My Secret History
Authors: Paul Theroux
A WONDERFUL BOOK …
“Theroux’s gift for painting Third World characters … is equal to that of Graham Greene or Somerset Maugham.”
—
Los Angeles Times Book Review
“Engagingly intimate … The chapters in this novel devoted to Andre’s years in Nyasaland and Uganda display Mr. Theroux’s now patented ability to describe the foreign, the alien, the strange, with both an insider’s affection and an outsider’s eye for incongruous detail.”
—
The New York Times
“No one has written about the inner life of the American male lately with more comic, poignant candor than Paul Theroux in his new novel.… He writes brilliantly about people.”
—
Playboy
“Jenny is one of Mr. Theroux’s great female creations.… MY SECRET HISTORY has a kind of artistry all its own.”
—
The New York Times Book Review
“A strikingly vivid picture of a writer.… Theroux’s trademark place descriptions are as vivid as ever, but with MY SECRET HISTORY, he takes us on a journey unlike any other.”
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The Houston Post
“Theroux’s account of the street-level effects of independence in ‘emerging’ nations is wryly funny and bitterly sad.… [The] last episode is marvelous, humming with tension, as Theroux at last makes Andre face up to what he has made of his life as a man and a writer.”
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San Francisco Chronicle
“The pleasure of reading MY SECRET HISTORY is that one comes home to the fact that one is reading for one’s life, taking deep breaths and trying to come alive, sharing many more secrets than we would at first admire or imagine.”
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Chicago Tribune
“First-rate … Theroux reveals the secret life and divided loyalties that make up a writer’s world. The result is a witty and wise portrait of a writer as he travels the globe searching for self-understanding.”
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Publishers Weekly
“Scandalously sexy.”
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Chicago Sun-Times
“Funny and engrossing.”
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Newsday
BY THE SAME AUTHOR
FICTION
Waldo
Fong and the Indians
Girls at Play
Jungle Lovers
Sinning with Annie
Saint Jack
The Black House
The Family Arsenal
The Consul’s File
A Christmas Card Picture Palace
London Snow
World’s End
The Mosquito Coast
The London Embassy
Half-Moon Street
O-Zone
Millroy the Magician
Chicago Loop
CRITICISM
V. S. Naipaul
NONFICTION
The Great Railway Bazaar
The Old Patagonian Express
The Kingdom by the Sea
Sailing Through China
Sunrise with Seamonsters
The Imperial Way
Riding the Iron Rooster
To the Ends of the Earth
The Happy Isles of Oceania
A Fawcett Columbine Book
Published by Ballantine Books
Copyright © 1989 by Cape Cod Scriveners Company
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Ballantine Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.
This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without permission.
The author gratefully acknowledges permission from the following sources to reprint material in their control:
Henry Holt and Company, Inc. for lines from “Into My Heart” by A. E. Housman. Copyright 1939, 1940, © 1965 by Holt, Rinehart and Winston. Copyright © 1967, 1968 by Robert E. Symons. Reprinted from
The Collected Poems of A. E. Housman
, by permission of Henry Holt and Company, Inc.
Warner Bros. Inc. for lyrics from “Moonlight Bay,” lyrics by Edward Madden, music by Percy Wenrich. © 1912 Warner Bros. Inc. (renewed). All rights reserved. Used by permission.
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 96-96618
eISBN: 978-0-307-79026-2
This edition published by arrangement with G. P. Putnam’s Sons, a division of the Putnam Berkley Group, Inc.
v3.1
AUTHOR’S NOTE
Although some of the events and places depicted in this novel bear a similarity to those in my own life, the characters all strolled out of my imagination. My wife Anne, for example, does not in the least resemble Andre Parent’s spouse. As Evelyn Waugh wrote in a similar context,
I am not I: thou art not he or she: they are not they
.
PAUL THEROUX
Into my heart an air that kills
From yon far country blows:
What are those blue remembered hills
,
What spires, what farms are those?
That is the land of lost content
,
I see it shining plain:
The happy highways where I went
And cannot come again
.
—
A. E. HOUSMAN
I was born poor in rich America, yet my secret instincts were better than money and were for me a source of power. I had advantages that no one could take away from me—a clear memory and brilliant dreams and a knack for knowing when I was happy.
I was at my happiest leading two lives, and it was a satisfaction to me that the second one—of the dreamer or the sneak—I kept hidden. That was how I spent my first fifteen years. Fifteen was young then and I knew this: The poor don’t belong. But one summer out of loneliness or impatience my second self did more than wake and watch, and more than remember. He began to see like a historian, and he acted. I have to save my life, I used to think.
Early that summer I was walking down a lovely crumbling little street lined with elms, called Brookview Road. The city of Boston, with its two tall buildings, was visible from one end of the road looking east along the Fellsway. The brook was a shallow ditch at the other end of the road, where the Italian families had tomato gardens. There were rats in the ditch, but it was a pretty part of town when the wineglass elms were heavy with leaves.
It was a perfect day of blue sky and the hot summer hum of insects, which made a sound like the temperature rising. I had my rifle over my shoulder—a Mossberg twenty-two—as I passed Tina Spector’s house. She was sitting on her piazza, which was our word for porch. I had planned it this way.
She said, “Hey, Andy, where are you going with that gun?”
“Church,” I said.
“It’s Tuesday!”
“But I’ve got a funeral.”
I was still walking, and now Tina started off the piazza towards me. I knew she would: it was part of my plan.
“How come you’re bringing your gun to church?”
“Target practice, up the Sandpits,” I said. “After.”
She said, “My mother can’t stand guns.”
Everybody said that. I kept walking.
“And you’re not even sixteen,” she said.
I could feel the warm pressure of her eyes on the back of my neck.
She said, “Can I come with you?”
“Okay,” I said, probably too eagerly—but I didn’t want her to change her mind. I had planned to agree very slowly and reluctantly. I had blurted it out, because I was so glad she had asked. The thought of being alone with Tina in the Sandpits on a hot summer afternoon was very erotic, and having my rifle with me made it still more erotic, for a reason I could not explain. I did not know what erotic meant; wicked was the word that went through my head.
“Meet me outside Saint Ray’s.”
“My mother doesn’t want me near that church.”
Her mother was a non-Catholic.
“What’s in that bag?” she asked—she was still following me, three steps behind.
“Ammo,” I said. “Bullets.”
That was a lie. My cartridges were in my pocket. In my bag I had a starched surplice—a white smock with starched sleeves and a stiff plastic collar. I was an altar boy, on my way to serve at a funeral.
I heard her sneakers crunch behind me. I knew she had stopped but I didn’t look around.
“See you later,” she said.
“Okay,” I said.
We were both fifteen years old. I did not know whether she would be waiting for me. Things always happened suddenly, without much warning. Some days nothing happened and other days everything.
* * *
The rule at St. Raphael’s—St. Ray’s—was that if you served at three funerals you got a wedding as a reward. Funerals were gloomy, and it was an elderly parish, so there were plenty of them. But there was money in a wedding. The altar boys usually got two dollars, and the priest got ten. The money was handed over by the best man or the bride’s father. It was always in a white envelope, always in the sacristy. “Here you are,” they’d say to us, and then turning to the priest, “This is for you, Father.”