Sir Vidia's Shadow

by Paul Theroux

  Now I knew, as only a friend can, that for all his apparent strength, he could also be weak and unsure, and even unfair, with a coldly sarcastic streak. He looked at the populous continent of Africa and said, “Bow-and-arrow men!” or “Cuffy!” He glanced across the English Channel at Holland and said, “Potato eaters!” He frowned at the whole of the Middle East and grunted, “Mr. Woggy.”

  But he had also written subtly of Africa, and appreciatively of Europe, and as for the Middle East, he had written an entire book about Islam. So, while I tried to see him clearly, I kept from judging what I did not understand.

  At its most profound, friendship is not a hearty, matey celebration of linked arms and vigorous toasts; it is, rather, a solemn understanding that is hardly ever discussed. Friends rarely use the word “friendship” and seldom speak of how they are linked. There is a sort of trust that is offered by very few people; there are favors very few can grant: such instances are the test of friendship. With your ego switched off, you accept this person—his demands, his silences—and it is reciprocal. The relationship does not have the hideous complexity of a family’s sibling rivalry—that struggling like crabs in a basket. Nor does it have the heat of romantic love or the contractual connection of marriage. Yet a sympathy as deep as love springs from the moment you detect any disturbance or intimation of inadequacy in this other person. You take the rest on faith. It is not belief but acceptance, and even a kind of protection.

  Friendship arises less from an admiring love of strength than a sense of gentleness, a suspicion of weakness. It is compassionate intimacy, a powerful kindness, and a knowledge of imperfection. Conversely, the attraction of power seems to me purely sexual in origin, something to do with advancing and strengthening the symmetry in the species, and with animals looking for mates. In the natural world the weak or wounded are outrun and eaten by predators. There are plenty of robust courtships among animals, and the strong have flocking instincts and a pack mentality: animal species succeed because they reject the lame and the halt. Geeks and wimps in the animal world are left to die. Friendship is peculiarly human, and all the implications of friendship lead inevitably to the conclusion that friends make bad mates.

  Humans like each other for opposite reasons, because although we might be weak and ineffectual, we are still kind. We have that in common, and much else: our intelligence and sympathy and self-respect. Vidia had liked me long ago in Africa. Before I had dared to admit that I wanted to write a book, he had said, “You’re a writer.”

  How helpless I must have seemed. But he saw other strengths in me, something in my heart. He saw my soul in my face, my art in the lines of my palm, my ambition and moods in the slope and stroke of my handwriting.

  I had thought he was very strong. We became friends. I saw that he had many weaknesses—and he saw mine. It made us better friends. Most writers are cranks, so friendship among them is rare, and they end up loners. I was lucky.

  Friendship means favors. Our friendship had started with a favor, Vidia’s saying “Do you have a motorcar?” And soon after, he did me the favor of reading some things I had written. He was under no obligation; he hardly knew me; I was not his student. The favors were reciprocal. Often the same favor helped both of us. I read The Mimic Men in proof form for typos; that was my favor to him. He allowed me the first glimpse of The Mimic Men and I learned a great deal; that was his favor to me.

  As the years passed, he would ask me for simple mysterious favors, like dialing the telephone number. Now and then he asked me to read the typescript of a book.

  A writer asks a friend to read something in typescript—a smudged provisional form—in order to be encouraged. In this lonely and paranoia-inducing job we need friendly words. And unless a writer already thinks a piece of writing is very good, he does not hand it over for inspection and favorable comment. After that, with publication, there are many judgments, but by then the writer has moved on to something else. So the first look and the first praise is crucial, and often it is all that matters. It is a privileged peep into the heart of a writer at his most vulnerable. No writer would allow it unless praise was expected.

  “I would like you to look at my new book,” Vidia said. “It’s Major.”

  It was A Bend in the River, a bundle of typed pages. It was set in Africa. Even before I began reading it, I was apprehensive. Vidia was afraid of “bush people,” as he said, of “bow-and-arrow men.” Most of Africa seemed to represent his worst nightmare of brutishness and illiteracy. He was without much hope. “Africa has no future.”

