by Paul Theroux
“Publishers want to cash in,” he said. “But why should they? We’re the ones who do the work.”
I said, “That campaign for PLR was quite a struggle. Nothing like it exists in the States. For a long time, no one paid any attention.”
“Really.” He raised himself up slightly from his chair and looked around. “I don’t see anyone I know here.”
“Who are you thinking of, Vidia?”
“No one in particular. But it’s nice when one sees someone one knows in a restaurant in London.”
“I saw Bruce Chatwin the other day in L’Escargot.”
“Who’s Bruce Chatwin?”
It was how Vidia belittled anyone.
“The way he talks,” Vidia said. “All those airs. That name-dropping. He is trying to live down the shame of being the son of a Birmingham solicitor.”
“I don’t think he cares about that,” I said. Bruce was a friend of mine, and I suspected this to be the reason for Vidia’s dismissing him.
“No. You’re wrong. Look at Noel Coward. His mother kept a lodging house. And he pretended to be so grand—that theatrical English accent. All that posturing. He knew he was common. It was all a pretense. And think of his pain.”
He was still scanning the restaurant for a familiar face. Seeing none, he settled into his prawn curry, seeming disappointed, as if he had shown up but no one else had.
“How’s your food?”
“It’s all right, but lunch—lunch is such an intrusion. It fractures one’s day. It takes over, makes the morning hectic, destroys the afternoon, and leaves one no appetite in the evening.”
“What’s the answer?”
“One prefers to break the day into three distinct parts. Work in the morning. Light lunch. Something in the afternoon. Exercise. Prepare for the evening—the dinner. Dinner is grander.”
“Grand” was one of those words that Vidia could use in an almost satirical way. But if you smiled he might react, and then you knew he really meant it. “Very grand” sometimes meant pompous and hollow, or it might mean important or powerful.
“Do you know Bibendum?” he asked.
It was a new restaurant in South Kensington, housed in a well-known Art Deco landmark usually referred to as the Michelin building. Bibendum had been started by the entrepreneur Sir Terence Conran, who insisted that people use his tide. Vidia had met him once, and he hated Conran for his brashness and his flaunted knighthood.
“Do try to get a table there next time, Paul, won’t you? One would be happier there.”
I said I would. What prevented me was the expense. It was a five-star restaurant. No matter where we went I ended up paying, and so I stayed away from the most expensive places, like Claridges, the Ritz, or the Connaught. I preferred the peacefulness of eating in relatively empty restaurants, which were always the less stylish ones.
Knowing of his interest in graphology, I showed him a page from a letter I had received that week. It was handwritten with black ballpoint on a yellow legal-sized sheet. There was no salutation, no signature, just a page of writing. I said, “So what do you think?”
“Oh, God. Oh, God. Oh, God.” Vidia’s face became a mask representing suffering and torment. He made passes with his fingers over the page. “This man is in trouble.”
“It’s from John Ehrlichman, the Watergate man. He sent me this from prison. He’s writing a book.”
We finished lunch. I paid. Leaving the Gaylord, we walked towards All Souls Church, in Langham Place, near Broadcasting House. Vidia pointed out the Langham, once a hotel, then a BBC building, where parts of the Overseas Service had had offices.
“I had an office there,” Vidia said. “I started writing there, in the Freelance Room. God!”
“What were you doing?”
“Caribbean Service. I did programs. One called Caribbean Voices. Went mad wondering whether I could write a book. I began writing Miguel Street there.”
Though I knew he had worked there, it was surprising to hear him mention it. He disapproved of a writer’s working a regular job and was proud of the fact that he had worked only ten weeks on salary, as a copywriter for a company that sold cement. That, as his whole salaried career, was bound to have distorted his view of the working world.
“Such a lovely church,” he said as we entered Langham Place.
“All Souls,” I said. “Thomas Nash.”
“It is Nash’s only church,” Vidia said. “So strong. Look what he does with the simplest lines. They ridiculed it when it was built in the 1820s. No one approved.”
“Kipling got married here,” I said.
Vidia smiled. He loved sparring.
“That was just before he went to America,” he said. “Of course, his wife was American.”
“Henry James was his best man,” I said.
“And then Kipling came back to England, moved into a grand house, and wrote nothing,” Vidia said.
“He wrote some great short stories.”
“Nothing as great as Plain Tales from the Hills.”
“The late stories are much subtler,” I said.
“Everyone tells me that,” Vidia said. He shook his head. “I have been seriously wondering about fiction. What is it now? What can it be?”
“What it has always been,” I said. “A version of the truth. And I think that’s what nonfiction is, too.”
“Yes, yes, yes,” Vidia said. He thought that was apt. “But I am still wondering. I think the novel as we know it is dated.”
And so we walked along, up to Regents Park and along the footpaths by the flower beds, until it was time for his dental appointment in Harley Street, where we parted.
