Sir Vidia's Shadow

by Paul Theroux

  Vidia told me he had pounced on the book, and he congratulated me and said it was “very very good”—all this in the first two lines of his air letter.

  He had praised me before, but this was different—he said that the book was wonderful and liberating to him. He praised details—that was the best of it, his close reading. In Singapore on hot buggy nights with the ceiling fan croaking, I needed this encouragement. I had written a few chapters of what I expected to be a long novel. I was still writing short stories. I was doing book reviews. I was teaching. How was it possible to work so hard and earn so little?

  Never mind, my book was good. V.S. Naipaul said so. He was even grateful to me for having written it—that sounded odd—but he said he would explain this gratitude some other time. He promised that I would get good reviews.

  I had managed to please the one person who mattered. And he was more than pleased. He was impressed by its fluency, the transparency of the prose, the dialogue, the opening paragraphs—nearly all of it he found arresting and powerful.

  Music to my ears. And there was more: “Above all, this is the work of a man who has come to a resolution about a particular experience ... There is an attitude that comprehends and absorbs all the experience that is given.”

  This seemed the greatest praise possible. He explained the point about resolution, which he said was an understanding of experience. Knowing what one was doing was an insight—so he said—that Norman Mailer did not have. He had apparently changed his mind about Mailer. He now said he found Mailer’s writing supremely egotistical. I had gone beyond my ego to a stronger objectivity, “the true artist’s detachment—which is not unconcern, far from it.”

  He liked the passion, the humor, the nuances, the peculiar characters, the aspects of English decline and African strangeness, the landscape, the emotion. Because he was so positive, he said, he was confident that he could tell me what was less successful. He singled out the confessions. He said they were “stagey.”

  I reread his letter. It was the best review I had ever had, from a wise man, who knew me, the man who always said, “Are you sure you want to show this to me? I’m brutal, you know.” Not only brutal but stingy and snobbish. Yet this was Vidia at his best, a subtle and generous man.

  “Many congratulations again and again” was his way of signing off.

  In the Singapore heat, on my low salary, battling with a new novel and feeling old at the age of twenty-eight, I was very happy. The letter lifted my spirits and sustained me for the next two years in Singapore. I worked with a will. I had been told I was doing the right thing.

  I had written Girls at Play off my own bat, without a contract, starting it in Africa, finishing it in Singapore. Here I was, still in Singapore on publication day. Vidia’s letter prepared me for good reviews, and over the following months I got them—praise in the London papers first, then in the provinces, and finally in the United States. The sales were modest, not substantial enough to liberate me from teaching, but it was all a good omen.

  His next air letter came from Canada and was dated August 18. It was the day after his thirty-seventh birthday, but he didn’t mention it. Again he had money on his mind. He didn’t have enough, he wanted more, he was insulted when a fee was low. Money was a theme with him, which was fine with me—I needed consolation on that score too. He had invested a small amount in the stock market, but he failed to make a killing. “What I need now is a lot of money,” he said, explaining that if he became rich he would not have to write ever again.

  For Vidia, as for me, journalism was money; fiction had to be supported by other work. We were paid for our books, but that money represented only a year’s income at best. I had been turned down by the Guggenheim Foundation, I won no prizes, my advances were low—£250 for Girls at Play in England, a few thousand dollars from my American publisher. I published a book-length novella, Murder in Mount Holly, but that had not earned me much. Therefore, I needed my teaching job and my hack work.

  Vidia was the soul of sympathy. He had no cash either. I put some money into stocks and they crashed. I moaned to Vidia. He said that the stock exchange underpinned Western civilization. You had to invest, but you needed to be wise. He analyzed the market, he denounced taxes, he described the fickleness of stocks, he deconstructed inflation, he cursed the necessity to spend.

  He had just been in California, writing about John Steinbeck’s Monterey. He doubted that I would like California. San Francisco was atmospheric but no match for New York. He had decided that New York was for him. He loved living in great cities—he was frank in his liking for the nightlife, the dinner parties, famous friends. The word “glamour” was used approvingly throughout his Mailer-for-Mayor piece. He found New York humor profoundly amusing. He put one such exchange into the article.

  “I was talking to an old Jew in Brooklyn yesterday,” a Mailer staffer says. “I told him about Mailer. He said, ‘Isn’t he the guy stabbed his wife?’ Nine years, and he’s talking about it like he’d read it in the paper that morning.”

  “He probably gets his papers late,” another staffer says.

  Vidia said, “New Yorkers protest too much about their problems; in fact it is their problems that give the city its special life and tone.”

  Vidia’s Mailer piece appeared in the Telegraph Magazine. He had written a dozen such articles since I had met him, mostly long, discursive pieces of intense analysis. He had traveled in India, the West Indies, Japan, Canada, and the United States. He had published seven novels and three works of nonfiction. Although he had published in the United States, he was hardly known there and his books soon went out of print. Even Vidia admitted he was nowhere—poor and overworked, like me. This was late in 1969.

