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

He seemed eager for me to know him. He said he slept badly, he was abstemious about alcohol, he got headaches, he had asthma. He claimed to have an explosive temper. He liked playing cricket and wanted me to help him find a pitch where he could practice bowling. He asked me about Gerald Moore, and when I said that Gerald had found him patrician, he seemed pleased.

“Jerry said that, did he?”

We never called the department head “Jerry.”

“What about Dudney?” he said. “His wife is incredibly ugly, which of course is why he married her. Unbelievably ugly.”

I said that in most parts of Uganda she was considered a beauty — plump and loud and fertile and maternal, and probably circumcised, with big lips and quarter-inch gaps between her teeth.

“That’s precisely what I mean.”

The whites he had met in Uganda so far were most of them degenerate, he said. They drank too much. They were intellectually dead. They were low class. Sometimes he used that expression, but more often he said, “They are common.” They were inferior.

“Infies” was his usual name for them. “Listen to the infy,” he would say while one of the expatriates held forth in the Senior Common Room. “Most of them are buggers, too.”

He found Swahili unpronounceable and was especially lost in nasalizing sounds, as when a consonant, following the rule of all Bantu languages, was softened or rubbed down by an initial m or n . He could not nasalize words such as mbuli (folly) or its opposite, mwambo , and while the meanings of more complex words, such as mkhwikhwiziri (b.o., the smell of an unwashed body), interested him as much as they did me, he found them impossible to say. Yet he sometimes made attempts, and it was difficult to know whether in garbling the words he was mocking them or simply making mistakes. “Mahboya” he said for the name Mboya. “Mah-zee” he said for mzee . An expatriate noted for his effeminacy and for patronizing African boys he called “Mah-bugga” and sometimes succeeded with “Mbugga.”

Looking for clues to his writing, I asked him what he read.

“One is reading the Bible. It’s frightfully good, you know. And Martial — delicious. You read Latin, of course you do.”

He quoted salacious epigrams and poems, many of which were about buggery. He said they were lyrical. “And so concise.”

He said frankly that coming to Uganda had been a great mistake, which he regretted. Although his trip had been financed by the American Farfield Foundation, he said he was losing money. But he had a book to finish.

Sure of himself and very direct, he commanded attention. He strode through Kampala, assessing it all, “being brutal,” as he said, like a man sent from headquarters to inspect a lagging field office. His conclusions: Mass sackings were called for. Eliminate all funding. Shut it down. Seal it off. Say goodbye.

And that was after only two weeks or so. I had never met anyone so certain, so intense, so observant, so hungry, so impatient, so intelligent. He was stimulating and tiring to be with, like a brilliant demanding child — needy, exhausting, funny, often making a po-faced joke just to please me, and who was I? But he seemed to like me. He asked to see more of my writing. Watching him evaluate it, I could hear the crackle of the circuits in his brain, a succession of satisfying clicks, and the fastening of synapses, like buckles being fixed, as he processed information. “Keep it up” was all he said. He had no small talk, and he pounced on incidental remarks.

“This is a pretty prosperous country,” I said casually.

“What do you mean by that?”

“I mean a successful agricultural economy. The tea, the coffee, the sugar—”

“Define the difference between success and achievement,” he demanded.

And he listened closely to all answers. It was hard to drive a car and hold this sort of conversation, but I did my best.

“We see the institutions that exist here,” he said. “What matters most is how they are maintained. Maintenance of a civilization is the proof that it has meaning and is coherent. Here in Uganda, other people are doing it for them. Outsiders are the key. Take them away and Uganda will go back to bush. All this will be jungle.”

On one of those early days in my car he plucked at the plastic seat cover and said, “American writers always know the names of these.”

“That’s a grommet,” I said.

“And these.”

“That’s a gusset.”

“And this.” He ran his thumb and forefinger along a seam.

“That’s called piping.”

A laugh had been building in his throat from the moment I had said “grommet,” and now he was laughing hard. No sound, except that of a lifelong smoker, was more satisfying than the dense laughter of an asthmatic, forcibly compressed, struggling and echoing through thickets in his lungs.

“You see? But they are silly words. They are purely technical. There is no picture. They say nothing. Don’t be that kind of writer. Promise me you won’t use those words.”

He was sure of everything he said, like a leader or a teacher, a man with no obvious doubts. So I listened, and I promised.

“Tell me what to read. I want to read something about this place.”

I recommended The White Nile .

“If only Alan Moorehead knew how to write.”

I told him I liked George Orwell.

“I have been compared with Orwell. Imagine. In a review. It was meant to be a compliment.” And he laughed again. “It was lost on me. I have a very low opinion of Orwell’s writing.”

I was reading Camus, I said.

“His collected fiction is a very slender book. I wonder about the achievement.”

He knew his own mind. He knew what he wanted. It was clear that he would not find what he was looking for in Uganda — anyway, he had already given up on us. He had impossibly high standards. He said there was no point in having standards unless they were high. He did not compromise. He expected the best, in writing, in speaking, in behavior, in reading. Martial? The Bible? Surely there were other books and writers he admired.

“It would be easier for me to tell you who I don’t like,” he said, and then listed, with a sour-taste-in-the-mouth expression, like the visible memory of a bad meal, the giants of literature: Jane Austen, Hardy, Henry James. “People tell me I should read James. I tried. I couldn’t see the point. There’s not much there.” He had not read widely in American literature. I was reading Emily Dickinson. He borrowed my book. The next day he said, “I’m afraid I don’t share your enthusiasm. Not much there for me.”

“What about African literature?”

“Does it exist?”

“Wole Soyinka. Chinua Achebe.”

“Did they write anything?”

“Novels,” I said.

“Mimicry,” he said. “You can’t beat a novel out on a drum.”

Naipaul was thirty-four but seemed much older, almost aged. He was opinionated and dissatisfied and restless, hard to please but still searching. This was a bad place for the search, however. For one thing, the whites were seriously unhealthy.

“Don’t be an infy, Paul,” he said. “I know I don’t want to be an infy.”

Africans were not infies. Most whites were. Some Indians in town he liked. Others he despaired of. He interrogated them, demanded to know their backup plans. He predicted that they would be thrown out and their businesses taken over. Some of them were infies.

To battle inferiority in the equatorial heat, he came with me to the sports field. He would practice bowling the cricket ball while I ran around the track, six times usually, sometimes more. He tried to do the same but his lungs gave out, and he ended up panting and sweating. “Must not be an infy!” The exercise gave me an appetite and a sweet tooth, and after each session we went into town and had tea and cakes. Stuffing myself, wolfing them down, I apologized, yet kept at it.