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

He was undeterred. “I hate the word ‘novel,’” he told an interviewer. He had always ridiculed the word “story.” He strongly implied that the novel was dead. I had never in my life heard an intelligent person state this opinion, only academic hacks who knew nothing of fiction. Perhaps his sort of novel was dead. Fair enough, but as always, in generalizing, he spoke for the world. When Vidia changed his mind, you changed yours, or else.

He insisted he was correct: that writing had to be one thing — his thing; that John Updike, who can be very funny and whose elegant sentences give pleasure for their sinuous intelligence — that Updike, whom he singled out, was somehow passé. “Golden sentences” was Vidia’s way of belittling Updike’s prose. He felt the same about Nabokov. No shining prose for Vidia, no excursions into the lapidary. “I don’t want [the reader] ever to say, ‘Oh my goodness, how nicely written this is.’ That would be a failure.” He commended only a style he termed “brambly.” He offered the Victorian Richard Jefferies, an obscure Wiltshire naturalist, as a model. Vidia’s insistence made me doubt him: I had become wary of his dogmatism.

We write as we can, not as we wish. Updike writes as Updike is able, and I am doing the best I can. I can’t choose to be “brambly” if, say, in describing Yomo’s sensuality, I am so sweetened by the mood of reminiscence that I write, “When she and Julian made love, which was often and always by the light of candles, she howled eagerly in the ecstasy of sex like an addict injected, and her eyes rolled up in her skull and she stared, still howling, with big white eyes like a blind zombie that sees everything. Her howls and her thrashing body made the candle flames do a smoky dance. Afterwards, limp and sleepy, stupefied by sex, she draped over Julian like a snake and pleaded for a child.” Let Vidia be brambly. He stopped trying to please the reader. He lost his humor, he blunted his descriptive gift, he denounced universities (as Richard Jefferies had done), he bemoaned readers, he tried to hold a funeral and bury the novel. But like the soothsayer who sees only evil because he is a miserable grouch, Vidia was not to be taken seriously.

He never denied that he was a crank, yet he elevated crankishness as the proof of his artistic temperament, which is irritating for anyone else who has to work for a living. It was a sorry excuse — and from someone who never tolerated excuses for an instant. He admitted being difficult, but instead of seeing this as a weakness, he implied that his difficult nature was a virtue, an aspect of his being special. It is no virtue at all.

I did not mind his contradictions. It is human to be contradictory. He had once claimed that England was second-rate; he spoke of crooked aristocrats and “bum politicians.” Then he accepted a knighthood. Was he acting logically, by hypocritically joining an establishment renowned for its hypocrisy?

I had found England narrow but far more benign. Vidia had not learned in forty years that the English are not blamers and are not a cruel people — indeed, the traits of passivity, shyness, and modesty predominate. Liking order, the English deplored people who groused—“whinged” was their wonderful word. “Mustn’t grumble,” they murmured when the going was hard. Vidia was the opposite of phlegmatic: he was an excitable Asiatic — his own word — the more volatile and wounded for his colonial experience, his being slighted by English landladies, and all the postcolonial humiliation a Trinidadian Indian must feel when rejected by blacks on the island.

It made him a blamer. He blamed society. He blamed the educational system. He blamed “stupid and common people,” people in general. He indulged himself in being fawned over and flattered. He became a regular at dinner parties and powerful American embassies.

This was the fierce-faced friend I saw now, but it was a mute vision. I neither wrote nor spoke about it: Vidia remained a vaguely menacing blur. But the world to me was clearer. Without his response — he didn’t answer my letters, he didn’t call, I was too far away to provide him any help — I was better able to understand my progress, from being his student to becoming his equal. In my heart, I suspected he was now much weaker and needier than me, which was why he valued my friendship.

Though I did not look into the future, I recalled his saying, “To all relations, every encounter, there’s always a time to call them off. And you call them off.”

After twenty-nine years he had left his publisher, André Deutsch. It is not unusual to change publishers, but it is rare to leave without some sort of farewell. He said nothing to Deutsch, who complained, “Not even a postcard!” And that was much more than an author-publisher relationship. It was a close collaboration and a friendship. Vidia told me he admired Deutsch for being tough, intelligent, and entrepreneurial, and for having the panache to send suspected dud bottles of wine back in restaurants. After the break with Deutsch, Vidia talked about him very differently.

And speaking of “you call them off,” what of the mysterious Margaret, who had dropped from view? She and Vidia had met in 1972. I had been introduced to her in 1977, and saw her again in 1979. Vidia had publicly celebrated their love affair and professed his ardor in The New Yorker in 1994. Pat had been upset, if not desolated, by Vidia’s enthusiastic candor and his telling the world of a sexual relationship that was, after two decades, still crackling away.

Margaret, his shadow wife, had accompanied him on trips while Pat stayed home. “His lady love,” Pat once said sadly, with a lump in her throat, of Margaret, who went to parties with Vidia. Margaret kept him company on his literary quests. I had not seen her for years, but I heard about her all the time. Because Vidia stayed on the American diplomatic circuit, I was always being told of his appearances. “Saw your friend Naipaul the other evening,” a diplomat would say. “We gave a little party for him.” And usually, “His friend Margaret was with him.”

That was the oddest part. I had heard this talk when he was writing his second Islam book, Beyond Belief . Twenty-four years later and he was apparently still passionate, still traveling with Margaret. Then he met Nadira: no more talk about Margaret. I had no idea how that had ended, except that it had to have been swift, and it must have been recent. Pat died. Margaret vanished. Vidia married Nadira. Margaret was in the shadows. An Indian friend of Vidia’s, Rahul Singh, wrote in an Indian magazine that Margaret was “an Argentinian companion” who “was devastated when he married Nadira.”

To all relations… there’s always a time to call them off . I took “all” to be his usual hyperbole for everyone but me. We were still friends. As for his silence, well, he was famous for his silences. All that had happened was that I had received a crazy letter from his excitable new wife. He probably knew nothing about it.

One thing in Nadira’s letter puzzled me: her mention of Vidia’s forthcoming biography. This as an imminent possibility had never occurred to me. I knew that Vidia had interviewed several prospective biographers but that nothing was settled. The project seemed inauspicious, for who but a masochist would take on the thankless and unrewarding job of being anyone’s official biographer? Access to letters had entertainment value — they had, to use a Vidia phrase, “horror interest.” But that sort of book always verges on hagiography.

The subtext of her letter was: Don’t write about him. This offended me. I had become a writer to be a free man, in Vidia’s own terms, not to take direction. And yet, when people asked me to write about him, I said no. I had no enthusiasm to write a biography. Until I received Nadira’s letter I had not even considered using Vidia as the subject of a book. I would pass my memories and letters to the designated Boswell and let that person do the work. Vidia was my friend. A book about such a friendship was an attractive idea, but it was impossible. Friendship had its rules.