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

But Vidia was only half teasing. He believed there were few real accidents in life. What you took to be an accident was undoubtedly well deserved, a kind of karma. Vidia was the first person I had ever heard use that word, as he was the first in my experience to use “vibration” to mean intimation. He also believed that some people’s inner disturbance and confusion made them magnets for ill fortune; others simply begged for it. Things not going well? Vidia was seldom sympathetic to anyone’s moaning. It had to be your own fault. Literary fellowships and free money and patronage did not get books written; writers did, and a good writer was dauntless. It was not an expression of fatalism or pitiless indifference but rather a belief in cosmic harmony on Vidia’s part when he repeated that in life people got pretty much what they deserved.

Shiva did complain, as Vidia said. Vidia didn’t listen. He saw the complaints as unjustified, merely Shiva’s indulging himself. “He is seeking attention. It’s theater. Stop listening and he’ll stop complaining.”

It did not help that Vidia praised me, and did so for the same reason. It was not by luck or accident that I was doing well, he said. It was application, hard work. “And you see, Paul, you have something to say.” I did not usually complain, but really, what had I to complain about? Even before my books sold in any numbers, I had found a way of making a living as a writer: publish a book a year and never say no to a magazine assignment. And, out of a horror of destitution, I lived within my means.

The irony was that I saw Shiva much more often than I saw Vidia. We were nearer in age — he was about four years younger than me — so we had more in common and knew many of the same people — Jonathan Raban, for example, who said he found Shiva Bunterish and nervous and inexplicably giggly. Shiva was not as strong as Vidia, but it was his fate, as the younger brother of a distinguished writer, to have his path to publication smoothed. Understandably, Shiva wanted to be judged separately from his brother, to be seen clearly, without that obscuring fraternal shadow. Yet he seemed self-destructive in his choice of subjects, which served only to make the brothers more intensely like versions of each other, alike in their concerns. Both of them wrote about colonialism as outrageous farce, the futility of African travel, the corruption of power in the Caribbean, the dead end of the Third World, the stagnating complexities of India, and, relentlessly, the question of alienation: where do I belong? And in this they were each deluded in believing that anyone cared.

Some of Shiva’s literary obsessions verged on mimicry. Shiva’s attack on calypso sounded like a parody of Vidia. There was a definite resemblance in their prose styles, even in the adoption by Shiva of some of Vidia’s favorite words—“tainted,” “fantasy,” “distress,” “loss,” “fraudulence”—and even the same fastidiousness, expressed in an almost identical way, calling attention to its similarity by the use of exaggeration.

Here is Shiva Naipaul having lunch in a Chinese restaurant in Sri Lanka, not an unusual event for a traveler anywhere. He is in the seaside town of Galle, a pretty little place. But for Shiva it is a disgusting experience of unimaginable uncleanness:

“I ate sparingly and nervously, avoiding the thumb-printed tumbler of water that had been brought me. Now, walking across the vacated Green, with the taint of sewage rising from the seashore, it was hard not to be apprehensive, not to recall, with rising alarm, the abandon with which carelessly tended hands had soiled my plate, my knife, my fork.”

The inhabited world is fairly dirty. It did not seem to occur to Shiva that his pompous description said nothing about the world and everything about his squeamishness. Vidia’s horror of dirt was a legendary revelation of his anal compulsiveness, but when he wrote about it he sometimes made a larger point, about caste or culture. Shiva merely revealed himself as a timid fusspot.

Vidia, the true colonial, made a convincing case for his sense of alienation, although any reader could reply, “So what? We all have problems.” After all, he wasn’t writing about the human condition so much as the privileged life of a prosperous middle-aged and middle-class shuttler between Wiltshire and Kensington — himself and no one else. Shiva, the postcolonial sixties rebel and seventies conservative, was unconvincing in depicting himself as an exile and a wanderer. Anyway, what wanderer? He frankly hated travel. His idea of the Worst Journey in the World was a junket to a Chinese restaurant. His trips were very short. He had married into a family of distinguished journalists and lived well in London, where he was known as a partygoer.

He went to parties alone and usually got tipsy, if not drunk, in a sad, giggly way. At his drunkest he indulged in weird confrontations with women in which he would compliment their beauty in a babu accent (“Goodness gracious, you are wery beautifool”), and with such insistence the women did not know whether they were being wooed or insulted.

Whatever Shiva happened to be writing was never going well. He paraphrased Vidia’s complaint about the difficulty of writing and made it into a form of boasting. “I haven’t written a word. It’s such a struggle.” What was the problem? He had wide recognition for his first book, a generous publisher, and hospitality in all the London papers.

I tried not to argue, for fear it would have seemed that I was minimizing his pain.

“A book is like an illness with me,” he said.

“Of course.”

“But you just churn them out, Paul.”

“You think so?”

That belittling word “churn” brought to mind a stick and a keg.

“What are you churning out now?”

That laugh of his, barking and too loud, was pure misery and perhaps was meant as another interruption, which kept me from replying.

“Writing’s easy for you,” he said.

This sort of insult I had begun to hear more and more in London — though not in the States — for envy gave the English a reckless confidence in giving offense. It had started with Shiva, probably as the result of his resentment of Vidia’s avuncular attention and pointed praise. My not complaining about the difficulty of writing was a sure sign I was second-rate; Shiva’s struggle was clear evidence of his genius.

“He drinks too much,” Vidia said. “The body is going. He is fat. Notice how puffy his face is? He gets no exercise. It is a lazy, selfish body.”

That was another aspect of Vidia’s sense of justice: you got the body you deserved. And in Vidia’s judgment people’s bodies told everything about them, even to the extent of bad skin making you a villain and obesity being like a moral fault. The fat characters in Vidia’s books were nearly always unreliable, if not outright crooks.

“I am very proud of having a beautiful physique,” Vidia had told an interviewer. “The body is the one thing we can control. It’s a kind of envelope that contains the soul.” In spite of this, several people had mentioned to me how Vidia, because of his small size and his asthma, had a deep sense of physical inferiority.

Anyone could see that Shiva was unhappy. I did not know why, but there had to be a connection with Vidia. I still felt that knowing Shiva better was a way of knowing Vidia, because — though Vidia might deny it — one brother was often the key to understanding the other. The paradox was that, more and more, Shiva and I were fraternal, in the feuding, wrong-footing mode, and our relationship was undermined by the nearest thing to sibling rivalry.

“Come to tea on Sunday,” Shiva said at a party one night. “Bring the family.”

That sounded all right. This was early on. Our wives and children had not met. Shiva was living in a house in Essex. On a map it seemed a straightforward drive, but on the day it was a three-hour slog in my small car because of rain and bad roads and the quaint and maddening bottlenecks of English villages (“This must be Gosfield”). All the way I had promised my little family that this visit would be worth it. We met Shiva’s father-in-law, a noted broadcaster. The house was crowded with people — Shiva was well connected. But he was on the telephone when we arrived, and when I managed to say hello, he smiled in exasperation.