Sir Vidia's Shadow

by Paul Theroux

  He was at a dinner party in New York City. He sipped his wine. It was satisfactory—he had insisted on choosing the wine. The dishes were passed by the waiter, people helping themselves. The main course was meat, but because Vidia was a guest, extra dishes of vegetables were also served. Vidia waved them away. He spent the entire meal sipping wine and nibbling a piece of bread.

  “You haven’t eaten anything, Mr. Naipaul,” the woman next to him said. She was Dame Drue Heinz, patroness of the arts and part of the Heinz food fortune.

  “Yes, I’m a vegetarian,” Vidia said.

  “There are vegetables in that bowl,” she indicated.

  Vidia explained that he had watched all the vegetables being served and had seen someone—he did not say whom—using a serving implement that had come into contact with the meat dish.

  “Those vegetables are tainted.”

  At another dinner party, in London, something similar happened. The dishes were passed, Vidia took nothing for himself. He sipped wine, he nibbled bread. The hostess was surprised by Vidia’s indifference, for knowing that he was a vegetarian she had made an effort to provide extra vegetables. She watched Vidia waving the steaming dishes aside.

  The host, tipped off by his wife, approached Vidia quietly after the meal.

  “Was there anything wrong with the food?”

  Vidia said, “I didn’t see anything for me.”

  “There were vegetables,” the host said.

  “Those were not my vegetables,” Vidia said. “Those were everyone’s vegetables.”

  Only a non-Hindu would find this behavior strange. One day in India I was approached by a beggar. I was seated under a peepul tree, eating a coconut that had just been cracked open for me by a street vendor. The beggar asked me for some rupees. He was starving, he said, and he looked it: ragged dhoti, hollow eyes, clawlike hands.

  “You are hungry?”

  “Yes, sahib.”

  “Have the rest of this coconut.”

  He refused. He was a high-caste beggar. I was a foreigner, an Untouchable. He could not eat coconut that had been tainted by my fingers. He wanted his own coconut. If he had been dying of thirst, he would not have drunk out of a container that had touched my lips. He was a Brahmin.

  Naipaul is a Brahmin. He is also proud of what he has achieved. On another occasion, he was guest of honor at a dinner in London to which a large number of people had been invited. Before the dinner, a woman came up to him and said, “You wrote a dishonest book about London—Mr. Stone. Nothing in that book is true. You totally misrepresented the way we live.”

  Vidia did not reply. Instead, he immediately left the party, before all the guests had arrived, before any were seated or the meal was served.

  “What about the hostess? Didn’t you say anything to her?” I asked, because Vidia himself had told me this story.

  Vidia shook his head. “Let that foolish woman who insulted me explain why I wasn’t there.”

  At about the same time, he told an interviewer, “I can’t be interested in people who don’t like what I write, because if you don’t like what I write you’re disliking me.” It was after such an encounter that he said, “England is a country of second-rate people—bum politicians, scruffy writers, and crooked aristocrats.”

  To people who found him demanding, insisting on high fees to speak or read, first-class airfares, five-star hotels, chauffeurs, minders, secretaries, and vintage wines, Vidia gave his usual reply: Treat me as you would a world-class brain surgeon or astrophysicist.

  His sweeping generalizations and cutting remarks were widely quoted. What about Africa? one interviewer asked him. What was the future for Africa?

  “Africa has no future,” he said.

  Indians were treated no more gently by him. They did not read, he said. “If they read at all, they read for magic. They read holy books, they read sacred hymns—books of wisdom, books that will do them good.” He told me that it was very bad that Indian women kept their hair so long: “It encourages rape.” He became noted for pointing out that the red-dot caste mark that Indians wear on their forehead means “my head is empty.”

  Asked about his book sales on his native island of Trinidad, he said, “My books aren’t read in Trinidad now. Drumbeating is a higher activity, a more satisfying activity.” Once he had written, “I happen to like Spanish dancing,” but later in an interview he said he deplored dancing. “Dance? I’ve never danced. I’d be ashamed of it. It is something out of the jungle. It’s undignified. I dislike all those lower-class cultural manifestations.”

