Paul Theroux - Blinding Light

So much of writing was pure silence, forethought, meditation, a kind of Zen, summoning the mood, achieving the mastery to begin; and writing poorly — the false start — was more damaging to an idea than not writing at all. So Steadman reasoned. He despised the vanity of writers who raced into print; he loathed looking at their clumsy sentences and upholstered paragraphs. He hated hearing them talk. “I’m doing a novel.” This paltry bookmaking merely repeated the banalities of the past; and Steadman swore that if he could not write something new — a novel so original as to be disturbing, in language coined for the purpose and ringing with reality, a book as powerful as Trespassing but an inner journey — well, then he would not write fiction at all and only volunteer for pieces if they interested him.

Then he stopped writing the pieces, and in the years before traveling to Ecuador he did nothing but live in obscurity, doodling at his desk on the Vineyard. He remained on the seasonal party list, a sought-after guest because he so seldom showed up. Parties and tennis and the water preoccupied the summer people, for whom the Vineyard was the greatest summer camp on earth. These people were cliquey and gossipy like campers, too. “How’s the book coming along?” he was sometimes asked, and he smiled and said, “Slowly. It’s only been twenty years.”

Publishing nothing because he refused to write badly conveyed the impression of virtue and made him self-important for a while. A writer’s obliquest boast was that he or she, so tormented and blocked, was not writing. But eventually people stopped inquiring. Much worse than their gauche questions about his work was their tactless not-asking, like people made awkward by a bereavement, pretending to demonstrate their concern by not commenting on the deceased. He avoided the parties for embarrassments like these. And he hated himself for his delay in writing another book. Or was delay the word? Perhaps he had nothing to write. He had had one book in him. He had been young, like Salinger and Ellison, and now he was middle-aged and depleted, perhaps kidding himself that he had anything more to give.

Yet he could not be calm, did not have the stomach for this. Not writing now seemed to him the crudest form of self-denial, a kind of mutilation.

He had changed, he was older, he was better read; he saw that Trespassing had been a marketable mythographic idea. It was a young man’s book, but now — he had never thought this would happen — he was neglected and ignored. To succeed in society you had to stay the same. That was also true of the most vulgar success in publishing: you had to stay true to the brand and repeat yourself. What had made him timid about writing the confessional novel he had planned for so many years was that it bore no relation to Trespassing; it was against the rules.

For years all he had ever heard from editors and publishers, and especially from the agency that sold merchandising rights, was “Give us another Trespassing .”

As time had passed he had become somewhat self-conscious about the success of his book — doubted its integrity precisely because it had been a success. What he had regarded as an achievement now seemed like a fluke. The only book they wanted was the very book he refused to write. So he did nothing, and he might as well have been dead.

The Vineyard was the perfect place to be dead. Except for the summer months it was an island of natives, exiles, and castaways. The off-season population was divided between millionaires and menials — the rich who were allowed to stay and the tenacious land-poor gentry who actually ran the island, through a network of obscure relationships, support systems, and productive rivalries. Being a wealthy summer resident on the Vineyard simply meant having a house on a piece of land; but the house was little more than a ticket to live there, and only a season ticket in most cases. On the Vineyard money was not a significant factor in acquiring power. Money didn’t even buy influence, because only influence mattered, and it could not be bought. An almost Asiatic system of loyalty and dependence, trust and cooperation, got things done, and without it life was impossible in any season. Your name mattered most. Everyone was known, or at least knowable. The oldest families, the most deferred to, the ones with power and influence, were by no means wealthy, though some still owned land. In every respect, as the years had passed, the Vineyard had become more and more like an island in the South Seas — inbred, enigmatic, with complex alliances and unsolvable issues of land and power — like many of the destinations in Trespassing.

The descent of the summer people overwhelmed the island. They were suffered for their revenue and their obedience. The crowds gathered in early June and the numbers swelled until just after Labor Day. Among the summer people were some of the island’s stalwarts — the celebrities, the money people, the fundraisers, the patrons, the ones for whom the Vineyard was a worthy cause, an art colony as well as a refuge. Most of them came to see each other and to glory in another golden summer. The village of Edgartown was house-proud and self-important and snobbish, attached to its history, and until just the other day was adamant in its tacit understanding of Whites Only and No Jews. Vineyard Haven was a working port and commercial center; Oak Bluffs, geographically in between, was upscale black; Aquinnah was Indian; Chappaquiddick, the most recently colonized, was New Yorkers and lawyers and trophy houses; South Beach was new money; Lambert’s Cove was old farmland and big houses. Scattered throughout, in the woodlots and among scrub oaks and bull briars and thickets of sumac, were the islanders, the old-timers, many of them living in hovels and bungalows, amid a clutter of pickup trucks and kids’ toys strewn on the lawn and, here and there, untidy stacks of lobster traps.

Up-island was harder to define, because there were so few solid landscape features. The presence of old families was one aspect — Mayhews here, Nortons and Athearns there — and so was the crossroads at West Tisbury. Squibnocket was another. Alley’s store and the old churches were landmarks. But most of up-island was hidden houses and steep meadows surrounded by high hedges and stone walls. One of those estates was Steadman’s, at the end of a gravel track that was more a country road than a driveway. For him the Vineyard did not grow smaller with time, and he did not get the “rock fever” others talked about. The longer he lived on the island the larger it appeared, and sometimes it seemed as vast as Australia. Yet it remained a place with no secrets.

For years Steadman believed he was hiding, and that he was being pursued and pestered. But at last, so thoroughly had he insisted on his privacy, people stopped seeking him out. The press stopped caring; there was no scandal and no new book. Steadman had had a succession of live-in girlfriends, but none of them had taken to the island. The winters were too quiet, the summers too loud, and Steadman never mentioned marriage. He was silent when asked “Where’s this thing going?” But the women knew that the very fact that they were asking the question meant the answer was “Nowhere.” Then he had married, but disastrously, the marriage shorter than the courtship. That was Charlotte — Charlie. Ava, whom he had first met at the Vineyard hospital, was more a wife to him than Charlie had ever been.

As one of the few doctors on the island, Ava was in demand; electricians, plumbers, housecleaners, carpenters, and handymen were also courted, because there were so few of them. Some were enticed from the Cape and flew over in the commuter jet from Hyannis to perform mundane tasks — mend a roof, stop a leak, rewire a house. When Ava took a leave of absence from the hospital to help Steadman with his novel, the hospital management screamed in frustration and begged her to come back.