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

When I got to the image of the snipped-off stem and ached remembering my father’s sweet nature, I realized that no matter how vital he might seem, he was dying.

The phone rang again, my mother. “Come quickly. He hasn’t got much time.”

My father was smiling the day he died. He even laughed proudly. He said, “You look good, Paul,” and seeing the whole family gathered near his bed, grateful at the moment of his death — could anyone be more humble? — he said, “What a wonderful reunion.”

I stayed with him to the end, with my brothers Gene and Joe, and after twenty minutes of agonal breathing he drew his last breath, almost on the stroke of nine o’clock. Nothing on earth I had ever seen had filled me with such desolation as watching my father die in his hospital bed in Hyannis.

“Grief is pure and holy,” a woman of ninety-seven wrote to me. “You will find out that your father has not left you but will continue to live within you and seem to guide you.”

This was accurate. I felt my father’s presence strongly afterwards. But I missed him as a friend. We had had no “issues.” He was proud of me, and I loved him — loved him most of all because he had set me free. When I told him I was going to Africa for two years, he was delighted for me. And: “No one owes you a thing.” He wrote to me often. I was in Africa more than five years. He encouraged me to explore. He had freed me because he was free himself. He had been loved by his parents. He knew how to love.

Vidia wrote. I had sent him my father’s obituary. “He sounded an immensely strong man, and his going will create a gap, whatever age he was.”

We were discussing by mail the appearance in The New Yorker of a number of letters Vidia had written me. They were “Letters to a Young Writer.” He reported the reactions. Only two. One letter from a friend. Another from a fool.

He had published A Way in the World . In it was the story about Raleigh, an old man on the Orinoco, under siege by the Spanish, hoping to find gold so that he would not be executed. Vidia had told me this story in New York, that snowy day twenty years before. He said he was planning a new journey for a book. It was to be a sequel to his Islamic travels of 1979 which resulted in Among the Believers— peregrinations in Malaysia, Indonesia, Iran, Pakistan.

He hoped he had the stomach to write the book. He had been visited again by the intimation that he was a has-been. He complained that in his writing life he had had few well-wishers and little practical help. He said that his had been a solitary struggle. “I have had to do it all out of my own reserves.”

That last part was inexplicable. Hadn’t he had plenty of encouragement? Not just the literary prizes — every English book prize that was winnable he had won. His friends were distinguished and adoring. His advances were substantial, far outweighing his sales, which were never great. With this prestige he had sold his archives, including hundreds of my letters, to the University of Oklahoma at Tulsa for $640,000.

One of his American acquaintances had said to me, in a reproving way, “Vidia wants everything.”

But everything means everything, for when wishes are granted, answered prayers are not sorted into two piles, good and bad, and always there are consequences: you had forgotten that asking for everything in the sack includes the sack itself. Vidia said this was the lesson of Salman Rushdie. He had set out to be original and shocking. He wished for fame. He became the most famous writer in the world, the origin of his fame the price on his head, like a cruel fable of wishes granted.

At this point, Vidia — Sir Vidia — had his wish: he too had everything. He had been very specific. He had wished for a place to call home. He now had three, two flats in London and a house in Wiltshire. He had wished to live in a manner that was “uncompromisingly fashionable” and to be “immensely famous.” He had Kensington and his knighthood. He had wished for a million pounds in the bank. Surely he had his million now.

When he returned from his Islamic journey, he was devastated by what he had found. He wrote urgently to tell me that Pat was on her deathbed. “It is more than I can bear,” he said. “She has been with me since January or February 1952. I cannot endure the knowledge that in another room of this house she is suffering without any hope of relief, except the very final one.” He implored me to write her obituary, in the form of a reminiscence. He reminded me that I had known her a very long time. He knew of my affection for her. He did not want her to be forgotten. His implication was that he himself was incapable of writing anything about her. Yet it seemed to me that we study the art of writing for, among other things, moments like this.

Now I understood the quarrels. “We row all the time now,” Vidia had told me. Pat, whose mocking maiden name was Hale, knew she was dying; she was raging — sorrowful, indignant. How unfair that someone who had asked so little of life, who had spent so much time waiting, attending, being silent, speaking ill of no one, constantly apologizing, excusing herself — the very model of intelligence and simplicity; frugal, frail, humble, full of compliments, saying sweetly, I thought of you , and almost the only person on earth who sent me a birthday card; modest, a little timid, always indoors — how unfair that death was stalking her.

More than anyone, Pat had had the darkest experience of Vidia’s shadow. Even if she had not known about his passion for prostitutes, which Vidia had claimed had lasted into his mid-thirties, she had been painfully acquainted with the facts of his relationship with Margaret, how he had traveled with her and taken her to parties. Everyone knew. Vidia did not conceal his affair with Margaret, and it had lasted as love.

Why didn’t the Naipauls just split up? Was it purely because Pat allowed him to have a lover, and his lover had not made marriage a condition? But life was more complicated than that.

In every sense, Pat was left behind. I had suspected this early on, seeing her as a worried woman of an old-fashioned sort who in another century would have been called neurasthenic. Her ill health was the result of the way she lived, as a captive wife, a shut-in, fluttering in whatever cage of a house Vidia devised for her. And of course, because the way she lived made her ill, and her lifestyle never changed, she got worse. “A case of nerves,” a quack would say. She was trembly, she was inward, introverted, a stay-at-home, afflicted with insomnia, a fretful and hesitant sort, and yet in the same room with Vidia she could seem maternal towards him — overprotective, solicitous, weepy, long-suffering. Vidia played the wayward demanding child to this wounded mother.

Everyone liked her, with an affection that bordered on pity. When Vidia was away — and he was probably with Margaret — Pat ran his affairs. It made me think that Pat was stronger than most people guessed. It was Vidia who could not function alone. What bothered me most about his “travel books” was that he seldom traveled by himself and never revealed his traveling companion. I suspected Vidia’s travel narratives to be extensively varnished, because Margaret was nowhere in them.

What was the challenge in traveling with a loving woman? To me, all such travel was just a holiday, no matter the destination. There were no alien places on earth for the man who had his lover to cling to at night and tell him he was a genius. I had, always avoided reading about the journey in which Mr. and Mrs. First-Class Traveler were embarked on a satisfying adventure (“My wife found an exquisite carving…”). That sort of vacation interested me only if it truthfully reported the cannibalism in the marital woe of the traveling couple: bitter arguments, jealousy, sex, pettiness, infidelity, unfounded accusations, culture shock, or pained silences.