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

I had written Girls at Play off my own bat, without a contract, starting it in Africa, finishing it in Singapore. Here I was, still in Singapore on publication day. Vidia’s letter prepared me for good reviews, and over the following months I got them — praise in the London papers first, then in the provinces, and finally in the United States. The sales were modest, not substantial enough to liberate me from teaching, but it was all a good omen.

His next air letter came from Canada and was dated August 18. It was the day after his thirty-seventh birthday, but he didn’t mention it. Again he had money on his mind. He didn’t have enough, he wanted more, he was insulted when a fee was low. Money was a theme with him, which was fine with me — I needed consolation on that score too. He had invested a small amount in the stock market, but he failed to make a killing. “What I need now is a lot of money,” he said, explaining that if he became rich he would not have to write ever again.

For Vidia, as for me, journalism was money; fiction had to be supported by other work. We were paid for our books, but that money represented only a year’s income at best. I had been turned down by the Guggenheim Foundation, I won no prizes, my advances were low—£250 for Girls at Play in England, a few thousand dollars from my American publisher. I published a book-length novella, Murder in Mount Holly , but that had not earned me much. Therefore, I needed my teaching job and my hack work.

Vidia was the soul of sympathy. He had no cash either. I put some money into stocks and they crashed. I moaned to Vidia. He said that the stock exchange underpinned Western civilization. You had to invest, but you needed to be wise. He analyzed the market, he denounced taxes, he described the fickleness of stocks, he deconstructed inflation, he cursed the necessity to spend.

He had just been in California, writing about John Steinbeck’s Monterey. He doubted that I would like California. San Francisco was atmospheric but no match for New York. He had decided that New York was for him. He loved living in great cities — he was frank in his liking for the nightlife, the dinner parties, famous friends. The word “glamour” was used approvingly throughout his Mailer-for-Mayor piece. He found New York humor profoundly amusing. He put one such exchange into the article.

“I was talking to an old Jew in Brooklyn yesterday,” a Mailer staffer says. “I told him about Mailer. He said, ‘Isn’t he the guy stabbed his wife?’ Nine years, and he’s talking about it like he’d read it in the paper that morning.”

“He probably gets his papers late,” another staffer says.

Vidia said, “New Yorkers protest too much about their problems; in fact it is their problems that give the city its special life and tone.”

Vidia’s Mailer piece appeared in the Telegraph Magazine . He had written a dozen such articles since I had met him, mostly long, discursive pieces of intense analysis. He had traveled in India, the West Indies, Japan, Canada, and the United States. He had published seven novels and three works of nonfiction. Although he had published in the United States, he was hardly known there and his books soon went out of print. Even Vidia admitted he was nowhere — poor and overworked, like me. This was late in 1969.

With Vidia’s plight in mind, I combed through the University of Singapore library’s reference section. I found bound sets of The Spectator and The New Statesman , in which there were scores of book reviews Vidia had written. They were hugely funny, some wickedly so. He was brutal, as he always said; he turned the books inside out, and he was harshest on West Indian authors. He had been writing book reviews since 1957. I read all these uncollected and obscure reviews and as many articles as I could find.

I decided to write a book about his work and proposed the idea to him in an air letter. He welcomed the proposal by opening his heart and telling me that he felt lost, he felt sad. I had to understand this, he said: he had come from nowhere, from nothing. He had been a “barefoot colonial.”

“Think of it like this,” he said. “Imagine the despair to which the barefoot colonial is reduced when, wanting to write, and reading the pattern books of Tolstoy, Balzac et al., he looks at his own world and discovers that it almost doesn’t exist. Hemingway? The barefoot colonial in Paris? Where the Hemingway adventure for him? Try to understand this and see the effort to make art out of this destitution and alienation.”

Writing on his air letter in small script, his return address a loaned house in Gloucestershire, he was experiencing a personal crisis, he said. It related to his being in that house. He was feeling like an exile. All his old uncertainties about nationality, passport, and home had returned to him in this period of inactivity. That his books were so personal was another cause for uncertainty, because he was from a small and incomplete world — not quaint or colorful, but destitute and dangerous to itself — with “spiritual blight.” His world was a fragment, and the people in it indulged themselves in make-believe and fantasy.

He had written honestly about this little world, but was it possible, he wondered, to turn something so private into art or literature? Also — just as important — would it sell?

He felt miserable. He wanted to buy a house but did not know where, “what physical area of the earth.” He wanted to write a book but his sense of crisis told him it would never find its audience. He felt that no one really cared about his dilemma.

I had dilemmas of my own: no money, a book in progress, the plays and poems of Shakespeare’s contemporaries to teach, an awful house with no air conditioning on a Singapore back street. My son was almost two; my wife was pregnant again and wondering whether she had the strength to go on working. As if I didn’t have enough to worry about, the vice-chancellor of the university, Dr. Toh Chin Chye, stopped me outside the library one day and told me my hair was too long.

I was in the right mood to explicate Vidia’s deepening sense of exile. Vidia agreed: he said it was opportune that I had suggested a book about his work. It eased his mind to know that I was eager to write something. In talking about his island, his sadness, his sense of exile, his uncertainty, he was preparing me. He was saying plainly that I had to know his background or else I would misinterpret him.

I took this as encouragement to write a book about his work. I made a bibliography. I read everything he had written, including all the incidental pieces — his 1958 review of Gustie Herrigel’s Zen in the Art of Flower Arrangement , his profile of Graham Greene, pieces in Vogue and Punch , his many London Letters in the Illustrated Weekly of India . Even his journalism sparkled.

In another air letter from Gloucestershire, Vidia stressed how temporary his residence was, how he was shuttling around. He also urged me to get out of Singapore and find a place that was intellectually congenial. He saw me having to endure in Singapore the sort of second-rate society he had known in Trinidad. He was interested that we were having a second child — he seemed a trifle dubious. He said he was pleased that I was writing a new book (“you really are a worker”). He looked forward to my study of his work. He gave me total freedom to criticize, deplore, dismiss anything I wished.

“You must give me the pleasure of seeing what I look like,” he said. “It would be like hearing one’s own voice, seeing oneself walk down the street. Show me!”

Did he want me to be brutal? I didn’t think so. I had told him how much I had liked The Loss of El Dorado . The Italian historian Benedetto Croce had said, “All history is contemporary,” that the present was part of all history that was written. So Vidia’s book explained much of what was going on in the year of its publication, 1970: the issues of race and violence and colonialism. A colony was by its very nature dependent and inferior. Vidia believed that a colony did not have the intelligence or concentration to rebel, which was why colonials had a self-destructive instinct for chaos.