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

A Bend in the River was shortlisted for the Booker Prize that year. I was one of the Booker judges. I reread the book, one of many submissions for the important prize, and saw that Vidia had transposed the sentence, as I had suggested. He had also made Salim a credible carnivore. But when it came to the decision, I voted against it. Mine was the deciding vote. I preferred Patrick White’s novel, The Twyborn Affair .

“Patrick White? Over my dead body,” one of the panelists said.

Another said to me, “I thought Naipaul was your friend.”

“So what? I didn’t like the spitting. I wasn’t convinced by the ending — all that to-ing and fro-ing, the visit to London.”

In the end, we compromised on Offshore , by Penelope Fitzgerald, and most people jeered at our choice. They said Naipaul should have won. But Vidia had already won the Booker Prize with In a Free State . It was thought that because I was a judge, Vidia would be a shoo-in. Not at all.

Though Vidia maintained that writing was fair and that books always made their own way, he had been impressed by the effectiveness of Shiva’s agent. I had introduced Shiva to this agent, who was also my agent. Vidia asked for an introduction and very soon afterwards became a client. Vidia’s advances and the terms of his contracts were greatly improved. He might soon have his million.

“I am not happy with my publisher,” Vidia said on another occasion.

I introduced him to my publisher.

“What can I do to tempt him?” my publisher said.

“Give him a million pounds.”

“Out of the question.”

“Then get a table at a fabulous restaurant for dinner. Not lunch. ‘Dinner is grander.’ Then let Vidia order the wine. It’s not a guarantee of success, but at least he won’t get up in the middle and stalk away.”

“Do you think he would have the temerity to do that?”

“It has happened before.”

I was invited to the dinner. My publisher was nervous. Vidia ordered a white Burgundy and a prawn entrée. But the prawns were bad. Vidia said he had to leave. I drove him back to Kensington just in time for him to be nauseated in the privacy of his own home. He found another publisher. It wasn’t the food, however, it was the money — he was still aiming at a million.

One of the chores of book publication is the writing of jacket copy. This copy is also recycled in the publisher’s catalogue. When he received the proposed jacket copy for A Turn in the South , Vidia pronounced it unsuitable. He did not rage. He wrote a long, patient letter to his publisher, Viking, explaining his intentions. He closed the letter: “A writer sets out to do a particular thing. He should do that thing, and should feel that he has done it. But every real book catches fire, goes beyond a writer’s intention. So it happens that readers and critics find other meanings in a real book. I was hoping that someone at Viking might have said something interesting in the blurb.”

But no one had, and the agent called me, saying, “Paul, Vidia asked me to ring you. We need a favor.”

This was in the month of August. I had just ended a book tour for Riding the Iron Rooster , my book about China. I was working on a novel, My Secret History . I listened with a sinking heart.

“Would you, as a favor, write the jacket blurb for A Turn in the South? ”

It meant putting my novel aside to perform the most menial and thankless work in publishing. It meant closely reading Vidia’s entire book, then writing the blurb — in effect a short, insightful, and persuasive rave — and sending it to the publisher, who was probably on vacation. It was a monumental intrusion into my writing life, something no writer — and certainly not Vidia — would consider for an instant.

“I’ll do it,” I said.

The agent laughed at my pliability. He was grateful, of course, and also surprised. But Vidia felt he was in a spot, and I remembered his saying years before, “That’s what friends are for.”

A bound proof was sent to me. I read it with interest and I liked it, the apparent simplicity of the journey in the American South: Vidia’s appreciation, something resembling humility in his approach, with no bombast and a genuine curiosity. He defined the sort of travel book he was writing and in so doing made helpful distinctions between other sorts. It was not possible to write a conventional travel book about the United States — a book in which, as Vidia explained, the traveler said, “This is me here. This is me getting off the old native bus and being led by strange boys, making improper proposals, to some squalid lodging. This is me having a drink in a bar with some local characters. This is me getting lost later that night.”

That kind of book, very common, depicted the traveler “defining himself against a foreign background.” He added that “depending on who he is, the book can be attractive,” but it worked only if the traveler was “alien or outlandish in some way.” Yet this method seldom worked for the traveler in the United States. “The place is not and cannot be alien in the simple way an African country is alien. It is too well known, too photographed, too written about; and, being more organized and less informal, it is not so open to casual inspection.”

This was to me an inspired lesson in the varieties of travel writing. Vidia also seemed, once again, to be speaking directly to me, a traveler on native buses, a buyer of drinks for local characters, making a meal of my losing my way. Twenty-three years on, I was still learning from him.

So I began my blurb, “ A Turn in the South is a completely fresh look at an area and a situation which have become caricaturish for some and incomprehensible for others.”

Knowing that Vidia would be scrutinizing every word, I wrote carefully, self-consciously, with the sort of precision and invention Vidia expected, struggling to make it right: a forty-eight-year-old man revisiting the humility and strain of his apprenticeship. The three hundred words took me two days. I sent the piece, via the agent, to Vidia, like a student submitting a crucial essay to his professor. It was both a test of friendship and a test of skill.

The reply came back from the agent, a scribble: V. very grateful .

A more unusual favor was asked of me by Vidia when he was writing The Enigma of Arrival . The germ of the book was old. In 1966 Vidia had shown me some pages of a story he intended to return to again. “I warm up this way,” he said. To get into a writing mood, he copied and recopied the pages, describing a classical scene pictured in a painting by De Chirico. Alter two decades he was using those same pages as part of a novel.

I met him for tea in his tiny flat in Queen’s Gate Terrace.

“I was assaulted in Gloucester Road,” he said. “A Negro approached me. He made as if to walk by and then hit me hard on the side of the head— whack! ”

“That’s terrible, Vidia.”

“It was a shock.”

But he was calm. Beside him was a large file folder containing a four-inch stack of paper, undoubtedly a typescript.

“I am at a very delicate point in my book,” Vidia said. He glanced at the file folder.

“Is that it?”

He nodded gravely. “It’s Major.”

He did not say that it was a continuation of his old story; he said nothing about it other than that it was Major. He only mentioned that he had not finished it.

“I may never finish it.”

What a funny thing to say, I thought. I said, “But you have to.”

“What if my brain is damaged?”

“Your brain is fine, Vidia.”

“What if someone else assaults me? One of these idlers one sees on the Gloucester Road. He might do serious damage. I would then be incapable of finishing the book. How could I, with a damaged brain?”