infiltrated by American troops and vindictive Contras, and the landscape of the novel more closely resembles that in Belize.

  "I came down here and looked around," Harrison Ford said. "Looked at the houses and looked at the hotels. Jesus, those hotels. They said, 'Where do you want to stay?' And I said, 'Get a cargo plane...'"

  Without any apparent effort he had turned into Allie Fox: the beaky cap, the flapping shirt, the pushed-back hair, the I-know-best eyes, and the gently maniacal voice explaining his brilliant plan.

  "'... one of those C-130s,' I told them. 'A big mother. Fill it up with a prefab house in lots of sections, all the plumbing, all the wires, maybe a helicopter, too. Drop the whole thing into Belize in one package and bolt it together. That's where I'll live.'"

  But he didn't end up doing this. I asked him why.

  "Because I had a better idea. I didn't have to live in Belize City, didn't have to live in Belize at all!"

  This again was pure Allie. He decided to hire a venerable 126-foot air-conditioned yacht—mahogany and brass and awnings and etched glass—with a gourmet cook and a crew of five. He anchored this magnificent boat offshore and commuted to the set by speedboat, returning to his yacht every evening. His wife, the screenwriter Melissa Matheson (ET, The Black Stallion), remained on board, working on a script about General Custer.

  Harrison is a brilliant mimic. He is funny, physical, and full of ideas, a kind of embodiment of Allie. He would do chin-ups over the taffrail as he talked.

  One night we were talking about anxiety attacks. He surprised Melissa by saying that he'd had a number of them. Had I? he wondered.

  Oh, sure, I said. Late one night in the African bush, a man had pushed a gun muzzle into my face and began screaming at me. I described how I had started gibbering.

  "That's not an anxiety attack," Harrison said, not looking at me, still chinning himself slowly, his deltoids swelling, his lats spreading. "That's scared shitless."

  He then volunteered the information that he often worried about his performance as Allie.

  "You shouldn't worry," I said. "You're doing everything right. You're Allie Fox. Listen, that's from the horse's mouth."

  He frowned at me. He said, "Don't tell me not to worry. I worry all the time. Does Allie Fox worry? Right. That's why I worry."

  He had another home-grown Allie Fox characteristic: he wouldn't say much. He would chin himself, or wrap himself around a chair and do isometrics, and then he would pipe up only to correct you.

  I had been saying something about Peter Weir's being a good listener.

  "He listens," Harrison said. "He hears. But that is all."

  Weir was so highly respected on the set that he could give an order without raising his voice and it was instantly acted upon. I never saw him lose his temper or get the least bit flustered. You might say, Why should he? But the air was stiflingly humid, the temperature in the high eighties. The sand flies were tortuous, the roads terrible, the machines on the set temperamental. Because children were involved in the filming, the working hours had to be limited. Some of the actors hardly spoke English.

  Several years before, Paul Schrader had told me, "The hardest films to make are those with scenes on ships, or ones set in the tropics, or ones with a lot of kids. This one has all three obstacles."

  Weir was imperturbable. He said there was a good analogy for directing The Mosquito Coast: "It's like being captain of a ship. Not a small vessel, but a ship of the line, with an enormous crew. I don't do it alone. John [Seale, the cameraman] is my first mate. Jerry and Saul are the owners. My second mate is..."

  This was another way of describing Allie, too: as a sea captain. In fact, I had given Allie a number of nautical expressions, to suggest this very aspect of his character.

  Any writer must be humbled when something he had dimly imagined and put down in a few sentences is brought to life. It is like magic, a conjuring trick, the words creating something solid. Surely the thrill of moviemaking has something to do with these apparitions? I could write "Father built a tall ice house and filled it with a wilderness of iron pipes," and then I saw the crew doing that very thing. It seemed rash, expensive, such an effort, but it worked! "He cleared thirty acres and put up a settlement"�
��and they went at it, cleared virgin jungle and did the same thing. "One day Fat Boy blew up," I wrote. The special effects crew said, "We're going to blow off the sides first, and then get those structures a hundred and eighty feet off the ground. We can do so many things here with explosives it will be a national event." I loved their eagerness.

  I wrote the book alone in a room, but to make the movie they had to do exactly what Father did—go into the jungle and colonize it and make ice. I am not understating my role. I had dreamed it all. But they had to tangibalize it, as Father Divine used to say. You have to agree with the Gospel: In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was made flesh. It is not always an easy transition, but that is cinematic transubstantiation, the making of movies out of novels.

  Kowloon Tong

  KOWLOON TONG did not percolate from my past the way most of my fiction has seemed to, but struck me suddenly one day in Hong Kong. I saw the story whole. I made notes, like a painter urgently sketching, and then back home I sat down and wrote it, confident that I was fulfilling an artistic as well as political intention. I feel awkward using the word "artistic," though. All I mean is that I was guided by my imagination and being myself.

  I had been in Hong Kong for an extended period, working on another project, spending my afternoons walking the back streets. That day, in a cold spring drizzle, I was in Kowloon, walking north from Mong Kok up Lai Chi Kok Road—just prowling. Not knowing what I was looking for, I looked at everything. A Union Jack flapping on a tall pole at Sham Shui Po Police Station caught my eye. Soon a red van sped by, on its side the British crest and the gold letters Royal Mail. A large truckload of doomed squealing pigs was driven into the abattoir on Fat Tseung Street. Nearby, on the western side of Kowloon, an enormous land-reclamation project was under way; the bridge to the new airport was being finished. Moody Mong Kok was scheduled for demolition. All the newspapers were full of stories about the coming Hand-over to the Chinese, and in the bookstores were such dire titles as The Fall of Hong Kong, The Last Colony, and The Last Days of Hong Kong.