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

Watching Vidia scuttle up the road towards Hyde Park, I noticed something amazing. On this bright day in April, the sun slanting into Gloucester Road, Vidia was very small, and shrinking fast, and it was as if he would vanish before he reached Kensington Road — so tiny, indeed, he cast no shadow. Without a shadow he seemed even smaller than he was, and darker, as though he had no substance. As though he were the shadow.

Take it on the chin and move on . It was, as always, challenging advice. But he talked tougher than he looked, because really he looked like Sir Vidia Nye-Powell.

Marcel was saying, “What a wally!”

I was dazed, because I was liberated at last. I saw how the end of a friendship was the start of an understanding. He had made me his by choosing me; his rejection of me meant I was on my own, out of his shadow. He had freed me, he had opened my eyes, he had given me a subject.

Before we got to Cromwell Road I had begun this book in my head, starting at the beginning. That is everything.

NOT LONG AFTER Sir Vidia’s Shadow was sent to the printer, I was fossicking among some papers and found an old notebook labeled “Diary,” with a date, and as a sort of title, “When I Was Off My Head.” This was an unexpected discovery because, except for some letters and a detailed one-page dream I had written down in a notebook that contained material for a novel, I had depended on memory alone for my Naipaul book. Here, I thought, was a chance to verify my memory.

Thirty-two years ago, in Africa, V. S. Naipaul had made me promise never to keep a diary. Such an activity, he said, was an obstacle to the workings of the imagination. Except for the exhaustive notes I made in diaristic travel journals, for the purpose of converting them into travel books, I had more or less kept my promise. In the year or so it took to write my book about our friendship, I was amazed by how clearly conversations and scenes returned to me. I started each day with a period of meditation, shutting my eyes and pressing my fingers to my temples, like an overacting clairvoyant. By degrees I could hear and see Naipaul. And the activity of writing an episode helped too, since all writing is itself a memory jogger.

Another mechanism aided my memory. It was Vidia’s very personality: demanding, judgmental, fastidiously attentive; he had kept me alert, not to say self-conscious. Being with him, always just this side of nervous, fearing I would be wrong-footed, I was given something bordering on total recall. In the neurology of memory there had to be something animal, related to survival, in the way anxiety helped one remember sights and sounds. So I was able to write my book almost without notes.

When I finished, I had two shocks. The first was that the friendship kept unspooling in my mind. I had developed such intense habits of concentration, of remembering and sifting, I found I could not switch off my active memory. In these afterthoughts were snippets of conversation or whole speeches I had not included in the book. I belatedly recalled Vidia’s ritually pronouncing, “I am going to open an account with him,” meaning he would settle someone’s hash; and “Women of sixty think of nothing but sex"; and how, as I was driving with him in Kampala, he once said, “They call those [speed bumps] ‘sleeping policemen’ in Trinidad.”

Some of these memories comprised whole episodes rather than one-liners. There was a tea party at which a book reviewer Vidia thought I should meet (“He’s very civilized; his wife is incredibly rich”) played a coarsely comic phonograph record that was loudly lavatorial, causing Vidia to make a frowning face and leave abruptly. And there was a long lunch in London with one of my relatives that did not surface into my consciousness until it was too late to include in the book. That the latter was a fairly disastrous meal a Freudian would put down to repression on my part.

Another vagrant memory concerned Vidia’s friend Colin MacInnes (1914–1976), who was a roving journalist in London in the 1950s and a novelist (City of Spades, Absolute Beginners) . Vidia used to say how spending just a short time with Maclnnes would draw off all his energy: “He took away my vitality. He sapped my strength. I was exhausted when he went away.” Vidia frequently had this same effect on me. Many of these afterthoughts were trivial, yet in the detail that makes up a friendship, almost everything matters.

Then there was the diary. The many closely written pages in this newly disinterred notebook contained the feverish and wide-ranging garrulity that afflicts me when I am in a state of funk, as well as the busy sentences of a troubled mind. That I had forgotten having kept the diary was not odd, in my experience. My diary-keeping is rare and nearly always associated with distress. Far from being an aid to memory, a diary has often been my way of forgetting. The consigning of anxious thoughts to a notebook is akin to dumping them into a barrel — the obscurity of a trash barrel rather than the potentially more stimulating cracker barrel.

The self-mocking suggestion of derangement in the label, “When I Was Off My Head,” framed in saner handwriting than the screwball scribble in the notebook, referred to a time of uncertainty in my life that occupied the best part of a year, one of those nonwriting periods when I was penetrated to my soul with a sense of being superfluous. I hardly existed; I had nothing to do; I was a wraith, a wisp, a leftover; I did not matter. At such times I could do no work, and I was not reassured when my older son, Marcel, a Russian speaker, said to me, “That’s nothing new. It’s a recurring theme in nineteenth-century Russian literature. Lishnii chelovek . The Superfluous Man, Dad!”

Was that why this diary had a Russian texture and tone, a bleakness composed of cold streets, late nights, littered rooms, dusty answers, and the irrefragable “What is to be done?” I am smiling as I write this, seeing my disturbed other self as a version of a bulimic Oblomov, but I wasn’t smiling then. The irony was that although I had made a solemn promise to Naipaul not to keep a diary, this notebook was full of accounts I had written of having spent evenings either dining with him or talking to him on the phone.

If keeping a diary was my technique for forgetting, then I had been successful. Here in the notebook, described over four pages, was a dinner Naipaul and I had had in Kensington that I had utterly forgotten. The dialogue was good and true. Naipaul had sat down and at once told me that he was having problems with his agent.

“I want you to help me with my business problem, and then I’ll listen to your sentimental problem.”

His concern was money. He was being undervalued, he felt, sold short. He had a book idea. He was looking for a contract.

“Will you write to someone?” he asked me.

All this was before we even had a menu in our hands. I liked his directness and said I would send a letter, offering the idea — a trip he planned — to my own publisher. Then I told him my dilemma.

His advice was for me to go away — drop everything, leave the country, begin a new life. He was very certain about this, so certain that there was no discussion. He ignored my two cents’ worth and pressed on, talking about his reading. He said (so I saw in this diary) that he was fascinated by Somerset Maugham. He wanted to write something about Proust’s critical study “Contre Sainte-Beuve” and Maugham, contrasting the two writers’ aesthetics. I said that although I liked Maugham’s travel, The Gentleman in the Parlor especially, and Ashenden , and some of his short stories, I had found much of Maugham unreadable.