Mother Land

by Paul Theroux

  That was just the beginning. I could see Floyd’s fingers madly tapping at the keys.

  “He is weak, emotionally cold, sexually guilty, hypocritical, jealous, faithless, and afraid. He writes spitefully about cats, overeaters, prep schools, the Guggenheim Committee, tour groups, Catholicism, British manners, virgins, bad shoes, New England weather, all athletes, patronage, donuts, Irish crudeness, his hometown, soldiers, importunate telephone calls, Armenians, families, and women.”

  Did he say “donuts”?

  “We in the family,” Floyd went on, seeming to settle into his new role as Mother’s enforcer, “don’t mind his affected gentility, his smug and self-important airs, his urgent star-fucking insistence that he’s a friend of lords and ladies, and only laugh at the fame he courts. But of his famous British accent—Cape Cod meets Cheltenham—what can I say? ‘Ring me up,’ he’ll say, or ‘How’s your glass?’ or ‘Can you fetch me those boat cushions from the boot?’ It may seem harmless, although I have long felt an unstated but cringing pain and mortification in finding him always getting pulled up for it, and his behavior vindicates a person who said to me recently, ‘Your brother is envious, short, womanizing, cheap, opinionated, and angry.’ The whole family laughs at him.”

  There were several more pages, about my pathetic house, my sidelined ex-wives, my unhappy children, my snobbery. There were sentences only Floyd could write: “He is a sedulous campaigner in the self-promotion of his ontological burdens.” I was also a plagiarist and a cad.

  “He has bowel worries and eats prunes for breakfast and once made inquiries to me about platform shoes,” he wrote, now cheerfully delusional but well into his stride. “No one I have ever met in my life is a worse, almost pathologically unsympathetic listener. He is a writer of venomous letters, an inveterate magpie, a rumpled dresser, an egotistical, unsettled eccentric, occasionally funny, and an all-time know-it-all.”

  Alexander Pope, Mark Twain, and Ludwig Wittgenstein were summoned to denounce my life and work, my “awful, unlawful side,” and at last, on the eighth page, I was judged by Floyd to have succeeded only “in the perverse and petty triumph of self-revelation in the failure of a book.”

  And though it was not news to the family, it was a revelation to the world when he mentioned “his illegitimate son”—as if I’d left a limping half-wit in my wake. “‘Now, gods, stand up for bastards!’” he concluded.

  That was his verdict: I was a failure. “He is ignored by the academy and smiled down on by the literary establishment, for the most part. Nobody I know has written so many books with so little serious critical recognition to show for it. None of his books are taught in colleges or have cult status or have generated, I believe, a single scholarly essay, and most of them are presently out of print.”

  My mouth was dry, my eyes were burning, as I pushed toward the end, though I kept glancing back to “The whole family laughs at him” and to the lies—the poison in a lie gives it a bitter vividness. It was an astonishing piece of invective. I had barely finished reading it when the telephone rang. A columnist from the Boston Globe.

  “Just wondering . . .” Had I seen the piece, had I read it, what did I think?

  “Obviously, it’s a valentine,” I said, and as I put the phone down, it rang again. Another newspaper.

  The questions wouldn’t go away, but why should they? In the long history of literary brothers there was no precedent for this attack. Plenty of brothers scribbled and quarreled—in fact, scribbling brothers nearly always quarreled. Thomas Mann had an angry brother, Heinrich. Henry James had William. Chekhov had Nikolai. Wilde had Willie. Joyce had Stanislaus. Lawrence Durrell had Gerald. William Faulkner had John. Hemingway had Leicester, Naipaul had Shiva—all of them rivals, more or less. The nicer-seeming brother is not necessarily the better writer, nor necessarily nicer. All had made belittling remarks, yet none of these men had ever reviewed the other’s work, pronouncing the book a failure and the brother a fake. Floyd was the first.