  With Vidia’s plight in mind, I combed through the University of Singapore library’s reference section. I found bound sets of The Spectator and The New Statesman, in which there were scores of book reviews Vidia had written. They were hugely funny, some wickedly so. He was brutal, as he always said; he turned the books inside out, and he was harshest on West Indian authors. He had been writing book reviews since 1957. I read all these uncollected and obscure reviews and as many articles as I could find.

  I decided to write a book about his work and proposed the idea to him in an air letter. He welcomed the proposal by opening his heart and telling me that he felt lost, he felt sad. I had to understand this, he said: he had come from nowhere, from nothing. He had been a “barefoot colonial.”

  “Think of it like this,” he said. “Imagine the despair to which the barefoot colonial is reduced when, wanting to write, and reading the pattern books of Tolstoy, Balzac et al., he looks at his own world and discovers that it almost doesn’t exist. Hemingway? The barefoot colonial in Paris? Where the Hemingway adventure for him? Try to understand this and see the effort to make art out of this destitution and alienation.”

  Writing on his air letter in small script, his return address a loaned house in Gloucestershire, he was experiencing a personal crisis, he said. It related to his being in that house. He was feeling like an exile. All his old uncertainties about nationality, passport, and home had returned to him in this period of inactivity. That his books were so personal was another cause for uncertainty, because he was from a small and incomplete world—not quaint or colorful, but destitute and dangerous to itself—with “spiritual blight.” His world was a fragment, and the people in it indulged themselves in make-believe and fantasy.

  He had written honestly about this little world, but was it possible, he wondered, to turn something so private into art or literature? Also—just as important—would it sell?

  He felt miserable. He wanted to buy a house but did not know where, “what physical area of the earth.” He wanted to write a book but his sense of crisis told him it would never find its audience. He felt that no one really cared about his dilemma.

  I had dilemmas of my own: no money, a book in progress, the plays and poems of Shakespeare’s contemporaries to t
each, an awful house with no air conditioning on a Singapore back street. My son was almost two; my wife was pregnant again and wondering whether she had the strength to go on working. As if I didn’t have enough to worry about, the vice-chancellor of the university, Dr. Toh Chin Chye, stopped me outside the library one day and told me my hair was too long.

  I was in the right mood to explicate Vidia’s deepening sense of exile. Vidia agreed: he said it was opportune that I had suggested a book about his work. It eased his mind to know that I was eager to write something. In talking about his island, his sadness, his sense of exile, his uncertainty, he was preparing me. He was saying plainly that I had to know his background or else I would misinterpret him.

  I took this as encouragement to write a book about his work. I made a bibliography. I read everything he had written, including all the incidental pieces—his 1958 review of Gustie Herrigel’s Zen in the Art of Flower Arrangement, his profile of Graham Greene, pieces in Vogue and Punch, his many London Letters in the Illustrated Weekly of India. Even his journalism sparkled.

  In another air letter from Gloucestershire, Vidia stressed how temporary his residence was, how he was shuttling around. He also urged me to get out of Singapore and find a place that was intellectually congenial. He saw me having to endure in Singapore the sort of second-rate society he had known in Trinidad. He was interested that we were having a second child—he seemed a trifle dubious. He said he was pleased that I was writing a new book (“you really are a worker”). He looked forward to my study of his work. He gave me total freedom to criticize, deplore, dismiss anything I wished.

  “You must give me the pleasure of seeing what I look like,” he said. “It would be like hearing one’s own voice, seeing oneself walk down the street. Show me!”

  Did he want me to be brutal? I didn’t think so. I had told him how much I had liked The Loss of El Dorado. The Italian historian Benedetto Croce had said, “All history is contemporary,” that the present was part of all history that was written. So Vidia’s book explained much of what was going on in the year of its publication, 1970: the issues of race and violence and colonialism. A colony was by its very nature dependent and inferior. Vidia believed that a colony did not have the intelligence or concentration to rebel, which was why colonials had a self-destructive instinct for chaos.

  He had been proven right about East Africa. Idi Amin had taken over and threatened to expel the Indians. “What will you do when the crunch comes?” Vidia had asked almost five years before. The crunch was coming in Uganda.

  The reviews of El Dorado had been good, though Graham Greene had reservations, finding the prose “airless.” Vidia was unmoved. Reviews did not really help a book, nor did publicity matter. If a book was good it would sell, and it would last.

  “The only consolation of the writing profession is that it is fair,” Vidia said in another air letter to me. This was his watchword, that literary excellence was always rewarded, in spite of everything.

  He then explained something that he had not had time to go into when he first mentioned it in an air letter almost a year before: how he had been grateful to me for having written Girls at Play. He said that my confidence and forthrightness in the book had encouraged him to think seriously about setting a novel in Africa. It had been something he felt was impossible for him.

  Five months after reading my African novel, he had started an African novel of his own. He was happy with its progress. It was a short novel. Writing it, he said, he thought constantly of me.

  That was a great compliment: something I had written about Africa had had a positive influence on Vidia. The result was In a Free State, which would not be published for another year.

  Around this time I had word from London that B. S. Johnson (“Remember, you’re first a poet”) had committed suicide. In a fit of depression he had sat before a mirror, slashed his wrists, and watched himself bleed to death. He had been just a few years older than me and one of the most optimistic writers I knew. I never found out what went wrong.

