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

“No. The French one.”

“But this is your Russian essay?”

“My essay’s in Russian. The book’s in French.”

“Yes, yes, yes, yes,” Vidia said, liking the answer. “And what about you, Louis?”

“English essay. My Phillimore.”

“What is a Phillimore?”

“It’s the big essay of the year. It’s supposed to be pretty long and serious.”

“Is yours long and serious?”

“It’s not done yet. It’s about the attraction of evil.”

“Yes,” Vidia said, concentrating hard and murmuring, “the attraction of evil.”

“Ahab,” Louis said. “Richard the Third.”

“You should read Old Goriot .”

Louis nodded, not sure whether a book or an author was being recommended.

After the boys had gone upstairs Vidia said, “You are so lucky to have your sons. They’re intelligent. They’re polite. They are nice boys.”

Agreeing with him, I deliberately positioned myself near the shelf in the bookcase where all of Vidia’s books were lined up, from the ones I had bought with Yomo, in Kampala, to the latest ones.

I said, “Vidia, would you mind signing these books?”

“Not now. Some other time,” he said.

He had convinced himself in the course of signing all those copies of Biswas that book signing was a cheat. Other people made money from signed books, not the author, who was invariably swindled. He consoled me with a joke about the writer who had signed so many books that the rarest books of all, and the most valuable, were the ones without his signature.

Every October, around the time the Nobel Prize was announced, Vidia was named in confidently speculative articles as the likely recipient. He never mentioned the prize, nor commented on the speculation. On the contrary, he seemed to make a point of ignoring it. It was I who brought up the subject. In 1973, when Patrick White had won, I told Vidia how pleased I was — I liked Patrick White’s fiction, his humorous and sometimes hallucinatory prose style. Besides, he conveyed very specific and vivid images of Australia.

Vidia said, “I’ve read him. I don’t think there’s much there.”

Three years later, Saul Bellow won. Vidia claimed he had never read him. And he laughed when William Golding won in 1983.

“Tell me, what did Golding do to win it?”

The Nigerian writer Wole Soyinka won the Nobel Prize in 1986.

“What do you think, Vidia?”

“Did he write anything?”

Vidia did not wait for my reply. We happened to be walking down Cromwell Road towards the V and A, and from the way he stiffened his legs in a marching manner and planted his feet more firmly I gathered that he had something on his mind. Perhaps it had unsettled him to think of Wole Soyinka, wearing a crown of laurel leaves, with $190,000 in his pocket. In any case, Vidia became agitated or sad when he thought about Africa.

“The Nobel committee are doing it again,” he said, striding down the sidewalk.

“Doing what?”

“Pissing on literature, as they do every year.”

I started to laugh.

“Pissing from a great height,” he said. “On books.”

In time, we changed from lunch to dinner. “Dinner is grander.” Also, it did not break up the day, as lunch did. Yet our dinners were no more frequent than our lunches had been. One or two, then nothing for a year. He was away — on the long journey for his Islam book, or in India, or, quite often, in Buenos Aires.

I was traveling too, in China and Africa, in the United States, and on book tours. Almost everywhere I went I was asked about Vidia: What influence did V.S. Naipaul have on your writing? or How did Naipaul help you as a writer? There was no simple answer, at least none shorter than would fill a five-hundred-page book. It was understood that we were friends, that we had had a teacher-student relationship when I had started writing. Because Vidia usually avoided book tours (“The book will find its own way”), people wondered what he was like. I told them truthfully that I had never met anyone like him.

“Writers are crankish,” Vidia said. “You get crankish from being alone.”

Often, I heard stories about him — people sought me out to tell me the stories, believing that I had to know everything about my friend.

When something disgraceful was rumored of Vidia, there were often several versions of the story. Vidia’s hasty exit from Amsterdam is a good example of the mutation of a simple tale. In the first version I heard, a Dutchman in Amsterdam told me of Vidia’s disastrous visit of a year before. Vidia had arrived from London to see his Dutch publisher and had agreed to a week of publicity. About an hour after his arrival, a press conference was arranged: Naipaul on a stage, the Dutch audience waiting to ask him questions; cameras, tape recorders, journalists.

The first question, phrased as antagonism, was from a woman who asked him to explain his offensive attitude towards Africans.

Vidia said, “I have no comment on this.”

The woman demanded an answer.

“I don’t have to listen to this,” Vidia said.

With that, he walked off the stage. Cameras and lights followed his progress out of the hall. He went back to his taxi, which still held his bag, and back to the airport. He returned that same day to London, without ever having unpacked or seen his hotel, his whole visit torpedoed by a single question that he had found impertinent.

The second version of Vidia’s Amsterdam exit was reported in the Dutch paper Het Parool , under the headline “Naipaul Came, Got Angry and Disappeared.”

In this story Vidia was to have spent five days in the Netherlands, but departed “in anger” after two days. For a public discussion at the Amsterdam PEN Center, Vidia asked that questions be submitted in writing, but he ridiculed them when he looked at them. A sample question he hooted at was “How do you see the future of our world in ten or twenty years?” To save the situation, the Dutch host asked a question, about how terms like “fascism” and “communism” describe European ideas that cannot necessarily be transposed onto societies fundamentally different from our own. When Vidia expressed mild agreement, a woman from Amsterdam’s Free University asked, “If terms like ‘fascism’ and ‘communism’ are not applicable, then how about using ‘rich’ and ‘poor’ as yardsticks?”

“Why ‘rich’ and ‘poor’?” Vidia said. “Why not ‘lazy’ and ‘ambitious,’ ‘learned’ and ‘illiterate,’ ‘good’ and ‘bad’? It’s about time we started looking at other aspects of people.”

Hearing this blunt reply, a Dutch author, Margaretha Ferguson, began (so the paper said) “an endless story about Naipaul’s negative attitude towards Islam,” and attacked him for saying that Dutch had virtually disappeared from the Indonesian language.

“Why do you ask me such things?” Vidia said (“irritatedly”). “To show that you know better? Of course you know better!”

“But if you are talking about intellectual clarity—” Miss Ferguson replied (“sputtered”).

“I don’t think you know what intellectual clarity is.”

Vidia rose from his chair, muttered something about the gathering’s being “senseless,” and decided to leave for the airport, where he handed back his fee for the afternoon (750 guilders) and flew home.

Which version was true?

“Does it matter when one is dealing with nonsense?” Vidia told me.

“What went wrong?”

I had had enjoyable experiences in Holland, where most people speak fluent English and are intellectually curious and widely traveled. They had not mythologized their colonial history, as the British and French sometimes had, making wog-bashing into a glorious mission to civilize. In the most provincial Dutch towns hundreds of people turned out to hear visiting novelists lecturing in English. But Vidia disagreed.