  He was invited to San Francisco to read at two performances. He demanded, and received, his astrophysicist’s fee. Both performances were sold out in advance. Vidia read. But the audience was disappointed that he took no questions afterwards. When his host tried to ask him why he would not relent, he pretended he had not heard the question and showed her his tweed jacket, saying, “It’s rather fine, don’t you think? Made in South Africa.”

  But he told me the reason. “I was invited to read from my work, not to answer asinine questions.”

  He was much more concerned by the movie shown on his incoming flight. He had hated it. He mentioned its name.

  “Do you know that film, Paul?”

  I said I didn’t.

  “The people responsible for making that film should be punished. They should be beaten. Whipped! No one should be allowed to make films like that. It was grotesque. Beat them!”

  Another flight, this one to Trinidad, also enraged him. After takeoff, he stood in the aisle to slip off his sweater. A flight attendant hurried towards him.

  “Please don’t take your shirt off,” she said.

  “You see?” he told me. “Here is this simple West Indian fellow. He is planning to fly to Trinidad with his shirt off—bare-chested—as they do on his island.”

  “What did you do?”

  “I’m afraid I raised my voice. I screamed at them. I said they were all cunts. Excuse me. I was very angry.”

  He screamed in India, too, when he was told to remove his shoes before entering various temples, including the ancient Lord Jagannath Temple in Puri. Vidia pointed out that the temple floor was far dirtier and more disgusting than his shoes and that the idea of defiling such a filthy, unswept place was ridiculous. This story was repeated in The Times of London, which indicated that there had been “an altercation.”

  In Portland, Oregon, he was being driven to the airport the day after a reading, which had been arranged by his American publisher. His driver, a local woman, making small talk on the long drive, asked him his feelings about Portland, and, as he had just visited Seattle, she chitchatted about their differences.

  “Seattle is an ocean city,” she said. “Portland is definitely an inland place.”

  “How would you characterize Portland?” Vidia asked.

  “This is a small town,” she said.

  Vidia suddenly became furious and turned on the woman, shouting, “I don’t go to small towns! I never go to small towns!”

  He raged on as the nervous woman drove. It was as though he had been tricked into visiting Portland, conned into believing it was a real city—which of course it is, substantial and prosperous and book-loving, Seattle’s younger sister.

  Seeing that her driving had been seriously impaired by Vidia’s outburst, the woman gripped the wheel and wondered what to say.

  “Thank you for doing this, then,” she said at last. “I really didn’t expect you to come here. I don’t expect you’ll be doing it again.”

  “By thanking me, you show me how stupid you are,” Vidia said.

  I must not cry, the woman thought, negotiating the rush-hour freeway traffic and feeling that tears were filling her eyes. She had risen early, given her husband breakfast, seen her children off to school, and hurried in the darkness to meet Vidia at his hotel, pay his hotel bill, and give him his fee and his lift to the airport. Now, so as not to rile Vidia further, she politely denied that she
was stupid, and she kept driving.

  Vidia said, “You are stupid, because if you knew anything about me, you would not have invited me to your small town.”

  “But you were sent here,” the woman said. “You have to understand that it was your publicist who arranged this. She indicated that you wanted to come.”

  “They don’t know me!” Vidia howled. “They don’t know me!”

  He was still ranting as the woman drove up the ramp to the airport terminal.

  “They are stupid too. How dare they send me here!”

  “That’s their job, to put you in front of audiences,” the woman said, and brought her car to the curb. She was dazed. She told me later, “It felt like being hit by a two-by-four.” She got out, took Vidia’s bag from the back seat, and placed it on the sidewalk.

  Vidia said, “Please bring my bag in,” and turned away sharply.

  Inside the terminal, the woman set the bag down on the scale at the check-in counter.

  Just as Vidia was about to speak, the woman winced. She thought he was going to scream again. But he said, “You have lovely fingers. So thin.”

  Without a word, the woman left him. She went to her car and found a parking ticket on her windshield for $72. She drove home sobbing.