  Once, writing about Vidia and Shiva Naipaul, both of whom I’d known, I had mentioned how brothers are versions of each other, a suggestion implicit in the word itself: the “other” in “brother.” The unfortunate history of scribbling brothers was full of conflict. There were no intellectual equals in brotherhood, for, being writers, they were borderline nutcases. Literary brothers were often fratricidal from birth and babyish in their battling, because of the lingering infantilism in sibling rivalry. When brothers fought, family secrets were revealed, and the shaming revelations often made forgiveness irrelevant. It is the tale told by Shem and Shaun.

  But the damage was done, and my book was sinking. All publicity is good publicity, people say. Every knock a boost. But no. I was a living example of someone so furiously publicized I was buried by it, for people reading the half-truths about Floyd and me meant they didn’t have to read my book. It amazed me that for this period I could be so well known and so widely discussed, yet remain so insignificant.

  “The whole family laughs at him,” rankled more than anything, though “his illegitimate child” was wounding too. I called Mother and urged her to respond.

  “What magazine article?” she said. “I wouldn’t know anything about that. I’ve been baking pies. I’m carving a heron. I go for walks. I don’t waste a minute on magazines.”

  Hating myself for my helplessness, I paid Mother a visit. After I pulled into her driveway, I sat in my car trembling, astonished at my feebleness and fear.

  How long had she been standing at the door? She was stifling a triumphant smile. She loved being visited by someone who needed her help. She could see I was below par. I noticed in her eye-glint and in the set of her jaw: He’s worse than I thought.

  Inside, I threw myself into a chair, while she sat on her big leather throne and clasped her hands, studying me.

  “It’s about the magazine article.”

  “Oh?”

  Cruelly impassive, playing dim and preoccupied with more important things, she made me explain the whole piece that Floyd had written. With the magazine in my hand I found myself stammering over some quotations, enraged at others. Mother claimed to know nothing about it, but when I showed her the pages, she turned away and dismissed it with her skinny hand.

  “Oh, you know how he is. Always trying to start trouble.”

  “Ma! No one has ever done this before.”

  “Then you’ve been lucky,” Mother said. “Lots of people have criticized me.”

  “I mean in history. A guy writing that his brother’s book is crap. Even Hemingway’s brother didn’t do it.”

  “Maybe he should have.” Mother laughed. “I never thought much of Hemingway’s work. Thought he was so important, killing all those animals. And then he killed himself.”

  I should not have mentioned Hemingway. He was a classic example of the sort of person Mother ridiculed, for in his roistering, his self-pity, and his death he was to blame for his own problem. Oh, he committed suicide, she would say. Whose fault is that?

  “Floyd says here that I have bowel problems. That I wear platform shoes. That my kids hate me.”

  “I sometimes wonder what my children really think of me,” Mother said.

  “Listen. ‘The whole family laughs at him.’ That’s not true—you know it’s not.”

  “Of course not. We love you. We admire everything you’ve written.”

  Her praise, as always, filled me with gloom and eroded my confidence.

  “You could say that, Ma. You could put that into a letter to the editor. About admiring me.”

  Mother smiled. “I ask you, what earthly good would that do?”

  “It would help.”

  “Oh?”

  She winced and touched her head, fingertips to temples, at first gently, as if she were comforting a small animal, and then as if testing a fruit for ripeness. After a moment she got a better grip and said that she had a splitting headache. She looked exactly like Floyd’s imitation of her. She smiled throug
h her pain.

  “Just let it go.” She winced a little, inviting me to pity her. “Be a good sport.”

  I glanced at the magazine in my hand and reflected that there was a stack of them on every newsstand in the state.

  “Do it for me,” she said.

  Why was she being so unhelpful? I was sure that it was because, since his break with me, Floyd had become close to her—valuable to her—and the others had rallied around. This closeness was her victory.

  “Do it for me,” she said as I left. “Do it for your mother.”

