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

“Hundreds of people. Angry West Indians.”

“Not angry,” he said. “Why would they be angry? They were jubilant. They wanted witnesses, and people took notice. They succeeded in destroying something. Windows, whatever. I suppose they stole some television sets.”

“It looked serious.”

“It’s all for show.”

“If that’s not a riot, what would you call it?”

“High spirits,” Vidia said.

He was afraid of mobs, he avoided large crowds, he did not use public transportation. But his general feeling was that it had all been done for cameras and publicity. If no one had taken any notice, nothing would have happened.

But when the riots — for they were riots and not high spirits — continued, Vidia was asked by a BBC news program to comment on the violence. He said all right, he had been thinking about it. The BBC would provide a car to take him to the studio, but Vidia said that such a trip was out of the question. With great reluctance, the producer agreed to come to Vidia’s flat with a camera crew.

I was at Vidia’s the next day while, smiling, he told me what had happened.

“There were three of them,” he said. “I must say, it was rather crowded. They wanted to get started immediately, and of course I had prepared my remarks. I wanted to talk about the excitement of this sort of affair, how it stirs people to see destruction and makes them spirited. I was going to quote from that lovely Louis MacNeice poem ‘Brother Fire.’ Do you know it? ‘When our Brother Fire was having his dog’s day / Jumping the London streets…’ It’s about London being blitzed by German bombs, the perverse thrill of someone watching it. It is perfect for what is happening now.

’"Shall we get started?’ the producer said.

“I said, ‘You haven’t mentioned money.’

“This clearly threw him. Money? But I told him I do not work for nothing, and that I must be paid. He asked me what I wanted. I said, ‘What you would pay a world-class doctor or lawyer.’

“‘I’ll telephone my department,’ he said. At the end of a very long call he said, ‘I can offer you three hundred pounds.’

’"Out of the question,’ I said.

’"It’s the best we can do.’

“I simply turned my back on him. I noticed that one of the crew was looking at my bronze of Shiva. I said, ‘Do you know how each arm is positioned in a particular upraised way and the whole figure gives the dynamic impression of movement?’”

I said, “What about the BBC?”

“They stood around for a while and then went away. I won’t work for three hundred pounds. The figure I had in mind was a thousand.”

“I wonder why they wouldn’t pay more.”

“Because they hold a writer in contempt.”

“But why did the man come all the way over, thinking you would do it?”

“Because he was a common, lying, low-class boy.”

“What about the others?”

“Epicene young men.”

He knew I was baiting him. He did not mind. He was glad to have a chance to vent his feelings. Pat tended to sigh or become fearful when Vidia fumed, but his anger was a loud broadcast of what was on his mind.

A writer must not let himself be presumed upon, he said. The TV crew had come and unpacked; the TV crew was sent away, having filmed nothing. A weaker person might have said (I am sure I would have said), “Since you’ve come all this way, we might as well do it. But this will be the last time.”

To relent in that way, Vidia would have had to break one of his cardinal rules, which was: Never allow yourself to be undervalued.

“Do lawyers allow it?” he said. “I say to these presumptuous people, ‘What would you pay a lawyer? What would you pay an architect, or a doctor at the height of his profession?’” On this subject he was unshakable. “An architect or a doctor would command thousands of pounds for a consultation. That is my fee. I am at the frontier of my profession as a writer. My fee must be no different from a doctor’s, or a scientist’s, or a lawyer’s. Anything less is an insult.”

Around this time, the first year of his little flat, the Public Lending Right movement had gained a following in London. The moving force was one person, the writer Brigid Brophy. The campaign called for a parliamentary bill to establish a government department that would determine, on the basis of random sampling, the number of times a writer’s books had been loaned from libraries. Using a formula, an amount would be worked out, and the writer would be sent an annual check. There would be a ceiling of about £2,500. Public Lending Right — authors compensated for library borrowings — was an enlightened scheme for which I became a strong advocate. In its early stages, signatures were needed to bring the idea to the attention of the minister for the arts. I pedaled up to Vidia’s for a signature.

“No,” he said. Never mind that it was a worthy cause. He hated petitions. And he could not bear to see his name on something he had not written. “I sign nothing.”

The push of his dignity, the force of his friendship, made me think of him vividly whenever I wrote anything. He hovered over my desk; he was the reader over my shoulder. His criticism had nothing to do with friendship. He might approve, but he was almost impossible to impress. Now and then he quoted a poem, but these were single lines. Really, there was not a living writer he praised, nor any dead ones he acknowledged as exemplars. I had mentioned his uniqueness, the apparent absence of influences, in my book about him, and was criticized for this by scholars and other writers. Perhaps I should have said his influences were minimal, and internalized to the point of their being untraceable. After a time, Vidia acknowledged his father’s writing as a strong influence. But he always said: You’re on your own.

Even knowing that he probably would not read what I had written, still he was the reader I had in mind whenever I framed a sentence. It gave me confidence to have his approval, but his approval was anything but casual. He hated inattention and intellectual laziness and received opinion. In conversation, he often said sharply, “What do you mean by that?” to the most offhand remark. When we were together I had his full attention, which was a demanding scrutiny. Usually I listened: I was Boswell, he was Johnson. I was still learning. I knew that I had to be at my best whenever I was with him, and that I got much more out of him as a listener than when I interrupted to argue with something he said. Challenge only infuriated him, so what was the use? He could be uncannily prescient, if not psychic, in some matters; at other times he was wrong and unfair and frighteningly intolerant.

Vidia tended to have something on his mind, always. While in England, as a householder, he did not get out much or see many people. He hardly talked on the phone. He ruminated when he was not working. World events and public people nagged at his solitary mind. In any encounter, he first fretted and explained what he had been thinking, whatever pent-up issue he had been worrying over during his long nights of insomnia. “This nonsense about South Africa,” he would say, and after that, with the matter ventilated, he could talk more easily. In his presence, my concentration was complete. Working alone, I was also intensely aware of his intelligence, and did not write a word without wondering what he would say about it, nor a paragraph without imagining his pen point striking through it (“I’m brutal, you know”) — even now, this one for example, ragged as it is.

“I am an exile,” he always said. In his own prim little flat in Queen’s Gate Terrace he said it more often, as though the flat were visible proof of the absurd delusion — and the settled belief of many foreigners in England — that owning property was the same as belonging. The more he became a householder, the stronger his sense of alienation.