by Bill Barich
Thurber earned a decent living on his articles, but the big money finally rolled in when his plays were produced and Hollywood came calling. He had divorced and remarried by then, and his one good eye had started to go bad. He was also plagued by a syndrome that affected many of his peers at the magazine—they tired of doing the sort of writing that they were known for, their trademark stuff, but they were too fixed in their ways to extend themselves. The New Yorker specialized in small, well-made prose pieces and in gem-like stories that did not rock the boat. Its editors shied away from any dark or upsetting vision and generated in consequence literature that was admirably done but, as one critic has put it, inevitably minor.
It seems that Thurber was bothered by his position in the literary pecking order. Kinney tells of his meetings with four major novelists—Hemingway, Faulkner, Fitzgerald and Thomas Wolfe—and notes that each went badly. Thurber appears not to have grasped that great books can be written by an inferior prose stylist like Wolfe. What he cared about most was the structure and effect of his sentences, and he aimed for perfection in six or seven pages. He often hit his target, but his artfully casual pieces did not amount to a work on the scale, say, of The Sound and the Fury. His brain was so used to conciseness, he complained once, that he lacked the ability to stretch out. That must have been frustrating for a creative spirit.
Thurber’s life ended sadly. He was almost completely blind at 45, yet he lived for almost 20 more years. It is a testament to his character that he still got some work done, mostly through dictation, but he gradually became more irascible and less stable and wound up offending everybody at the New Yorker with his book about Harold Ross (The Years with Ross), which was criticized for its unfair treatment of the founder. The times were changing, too, and William Shawn, Ross’s successor, was steering the magazine in a new direction, away from light humor toward weightier reporting. Thurber railed against it all and died of a massive brain tumor in 1961.
Kinney’s book is not without its faults, of course, and its 1,238-page length is chief among them. The word “leisurely” would be a kind way to describe the pace at which the story unfolds. We have to endure 300 pages before Thurber even gets to New York. The author has a tendency, as well, to regard the New Yorker with the same sort of devotion a practicing Catholic might demonstrate for the Vatican. One wishes, too, that he’d been more selective and analytical; the childhood episode that cost Thurber an eye, for example, is dismissed in a single paragraph.
It was E. B. White who warned Kinney that Thurber would not be a simple subject for a biography—White figured the project would take about 125 years—and we are fortunate that Kinney didn’t heed his advice. He has captured the essence of a sacred monster whose blindness has in it the seeds of a Greek tragedy, and we are left to ponder how a man so tortured by private demons could put together a body of work that rests so lightly on his readers and affords them so many comic pleasures.
Los Angeles Times, 1996
Sir Vidia’s Shadow by Paul Theroux
Few writers are as ambitious, hardworking and gifted as Paul Theroux. He published eight books before he was 30, often writing them in trying circumstances while living poor in Africa and Asia. They might not have been written at all without the encouragement of his former friend and mentor, V.S. Naipaul, if we are to accept Theroux’s account in Sir Vidia’s Shadow, a memoir that raises as many questions as it answers.
The memoir is a tricky business, and Theroux knows it. He begins Sir Vidia as a roman à clef, with the arrival of U.V. Pradesh—a brilliant but difficult Indian writer—at a university in Uganda, where a young American—a would-be writer—happens to be teaching.
The tone is comic, but Theroux drops the fiction in the second chapter and confesses that he’s lying. “Wait, wait, wait,” he says. “This is not a novel, it is a memory.” It would be impossible to disguise V.S. Naipaul anyway, he adds, asking us to believe that he had no choice in the matter, issues of trust and privacy aside.
When the real Naipaul steps onstage in Kampala in 1966, he comes across as proud, arrogant, funny, mannered and cruel, locked into a sexless marriage to a devoted English wife. He reads palms and is sensitive to vibrations. A Brahmin, he regards the world from a lofty height and despises the African bush. Its people are “infies,” or inferiors, as are the tutors on the university staff. At 34, Naipaul cares only about his writing. Two maxims guide him—from the Gita, “One must act”; and from his heart, “Tell the truth.”
