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

He did not, of course, use language casually. He was particular in his choice of words, which made him a demanding listener, too. Any word he used was intended, and considered; he sought simplicity, and one of his gifts was finding ambiguity and subtle meaning using primary colors. It was unusual for him to use a word such as “deliquesce,” though he did once, in An Area of Darkness; “nigrescent” he used only in The Mystic Masseur . He would say “cushion-shaped” rather than “pulvinate,” and “strong as leather” instead of “coriaceous,” and would always choose “delay” over “cunctation.” Anything that smacked of show, or style, or display, or falsity, anything that was used purely for effect, he disdained. Writing must never call attention to itself. “I just wish my prose to be very transparent. I don’t want the reader to stumble over me.” He was such a stickler for the truth, and so determined to root out any pretense in his work, that a style evolved made of favorite words, a way of expressing an idea and the ideas themselves, a tone of voice, recognizable sentence structures. His style came naturally and was the more distinct because it was a rejection of style. No one wrote like him.

The lightness of his early books was gone. Much of the humor was gone. His writing was denser, plainer, devoid of ornamentation. His gift for summing up a landscape was as strong as ever, but even more abbreviated, the effects concentrated in just a few words, a flash of light, an intrusion of weather, the texture of stone or wood or fading light sharply rendered. His writing acquired a wintry stoicism, full of fine shadings of a single color, powerful for its being monochromatic; a lushness was lost, but he had never trusted lushness. And now, in travel, he let people speak for themselves — sometimes for a dozen pages of monologue, in his attempt to devise a new sort of travel book, which was a chorus of people talking about their lives, a chain of voices, with hardly any intervention on his part.

There was always a lesson for me. I was not so sure that native monologues were the best way to write about a distant country. Vidia always said, “Make the reader see.” All that talking, like those ten-page confessional speeches in a Russian novel, blurred my vision. His more recent books were shaped like Studs Terkel’s tape-recorded narratives, but of a heartless and selective sort — tendentious, a word that Vidia hardly ever used.

He did not parody himself, but he had kept to his habit of thinking out loud. Saying “It’s Major” was his way of testing the possibility on me.

I took it that way. He was trying it out, and also, in his heart, he believed it to be true.

Another day he said, “Can you meet me in Kensington?”

I said yes, and met Vidia at the appointed place, a crimson telephone booth on a side street.

“Please make a phone call for me,” he said.

Following his instructions, I dialed the number, made the call, and asked for a certain woman; I had made no comment when Vidia told me the woman’s name was Margaret. She was summoned to the phone by the man who had answered me in a chilly voice, as though he suspected the ruse. I told Margaret that Vidia would call at a particular time.

“It’s much too boring to explain,” Vidia said after I hung up.

He did not have to explain. It was no mystery to me that such a wonderful writer could speak of his present work as Major, and be a guest at Garden Party at Buckingham Palace ( The Lord Chamberlain is commanded by Her Majesty to invite …), and the next moment would implore me like a child to dial a telephone number, because — surely? — he feared his own undisguisable voice might provoke an unwelcome reaction. He didn’t want to be told off. He was human.

Now I knew, as only a friend can, that for all his apparent strength, he could also be weak and unsure, and even unfair, with a coldly sarcastic streak. He looked at the populous continent of Africa and said, “Bow-and-arrow men!” or “Cuffy!” He glanced across the English Channel at Holland and said, “Potato eaters!” He frowned at the whole of the Middle East and grunted, “Mr. Woggy.”

But he had also written subtly of Africa, and appreciatively of Europe, and as for the Middle East, he had written an entire book about Islam. So, while I tried to see him clearly, I kept from judging what I did not understand.

At its most profound, friendship is not a hearty, matey celebration of linked arms and vigorous toasts; it is, rather, a solemn understanding that is hardly ever discussed. Friends rarely use the word “friendship” and seldom speak of how they are linked. There is a sort of trust that is offered by very few people; there are favors very few can grant: such instances are the test of friendship. With your ego switched off, you accept this person — his demands, his silences — and it is reciprocal. The relationship does not have the hideous complexity of a family’s sibling rivalry — that struggling like crabs in a basket. Nor does it have the heat of romantic love or the contractual connection of marriage. Yet a sympathy as deep as love springs from the moment you detect any disturbance or intimation of inadequacy in this other person. You take the rest on faith. It is not belief but acceptance, and even a kind of protection.

Friendship arises less from an admiring love of strength than a sense of gentleness, a suspicion of weakness. It is compassionate intimacy, a powerful kindness, and a knowledge of imperfection. Conversely, the attraction of power seems to me purely sexual in origin, something to do with advancing and strengthening the symmetry in the species, and with animals looking for mates. In the natural world the weak or wounded are outrun and eaten by predators. There are plenty of robust courtships among animals, and the strong have flocking instincts and a pack mentality: animal species succeed because they reject the lame and the halt. Geeks and wimps in the animal world are left to die. Friendship is peculiarly human, and all the implications of friendship lead inevitably to the conclusion that friends make bad mates.

Humans like each other for opposite reasons, because although we might be weak and ineffectual, we are still kind. We have that in common, and much else: our intelligence and sympathy and self-respect. Vidia had liked me long ago in Africa. Before I had dared to admit that I wanted to write a book, he had said, “You’re a writer.”

How helpless I must have seemed. But he saw other strengths in me, something in my heart. He saw my soul in my face, my art in the lines of my palm, my ambition and moods in the slope and stroke of my handwriting.

I had thought he was very strong. We became friends. I saw that he had many weaknesses — and he saw mine. It made us better friends. Most writers are cranks, so friendship among them is rare, and they end up loners. I was lucky.

Friendship means favors. Our friendship had started with a favor, Vidia’s saying “Do you have a motorcar?” And soon after, he did me the favor of reading some things I had written. He was under no obligation; he hardly knew me; I was not his student. The favors were reciprocal. Often the same favor helped both of us. I read The Mimic Men in proof form for typos; that was my favor to him. He allowed me the first glimpse of The Mimic Men and I learned a great deal; that was his favor to me.

As the years passed, he would ask me for simple mysterious favors, like dialing the telephone number. Now and then he asked me to read the typescript of a book.

A writer asks a friend to read something in typescript — a smudged provisional form — in order to be encouraged. In this lonely and paranoia-inducing job we need friendly words. And unless a writer already thinks a piece of writing is very good, he does not hand it over for inspection and favorable comment. After that, with publication, there are many judgments, but by then the writer has moved on to something else. So the first look and the first praise is crucial, and often it is all that matters. It is a privileged peep into the heart of a writer at his most vulnerable. No writer would allow it unless praise was expected.