  I opened the book. I read, “Nazruddin, who sold me the shop cheap, didn’t think I would have it easy when I took over.”

  The narrator of this perversely plain opening sentence, Salim, was a Muslim. That was something new. As a Brahmin, a half-believing Hindu, Vidia had never shown much interest in Muslims, and he had often been distinctly unsympathetic, blaming Islamic nationalists for the partition of India and for a repressive Pakistan. In Africa he had gravitated to the Hindu dukawallahs.

  Right away I felt something was wrong, not just with that opening sentence but with some details. Salim ate nothing but beans. Surely a Muslim would eat meat and would make sure the animal had been slaughtered in the proper way, so that it was halal, the Islamic equivalent of kosher. Vidia had unconsciously imposed his own bean eating on his narrator. I made a note in the margin: Eats only beans?

  The novel showed an intimate knowledge of Kisangani, at a bend in the Zaire River. In an earlier magazine piece about the Congo, “A New King for the Congo,” Vidia had written of how Stanleyville—Stanley Falls Station—had been the actual haunt of Mr. Kurtz, the heart of darkness, and “seventy years later at this bend in the river, something like Conrad’s fantasy came to pass.” He meant the tyrannical reign of Mobutu.

  I found myself reading the typescript quickly, finding little to comment upon. It was a good book. It contained the somnolence as well as the random violence of Africa, and Vidia’s nose anatomized the stinks and putrefaction, the atmosphere of imperial failure and ruin. It was also a love story. Salim has an affair with Yvette, the wife of an expatriate. Salim is also a very prickly fellow. One day he feels slighted by Yvette, so he kicks her. She cries. Moments later she gets into bed, inviting him to join her. He realizes that it is the end of their affair. “Her body had a softness, a pliability, and a great warmth.” One expects that he will make love to her. He holds her legs apart. What Salim did next made me swing the typescript away from my face: “I spat at her between the legs until I had no more spit.” What? Yvette objects—naturally—and she shouts and struggles. So Salim hits her again. “Bone struck against bone again; my hand ached at every blow.”

  I spat at her between the legs until I had no more spit.

  The difficulty I always had with Vidia’s scenes of sex or violence became almost overwhelming. Was it because I did not want to read such scenes for what they disclosed about my friend? A writer is never more unconsciously confessional than when he writes of sex. Vidia’s scenes were aggressive, strange, joyless. Women’s bodies were pathetic and frail; they smelled. He was forever finding women leaky and damp, in sadly wrinkled clothes, creases at the crotch, stains at the armpits. Even when they tried to correct the condition, they could not win. In In a Free State, Bobby finds a sachet in Linda’s room. “It was a vaginal deodorant with an appalling name. The slut, Bobby thought, the slut.”

  And in The Mimic Men there had been the whore in Spain whom Ralph Singh brought to his hotel room: “A figure from hell with a smiling child’s face.” She is very fat. The act of love is like a visit from a proctologist. “Nails, tongue, breath and lips were the instruments of this disembodied probing ... The probing went lower. I was turned over on my belly. The probing continued with the same instruments.”

  Disgust and desire were mingled with a distinct hostility towards women in Guerrillas. The “white liberal” woman, Jane, becomes aroused when she is viciously slapped, “so hard that her j
aw jarred ... and then she was slapped again.” She discovers “to her dismay and disgust that she was moist.” Odd that Vidia, of all people, found any veracity in the misogynistic cliché of slapping as foreplay and a beating as an aphrodisiac. Later, in a Black Power commune, Jane is raped by Jimmy Ahmed, who is the commune’s leader. Jimmy has a hair-trigger problem: “Just like that, without convulsions, his little strained strength leaked out of him, and it was all over.” But forget hanky-panky: Jane is more aroused by being slapped around. And Jimmy is actually homosexual: “He longed for the feel of Bryant’s warm firm flesh and his relieving mouth and tongue.” Nevertheless, Jane stays in the commune, only to be violently sodomized by Jimmy, who taunts her: “You didn’t bring your Vaseline.” In this act, his ejaculatio praecox is apparently cured: “He drove deeper and deeper until he was almost sitting upright on her.” Very soon after, at Jimmy’s command, Jane is hacked to death with machetes.

