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

On the way back to London on the train, Vidia said, “I wonder whether any of my books will last?”

I said that I thought A House for Mr. Biswas was a masterpiece that would last as long as people read books.

“You’re so kind,” he said. He seemed to consider the word “masterpiece.” Then he said, “One hopes so. It’s a big book.”

We talked about the book. Vidia said that although he had never reread it, he had put everything into it — his family, his island, everything he knew. Even small things in the book pleased him. He smiled at a memory.

“There are three Negro workmen in the book — just simple fellows, with shovels. Do you remember them? They only have first names, Edgar, Sam, and George.”

“They work on Biswas’s house.”

“Yes, yes.” But he was already laughing. “Edgar Mittelholzer, Samuel Selvon, and George Lamming,” he said, naming three black novelists from Trinidad.

He almost gagged laughing at this private joke, but after a while, still talking about the novel, we discussed Mr. Biswas’s views on typefaces. Vidia became animated again. With his mouth close to the window of the train, he exhaled on the glass.

“This is Times.” He sketched a letter with his finger, then added embellishments and more letters. “This is sans serif. And this”—he was still adding letters to the steam-clouded glass—“is Bodoni. I like this.”

He was intent, still sketching with his finger, still describing.

I said, “Sometimes they put that information on the last page of a book. I never know what to make of it.”

“I love it,” he said.

“And this,” he said, working his finger on the window, “this is Caslon. Notice the difference?”

The letters seemed to fade. But no, they remained on the glass. As soon as we got near London they were lit again by the city’s lights, all those different letters.

The day before I left, there were workmen in Vidia’s house. They were hammering in his bedroom, fixing some shelves that Vidia considered badly built. It was a Saturday. I called Heather and asked if we could meet. She said yes but suggested a pub, not her apartment. She knew I was leaving. At the pub, she complained that I cared more about Vidia than about her.

“He’s my friend,” I said.

“Thanks,” she said.

Seeing I had hurt her, I said, “You’re my friend too, of course you are.”

I could not explain how Vidia mattered, and how his friendship was different from anyone else’s. I knew he loved Shiva, but he seemed to depend on me so much more than he did on his brother, and he knew more about my writing ambition than I had ever dared tell my own family.

Heather and I went on drinking. We did not make love that day. The omission made it more final a farewell.

Vidia looked grief-stricken when I got back that night. Pat was on the parlor sofa. He was sitting in his armchair, an expression of sorrow on his face, but when he began to speak to her, he sounded like a small child who had been wronged.

“I can’t sleep in that bed,” he said. “It’s tainted. Why did he do it? The foolish, ignorant man!”

He was disgusted and near to tears.

“What happened?” I asked.

“One of the workmen in Vidia’s bedroom was explaining something,” Pat began. But she seemed too frightened to continue.

His face twisted in nausea, Vidia said, “And he sat on my bed, Patsy. He put his bottom on my bed.”

The next morning, Vidia was still seated in his armchair in the parlor. He looked grim. Fatigue made his skin grayish. He had not slept. It would be a long day, and I could not begin to comprehend how the bed that the workman had tainted by sitting on it would ever be purified. Violation by a workman’s bottom was one of those problems that were unique to Vidia. Only he understood the problem, and so only he had the solution.

He looked weary. He said he was sorry I was leaving, and he meant it — he looked as though he needed to be propped up. Pat was fretful and weepy, but I could not tell whether my departure was the cause.

As always, Vidia said, “You’re going to be all right.”

VIDIA CLAIMED that handwriting spoke volumes. Even if you could not read the words, the way they were written, just the loops and slants and how a t was crossed, told you what you needed to know. He had taught me to read the moods in his handwriting, for which he always used a fountain pen and black ink. Large and loopy meant he was idle and calm, regular squiggles indicated concentration, small meant anxious, tiny meant fearful and overworked, and at its most minuscule he was at his wits’ end. It was perhaps some consolation that, graphologically inclined, he knew what his own handwriting told him.

For the next five years, we conversed by airmail over long distances. I was in Africa and later in Singapore; Vidia was in and out of England. He usually wrote me on blue air-letter forms from the post office, the ones with preprinted stamps on the front. They unfolded to narrow lengths of paper that seemed Chinese to him, he said. He used them vertically, cramming them with his handwriting.

These letters were for me a source of wisdom and strength and amounted to a correspondence course in creative writing; from Vidia I learned the reality of being a writer. During this period I had no telephone, I had no other close friends, I did not leave the Equator. The mail was everything. Face to face, anyone can say he is your friend and can promise to write faithfully, but the test of friendship is the letters themselves, the fondest proof that you are remembered. I did not want to be forgotten, for once again I was buried in Africa.

It bewildered me when the first letter I received from him was cold. Worse than cold: somewhat offensive. That curfew book I had given to his editor Diana Athill, at André Deutsch, had been turned down. Her letter had discouraged me in what I had thought was a great idea: a book about Africa in the form of a chronicle about a violent curfew. I had complained to Vidia of her indifference.

In his letter, a Lebanese stamp on the envelope, written on the stationery of the Bristol Hotel in Beirut, Vidia stood by his editor. He said her judgment was sound. He would not give me any further advice about publishing. He suggested that I was patronizing him in the language of my letter, that I misread Africa, that I did not understand Martial’s epigrams, and he wished me well in my journalism. This seemed belittling to the fiction I was trying to write. He closed with a mention of Francis Chichester, at that moment sailing his Gipsy Moth IV solo around the world. He wrote, “I hope he drowns.”

It was a bad-tempered letter, written in one of his moods. I could have guessed that when I saw his handwriting. Though he was in Beirut, he did not refer to it, except by using the hotel’s ornate letterhead — I suspected him of ostentation. He did not say where he was going, or why. It was a grand gesture, his letter from Lebanon, a romantic and cosmopolitan place that was on the itinerary of a successful writer.

In fact he was on his way to India, Pat wrote, in a letter I received a week later. She called his trip “a journalistic assignment” and said he would be in India two months, for a long article. His dismissive mention of my journalism, which had rankled, perhaps also explained why he had not said he was going to be a journalist in India.

They were terrible letter writers, all of them, Pat said. Shiva did not even write home. I should not expect too much, and yet she said that it had pleased her to see that we were exchanging letters regularly — it was uncharacteristic of Vidia to write so often.