Paul Theroux - My Secret History

The news was always fat men in suits going into meetings and coming out of meetings, and you knew their opinions from their accents — educated right-wing, uneducated left-wing. They were all stubborn. The sameness of it fascinated me.

“I’ll be home all day tomorrow,” Jenny said.

“Is it a holiday?”

“Bank’s closed. Everything closed. We’re going on a three-day week.”

“What’s the point of that?”

“Government order. It’s a way of saving coal. It’s to break the miners’ strike.”

It did not worry me that the country was closing down for four days a week — in fact I liked the absurdity of it; but with Jenny at home I could not work. I needed to be alone. She hated me, and I could not work in an atmosphere of her loathing. The more I thought of it the less I liked the three-day week. It was a vindictive piece of trickery. What a country it was for refusing to work!

“What a stupid country.”

“You could leave,” she said. “No one’s keeping you here.”

I wanted to answer her, but when I opened my mouth to speak I began to cry. I thought of Jack asleep upstairs, and Jenny, the happy years of our marriage, and all my work. I had published six novels. They had been well-reviewed, they had sold moderately, but I had no money left. I knew that to make a living I would have to write a book a year, but I felt I was capable of that. Yet it was hard to be both praised and penniless; for a writer it seemed another kind of Siberia.

“Why don’t you leave England, if you hate it so much?”

I sobbed and said, “I don’t live in this country. I live upstairs in this house, like one of those crazy bastards who thinks the war is still on, hiding from everyone, and afraid—”

What was I saying? My face was messy with tears.

Jenny said, “God, you’re pathetic.”

That was a typical day — the excitement of writing, the appearance of Jenny, a gloomy meal, the miners’ strike on the news and tears: sometimes hers, sometimes mine.

I felt she had given up on me. I was alone. But I had a cure for loneliness: this book. I would never have been able to write a novel or a story. My imagination was blunted. But my trip in these notebooks was like a first draft; I only needed to improve it, and improvement usually meant no more than leaving things out, not adding anything. I had brought the whole trip back with me — all the trains, all the talk, all the people. I did not particularly like travel books — the form had fatal insufficiencies. It was usually geography, and potted history, and a kind of lifeless boasting about how far the writer had gone and what he ate. I wanted something different, but I wasn’t trying to devise a new form, I was only attempting to lift my mood. I always sat down sorrowful but as soon as I became engrossed in my notebooks I began to smile.

It was I think the effect of people talking. I had always written down what people said, their exact words. Nothing was more human than direct speech. It could be very simple, the place making it extraordinary. In the most remote part of Afghanistan, in the worst and dirtiest hotel I had ever seen, I was playing the game of Hearts with an American hippy. We had traveled overland from Istanbul, two thousand miles, and had just arrived in a settlement with three buildings. A telephone rang. The hippy yelled, “If it’s for me, tell them I’m out!”

I had come across just that sort of thing in a book about the West Indies by Anthony Trollope. It was a scene, like a scene in a novel, that took place in a shoe shop in Jamaica. It was all dialogue, it was comic, and it seemed to have nothing to do with Jamaica. But it was telling, it was Jamaican, and it mattered because it was memorable.

So far my writing had saved me. That was also how I had managed my trip. I saw it in the notebooks. I had been very lonely traveling. I had missed Jenny and Jack. I had always thought of myself as a homesick traveler. But by writing, and especially by not writing about the very thing that was bothering me — not indulging myself — I was able to make something new of my experience, and I created a mood of appreciation. In writing well and giving the experience order I gained a perspective and discovered my place in it.

On the trip I was less intense than I was now, because I had been heading home to my happy family, or so I had thought. I had been wrong, and I found myself in a truer, colder, more imprisoning Siberia than the one I had left. I could not rely on anyone’s help in getting me out of it. No one was waiting for me now — that was the worst of it, but it was also a spur. I saw that when I was writing I was not only changing my mood, I was actually using this solitude and loneliness and all the freezing indifference of the world to make a good thing; turning failure into its opposite, something sunny.

But Siberia remained. Siberia was the unfinished book; and Siberia was also the world around me every day when I stopped writing. Nothing depressed me so suddenly or made me doubt myself so swiftly than the question, “How’s your work going?”

Then I was reminded of my secret life — the room in which I both worked and slept. I was living far from the civilized world and trying to make sense of where I was. In the past I had written out of a different anxiety: I had been mocking ghosts to show I was not afraid. It had worked.

But now I was in Siberia and I was terrified. Hiding that terror in my writing — because I was determined not to freeze — made my writing breezy and gave it strange grace notes. In the best comedy, there is clearly something wrong, but it is secret and unstated — not even implied. Comedy is the public version of a private darkness. The funnier it is the more one must speculate on how much terror lies hidden. I had just discovered that simple truth. In writing, though, I was not trying to be funny; I was just trying not to be gloomy. Sometimes I was drowning and sometimes swimming, and I was often surprised I hadn’t died.

I was also taking the trip for the second time, and now I knew where to go and what to do. That was the beauty of a travel book. It was true of most other writing, too: it was a second chance. What looked like the gift of prophecy was no more than hindsight.

This time on the trip I was alone. I was an alien. I did not belong in this country and I had to face the fact that if I had died it would not have mattered. There was always someone else to take your place. There had been someone. From time to time, as fuel, I saw distinctly the scene in the warm, well-lighted room at Greville Lodge. The fearful faces. All the food. Wilkie trembling. “Eat it!” The man’s wrinkled lips as he swallowed, and then “My eyes!” I laughed. But though I was ashamed I would have done it again.

I was writing for my life, I was writing to prove that I existed. It was as though I was inventing a written language, innovating a book, originating a point of view; taking deep breaths and trying to come alive.

Each day when Jenny set off for work I crept into my room and I wrote. Some days I worked by candlelight. The miners’ strike caused these blackouts. I loved them — the sudden darkness, the helpless city lit by flashlights and candles; everything locked and closed, like a plague city. It was the way I felt — a big city lit by candles, only part of my mind engaged, muddling through. On the days that Jenny was home I hardly worked. I went out, and walked, and I realized what a foreigner I was, and how little I belonged. And so when I worked I worked with passion. It was like facing a blizzard and shouting into the wind. It didn’t affect the wind but it made me strong.

The days lengthened. At some point the miners’ strike ended, and both sides claimed victory. The light sharpened, and there was more of it. That helped. And spring came. Some evenings Jenny came home and said, “What do you do all day?” I did not say. Spring deepened and progressed. It was then I discovered the only predictable season in England. Summer was uncertain and often cold. Autumn was chilly and no sooner had the leaves changed color than they were gone. They did not fall as they did in Massachusetts. They were torn off the trees by the wind, or else soaked and splatted on the street. Winter was damp and dark; the dampness was colder than frost. But spring came on time, in overlapping phases and echoes; it was a feeling, then a suggestion of color, and a new temperature, and then it began to surge. It was like a song, with a chorus, a round perhaps, sung over and over again, growing louder and greener, becoming warmer; and the whole season came out of the ground.