  Floyd’s article intensified the family’s fear of him. They were glad the subject was me and not any of them. They were not outraged, they were relieved.

  Still, I asked Fred if he might write a letter to the magazine’s editor to set the record straight.

  “What can I do?” he said, meaning he would do nothing.

  “Floyd said, ‘The whole family laughs at him.’ You could say you don’t.”

  “That would just stir things up.”

  “No. It would clarify them.”

  Fred smiled at me, at my helpless fury. He was Floyd smiling at me; Mother had been Floyd too. All my detractors looked like Floyd now, the same hair, the flinty eyes, the satirical lips. They even talked like him, adopting his tone.

  “He’s crazy, you know,” Fred said.

  “You could say that in your letter to the editor.”

  A flicker of uncertainty passed across Fred’s face, a blink of caution, for what if I told Floyd what he had just said? He knew he had said too much.

  Fred must have alerted Franny, because when I called her she was overprepared to rebuff me. Rose didn’t say much, indeed seemed to imply that I was to blame for Floyd’s piece. Gilbert and Hubby weren’t helpful either. I had the sense that all of them believed that I deserved it, that every lie and wild assertion Floyd had written was essentially true. And so, really, the whole family was laughing at me.

  Just as bad, sales of the book were affected. Every interview on every stop of my book tour included the question, “Why did your brother write that piece about you?”

  I said, “Why don’t you ask him?” and gave them Floyd’s telephone number, and I went on smiling and describing the piece as a valentine.

  And I realized that Mother was not strong at all. She was weak and needy. She could not handle dissension, she was a poor disciplinarian, she was too narcissistic to be in complete control. She required connivance, deference, and respect, but was never sure how best to gain that obedience. Floyd was a help. At that time she wanted me outside her orbit; she wanted Floyd in it, no matter the cost, for with Floyd she had more power, and although she was weak, she was in charge. In that way she was obeyed.

  Too late I remembered that it was a family in which we had been conditioned never to ask for a favor.

  18

  Second Childhood

  “Plaquoteurs!” Father would have shouted at all this fuss, had he been alive. Bunglers! In the family turmoil that had followed his death, four full years of Mother and heading into the fifth, I had grown older, and not in years alone. I was weaker, and my decline was a shock to me. I had always imagined—don’t most people?—that my life would be a long upward climb, growing in prosperity, with improving views and the clarity of sky, passing the crags, braced and vitalized by the sharp air, a series of steady achievements, more comfort, more money. Soul mate by my side.

  I had never envisioned my life as a rugged descent, bumping down the glacier of neglect, this wearisome solitude, finding myself hard up, hunched over a poorly lit desk in a chilly room, writing a self-pitying sentence such as this.

  My book tanked. I blamed Floyd. I blamed the whole indifferent family, who, if they took any notice at all, were secretly, smugly pleased. I had proof that they resented me. I had known years of fame and prosperity in my thirties and forties and into my fifties—what a biographer would have called my middle years. Now that I was sixty I was given a terrifying perspective of all that elapsed time, like a view from a bleak summit, the truth that it is all downhill from here. I had been doing all right until this failure, which reminded me of all my other failures. Floyd’s eight-page review of my book—his assessment of my despicable life—crushed me.

  So what do you think about your brother’s piece?

  I had an answer.

  Live long enough and, from the thin air in the heights of age, you see everything. You eventually understand that you reach a point in life when there is no more for you, nothing but diminishing repetition, the dying echo of things past. The upward climb, so difficult at the time, now seems horribly brief, the satisfactions few, the intensity blunted by all the rest of the bother. I was shocked to realize that I’d had my time. What I was living now was something like a second childhood. Fortifying this impression was the looming figure of Mother, still alive, still fierce, still enigmatic, still dominant, still hard to please, and not really on anyone’s side.

