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

“Brown will do your laundry. When you leave, you might give her a few pence.”

“Five pounds?”

“Too much. No, no. That would spoil Brown.”

That was my first day. He spent most of the next morning in his pajamas, reading the proofs of The Mimic Men . We had lunch. Vidia was still in his pajamas.

“I dress for dinner,” he said, and laughed — a more bronchial laugh than his East African laugh.

In the next few days he gave me a lightning tour of London, starting from his nearest tube station, Stockwell, on the Northern Line, and heading for Tottenham Court Road. A gasping dusty wind coursed through the station and up the wooden escalator: it was a city of cold dead smells, of rust and damp brick and oil — smells of prosperity and traffic. Being here was an adventure, but I thought: I could never live here, ever. Another thought that stayed in my mind was that we were on an island, a cold island in winter.

From Tottenham Court Road we crossed Oxford Street and walked to the British Museum. Now I understood why Vidia felt there was such ignorance and poverty in Uganda’s place names: London ones were so grand, much grander than the streets and squares they described. Vidia seemed to be following a route he had taken many times before. At the British Museum, as though programmed, he showed me the glass cases containing manuscripts of Byron, Keats, Browning; then onward and downstairs, through the Roman and Greek rooms to the Egyptian artifacts, the mummies and the sarcophagi, some like water troughs, some like cupboards.

“Notice the decadence in this period. They become rubbishy and repetitive with the Roman occupation. This isn’t art. This is just mimicry, man.”

Down the road to Holborn, through an alley, a gateway, into a parklike square: Sir John Soane’s Museum. Without looking left or right, Vidia led me to the Indian miniatures and the Daniell aquatints and Hogarth’s series of four paintings titled The Election . Nearby, at Gaston’s in Chancery Lane, he sold the armful of books he had been carrying — his review books, half price for clean copies. He bought a tin of Player’s Navy Cut pipe tobacco with some of the proceeds. Then we had lunch at Wheeler’s, on Old Compton Street. He had prawns, I had “Sole Walewska.”

Vidia ordered an expensive bottle of wine. He said, “You university lecturers have lots of money, don’t you?”

I didn’t. I had spent all my spare cash on the airline ticket, but I was so grateful for his hospitality I paid for the lunch.

In that restaurant with close-together tables and smoky air we talked about Africa. Vidia was not a mocker anymore. East Africa had affected him. The food was real there, he said — fresh vegetables, lettuce and broad beans, and fish from Lake Victoria, Nile perch from upcountry, the first plantains he had eaten since he was a child. And the light was wonderful. And that sky, all those stars. He worried about the Major at the Kaptagat Arms and the other people whom he had met, whom he liked, some expatriates, some Indians.

“They’re not all infies,” I said.

“Of course not. But they will all be destroyed by Africa.”

“You belong here, I guess.”

“I belong nowhere,” he said. “I have no home.”

He had that disconcerting way of turning chitchat into metaphysics about the human condition.

“Who do you see here?”

He did not answer this. He looked aside and said, “I don’t want to meet new people.”

He looked at his watch and pinched it, the way people do when they are making a point, impatient to go. But no. He said, “My father gave me this watch,” and he looked as though he were stifling tears.

I did not think I could bear his weeping. I said, “Shall we go?”

He was silent on the way to the National Gallery, and then among the paintings he brightened. The specific circuit he made in the galleries — bypassing some rooms, lingering in others, selecting one painting in certain rooms — told me that he had unshakable habits and preferences. He moved so quickly I could hardly keep up with him. He hurried past twenty pictures to get close to one, to put his face against particular details on that canvas. One was a Matisse with a daub of red, like the simplest Chinese character stroke, splashed near the center of the landscape.

“Look. Come close. It’s nothing. It is utterly meaningless.”

He poked his finger at the eyebrow-shaped splosh of a brush stroke. Then he dragged me back like an agitated teacher provoking a response and urged me to look again.

“See? Now it’s a person. It has life. It has shape and meaning. It even has emotion — all that from a brush stroke. Matisse knew exactly what he was doing when he touched his brush here.”

It was conversation in the form of a lesson, but I did not mind this teacher-student relationship with him because I was learning so much. His attention to me made me surer of myself. He was right: the random-looking swipe of paint was a daring experiment in form.

We went to the Victoria and Albert Museum. In the taxi, going through Parliament Square, he saw me looking at the statue of Abraham Lincoln standing before a chair.

“That’s called ‘The Hot Seat,”’ Vidia said.

There was another statue just past it, of Jan Smuts, also standing but canted forward like a skater.

“And he’s skating,” I said.

“On thin ice,” Vidia said.

At the V and A, again he followed his own route, ignoring most of the rooms, concentrating on the Indian pictures, the Mogul paintings, the miniatures, the bronzes. I was following; he saw my concentration flag.

“What do you want to see?” he asked.

“Henry Fuseli. Salvador Dali.”

“They’re at the Tate.”

He stood aside at the Tate Gallery while I looked at Fuseli’s nightmares and Dalí’s Autumn Cannibalism , and then he introduced me to the Turners — another lecture on the subtle technique of brushwork — and the Blakes and the Whistlers.

Back at home in Stockwell, he put on his pajamas and read the proofs of The Mimic Men . And he asked what I had been writing. I told him my book was about the dusk-to-dawn curfew in Uganda, the strangest and most telling episode I had known in Africa. I had the typescript with me.

“I think you should offer it to André.”

We went the next morning to André Deutsch Ltd. Vidia instructed me to leave the typescript with his editor, Diana Athill. Vidia stayed outside, puffing his pipe under an awning in Great Russell Street, while I asked for Miss Athill. Hearing my name, she invited me into her office and we talked awhile. She said she was eager to read the book. I was hopeful when I left, but when I saw Vidia he lunged at me and began shouting.

“Where have you been!” he said. He made stabbing gestures with his pipe. He looked furious. He looked betrayed. He had been standing all this time under the awning. “What have you done?”

I could not understand his anger. He knew where I had been, talking with Miss Athill.

“You said—”

“The man must never precede the work!” he shouted. In the fifteen minutes I had been absent, he had gone from being the soul of kindness to the embodiment of pure rage. “Do you hear me? The man must never precede the work.”

He said that he had to go home, that he had work to do and no time to waste, but that I should stay out and enjoy myself. He descended the steps to the Northern Line, biting the stem of his pipe. I walked the streets, feeling wronged. When I returned to Stockwell, Vidia was in his study, sitting in the chaise, smoking in the dark.

Each night we read the Mimic Men proofs. He had one copy, I had another. I skipped ahead and looked for Africa in it, for any indication that the last part of it had been written at the Kaptagat Arms in western Kenya. It was an elliptical story of a West Indian politician, his rise and fall, his love affairs, his flight to England, his exile in a London hotel. It was, subtly, about power, money, friendship, and failure, about a small fragile country, a Third World island. Perhaps he had been influenced by Africa after all. I looked for, and found, “wise old negro” in the sentence “he had created for himself the character of the wise old negro who knew the ways of the white world.” So Pat had prevailed.