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

“No, you can’t go back. You can’t pretend, you can’t unlearn what you’ve learned.”

“A moment earlier you sounded like Chairman Mao.”

Laughing, relaxing a bit after having delivered his tirade, Vidia said, “When did I sound like Chairman Mao? You mean ‘Get them on the buses’?”

“Learning by doing,” I said. “It’s one of his thoughts.”

“Like Mr. Squeers.”

“And also: Go into the countryside and learn how to pound yams.”

Vidia said, in a reasonable voice, “Literature will look after itself. People will have to read it. Now, apart from the universities you have the dreadful pressures of the prizes, which are a dreadful kind of corruption of publishing. As I said, when my first books were published there were no interviews, nothing, and books just trickled down and made their own way. If there had been all these prizes, and my books hadn’t got the prizes I would have been run out of town by the publishers.”

“But that is part of the selling mechanism,” I said. “Interestingly, universities are also a business.”

“And part of the contraction of the reading habit, because of certain approved texts,” Vidia said. “I am told that Francis Parkman is no longer taught, no longer approved in America. People are no longer encouraged to read his work. He’s a great writer. The Oregon Trail is a great work. But he’s not there, not available, because he is politically unacceptable. There is a kind of tyranny which this bogus English course has imposed on whole civilizations.”

“So reading should be a private activity.”

“Yes. A private activity. And your friends will tell you to read a book. And you’ll read it quietly. You don’t want people telling you what to think.”

“But if you went back to Oxford now, what would you study?”

“I would have to do something equally idle,” Vidia said, laughing softly, sounding West Indian again. “The whole point of doing English was a form of idleness, you know. It was a way of spending time — it wasn’t serious. So we need a place as a kind of decompression chamber, from adolescence to adulthood.”

I said, “But it was a crucial period for you as a writer.”

“No. No. No. It was not. Except if you consider what perhaps are the effects of solitude, or long solitude, or long unhappiness, but that probably would have occurred elsewhere.”

“You didn’t need to go to Oxford for that?”

“Didn’t need to go to Oxford for that, to be unhappy, or to be poor.”

Buford had been sitting by, laughing and occasionally looking shocked. He said, “You said something earlier which I found interesting, when you described travel writing as somehow more authentic than some fiction. Do you find your nonfiction now more honest or more satisfying to write?”

“Yes. I’d have a lot of trouble writing straight fiction now, because I’ve done my fiction,” Vidia said. “And I’ve been writing for forty years. I’ve handled my experience as best as I can. I can’t go back to doing this thing which I now reject, because I want to know why one should falsify a perfectly valid experience. Why, for the sake of drama, should one dress it up? In the last century, things moved quickly because of this swift modification that occurred, writer by writer, book by book, and the forms developed quickly. I think now that if your material is so varied, so many cultures meet, and the novel works best when you’re dealing with a monoculture — one culture with a set of norms that everyone can appreciate, almost like Jane Austen. It’s easier to write fiction like that. But when the world is moving together in all kinds of ways, that form doesn’t absolutely answer, and the ability to lie is so immense. When I read books from Southeast Asia, I worry about it. I think, ‘Where is this lie from? Why is this a lie?’ It’s like reading an autobiography, where you think, ‘What is being left out? What is being distorted?’”

I said, “So your response to this need for a new form is The Enigma of Arrival and A Way in the World! ”

He said, “All great writing has its own new form. Montaigne’s essays — completely new. He began writing classical essays, and then it develops, he writes about himself, he writes about the war around him, he writes about cruelty, he writes about the discoveries of the world, and he writes in his mocking way about himself as well, this new modern man — absolutely new. That is why Montaigne is Montaigne. All great writers are new. They are not like other people.”

I liked this observation, not only for what it said about great writers but for what it revealed of Vidia’s own conceit about himself. He saw himself as one of these new men, and now I saw his reason: his role model was Michel Eyquem de Montaigne (1533–1592).

He said, “At the universities and the schools, people are not taught to be new. They are taught to copy other people. Copying becomes the highest virtue, and I don’t know how you can judge a derivative form. I don’t know how, if you get forms that are not original, not delivering new visions, how to go about judging them. People say, ‘Judge for the style. Judge for the characters.’ I don’t know.

Buford said, “Both of you have written strongly autobiographical novels. The thing about the autobiographical novel, whether it’s The Enigma of Arrival or A House for Mr. Biswas, My Secret History or My Other Life, is that once those stories are told, they’re told. The autobiographical novel is spent, therefore that kind of novel’s possibilities are exhausted.”

Vidia made a magisterial gesture, doing his Gradgrind impersonation, and said, “I feel I want to say that I am not against narratives fundamentally. We must deal in narrative. Without narrative there is no point.” He grimaced, he invited attention. He said, “So what can I say about novels now? Narrative writing is what we need, whatever form it takes. The reason Paul probably had to go in for the autobiographical fiction is that his experience has been unique. It has not been a simple Massachusetts childhood. He has traveled, he has gathered experience in different cultures, he has ventured and absorbed other cultures. And because of this special experience, he has to define himself in the books he is writing. He just can’t write a third-person narrative without defining who the participant, the viewer, who the ‘I’ and the ‘eye’ are. And probably more and more people, as the world gets more confused, will feel the need to define exactly who they are. Otherwise, with the third-person narrative one wonders, ‘Who is writing this?’”

It seemed a strange observation, a loss of faith in fiction that was akin to saying the novel was misleading and mendacious, if not dead. But it was not news. Almost three hundred years ago, Daniel Defoe had said as much in one of the sequels to Robinson Crusoe , after the first volume became a huge hit: “This supplying a story by invention is certainly a most scandalous crime, and yet very little regarded in that part. It is a sort of lying that makes a great hole in the heart, at which by degrees a habit of lying enters in.” I did not agree at all with this, and I felt that, like Vidia, Defoe was being self-serving, as well as pandering to puritanism.

I said, “But in The Mystic Masseur , your first book, you’re sometimes writing in the third person and sometimes in the first person. I thought that was the most amazing innovation. I had never read a book in which that happened. Where did that come from?”

“Ignorance!” Vidia shouted, and laughed. “And both people were fictions — that is, the narrator was an artificial figure too.”

“Could I ask you how your father influenced you?” Bill asked.