Blinding Light

by Paul Theroux

  His fame disgusted him, not because it was hollow and cheaply won—he had earned it, he had craved it—but because as more time passed he felt unworthy. There was just that one book, the chronicle of a reckless stunt, and where was his second? His self-disgust made him cynical and envious, his inaction shamed him. He collected the names and studied the lives of one-book Americans—Salinger gone to seed in New Hampshire, Ralph Ellison teaching literature in New Jersey, Jim Powers drunk and frail in Minnesota. Steadman understood their anger and bitterness. They were not forgotten, but they had been abandoned.

  People hardly talked about them anymore. If you didn’t produce another book, you were as good as dead. That same sudden obscurity befell Steadman; he realized it when the phone stopped ringing and the talk ceased. Once he had pleaded to be left alone; then, years later, he had his wish and he was at sea. There was no need to hide, no one to hide from. Who cared? As the Vineyard had grown in popularity, his own fame had slipped, and it had gotten to the point where, though the title Trespassing was well known, his own name was not linked to it. The book was associated with the TV series, the bad film, the branding of the outdoor clothing line and the licensed accessories—waterproof watches, footwear, binoculars, sunglasses. His own name was forgotten, or perhaps—suggested by Sabra in Ecuador and her referring to him as a “legendary has-been”—Steadman was thought to be dead.

  In old age most writers fell silent and existed without force, in a precious obscurity indistinguishable from death. Mute, aged, feeble, unremembered, they were little more than moth-eaten ornaments, wheeled out for prizes, for ceremonies, the indignities of being patronized for giving keynote speeches and getting honorary doctorates, the ridiculous robes and unwearable medals, the pompous tributes of philistines who served merely to remind an indifferent public that such forgotten fogies were still alive. You saw them looking like tramps or mad uncles, with wild hair, twitching fingers, baggy trousers. Old writers were uglier and crazier-looking and smellier than other civilians—shuffle-hurrying to the men’s room after the ceremony, and the next thing you knew they were actually dead.

  In his first years of seclusion Steadman had wanted to write a novel as original and strange as his travel book. But all he wrote were magazine pieces, travel stories that were the opposite of Trespassing, the opposite of what he wished his writing to be. And he told himself that he had another writing life, which was more real to him for being his secret. He was confident in his own ideas—the unwritten books, the stories that were just jotted notes, the sheaf of false starts. There was time for them—why spoil a good idea by being hasty? He didn’t want to rush his book. He wrote nothing substantial.

  So much of writing was pure silence, forethought, meditation, a kind of Zen, summoning the mood, achieving the mastery to begin; and writing poorly—the false start—was more damaging to an idea than not writing at all. So Steadman reasoned. He despised the vanity of writers who raced into print; he loathed looking at their clumsy sentences and upholstered paragraphs. He hated hearing them talk. “I’m doing a novel.” This paltry bookmaking merely repeated the banalities of the past; and Steadman swore that if he could not write something new—a novel so original as to be disturbing, in language coined for the purpose and ringing with reality, a book as powerful as Trespassing but an inner journey—well, then he would not write fiction at all and only volunteer for pieces if they interested him.

  Then he stopped writing the pieces, and in the years before traveling to Ecuador he did nothing but live in obscurity, doodling at his desk on the Vineyard. He remained on the seasonal party list, a sought-after guest because he so seldom showed up. Parties and tennis and the water preoccupied the summer people, for whom the Vineyard was the greatest summer camp on earth. These people were cliquey and gossipy like campers, too. “How’s the book coming along?” he was sometimes asked, and he smiled and said, “Slowly. It’s only been twenty years.”

  Publishing nothing because he refused to write badly conveyed the impression of virtue and made him self-important for a while. A writer’s obliquest boast was that he or she, so tormented and blocked, was not writing. But eventually people stopped inquiring. Much worse than their gauche questions about his work was their tactless not-asking, like people made awkward by a bereavement, pretending to demonstrate their concern by not commenting on the deceased. He avoided the parties for embarrassments like these. And he hated himself for his delay in writing another book. Or was delay the word? Perhaps he had nothing to write. He had had one book in him. He had been young, like Salinger and Ellison, and now he was middle-aged and depleted, perhaps kidding himself that he had anything more to give.

