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

Vidia and Nadira had arrived, having left Dairy Cottage that morning.

“Paul, this is Nadira.”

The skinny, scowling seven-year-old girl in her little princess sari on the Nairobi verandah had become a big woman. She was dark and tall — taller than Vidia — and watchful, with the sort of frank sizing-you-up stare that is never seen on the faces of Pakistani women. Her sari was loose at the hips, as if she had just lost some weight. She was waiting for me to say something. I spoke to Vidia.

“I just missed you at that Indian show at Christie’s yesterday.”

Before Vidia could reply, Nadira slapped his shoulder and said, “You bad man! You did not tell me you went there!”

She slapped his arm again and scolded him. This seemed a trifle presumptuous in a woman who had been married only a month. I had never seen anyone touch Vidia before.

“You will not buy any more pictures!”

“You’re telling my secrets, Paul,” Vidia said quietly, looking a little grim.

Salman Rushdie was being introduced to Vidia as I stepped up to a table to get myself a cup of coffee, and then I saw Bill Buford from The New Yorker beckoning, and we all headed to a big white circus tent.

As I passed Salman, he was smiling and shaking his head. He said, “I have never met him before.”

“What did he say?”

“He said, ‘Are you all right?’ I told him yes, I am all right. He said, ‘Good, good, good.’” Salman began to laugh.

We took our seats, Vidia, Bill Buford, and I, on the stage in the big circus tent. The audience was large, but still the atmosphere was that of a dog show. We were being asked to perform, to walk on our hind legs, jump through hoops, create a spectacle for the readers. Buford said, “What about questions afterwards?”

“No questions,” Vidia said. I felt sure he hated doing this, but he had agreed; I had not twisted his arm. His general philosophy was “The writer should never precede the work.” Or even: “The writer should remain invisible.” Books were the things. But there were no books in sight, only goggling faces in the sold-out tent and the sense of scrutiny, all those faces like light bulbs.

In his rambling introduction — Vidia fidgeting irritatedly as my new book was mentioned — Bill said, “Paul, you’re two decades younger than Vidia,” and finally asked, “What did Vidia give you as a writer?”

I thanked him and said, “A couple of corrections, Bill. I am not two decades younger than Vidia. I am fifty-five, Vidia’s sixty-four. And we met over thirty years ago, when I actually did feel more than twenty years younger. I felt very young. I felt that I was meeting a much older, much wiser, much more experienced person. A person much more than nine or ten years older than I was.”

Vidia sat looking meditative. He had not said a word, and we had hardly spoken beforehand. He was wearing a dark jacket and a sweater under it, dark wool trousers, dark shoes. He seemed to be listening carefully, and I was grateful to have this chance to pay tribute to him.

“And you ask what he gave me?” I said. “I feel that he gave me everything. The main thing that he gave me was the confidence that I was a writer. He said that every writer was different, and if you were great, you were a new man. I had to write my own book, but that it would not resemble anyone else’s book. My writing had to come from inside me, and that every book needed a reason to be written.”

To my left, I could see Vidia nodding. I was annoyed that I had had to speak first, and I felt I was rambling.

“In 1966 in Kampala, when I met Vidia, I had not published a book. Vidia was the first writer I had met who had a total sense of mission, a total sense of self, an uncompromising attitude towards himself, towards the novel. If he made a rule, he kept to the rule. He said that a writer has to make his own way in the world. He asked me once or twice, Are you sure you’re up for it? Are you sure you want to be a writer? Are you sure you want to live this terrible life?’ I was twenty-four years old. I said, ‘I’m up for it.’”

Vidia was sitting next to me, near enough for me to hear him sighing in impatience — or perhaps he was simply breathing asthmatically. Near as he was, he was not looking at me or at the audience. He sat at an angle and stared into space while, on his other side, Bill Buford spoke to him — spoke to his shoulder, for Vidia remained turned away. His body language said bluntly that he wished he was elsewhere.

Bill began to ask me another question when, out of self-consciousness — for Vidia, the star of this show, still had not spoken — I turned to Vidia and asked, “You once wrote, ‘To be a victim is to be absurd.’ What did you mean by this?”

Vidia cleared his throat and said, “Well, I think the word ‘victim’ has probably been extended. I was thinking about people who were utterly helpless politically and had no rights, no one to turn to, and I thought: They were always absurd. This was in a note to a study of slavery and revolution that I spent some years in working on. The slaves had no rights — and I am thinking about the Caribbean slavery — and to be a victim is to be absurd. Slaves are absurd people. That is the truth. The current use of the word is an extension of that. I haven’t thought about it like that. I was thinking about it in a very practical, realistic way. I don’t make generalizations.”

“So you don’t mean it in the modern sense,” I said.

“No, not in the sense of someone in a university who can’t get a job,” Vidia said with the sort of snappish energy he had when he was irritable. I had noticed the awkward way he sat and could see that he had something on his mind. “No, that’s another kind of victim.”

People in the audience laughed at his seeming to mock universities, and over their laughter I persisted, hoping to draw him out.

Vidia lifted his head, looked at nothing, and said, “I don’t think like this about myself. I deal with material at hand and I don’t make generalizations like this.”

Feeling rebuffed, I said no more and let the silence descend. Time for Vidia to offer something. Perhaps he was right: it seemed in my question that I was embarrassed by his discomfort and trying to ingratiate myself.

He giggled confidently in the silence and said, “Sorry, I don’t want to stump the conversation.”

Buford rescued the faltering moment, saying, “Paul, if I can intercept. I arrived from New York last night, and as I got here on the train I was thinking of your books. In some ways no two writers could be more different, and yet there are some similarities. And one is that both of you became writers in Britain. In your case, Vidia, you actively became a writer when you came to Britain and started studying at Oxford. And in Paul’s case — you, Paul, also became a writer when you lived here. What was the effect of being in Britain for you?”

I gestured for Vidia to answer.

“This is a very important question,” Vidia said.

He coiled on his chair, concentrating hard, and lifted his gaze again, speaking to the heights of the circus tent.

“It has to be considered,” he said. “Writing is a physical business. Books are real physical objects. They have to be printed, published, reviewed, read, distributed — it’s a physical object, it’s a commercial enterprise. It’s an effect of the industrial society. You can’t beat a book out on a drum.” He let this sink in. “So, in the 1950s, when I started, if you were writing in English, there was only one place where you could be a writer. It was here. It couldn’t be the United States, because I had no link with America. I had a link only with here. It certainly couldn’t be any other English-speaking country, because I don’t think they even had publishing industries.”