  The woman was my friend. In telling me the story, she was also saying, Why did your friend Naipaul do this to me? I winced at these stories. I had no answer.

  Such stories that people volunteered, saying “You must hear this,” Vidia always said were true. It was sometimes hard for me to imagine his fury or his cold cruelty, because we had never quarreled, nor had I ever witnessed a scene as awful as those I heard described.

  There was a story I never asked Vidia to verify—didn’t dare ask, because I wanted it to be true. If it was not true, it ought to have been.

  Ved Mehta is a distinguished Indian writer. Vidia knew of him. Speaking of The New Yorker once, how under the editorship of William Shawn he could not interest the magazine in his writing, Vidia said, “Of course, they already have a tame Indian.”

  Ved Mehta is also famously blind. A certain New Yorker doubted his blindness. Seeing Mehta at a New York party, speaking to a group of attentive people, holding court, the man decided to test it. He had always been skeptical that Mehta was totally blind, since in his writing he minutely described people’s faces and wrote about the nuances of color and texture with elaborate subtlety, making precise distinctions.

  The man crept over to where Mehta was sitting, and as the writer continued to speak, the doubting man began making faces at him. He leaned over and waved his hands at Ved Mehta’s eyes. He thumbed his nose at Ved Mehta. He wagged his fingers in Ved Mehta’s face.

  Still, Mehta went on speaking, calmly and in perfectly enunciated sentences, never faltering in his expansive monologue.

  The man made a last attempt: he put his own face a foot away and stuck his tongue out. But Mehta spoke without pause, as if the man did not exist.

  Realizing how wrong he had been, the man felt uncomfortable and wanted to go home. Leaving the party, he said to the hostess, “I had always thought Ved Mehta was faking his blindness, or at least exaggerating. I am now convinced that Ved Mehta is blind.”

  “That’s not Ved Mehta,” the hostess said. “It’s V.S. Naipaul.”

  15

  “It’s Major”

  AT SOME POINT in these late middle years, when Vidia was working on a book, hiding and making himself ill from hunching over it as his handwriting grew tinier with concentration and anxiety, he would interrupt himself in describing what he was writing and say, “It’s Major.” His pompous certainty gave the word a capital letter.

  In the past he had said, “It’s Important,” or “It’s a Big Book,” and raised his eyes and seemed to see it hovering in the air, like the prophet Joseph Smith contemplating the gold plates of Mormonism glittering in the hands of the angel Moroni. Several times, Vidia had applied this praise to me. The Mosquito Coast was a Big Book. My Africa books were Big Books. They might even have been Important Books. But they weren’t Major. A Bend in the River was Major. Being Vidia, he repeated it: “It’s Major. It’s Major.”

  Was he satirizing himself? Not so far as I knew. He never spoke about his work except in tones of the utmost solemnity. No one I had ever met was so devoted to the act of writing. That was his lesson. His dedication and belief had attracted and inspired me, so I had followed him, uttering my own humble equivalent of “Good Master, what good thing shall I do, that I may have eternal life?” Vidia was almost mystical in his belief in writing, for literary creation was a form of prayer, a disturbing prayer. He was not the writer as equal, the reader’s buddy, but rather the writer as priestly figure. Nor did he deviate from his vows: if he said something was Major, he meant it.

  Much of Vidia’s writing is like a literary shadowgraph, full of the starkly textured silhouettes of keenly observed shadows, as though the penumbra for Vidia has more meaning than the person or thing that shapes it. Miguel Street, the first book he wrote (though not the first published), ends with a dramatic departure, as the narrator says, “I left them all and walked briskly towards the aeroplane, not looking back, only looking at my shadow before me, a dancing dwarf on the tarmac.”

  There is also adumbration in the last sentence of In a Free State: “Seventeen months later these men, or men like them, were to know total defeat in the desert; and news photographs taken from helicopters flying down low were to show them lost, trying to walk back home, casting long shadows on the sand.”

