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

That was his greatest strength, his unwavering belief that writing was fair — that a good book cannot fail, that it will ultimately be recognized as good; that a bad book will eventually be seen as junk, no matter what happens in the short run. Only the long run mattered. There was justice in writing. If you failed, you deserved to fail. You had to accept your failure.

This belief was both armor and a sword, and by repetition he instilled this belief in me and made me strong. It was a little early to tell whether we would be rewarded for our work. The external signs were still ambiguous. He was living in a room at his sister’s house, in 3 Woodlands Road, Valsayn Park, Port of Spain, Trinidad; and I inhabited, with my family of four, a pair of narrow rooms in 80 Gordon Road, Ealing, West London, with someone’s radio playing and a child crying upstairs. It helped that I believed in my writing, and it helped as much — perhaps more — that he believed in me.

Even his asking favors was a form of giving me confidence. He wondered whether I would be willing to look over the proofs of his collection of articles. If anything dismayed me, I should tell him. This was the book I had suggested to him after I read all his magazine pieces in Singapore. I had made a list. He used some from the list but in the end did not include any of the book reviews I had found. That was another lesson. He said that book reviews served their purpose but had no lasting value, except for the jokes. “Too bad we can’t keep the jokes and get rid of the rest.” He chose long, solid pieces. He had put enormous effort into his journalism, bringing to it the intensity of fiction writing. In this period, as he put it, no novel offered itself to him.

He had no ideas for a novel. “Creatively, I continue barren.” He was healthier than he had felt for a while, but he feared the future. He maintained that my most productive years and best work were ahead of me — I had that to look forward to. That promise excited me. As for himself, “At forty, I have the sickening sensation that my work is behind me.”

The very sight of his books irritated him. He hated talking about them. He felt like a fraud. He was pretty gloomy, he said. “In this profession, is satisfaction ever attained?”

The words were harsher than the tone he used in the rest of the letter. He seemed energetic, like a mountaineer cheerfully grumbling about the steepness of the ascent as he skipped from ledge to ledge. He even sounded hopeful. “If I write again, though, I think it will be a new man writing.” Up till then, writing had been his “therapy.” It had given him confidence, he said. Now he suggested that he was starting over.

Already he seemed like a new man. No novel, true, but he had pieces to write and travel plans. And he was full of insights. He said that a girl he had met in Argentina had copied two pages from a Thomas Hardy novel in which a heroine reflects on the melancholy of her life and situation. One of the Hardy lines, “meanest kisses were at famine prices,” was frightening, Vidia said, commenting on the shocking juxtaposition of “famine” and “prices” and “kisses.”

He did not quote more than this, and he gave me only the tide of the novel, The Return of the Native , but I found the pages and, moved by what I read, marked several paragraphs with a red pen.

To be loved to madness — such was her great desire. Love was the one cordial which could drive away the eating loneliness of her days. And she seemed to long for the abstraction called passionate love more than for any particular lover.

She could show a most reproachful look at times, but it was directed less against human beings than against certain creatures of her mind, the chief of these being Destiny, through whose interference she dimly fancied it arose that love alighted only on gliding youth — that any love she might win would sink simultaneously with the sand in the glass. She thought of it with an ever-growing consciousness of cruelty, which tended to breed actions of reckless unconventionality, framed to snatch a year’s, a week’s, even an hour’s passion from anywhere while it could be won. Through want of it she had sung without being merry, possessed without enjoying, outshone without triumphing. Her loneliness deepened her desire. On Egdon, coldest and meanest kisses were at famine prices; and where was a mouth matching hers to be found?

Fidelity in love for fidelity’s sake had less attraction for her than for most women: fidelity because of love’s grip had much. A blaze of love, and extinction, was better than a lantern glimmer of the same which should last long years. On this head she knew by prevision what most women learn only by experience: she had mentally walked round love, told the towers thereof, considered its palaces; and concluded that love was but a doleful joy. Yet she desired it, as one in a desert would be thankful for brackish water.

She often repeated her prayers; not at particular times, but, like the unaffected devout, when she desired to pray. Her prayer was always spontaneous, and often ran thus, “O deliver my heart from this fearful gloom and loneliness: send me great love from somewhere, else I shall die.”

“So I feel about love and writing,” Vidia wrote to me. Waxing uncharacteristically lyrical, he said he needed passion and comedy and relief from the past. If he were not vitalized, he feared he would die at a time when he was capable of writing brilliantly.

This astonished me — the sudden outburst, the yearning, the passion, the appeal. It sounded like the fear of unrequited love. He then quoted some lines from Derek Walcott. He had quoted Walcott before; the man was a neighbor islander, a man close to his own age. He said the words had scared him in 1954 when he had first read them: “But my talent grew bad and my wit turned stale /—but I sprang from my mind—”

I reread the lines. I reread the Hardy: “meanest kisses.” Vidia closed, saying, “See how this jolly letter has turned out. Strange things happen when a writer sits down on an off day to write to a friend.”

That was like a poem (“See how…”). Vidia’s lines were more mellifluous and rhythmic and meaningful than Walcott’s, with its weak second line. Once again, by his using the word “friend” and his affirmation of friendship, I was bucked up. That same day, in spite of the radio and the squawking child and my debts, I had the confidence to work. I began plotting my next novel, The Black House .

One other thing I noticed. His letter had been tampered with. He had done the tampering, had torn off half a page. He explained it in a teasing parenthesis: “Last half of that first page censored. I must keep some secrets.”

When Pat wrote a month later from Trinidad to say that she liked my book about Vidia’s work, I was pleased; and she added, “Vidia cannot be detached from it. He read with great absorption and smiled or laughed often,” which delighted me.

Yet I continued to worry about what was to become of me. My strategy had been to write and survive that way; my strategy was not working. A novel, a book of criticism, scores of book reviews, a collection of short stories — this in less than a year had produced such a paltry income that I was grateful to my wife for getting a job. Now I was at work on my seventh novel, and still doing journalism, and it did not seem as though I could make a living. All this in spite of burning the midnight oil and getting wonderful reviews.

In this profession, is satisfaction ever attained?

I thought, Yes. I was satisfied, but I had no money. It was all the more important that I had Vidia as a friend.

Pat said she saw the love and understanding in my book V. S. Naipaul , and the depth of this feeling had given me unusual insights into Vidia’s work. She confessed that she had thought of writing something personal about Vidia. During the writing of In a Free State , he had read a biography of Tolstoy and a book about Dorothy Wordsworth and other writers’ lives. Literary biography was something Vidia often read, as if peering through a window to compare his life with the lives of fellow sufferers. Listening to him read aloud from the diaries of Dorothy Wordsworth and Sonya Tolstoy, Pat Naipaul marveled at the perceptions, and she thought she might do something similar.