Theroux, 10 years younger, is dazzled. He shows his early poems to Vidia (short for Vidiadhar), who remarks, “Lots of libido.” The older man offers support and shares his wisdom freely. He’s also lonely, in need of a friend. He and Theroux walk the city streets and take trips to Kenya and Rwanda.
Naipaul can feel the jungle closing in; he predicts Uganda’s demise. At the Gardenia, where Theroux picks up bar girls, Naipaul admits that he was once “a big prostitute man.” Always precise, he praises a roadside sign, “Beware of Fallen Rocks,” for its economy.
These African scenes are wonderfully detailed. Theroux writes with a bright flame, for keeps, as though striving to meet Naipaul’s impeccable standards. He captures the drunken, ecstatic chaos of Uganda as the country falls apart, and his pulse still quickens when he describes his wild shack-ups with the Gardenia women.
There are moments of pure poetry, too, as in the village of Bundibugyo, where “One night after rain I went outside and found thirsty children licking raindrops off my car.” With a single image, he sums up a continent.
It’s hard on Theroux when Naipaul returns to England. Not only does he miss his friend, he starts to see Africa through Vidia’s eyes, as dusty and flimsy. Soon he is on his way to London for a Christmas visit, during which Naipaul generously puts him up and introduces him to his literary circle.
But Vidia’s mood has not improved. The writing goes slowly, a form of torture. He ridicules others and reduces his wife to tears, dislikes children and avoids strangers. He does enjoy dinner parties, though, but only if he’s the guest of honor. His work merits such treatment, he feels.
In time, Theroux marries and settles in England himself. He continues to write books that don’t earn him any money, including one on Naipaul, V.S. Naipaul: An Introduction to His Work. Their friendship changes gradually, becoming more distant. Both men travel a lot and keep in touch by mail. There are occasional lunches; Theroux always gets stuck with the check. When Theroux has a commercial hit with The Great Railroad Bazaar, Vidia seems envious. Vidia’s own books are still highly regarded, but they’re more hermetic and insular. His life is troubled.
Naipaul suffers a blow when his brother, Shiva, dies at an early age. The two have never made peace. He conducts a public affair with a woman from Argentina and considers moving somewhere else. New York? Montana? He is fond of snow, but only in the abstract. He dreams of having a million pounds in the bank. He builds an elaborate wine cellar, although he scarcely drinks, and accepts a knighthood. Through it all Theroux remains his shadow—his loyal squire—despite his own growing fame, but the position is increasingly uncomfortable. The balance of power is shifting and inevitably does.
When Vidia’s wife succumbs to cancer in 1996, Vidia asks Theroux to write an obituary, and he complies. He is astounded when, two months later, his mentor remarries.
The bride, Nadira Alvi, is a Pakistani raised in Kenya, much younger than Naipaul. She is not worthy of him, Theroux thinks, and yet Vidia is smitten, even happy! He holds her hand and tells an interviewer, “I took writing far too seriously.” It is a complete reversal, one that ultimately leaves Theroux out in the cold.
The new Lady Naipaul decides to clean house. When a few of Theroux’s inscribed first editions turn up in a bookseller’s catalog, he faxes the pages to Vidia to tweak him. There’s no reply. Instead, he receives a fax from Nadira—childish, ungrammatical, insulting. It strikes him as a little crazy.
Again he importunes Vidia, and again the answer is
silence. He is obsessed by the situation; he feels used, angry with himself for defending Naipaul and explaining away his flaws. Vidia isn’t eccentric; he’s mean, “mistaken about so much.” Even the work begins to seem suspect.
Theroux has one last meeting with his mentor, by chance on a London street, and Naipaul delivers a final piece of advice: “Take it on the chin and move on.” But his old apprentice has done the opposite and has chosen to put the 30-year experience between covers.
We do not doubt the extent of his hurt. Sir Vidia’s Shadow is a brave, intelligent book, rich in anecdote and beautifully written, but it’s also vengeful and damaging in places. It belongs to the literature of transgression, wherein an injured party—the betrayed—turns into a betrayer and bends the rules to settle a score.
