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

“We can’t go into this, Bill, because the subject of one’s writing — it’s too profound, and too personal.”

Almost an hour had passed. Buford thanked us, and as the audience applauded, Vidia repeated to Buford, “No questions.”

As we were led out, I said, “Are you staying at the hotel, Vidia?”

“I’m not staying. I’m going back to Wiltshire,” he said.

He looked pained — less irritated and edgy than he had onstage, but tired and unforthcoming.

“It seems quite a nice hotel,” I said. “We could have dinner later.”

“I get so lonely in hotel rooms.”

He spotted Nadira coming towards him through the departing crowd. He motioned to her, and seeing him, she picked up her pace. She moved quickly, marching like a soldier, swinging her arms. Her hands were fists.

“We’ll talk,” he said.

As Vidia and Nadira were escorted to their car, Salman Rushdie came up to me. His heavy-lidded eyes gave him a perpetually mocking look, and he had never looked more disdainful. He was holding a small notebook and peering at a scribbled-on page. Vidia would have read a great deal in Salman’s handwriting: it was upright, confident, closely printed, very black, un-English, linear on a page without lines. Even upside down it looks arrogant, Vidia might have said. He would have been impressed.

“I learned two things,” Salman said. “One, close the English departments. Two, literature is for the wounded and the damaged. Ha-ha!”

“WE’LL TALK,” Vidia had said, but it was not possible. I wrote to him, but for almost a year I was seldom in one place long enough to receive a letter or a fax. I was on the move — more than two months in the African bush, drinking the rivers again: on the Angola border of the upper Zambezi, in Barotseland, camped in the compound of the Litunga, the Lozi king; sick in a tent in the remote Dinde Marsh of southern Malawi, with acute dehydration, not drinking enough of the muddy river; and paddling in Mozambique, near where Mrs. Livingstone lay buried under a baobab tree at Chupanga. On the lower Zambezi I saw a lion’s paw prints in the dust of the riverbank. The creature had paused to relieve herself.

“Female,” I said.

My observation was challenged by one of those aggressively skeptical Australian women you meet in such places.

“How do you know that?”

“Females are retromingent. You probably are.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Piss backwards.”

Then I was in Hong Kong, mugging up on the Chinese take-away. I had kidney problems and gout brought on by the African dehydration.

All this I faithfully reported to Vidia in my usual way: postcards, air letters. I could not phone. It did not strike me as unusual that Vidia did not respond. I knew he was still writing Beyond Belief , the sequel to his Islam book. You will say: But you corresponded with him and wrote his blurbs and read his manuscripts while you were working on a book. Yes, but he had different rules. I found rules, in general, an inconvenience.

We no longer had any friends in common. I had no idea what was happening in his life. This was strange, since for thirty years I had had a pretty good idea of the ebb and flow of his affairs.

There was a piece in the magazine supplement of India Today (Delhi) early in 1997, an interview with Vidia and Nadira, a portrait of their new life together. Nadira had taken charge. For one thing, she had closed his archives in Tulsa. Vidia said, “Nadira is more encouraging. Pat could be very stubborn and critical.” And: “I think I made a great error. I took writing far too seriously.” The author of the article found Nadira imperious and wrote, “She likes to be called Lady Naipaul.”

Then, about a year after Hay-on-Wye, when I was in Hawaii in an angle of repose, I received by mail a catalogue from a bookseller who specialized in modern first editions. Some items caught my attention:

#336 THEROUX, Paul. Fong and the Indians . Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1968. His second book… This copy is inscribed by Theroux to writer V. S. Naipaul: “For Vidia/ & Pat/ with love/ Paul.” Near fine in a very good dust jacket… Theroux and Naipaul met in east Africa in 1966, presumably about the time and place that constitute the setting for this novel, and their friendship extends over three decades, dating from a time when both were relatively young writers, and neither had achieved the degree of literary renown that both enjoy today… An excellent association copy. $1500.

#337 THEROUX, Paul. Sinning with Annie . Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1972. His first collection of stories. This copy is inscribed by Theroux to V. S. Naipaul in the month of publication: “To Vidia & Pat/ with love/ Paul. “… An excellent association copy, inscribed at approximately the time that Theroux’s book on Naipaul would have been approaching publication. $1500.

#338 THEROUX, Paul. V. S. Naipaul: An Introduction to His Work . (London): Deutsch (1972). An early book of criticism of Trinidadian author V.S. Naipaul… Scarce… $850.

No inscription on that last one. I suspected it was a copy I had sent through the publisher, who was Vidia’s friend, so that Vidia could see the earliest possible copy. I hoped that he would like it. He had, as he had said in several effusive letters. There were several more of my books in the catalogue, and I wondered if they too were from the shelves of Dairy Cottage, Salterton, Wiltshire. Apparently someone was cleaning house.

The prices were, I thought, extortionate. And assuming that the books had passed through the hands of several booksellers, a common practice in the “collectibles” market, Vidia would have received only a fraction of that — Modern Firsts is one of the adjuncts to the rag-and-bone trade, and its practitioners are glorified junk dealers. To twit him about this, I faxed him the bookseller’s catalogue pages, and I asked, “How are you?”

The reply came from his new wife. It was one of the strangest-looking messages I had ever received, printed in big wobbly letters like a child’s school essay. I watched, squinnying at it, as it scrolled out of my fax machine. My first thought was that the chuntering woman from Pakistan had lost her marbles.

Just the look of it, the way it was set out on the page — the oversized printing, the crazily toppling paragraphs, the random punctuation and nineteenth-century notion of capitalizing, the odd locutions and even odder grammar — was slipshod even by Bahawalpur standards. There was another telling thing. You can judge a person by the manner in which, over the course of a two- or three-page letter, the handwriting breaks down. Vidia had taught me that. Nadira’s began at the top of the first page as big accusatory capitals and then sloped and tottered and, as though a new person had taken over the scribble on page two, collapsed into a slant, which I read as the sort of italics you would use to indicate a hoarse nagging. And I could see that it was indeed a nagging letter.

My immediate reaction was deep embarrassment for Vidia.

She began with a startling non sequitur, asserting that I would not be writing her obituary. As I was murmuring “What?” I read on. She wanted to make a few things clear, and she rambled a bit. It was babu English, but I got the point.

The obituary I had written of Pat Naipaul was a pretty poor job, Nadira said. It was not an obituary at all. It belonged in the realm of fiction and was more about me than about “poor Pat.” And I reread “poor Pat” in the block letters of the woman who had been paddling palms with Vidia in Lahore as the unlucky woman lay dying in Wiltshire.

If my writing the obituary had been a favor, Nadira went on, the favor was reciprocated by Vidia’s agreeing to appear at the Hay-on-Wye festival. She then rubbished Bill Buford, who had arranged the event. She rubbished the event. She accused me of trying to make Vidia seem fanatical and extreme on the subject of Africa. In two novels, she said, Vidia had told the truth about Africa. I had not followed his example. I had misrepresented Africa.