It seemed cruelly ironic that Vidia’s developing interest in stylish restaurants coincided with serious dental problems—gum disease, a gingivectomy, and painful extractions. I sometimes met him at his dentist’s office. He was one of the few people in England I knew who had a private dentist; most people made do with the impatient National Health Service dentists, who gave them fifteen minutes of attention every four months and, in their incompetent haste, were lax in detecting the sort of gum disease that was afflicting Vidia.
At another lunch, Vidia wincing with each bite from his sore teeth, we talked about money. We usually talked about money, as writers do—the futility of making it, the punishing British tax system, the way people presumed on writers by trying to underpay them, the fatuity of wealth, and could we have some more money, please?
“I know the solution—my solution,” Vidia said.
“Please tell me.”
“I want a million pounds in the bank,” he said. “Not the equivalent of a million in real estate. Not valuables. Not stocks. I want a million in my account.”
“I suppose that’s possible,” I said, so as not to discourage him. In fact, I had no idea how one would accumulate that amount.
“But you have a million, Paul.”
“You’re joking.”
“You got a million for the Mosquito Coast film, surely.”
“Nowhere near it. Maybe a fifth of that.”
“Really.” He was surprised, even shocked.
“And I bought a house with it, so now it’s gone.”
“Actors get paid in the millions, surely.”
“Yes,” I said. “But not writers.”
“I will get my million,” he said, as I paid the bill for lunch.
After yet another lunch, we walked to the offices of his publisher so he could sign three hundred copies of A House for Mr. Biswas, one of the titles in a series of signed books that were part of a book-club offer. I stood by him, opening them to the half-title page, and he wrote his signature. As always, he used a fountain pen and black ink.
“When I wrote this book I wore out a pen. The nib was worn down to the gold. It was a little stump. Imagine the labor.”
He signed, I stacked.
“What is the good of signing books? It simply inflates their value in a bogus way. I will never see the
profits. Someone else will get it. All these people who call themselves publishers—they are no better than people who sell books off a barrow.”
I pushed the books at him. He signed quickly, making his initials and his surname into a single calligraphic flourish.
“These will go for big money,” he said. “They will be resold. Why am I doing this?”
And he stopped signing. He put the cap on his pen and stood up. He was done.
“There’s more,” I said.
“That’s enough,” he said, having convinced himself that signing the books was a mistake.
Later that day, we went to my house for tea. My two boys were upstairs in their rooms, doing homework. I called them down so they could say hello. I was proud of them; I wanted Vidia to see them. Now they were the right age. Vidia could not deal with young children—he rather disliked children—but he took to my boys as he had taken to me, long before.
“And what homework are you doing, Marcel?”
“English prep. And a Russian essay.” He swallowed and went on. “On Ivan the Terrible.”
“Tell me about Ivan the Terrible.”
Marcel said, “I’m reading a book about him by Henri Troyat.”
“I know Troyat’s Tolstoy. You say this book is about Ivan the Terrible?”
“It’s his new one. It hasn’t come out here yet.”
“You have the American edition?”
“No. The French one.”
“But this is your Russian essay?”
“My essay’s in Russian. The book’s in French.”
“Yes, yes, yes, yes,” Vidia said, liking the answer. “And what about you, Louis?”
“English essay. My Phillimore.”
“What is a Phillimore?”
“It’s the big essay of the year. It’s supposed to be pretty long and serious.”
“Is yours long and serious?”
“It’s not done yet. It’s about the attraction of evil.”
“Yes,” Vidia said, concentrating hard and murmuring, “the attraction of evil.”
“Ahab,” Louis said. “Richard the Third.”
“You should read Old Goriot.”
Louis nodded, not sure whether a book or an author was being recommended.
After the boys had gone upstairs Vidia said, “You are so lucky to have your sons. They’re intelligent. They’re polite. They are nice boys.”
Agreeing with him, I deliberately positioned myself near the shelf in the bookcase where all of Vidia’s books were lined up, from the ones I had bought with Yomo, in Kampala, to the latest ones.
I said, “Vidia, would you mind signing these books?”
“Not now. Some other time,” he said.
He had convinced himself in the course of signing all those copies of Biswas that book signing was a cheat. Other people made money from signed books, not the author, who was invariably swindled. He consoled me with a joke about the writer who had signed so many books that the rarest books of all, and the most valuable, were the ones without his signature.
Every October, around the time the Nobel Prize was announced, Vidia was named in confidently speculative articles as the likely recipient. He never mentioned the prize, nor commented on the speculation. On the contrary, he seemed to make a point of ignoring it. It was I who brought up the subject. In 1973, when Patrick White had won, I told Vidia how pleased I was—I liked Patrick White’s fiction, his humorous and sometimes hallucinatory prose style. Besides, he conveyed very specific and vivid images of Australia.
Vidia said, “I’ve read him. I don’t think there’s much there.”
Three years later, Saul Bellow won. Vidia claimed he had never read him. And he laughed when William Golding won in 1983.
“Tell me, what did Golding do to win it?”
The Nigerian writer Wole Soyinka won the Nobel Prize in 1986.
“What do you think, Vidia?”
“Did he write anything?”
