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

Naipaul also gave the appearance of being a snob. He ridiculed our beer drinking and our bad wine and the power that our servants had over us. He had no faith in the students. The news had circulated that he had awarded only one prize, Third Prize, to Winston Wabamba, and no one found it funny. Some of his scorning observations were repeated. People said, “I feel sorry for his wife.” “Patrician” was the kindest word I heard used for him. The Staff Club was noted for its foul language, and Vidia was described in the crudest anatomical terms. The local Indians generally felt he had been browbeating them when he had talked about their days being numbered and nagged them about their exit strategy.

Dust devils, those furious little whirlwinds, were common on our roads and in the dry fields. Vidia had appeared like a dust devil, had sternly questioned every received opinion and demanded answers, and then, like a dust devil, he had whirled away — shivered into the distance, leaving a small scoured trail in the earth.

After Naipaul left I had to explain him, and, exposed as someone aspiring to be like him, I was regarded with suspicion, as unreliable, a secret mocker, like him. I would never again be a Staff Club hearty, taking turns as barman.

“I used to like you,” an expatriate woman said to me one night in the club’s bar. Her name was Maureen. She was drunk and truthful. “I don’t like you anymore. I think you’re a shit. So does Brian.”

Brian was her husband, a mathematician who taught Boolean algebra. He also did the Staff Club accounts. Hearing Maureen denounce me, he said, “Fucking Yank.”

He seemed to lose his footing as he spoke, but instead of regaining his balance he kept falling. He was drunk too, and he brought down one of the bar stools with him as he fell. Maureen had not moved; she still glared at me.

“Aren’t you going to help him?” I asked.

“He can’t fall any further,” Maureen said, and raised her glass to her lips.

It was just the three of us in the bar on this hot night, with the cicadas chattering outside. On the bar were the India Pale Ale and Tusker Beer mats, on the wall the clock that said Watney’s , the Guinness for Power sign, the stylish African couple — man in brown suit, woman in frilly dress — on the sign that said Waragi — Uganda’s National Drink! , and stacked to the side were year-old copies of Private Eye .

Maureen pressed her lips together, sloshed the waragi in her mouth, and swallowed it, blinking and smiling. It was terrible stuff, banana gin.

“What the fuck are you doing here?” she said.

The things they said to me were the things they had wanted to say to Vidia.

To console myself, I went to the Gardenia more often. I nearly always took a girl home. It was so simple, always the direct question: “Do you want to come back to my house?” And the greatest satisfaction of the question for me was that the word for house, nyumba , was the same as for mud hut. Usually the answer was yes, or else “Let’s go dancing first.”

“I’m the meat, you’re the knife.” That was my life again.

The expatriates at the Staff Club went on complaining about Vidia long after he had gone. How little they knew of him. “The mob,” Vidia had called them. He had urged me to leave, saying it was dangerous to the intellect to live in such a place. I did not have time to waste, he said. I knew he was thinking of himself.

“I am old and slow,” he had said, and talked about the past in the regretful yearning voice of an elderly man. Things had been different years ago; so much had changed for the worse.

Old-crock expressions were the ones he liked best: “latterly,” “a few pence,” and “some little time.” He called all magazines “papers,” which was perhaps not as quaint as old Duffield, who called them “shinies.” Still, Vidia lamented the age, its scruffiness, its whining low-class people, and its crooked aristocrats. “What is a title?” he would shout. It was just something to impress the Americans. It was meaningless. Literary agents were “idlers” and many publishers were “crummy.”

He was often unwell. His asthma had come back to him in Africa and gagged him. He had insomnia or else bad dreams. He was often low or depressed. Perhaps these afflictions were to be expected in someone so old. He was thirty-four.

As colonials, he had said, he and I had a great deal in common. Was I a colonial? I had never thought so. Never mind. He was my friend. Nor did I question his feeling of being elderly. Perhaps, I thought, when I am in my thirties I will feel that way too. Thirties seemed like middle age, forty was old, fifty was past it, sixty cadaverous.

I was ten years younger than Vidia, which seemed a long time, long enough for someone like me to be transformed into an old man. I had finished my novel and started another. I was confident. What mattered most was that Vidia, a brilliant writer, believed in me.

No one else I had ever known had looked into my face and seen a writer. Vidia did that and more: he said I was a writer of promise, and he marveled at how quickly I worked. I could call him my friend. He paid me the compliment of writing to me regularly after he got to London, and each letter was a lesson.

In his swift, decisive way, in an early letter he analyzed my keeping a journal and rejected the idea. I must abandon it, he said. It was just a way of anthologizing experience. A writer was not a writer because things happened around him. A writer did other things. A diary, more detailed, was worse — I should not even think about it. I ditched my journal, I abandoned my diary for good.

I should consider writing for The New Statesman , he said. I ought to avoid “little magazines": literary journals, university quarterlies, the small-circulation nonpayers.

If I wrote a story, I had to know why my story happened. I had to know why I was writing my novel. He mentioned Miss Lonelyhearts . I had urged him to read it. He disliked it and could not understand my enthusiasm for it. He did not see its point. I did not argue with any of this, though secretly I went on admiring the book for its wicked and wayward satire.

Vidia advised me, also by mail, to settle down with an agent and a publisher in England. American publishers were interested only in a single book; English publishers were interested in a writer — all the work. He would help me find an agent, and I should then look for a good publisher.

If I insisted on staying in Africa, I ought to consider, he said, writing a monthly “Letter from East Africa” for an Indian paper. He would arrange everything. I might get as much as £20 for each piece.

“Aim high,” he said. “Tell the truth.”

The worst thing a writer could say was “I am just a storyteller.” He suggested that it was a form of boasting. Vidia despised the description and disliked the very word “story.” It was a misleading and perhaps meaningless word. He had once told me that many stories did not have an ending. He used the word “narrative” instead. It was vaguer but more helpful. Structure and form were of utmost importance. The notion of style irritated him: it was showing off, a display of ego and inexperience, pretentious and pointless. He said that art was not pretty.

About two months after arriving back in London, he wrote to say that he was reviewing a life of Ian Fleming, the author of the James Bond books. The biography was not important, the review was not long, yet he said the writing was torture. In the piece that was published in The New Statesman , he mentioned in a jeering way that Milton Obote, the Ugandan prime minister, had attended a special screening of a Bond film. Obote’s Rolls-Royce had been parked outside the Rainbow Cinema with Thunderball on the marquee.