Paul Theroux - Sir Vidia's Shadow - A Friendship Across Five Continents

Then an unexpected thing happened. I had never been homesick in Africa, nor had I despaired at what I saw. I was there to work and was grateful for the job. I liked my life. I was self-sufficient. Some days I was Albert Camus, a schoolteacher in remote Algeria. Some days I was George Orwell, preparing to shoot an elephant. There were days when I was myself, writing something that I believed had never been written before, that would surprise the world. But when Vidia left on the plane from Entebbe, I drove back to town feeling lonely, and my loneliness stayed with me. From then on, I liked the place less. I had begun to see it with his eyes and to speak about it using his words.

He had believed in me. He had talked about how in writing you served an apprenticeship. He said we were freer than any writers had been in the past. “We are free from dogma, religious and political dogma. Use that freedom.” I remembered the many times that he had peered into my face (“a man’s life is in his face”) or traced my palm and said, “You’re going to be all right, Paul.” What did he see?

A note of comedy crept into my writing. It was an effect of my loneliness, and it startled me, but it gave me vitality. And it seemed more authentic than the solemnity it had displaced. I began to understand that the truest expression of life was humor, especially at its most disturbing. Much of what happened in Africa was not tragedy but farce. It was the influence of Vidia.

Friendship is plainer but deeper than love. A friend knows your faults and forgives them, but more than that, a friend is a witness. I needed Vidia as a friend, because he saw something in me I did not see. He said I was a writer. He spoke about it with his customary directness. That meant everything to me, because I had no idea what I was going to do next.

And I certainly had no idea that my meeting with Vidia would loom so large in my life, or his. But long after this, in an introduction to one of Vidia’s books, the English critic Karl Miller wrote, “The novelist Paul Theroux was with Naipaul in a disrupted Uganda, rather as one might once have been said to have been with Kitchener at Khartoum.”

JUST BEFORE he left Kampala, Vidia released me. He looked one last time at my much-slashed and — amended essay on cowardice, which was already scheduled to be published. He said that it was finished, though I guessed that it still did not seem quite right to him.

Move on to something new, he said; the new thing would be better for what I had learned from him. I was sorry to see him go. I had come to depend on his reading and his friendly advice. Needing him to put his whole philosophy into a sentence, I mocked myself by thinking of the man who asked Christ, “Good Master, what good thing shall I do that I may have eternal life?” Christ gives him a quick summary of the essentials, beginning with “Do not kill” and ending with “Sell everything you have.”

I found a way of framing the question and managed to stammer it to Vidia.

Vidia’s answer was “Tell the truth.”

And there was his dream, the one I had written down. It went this way.

Vidia and his brother, Shiva, were staying with a family in which there were two other children, a boy and a girl. Shiva hated the boy, and one day when Vidia, his brother, and the boy were on an outing, an argument started. Shiva set upon the boy and killed him.

“Look what you’ve done — you’ve killed him!” Vidia said.

Vidia and Shiva dug a hole and hid the corpse of the boy in it.

Now it so happened that the boy was to have been away for several days; there were no questions or suspicions when Vidia and Shiva returned to the family. They were feeling horribly guilty for the murder, however; they could not screw up their courage sufficiently to tell the truth. They knew that the body would be found and that they would be blamed.

A few days later the newspapers were full of the story of the disappearance, and the body was soon found. During this time the child’s father underwent a severe change — he remembered various petty cruelties he had inflicted on the boy, and he began blaming himself for the crime. He said, “I know what happened… I made him cut his throat.” Naipaul and his brother remained silent — guilty but so far not blamed. They did not speak of the crime, and yet they were not off the hook. End of dream: night sweats, terror, anxiety, guilt.

I was impressed because it revealed so much. It amazed me that a dream that reflected no credit upon him, that showed him as guilty and sneaky, depicting his brother as a killer, was one he told me coldly and in detail.

Vidia was in London, and I was alone in a land that now seemed dustier and flimsier and fictitious. I had grown used to being alone in Africa: the solitude had sharpened my concentration, and this intensity served my writing. But for the first time I was lonely and felt listless with disappointment. Africa had once seemed limitless and powerful and liberating. Vidia had left me with doubts. He had belittled the politicians, ridiculed the currency, sneered at the newspapers, and Africa now seemed tiny, self-destructive, and confining. It was full of crooked opportunists and it was dangerous. It was ruinous and random. Do you notice how they make their own paths everywhere?

In the Senior Common Room and the Staff Club and the Kampala Film Society, the word “infies” rang in my ears. On Sundays I went for long bird-watching walks up the Bombo Road and in the bush. Nothing has a name here — it is always “hill,” “tree,” “river,” “bird.” They don’t differentiate. There is no drama. They don’t see .

My habits were the same: work in the morning in my office, do some teaching, eat lunch at home or at the Hindoo Lodge. After a nap, writing in the afternoon, then into town through the big iron gates under the Makerere motto, Pro Futuro Aedificamus . At the gates and in the road and in Bat Valley and in town I heard: This will go back to bush. The jungle will move in. Look, already it has started .

At the Staff Club people inquired insincerely about Vidia.

“What do you hear from your friend Naipaul?”

Their insincerity was tinged with sarcasm, because for the whole period of Vidia’s stay in Kampala I had been his shadow. He had been my friend, not theirs. They saw it as my abandonment of them — I had rejected them and become Naipaul’s friend. It was true: I had rejected them, but I thought it was my secret. In being Naipaul’s shadow I had revealed myself, revealed my literary ambitions most of all. Until then I had been seen as a village explainer, indulging myself. I knew, even then, that a writer lives in his writing. I suspected I had given myself away, perhaps had shown my ambition, certainly had exposed my wound. That was all right with the Staff Club. It was okay to be a local writer, but in befriending Naipaul it appeared that I was getting above myself, looking to London for approval. Expatriates both hated and hankered for London. I had ignored them. Naipaul had ignored them. They knew his contempt, his indifference; they knew his insulting word for them.

To most of them he was a bird of passage, the most undesirable expatriate: an enigma, a mocker, a complainer, someone who would bolt when things got bad. Some had bolted when the Kabaka fell. People flew in and said all sorts of things about Uganda, and like Vidia even mocked it. When they left, we mocked them. What did they know? This was our home, our place of work, our risk. We lived here because we liked it. It was regarded as bad form to jeer at Africans or to speak slightingly of the students. It was dangerous to laugh at the government. Vidia had broken most of the unspoken rules. No one had openly disagreed with him — indeed, in our hearts many of us agreed — but he was resented for trying to demoralize us. Africans said he was typically English. The English expatriates called him typically Trinidadian. The Indians in Kampala called him a typical Brahmin. A number of people said he was a settler type, which was the worst you could say about anyone.