Sir Vidia's Shadow

by Paul Theroux

  I met him for tea in his tiny flat in Queen’s Gate Terrace.

  “I was assaulted in Gloucester Road,” he said. “A Negro approached me. He made as if to walk by and then hit me hard on the side of the head—whack!”

  “That’s terrible, Vidia.”

  “It was a shock.”

  But he was calm. Beside him was a large file folder containing a four-inch stack of paper, undoubtedly a typescript.

  “I am at a very delicate point in my book,” Vidia said. He glanced at the file folder.

  “Is that it?”

  He nodded gravely. “It’s Major.”

  He did not say that it was a continuation of his old story; he said nothing about it other than that it was Major. He only mentioned that he had not finished it.

  “I may never finish it.”

  What a funny thing to say, I thought. I said, “But you have to.”

  “What if my brain is damaged?”

  “Your brain is fine, Vidia.”

  “What if someone else assaults me? One of these idlers one sees on the Gloucester Road. He might do serious damage. I would then be incapable of finishing the book. How could I, with a damaged brain?”

  “In that case, I see, you’d be mentally unfit. But that’s just speculation.”

  “It is a real possibility! I tell you, I was attacked by a Negro!”

  “Maybe you should stay in Wiltshire.”

  “I shall. But one comes up for the odd errand. One’s bank manager. One’s publishers. One’s haircut,” he said. “Paul, I want you to read this typescript. Read it closely.”

  “Of course. I’d be happy to.”

  “And if my brain is damaged and I cannot continue, I want you to finish writing the book.”

  I leaned back to give myself perspective and to see whether he was smiling. But no, he was stern and certain, and he was brisk in his certainty, like a warrior making a will.

  “You’ll notice there are many repetitions. Those are intentional. Keep the repetitions. And the rhythm, the way the sentences flow—keep that. You’ll see how the narrative builds. Keep building, let it flow.”

  From the way he spoke, I had already, it seemed, been commissioned to finish writing The Enigma of Arrival, and he was brain damaged, sitting by while I scribbled, the ultimate test of the Sorcerer’s Apprentice, his snarelike shadow falling over me.

  “What do you think, Paul?”

  “It would be an honor, of course. And a challenge. A bit like Ford Madox Ford and Conrad collaborating on a novel, or Stevenson and his stepson Lloyd writing something together.”

  “No, no. This is Major.”

  I went home with the heavy typescript. I read it—three quarters of the book—and at the end my confidence was gone. There was no way I could finish the book or comment on it. I didn’t even like it. It seemed a studied monotony—repetitive, as he had said; indistinct, allusive, but fogbound, enigmatic in every way, a ponderous agglomeration of the dullest rural incidents. I had never read anything like it. It might be a masterpiece like Finnegans Wake, the sort of book people studied but could not read consecutively, an ambitious failure, something for the English Department to explicate and defend.

  The Bungalow and Wilsford were in it, and so was a glimpse of Stephen Tennant—his plump pink thigh, his straw hat. Not very funny, though. The nutter seemed to represent the decline of Englishness rather than (as I thought) the apogee of the landlord as drag queen. Julian Jebb was in the book. He was unmistakable, his “little old woman’s face.” He was called Alan. I knew him to be an accomplished television producer. Vidia depicted him as a drunken flatterer, rather pathetic and hollow. He was “theatrical.” Jebb’s suicide was in it, in the middle of a dismissive paragraph, with less compassion than if Jebb had passed a kidney stone. “And then one day I heard—some days after the event—that he had taken some pills one night after a bout of hard drinking and died. It was a theatrical kind of death.”

  But what threw me was this: “One autumn afternoon I had a slight choking fit as I walked past Jack’s old cottage and the derelict farmyard. The fit passed by the time I had got around the corner, cleared the farmyard, and left behind the old metal and tangled wire and timber junk below the beeches. (Not the birches near the firepit; they were on the other side of the way. These beeches were at the edge of the farmyard, big trees now in their prime, their lowest branches very low, providing a wonderful rich, enclosing shade in the summer that made me think of George Borrow in The Romany Rye and Lavengro.) Past the beeches and the farm, in the familiar solitude of the grassy way, I began to breathe easily again...”