  In his essay on Evita Peron, Vidia mentions Evita’s full red lips, hinting at “her reputed skill in fellatio.” He describes the machismo of Argentine males and their single-mindedness on the subject of sodomy. “The macho’s conquest of a woman is complete only when he has buggered her ... La tuve en el culo, I’ve had her in the arse ... a kind of sexual black mass.” Elsewhere in his writing he would describe a man with a complexion “like risen dough” and imply, and sometimes assert, it to be the clear indication that the man was an ardent masturbator, much as Dickens had implied the same nocturnal autoeroticism by giving Uriah Heep circles around his eyes. If it is fair to regard the passions and fantasies of a writer’s characters as those of the writer himself—and why not?—then I found Vidia’s observations unsettling.

  “In the old days I would have grown dizzy with excitement here,” Vidia wrote recently in Beyond Belief, describing the crowds of Pakistani whores in the red-light district of Lahore. “Up to my mid-thirties I had been attracted to prostitutes and sought them out.” If that was true, how did it square with his looking me in the eye in Kampala, when he was thirty-four, and saying, “I have given up sex"? It did not square at all, of course, and I now believed the later statement, of his having been a whore-hopper, which was why I was convinced that only with the passage of time did one know the truth.

  But I had A Bend in the River in my hand. The spitting scene stayed in my mind, as well as that unpromising first sentence. The rest I liked. We met for tea. I brought the typescript.

  “What do you think, Paul?”

  “You’re right. It’s Major.”

  “No suggestions?”

  “The first sentence is wonderful,” I said. “But there is an even better one in the sixth paragraph.”

  “Show me.”

  It was in the middle of the paragraph. It ran, “The world is what it is; men who are nothing, who allow themselves to become nothing, have no place in it.”

  It was certainly a mouthful for a semi-educated Indian shopkeeper in the Congolese bush, yet it seemed to me the most effective way of starting the novel.

  Vidia circled it, made a balloon for it, and indicated where it should be inserted, at the top of the first paragraph.

  “You’re right, Paul,” he said. “I’m sure that’s better. It will sell more copies this way.”

  “One other thing. Salim eats an awful lot of beans. He never eats meat.”

  “Patsy said something about that.”

  “Give him some meat, I think.”

  A Bend in the River was shortlisted for the Booker Prize that year. I was one of the Booker judges. I reread the book, one of many submissions for the important prize, and saw that Vidia had transposed the sentence, as I had suggested. He had also made Salim a credible carnivore. But when it came to the decision, I voted against it. Mine was the deciding vote. I preferred Patrick White’s novel, The Twyborn Affair.

  “Patrick White? Over my dead body,” one of the panelists said.

  Another said to me, “I thought Naipaul was your friend.”

  “So what? I didn’t like the spitting. I wasn’t convinced by the ending—all that to-ing and fro-ing, the visit to London.”

  In the end, we compromised on Offshore, by Penelope Fitzgerald, and most people jeered at our choice. They said Naipaul should have won. But Vidia had already won the Booker Prize with In a Free State. It was thought that because I was a judge, Vidia would be a shoo-in. Not at all.

  Though Vidia maintained that writing was fair and that books always made their own way, he had been impressed by the effectiveness of Shiva’s agent. I had introduced Shiva to this agent, who was also my agent. Vidia asked for an introduction and very soon afterwards became a client. Vidia’s advances and the terms of his contracts were greatly improved. He might soon have his million.

  “I am not happy with my publisher,” Vidia said on another occasion.

  I introduced him to my publisher.

  “What can I do to tempt him?” my publisher said.

  “Give him a million pounds.”

  “Out of the question.”

  “Then get a table at a fabulous restaurant for dinner. Not lunch. ‘Dinner is grander.’ Then let Vidia order the wine. It’s not a guarantee of success, but at least he won’t get up in the middle and stalk away.”

