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

Tennant had been out of his mind for years. “I am the Prince Youssoupoff of England!” he sometimes screamed. His hair was dyed purple, and sometimes hennaed. He put on makeup every morning, crimson lipstick, rouge for his cheeks, and eye shadow — he was said to have sixty-six shades of eye shadow. He never went anywhere without his teddy bear and his toy plush monkey. Though he seldom stirred outside his house, he was not a recluse; he sometimes traveled to Bournemouth to buy cosmetics, and now and then went to London and even New York. He wrote bad poems. Before he went completely off his head, he had been a socialite. He had known Willa Cather and E. M. Forster, and one of his lovers had been the war poet Siegfried Sassoon. He also painted. His childishly hyperbolic pictures were of cartoonish men, sailors mostly, lascars, matelots, with the faces of lecherous cherubs, big biceps, and improbable bulges in their trousers, some like cucumbers and some like cantaloupes.

An idle, silly queen, Stephen Tennant was upper class and rich, so people laughed at his jokes and called him marvelous. He was looked after by a couple, Mr. and Mrs. Skull—“the Skulls,” Vidia called them, always referring to John and Mary Skull as a pair. In protecting Tennant and attending to him, the Skulls, kindly and long-suffering, had become the sort of English servants who were indistinguishable from masters. They had power — nanny power, butler boldness, “Begging your pardon, sir, but…”—and they stood between sad, giggling Stephen and the world. Were anyone to attempt to remove the strangling ivy from the trees on the estate, the Skulls would put a stop to that, smartish, as they might say. “We’ll have none of that here.”

But the black ivy made the place spooky and gave the trees an asymmetrical shape. The density and damage of the ivy obscured the varieties and species of the trees. They had the starkness of gallows, all standing in the soggy water meadows.

After almost nine years in the tropics, I could not believe how dark and unfriendly this landscape looked. Haunted was a perfect word for it. It seemed to me the weirdest place I had ever been. I felt a stronger sense of alienation than I had ever known in Bundibugyo. I looked at the dead and decaying trees and thought of Tennant.

The oddest thing was that Vidia had not set eyes on Tennant. In the event, after fifteen years Vidia had only a glimpse of the man, and he never spoke to him. Of all the strange places Vidia had lived, this was by far the strangest. But The Bungalow was cheap: Vidia paid his nominal rent to Lord Glenconner, Stephen’s brother Christopher Tennant, and Vidia became the writer at the bottom of the garden, living within shouting distance of a crackpot who often said, “Some people think I’m a genius.”

The Bungalow was poorly lit, with a low ceiling and thick cold walls and small windows. The flatness of Wiltshire was unlike anything in the west of Dorset, the neighbor county, where we lived. We were seventy miles away, in the rugged hills at the lip of Marshwood Vale, among the hedgerows, hardly hedgerows, sportive briars, and crumbling rock walls and earthworks. Near our house, called The Forge, there were old hill forts and small dark churches. The nearest church, in the village of Stoke Abbott, had been built in the eleventh century. The Forge had five rooms. I sat in the smallest one upstairs, writing my novel Saint Jack . Singapore and sunlight and mischief on my inky pages; and outside my window dark skies, wet lumpy fields, and black leafless trees, all oaks, which howled when the salt wind tore through their branches.

Please telephone, please visit, Vidia had written.

“You are phoning at the most expensive time of day!” he said when I spoke to him. It was eleven in the morning. I was not extravagant but careless. I was eager to see him again. We agreed on a day.

Vidia had prepared me for the social rituals of English life, the stages of getting acquainted, which started with a cup-of-coffee meeting and progressed, as the friendship ripened, to drinks at five and then the greater commitment of lunch. Dinner was the highest level of intimacy. “Dinner is grand,” Vidia said. “Dinner is important.” Meals and rituals meant a great deal to him. He always insisted on choosing the wine, though he seldom paid for it. (“People enjoy paying. I don’t want to spoil their pleasure.”) He noticed the quality of the food, even if he did not eat much. He judged people by what they offered him — the restaurant, the meal, the wine, the conversation, even the way that people dressed. If they were badly dressed he was insulted. He took everything personally. Your shoes not shined? That was a comment on him. Your scruffiness was rudeness.

I had bought a bottle of wine in our market town of Bridport, on the river Brit, and set off with my wife, leaving plenty of time for the trip, knowing Vidia to be an obsessive timekeeper. Lateness was also rudeness.

Preparing for such a visit, I was always reminded of his once saying about someone, “You see? He is afraid he is going to do something wrong and therefore he does everything wrong. Anxious about failing, he fails. It is almost deliberate.”

But Vidia was also my friend. The last time we had been together, I was in Uganda and had published nothing. Five years had passed. I had published Waldo, Fong and the Indians, Girls at Play, Murder in Mount Holly, Jungle Lovers . I was done with V. S. Naipaul: An Introduction to His Work . I had just received an advance copy of my collection of short stories, Sinning with Annie . I was half done with Saint Jack . Eight books: I was thirty.

My advances had been small, my sales modest; still, I knew I had done the right thing in chucking my Singapore job and striking out on my own. I had done it with Vidia’s encouragement. He had insisted there was no middle way. A writer had to be a free man. Anyone with a salary and a boss and office obligations was not free.

This subject came up on the way to Vidia’s.

“I want to get a job,” my wife said. She had an Oxford education, she was intelligent, and to her — to many women at that time — a job represented a sort of freedom.

“What will you do in Dorset?”

“We’ll have to move to London. There are no jobs here.”

But I liked Dorset, liked its darkness most of all — I wanted to write about it. This remote part of Dorset had pagan roots, witch stories, and on its prettiest churches ugly-faced gargoyles known locally as hunky-punks; it was deeply rural, snug and distant and cozy. The rent was low, and the hinterland was full of dropouts, potters and painters, farm laborers, rat catchers, and farriers. I met them at the pub, playing darts and skittles and bar billiards, at the Gollop Arms in South Bowood, which was not even a hamlet, just a crossroads. Up the road, at Four Ashes, another crossroads, there was a haunted house, called The Black House.

We traveled east on the road to Vidia’s, talking about jobs; from Powerstock to Evershot and Wynford Eagle and Toller Porcorum and Puddletown near Tolpuddle, and onward past East Coker, where T. S. Eliot was buried.

“This is so beautiful,” I said.

“I’d rather be in London,” she said.

The thought of sooty bricks and filthy air and sour faces in London only depressed me, and in this mood of disagreement we arrived at Wilsford Manor and rolled up to The Bungalow. Vidia, who was a keen receptor of vibrations, definitely sensed the unresolved conflict, a sense of static and clatter in the air. I could tell, because he was so solicitous. He also knew a thing or two about marital quarrels. He was chirping, glad to see us.

“Before we go in — look. You see that wall?”

It was a thick cracked battlement near The Bungalow.