  Vidia kept me confident, and he filled me with such hope that I began to think of leaving Singapore, taking my wife and two children—my second son, Louis, had been born in Singapore in 1970—somewhere and never again working for a salary, never having a boss or employees. Vidia had always emphasized the freedom of a writer. It was something I badly wanted. I finished Jungle Lovers and decided to take off for a few weeks, to get on a ship to Borneo and climb Mount Kinabalu. My wife said, “If that’s what you want ...”

  So I went to Borneo by sea. In the town of Kota Kinabalu I hired a Malay man to guide me. We went up and down the mountain without any technical equipment, hiking through jungles and upwards through forests of ferns and carnivorous plants. The pitcher plants were pitcher-sized, and purple orchids hung in clusters from wet trees. We spent several nights in mountainside shelters. On my way home I decided to give Singapore one more year and then re-sign.

  I asked Vidia where I should go.

  Think carefully about what you are planning, he said in his next air letter. I had mentioned the English countryside, but he said I was too young to retreat there. I needed to have connections to society. I should not cut myself off. “Life appears very long; but no one does much creative work of a new sort after fifty; and the next twenty years are of great importance to you.” I was twenty-nine.

  He doubted that England was a good place to live. It was sterile; there was no intellectual debate; English writers were cliquey. A writer had to be a part of the world if his work was to matter. “Hemingway, Fitzgerald and the others, who were outside the world, are bad writers, for their inability to see beyond their careers as ‘writers.’”

  It was only possible, he said, to live in the English countryside if I had a book to write. Otherwise it was dreary and pointless. In any case, I would need to go to London once a week to see people, buy books, keep in touch. He advised me not to buy a house but simply to see what England was like. I should not commit myself, because essentially a house in the country was a place to write, a retreat. The world was elsewhere. He had been living in Gloucestershire for ten months, but as soon as he finished In a Free State he was getting out, he said, “to see the world again.”

  A month later there was another air letter. He had been brooding over my expression “cottage in Dorset,” which was what I had in mind. He satirized my words, saying that I was thinking in clichés about the English countryside—“milk maids, spring mornings, polite rural greetings,” and also the absurd daydream of writing in the bosom of England on a sunny day behind the bright mullioned windows of my library.

  Yet I had no fantasies of this kind. I was looking for an inexpensive house in a rural setting because I had a book to write. I had finished with Africa. I was making notes for a new novel, set in Singapore, about a man who becomes stuck there, working for a cruel Chinese boss (“Get a haircut”)—my nightmare—and how he survives by pimping. Vietnam was to be part of it, since American soldiers came to Singapore all the time on R and R. I mentioned Dorset as a possibility because my in-laws now lived there and were looking for a house we might rent. I was itching to quit my job; I longed to spend my whole day writing.

  In Singapore I was the last of the Mohicans: all the other expatriates in my department had left. The new policy was to hire only Chinese lecturers. I was asked when I would be leaving; they wanted to replace me with an ethnic Chinese person.

  “I’m staying,” I said, just to annoy them. Privately I vowed to leave as soon as I could.

  It was not merely that I felt overworked. I was also sick of Staff Club drunks, grousing expats, rude Singaporeans, high humidity, and monsoon rain. I hated our house, the stinks from the storm drain, the way my pen slipped through my perspiring fingers. There was no hinterland in Singapore. To cure myself of this sense of confinement, I traveled, taking turns with my wife in looking after the two children. But I had the better of it. I took the train from Singapore to Bangkok, then went to Burma, to
Bali, and hiked in northern Sumatra, among the Batak people. In Bali late in 1970, I seriously considered dropping out, disappearing with my family, taking to the hills. But that was the effect of a brief experiment in smoking heroin. I was soon back at my desk.

  When In a Free State was done, Vidia said in an air letter from London, “This book will be of special interest to you: you and you alone, for reasons you will understand when you read it, are able to say certain things about it.”

  He is my friend, I thought. I have a friend. I was a part of his writing life now, and he was certainly part of mine. In the dedicated diaristic activity of letter writing, I reported my progress—and he praised it; I sought his advice—and he obliged me; and we talked about the world. He was right about his book. I read it with special interest. I recognized many faces and landscapes.

  Vidia went to Jamaica early in 1971. He sent me an air letter from Kingston to say that he had found some of his early articles back home in Trinidad and was struck by how hard he had worked and how quickly time had passed. He said, “I had the curious feeling that I was looking over the relics of a dead man.”

  He urged me to press on with the book about his work. He listed all the obscure magazines he had written for, including The Illustrated Weekly of India, The Economic Weekly (Bombay), and London Life, Twentieth Century, and Queen. He wanted me to succeed with my book. He was sure there was a market for it. Still he was nowhere in the United States, and in spite of the prizes he had won in Britain, his sales were small.

  In the middle of May 1971, he reported in an air letter that he was at a very low ebb. He had retreated to Wiltshire, to a bungalow on a large estate. The bungalow was another borrowed address that made him feel like an exile. He had been sick and depressed for five months and had not written anything and so had earned nothing, which he underlined.