Sir Vidia's Shadow (50 page)

“No questions,” Vidia said. I felt sure he hated doing this, but he had agreed; I had not twisted his arm. His general philosophy was “The writer should never precede the work.” Or even: “The writer should remain invisible.” Books were the things. But there were no books in sight, only goggling faces in the sold-out tent and the sense of scrutiny, all those faces like light bulbs.

In his rambling introduction—Vidia fidgeting irritatedly as my new book was mentioned—Bill said, “Paul, you're two decades younger than Vidia,” and finally asked, “What did Vidia give you as a writer?”

I thanked him and said, “A couple of corrections, Bill. I am not two decades younger than Vidia. I am fifty-five, Vidia's sixty-four. And we met over thirty years ago, when I actually did feel more than twenty years younger. I felt very young. I felt that I was meeting a much older, much wiser, much more experienced person. A person much more than nine or ten years older than I was.”

Vidia sat looking meditative. He had not said a word, and we had hardly spoken beforehand. He was wearing a dark jacket and a sweater under it, dark wool trousers, dark shoes. He seemed to be listening carefully, and I was grateful to have this chance to pay tribute to him.

“And you ask what he gave me?” I said. “I feel that he gave me everything. The main thing that he gave me was the confidence that I was a writer. He said that every writer was different, and if you were great, you were a new man. I had to write my own book, but that it would not resemble anyone else's book. My writing had to come from inside me, and that every book needed a reason to be written.”

To my left, I could see Vidia nodding. I was annoyed that I had had to speak first, and I felt I was rambling.

“In 1966 in Kampala, when I met Vidia, I had not published a book. Vidia was the first writer I had met who had a total sense of mission, a total sense of self, an uncompromising attitude towards himself, towards the novel. If he made a rule, he kept to the rule. He said that a writer has to make his own way in the world. He asked me once or twice, Are you sure you're up for it? Are you sure you want to be a writer? Are you sure you want to live this terrible life?' I was twenty-four years old. I said, ‘I'm up for it.'”

Vidia was sitting next to me, near enough for me to hear him sighing in impatience—or perhaps he was simply breathing asthmatically. Near as he was, he was not looking at me or at the audience. He sat at an angle and stared into space while, on his other side, Bill Buford spoke to him—spoke to his shoulder, for Vidia remained turned away. His body language said bluntly that he wished he was elsewhere.

Bill began to ask me another question when, out of self-consciousness—for Vidia, the star of this show, still had not spoken—I turned to Vidia and asked, “You once wrote, ‘To be a victim is to be absurd.' What did you mean by this?”

Vidia cleared his throat and said, “Well, I think the word ‘victim' has probably been extended. I was thinking about people who were utterly helpless politically and had no rights, no one to turn to, and I thought: They were always absurd. This was in a note to a study of slavery and revolution that I spent some years in working on. The slaves had no rights—and I am thinking about the Caribbean slavery—and to be a victim
is
to be absurd. Slaves are absurd people. That is the truth. The current use of the word is an extension of that. I haven't thought about it like that. I was thinking about it in a very practical, realistic way. I don't make generalizations.”

“So you don't mean it in the modern sense,” I said.

“No, not in the sense of someone in a university who can't get a job,” Vidia said with the sort of snappish energy he had when he was irritable. I had noticed the awkward way he sat and could see that he had something on his mind. “No, that's another kind of victim.”

People in the audience laughed at his seeming to mock universities, and over their laughter I persisted, hoping to draw him out.

Vidia lifted his head, looked at nothing, and said, “I don't think like this about myself. I deal with material at hand and I don't make generalizations like this.”

Feeling rebuffed, I said no more and let the silence descend. Time for Vidia to offer something. Perhaps he was right: it seemed in my question that I was embarrassed by his discomfort and trying to ingratiate myself.

He giggled confidently in the silence and said, “Sorry, I don't want to stump the conversation.”

Buford rescued the faltering moment, saying, “Paul, if I can intercept. I arrived from New York last night, and as I got here on the train I was thinking of your books. In some ways no two writers could be more different, and yet there are some similarities. And one is that both of you became writers in Britain. In your case, Vidia, you actively became a writer when you came to Britain and started studying at Oxford. And in Paul's case—you, Paul, also became a writer when you lived here. What was the effect of being in Britain for you?”

I gestured for Vidia to answer.

“This is a very important question,” Vidia said.

He coiled on his chair, concentrating hard, and lifted his gaze again, speaking to the heights of the circus tent.

“It has to be considered,” he said. “Writing is a physical business. Books are real physical objects. They have to be printed, published, reviewed, read, distributed—it's a physical object, it's a commercial enterprise. It's an effect of the industrial society. You can't beat a book out on a drum.” He let this sink in. “So, in the 1950s, when I started, if you were writing in English, there was only one place where you could be a writer. It was here. It couldn't be the United States, because I had no link with America. I had a link only with here. It certainly couldn't be any other English-speaking country, because I don't think they even had publishing industries.”

He frowned and folded his arms, looking defiant. “The thing was different in 1950. It has changed considerably. There's a publishing industry in Australia, Canada—India has developed a publishing industry. And to write always as an exotic is a very awful thing to have to do.”

“Why is it awful?” Buford asked.

“Because you seldom have people who can share your experience, your background,” Vidia said. “My brother, while he lived, said to me one day that probably he was the only man who could truly understand what I was writing. And I understood a little bit more of what he was trying to do as well, because we shared the background. If we were addressing audiences of people like ourselves, we would have been different writers. I am always aware of writing in a vacuum, almost always for myself, and almost not having an audience. That wonderful relationship that I felt an American writer would always have with his American readers, or a French writer with his French readers—I was always writing for people who were indifferent to my material.”