  Yet he could not be calm, did not have the stomach for this. Not writing now seemed to him the crudest form of self-denial, a kind of mutilation.

  He had changed, he was older, he was better read; he saw that Trespassing had been a marketable mythographic idea. It was a young man’s book, but now—he had never thought this would happen—he was neglected and ignored. To succeed in society you had to stay the same. That was also true of the most vulgar success in publishing: you had to stay true to the brand and repeat yourself. What had made him timid about writing the confessional novel he had planned for so many years was that it bore no relation to Trespassing; it was against the rules.

  For years all he had ever heard from editors and publishers, and especially from the agency that sold merchandising rights, was “Give us another Trespassing.”

  As time had passed he had become somewhat self-conscious about the success of his book—doubted its integrity precisely because it had been a success. What he had regarded as an achievement now seemed like a fluke. The only book they wanted was the very book he refused to write. So he did nothing, and he might as well have been dead.

  The Vineyard was the perfect place to be dead. Except for the summer months it was an island of natives, exiles, and castaways. The off-season population was divided between millionaires and menials—the rich who were allowed to stay and the tenacious land-poor gentry who actually ran the island, through a network of obscure relationships, support systems, and productive rivalries. Being a wealthy summer resident on the Vineyard simply meant having a house on a piece of land; but the house was little more than a ticket to live there, and only a season ticket in most cases. On the Vineyard money was not a significant factor in acquiring power. Money didn’t even buy influence, because only influence mattered, and it could not be bought. An almost Asiatic system of loyalty and dependence, trust and cooperation, got things done, and without it life was impossible in any season. Your name mattered most. Everyone was known, or at least knowable. The oldest families, the most deferred to, the ones with power and influence, were by no means wealthy, though some still owned land. In every respect, as the years had passed, the Vineyard had become more and more like an island in the South Seas—inbred, enigmatic, with complex alliances and unsolvable issues of land and power—like many of the destinations in Trespassing.

  The descent of the summer people overwhelmed the island. They were suffered for their revenue and their obedience. The crowds gathered in early June and the numbers swelled until just after Labor Day. Among the summer people were some of the island’s stalwarts—the celebrities, the money people, the fundraisers, the patrons, the ones for whom the Vineyard was a worthy cause, an art colony as well as a refuge. Most of them came to see each other and to glory in another golden summer. The village of Edgartown was house-proud and self-important and snobbish, attached to its history, and until just the other day was adamant in its tacit understanding of Whites Only and No Jews. Vineyard Haven was a working port and commercial center; Oak Bluffs, geographically in between, was upscale black; Aquinnah was Indian; Chappaquiddick, the most recently colonized, was New Yorkers and lawyers and trophy houses; South Beach was new money; Lambert’s Cove was old farmland and big houses. Scattered throughout, in the woodlots and among scrub oaks and bull briars and thickets of sumac, were the i
slanders, the old-timers, many of them living in hovels and bungalows, amid a clutter of pickup trucks and kids’ toys strewn on the lawn and, here and there, untidy stacks of lobster traps.

  Up-island was harder to define, because there were so few solid landscape features. The presence of old families was one aspect—Mayhews here, Nortons and Athearns there—and so was the crossroads at West Tisbury. Squibnocket was another. Alley’s store and the old churches were landmarks. But most of up-island was hidden houses and steep meadows surrounded by high hedges and stone walls. One of those estates was Steadman’s, at the end of a gravel track that was more a country road than a driveway. For him the Vineyard did not grow smaller with time, and he did not get the “rock fever” others talked about. The longer he lived on the island the larger it appeared, and sometimes it seemed as vast as Australia. Yet it remained a place with no secrets.

