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

“The Dutch,” he said. “Potato eaters.”

The famous image in the Van Gogh painting said everything about the culture, he believed: ugly, moronic, famished peasants in a greasy kitchen, crouched over a basin of spuds and cramming them into their mouths.

I heard other stories that I did not bother to verify, because they had the ring of truth. There were many complaints about his behavior and even his writing. Vidia was used to complaints. He said, “I think unless one hears a little squeal of pain after one’s done some writing, one has not really done much.” Any story related to fastidiousness, and especially food, was unquestionably true.

He was at a dinner party in New York City. He sipped his wine. It was satisfactory — he had insisted on choosing the wine. The dishes were passed by the waiter, people helping themselves. The main course was meat, but because Vidia was a guest, extra dishes of vegetables were also served. Vidia waved them away. He spent the entire meal sipping wine and nibbling a piece of bread.

“You haven’t eaten anything, Mr. Naipaul,” the woman next to him said. She was Dame Drue Heinz, patroness of the arts and part of the Heinz food fortune.

“Yes, I’m a vegetarian,” Vidia said.

“There are vegetables in that bowl,” she indicated.

Vidia explained that he had watched all the vegetables being served and had seen someone — he did not say whom — using a serving implement that had come into contact with the meat dish.

“Those vegetables are tainted.”

At another dinner party, in London, something similar happened. The dishes were passed, Vidia took nothing for himself. He sipped wine, he nibbled bread. The hostess was surprised by Vidia’s indifference, for knowing that he was a vegetarian she had made an effort to provide extra vegetables. She watched Vidia waving the steaming dishes aside.

The host, tipped off by his wife, approached Vidia quietly after the meal.

“Was there anything wrong with the food?”

Vidia said, “I didn’t see anything for me.”

“There were vegetables,” the host said.

“Those were not my vegetables,” Vidia said. “Those were everyone’s vegetables.”

Only a non-Hindu would find this behavior strange. One day in India I was approached by a beggar. I was seated under a peepul tree, eating a coconut that had just been cracked open for me by a street vendor. The beggar asked me for some rupees. He was starving, he said, and he looked it: ragged dhoti, hollow eyes, clawlike hands.

“You are hungry?”

“Yes, sahib.”

“Have the rest of this coconut.”

He refused. He was a high-caste beggar. I was a foreigner, an Untouchable. He could not eat coconut that had been tainted by my fingers. He wanted his own coconut. If he had been dying of thirst, he would not have drunk out of a container that had touched my lips. He was a Brahmin.

Naipaul is a Brahmin. He is also proud of what he has achieved. On another occasion, he was guest of honor at a dinner in London to which a large number of people had been invited. Before the dinner, a woman came up to him and said, “You wrote a dishonest book about London— Mr. Stone . Nothing in that book is true. You totally misrepresented the way we live.”

Vidia did not reply. Instead, he immediately left the party, before all the guests had arrived, before any were seated or the meal was served.

“What about the hostess? Didn’t you say anything to her?” I asked, because Vidia himself had told me this story.

Vidia shook his head. “Let that foolish woman who insulted me explain why I wasn’t there.”

At about the same time, he told an interviewer, “I can’t be interested in people who don’t like what I write, because if you don’t like what I write you’re disliking me.” It was after such an encounter that he said, “England is a country of second-rate people — bum politicians, scruffy writers, and crooked aristocrats.”

To people who found him demanding, insisting on high fees to speak or read, first-class airfares, five-star hotels, chauffeurs, minders, secretaries, and vintage wines, Vidia gave his usual reply: Treat me as you would a world-class brain surgeon or astrophysicist.

His sweeping generalizations and cutting remarks were widely quoted. What about Africa? one interviewer asked him. What was the future for Africa?

“Africa has no future,” he said.

Indians were treated no more gently by him. They did not read, he said. “If they read at all, they read for magic. They read holy books, they read sacred hymns — books of wisdom, books that will do them good.” He told me that it was very bad that Indian women kept their hair so long: “It encourages rape.” He became noted for pointing out that the red-dot caste mark that Indians wear on their forehead means “my head is empty.”

Asked about his book sales on his native island of Trinidad, he said, “My books aren’t read in Trinidad now. Drumbeating is a higher activity, a more satisfying activity.” Once he had written, “I happen to like Spanish dancing,” but later in an interview he said he deplored dancing. “Dance? I’ve never danced. I’d be ashamed of it. It is something out of the jungle. It’s undignified. I dislike all those lower-class cultural manifestations.”

He was invited to San Francisco to read at two performances. He demanded, and received, his astrophysicist’s fee. Both performances were sold out in advance. Vidia read. But the audience was disappointed that he took no questions afterwards. When his host tried to ask him why he would not relent, he pretended he had not heard the question and showed her his tweed jacket, saying, “It’s rather fine, don’t you think? Made in South Africa.”

But he told me the reason. “I was invited to read from my work, not to answer asinine questions.”

He was much more concerned by the movie shown on his incoming flight. He had hated it. He mentioned its name.

“Do you know that film, Paul?”

I said I didn’t.

“The people responsible for making that film should be punished. They should be beaten. Whipped! No one should be allowed to make films like that. It was grotesque. Beat them!”

Another flight, this one to Trinidad, also enraged him. After takeoff, he stood in the aisle to slip off his sweater. A flight attendant hurried towards him.

“Please don’t take your shirt off,” she said.

“You see?” he told me. “Here is this simple West Indian fellow. He is planning to fly to Trinidad with his shirt off — bare-chested — as they do on his island.”

“What did you do?”

“I’m afraid I raised my voice. I screamed at them. I said they were all cunts. Excuse me. I was very angry.”

He screamed in India, too, when he was told to remove his shoes before entering various temples, including the ancient Lord Jagannath Temple in Puri. Vidia pointed out that the temple floor was far dirtier and more disgusting than his shoes and that the idea of defiling such a filthy, unswept place was ridiculous. This story was repeated in The Times of London, which indicated that there had been “an altercation.”

In Portland, Oregon, he was being driven to the airport the day after a reading, which had been arranged by his American publisher. His driver, a local woman, making small talk on the long drive, asked him his feelings about Portland, and, as he had just visited Seattle, she chitchatted about their differences.

“Seattle is an ocean city,” she said. “Portland is definitely an inland place.”

“How would you characterize Portland?” Vidia asked.

“This is a small town,” she said.

Vidia suddenly became furious and turned on the woman, shouting, “I don’t go to small towns! I never go to small towns!”