  So, with the failure of that book, my middle years, the active part of my life, was over. Awful to contemplate with Mother looking on. I knew now there was nothing more for me. I had seen the worst, and now that events were repeating—the repetition seemed like mockery—I was frightened, for I was being told that there was nothing new for me. It was someone else’s turn—for prizes, for fame, for pleasure and rewards, the windfall. I understood, as the young seldom do, that I could not make it happen again. The hardest thing for me was to disguise my disappointment as I knocked on the door of sixty-one. Impotence is one way of describing it, but it was worse than that, for I was impotent in every respect, except the one the word was supposed to describe.

  I had known years of productive work and some achievement, a better score than many people. Public years, years of travel and challenge, of unexpected rewards, years that could be happily chronicled and accounted for, years of “I’ve got some good news for you!” Years of using time and knowing love, and also knowing failure, but failure of a kind that strengthened and improved me as a man and a writer. I was a familiar face, and because my intimate thoughts were published in my own voice, I was well known. I had few secrets in those years. I lived my life, and lived my crises, in full view of the spectators who were my readers. I turned my crises into fiction and endured them that way, ultimately learning to value them.

  Those years on the record, interviewers would ask blunt questions about my marriage or divorce, my children, my money, what I’d had for breakfast, and what I was writing. Even a lazy biographer on a fellowship, with grad students doing the grunt work, could do justice to those years—could probably describe them as well as I. My successes were public, my failures were in full view, exaggerated by all that sunlight. It sometimes seemed in those years that I belonged to the public, to my readers, to the people eager for the minor scandals associated with me—the two wives, the two children, the houses, the travel, the squandered fortune, the color and buzz of my writing life. I had lived through a time when a writer was a magic figure, a person of influence and power, watched closely and admired and envied.

  Perhaps the way I lived, sharing my life with the world, was the reason it all came to an end. I was popular for thirty years, and then I was out of favor, I was hidden, I became what’s-his-name. Maybe I was dead. Yet I was alive and alert, wondering in my new obscurity what would come next, and all I saw was Mother.

  Everything that had come before those years of public life was yearning—fantasy, pain and preparation, Mother’s scorn, stocking supermarket shelves. Everything that followed those years was diminution, as I sank. Everything I did occurred with a dying fall. I began to understand the older people I had known earlier in my life, the men and women I had smiled at and not taken seriously, because they had not taken me seriously. Their mood of disappointment, their skepticism, their bitter humor, their refrain of “You’ll see, I was like you once.” I remembered how they had mocked my hope, jeered at my ambition. “What will you write about? Who’ll publish it
? Do you have anything to say? Who will care?”—the challenges that Mother had made that rang in my mind all those years.

  At a certain stage of life you realize that most of what you’d hoped for will never come to you. Not gonna happen! I consoled myself with the thought that I’d been luckier than most. I’d had decades of pleasure, of dreams fulfilled. It was just that I wanted more. I had not guessed that it would all end, was not prepared for it, and the ending made those earlier years seem unreal, as though they’d happened to someone else, not anyone who resembled me, for I had nothing to show for my effort. All gone! I was back where I’d started, literally so, with Mother, Fred and Floyd, Franny and Rose, Hubby and Gilbert, and the ghost of Angela. Back in Mother Land.

  I had never written about that—my family, my early years of hope and ambition and yearning. No big families appeared in any of my books; the mothers I described were blurry but benign. What I wrote about, what people mostly write about, the busy years, the noisy years in the limelight, when they are on good terms with the world, are far less important than the hidden years, of doubt and struggle, because they are so messy and shameful. Although they are severely plotted, like my “best year,” they seem at the time to have no order to them. As a child, as an aspiring writer, I felt like an ant: I believed I had an ant’s chance of success. I saw very little; no one could see me. I was beneath notice, insignificant.

  How I survived in the family, struggling to hold my own, keeping my secrets and my dreams intact—and what happened next—were what mattered to me most. I developed such a solemn habit of concealment I was not able to write about the circumstances that made me who I was. And I knew what I was concealing was too sad to think about.