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

She began making notes, describing Vidia’s progress on his book, keeping a diary, writing down his comments. But she lost heart. She had never been strong, and it was hard to write in a household where the central figure was V.S. Naipaul. She felt she lacked profundity and passion; she suspected that she was trivial. There was something wrong about her — Vidia’s wife — using him as the subject for a candid or intimate portrait. It was intrusive and bordered on vulgarity.

That was why, she said, my book meant so much to her, because I expressed many of her own feelings about Vidia’s work. She said she was delighted I had done the book, since she was so similarly affected by his writing.

Another success, another good review, but I had no income. I was angry and bewildered. I had not asked for much, only a simple living. I did not dare think about getting rich. I wanted to get by, nothing more.

In the midst of my bewilderment, a letter was pushed through the letter slot of this rented place, asking me if I would consider being a writer in residence at the University of Virginia, starting in two months. I said yes. If I went alone and lived like a monk, I could finish my novel and pocket most of my salary. I would be away four months, the first semester.

My wife said, “I’ll miss you.”

She understood. She was happy working at the BBC, and this fulfillment made her sympathetic about my frustration. But there was something especially galling about returning to a university a year after quitting my Singapore job and saying I would never teach again. I should have been consoled by my grandiose job title, writer in residence, but it mocked me. A writer was supposed to be free of any employer — Vidia had said so.

In Virginia, living my monkish life, I received a letter from Vidia describing his trip to New Zealand. He was back at The Bungalow. He had passed through Trinidad again, visited Argentina again, finished writing his pieces. He had read my book and wanted to reread it, because he had been distracted by work. He had also felt self-conscious, being written about. He was his usual paradoxical self: “But I don’t think it matters what I think (and I don’t know what I think),”

He wanted to meet, to talk about England and how I was adapting. Was I disappointed? After my eight years in the tropics, what did I think of this “industrial reality"?

Africa was on his mind, because the Indians had been thrown out of Uganda by Idi Amin. As he had predicted so often, he said, Uganda was turning into a jungle. He blamed the white expatriates, who would take no responsibility for Amin — yet they had created the situation that had produced Amin. In the end they would go away and allow Uganda to become a forgotten horror.

I had not heard Vidia denounce a situation so thoroughly for years, but his anger was doubtless deepened by the fact that all his dire warnings had been fulfilled. He had predicted the rise of the dictatorship, the expulsion of the Indians, the bolting of the whites, the decline of Kampala into bush.

“It is an obscene continent, fit only for second-rate people. Second-rate whites with second-rate ambitions, who are prepared, as in South Africa, to indulge in the obscenity of disciplining Africans.” You either stayed away or you remained, with a whip in your hand. Uganda proved that the only survivors in Africa were second-raters and savages, masters and slaves.

This was the most severe condemnation he had ever made. He was raging as eighty thousand Indians — men, women, and children — were being loaded onto planes, their valuables being snatched from them by African soldiers. They were losing homes and land and businesses, and in many cases their life savings. Most were allowed into Britain, but they really did not want to live in a cold and hostile climate. They had few defenders in Britain and the United States; they had none in Africa. Africans heckled them, and the white expatriates, as Vidia had said, stood by and watched.

“The melancholy thing about the world is that it is full of stupid and common people; and the world is run for the benefit of the stupid and the common.”

As for plans, Vidia had none. He had been back in England for only four days, and he felt he was living through an uncertain, purgatorial period. He spoke of his four years without a house. He feared a stock market crash. He wanted to write a book but had no ideas. It was his old feeling of emptiness and insecurity, of his life’s being over, the dusty intimation of the scrap heap.

He was low and feeling adrift. It was his alienated mood of What country? What passport ? He was placeless in The Bungalow and this was another reason he wanted to talk about England with me. He wanted to find out what I liked and didn’t like. He saw me as another wanderer.

But I was in Virginia, dreaming of my wife and two children, like a sailor in a storm at sea, vowing that I would never do this again. Vidia spoke of going back to Trinidad to cover the violent murders that had taken place at a Black Power commune.

His verdict on my book about his work was just what I wanted. He said he had read it “with amazement, delight and great humility. It seems marvelously responsive and humane; it reminds me and informs me of things that I had forgotten and perhaps had never realized.” He spoke of my generosity and thoroughness. Reflecting on so much labor in the past (“gone, gone”), he became apprehensive about the future. He was sad and fearful, he said.

He had won the John Llewelyn Rhys Memorial Prize, the Somerset Maugham Award, the Hawthornden Prize, the W. H. Smith Award, and, with In a Free State , the Booker Prize. Already he was being spoken of as the greatest living writer in the English language. Yet it was little comfort to him to know that his reputation was formidable. He pined for better sales and more money.

While he regarded his life as over, mine had, I felt, hardly begun. He made a few corrections in my book, small ones, all of them factual. He talked about In a Free State , how “tightly constructed” it was. He wrote about a dream the main character had that he decided to leave out. “I dreamed all the dreams myself, for him, during the writing.” The book had possessed him; he had been “deeply immersed — almost to the point of neurosis” in it.

I had felt so close to In a Free State that I could not evaluate it. In the book I recognized Haji Hallsmith and the besieged African king; I knew some of the Africans; Vidia’s Colonel was the Major of the Kaptagat Arms — the same man, the same shouting; the waiters were his waiters, and, as Vidia had remarked at the time, “The boy was big and he moved briskly, creating little turbulences of stink.” The roads were the roads we had traveled down; the well-marked sign the same Beware of Fallen Rocks; the coming-of-age boys I had seen myself. I had been frightened by those same dogs barking. Much of it was our safari in Rwanda, but made into a quilt: I saw the stitches, and what another reader would see as a large, harmonious design seemed to me a mass of patches. But that is what happens when you have a writer for a friend and you travel the same road.

He said, “I do hope that your book will show you some reward for your great sensitivity, labor and love.”

My reward was his saying that. I had begun the book as a labor of love, a favor to him, a lesson for me. I learned a great deal in the writing, but there was no material gain. Perhaps it interested some people in his work and found him new readers. But I suspected that in many ways Vidia’s life was even more interesting than his work. He had made this observation about Somerset Maugham, how Maugham’s life was complex and rich, even though the old man always denied it. As for V. S. Naipaul: An Introduction to His Work , it hardly sold and was not reprinted. Twenty-five years later it was still out of print. The advance was spent the day I received it. There were no royalties in twenty-five years, nor did I ever get a sales statement from the publisher. I never discovered how many copies were printed. A few thousand, perhaps. It met the worst fate that can befall a book: it became a collector’s item, pretty much unread and uncirculated, celebrated only for its scarcity.