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

“I would like you to look at my new book,” Vidia said. “It’s Major.”

It was A Bend in the River , a bundle of typed pages. It was set in Africa. Even before I began reading it, I was apprehensive. Vidia was afraid of “bush people,” as he said, of “bow-and-arrow men.” Most of Africa seemed to represent his worst nightmare of brutishness and illiteracy. He was without much hope. “Africa has no future.”

I opened the book. I read, “Nazruddin, who sold me the shop cheap, didn’t think I would have it easy when I took over.”

The narrator of this perversely plain opening sentence, Salim, was a Muslim. That was something new. As a Brahmin, a half-believing Hindu, Vidia had never shown much interest in Muslims, and he had often been distinctly unsympathetic, blaming Islamic nationalists for the partition of India and for a repressive Pakistan. In Africa he had gravitated to the Hindu dukawallahs .

Right away I felt something was wrong, not just with that opening sentence but with some details. Salim ate nothing but beans. Surely a Muslim would eat meat and would make sure the animal had been slaughtered in the proper way, so that it was halal , the Islamic equivalent of kosher. Vidia had unconsciously imposed his own bean eating on his narrator. I made a note in the margin: Eats only beans?

The novel showed an intimate knowledge of Kisangani, at a bend in the Zaire River. In an earlier magazine piece about the Congo, “A New King for the Congo,” Vidia had written of how Stanleyville — Stanley Falls Station — had been the actual haunt of Mr. Kurtz, the heart of darkness, and “seventy years later at this bend in the river, something like Conrad’s fantasy came to pass.” He meant the tyrannical reign of Mobutu.

I found myself reading the typescript quickly, finding little to comment upon. It was a good book. It contained the somnolence as well as the random violence of Africa, and Vidia’s nose anatomized the stinks and putrefaction, the atmosphere of imperial failure and ruin. It was also a love story. Salim has an affair with Yvette, the wife of an expatriate. Salim is also a very prickly fellow. One day he feels slighted by Yvette, so he kicks her. She cries. Moments later she gets into bed, inviting him to join her. He realizes that it is the end of their affair. “Her body had a softness, a pliability, and a great warmth.” One expects that he will make love to her. He holds her legs apart. What Salim did next made me swing the typescript away from my face: “I spat at her between the legs until I had no more spit.” What? Yvette objects — naturally — and she shouts and struggles. So Salim hits her again. “Bone struck against bone again; my hand ached at every blow.”

I spat at her between the legs until I had no more spit .

The difficulty I always had with Vidia’s scenes of sex or violence became almost overwhelming. Was it because I did not want to read such scenes for what they disclosed about my friend? A writer is never more unconsciously confessional than when he writes of sex. Vidia’s scenes were aggressive, strange, joyless. Women’s bodies were pathetic and frail; they smelled. He was forever finding women leaky and damp, in sadly wrinkled clothes, creases at the crotch, stains at the armpits. Even when they tried to correct the condition, they could not win. In In a Free State , Bobby finds a sachet in Linda’s room. “It was a vaginal deodorant with an appalling name. The slut, Bobby thought, the slut.”

And in The Mimic Men there had been the whore in Spain whom Ralph Singh brought to his hotel room: “A figure from hell with a smiling child’s face.” She is very fat. The act of love is like a visit from a proctologist. “Nails, tongue, breath and lips were the instruments of this disembodied probing… The probing went lower. I was turned over on my belly. The probing continued with the same instruments.”

Disgust and desire were mingled with a distinct hostility towards women in Guerrillas . The “white liberal” woman, Jane, becomes aroused when she is viciously slapped, “so hard that her jaw jarred… and then she was slapped again.” She discovers “to her dismay and disgust that she was moist.” Odd that Vidia, of all people, found any veracity in the misogynistic cliché of slapping as foreplay and a beating as an aphrodisiac. Later, in a Black Power commune, Jane is raped by Jimmy Ahmed, who is the commune’s leader. Jimmy has a hair-trigger problem: “Just like that, without convulsions, his little strained strength leaked out of him, and it was all over.” But forget hanky-panky: Jane is more aroused by being slapped around. And Jimmy is actually homosexual: “He longed for the feel of Bryant’s warm firm flesh and his relieving mouth and tongue.” Nevertheless, Jane stays in the commune, only to be violently sodomized by Jimmy, who taunts her: “You didn’t bring your Vaseline.” In this act, his ejaculatio praecox is apparently cured: “He drove deeper and deeper until he was almost sitting upright on her.” Very soon after, at Jimmy’s command, Jane is hacked to death with machetes.

In his essay on Evita Peron, Vidia mentions Evita’s full red lips, hinting at “her reputed skill in fellatio.” He describes the machismo of Argentine males and their single-mindedness on the subject of sodomy. “The macho’s conquest of a woman is complete only when he has buggered her… La tuve en el culo , I’ve had her in the arse… a kind of sexual black mass.” Elsewhere in his writing he would describe a man with a complexion “like risen dough” and imply, and sometimes assert, it to be the clear indication that the man was an ardent masturbator, much as Dickens had implied the same nocturnal autoeroticism by giving Uriah Heep circles around his eyes. If it is fair to regard the passions and fantasies of a writer’s characters as those of the writer himself — and why not? — then I found Vidia’s observations unsettling.

“In the old days I would have grown dizzy with excitement here,” Vidia wrote recently in Beyond Belief , describing the crowds of Pakistani whores in the red-light district of Lahore. “Up to my mid-thirties I had been attracted to prostitutes and sought them out.” If that was true, how did it square with his looking me in the eye in Kampala, when he was thirty-four, and saying, “I have given up sex"? It did not square at all, of course, and I now believed the later statement, of his having been a whore-hopper, which was why I was convinced that only with the passage of time did one know the truth.

But I had A Bend in the River in my hand. The spitting scene stayed in my mind, as well as that unpromising first sentence. The rest I liked. We met for tea. I brought the typescript.

“What do you think, Paul?”

“You’re right. It’s Major.”

“No suggestions?”

“The first sentence is wonderful,” I said. “But there is an even better one in the sixth paragraph.”

“Show me.”

It was in the middle of the paragraph. It ran, “The world is what it is; men who are nothing, who allow themselves to become nothing, have no place in it.”

It was certainly a mouthful for a semi-educated Indian shopkeeper in the Congolese bush, yet it seemed to me the most effective way of starting the novel.

Vidia circled it, made a balloon for it, and indicated where it should be inserted, at the top of the first paragraph.

“You’re right, Paul,” he said. “I’m sure that’s better. It will sell more copies this way.”

“One other thing. Salim eats an awful lot of beans. He never eats meat.”

“Patsy said something about that.”

“Give him some meat, I think.”