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

Long after, he attacked Oxford. He said he “hated” his college. He had nothing but bad memories, and “I was far more intelligent than most people there.” He said he had tried to gas himself at Oxford, but failed because “he ran out of coins to feed the gas meter.” After I had read this disclosure, it was hard to resist the gibe that it was only his parsimony that stood between life and death; had someone else paid, Vidia would probably have succeeded in doing himself in. But in the event, he spent nearly two years in a state of nervous collapse. “One was terrified of human beings, one didn’t wish to show oneself to them.”

To be the guest of honor at a dinner party — that, for Vidia, was bliss, he said. This remark, made to another interviewer, rang true. He said he loved occasions “when one feels cherished.” To be cherished meant more than flattery and good food and vintage wines; it meant attentive listeners who paid the bill, as I knew. “He likes paying,” he said of any person who picked up a bill. “He wants to do it.” And was there any more tangible expression of being cherished than the bestowal of a knighthood? It was the dream of the wily pundit Ganesh Ramsumair, in The Mystic Masseur , to be transformed into the unapproachable Sir G. Ramsay Muir. Someone who builds a life on being pleasured by honors and flattery can only have known great rejection and insecurity and a yearning to belong. But then, hadn’t Vidia reminded me long ago that in order to understand him I had to know his past as “a barefoot colonial"?

From my earliest attempts at writing, I had wanted security too. I knew when I had enough. “Don’t wish for too much” was my father’s lesson. And he always said, “Be kind.”

Vidia’s temperament was a riddle. There seemed to me nothing lower than being beastly to book-tour escorts and nasty to secretaries, or to any underling who, out of nervousness, made gauche remarks. Did Vidia’s compulsion to intimidate such people arise from his having felt rejected himself? He did not make much of his experience of racism, but he acknowledged that he had known it in England. His cruelty could have been a case of monumental payback, though it was anyone’s guess why his victims were innocent Americans and English flunkies and earnest Hollanders.

Vidia denied being Indian. He saw himself as “a new man.” But he behaved like an upper-caste Indian. And Vidia often assumed the insufferable do-you-know-who-I-am? posturing of a particular kind of Indian bureaucrat, which is always a sign of inferiority. It had taken me a long time to understand that Vidia was not in any sense English, not even Anglicized, but Indian to his core — caste conscious, race conscious, a food fanatic, precious in his fears from worrying about his body being “tainted.” Because he was an Indian from the West Indies — defensive, feeling his culture was under siege — his attitudes approached the level of self-parody.

He was mistaken about so much. He made confused statements about Africa and seemed to regard the continent as starting in south London and extending to the Caribbean, the whole of it a jungle of jitterbugging “bush men.” These generalizations appeared to be no more than futile attempts to validate his novel A Bend in the River . It represented Vidia’s horror of the bush. But in the bush lay Africa’s essence, which Vidia never understood was more benign than wild.

In three books, he had changed his mind about India with each one. And he was still wrong. I didn’t dispute his views. Challenge him and he was an enemy; treat him handsomely and there was a chance he would be kind. Cherish him and he was yours. Hadn’t I cherished him? So we had never quarreled.

“To grow up in a large extended family was to acquire a lasting distaste for family life,” he told an interviewer in 1983. “It was to give me the desire never to have children of my own.” But he disliked children anyway. There are hardly any children in his books, and no happy ones.

As a father, I was angered that he actively disliked children, because any parent has an animal awareness of that hostility. It made me protective. I also saw that the man who dislikes children and doesn’t have any of his own is probably himself childish, and sees other children as a threat. Vidia was the neediest person I have ever known. He fretted incessantly, couldn’t cook, never cleaned, wouldn’t drive, demanded help, had to be the center of attention.

Now, away from his influence, I saw all this — not that I dared utter it, or think it through as an indictment. I saw him as deeply flawed, and as a friend — our friendship was the consequence of his imperfections, for character flaws seem to inspire the sympathy that lies at the very foundation of friendship. I knew this but kept it to myself, and when I dared to think about it, I inverted it.

To maintain my self-respect and to defend Vidia, I often called him generous when I found him to be mean, and said he was eccentric when I felt he had been cruel. My obituary of Pat was a rosy picture of an adversarial marriage. I did this not to spare Vidia but to spare myself. I was ashamed to say that he treated people badly and that he was casual and presumptuous with me. Had I not repressed this, I would have had to admit that I was weak. But from the beginning I had known that I was a bit afraid of him. It is impossible to see a friend lose his temper with someone and not imagine that same fury turned on you.

I had admired his talent. After a while I admired nothing else. Finally I began to wonder about his talent, seriously to wonder, and doubted it when I found myself skipping pages in his more recent books. In the past I would have said the fault was mine. Now I knew that he could be the monomaniac in print that he was in person.

I did not want to think about any of this. That was why I never contemplated writing about him, because writing meant scrutinizing character and giving voice to feelings of disappointment and being truthful. It was much simpler to overlook Vidia’s faults. Let someone else be Boswell and write the biography.

But there was that face. Some things I could not overlook, because they loomed too large and were too twisted. His personality dominated his face, which was forever contorted, twisted down in disapproval and misery and suffering, and his nose was thickened with anger. Seeing that face for the first time, Saul Bellow said, “After one look from him, I could skip Yom Kippur.” The years had given Vidia a fixed and unimpressed mask, scored with the crow’s feet of skepticism. He had the blinkless gaze of a raptor. You never wanted to see that face turned against yours. In another person, Vidia would have called it an ugly face.

Once an interviewer mentioned to Vidia that I had said he was compassionate. Vidia rejected the description. He said it was a “political” word. It is not political at all, of course. But Vidia was right to deflect the word. I had said it in my eagerness to cover myself, because in my heart I felt he lacked compassion.

His books had been part of my education, and were a broader education for showing what was good and what was lame — sometimes on the same page. Some of his books are excellent, even prophetic and wise, and others are unreadable and silly. Critics had used the infantile words “genius” and “masterpiece” in connection with Vidia and his work, perhaps for the same reason I had called him compassionate, because his recent books were just odd and insufficient. He took down the laborious monologues of people, and these lengthy interviews were presented as documentary almost without any intervention by Vidia. Long ago he had impressed me by observing that Columbus never mentioned that it was hot in the New World. In Vidia’s India: A Million Mutinies Now there is little landscape and hardly any weather. There is no smell, no heat or dust, no sweating men, no lisping saris, no honking traffic, nothing except the sound of yakking Indians. The same is true of the Islam books, with the additional handicap of Vidia’s naive grasp of Islam and his ignorance of Arabic, which kept him from understanding the Koran.