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

“What’s the answer?”

“One prefers to break the day into three distinct parts. Work in the morning. Light lunch. Something in the afternoon. Exercise. Prepare for the evening — the dinner. Dinner is grander.”

“Grand” was one of those words that Vidia could use in an almost satirical way. But if you smiled he might react, and then you knew he really meant it. “Very grand” sometimes meant pompous and hollow, or it might mean important or powerful.

“Do you know Bibendum?” he asked.

It was a new restaurant in South Kensington, housed in a well-known Art Deco landmark usually referred to as the Michelin building. Bibendum had been started by the entrepreneur Sir Terence Conran, who insisted that people use his tide. Vidia had met him once, and he hated Conran for his brashness and his flaunted knighthood.

“Do try to get a table there next time, Paul, won’t you? One would be happier there.”

I said I would. What prevented me was the expense. It was a five-star restaurant. No matter where we went I ended up paying, and so I stayed away from the most expensive places, like Claridges, the Ritz, or the Connaught. I preferred the peacefulness of eating in relatively empty restaurants, which were always the less stylish ones.

Knowing of his interest in graphology, I showed him a page from a letter I had received that week. It was handwritten with black ballpoint on a yellow legal-sized sheet. There was no salutation, no signature, just a page of writing. I said, “So what do you think?”

“Oh, God. Oh, God. Oh, God.” Vidia’s face became a mask representing suffering and torment. He made passes with his fingers over the page. “This man is in trouble.”

“It’s from John Ehrlichman, the Watergate man. He sent me this from prison. He’s writing a book.”

We finished lunch. I paid. Leaving the Gaylord, we walked towards All Souls Church, in Langham Place, near Broadcasting House. Vidia pointed out the Langham, once a hotel, then a BBC building, where parts of the Overseas Service had had offices.

“I had an office there,” Vidia said. “I started writing there, in the Freelance Room. God!”

“What were you doing?”

“Caribbean Service. I did programs. One called Caribbean Voices . Went mad wondering whether I could write a book. I began writing Miguel Street there.”

Though I knew he had worked there, it was surprising to hear him mention it. He disapproved of a writer’s working a regular job and was proud of the fact that he had worked only ten weeks on salary, as a copywriter for a company that sold cement. That, as his whole salaried career, was bound to have distorted his view of the working world.

“Such a lovely church,” he said as we entered Langham Place.

“All Souls,” I said. “Thomas Nash.”

“It is Nash’s only church,” Vidia said. “So strong. Look what he does with the simplest lines. They ridiculed it when it was built in the 1820s. No one approved.”

“Kipling got married here,” I said.

Vidia smiled. He loved sparring.

“That was just before he went to America,” he said. “Of course, his wife was American.”

“Henry James was his best man,” I said.

“And then Kipling came back to England, moved into a grand house, and wrote nothing,” Vidia said.

“He wrote some great short stories.”

“Nothing as great as Plain Tales from the Hills .”

“The late stories are much subtler,” I said.

“Everyone tells me that,” Vidia said. He shook his head. “I have been seriously wondering about fiction. What is it now? What can it be?”

“What it has always been,” I said. “A version of the truth. And I think that’s what nonfiction is, too.”

“Yes, yes, yes,” Vidia said. He thought that was apt. “But I am still wondering. I think the novel as we know it is dated.”

And so we walked along, up to Regents Park and along the footpaths by the flower beds, until it was time for his dental appointment in Harley Street, where we parted.

It seemed cruelly ironic that Vidia’s developing interest in stylish restaurants coincided with serious dental problems — gum disease, a gingivectomy, and painful extractions. I sometimes met him at his dentist’s office. He was one of the few people in England I knew who had a private dentist; most people made do with the impatient National Health Service dentists, who gave them fifteen minutes of attention every four months and, in their incompetent haste, were lax in detecting the sort of gum disease that was afflicting Vidia.

At another lunch, Vidia wincing with each bite from his sore teeth, we talked about money. We usually talked about money, as writers do — the futility of making it, the punishing British tax system, the way people presumed on writers by trying to underpay them, the fatuity of wealth, and could we have some more money, please?

“I know the solution — my solution,” Vidia said.

“Please tell me.”

“I want a million pounds in the bank,” he said. “Not the equivalent of a million in real estate. Not valuables. Not stocks. I want a million in my account.”

“I suppose that’s possible,” I said, so as not to discourage him. In fact, I had no idea how one would accumulate that amount.

“But you have a million, Paul.”

“You’re joking.”

“You got a million for the Mosquito Coast film, surely.”

“Nowhere near it. Maybe a fifth of that.”

“Really.” He was surprised, even shocked.

“And I bought a house with it, so now it’s gone.”

“Actors get paid in the millions, surely.”

“Yes,” I said. “But not writers.”

“I will get my million,” he said, as I paid the bill for lunch.

After yet another lunch, we walked to the offices of his publisher so he could sign three hundred copies of A House for Mr. Biswas , one of the titles in a series of signed books that were part of a book-club offer. I stood by him, opening them to the half-title page, and he wrote his signature. As always, he used a fountain pen and black ink.

“When I wrote this book I wore out a pen. The nib was worn down to the gold. It was a little stump. Imagine the labor.”

He signed, I stacked.

“What is the good of signing books? It simply inflates their value in a bogus way. I will never see the profits. Someone else will get it. All these people who call themselves publishers — they are no better than people who sell books off a barrow.”

I pushed the books at him. He signed quickly, making his initials and his surname into a single calligraphic flourish.

“These will go for big money,” he said. “They will be resold. Why am I doing this?”

And he stopped signing. He put the cap on his pen and stood up. He was done.

“There’s more,” I said.

“That’s enough,” he said, having convinced himself that signing the books was a mistake.

Later that day, we went to my house for tea. My two boys were upstairs in their rooms, doing homework. I called them down so they could say hello. I was proud of them; I wanted Vidia to see them. Now they were the right age. Vidia could not deal with young children — he rather disliked children — but he took to my boys as he had taken to me, long before.

“And what homework are you doing, Marcel?”

“English prep. And a Russian essay.” He swallowed and went on. “On Ivan the Terrible.”

“Tell me about Ivan the Terrible.”

Marcel said, “I’m reading a book about him by Henri Troyat.”

“I know Troyat’s Tolstoy . You say this book is about Ivan the Terrible?”

“It’s his new one. It hasn’t come out here yet.”

“You have the American edition?”