  It was at this point that I had a choking fit of my own. I could never enter into this narrative. I did not understand it. My bafflement made me anxious. What was this book about? The writing was so deliberately plain, so humorless, so obstinate in denying itself pleasure that even when it was being particular it was indistinct, as in the choking-fit passage, with the beeches and the birches. But I had only part of the novel. When Vidia finished it I would understand, I was sure. There was no way on earth that I could write a word of this.

  “You must finish this yourself,” I said when I saw Vidia again. “It’s beyond me.”

  “What if my brain is damaged?”

  “It won’t be damaged in Wiltshire by anyone. Just stay there and work. Please, Vidia, I can’t do this.”

  “You can see that it’s Major.”

  “Absolutely.”

  He knew I admired V.S. Pritchett. He told me the proof that Pritchett was second-rate was that he was still writing short stories as he approached the age of ninety and still found writing enjoyable: “It’s frightfully easy for him!” Vidia announced in an interview, “I have done an immense amount of work,” and speaking of the quality of his writing, he said, “It’s a great achievement we’re talking about.”

  Pritchett himself had said—truly, I think—that all writers were at heart fanatical.

  The Enigma of Arrival was published and was found by many reviewers to be enigmatic. Vidia said he paid no attention to reviewers. One English reviewer, known for his oldfangledness and his pipe-stuffing rusticity, hailed the novel as a masterpiece. Derek Walcott disagreed. He did not like it at all. This was a change. Vidia had quoted Derek Walcott to me with approval many times. Walcott had dedicated an early poem, “Laventille,” to Vidia—it was about a visit to a poor district in rural Trinidad. I had understood the two writers to be friends, and I had admired Walcott’s poetry as much as I admired Vidia’s prose.

  Walcott attacked Vidia in his review. “The myth of Naipaul as a phenomenon, as a singular, contradictory genius ... has long been a farce. It is a myth he chooses to encourage—though he alone knows why ... There is something alarmingly venal in all this dislocation and despair. Besides, it is not true. There is instead another truth. Naipaul’s prejudice.”

  Walcott went on to say that Vidia’s frankness was nothing more than bigotry. “If Naipaul’s attitude towards Negroes, with its nasty little sneers ... was turned on Jews, for example, how many people would praise him for his frankness?” Privately, he called himself V.S. Nightfall.

  Being black himself, Walcott had some authority in this matter, but Vidia was also a man of color. Speaking strictly of tinctures, Vidia was a double espresso to Derek’s café au lait, which was why from time to time Vidia had been discriminated against in England for showing this face. The charge of racism was serious, but it was odd, too, given Vidia’s race. And Walcott was attacking someone who admired him: one of the few living writers whom Vidia praised. Though he had been born on St. Lucia, in the Windward Islands, Walcott had become a permanent resident (and prominent writer) of Trinidad in 1958, when he was still in his twenties. He was a near contemporary of Vidia’s, a fellow islander, and in many respects a brother writer. Two brown men from the same dot on the map.

  I did not mention the review to Vidia. It was my favor to him.

  A few years later, Derek Walcott won th
e Nobel Prize in literature. Because the prize is essentially political (a Pole this year, a South American next year, a Trinidadian the year after), it meant that Vidia had missed his chance. He would probably never get it. Two Trinidadian Nobel laureates? It was as unlikely as two Albanians.

  Vidia might have muttered, “There they go, pissing on literature,” but I doubted it. Derek Walcott was someone he read and remembered.

  So I did not mention the Nobel Prize ever again. Another favor.

  PART FOUR

  REVERSALS

  16

  Poetry of Departures

  SUDDENLY Vidia was honored—at fifty-eight a knight, and Pat a lady by association. Such gongs in England were mostly granted to older people—Angus Wilson at seventy, V.S. Pritchett and Stephen Spender at eighty, P. G. Wodehouse at ninety—and to nearly everyone else they never came at all. It was especially rare to find a writer’s name on the Honours List, because writers were suspect, had nothing to give to the politicians who helped draw up the list, had no allies in the government, were notorious carpers and boat-rockers. Actors were a better bet and much more popular. As Vidia had once said, titles were usually awarded to the more devious of the Queen’s subjects. Even so, Vidia got the lowest order of knighthood, the Knight Batchelor, rather than the grander Knight of the Thistle (KT) or, the grandest of all, Knight Commander of the Order of St. Michael and St. George (KCMG, which to insiders stood for “the King Calls Me God”).