Vidia did not wait for my reply. We happened to be walking down Cromwell Road towards the V and A, and from the way he stiffened his legs in a marching manner and planted his feet more firmly I gathered that he had something on his mind. Perhaps it had unsettled him to think of Wole Soyinka, wearing a crown of laurel leaves, with $190,000 in his pocket. In any case, Vidia became agitated or sad when he thought about Africa.
“The Nobel committee are doing it again,” he said, striding down the sidewalk.
“Doing what?”
“Pissing on literature, as they do every year.”
I started to laugh.
“Pissing from a great height,” he said. “On books.”
In time, we changed from lunch to dinner. “Dinner is grander.” Also, it did not break up the day, as lunch did. Yet our dinners were no more frequent than our lunches had been. One or two, then nothing for a year. He was away—on the long journey for his Islam book, or in India, or, quite often, in Buenos Aires.
I was traveling too, in China and Africa, in the United States, and on book tours. Almost everywhere I went I was asked about Vidia: What influence did V.S. Naipaul have on your writing? or How did Naipaul help you as a writer? There was no simple answer, at least none shorter than would fill a five-hundred-page book. It was understood that we were friends, that we had had a teacher-student relationship when I had started writing. Because Vidia usually avoided book tours (“The book will find its own way”), people wondered what he was like. I told them truthfully that I had never met anyone like him.
“Writers are crankish,” Vidia said. “You get crankish from being alone.”
Often, I heard stories about him—people sought me out to tell me the stories, believing that I had to know everything about my friend.
When something disgraceful was rumored of Vidia, there were often several versions of the story. Vidia’s hasty exit from Amsterdam is a good example of the mutation of a simple tale. In the first version I heard, a Dutchman in Amsterdam told me of Vidia’s disastrous visit of a year before. Vidia had arrived from London to see his Dutch publisher and had agreed to a week of publicity. About an hour after his arrival, a press conference was arranged: Naipaul on a stage, the Dutch audience waiting to ask him questions; cameras, tape recorders, journalists.
The first question, phrased as antagonism, was from a woman who asked him to explain his offensive attitude towards Africans.
Vidia said, “I have no comment on this.”
The woman demanded an answer.
“I don’t have to listen to this,” Vidia said.
With that, he walked off the stage. Cameras and lights followed his progress out of the hall. He went back to his taxi, which still held his bag, and back to the airport. He returned that same day to London, without ever having unpacked or seen his hotel, his whole visit torpedoed by a single question that he had found impertinent.
The second version of Vidia’s Amsterdam exit was reported in the Dutch paper Het Parool, under the headline “Naipaul Came, Got Angry and Disappeared.”
In this story Vidia was to have spent five days in the Netherlands, but departed “in anger” after two days. For a public discussion at the Amsterdam PEN Center, Vidia asked that questions be submitted in writing, but he ridiculed them when he looked at them. A sample question he hooted at was “How do you see the future of our world in ten or twenty years?” To save the situation, the Dutch host asked a question, about how terms like “fascism” and “communism” describe European ideas that cannot necessarily be transposed onto societies fundamentally different from our own. When Vidia expressed mild agreement, a woman from Amsterdam’s Free University asked, “If terms like ‘fascism’ and ‘communism’ are not applicable, then how about using ‘rich’ and ‘poor’ as yardsticks?”
“Why ‘rich’ and ‘poor’?” Vidia said. “Why not ‘lazy’ and ‘ambitious,’ ‘learned’ and ‘illiterate,’ ‘good’ and ‘bad’? It’s about time we started looking at other aspects of people.”
Hearing this
blunt reply, a Dutch author, Margaretha Ferguson, began (so the paper said) “an endless story about Naipaul’s negative attitude towards Islam,” and attacked him for saying that Dutch had virtually disappeared from the Indonesian language.
“Why do you ask me such things?” Vidia said (“irritatedly”). “To show that you know better? Of course you know better!”
“But if you are talking about intellectual clarity—” Miss Ferguson replied (“sputtered”).
“I don’t think you know what intellectual clarity is.”
Vidia rose from his chair, muttered something about the gathering’s being “senseless,” and decided to leave for the airport, where he handed back his fee for the afternoon (750 guilders) and flew home.
Which version was true?
“Does it matter when one is dealing with nonsense?” Vidia told me.
“What went wrong?”
I had had enjoyable experiences in Holland, where most people speak fluent English and are intellectually curious and widely traveled. They had not mythologized their colonial history, as the British and French sometimes had, making wog-bashing into a glorious mission to civilize. In the most provincial Dutch towns hundreds of people turned out to hear visiting novelists lecturing in English. But Vidia disagreed.
“The Dutch,” he said. “Potato eaters.”
The famous image in the Van Gogh painting said everything about the culture, he believed: ugly, moronic, famished peasants in a greasy kitchen, crouched over a basin of spuds and cramming them into their mouths.
I heard other stories that I did not bother to verify, because they had the ring of truth. There were many complaints about his behavior and even his writing. Vidia was used to complaints. He said, “I think unless one hears a little squeal of pain after one’s done some writing, one has not really done much.” Any story related to fastidiousness, and especially food, was unquestionably true.
