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

“In that case, I see, you’d be mentally unfit. But that’s just speculation.”

“It is a real possibility! I tell you, I was attacked by a Negro!”

“Maybe you should stay in Wiltshire.”

“I shall. But one comes up for the odd errand. One’s bank manager. One’s publishers. One’s haircut,” he said. “Paul, I want you to read this typescript. Read it closely.”

“Of course. I’d be happy to.”

“And if my brain is damaged and I cannot continue, I want you to finish writing the book.”

I leaned back to give myself perspective and to see whether he was smiling. But no, he was stern and certain, and he was brisk in his certainty, like a warrior making a will.

“You’ll notice there are many repetitions. Those are intentional. Keep the repetitions. And the rhythm, the way the sentences flow — keep that. You’ll see how the narrative builds. Keep building, let it flow.”

From the way he spoke, I had already, it seemed, been commissioned to finish writing The Enigma of Arrival , and he was brain damaged, sitting by while I scribbled, the ultimate test of the Sorcerer’s Apprentice, his snarelike shadow falling over me.

“What do you think, Paul?”

“It would be an honor, of course. And a challenge. A bit like Ford Madox Ford and Conrad collaborating on a novel, or Stevenson and his stepson Lloyd writing something together.”

“No, no. This is Major.”

I went home with the heavy typescript. I read it — three quarters of the book — and at the end my confidence was gone. There was no way I could finish the book or comment on it. I didn’t even like it. It seemed a studied monotony — repetitive, as he had said; indistinct, allusive, but fogbound, enigmatic in every way, a ponderous agglomeration of the dullest rural incidents. I had never read anything like it. It might be a masterpiece like Finnegans Wake , the sort of book people studied but could not read consecutively, an ambitious failure, something for the English Department to explicate and defend.

The Bungalow and Wilsford were in it, and so was a glimpse of Stephen Tennant — his plump pink thigh, his straw hat. Not very funny, though. The nutter seemed to represent the decline of Englishness rather than (as I thought) the apogee of the landlord as drag queen. Julian Jebb was in the book. He was unmistakable, his “little old woman’s face.” He was called Alan. I knew him to be an accomplished television producer. Vidia depicted him as a drunken flatterer, rather pathetic and hollow. He was “theatrical.” Jebb’s suicide was in it, in the middle of a dismissive paragraph, with less compassion than if Jebb had passed a kidney stone. “And then one day I heard — some days after the event — that he had taken some pills one night after a bout of hard drinking and died. It was a theatrical kind of death.”

But what threw me was this: “One autumn afternoon I had a slight choking fit as I walked past Jack’s old cottage and the derelict farmyard. The fit passed by the time I had got around the corner, cleared the farmyard, and left behind the old metal and tangled wire and timber junk below the beeches. (Not the birches near the firepit; they were on the other side of the way. These beeches were at the edge of the farmyard, big trees now in their prime, their lowest branches very low, providing a wonderful rich, enclosing shade in the summer that made me think of George Borrow in The Romany Rye and Lavengro .) Past the beeches and the farm, in the familiar solitude of the grassy way, I began to breathe easily again…”

It was at this point that I had a choking fit of my own. I could never enter into this narrative. I did not understand it. My bafflement made me anxious. What was this book about? The writing was so deliberately plain, so humorless, so obstinate in denying itself pleasure that even when it was being particular it was indistinct, as in the choking-fit passage, with the beeches and the birches. But I had only part of the novel. When Vidia finished it I would understand, I was sure. There was no way on earth that I could write a word of this.

“You must finish this yourself,” I said when I saw Vidia again. “It’s beyond me.”

“What if my brain is damaged?”

“It won’t be damaged in Wiltshire by anyone. Just stay there and work. Please, Vidia, I can’t do this.”

“You can see that it’s Major.”

“Absolutely.”

He knew I admired V.S. Pritchett. He told me the proof that Pritchett was second-rate was that he was still writing short stories as he approached the age of ninety and still found writing enjoyable: “It’s frightfully easy for him!” Vidia announced in an interview, “I have done an immense amount of work,” and speaking of the quality of his writing, he said, “It’s a great achievement we’re talking about.”

Pritchett himself had said — truly, I think — that all writers were at heart fanatical.

The Enigma of Arrival was published and was found by many reviewers to be enigmatic. Vidia said he paid no attention to reviewers. One English reviewer, known for his oldfangledness and his pipe-stuffing rusticity, hailed the novel as a masterpiece. Derek Walcott disagreed. He did not like it at all. This was a change. Vidia had quoted Derek Walcott to me with approval many times. Walcott had dedicated an early poem, “Laventille,” to Vidia — it was about a visit to a poor district in rural Trinidad. I had understood the two writers to be friends, and I had admired Walcott’s poetry as much as I admired Vidia’s prose.

Walcott attacked Vidia in his review. “The myth of Naipaul as a phenomenon, as a singular, contradictory genius… has long been a farce. It is a myth he chooses to encourage — though he alone knows why… There is something alarmingly venal in all this dislocation and despair. Besides, it is not true. There is instead another truth. Naipaul’s prejudice.”

Walcott went on to say that Vidia’s frankness was nothing more than bigotry. “If Naipaul’s attitude towards Negroes, with its nasty little sneers… was turned on Jews, for example, how many people would praise him for his frankness?” Privately, he called himself V.S. Nightfall.

Being black himself, Walcott had some authority in this matter, but Vidia was also a man of color. Speaking strictly of tinctures, Vidia was a double espresso to Derek’s café au lait, which was why from time to time Vidia had been discriminated against in England for showing this face. The charge of racism was serious, but it was odd, too, given Vidia’s race. And Walcott was attacking someone who admired him: one of the few living writers whom Vidia praised. Though he had been born on St. Lucia, in the Windward Islands, Walcott had become a permanent resident (and prominent writer) of Trinidad in 1958, when he was still in his twenties. He was a near contemporary of Vidia’s, a fellow islander, and in many respects a brother writer. Two brown men from the same dot on the map.

I did not mention the review to Vidia. It was my favor to him.

A few years later, Derek Walcott won the Nobel Prize in literature. Because the prize is essentially political (a Pole this year, a South American next year, a Trinidadian the year after), it meant that Vidia had missed his chance. He would probably never get it. Two Trinidadian Nobel laureates? It was as unlikely as two Albanians.

Vidia might have muttered, “There they go, pissing on literature,” but I doubted it. Derek Walcott was someone he read and remembered.

So I did not mention the Nobel Prize ever again. Another favor.

SUDDENLY Vidia was honored — at fifty-eight a knight, and Pat a lady by association. Such gongs in England were mostly granted to older people — Angus Wilson at seventy, V.S. Pritchett and Stephen Spender at eighty, P. G. Wodehouse at ninety — and to nearly everyone else they never came at all. It was especially rare to find a writer’s name on the Honours List, because writers were suspect, had nothing to give to the politicians who helped draw up the list, had no allies in the government, were notorious carpers and boat-rockers. Actors were a better bet and much more popular. As Vidia had once said, titles were usually awarded to the more devious of the Queen’s subjects. Even so, Vidia got the lowest order of knighthood, the Knight Batchelor, rather than the grander Knight of the Thistle (KT) or, the grandest of all, Knight Commander of the Order of St. Michael and St. George (KCMG, which to insiders stood for “the King Calls Me God”).