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

Elaborating on this last point, she said that she had read something I had written about Africa — she did not identify the work by name. She implied that I had quoted Vidia out of context. Of course, Vidia was far too greathearted to care about being quoted, she said, but I had to understand that his life would soon be made public. She hinted at a forthcoming biography. Therefore — and this constituted a type of warning — I should be a better and more responsible friend, for did I not know that Vidia set himself apart from the pettiness of liberals?

Affirming her friendship for Vidia’s literary agent, she signed off, “Nadira.”

She’s crazy, I thought, and I began to laugh and crinkle the fax paper in my hand. She’s nuts! Going absolutely barking mad in Wiltshire! It was predictable. The woman was a highly visible person who would have been denounced or ridiculed on sight as “colored” or a “Paki” in most of Britain. Wiltshire was the haven of crusty right-wing retired military men and xenophobic farmers. This was, surely, a kind of nightmare for the lady letter writer from Bahawalpur.

This was crazy, for there was nothing I had done to provoke the letter. Certainly my role as Patricia Naipaul’s obituarist did not justify this abuse. And the festival business was misdirected — since when did anyone force Vidia to say or do something against his will? He was a man of iron resolve. Vidia had asked for the obituary. He had thanked me afterwards. I had his letter — only gratitude and grief in it.

At first I put her letter down to a need to prove herself to Vidia. She had decided to take charge, to clean house in all senses. She had to have been the one to get rid of the books with the loving dedications that had predated her. This was the inevitable revisionism of the new wife. She had turned into Carrie Kipling, Fanny Stevenson, and was aiming at being Jane Carlyle, the martyr of Craigenputtock, humoring and defending her wayward husband. Nadira was seeing me off.

The more I reflected on her letter, the louder I laughed. Its obsessional style and bad grammar and clumsy handwriting were proof that Vidia had not seen it before she sent it. He was scrupulous in matters of punctuation. Poor grammar set his teeth on edge. I had seen him scream at such an ill-conceived thing, like a man howling at a filthy rag. He was put off by the slightest gaucheries. I remembered how, in Stockwell, he had whimperingly told Pat and me that he had seen a workman sit on his bed — the thought of the man putting his bum on the place where Vidia slept was too much, and he nearly sobbed. This abusive note would be just such a horror to a man who saw English departments as representing corruption and the decline of civilization. It was a weird, shame-making letter. I thought he should see it.

I faxed it to him with this message: “I have just received the attached fax from your wife. I will reply to her, but of course am rather puzzled about it and wonder what could possibly have motivated her to write to me in this way.”

There was no reply from him. That was odd, but at least — unless she had intercepted the fax — he had seen her crazy letter, accusing me of writing a self-serving obituary and browbeating him into going to Hay-on-Wye more than a year before.

He was my friend. He had been my friend for over thirty years! He was not by nature a bridge burner — there weren’t enough bridges in his life for him to develop any skills of this sort. He was, if anything, a mushy soul afflicted with a cruel streak, and like many severe men, something of a sentimentalist. He was depressive. He cried easily.

After a suitable interval, I wrote to Nadira. I curbed my instinct to fill my letter with sarcasm or write a parody of one of her Letters from Bahawalpur, a name I had begun childishly to enjoy murmuring for its nearness to the word “bowel”—“Bowelpur,” as I thought of it, the quintessential shitty little town. She would not find that funny. And if I parodied her in the style of the Bowelpur columns, with their sententious theorizing and garbled English and frequent references to her husband and her characteristic “loose” for “lose” and the shortage of definite and indefinite articles, she would, I was sure, miss the point. So I wrote:

Dear Mrs. Naipaul,

I had not written to you, but to Vidia, and was therefore surprised to receive your fax today, and rather startled by its confused and rather combative tone.

You object to my obituary of Pat Naipaul. I wonder why. She was a woman I loved deeply; the piece was not “a favor,” as you put it, but a labor of love. You accused me of writing a self-serving obituary of, as you termed her, “poor Pat.” How inappropriate that you should mention her name in this way, since you were associated with Vidia as the woman lay dying. I attach a letter written to me by Vidia afterwards which begins, “Thank you for the lovely and generous note about Pat…”

I did not make Vidia go to Hay-on-Wye, though I recall your urging him to go. Vidia was at center stage, speaking his mind. He says and does exactly what his brilliance dictates. It is folly to think that I have any influence over him.

“Having read your African piece,” you say. Again, I do not know what you are talking about. Over the past 30 years I have written a great deal about Africa. Though I understand your intention is to be offensive to my work your entire paragraph is obscure to me.

You obviously intended your message to me to be provocative. You can see that I am not provoked but only fascinated by your tone, your mistaken assumptions and your odd references.

In almost 32 years of friendship with Vidia I have asked for little and have given a great deal, because I admired Vidia’s writing. You should not have written to me in those terms. Yet I am still smiling at your mention of my not writing your obituary.

You are newly arrived. You ought to be more careful. Others have been in your position and have felt just as certain and been just as mistaken.

Believe me, should I wish to write your obituary — or anything else — I shall do so, without needing to be asked.

There was no reply. Perhaps this silence was not so strange. In Africa, when an expatriate got married his new wife fired all his servants and discouraged his old friends from coming around. This was a species of that behavior, but without, I was almost certain, Vidia’s shadow over it. Vidia was my friend.

In spite of We’ll talk , and our not meeting, still I knew what he was up to. I saw his recurring photographs, two in Indian magazines that showed him to be greatly changed: darker face, bristly bearded, swollen eyes, frowning mouth, grayer hair — long crazy hair that looked as if it had been nagged at with a jagged implement. As he said, You carry your life in your face .

Often, hearing secondhand his eccentric views and outrageous opinions, I laughed, though sometimes uneasily, as when I read that he had told an interviewer, “French is now of no account, no consequence, a language spoken by some black people and some Arabs”—and of course spoken by the dusky Vidia himself. In a restaurant in San Francisco, he looked at the next table and said to his companion, “Aren’t those the ugliest people you’ve ever seen? Do you think they were put there to punish us?”

How different we were. Cut off from him, I saw it clearly. I had always known that he dealt with strangers by trying to shock them, while my manner was ingratiating — just listening politely. His views of women ranged from offensive to silly, but also (as eccentricities do) revealed a lot about him: “My experience is that very few women have experienced true passion.” You had to smile at Vidia, of all people, considering himself a connoisseur of true passion. Much of the time, in these reported comments, he sounded very angry, but I read it as fear. This fear was in his soul. He was a man who, while a student at Oxford, had (as he put it) “fallen into a gloom” that had lasted twenty-one months.