  For years Steadman believed he was hiding, and that he was being pursued and pestered. But at last, so thoroughly had he insisted on his privacy, people stopped seeking him out. The press stopped caring; there was no scandal and no new book. Steadman had had a succession of live-in girlfriends, but none of them had taken to the island. The winters were too quiet, the summers too loud, and Steadman never mentioned marriage. He was silent when asked “Where’s this thing going?” But the women knew that the very fact that they were asking the question meant the answer was “Nowhere.” Then he had married, but disastrously, the marriage shorter than the courtship. That was Charlotte—Charlie. Ava, whom he had first met at the Vineyard hospital, was more a wife to him than Charlie had ever been.

  As one of the few doctors on the island, Ava was in demand; electricians, plumbers, housecleaners, carpenters, and handymen were also courted, because there were so few of them. Some were enticed from the Cape and flew over in the commuter jet from Hyannis to perform mundane tasks—mend a roof, stop a leak, rewire a house. When Ava took a leave of absence from the hospital to help Steadman with his novel, the hospital management screamed in frustration and begged her to come back.

  The Vineyard was the real estate phenomenon of Steadman’s life. He had gone there from Boston as a child when it had been a hymn-singing island of fishermen and vegetable farmers, odd-jobbers and lobster - men. His mother had been a Mayhew; it was a return for her. Then the island became a version of America—a choice destination with an unflagging building boom, too many newcomers, mutual suspicion and class conflict, environmental battles, unsustainable development crowding areas of natural beauty, a dwindling labor pool, heavy traffic, drugs in the summer, race problems, angry Indians, and now and then a knifing in Oak Bluffs: Hometown USA.

  Still, it was home for him, and for that reason, prettier than anywhere else. Old money built discreetly and dressed down and didn’t show off and was famously frugal. Old money fraternized with the locals, formed alliances, got things done—or, more often, managed to be quietly obstructive, meddling for the good of the island. What new money there was remained intimidated by the locals, gently browbeaten, never understanding that the gentry prided themselves on and gained self-esteem by knowing the workers, for the boat builders and the fishermen and the ferrymen and the police and the raggedest Wamponoags were the island’s true aristocrats.

  “How long have you lived here?” Steadman was sometimes asked.

  “I went to John Belushi’s funeral,” he said. “And my mother’s people, the Mayhews, have lived here for three hundred and sixty-five years.”

  These days, as an addict—there was no other word—he often thought about Belushi’s drug habit. He knew enough about it to understand that it was the opposite of his own. Poor Belushi shot himself full of speedballs and was incoherent and out of control, comatose and futile. Steadman’s addiction was benign and enlightening, healthful and productive.

  The blinding light bestowed by the datura inspired and strengthened him and gave him back the past; granted him something just short of omniscience; was revelation and remembrance. He had heard that blindness was sensory deprivation and had believed it to be something like a thick bag over the head of a doomed man in a noose. Never had he imagined that such blindness would grant him power, that he would be given such vision. Darkness was light, the world was turned inside out, he saw to the essence of things, and it was prophetic, for at the heart of it all was the future.

  Blindness was his addiction and his obsession—his entire waking life was given to it; his whole world was transformed. No one knew what he knew. How deluded sighted people were, insects twitching in a stick-figure tango, animated by their feeble impulses, seeing so little.

  Drinking the muddy mixture, Steadman was blinded and uplifted. In the glow of his sightlessness nothing was hidden; the world was vast and bright, and its vital odors filled his soul. The simplest touch roused him by the pressure of its tragic eloquence. He learned a whole narrative of smell, a grammar of sound, a syntax of touch.

  At first, preoccupied with dabbling in the datura, he had done no writing at all. He had sat big and bright as though enthroned, overwhelmed by the luminous warmth that blindness had kindled in him and by the insights it provoked—he was truly seeing the world for the first time. Writing could wait. He had fantasized that as a blind man he needed round-the-clock nursing. Well, it was partly true.