  “Do you think he would have the temerity to do that?”

  “It has happened before.”

  I was invited to the dinner. My publisher was nervous. Vidia ordered a white Burgundy and a prawn entrée. But the prawns were bad. Vidia said he had to leave. I drove him back to Kensington just in time for him to be nauseated in the privacy of his own home. He found another publisher. It wasn’t the food, however, it was the money—he was still aiming at a million.

  One of the chores of book publication is the writing of jacket copy. This copy is also recycled in the publisher’s catalogue. When he received the proposed jacket copy for A Turn in the South, Vidia pronounced it unsuitable. He did not rage. He wrote a long, patient letter to his publisher, Viking, explaining his intentions. He closed the letter: “A writer sets out to do a particular thing. He should do that thing, and should feel that he has done it. But every real book catches fire, goes beyond a writer’s intention. So it happens that readers and critics find other meanings in a real book. I was hoping that someone at Viking might have said something interesting in the blurb.”

  But no one had, and the agent called me, saying, “Paul, Vidia asked me to ring you. We need a favor.”

  This was in the month of August. I had just ended a book tour for Riding the Iron Rooster, my book about China. I was working on a novel, My Secret History. I listened with a sinking heart.

  “Would you, as a favor, write the jacket blurb for A Turn in the South?”

  It meant putting my novel aside to perform the most menial and thankless work in publishing. It meant closely reading Vidia’s entire book, then writing the blurb—in effect a short, insightful, and persuasive rave—and sending it to the publisher, who was probably on vacation. It was a monumental intrusion into my writing life, something no writer—and certainly not Vidia—would consider for an instant.

  “I’ll do it,” I said.

  The agent laughed at my pliability. He was grateful, of course, and also surprised. But Vidia felt he was in a spot, and I remembered his saying years before, “That’s what friends are for.”

  A bound proof was sent to me. I read it with interest and I liked it, the apparent simplicity of the journey in the American South: Vidia’s appreciation, something resembling humility in his approach, with no bombast and a genuine curiosity. He defined the sort of travel book he was writing and in so doing made helpful distinctions between other sorts. It was not possible to write a conventional travel book about the United States—a book in which, as Vidia explained, the traveler said, “This is me here. This is me getting off the old native bus and being led by strange boys, making improper proposals, to some squalid lodging. This is me having a drink in a bar with some local characters. This is me getti
ng lost later that night.”

  That kind of book, very common, depicted the traveler “defining himself against a foreign background.” He added that “depending on who he is, the book can be attractive,” but it worked only if the traveler was “alien or outlandish in some way.” Yet this method seldom worked for the traveler in the United States. “The place is not and cannot be alien in the simple way an African country is alien. It is too well known, too photographed, too written about; and, being more organized and less informal, it is not so open to casual inspection.”

  This was to me an inspired lesson in the varieties of travel writing. Vidia also seemed, once again, to be speaking directly to me, a traveler on native buses, a buyer of drinks for local characters, making a meal of my losing my way. Twenty-three years on, I was still learning from him.

  So I began my blurb, “A Turn in the South is a completely fresh look at an area and a situation which have become caricaturish for some and incomprehensible for others.”

  Knowing that Vidia would be scrutinizing every word, I wrote carefully, self-consciously, with the sort of precision and invention Vidia expected, struggling to make it right: a forty-eight-year-old man revisiting the humility and strain of his apprenticeship. The three hundred words took me two days. I sent the piece, via the agent, to Vidia, like a student submitting a crucial essay to his professor. It was both a test of friendship and a test of skill.

  The reply came back from the agent, a scribble: V. very grateful.

  A more unusual favor was asked of me by Vidia when he was writing The Enigma of Arrival. The germ of the book was old. In 1966 Vidia had shown me some pages of a story he intended to return to again. “I warm up this way,” he said. To get into a writing mood, he copied and recopied the pages, describing a classical scene pictured in a painting by De Chirico. Alter two decades he was using those same pages as part of a novel.