Sir Vidia's Shadow (23 page)

For the next five years, we conversed by airmail over long distances. I was in Africa and later in Singapore; Vidia was in and out of England. He usually wrote me on blue air-letter forms from the post office, the ones with preprinted stamps on the front. They unfolded to narrow lengths of paper that seemed Chinese to him, he said. He used them vertically, cramming them with his handwriting.

These letters were for me a source of wisdom and strength and amounted to a correspondence course in creative writing; from Vidia I learned the reality of being a writer. During this period I had no telephone, I had no other close friends, I did not leave the Equator. The mail was everything. Face to face, anyone can say he is your friend and can promise to write faithfully, but the test of friendship is the letters themselves, the fondest proof that you are remembered. I did not want to be forgotten, for once again I was buried in Africa.

 

It bewildered me when the first letter I received from him was cold. Worse than cold: somewhat offensive. That curfew book I had given to his editor Diana Athill, at André Deutsch, had been turned down. Her letter had discouraged me in what I had thought was a great idea: a book about Africa in the form of a chronicle about a violent curfew. I had complained to Vidia of her indifference.

In his letter, a Lebanese stamp on the envelope, written on the stationery of the Bristol Hotel in Beirut, Vidia stood by his editor. He said her judgment was sound. He would not give me any further advice about publishing. He suggested that I was patronizing him in the language of my letter, that I misread Africa, that I did not understand Martial's epigrams, and he wished me well in my journalism. This seemed belittling to the fiction I was trying to write. He closed with a mention of Francis Chichester, at that moment sailing his
Gipsy Moth IV
solo around the world. He wrote, “I hope he drowns.”

It was a bad-tempered letter, written in one of his moods. I could have guessed that when I saw his handwriting. Though he was in Beirut, he did not refer to it, except by using the hotel's ornate letterhead—I suspected him of ostentation. He did not say where he was going, or why. It was a grand gesture, his letter from Lebanon, a romantic and cosmopolitan place that was on the itinerary of a successful writer.

In fact he was on his way to India, Pat wrote, in a letter I received a week later. She called his trip “a journalistic assignment” and said he would be in India two months, for a long article. His dismissive mention of my journalism, which had rankled, perhaps also explained why he had not said he was going to be a journalist in India.

They were terrible letter writers, all of them, Pat said. Shiva did not even write home. I should not expect too much, and yet she said that it had pleased her to see that we were exchanging letters regularly—it was uncharacteristic of Vidia to write so often.

She reported Vidia's comings and goings like a doting mother. He had been living in the Kent town of Sandwich, in a loaned house, while Pat had commuted by train every few days from her teaching duties. Running on the beach—
running on the beach
? I had to read the sentence three times—Vidia had sprained his ankle, but he had looked so comic falling down and gesturing that Pat had not taken it seriously. A swollen ankle was the upshot, and, as a fellow athlete (the man had once water-skied to France), the doctor was sympathetic.

Pat Naipaul's affectionate letter lifted my spirits and explained Vidia's mood. He was much sweeter, his old encouraging self, when I heard from him again, on his return from India two months later. He praised me, he praised my letters—I was gifted; he complained that he was dull, he was slow, and that he often gave offense without meaning to.

Here were some examples, he said. Shiva had gotten married. Vidia had offended him and offended his wife. He had also offended his editor in New York. The answer was to acknowledge one's limitations and as a letter writer to write the simplest, most businesslike notes, so that they could not be misconstrued.

I need not have feared that he would be businesslike with me. He described how, at the house of Anthony Powell, he had seen an advertisement for my novel—my first novel—in a New York magazine. He talked about the way Israel, a place he had been bored by, was being praised while the Arabs were being scorned. He recalled how noble the stereotype of the Arabs had once been: “fine gentlemen, romantic desert folk, fair in battle, unconquerable in love”—no more!

After all his travels and all his work, he had insomnia again. His life was a monotony. He welcomed the birds' singing in the morning. Sleeping pills made him asthmatic. He had lost weight—he was down to 120 pounds. This suffering was an omen: “It is time I set up house in another country.”