It may well be that Naipaul is a holy monster, guilty as charged: a monomaniac. His behavior is surely tongue-in-cheek at times, but at others he’s undeniably nasty. In the end he will get his wish, and only his books will matter—and matter they do.
Whether he truly betrayed Paul Theroux is moot, however, and subject to interpretation. But it does seem strange that Theroux couldn’t take an ounce of pleasure in his friend’s late-blooming romance or find more to admire in his character. In closing the book, a favorite admonition of Theroux’s father comes to mind, one that he cites in the text, just two words, “Be kind.”
San Francisco Chronicle, 1998
Kingsley Amis: A Biography by Eric Jacobs
Beware the authorized biography that’s written while its subject is still alive. The pitfalls are obvious, of course, but they don’t seem to have daunted Eric Jacobs, a Fleet Street journalist, whose life of Kingsley Amis has the air of an “as-told-to” rather than a critical study or a clear-eyed historical account. That doesn’t make for an unreadable book, just one that skates lightly over the negatives and finds positives where they may not exist.
Amis, who died in 1995, gave Jacobs access to his papers and his person in exchange for a chance to use a red pencil on the final text. He used it sparingly, Jacobs tells us, but he had no reason to do otherwise, since the book’s tone is mostly chummy. Jacobs enjoyed Amis’s company and drank “a great deal” with him at various pubs and clubs, rising (or sinking) to such a degree of intimacy that he learned how Amis’s bowel movements could affect his mood.
Born in 1922, Amis was an old-fashioned man of letters, equally at home as a novelist, poet, essayist and reviewer. He attended Oxford on a scholarship, where he distinguished himself as a mimic, a literary wit and a toper of truly prodigious thirst. He also met his lifelong friend Philip Larkin at university. They shared a passion for booze, jazz, books and women, and their correspondence forms a primary source for Jacobs.
Both men, in youth, complained about how difficult it was to find sexual partners. After a stint in the army, Amis put things right by marrying Hilary Barnwell, who was pregnant with his first child. Yet the marriage didn’t keep him from belatedly sowing his wild oats. Soon he was having affairs with his new wife’s friends, a pattern of infidelity that went on for many years. What was Hilary to do? “Motherhood and lack of money narrowed her options,” Jacobs writes. “Besides, she still loved him, still wanted to keep him.” One wonders.
In 1949, to support his family, Amis took a job teaching at a college in Swansea, Wales. He’d published a volume of poetry by then, but writing fiction was his chief interest. Five years later, he scored big with his first novel, Lucky Jim, an anarchic comedy about academics that sold extremely well and made his reputation. “Humorous, self-mocking, hopeful and endearing,” said a blurb on the book’s jacket—words that can still be applied to Amis at his best. Critics thought he might be the next Evelyn Waugh or P.G. Wodehouse; later, they began to ask if he’d ever fulfill his early promise.
Fame followed, and Amis seems to have handled it no better than most. He drank more, screwed around more (once, when he fell asleep sunbathing, Hilary used her lipstick to write on his back, “I F—Anything”) and accepted paying gigs that forced him to travel to places he never wanted to go. His taste in literature remained parochial, though, and he pushed the merits of such minor British writers as John Dickson Carr while trashing giants like D.H. Lawrence and James Joyce.
Still, he always put in his daily stint at the typewriter. He would produce more than 20 novels in all, along with a miscellany of other books, among them The King’s English. He hoped it would be a companion to H.W. Fowler’s Modern English Usage, but it is more eccentric and cantankerous. The contents do point up the attention Amis paid to the importance of style, however, and the little essays he provides on, say, the exact meaning of “pristine” are often enlightening. He loved the language and worked to keep it as pure as possible, and that in itself was a worthwhile goal.
At the time Lucky Jim was published, the British press tended to regard Amis as “a provincial philistine drunk, boor, Lefty, and all-purpose Angry Young Man.” That image would be revised over the next two decades, until he came to stand for everything conservative and even right wing, a Colonel Blimp of the literary world. He would desert Hilary and his children for another woman, but that marriage ended badly, too. In his 50s he complained to Larkin that he’d lost any desire for sex, and he turned into a crusty old bachelor who sought out his thrills at the bar of the Garrick Club.
