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

“Did I hear someone say ‘parliament’? ‘democracy’? ‘socialism’?” Naipaul made his disgusted face and repeated a bit of literary criticism he had just read. “The words are all wrong. These fraudulent people are trying to prettify this situation. It’s a huge whitewash, man. No—” The laughter began to tumble in his lungs. “It’s blackwash, that’s what it is. Blackwash.”

He avoided the Senior Common Room. He made one visit to the Staff Club, and mainly for his benefit, one of the jollier members told jokes that all of us had heard before. Naipaul sat stony-faced. Afterwards he said he hated jokes. He hated the English when they tried to be colorful characters.

“Your infies,” he called them. And he was remembered in the Staff Club for having referred to Britain as “that socialist paradise.”

“I’ve been a socialist all my life,” Haji Hallsmith said.

Hallsmith’s apartment revolted Naipaul. “It smells,” he said. “And have you noticed the way Hallsmith dresses? Those African shirts he wears are ridiculous. I had always thought of a university lecturer as someone rather grand. Why, he’s just a common infy.”

In an almost constant state of niggling annoyance, incessantly judgmental, he developed the notion that nearly all the expatriates were homosexual, living out a fantasy of sexual license in Uganda. He believed that their political views were insincere and mocking, merely a transparent justification for chasing boys. He laughed at the thought that they regarded themselves as liberals and intellectuals.

We were driving when he told me this. He was holding a cigarette — he tamped them and played with them as though fine-tuning them, packing the tobacco, smoothing the paper with his thumb, before he smoked them.

I said, “So I guess you would agree with George Wallace in thinking of them as ‘pointy-headed intellectuals.’”

He loved that. He repeated it twice, saying it was true.

“This place is absolutely full of buggers.”

“Please, Vidia,” Pat said from the back seat.

“And pointy-headed intellectuals.” He was smiling grimly out the window. He lit the cigarette and smoked it awhile, tapping the Sportsman pack on the back of his hand.

“How do you stand it, Paul?”

I was about to say how happy I was, living in Uganda with Yomo. It seemed a dream at times, to be in such a beautiful place with someone I loved. She was brave; she mocked the men who leered at her or who made remarks because she was holding hands with a white man. She didn’t mind the long dusty drives or the spiders or the snakes or the little crawling dudus . Even the thought of living in the bush behind Bundibugyo did not faze her. I liked my job. I found my students vague but teachable.

But before I could say any of this, Naipaul piped up, “Your writing, of course. If you didn’t write, you’d go out of your mind.”

He had read only a small amount of what I had written, but he seemed to see that it stood for more. I had written many poems and published some in American and British literary magazines. “Little magazines,” Naipaul called them, making a face. “Lots of libido,” he always said of my poems, but it was not a criticism. He liked one I had published in the Central African Examiner about an old car I had seen rotting in the bush. He quoted it word for word to me a few days afterwards. It was a trenchant comment about colonialism, he said; it was about Africans letting things go to ruin. I reread it and thought: Maybe.

My writing project at the time was an essay on cowardice, inspired by Orwell’s clear-sighted and confessional essays. I had been writing it for the American magazine Commentary . Naipaul had approved; it was not a little magazine, but the essay needed work. “I warned you, I’m brutal,” he said. “Forget Orwell for the moment.” I was on my fifth or sixth revision with him. It was like whittling a stick, but I was learning.

“It’s true, Patsy. You know that. He’d go out of his mind.”

I kept driving, heading back to town, wondering whether it was true. I had been content for two years at a bush school in Malawi. I had been writing the whole time. Had the writing kept me sane?

“More bongo drums,” Naipaul said as we passed a roadside market.

There was noise, for sure, but no bongo drums. I said, “The only bongo in Uganda is an animal that looks like a kudu. They’re hunted with dogs by wealthy tourists who go on safaris here. When the bongo turns to battle the dogs with his horns, the hunters shoot him. They’re mostly in the Ruwenzoris. In the bundu .”

“I want to see the bush,” Naipaul said. “The bush is the future.”

We were on the outskirts of Kampala, passing a row of Indian shops, where on the verandahs some African men sat at Singer sewing machines, working the treadles with their bare feet, running up missionary-style dresses. Another African was squatting at a box, looking serious and intent, writing a letter in clear copperplate script for a customer, a woman who knelt, wringing her hands.

“And the president of Gabon is called Bongo,” I said. “Omar Bongo.”

“Omar Bongo! Did you hear that, Patsy? Omar Bongo. Oh, how I don’t want to go to Gabon.”

He brooded for a moment, then asked me to slow down at the next row of Indian shops.

“It is hopeless for them,” he said. “They should leave. You know that Indian boy, Raju? I told him to go away, to save himself. Of course I didn’t say it so simply. I asked him, ‘What is the message of the Gita?’ The Bhagavad-Gita . You’ve read it, Paul, of course you have.”

From the back seat, Pat said, “You were too hard on Raju.”

“‘The message of the Gita,’ I said to him, ‘is action.’”

“It’s just as bad for him to go as to stay here,” Pat said.

“Action. He’s got to take action. These people”—Naipaul was gesturing at the little shops and the people on the verandah, who were baffled by the gesticulating Hindi in the bush hat in my car—“will be dead unless they read the Gita and take action.”

“No, no!” Pat Naipaul cried out from the back seat. “How can you say that?”

A growling in my guts told me that a quarrel was starting. I had never been in the presence of a husband and wife having an unself-conscious quarrel. I felt fearful and helpless.

“They should forget England. The bitches will lie to them. India is the answer. It is a real country. A big country. They make things in India. Steel. Paper. Cloth. They publish books. What do they make here? Nothing, or some rubbish that no one wants, while the infies tell them how wonderful it all is.”

“It would be worse for them in India. You’ve seen it,” Pat said with passion, and she seemed to be sobbing. “They’d be licking the shoes of those horrible people.”

Coolly facing forward, Naipaul said, “You always take that simple senseless path.”

“India would destroy them,” Pat said, and I could see in the rear-view mirror that she was wiping tears from her eyes and trying to speak.

“I was offering him a real solution,” Naipaul said.

Pat replied, but her weeping made it difficult for her to speak, and while she faltered, saying how unfair he was, Naipaul became calm, rational, colder, and did not give an inch.

“Stop chuntering, Patsy. You’re just chuntering, and you have no idea of what you’re talking about.”

The tears kept rolling down Pat’s cheeks, and though she dabbed at her face she could not stanch the flow. There were tears on her pretty protruding lips. I was shocked, but there was something in her tear-stained face and her posture that aroused me.

“I think we’ve done this,” Naipaul said, tapping the cigarette pack.