  He did not begin writing immediately, but when he did he realized how incomplete Trespassing had been, how thinly imagined, and not a fluke but a failure. Yet even failures had the power to delude the reader. Once, he had wondered whether he would ever write anything again. Trespassing, for those who remembered that he wrote it, might be his only literary legacy. Now, with the datura, he could not see any end of creation. He could barely keep pace with the tumult of his visions, the record of his nights and days, in the god-like realm of the erotic, the doctor by his side, his dark dreams fulfilled and revealed.

  On some days of dictation he felt that he had poisoned himself and died; that in death he had entered the shimmering chambers that some people had glimpsed but none had described, because unlike Steadman they were unable to come back from the dead. He died once a day and woke, delivered from death, freighted with revelation.

  He worked alone, with Ava. No one else knew how he had been transformed. Steadman remained secluded as the bleaker seasons passed into the cold Vineyard spring, with its spells of frigid sunshine. He had no need to go anywhere. His writing was the one constant in his life, and he was content with the conceit that, blinded this way, he contained the world.

  But late May brought warmth and color. After the clammy winter and the cold northwest wind there were some uncertain days, and then at last the Vineyard was enlarged with more assertive sunlight, and the rain diminished, and the wind swung around and blew from the southwest. He knew the island would be sunny and pleasant for the next four months. The first flowers were the biggest and brightest, the daffodils and early Asian daylilies, the azaleas, the rhododendrons, the white viburnum the locals called mayflowers, the blossoms he preferred for their fragrance, for the more extravagant the flower, the more modest its aroma. He was no longer tricked by his eye. One of the lessons of blindness was that night-blooming flowers had the most powerful perfume.

  After the long winter up-island he prepared himself for summer—the pleasures of spring lasted just a few weeks. Steadman wondered what the season might bring. The winter for him had been perfect: safe and sexual, turning him into an imaginative animal. After his day’s work, he ate and rutted and then slept soundly. He woke and blinded himself first thing and resumed his dictation. He felt as confident as a prophet. He spoke his narrative as the book was revealed to him.

  His writing was not work—it was his life, flesh made into words, the erotic novel rehearsed at night. He was like someone conducting an experiment on himself, then writing up the results. Blindness was his method and his memory; the drug created in his consciousness a miracle of remembering and invention.

  He was most himself in his blindness, an eyeless w
orm on the move; most himself in his sexuality, and paired with Ava absolutely without inhibition. He was convinced that his sexual history was the essential truth that demanded to be written as fiction.

  He was satisfied with his progress so far: enough had been transcribed and printed for him to begin calling it a book. The book contained his world; he inhabited the book. The act of creation became understandable to him: it was brilliant transformation, not making something from nothing, but giving order to his life, turning darkness into light. He knew now that the travel in Trespassing was a delusion. There was no travel on earth like the distances he was covering now, locked and blindfolded in his hidden house.

  A satisfying solitude was returned to him, and he delighted in its stimulation. For years he had longed to write the fictional counterpart to Trespassing, a novel as an interior journey that would also be an erotic masterpiece, wandering across areas of human experience that had been regarded as forbidden—like the sort of fenced-off frontiers he had crossed in his travel book: sex as trespass in the realms of touch, taste, and smell; sex as memory, as fantasy, as prophecy. And fantasy, because it was ritualistic, became something like a sacrament that gave him access to the truth of his past.

  He had been so hesitant to go to Ecuador; it had taken an effort of will to submit to the drugs; he had needed to be tempted; he knew it was his last bargain. But the datura had made all the difference, had revealed his book to him, and the months of productive seclusion he had spent since arriving back on the island were the happiest he had ever known.

  And he had discovered through the drug’s blinding light that the truth was sexual: the source of truth was pleasure itself, fundamental and sensual. Everything else was a dishonest aspect of an elaborate and misleading surface—all lies.

  He intended his book as a confession and a consolation. In a world full of desperate and bloody imagery, how could such a thing as sex be shocking? Yet he was interested in describing only the nightmarish intimacies of his sexuality. For the traveler who had gone everywhere else on earth, this was the undiscovered world of his mind and heart, the basis of his being, his inner life revealed, not anyone else’s. No one could say, “Not true!” when he knew it was his own truth, that he had risked blindness to understand.