He had started his Port of Spain book, a history, which he would eventually title
The Loss of El Dorado
. Doing research, reading everything on the subject, he stumbled across oddities of scholarship, such as the Spaniard who had devoted his life to proving that Columbus, Cervantes, and Saint Theresa were Jewish.

In an aside in one letter he mentioned that I seemed very happy. That was astute of him. I was happy. I had fallen in love. This was about three months after returning to Uganda. I told Vidia about it and that I planned to get married to this woman, a teacher in Kenya whom I had met in Kampala. She was from London. He congratulated me, said he was delighted. He was also pleased to hear that his magazine pieces about India—the journalism—had been reprinted in Nairobi. I admired his confidence in saying, “It was a good piece of work, and I think one of the best things I have written.” He was putting India aside for good. He had no interest in writing about it ever again, he said.

To cheer himself up, he took a trip to Denmark. But the place depressed him—all the conformity, and the prison cells of houses, the high taxes. Vidia found Danes to be bored and lonely and solitary. To lighten their hearts they drank themselves silly on booze cruises, called “spirit boats,” but ended up more depressed. The saddest expression of Danish solitude was their pornography, which was mere exhibitionism, without innovation: women with “legs wide apart” or men sitting naked on steps “so that the genitals hang visibly down.” He now hated the very word “Scandinavian” as “full of ice and death and sullen coitus.”

A brilliant phrase like “sullen coitus” made me glad I knew him, and also glad to be in Africa, where coitus was never sullen. By the way, Vidia said, the Carib Indians worshiped a devil god called Mah-boya, who probably resembled his namesake, the Kenyan politician Tom Mboya, whose name Vidia always mispronounced.

Still collecting gossip and hearsay for my study of rumors in Africa (their strangeness and their speed of travel), I reported to Vidia a story that involved Tom Mboya. A year before, Mboya's infant son had mysteriously died. The death was mentioned in the newspapers, but without giving any details. According to the rumor, Mboya had murdered his own son because he had discovered the baby to be half white, the love child of Mrs. Mboya and the U.S. ambassador, William Attwood. This rumor, totally false, was circulating in the British expatriate community in Nairobi.

Any day now, Vidia said, he was going to fly to the West Indies and the United States, to finish his book. But he did not go. His book continued slowly. The next time I heard from him, six weeks later, he was still in London. All his plans had changed.

I had to promise, he insisted, that I would say nothing about a scoop he had just been offered by a magazine that had assigned him to do a profile-interview, in utmost secrecy, with Jacques Soustelle, a French intellectual and political renegade. I had never heard of the man. I had finished my Chinese-grocer novel and had started another; I was now spending all my free time in Embu, in upcountry Kenya, with my fiancée, who taught in an African school. I knew no one who was interested in Vidia's secret.

I wondered what to make of the journalism he was doing. He had told me once that he did such work for the money. His assignments meant foreign travel. They meant breaking off work on his book—a hard thing to do. I was teaching every day and also working on a novel, so it consoled me to hear about his interruptions.

He asked in one letter whether he should call his West Indian history
The Quest and the Question
. The book was about two related stories separated by many years: the quest for El Dorado, the golden land, and the question of torture involving a notorious case in Trinidad. I timidly suggested that it seemed a weak and mechanical title and that El Dorado was such an evocative name, couldn't that be part of it? To ingratiate myself, I told him I was also having a title problem with my new novel.

He was scrapping his tide, he said in reply, and was glad to hear about my novel. Returning to his role of teacher, he asked me whether my novel had arisen out of “a still centre.”

He went on, “Every good book suggests that the writer, however painful its subject, has arrived at some inward peace about it, some inner resolution, even of anger and despair, even though this peace and resolution is purely temporary. So that you know where a man stands.”