  It might have come about, as happens in Britain, because Vidia knew a lord or two. One was the plain Hugh Thomas I had met at Vidia’s house in Stockwell thirty years before; he had been elevated to the Baron Thomas of Swynnerton, and as his peerage showed, he was thick with Thatcher. One of the pleasures of my seventeen years as an alien bystander in Britain was seeing how the ordinary names of familiar people were festooned by titles and sometimes transformed by baronetcies and lordships. Simple Smith or Jones in his brown suit, his knees shiny from his being arse-creeper to the party in power, now bore a title befitting a twelfth-century crusader and became the unapproachable Lord Futtock of Shallow Bowels, waving a banner with a strange device. “You’re just envious,” English people whinnied at me when I shared these skeptical sentiments, and of course I was envious, for while the honorees said it made no difference, it manifestly did. Among other things, a tide assured the bearer an excellent table in a restaurant.

  When she knighted Vidia at Buckingham Palace (for reasons he did not explain, Vidia left Pat at home), the Queen bobbled her notes and said vaguely, “Naipaul. You’re in books.”

  Dissolve in a flashback to a food-splashed table at the Connaught and the remains of lunch, the last of the wine, bread crusts, sticky spoons, the white bill primly folded in half on a white saucer, Vidia still chewing and saying, A title is nothing ... I have the idea that they should sell titles at the post office ... You go in, buy some stamps, and paste them into a little book ... Three books of stamps would get you an MBE. Six for an OBE. A dozen books of stamps would be worth a knighthood.

  “Yes, Your Majesty,” Vidia said, bowing deeply. But Vidia’s cut-price knighthood, by his own calculation, was perhaps worth only eight books of stamps.

  The conglobated Sanskritic syllables that made up his almost unpronounceable name did not easily attach to the archaic Anglo-Saxon handle of a knighthood. Nevertheless, he was now Sir Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul. The only precedents of his sort were Indian cricketers and politicians and the oiliest Indian tycoons. It was impossible to know how he would style himself, but after some experimentation he settled on Sir Vidia. Pat was the Lady Naipaul. And it can’t have escaped her sense of the absurd to reflect on how one day she was peeling the sprouts and a little tearful over the stale sponge cake she had bought at Tesco, and the next day, with her name change, she sounded like the heroine of an Arthurian legend.

  I was transformed too, or at least I understood the role I had played from my earliest days with Vidia, for in a sense he had always been a knight. I saw that I had always been his squire—driver, sidekick, spear carrier, flunky, gofer; diligent, tactful, helpful—delicately finessing the occasional intervention. Paul, I want you to deal with this. It was my luck. I had never contradicted him; we had never quarreled. Because he was not the perfect knight, I had to be the perfect squire, Sir Vidia’s shadow.

  It seemed to me he knew that. When he bought his first computer and got some lessons in using it, he wrote to me, just rambling, to test the printer. He was delighted that he had managed to make it work, another technological triumph for the man who had begun his writing life with a dunk-and-scratch quill pen in a little school in Trinidad.

  On the bottom of the crisply printed page of the letter, he wrote in black ink—unbidden, voluntarily, what was he thinking?—Your work is such an example and an encouragement to me.

  Hadn’t I many times said or suggested those same words to him? His repeating them back to me was a gift, particularly now, at the moment of his greatest eminence.

  “I’d like to visit you,” I said to him on the phone.

  I had news. Again I put my bike on the train and rode second class to Salisbury. I had been feeling ill that day, the sense of a wasting disease that depression seems to bring on, a spiritless and leaden feeling that was deepened by the sight of bare branches and wet fields, coots and moorhens toiling frantically across muddy ponds. Hopelessness had robbed me of my strength, and cycling uphill from Salisbury to Salterton just made me feel worse.

