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

Vidia also needed money at this time, so he said. He had no assets apart from his manuscripts and papers, an entire record of his career to date. He had gone to the British Museum and discussed the matter, mentioning a figure of £40,000, which would include letters, manuscripts, pictures, mementos, maps, sketches, notebooks, everything in his paper-rich life. It was quite a large stack, for he had told me he was superstitious and never threw away a piece of paper with his handwriting on it, as one might keep nail parings or locks of hair. It was possible that after his gathering up all his papers, the British Museum would change its mind and not pay even the agreed-upon minimum. He needed a backup plan.

Would I please, therefore, spread the word that he was thinking of selling his archives? An American university would be convenient because he wished to consult them in the future. In a cardboard box in Trinidad he had found letters and notes he had written in the distant past: “penciled notes I made in the PAA aeroplane as soon as I got off the ground in July, 1950.” Rereading the many letters had suggested to him that he might write an autobiography. But what if the papers were destroyed in a riot (“not unlikely in Trinidad”)? He needed them to be in a safe place.

Also, the money. He wanted to convert the papers into a flat in central London.

The chairman of the English Department at the University of Virginia was also a friend. He was the man who had offered me the writer-in-residence job. I asked his advice. He said I should see the university’s librarian. The librarian was the assiduously orderly sort of person — more orderly than intellectual — you find running libraries. He had the peculiar baldness that went with an orderly disposition; he was close-shaven, with pink cheeks, and so tidy and well turned out that I doubted he was much of a reader.

“I wonder if you’d be interested in buying the archives of V.S. Naipaul,” I said.

“I know that name,” the librarian said. “He wrote The Man-Eater of Malgudi .”

“That was R. K. Narayan,” I said. So I was right: this clean, clear-eyed man was really thick. I listed Vidia’s book tides, none of which rang a bell, though the man kept smiling.

“What is he selling?”

“Everything. Every piece of paper he has. Letters, books, manuscripts, pictures, the lot.”

“Would he have any interesting letters from well-known writers? Those are usually pretty valuable.”

I felt this conversation was not going well, and I was glad that Vidia was being spared the indignity of explaining that he was not R. K. Narayan.

“I’m sure he has lots of letters of that kind. Anthony Powell is one of his closest friends.”

The librarian smiled, but not with pleasure. It was the uneasy smile that indicates incomprehension, as if I had slipped unconsciously into a foreign language.

“What sort of figure does he have in mind?”

“Forty thousand pounds.”

“How much is that in real money?”

“Maybe ninety grand.”

“You’re joking.”

I said nothing. The librarian clamped his jaw shut and bit on his teeth. The university didn’t have that kind of money, he said. I sensed his triumphant smile grimly heating my back as I left his office.

Surely other libraries or universities would be interested. I wrote letters. I made phone calls. Sometimes I mentioned the price, other times I solicited a price. There were no takers. Many people I spoke to were only dimly aware of the name Naipaul. How was this possible? It did not surprise me that Vidia was little known in the United States; it was the reason I had written my book about his work. But I was astounded that academics and librarians were so clueless.

I broke the news gently to Vidia, but perhaps it was my delicacy and tact that made it obvious I had been rebuffed. Sensitive to rejection, Vidia took it badly. He sent a brief note and lapsed into silence.

Judging from my classes at the University of Virginia, American universities were vastly inferior to Makerere University and the University of Singapore. My Charlottesville students had read little — hardly any of them had read the short stories of Joyce or Chekhov, but they wanted to write short stories themselves. Sometimes they handed in work they had done the previous year, for another course. Usually they handed in nothing. They were pleasant but intellectually lazy. Some were graduate students. When I gave them low marks they objected.

“Hey, Paul. You don’t get it. I need a B in this course,” one grad student said to me.

I told him that his C was generosity on my part. He was in the master’s program. He had done very little work.

“Look, I need a B,” he said in the snarling voice of someone demanding my wallet.

This was new to me: teachers who did not read, students who could not write. One semester of this was enough. I took my savings and went back to London.

We moved from west London to south London. We had a whole house in Catford, but the area was much grimmer than Ealing. It was full of lawbreakers — petty burglars, pickpockets, car thieves, bag boosters, second-story men, muggers, and hoisters of all description. But Catford was so poor these villains had to take a train to other boroughs or up to the West End, the more salubrious parts of London where the pickings were better, to commit their crimes.

In the spring of 1973, having finished The Black House , I cycled to Waterloo, put my bike on the train, and went to Salisbury, cycling from there to Wilsford Manor. Vidia could see that my finances were as miserable as ever, but I told him why I had left the University of Virginia.

“You had said you’d never teach again,” Vidia said. “You broke your own rule. If you make a rule, keep to it.”

We walked to Stonehenge, through the fields, and he explained the water meadows once more.

“You’d like Virginia,” I said. “The countryside is beautiful — rolling hills and meadows.”

“I’m afraid that America is not for me. I don’t think I could live in a rural setting.”

“In some ways it’s a bit like this.”

But I was thinking: It is much more beautiful than this funny fenced-off part of Salisbury Plain, with a highway running alongside this weird ancient monument, belittling it.

“I have to stick with what I have,” Vidia said. “It’s too late for me to transfer to another country.”

We kept walking towards the big biscuit-colored cromlech that lay on the other side of the whizzing cars on the motorway.

“So what’s the plan?”

“I’m still looking for money,” he said.

“Are you serious about buying a place in London?”

“Yes. I think it’s just what I need.”

“I’m sure you could get something for less than forty thousand.”

He said, “No. I want something uncompromisingly fashionable.”

He said this while looking at the sky.

A few days after I returned to London, my editor at The Bodley Head, a cigar-smoking Scotsman and sometime poet named James Michie, invited me to lunch at the Chez Victor. He said he wanted to discuss The Black House . He was very friendly when I met him, but it seemed ominous that we had finished the first course and most of the bottle of wine before he mentioned my book, and then he told me he did not like it at all.

“I’m afraid I can’t publish it,” Michie said.

“You mean you’re turning it down?” I could not believe this.

“It will hurt your reputation,” he said.

“I have no reputation.”

“I think if you reread the book you will agree with me,” he said.

“I don’t have to reread the book. I wrote the book. If I thought it was no good I wouldn’t have submitted it.”