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

Wait, wait, wait. You know I’m lying, don’t you? This is not a novel, it is a memory.

The man is not “U. V. Pradesh.” It is V.S. Naipaul, and the book I mentioned in the previous chapter is The Mystic Masseur , and the hero is Ganesh Ramsumair of Trinidad, who turned into G. Ramsay Muir in London. Yomo is Yomo, and Hallsmith is Hallsmith, but the young man is not Julian Lavalle. It’s me, Paul Theroux, and I am shining my light upon the past. I cannot improve on this story, because Naipaul always said, Don’t prettify it , and The greatest writing is a disturbing vision offered from a position of strength — aspire to that , and Tell the truth .

It is a morning in June on Cape Cod, bright and dry — hasn’t rained for more than a month — and I have set myself the task of putting down everything that happened thirty years ago in Africa, when I first met him, because it all matters. I cannot change any of this. I am writing with a ballpoint on a pad at my desk. How can this be a novel? This narrative is not something that would be improved by the masks of fiction. It needs only to be put in order. I am free of the constraint of alteration and fictionalizing.

You would say “Isn’t that V.S. Naipaul?” in any case.

There is so much of it. This was going to be a short memoir, but now I see it will be a book, because I remember everything. Where was I? Yes. He was laughing.

— especially when Naipaul was laughing at one of his own pointed remarks. It was a surprised bellow of appreciation, deepened and made resonant by tobacco smoke and asthma. It made you wonder whether he saw something you didn’t see. I learned all this within seconds of our first meeting, at Hallsmith’s party. With a disgusted and fastidious face, Naipaul had commented on how dirty Kampala was. Having just read The Mystic Masseur —a better title than The Part-Time Pundit; I will stick to the facts — I said, quoting his shopkeeper in the book, “It only looks dirty.”

With his deep, fruity smoker’s laugh booming in his lungs, he showed me his delight and then gave me the next line, and the next. He recited most of that page. He could have given me the whole book verbatim. I was thinking how he knew his work well. He told me later that he knew each of his books by heart, storing them during the slow process of writing and rewriting them in longhand.

After he was introduced to more people, his martyred smile returned. He was soon in distress. When Yomo said, “Your characters in your books talk like Nigerians,” he merely stared at her and frowned.

“Really.”

To someone with no sense of irony, his tone was one of shimmering fascination. He was thrown by Yomo’s innocent statement, and perhaps by Yomo herself, who was very dark with high cheekbones and those drowsy eyes; in her stiffly wound turban she towered over him. She had the effect of making shorter people seem always to be ducking her. Naipaul behaved that way, moved sideways, nearer to me, dodging her, as if he were unused to discussing his work with such a tall, self-assured black woman.

“Where are you staying?” I asked.

“Here, I’m afraid,” he said, clearly intending to say more when his wife interrupted him.

“Vidia,” she said in a cautioning voice. That was the first time I heard his name, a contraction of it, which was Vidiadhar.

“Patsy,” he said, acquiescing, smiling in misery.

His wife, Patricia, was a small pale woman with a sweet face, premature gray hair, lovely pale blue eyes, and full lips with the sort of contour and droop that even in repose suggests a lisp. She was pretty, about ten years older than me, and though she was assertive, she seemed frail.

“They’ve promised us a house,” he said. “Mr. Bwogo. Have I got it right? Mr. Bwogo.” He nodded and seemed to recite it, giving it too many syllables: “ Bah-wo-go .” “It seems nothing can be done without Mr. Bwogo.”

“He’s the chief housing officer,” I said.

“Chief housing officer,” Naipaul said, and just saying it, reciting it again in his gloomy voice, he made the title ridiculous and grand and ill suited to describe Mr. Bwogo.

“I’m sure he’ll take care of you,” I said.

With sudden insistence, as if demanding a drink, he said, “I want to meet people. Tell me whom I should meet.”

This baffled me, both the question and the urgent way he made me responsible for the answer. But I was flattered too, most of all because of the intense way he waited for a reply. Nerves of concentration tightened in his face, and even his muscles contrived to make his posture more than just receptive — imploring. On that first meeting I had an inkling of him as an intimidating listener.

“What is it you want to know?” I asked.

“I want to understand,” he said. “I want to meet people who know what is happening here. People who read books. People who are still in the world. You can find them for me, can’t you? I don’t mean only at Makerere.”

He smiled, making a hash of the university’s name, pronouncing it “Maka-ray-ray.”

“Because I suspect a lot of fraudulence,” he said. “One hears it. One has vibrations.”

Pat had winced at “Maka-ray-ray” and said in an exasperated way, “He has no trouble at all with the most difficult Indian names.”

“Do you know Rajagopalachari’s translation of the Mahabharata? ” Naipaul said, and laughed hard, the laughter in his lungs like a loud kind of hydraulics.

I introduced him to my head of department, an expatriate Englishman named Gerald Moore, who was an anthologizer as well as an evangelizer of African poetry. Having spent some time in Nigeria, Gerald occasionally attempted a Yoruba salutation upon Yomo, whose way of replying was to mock his mispronunciation by repeating it in a shriek, opening her mouth very wide in Gerald’s pink face. But he was a friendly fellow, and he had hired me. He mentioned his African anthology to Naipaul.

“Really,” Naipaul said, mocking in his profoundly fascinated way, and now I understood his tone as utter disbelief and dismissal.

The irony was not lost on Gerald, who fidgeted and said, “Some quite good poems.”

“Really.”

“Leopold Senghor.”

“Isn’t he the president of something?”

“Senegal,” Gerald said. “And Rabearivelo.”

“Is he a president too?”

“Dead, actually. Madagascan.”

“These names just trip off your tongue.”

“I could give you a copy,” Gerald said. “It’s a Penguin.”

“A Penguin, yes,” Naipaul said. “You are so kind.”

“I also do some writing. I’d like to show you. See what you think.”

Naipaul smiled a wolfish smile and said, “Are you sure you want me to read your poems? I warn you that I will tell you exactly what I think.”

“That’s all right.”

“But I’m brutal, you know.”

Gerald winced, and later on the verandah he said to me, “He’s different from what I expected.”

“In what way?”

“Rather patrician.”

But I thought: I want to show him my work. I want to know exactly what he thinks. I had never shown anyone my novel. I wanted him to be brutal.

I saw Naipaul talking to Professor Dudney, an authority on the pastoral Karamojong people of Karamoja, one of the northern provinces of Uganda. The Karamojong went mother-naked, and the men were often photographed posing unashamed, letting their penises hang as impressively as prize aubergines. Dudney had married a Karamojong woman, who was just as attracted to Kampala cocktail parties as Dudney was to Karamojong rituals during which the blood of cattle was guzzled.

At about five o’clock, Haji Hallsmith started turning the knobs of a large wooden radio. He urged the guests to be seated, to listen to the program, one he had made himself with his African students. I knew the producer, Miles Lee, an authentic Gypsy whose training for Radio Uganda consisted of working for many years as a fortuneteller at the Goose Fair in Nottingham. He too had become a Muslim, changing his middle name, Allday, to Ahmed, and could be found drinking with Haji Hallsmith. He was another one who said, “Of course Muslims can drink. But not during prayers.”