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

He reported that the literary editor of The Times liked my work and was using the reviews regularly, in spite of having to send the books all the way to Singapore. But the Washington Post was doing the same thing. What with my teaching and my short stories and the novel I had started, I had never worked so hard for so little money. My wife got a job at the Chinese university to keep us afloat, but still we had no savings.

Money was on Vidia’s mind. He complained of high taxes and low standards in Trinidad. He would soon be leaving for New York City. A few months later, in March 1969, he wrote me from the New York apartment of Robert Lowell, where he was a houseguest. Lowell, he said, was the only writer in New York who had read his work. One of his bits of journalism was an interview with Lowell.

Vidia felt awkward being in New York, where no one cared about his work. He said. “It makes me feel an intruder.”

He was out of sympathy with the writers and intellectuals he met in New York: Baldwin, Bellow, Roth, Trilling. He had no patience with their views. He saw them as obsessed and, ultimately, trivial- minded. Half the time he had no idea what they were writing about. They were publicity seekers, he said; their writing was Teutonically wordy. It was better to grow slowly as a writer and to build a reputation book by book. He meant himself, and I guessed it was also a hint to me.

There were aspects of New York that he liked. The wine was good and inexpensive. The city had energy. He envisioned making a life in New York, buying an apartment and spending part of every year there. Indians — not “dot Indians” but “feather Indians”—were on his mind. “I alternate between great happiness and great rage at the violence done to the American Indians,” he said. “I feel the land very much as theirs at dusk, the sky high above Central Park.”

I had told him that I was getting on in Singapore; in spite of the financial narrowness, it was a new place with new people, and it gave me the chance to travel in Burma and Indonesia. I had begun to write Jungle Lovers. Fong had appeared — a small advance, good reviews, but no steady income. I said to myself, If I write a book every year for the next ten years, I am sure I can make a living. I could not think beyond ten years.

Vidia wrote back from New York to wish me well. He said he had been thinking fondly about my wife and son. That touched me at a time when I felt burdened and overworked. I lived in a small, hot semidetached house and wrote in an airless upstairs room. I could write only after my lectures had been delivered, my papers marked, and my wife and child were contented. After eight months in Singapore I had settled into a routine, but this, I swore, would be my last job. I fantasized about quitting, but I had no place to go. I had no plans, except that I was embarked on my fourth novel. My third, Girls at Play, was about to be published in England.

Vidia had plans, he said. He had written a piece for the Telegraph in London and another for The New York Review of Books , about Anguilla. He was planning to spend the spring and summer in the United States and then travel back to London in September, when The Loss of El Dorado came out — not return for his own sake but to give some moral support to his publishers. Then, after London, perhaps Spain, to work on a book — he did not say what he had in mind — because Spain would be inexpensive.

He took an oblique and somewhat credulous interest in astrology and palmistry. The lines on my palm had impressed him. In New York he had met an astrologer who, noting that Vidia was a Leo, gave him a reading and predicted unending travel, both mental and physical. Vidia welcomed the prophecy. He was eager for a phone call that would send him abroad. The astrologer had said that no sooner would Vidia put his suitcase down than he would pick it up again.

Accompanying Norman Mailer in his campaign to be mayor of New York had occupied some weeks of Vidia’s time. That was another piece of journalism. Vidia found Mailer energetic and attractive. He was reading Mailer’s book about the political conventions, Miami and the Siege of Chicago . Mailer had called it “a bazaar of metaphors.” Vidia corrected this: surely Mailer meant similes. Nevertheless, Vidia liked the book, and he liked Mailer. It was strange to hear Vidia praising a living writer and a new book. I had never heard him do this before.

By the way, he wondered, had I read Henry James’s study of Hawthorne? I immediately got it out of the library and read it with pleasure. I wrote back, thanking him for the suggestion. He was still my teacher, my friend.

A month later, he read my new novel and praised me extravagantly. This was the middle of 1969. The book had just appeared in London, but a copy had been sent to Vidia in New York. Girls at Play was a dark book, set in a girls’ school in upcountry Kenya. Though I denied the fact for legal reasons, the school was based on the one where my then fiancée had taught in Embu, in the bush about eighty miles northeast of Nairobi.

Vidia told me he had pounced on the book, and he congratulated me and said it was “very very good”—all this in the first two lines of his air letter.

He had praised me before, but this was different — he said that the book was wonderful and liberating to him. He praised details — that was the best of it, his close reading. In Singapore on hot buggy nights with the ceiling fan croaking, I needed this encouragement. I had written a few chapters of what I expected to be a long novel. I was still writing short stories. I was doing book reviews. I was teaching. How was it possible to work so hard and earn so little?

Never mind, my book was good. V.S. Naipaul said so. He was even grateful to me for having written it — that sounded odd — but he said he would explain this gratitude some other time. He promised that I would get good reviews.

I had managed to please the one person who mattered. And he was more than pleased. He was impressed by its fluency, the transparency of the prose, the dialogue, the opening paragraphs — nearly all of it he found arresting and powerful.

Music to my ears. And there was more: “Above all, this is the work of a man who has come to a resolution about a particular experience… There is an attitude that comprehends and absorbs all the experience that is given.”

This seemed the greatest praise possible. He explained the point about resolution, which he said was an understanding of experience. Knowing what one was doing was an insight — so he said — that Norman Mailer did not have. He had apparently changed his mind about Mailer. He now said he found Mailer’s writing supremely egotistical. I had gone beyond my ego to a stronger objectivity, “the true artist’s detachment — which is not unconcern, far from it.”

He liked the passion, the humor, the nuances, the peculiar characters, the aspects of English decline and African strangeness, the landscape, the emotion. Because he was so positive, he said, he was confident that he could tell me what was less successful. He singled out the confessions. He said they were “stagey.”

I reread his letter. It was the best review I had ever had, from a wise man, who knew me, the man who always said, “Are you sure you want to show this to me? I’m brutal, you know.” Not only brutal but stingy and snobbish. Yet this was Vidia at his best, a subtle and generous man.

“Many congratulations again and again” was his way of signing off.

In the Singapore heat, on my low salary, battling with a new novel and feeling old at the age of twenty-eight, I was very happy. The letter lifted my spirits and sustained me for the next two years in Singapore. I worked with a will. I had been told I was doing the right thing.