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

Realizing that I needed to prod him with a question, I said, “There was something I was going to ask you. Yesterday when I was in London, I went to the Christie’s preview of ‘Visions of India’ and someone said that I had just missed you.”

“Oh, my God. My secrets given away,” Vidia said, and I knew it was a mistake to begin that way. But I kept on. “I wanted to ask you about pictures and writing. How is your imagination fed by images and a love of the pictorial and your writing?”

Sounding stubborn and doubtful, Vidia said, “I don’t think there’s any relation. I think words and the pictures of words are quite different. And the thoughts of words and the things that occur in the brain are different from the pictorial impressions. The talents are entirely different. I don’t think I’m a judge of art.”

“I think you’re being modest. You are a good judge of art. You’ve bought it, you have it on your walls. So?”

“But I don’t think it’s related, Paul.”

He was stumping me again, but I could not understand why he denied his pictorial gift. I said, “The images in your books are made out of words, but they begin as observations — describing someone’s shadow, the texture of skin, hair, sunlight, color, the shapes of things. Obviously the talent is different: Landseer could draw fur, but you can describe fur.”

“I think it is an intensity for observation with which I was born,” he said, admitting this. “I remember being aware of it when I was very young. Studying a face very carefully, for what it said. Studying hands and the shape of bodies, the parts of people.”

“Isn’t that what painters do?”

“I don’t know. I like the line in a painting. I like Hokusai’s invention. Velazquez, the way he handles paint. It’s quite different from writing a sentence or shaping a narrative.”

“But how can you write if you can’t observe? The gift of observation is transformed into writing.”

“You must observe,” he said, at last agreeing with what I had been hinting at all along. “I’ll tell you a story of the observing gift. One of the earliest memories I have, probably when I was about six or seven. I was at my grandmother’s house in a country town in Trinidad during the school holidays. And there’s a teacher, an Indian teacher from the school, and he’s moving his possessions in a box cart. My father stops him and they exchange a few words. And the teacher says, ‘I’m not like some people who will show off and get a proper cart or get a van to move my goods. I will move them and let people look at me and let them laugh!’ And I thought, ‘That is how the poor behave.’ A boy of six made this sad observation. ‘He’s like this because he’s a poor man. He’s a teacher whom one respects, but really he’s a poor man.’ So, it’s deep inside one. And it’s also related, perhaps, to my feeling for handwriting. You know, one judges people by their handwriting, or their parents, or the way you look, the way you walk, the way you talk. The whole person. No mysteries for me.”

“Aren’t those surfaces you’re talking about?” I asked.

“No, not surfaces, because we carry our life in our face. We carry our experiences in our face.”

“But they are surfaces — surfaces that reveal inner states?”

“Yes, we make ourselves.”

More confident over the flow of talk that had developed, something like a conversation, even if it was all made of my impatient questions and his reluctant answers, I said, “I want to ask you about universities. You once said that you were disappointed at Oxford. How do you think you would fare at a university these days?”

“I think they’re calamitous, these English courses,” Vidia said angrily. He shifted in his chair, looking combative, shooting from the hip. “They’re actively destructive of civilization and thought. When I was at Oxford in 1950, I think we all knew that English was not a serious subject for study, not worth a serious degree, not worth a physics degree. It was not worth a man doing medical research.”

The audience was restless, suspecting heresy but half agreeing with it, as Vidia warmed to his theme. Obviously I had struck a nerve.

“We knew that this business of doing English was a very soft option, an extension of the divinity courses of the last century. But that was what people went to Oxford for, to learn to hunt and to live this great social life, and later, endless divinity people were produced. Probably a hundred years ago or less, Professor Sweet — you know, who is the origin of Professor Higgins in the Shaw play” (he meant Henry Sweet, 1845–1912, phonetician and philologist)—“he and some other people established this English course, a form of idleness for simple people. So it was a kind of imperial statement about English literature, like English history, so it was a brand-new study. In 1950 the study stopped at 1830, people weren’t encouraged to go beyond that, and very few wanted to. They were content with the shallows of the eighteenth century.”

Vidia sat very erect, folded his arms again, and his voice became almost a shout.

“So that now what has happened is that this non-course, this non-subject, has been taken over by politically motivated people. Universities have become places where free thinking is not allowed, where your tutor does not ask for an original thought about a work. But it’s a political line! We were told at Oxford in 1950 that the best thing that happened to you occurred in the holidays. That’s when you did a lot of reading. The point of this course was that it allowed you to do an infinite amount of reading. Nowadays people read very, very little, and they have elaborate theories. And there have emerged whole generations from the universities who can’t think and who just parrot the phrases.”

There was applause from several sections of the audience. Who had ever heard English departments being attacked or subjects being evaluated this way? Physics more important than English — indeed, English study vastly inferior to all others.

“This has particularly damaged the newer countries, the lesser cultures, who at great cost have produced intellectuals. They send them to Oxford, Cambridge, they send them to American universities, and they come back parroting dreadful political tripe. They’re corrupt!”

The response, as his voice broke on the word “corrupt,” was tumultuous applause from every side of the circus tent. At last they had a performance worthy of such a tent, a raging novelist in full cry, an Indian performing an authentic rope trick.

“And I think that an English course ought to be recognized as a silly course!” he called out. “Not worth a physics course, or a medical research course, or astronomy! And there should be no support for it, and all the professors and all the lecturers should be withdrawn from that kind of work and put into some other job. I wonder what work they’ll do? What work will they do! In the old days we’d say, ‘Get them on the buses!’ But now we know that conducting a bus is a form of idleness.”

There was no point in my saying anything now. I waited for the laughter and applause to die down and then crept into his shadow once again and asked, “So you think that literature courses should be disbanded?”

“I think literature should be read privately,” Vidia said. “Literature is not for the young. Literature is for the old, the experienced, the wounded, the damaged, who read literature to find echoes of their own experience and balm of a certain sort.”

“The old and the damaged,” I said.

Vidia had begun to laugh in a triumphant way. “Contented tribal societies don’t need literature. They pound their yams and they’re quite happy!”

“But people can’t abandon literacy, can they?”