  Perhaps because of its shadowy tide, there are many shadows in An Area of Darkness, but the best image occurs in Amritsar: “Each Sikh was attached to a brisk black shadow.” And in his latest, Beyond Belief, a book that is almost devoid of landscape and weather and color, he writes particularly of shadows, how in Iran “on sunny days light and cloud shadows constantly modeled and remodeled the ridges and the dips of the bare, beige-colored mountains.” In that same book, trees are judged less by their foliage than by their shadows, as with the trees he describes on the outskirts of Peshawar, Pakistan: “a spindly hybrid poplar that cast little shadow.” And the racecourse in Kuala Lumpur, “green and sun-struck, with still, black shadows.” And the wall in Tehran that “cast a broad diagonal of shadow tapering up to the top and there disappearing.” Even people can be shadows, like the servants in Pakistan, “the thin and dingy shadow people of every Pakistani household.”

  It is as if, for Vidia, shadows have substance.

  He did not, of course, use language casually. He was particular in his choice of words, which made him a demanding listener, too. Any word he used was intended, and considered; he sought simplicity, and one of his gifts was finding ambiguity and subtle meaning using primary colors. It was unusual for him to use a word such as “deliquesce,” though he did once, in An Area of Darkness; “nigrescent” he used only in The Mystic Masseur. He would say “cushion-shaped” rather than “pulvinate,” and “strong as leather” instead of “coriaceous,” and would always choose “delay” over “cunctation.” Anything that smacked of show, or style, or display, or falsity, anything that was used purely for effect, he disdained. Writing must never call attention to itself. “I just wish my prose to be very transparent. I don’t want the reader to stumble over me.” He was such a stickler for the truth, and so determined to root out any pretense in his work, that a style evolved made of favorite words, a way of expressing an idea and the ideas themselves, a tone of voice, recognizable sentence structures. His style came naturally and was the more distinct because it was a rejection of style. No one wrote like him.

  The lightness of his early books was gone. Much of the humor was gone. His writing was denser, plainer, devoid of ornamentation. His gift for summing up a landscape was as strong as ever, but even more abbreviated, the effects concentrated in just a few words, a flash of light, an intrusion of weather, the texture of stone or wood or fading light sharply rendered. His writing acquired a wintry
stoicism, full of fine shadings of a single color, powerful for its being monochromatic; a lushness was lost, but he had never trusted lushness. And now, in travel, he let people speak for themselves—sometimes for a dozen pages of monologue, in his attempt to devise a new sort of travel book, which was a chorus of people talking about their lives, a chain of voices, with hardly any intervention on his part.

  There was always a lesson for me. I was not so sure that native monologues were the best way to write about a distant country. Vidia always said, “Make the reader see.” All that talking, like those ten-page confessional speeches in a Russian novel, blurred my vision. His more recent books were shaped like Studs Terkel’s tape-recorded narratives, but of a heartless and selective sort—tendentious, a word that Vidia hardly ever used.

  He did not parody himself, but he had kept to his habit of thinking out loud. Saying “It’s Major” was his way of testing the possibility on me.

  I took it that way. He was trying it out, and also, in his heart, he believed it to be true.

  Another day he said, “Can you meet me in Kensington?”

  I said yes, and met Vidia at the appointed place, a crimson telephone booth on a side street.

  “Please make a phone call for me,” he said.

  Following his instructions, I dialed the number, made the call, and asked for a certain woman; I had made no comment when Vidia told me the woman’s name was Margaret. She was summoned to the phone by the man who had answered me in a chilly voice, as though he suspected the ruse. I told Margaret that Vidia would call at a particular time.

  “It’s much too boring to explain,” Vidia said after I hung up.

  He did not have to explain. It was no mystery to me that such a wonderful writer could speak of his present work as Major, and be a guest at Garden Party at Buckingham Palace (The Lord Chamberlain is commanded by Her Majesty to invite...), and the next moment would implore me like a child to dial a telephone number, because—surely?—he feared his own undisguisable voice might provoke an unwelcome reaction. He didn’t want to be told off. He was human.