  “Tell me, tell me, tell me,” Vidia said at the gate of his house. There were no obvious signs of knightliness in his demeanor. “What’s wrong?”

  He had the strongest intuition of anyone I had ever known. He was sometimes wrong, but more often he had an unnerving ability to detect my moods, particularly my low spirits. This may have been because they so closely reflected his own moods and matched his own low spirits, his intuition an example of a known echo, perhaps often the case when a person is prescient—prescience being the ringing of a familiar bell. It helped that he was always so solitary. In one of the few works Vidia ever recommended to me, Death in Venice, Thomas Mann had written, “Solitude gives birth to the original in us, to beauty unfamiliar and perilous—to poetry. But also, it gives birth to the opposite; to the perverse, the illicit, the absurd.” Vidia’s solitude had similarly driven him in both directions.

  I parked my bike. I said, “My wife and I are splitting up.”

  “God.”

  Pat appeared, smiling wanly at the kitchen door. She looked so ill that I could say nothing more about myself. She was like an apparition, ghostly white—white hair, white skin, no color in her lips, and her whiteness was a kind of translucence almost, the papery skin traced with spidery veins like lines in parchment. She was breathless, stoop-shouldered, a tottering insomniac, and she looked at me with colorless eyes. I kissed her and, holding her, I could feel her bones, all her frailty in my hands. The Lady Naipaul.

  “How are you, Paul?”

  “I’m fine.”

  I had just biked fifteen miles and had my health, so what was I complaining about?

  In the wine cellar, choosing a bottle while Pat made lunch, Vidia and I talked about my situation. My wife and I had agreed to separate. I would be leaving England.

  I said, “I always thought I would stay ten years. Look, it’s almost eighteen now that I’ve been here.”

  “Good things have happened to you,” he said. His back was turned. He was looking at the wine bottles in the racks. “Haven’t you felt that people have been kind?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  People had been kind, yet I had never felt like anything but an alien bystander in their midst. I could not help thinking of all the English people I knew in the States who, in much less than eighteen years, had been accepted and become established. They were bureaucrats, politicians, businessmen, educators, local writers: the bossy Scotsman in his employment agency, the Ulsterman flush with real estate, the pushy Liverpudlian on
the planning board, denying me permission to subdivide some land in Massachusetts, where I was born and he wasn’t. I saw them on television, or met them. I knew the accents, they couldn’t fool me—London, Birmingham, the West Country, Cornwall, Wales, the North. They were important in America and part of the system and moaned or boasted like everyone else. When had I ever been part of the English system? I had always been an alien, like almost every other immigrant. The people who had been kind to me had also been waiting for me to leave.

  I said some of this to Vidia. He was crouched near the wine racks, hovering over his selection.

  “But England has been good to you,” he said.

  “Of course. I suppose it’s been the making of me.”

  “About the other thing,” he said. He meant the separation. “You don’t have to leave. It’s your house. Your property. You can stay.”

  “I don’t care about the house. Why do material things seem so sad just now? I get depressed just being in it.”

  “God.”

  He was so shocked by my news that I felt awkward pursuing it. I said, “This has become quite a wine cellar. It’s so much bigger than the last time I saw it.”

  “These are my clarets,” Vidia said, sounding relieved that I had changed the subject. He indicated bottles on racks and in cut-open cases, the necks protruding. “These are my Burgundies—white Burgundy here, red there. This year’s reds are big fruity wines. My Bordeaux are tannic. I’m laying them down. Last year’s Sauternes are perfect—rich, concentrated.” He picked out a bottle. “This is big.”

  I looked at the label: a Bordeaux.

  “This is fleshy. I am waiting a bit,” he said. He replaced it. He brought out another bottle. “This is crisp. A little fruity but soft. You’ll like it. It’s classic.”

  That word an echo from the Connaught lunch all those years ago. Easy to remember the day, not because we discussed knighthoods but because the bill had cleaned me out and I had gone back to Dorset broke. This classic was also a white Burgundy, each sip a taste of destitution.