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

She came to dinner on her own and seemed frailer for being alone.

“Vidia’s away,” she said in a faltering voice. “He has taken one of those jobs in America at… would it be called Wesleyan?”

“Vidia? Teaching?”

“I’m afraid so.” Her smile was a smile of pure worry. “He’s awfully good and the people were terribly nice to him. And you know he gets standing ovations when he speaks sometimes — he did in New Zealand that time. But”—she paused and turned her pale eyes away—“he does get ever so cross if the students don’t do their work.”

I knew that “ever so cross.” It was purple, tight-faced rage.

“Do you have his number? I have to go to the States in a few weeks.”

It was the snowiest day I had ever known in New York, so snowy the city had shut down — stopped cold, brimming with drifts, no cars at all moving down Fifth Avenue, only people in the deep white street. Such conditions always made me think of Vidia’s saying, “I love dramatic weather.” He meant hail, high winds, monsoon rain, ice storms, snow like this.

New York was transformed. It was muffled and made natural again, silenced, simplified, made safer even, for in the worst weather villains and muggers stay home in stinking rooms and lie snoring in bed. The soft white city was beautiful and wild, the blurred mist-shrouded skyscrapers like the north face of a mountain range of glaciated canyons and ledges, where icicles drooped like dragon fangs.

Having just come from Vermont, I was dressed for this snow. I trudged to several appointments — though most businesses and offices were closed — and at noon called Vidia at Wesleyan.

A woman answered the phone.

“Vido, it’s for you.”

Veedo?

“Yes, yes, yes,” Vidia said in the old way when he recognized my voice. He was glad I had called, he said. He wanted to drive into New York. We could have dinner.

“What sort of car do you have?”

Always finding absurdity in technical description, he clearly enjoyed telling me it was a “subcompact,” and he repeated it twice, chuckling.

“Will it make it through the snow?”

“It will be fine.”

He was never prouder of his punctuality: he made it from the snowdrifts of Middletown, Connecticut, to Manhattan at the appointed time, six o’clock.

“Americans fuss so about the snow,” he said. “It stopped just after you rang. All the roads were sanded and plowed. The road crews are marvelous. People exaggerate the danger. I loved the drive.”

“You drove the whole way?”

“Of course.”

Dressed warmly, he looked more Asiatic, not Indian at all but like one of those tiny, flint-eyed nomadic descendants of the Golden Horde you see hunkered on horses in central Asia. He was alone. His hair was long and, as always when he was tired, his eyes were more slanted and hooded.

“I thought we might go to the Oyster Bar at Grand Central station,” he said. “I’m told it’s all right.”

“But let’s have a drink first.”

We were at my hotel on Central Park South, in my room. I had been drinking a beer when he arrived. I finished that one and was halfway through another. Vidia noticed.

“It’s the heat,” he said, defending me. “You need that beer because you’re dehydrated from the central heating. They overdo it here. And American walls are so thin you can always hear someone chuntering.” And he laughed, because I was opening a third beer. “Are you going to drink another one, really?”

I poured him a glass of wine. “How’s teaching?”

The tables were turned. Twelve years before, I had been the teacher and he the writer. He had warned me against teaching jobs. It was acceptable to travel to Singapore, but teach there? As you know, I disapprove of the means … A writer ought to have no job, no boss, no teacher, no students; ought to follow no one else’s routine; ought to have no masters, no servants. The essential point was that writing was not a job at all but, in his own phrase, a process of life.

I knew from eight years of slogging in the tropics that it was not possible for me to teach and also to write well. Many people did it, and some succeeded, but even when the writing was fluent, something was missing, because colleges were so far from the world. Vidia himself had taught me this lesson — Vidia now a poorly paid writer in residence and teacher of creative writing in a snooty college. He had recently given an interview in the London Sunday Telegraph in which he had said, “I would take poison rather than do this for a living.”

All this went through my mind because Vidia had not answered my question. He was frowning at his glass of wine.

“I didn’t know that writing courses were a soft option!” he said in a voice of mock astonishment, slightly overdoing it out of anger.

“Neither did I,” I said. “You’re a tough teacher, aren’t you?”

“Not tough enough,” Vidia said. “The students take my course because they want A’s without having to work. They seldom do the assignment. They hardly write. They lie to me. I try to goad them into work and they glare at me. They are deeply offended. ‘But this is a writing course! This is supposed to be easy! You are making us work!’”

He raised his hand in resignation, and sipped, and looked miserable. In the Telegraph piece, one of his students had described her reason for dropping out of his course: “He was simply the worst, most close-minded, inconsiderate, uninteresting and incompetent professor I have ever met.”

“That’s supposed to be a good university,” I said.

“They’re all corrupt. It’s all a con.” The students were lazy, the other teachers were inferior, the place was intolerable. His own mind was being damaged from being in close contact with people so inferior.

“What about the weather?”

“The weather is very nice,” he said. “Let’s not talk about the corruption. This wine is not bad. May I see the cork?”

Twitching the cork with his thumb and forefinger, he uncovered the details of the vineyard. He revolved the cork again, and again twitched the dusty residue, like an archeologist with a helpful artifact.

“California wine is vastly underrated,” he said, almost to himself, and then, “What brings you to New York?”

“I was in Vermont, visiting Kipling’s house outside Brattleboro,” I said. “I want to write about him — his American wife, his American residence, the way it ended.”

“And how did it end?”

“In a huge kerfuffle. His drunken brother-in-law threatened to kill him. It was just bluster, but Kipling decided to bring a case against him. His brother-in-law was popular, a good old boy. Kipling was regarded as a snob and an interloper, a limey. It ended badly. Kipling went back to England and sulked.”

“He was immensely famous,” Vidia said. “ Immensely famous.”

“I think it would make a terrific play — the arguments, the rivalries, the court hearing, all that. I have a transcript of the case. And he was writing The Jungle Book at the time — you know, the law of the jungle.”

“It’s a lovely idea,” Vidia said. “Very attractive.” He brooded a bit. He sniffed the cork.

“Shall we eat? There are some restaurants near here that aren’t bad. An Indian one near the Plaza.”

“Let’s try the Oyster Bar, shall we?” he said with a note of insistence.

We walked out of the hotel and the fifteen blocks to Grand Central station, all the while marveling at the silence. By now some streets had been cleared, and a few taxis moved slowly through the whiteness.

“I have an idea for a play,” Vidia said. “Raleigh is sixty-four, in Guyana. He has been let out of the Tower so that he can find El Dorado and redeem himself. It is a risk, and now he has found himself at a dead end. But he can’t admit defeat. He is old and lost.”