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

VIDIA SPOKE about finding me, yet my conceit was that I had discovered him. Both could have been true. Friendship is often a case of mutual rescue. The previous year, in Singapore, I had written a book about his work because he was unknown in the United States. He had no American publisher; his American editions were out of print; there had never been paperbacks. I was grateful to him for his help in my writing, but I also thought he could use my help. And publishing my book in the States might bring both of us to the attention of readers. So V. S. Naipaul: An Introduction to His Work was a labor of love, done out of friendship, but like many gifts it was also self-serving.

The book was accepted by Vidia’s publisher. The advance was small, surprisingly small — say, four lunches at the Connaught. I was counting on my novel Saint Jack to restore me to solvency.

Writing to me at The Forge from Trinidad, Vidia expressed his pleasure that the book about him was to be published. In spite of the tiny advance, he said, his publisher would stand by the book. If it sold well I would benefit; if it was a good book, it would cause many things to happen. A worthy book made its own way, and a gifted author never failed to be rewarded. And, sometimes, miracles happened.

I had complained to him that I was working too hard, combining work on my novel with writing book reviews. He said he understood my dilemma.

“You need to appear more often in the English papers, to broaden the base of your reputation,” he said. Practical as always, sound advice. “But they do pay appallingly.”

On the subject of drudging as a freelance, Vidia knew what he was talking about. He had trodden this same road, hacking away on Grub Street, twelve years before: the small rented house, tight money, the weekly review, hack work and honorariums. I knew from the bibliography I had made that he had reviewed many books while writing A House for Mr. Biswas . If he could write a masterpiece and review books at the same time, surely I could follow his example. He was sensitive to this burden, which was part of a writer’s independence. Writers in residence never faced it, salaried magazine staffers and writers on fat contracts were oblivious of it, but for the freelance writer it is a constant dilemma, because the freelancer hates to say no to any request, for fear that the requests will vanish. At the same time, the freelancer knows that the true meaning of “hack” is “workhorse.”

A similar sort of problem had just arisen in Vidia’s writing life. He intended to go to South America, on assignment for The New York Review of Books . But its rates were low. He wanted to write about Argentina — and the Review would print anything he cared to write — yet he felt there was no profit in it. So he was inclined to remain in Trinidad, at his sister’s, queen-beeing it, so he said.

His usual discursive medical report was appended to this letter. He tended to go into minute detail when the subject was money or health. He anatomized insomnia, and his dealings on the stock market were another sort of fever chart. Writing exhausted him. Each time he finished a book he was close to collapse. He said he had been working steadily from 1965 to 1971, and he felt depleted by The Mimic Men, The Loss of El Dorado , and In a Free State , as well as by all the journalism — enough to fill another book. The potted history of his physical effort was just the inspiration I needed, though I was alarmed by the consequences he described: extreme torpor, fatigue, dizzy spells in public places, frayed nerves—“the mind, rather than the body, calling for rest and still more rest.”

In this burned-out state he stopped writing, and I remembered his saying, “I may fall silent.” I still wrote to him in Trinidad. I had more time now. I had finished Saint Jack and sold it to The Bodley Head in London. It had not solved my problems. My English advance was £250, half on signature, half on publication. For my year’s work on the novel I now had £125, minus the agent’s ten percent — five meals at the Connaught. “We wish it were more,” my editor had said. So did I.

All these tiddly, trifling numbers — but they mattered to me at the time because my life depended on them.

“And you say you don’t want me to get a job?” my wife said. But she did not recriminate; she was gentle. This was a delicate subject.

She got a job with the BBC and we moved to London, wrenched from Dorset in the clammy English spring, with a damp summer looming. Instead of rural poverty, which I found bearable for its downrightness and sufficiently dignified for the amount of space we had — a whole house, the surrounding woods and meadows — we were now plunged into a dreary inner suburb, in a small apartment. It was nasty and uncomfortable, narrow, dirty, mean, and noisy. It smelled, it was cold. The seedy grumbling neighbors, the big cars flashing loudly past on the main road — every bit of it was like a reminder of failure.

I wanted to start another novel. I had a good idea, based on a ghost story I had been told in Dorset by an old man in the Gollop Arms. My first impression of Dorset was of a weird landscape. I wanted to write about that, a place darker and stranger than anything I had known in Africa. Beyond the ghost story, the germ of my idea was of an English anthropologist who has thrived in Africa and then retires and returns home to this haunted place.

But in London I had no place to work. We lived in two rooms in a noisy, much subdivided house. I tried to write on a table in the bedroom but was disturbed by all the ambiguous memories and associations: a bedroom is charged with dreams and slumber and sex, and this one had all the residue of its previous tenants. It stank, too, as bedrooms in rented houses often do.

It was at ground level, and from where I sat, with my back to the room, I could see beyond the weedy front yard to Gordon Road, Ealing, under a gray sky. My two children were in the other room, staring at the rented television set. I could not work. I felt idle. I complained of this idleness to Vidia. His response was friendly and wise.

“The essence of the freelance life is freedom,” he wrote. And he spoke of indolence as an aspect of freedom, one that I should accept. He said that any freelancer needed the confidence to believe that in spite of occasional setbacks, everything was going to be fine in the end. But of course that was a problem. “This faith your friends cannot give you: it is something you have to discover in yourself.”

He went on to speak approvingly of my wife’s job with the BBC World Service, which he listened to all the time. This second letter from Trinidad was more allusive than any I had received from him lately. He seemed refreshed by his trip to Argentina — he had taken the assignment after all. He had been back in Port of Spain for only two days and he was making plans. He would first write his pieces, one on the Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges, the other on Argentina itself, Evita and Peronism figuring strongly. After that, he had to choose whether to go to Brazil (for £400) or New Zealand (for £500), or head straight back to The Bungalow. He had recently turned down trips to Canada and Nigeria.

Perversely, being in demand reminded him of rejection. The very fact of this friendly attention and the many invitations gave him a gloomy vision of his future, when he would get no attention, nor any invitations. He could not contemplate acceptance without anticipating his being superfluous. In this mood he regarded goodwill as a curse and praise as the Evil Eye.

Preparing the collection of pieces that he was planning to call The Overcrowded Barracoon and Other Articles , he was opposed by Pat on his intention to include his pieces about India. She said that no one would be interested in them. The reviewers would use those pieces to attack the book for its monotonous insistence on Indian subjects, Indian elections, Indian deficiencies. Pat was correct, India was his obsessive subject, but the act of writing was obsessive and often irrational. So he resisted. He felt that in the end he would be all right. He often said so.