The last years were not kind to Amis. His single high point came when his novel The Old Devils (1986) won the coveted Booker Prize. But he also stood accused of misogyny, watched his fame drop away and seemed irritated by his son Martin’s growing success. He liked to toss Martin’s books across the room and claimed never to have finished one. He had a terrible fear of living alone, so Hilary, now married to her third husband, a politician, took him in, and he would remain in her extended family until his death.
There’s something delicious about Amis collaborating on an authorized biography, especially after he’d already written and published his memoirs. The premise could serve as a plot for one of his comic novels, with the subject and his scribe toddling off to the Garrick to discuss his vagaries over another round. Although Jacobs doesn’t go very deep, it’s fair to say he’s never boring—a standard Amis insisted upon. He recounts the approved story in a good-hearted way, and his book should be read in that spirit, preferably with a glass of Amis’s preferred Macallan scotch nearby.
San Francisco Chronicle, 1998
My Racing Heart by Nan Mooney/Stud by Kevin Conley
There’s a belief around the racetrack that all of humanity can be divided into two groups: those who fall deeply in love with horses and those who don’t. If you belong to the first group, you can’t help regarding the second as flawed in some essential way. Passion is relative, of course, but we still reserve the right to pass judgment on it. When Mozart’s Requiem moves someone to tears, we’re inclined to be approving, while we’re less sympathetic to the fellow caught weeping over “The Impossible Dream.” A heart that fails to respond to the beauty of thoroughbreds, then, probably deserves our suspicion.
Fortunately, Nan Mooney and Kevin Conley both have big hearts and an urge to celebrate the fact that horses allow us into their orbit at all. Mooney is an insider who writes for an industry journal, The Blood-Horse, and she tells us in My Racing Heart that she was seduced by the world of racing when she was a little girl. Conley stumbled into the magical realm as a reporter for the New Yorker, who wanted to learn more about the breeding habits of stallions and mares. Though their books differ in tone and style, the authors share the blissful sort of awe you see on the faces of riders in Central Park as spring approaches and blood dulled by winter begins to beat with renewed energy.
Mooney’s story revolves around the impressive figure of her grandmother, Mary Stuart Mooney, known as May-May because a cousin “couldn’t get his mouth around the word Mary.” As a blue-blooded graduate of the Hannah Moore finishing school, class of ’06, May-May could have assumed a privileged spot in the social hierarchy of Baltimore, but
she was a rebel and a budding feminist and chose to hang out at Pimlico Race Course. She had fantasies about becoming a jockey, even though women were barely tolerated in the grandstand at the time, and eventually she bought a pair of broken-down American saddlebreds, nursing them back to health and driving them in trotting races herself.
May-May passed on her affection for horses to her granddaughter, plunking Nan down in front of a television set at the age of 7, pouring her a glass of port, and introducing her to the Kentucky Derby. Mooney had a rebellious streak, as well, so the two formed a bond that centered on racing and lasted until May-May’s death. That put an end to Mooney’s enthusiasm for thoroughbreds, at least for the moment. As a young woman, she pursued a conventional career, only to find the old attachment welling up again around her 28th birthday. She missed the risk, the excitement, and the camaraderie of the racetrack, and longed for a different life that was “authentic and rich and full,” so the horses seduced her once more.
Mooney’s account of her relationship with May-May is the freshest, most touching aspect of her book, but she is an ambitious writer and aspires to more than a memoir. Her account sets up as a quest; she tries to investigate every angle of the sport, as if piecing together a puzzle. Here she’s less successful. She delves into racing’s history, chats with people around the barns, and ties it all together with a thread of autobiography. But her design has a by-the-numbers quality that feels forced. Her visits with famous tricksters like Bob Baffert and Angel Cordero, the hotheaded jockey, amount to no more than interviews and don’t reveal much that’s new, while her historical sections might seem overly familiar to anyone who’s done some reading about the track.