Buford said, “Why could you not return to Trinidad?”

“You cannot beat books out on the drum!” Vidia cried. “It's as simple as that. What would I have done?” He moved heavily in his chair and looked pleadingly at Buford, mocking him with incomprehension. “I mean, enter into it imaginatively—that question. Who would have published your books? Who would have read them? Who would have reviewed them? Who would have bought them? Who would have paid you for the effort? It's not a question.”

Over the nervous laughter from the audience at seeing Vidia's hackles rise, Buford said that surely the source of Vidia's fiction was the richness of Trinidad.

“Yes, yes, inevitably, because that's the material you have when you're starting out,” Vidia said. “It's the material you carry for your first twenty years or so. And it is very important, because it's a complete experience. Experience later will be modified. But that's very pure.”

“I was just wondering, regarding this question of an audience,” I said. “When did you develop this sense of people reading your work?”

“I don't have that sense at all. I've seldom met people who have,” he said, and there was laughter. “I've met an awful lot of people who come and bluff their way through interviews with me.” There was more laughter, and silence when the laughter died down. In that silence Vidia smirked and said, “But again, I don't want to stump the conversation.”

“No, you're not stumping it.”

“Oh, good.”

“But circumstances of writing do change,” I said.

It was obvious that he had no questions for me. So I was obliged to assume the humble position of interviewer and petition him with questions. Once again his shadow fell across me. Did I mind? Not at all, for here we were, occupying a stage in front of an attentive audience of readers. Yet I had a vibration—yes, a vibration—that Vidia objected to sharing the stage.

“Now, you said once that writing
Mr. Biswas
was your Eden,” I said. “I just imagine a kind of paradise—in quotation marks. I think I know what you mean, but would you explain that?”

Vidia frowned and said, “Well, great anxiety. Great poverty. Extraordinarily squalid conditions in London, especially for people like myself. Very hard to get accommodation.”

The audience became very attentive at hearing Vidia refer to racism in Britain as personally affecting him. Vidia was usually seen to be the snob, the excluder, the mutterer.

“Miraculously, in 1958, I found a lady in Streatham Hill who let me have the top part of her house,” he said. “She worked all day, so I had the house to myself. This was a wonderful experience for me. I was in the second year of this book, and I began to feel the strength in myself as a writer. I was extremely happy. It didn't matter to me what was said about the book afterwards.”

He seemed happy saying this, speaking about the work of writing and its satisfaction to him almost forty years ago. I sat back and listened and tried to think of a new question.

“And it was an Eden,” he said, “because there was a kind of innocence about the purity of that dedication and that happiness. And in those days—you know, people have probably forgotten—in those days when you published a book, nothing happened. There were no interviews. There was no radio. No television. Books were published—they made their way. That was a thing in many ways.
There wasn't this element of the show about it. That was a kind of purity.”

“Were you aware that you were writing a very ambitious book?” I asked.

“Yes, I knew that I was writing an immensely ambitious work, and the knowledge of this grew on me. The book began simply in conception and developed as I wrote it.”

I said, “I'd like to pursue this a bit, because I read all the early reviews of
A House for Mr. Biswas
, and this is the first time I have heard you say that reviews would not have mattered to you. The reviews were good, but they weren't ecstatic. They welcomed the book.
The New Statesman—
”

“Bad review! Bad review in the
Statesman
. My own paper!”

“How did you feel?”

“Didn't mind!” Vidia crowed. “I knew it was going to be all right. I had to comfort my editors. I used to say, ‘Forget it—it's going to be all right.'” He laughed at the thought of consoling his editors. “Certainly in the United States I had to comfort a series of broken editors. ‘It will be all right! It will be all right!' And they were in tears, if they were women, and saying, ‘We should be doing this for you, and here you are comforting me.'”

“Not too long after that you went to India,” I said.

He nodded and awaited my question. Now I was firmly in the position of pedestrian interviewer, and Vidia was the immensely famous interviewee, the focal point of this event. It was better this way: he was happier, I was happier. He did not want to listen to me, or anyone, talk about writing. It bored him. But he had become animated talking about
Biswas
.

“You have written three books about India, directly about experiences of living and traveling in India. Most people write about a place once, then go away and don't come back.”

“Paul, you were one of the people I consulted. I said, ‘Should I do it?' It was an idea from another source. I asked you, and you said, ‘They're thirteen years apart. You should do the book.'”

I had no recollection of saying that. But if I had, then I suppose I could take some credit for his return to India and his writing
A Wounded Civilization
.

“It was an entirely different book,” he said. “The first book was personal. It was—you know, our family had left India in the 1880s.
We were really ragged dirt-poor people from the eastern Uttar Pradesh, Bihar area, wretched after the Mutiny and everything else. India was a subject full of nerves. Nerves was the subject of the first book. The second book was more analytical, so there's always more distance, and I just wanted to go and write another kind of book. In the third book, I had arrived at this new way of writing, the travel books, which would make the word ‘travel' a little odd. Exploring civilizations not through what one thought of them but through what the people had lived through, and making a pattern of that.”

I said, “To me, the most interesting thing one can do is to go back to a country, to look at it again, write it again.”

“The world has changed, I have changed,” Vidia said. “I wish to add new knowledge to the old. I don't wish to do a repeat. I would like every book to be different from the ones that have gone before. I'm not stirred to write a book unless it is different from the ones that have gone before. This thing about travel books—I find what I do very interesting, taking human narratives and sticking to the truth as far as possible. It seems to me preferable to taking an adventure which you stumbled upon and falsifying it in fiction, to do a Maugham sort of novel.”

Realizing that I needed to prod him with a question, I said, “There was something I was going to ask you. Yesterday when I was in London, I went to the Christie's preview of ‘Visions of India' and someone said that I had just missed you.”