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

He wanted to go to the United States. He wondered whether my older brother, Eugene, could help him find a house to rent in order for him to finish his book. After his book was done, he would be a journalist for a while, just for the money. When he had some money he would start a new book. He suggested that he had an idea for one.

My writing about Africa stimulated him, he said. He too had been thinking of writing about Africa. He sent his love.

In the middle of 1968, in his tiniest handwriting, an effect of concentrated writing and worry, he reflected on the paradoxes of being a writer. He was in Scotland, a houseguest at a baronial mansion. He complimented me on my letters to him. *They reminded him of Scott Fitzgerald’s, which he had been reading. Fitzgerald had written many letters to his daughter, Vidia said, all about writing. It was the sort of obsession that writers developed about their art. The origin of this was that we all started by wishing to be writers and by mimicking what we had read. Through work we eventually arrived at another level, doing a sort of writing we didn’t really understand. We became lost and questioned the point of writing. It was a problem both the schoolboy and the older writer had to solve.

There was a strong, almost Buddhist element in writing, he said, in that good writing canceled out what had existed before. Even the second half of a book canceled out the first half, and each book canceled out the previous one and existed as a reincarnation of the earlier work.

In this meditation in the Scottish mansion, Vidia reflected on the vanity of fame and posterity, because all the books in the library there seemed so dated. They no longer mattered; fame was nothing. Writers were steadily canceling themselves out, the new replacing the old. The paradox was that the better they were, the more likely they were to be rejected, for they created a standard that would be revised and superseded. That was the saddest part. “Really how unfair we are today to writers who educated us when we were young and sharpened our minds and gave us a new way of looking at the world and made us want to be writers.”

Maugham was almost unreadable now, Vidia said, yet Maugham had once been important in shaping his sensibility. The worst aspect of the study of literature was that it dealt with the past, because literature was alive and mattered, or else it was nothing.

He urged me to consider the notion of time and tradition in relation to two prodigies of nineteenth-century English writing, Charles Dickens and Rudyard Kipling. They had each been immensely successful, yet in their writing they had described a much older version of their culture. This version had been ignored because lesser writers — copycats, missing the point — had simply gone on working in a literary tradition. For example, Kipling wrote about an India that was twenty years out of date, but Kipling’s contemporaries were still imitating Dickens, who himself had set his own books in an earlier period.

With this wise lesson in literature, Vidia sent his love.

I was encouraged to have him as a friend, and what he said was helpful to me, because I felt cut off in my house in Uganda, writing my third novel. The implication I drew from his air letter was that he saw me as a promising modernist, at a frontier in Africa, writing about what I knew. He was encouraging me; he wanted me to understand the paradoxes.

I needed the help. It was June 1968. My first novel, Waldo , had gotten good reviews. Fong and the Indians was about to appear. I was at work on another novel with an African setting, Girls at Play . My first child, a son, had just been born. I had resigned from my job in Uganda and had been hired to teach in Singapore. I was flying by the seat of my pants.

Departing from the blue Chinese-style air-letter forms, Vidia wrote across two sheets of note paper to congratulate us on our new baby. He also congratulated me on leaving Africa after more than five years. He frankly disapproved of the fact that I was going to Singapore to teach English literature, and he claimed never to have heard of the course I was to teach: Jacobean literature — Shakespeare’s contemporaries in the age of James I. But — and here came a Naipaul curve ball—“perhaps you might get me out there as a visiting idler.”

It was just like Vidia to scorn the job I had taken in desperation, and to repeat his contempt for the study of literature, but at the same time to ask me to find him a slot as a visiting writer of the sort he had been, disastrously, in Uganda. It was a paradox he himself admitted. He tried to be high-minded, yet he was the first to confess his contradictions. The example of his candor was his greatest lesson.

Knowing that I needed to establish myself in England, he suggested to the literary editor of The Times that I become a regular reviewer. The money was not the point — I would get £10 for each review — it was, rather, the chance to become part of the London reviewing and writing coterie. I had to be seen as someone who was serious, who had judgment and wit, who was not above reviewing books.

Vidia said that he was traveling, leaving London, but not sure where he was going. He had sold his house. He still wanted to go to the United States. He repeated his request for my brother to find him a house, somewhere in rural America. He still had some journalism to do.

My wife and I moved from Uganda to Singapore with our baby son. This was in the autumn of 1968. I resumed teaching. I wrote some short stories and published them. I began reviewing books for The Times . My third novel was done, and I had an idea for another, more ambitious novel, about life in an African dictatorship. I still had no money. But it was not only poverty that kept me from returning to the States; it was also my curiosity about Southeast Asia — the echo of the gunfire from Vietnam, the effects of the war on nearby countries. And I found that I could teach and write. Teaching was not difficult; I found Shakespeare’s contemporaries illuminating and undemanding, and the violent vengefulness in the plays made sense to my Chinese students, some of whom were ardent supporters of the Cultural Revolution.

Even in Singapore I had regular air letters from my friend Naipaul, who believed in me.

“What lovely Bongo-Wongo addresses you are picking up on the way!” he wrote in a letter with my exotic Singapore street address. A Trinidad stamp on that letter looked equally exotic to me.

In the past, when he was feeling frail from having worked hard, he said, “I feel like a bird with a broken wing.” Now his broken wing was healing, he said. He was in Port of Spain. He had finished his historical narrative, pleased with it for being so contemporary. Even Pat had liked it. He implied that she was often one of his worst detractors. After two years, The Loss of El Dorado was done, and when it appeared it would explain a great deal about the modern world, in which race and class were primary issues. “The book is good.”

From Trinidad, he was embarking on some journalistic assignments in the United States. Needing a visa, he had gone to the U.S. consulate in Port of Spain and been treated with lavish courtesy and deference. He said to me, “Guilt will make my hand shake if I ever write an unkind word about the U.S.”

He had been greeted at the consulate as an important writer. He was granted two visas: one to enter the country, the other to work as a journalist for four years — he underlined the four. The visas had been presented with style, the consul-general emerging from his office to extend his congratulations, the whole consulate staff beaming. “The natives goggling on their benches.”

It mattered a lot to him that he had been singled out from the other islanders and treated with respect. He did not take it for granted. He said he left the consulate feeling weak.