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

He had been proven right about East Africa. Idi Amin had taken over and threatened to expel the Indians. “What will you do when the crunch comes?” Vidia had asked almost five years before. The crunch was coming in Uganda.

The reviews of El Dorado had been good, though Graham Greene had reservations, finding the prose “airless.” Vidia was unmoved. Reviews did not really help a book, nor did publicity matter. If a book was good it would sell, and it would last.

“The only consolation of the writing profession is that it is fair,” Vidia said in another air letter to me. This was his watchword, that literary excellence was always rewarded, in spite of everything.

He then explained something that he had not had time to go into when he first mentioned it in an air letter almost a year before: how he had been grateful to me for having written Girls at Play . He said that my confidence and forthrightness in the book had encouraged him to think seriously about setting a novel in Africa. It had been something he felt was impossible for him.

Five months after reading my African novel, he had started an African novel of his own. He was happy with its progress. It was a short novel. Writing it, he said, he thought constantly of me.

That was a great compliment: something I had written about Africa had had a positive influence on Vidia. The result was In a Free State, which would not be published for another year.

Around this time I had word from London that B. S. Johnson (“Remember, you’re first a poet”) had committed suicide. In a fit of depression he had sat before a mirror, slashed his wrists, and watched himself bleed to death. He had been just a few years older than me and one of the most optimistic writers I knew. I never found out what went wrong.

Vidia kept me confident, and he filled me with such hope that I began to think of leaving Singapore, taking my wife and two children — my second son, Louis, had been born in Singapore in 1970—somewhere and never again working for a salary, never having a boss or employees. Vidia had always emphasized the freedom of a writer. It was something I badly wanted. I finished Jungle Lovers and decided to take off for a few weeks, to get on a ship to Borneo and climb Mount Kinabalu. My wife said, “If that’s what you want…”

So I went to Borneo by sea. In the town of Kota Kinabalu I hired a Malay man to guide me. We went up and down the mountain without any technical equipment, hiking through jungles and upwards through forests of ferns and carnivorous plants. The pitcher plants were pitcher-sized, and purple orchids hung in clusters from wet trees. We spent several nights in mountainside shelters. On my way home I decided to give Singapore one more year and then re-sign.

I asked Vidia where I should go.

Think carefully about what you are planning, he said in his next air letter. I had mentioned the English countryside, but he said I was too young to retreat there. I needed to have connections to society. I should not cut myself off. “Life appears very long; but no one does much creative work of a new sort after fifty; and the next twenty years are of great importance to you.” I was twenty-nine.

He doubted that England was a good place to live. It was sterile; there was no intellectual debate; English writers were cliquey. A writer had to be a part of the world if his work was to matter. “Hemingway, Fitzgerald and the others, who were outside the world, are bad writers, for their inability to see beyond their careers as ‘writers.’”

It was only possible, he said, to live in the English countryside if I had a book to write. Otherwise it was dreary and pointless. In any case, I would need to go to London once a week to see people, buy books, keep in touch. He advised me not to buy a house but simply to see what England was like. I should not commit myself, because essentially a house in the country was a place to write, a retreat. The world was elsewhere. He had been living in Gloucestershire for ten months, but as soon as he finished In a Free State he was getting out, he said, “to see the world again.”

A month later there was another air letter. He had been brooding over my expression “cottage in Dorset,” which was what I had in mind. He satirized my words, saying that I was thinking in clichés about the English countryside—“milk maids, spring mornings, polite rural greetings,” and also the absurd daydream of writing in the bosom of England on a sunny day behind the bright mullioned windows of my library.

Yet I had no fantasies of this kind. I was looking for an inexpensive house in a rural setting because I had a book to write. I had finished with Africa. I was making notes for a new novel, set in Singapore, about a man who becomes stuck there, working for a cruel Chinese boss (“Get a haircut”) — my nightmare — and how he survives by pimping. Vietnam was to be part of it, since American soldiers came to Singapore all the time on R and R. I mentioned Dorset as a possibility because my in-laws now lived there and were looking for a house we might rent. I was itching to quit my job; I longed to spend my whole day writing.

In Singapore I was the last of the Mohicans: all the other expatriates in my department had left. The new policy was to hire only Chinese lecturers. I was asked when I would be leaving; they wanted to replace me with an ethnic Chinese person.

“I’m staying,” I said, just to annoy them. Privately I vowed to leave as soon as I could.

It was not merely that I felt overworked. I was also sick of Staff Club drunks, grousing expats, rude Singaporeans, high humidity, and monsoon rain. I hated our house, the stinks from the storm drain, the way my pen slipped through my perspiring fingers. There was no hinterland in Singapore. To cure myself of this sense of confinement, I traveled, taking turns with my wife in looking after the two children. But I had the better of it. I took the train from Singapore to Bangkok, then went to Burma, to Bali, and hiked in northern Sumatra, among the Batak people. In Bali late in 1970, I seriously considered dropping out, disappearing with my family, taking to the hills. But that was the effect of a brief experiment in smoking heroin. I was soon back at my desk.

When In a Free State was done, Vidia said in an air letter from London, “This book will be of special interest to you: you and you alone, for reasons you will understand when you read it, are able to say certain things about it.”

He is my friend, I thought. I have a friend. I was a part of his writing life now, and he was certainly part of mine. In the dedicated diaristic activity of letter writing, I reported my progress — and he praised it; I sought his advice — and he obliged me; and we talked about the world. He was right about his book. I read it with special interest. I recognized many faces and landscapes.

Vidia went to Jamaica early in 1971. He sent me an air letter from Kingston to say that he had found some of his early articles back home in Trinidad and was struck by how hard he had worked and how quickly time had passed. He said, “I had the curious feeling that I was looking over the relics of a dead man.”

He urged me to press on with the book about his work. He listed all the obscure magazines he had written for, including The Illustrated Weekly of India, The Economic Weekly (Bombay), and London Life, Twentieth Century , and Queen . He wanted me to succeed with my book. He was sure there was a market for it. Still he was nowhere in the United States, and in spite of the prizes he had won in Britain, his sales were small.

In the middle of May 1971, he reported in an air letter that he was at a very low ebb. He had retreated to Wiltshire, to a bungalow on a large estate. The bungalow was another borrowed address that made him feel like an exile. He had been sick and depressed for five months and had not written anything and so had earned nothing, which he underlined.