That perception had come from the magazine work he was doing. He was opinionated, he had a strong personality, and magazine editors liked this kind of writer. He was being given many assignments. He also wrote pieces for American magazines. One was entitled, “What's Wrong with Being a Snob?” In it, he made a case for the snob, as though snobs were a victimized minority.

I had never met a snob who was not also a liar, and that was what was wrong about snobbery. But I did not say so to Vidia. His snobbery, like his article (which he never reprinted), seemed to be harmless posturing and pulling rank and, as I had seen, fueled mostly by fear.

I got married in Kampala at the end of 1967. Vidia wrote to congratulate me and mentioned that he himself had been married for thirteen years. In closing, he asked me to buy him an ivory cigarette holder (elephants were still being recycled into such items then). And how about a big yellow meerschaum pipe? Could he have one of those too?

Vidia was in the midst of change. He had decided to sell his house—the house he seemed so fond of. He was selling it for £12,000 to Tristram Powell, whom I had met at the dinner party at Vidia's. It was actually worth £14,000, but this way Vidia would not need to pay an agent's commission or have to deal with delays.

He wanted to go to the United States. He wondered whether my older brother, Eugene, could help him find a house to rent in order for him to finish his book. After his book was done, he would be a journalist for a while, just for the money. When he had some money he would start a new book. He suggested that he had an idea for one.

My writing about Africa stimulated him, he said. He too had been thinking of writing about Africa. He sent his love.

In the middle of 1968, in his tiniest handwriting, an effect of concentrated writing and worry, he reflected on the paradoxes of being a writer. He was in Scotland, a houseguest at a baronial mansion. He complimented me on my letters to him.
^*
They reminded him of Scott Fitzgerald's, which he had been reading. Fitzgerald had written many letters to his daughter, Vidia said, all about writing. It was the sort of obsession that writers developed about their art. The origin of this was that we all started by wishing to be writers and by mimicking what we had read. Through work we eventually arrived at another level, doing a sort of writing we didn't really understand. We became lost and questioned the point of writing. It was a problem both the schoolboy and the older writer had to solve.

There was a strong, almost Buddhist element in writing, he said, in that good writing canceled out what had existed before. Even the second half of a book canceled out the first half, and each book canceled out the previous one and existed as a reincarnation of the earlier work.

In this meditation in the Scottish mansion, Vidia reflected on the vanity of fame and posterity, because all the books in the library there seemed so dated. They no longer mattered; fame was nothing. Writers were steadily canceling themselves out, the new replacing the old. The paradox was that the better they were, the more likely they were to be rejected, for they created a standard that would be revised and superseded. That was the saddest part. “Really how unfair we are today to writers who educated us when we were young and sharpened our minds and gave us a new way of looking at the world and made us want to be writers.”

Maugham was almost unreadable now, Vidia said, yet Maugham had once been important in shaping his sensibility. The worst aspect of the study of literature was that it dealt with the past, because literature was alive and mattered, or else it was nothing.

He urged me to consider the notion of time and tradition in relation to two prodigies of nineteenth-century English writing, Charles Dickens and Rudyard Kipling. They had each been immensely successful, yet in their writing they had described a much older version of their culture. This version had been ignored because lesser writers—copycats, missing the point—had simply gone on working in a literary tradition. For example, Kipling wrote about an India that was twenty years out of date, but Kipling's contemporaries were still imitating Dickens, who himself had set his own books in an earlier period.

With this wise lesson in literature, Vidia sent his love.

I was encouraged to have him as a friend, and what he said was helpful to me, because I felt cut off in my house in Uganda, writing my third novel. The implication I drew from his air letter was that he saw me as a promising modernist, at a frontier in Africa, writing about what I knew. He was encouraging me; he wanted me to understand the paradoxes.

I needed the help. It was June 1968. My first novel,
Waldo
, had gotten good reviews.
Fong and the Indians
was about to appear. I was at work on another novel with an African setting,
Girls at Play
. My first child, a son, had just been born. I had resigned from my job in Uganda and had been hired to teach in Singapore. I was flying by the seat of my pants.