Sir Vidia's Shadow: A Friendship Across Five Continents

16. Poetry of Departures

SUDDENLY Vidia was honored — at fifty-eight a knight, and Pat a lady by association. Such gongs in England were mostly granted to older people — Angus Wilson at seventy, V.S. Pritchett and Stephen Spender at eighty, P. G. Wodehouse at ninety — and to nearly everyone else they never came at all. It was especially rare to find a writer’s name on the Honours List, because writers were suspect, had nothing to give to the politicians who helped draw up the list, had no allies in the government, were notorious carpers and boat-rockers. Actors were a better bet and much more popular. As Vidia had once said, titles were usually awarded to the more devious of the Queen’s subjects. Even so, Vidia got the lowest order of knighthood, the Knight Batchelor, rather than the grander Knight of the Thistle (KT) or, the grandest of all, Knight Commander of the Order of St. Michael and St. George (KCMG, which to insiders stood for “the King Calls Me God”).

It might have come about, as happens in Britain, because Vidia knew a lord or two. One was the plain Hugh Thomas I had met at Vidia’s house in Stockwell thirty years before; he had been elevated to the Baron Thomas of Swynnerton, and as his peerage showed, he was thick with Thatcher. One of the pleasures of my seventeen years as an alien bystander in Britain was seeing how the ordinary names of familiar people were festooned by titles and sometimes transformed by baronetcies and lordships. Simple Smith or Jones in his brown suit, his knees shiny from his being arse-creeper to the party in power, now bore a title befitting a twelfth-century crusader and became the unapproachable Lord Futtock of Shallow Bowels, waving a banner with a strange device. “You’re just envious,” English people whinnied at me when I shared these skeptical sentiments, and of course I was envious, for while the honorees said it made no difference, it manifestly did. Among other things, a tide assured the bearer an excellent table in a restaurant.

When she knighted Vidia at Buckingham Palace (for reasons he did not explain, Vidia left Pat at home), the Queen bobbled her notes and said vaguely, “Naipaul. You’re in books.”

Dissolve in a flashback to a food-splashed table at the Connaught and the remains of lunch, the last of the wine, bread crusts, sticky spoons, the white bill primly folded in half on a white saucer, Vidia still chewing and saying, A title is nothing… I have the idea that they should sell titles at the post office… You go in, buy some stamps, and paste them into a little book… Three books of stamps would get you an MBE. Six for an OBE. A dozen books of stamps would be worth a knighthood.

“Yes, Your Majesty,” Vidia said, bowing deeply. But Vidia’s cut-price knighthood, by his own calculation, was perhaps worth only eight books of stamps.

The conglobated Sanskritic syllables that made up his almost unpronounceable name did not easily attach to the archaic Anglo-Saxon handle of a knighthood. Nevertheless, he was now Sir Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul. The only precedents of his sort were Indian cricketers and politicians and the oiliest Indian tycoons. It was impossible to know how he would style himself, but after some experimentation he settled on Sir Vidia. Pat was the Lady Naipaul. And it can’t have escaped her sense of the absurd to reflect on how one day she was peeling the sprouts and a little tearful over the stale sponge cake she had bought at Tesco, and the next day, with her name change, she sounded like the heroine of an Arthurian legend.

I was transformed too, or at least I understood the role I had played from my earliest days with Vidia, for in a sense he had always been a knight. I saw that I had always been his squire — driver, sidekick, spear carrier, flunky, gofer; diligent, tactful, helpful — delicately finessing the occasional intervention. Paul, I want you to deal with this. It was my luck. I had never contradicted him; we had never quarreled. Because he was not the perfect knight, I had to be the perfect squire, Sir Vidia’s shadow.

It seemed to me he knew that. When he bought his first computer and got some lessons in using it, he wrote to me, just rambling, to test the printer. He was delighted that he had managed to make it work, another technological triumph for the man who had begun his writing life with a dunk-and-scratch quill pen in a little school in Trinidad.

On the bottom of the crisply printed page of the letter, he wrote in black ink — unbidden, voluntarily, what was he thinking? — Your work is such an example and an encouragement to me.

Hadn’t I many times said or suggested those same words to him? His repeating them back to me was a gift, particularly now, at the moment of his greatest eminence.

“I’d like to visit you,” I said to him on the phone.

I had news. Again I put my bike on the train and rode second class to Salisbury. I had been feeling ill that day, the sense of a wasting disease that depression seems to bring on, a spiritless and leaden feeling that was deepened by the sight of bare branches and wet fields, coots and moorhens toiling frantically across muddy ponds. Hopelessness had robbed me of my strength, and cycling uphill from Salisbury to Salterton just made me feel worse.

“Tell me, tell me, tell me,” Vidia said at the gate of his house. There were no obvious signs of knightliness in his demeanor. “What’s wrong?”

He had the strongest intuition of anyone I had ever known. He was sometimes wrong, but more often he had an unnerving ability to detect my moods, particularly my low spirits. This may have been because they so closely reflected his own moods and matched his own low spirits, his intuition an example of a known echo, perhaps often the case when a person is prescient — prescience being the ringing of a familiar bell. It helped that he was always so solitary. In one of the few works Vidia ever recommended to me, Death in Venice, Thomas Mann had written, “Solitude gives birth to the original in us, to beauty unfamiliar and perilous — to poetry. But also, it gives birth to the opposite; to the perverse, the illicit, the absurd.” Vidia’s solitude had similarly driven him in both directions.

I parked my bike. I said, “My wife and I are splitting up.”

“God.”

Pat appeared, smiling wanly at the kitchen door. She looked so ill that I could say nothing more about myself. She was like an apparition, ghostly white — white hair, white skin, no color in her lips, and her whiteness was a kind of translucence almost, the papery skin traced with spidery veins like lines in parchment. She was breathless, stoop-shouldered, a tottering insomniac, and she looked at me with colorless eyes. I kissed her and, holding her, I could feel her bones, all her frailty in my hands. The Lady Naipaul.

“How are you, Paul?”

“I’m fine.”

I had just biked fifteen miles and had my health, so what was I complaining about?

In the wine cellar, choosing a bottle while Pat made lunch, Vidia and I talked about my situation. My wife and I had agreed to separate. I would be leaving England.

I said, “I always thought I would stay ten years. Look, it’s almost eighteen now that I’ve been here.”

“Good things have happened to you,” he said. His back was turned. He was looking at the wine bottles in the racks. “Haven’t you felt that people have been kind?”

“Yes,” I said.

People had been kind, yet I had never felt like anything but an alien bystander in their midst. I could not help thinking of all the English people I knew in the States who, in much less than eighteen years, had been accepted and become established. They were bureaucrats, politicians, businessmen, educators, local writers: the bossy Scotsman in his employment agency, the Ulsterman flush with real estate, the pushy Liverpudlian on the planning board, denying me permission to subdivide some land in Massachusetts, where I was born and he wasn’t. I saw them on television, or met them. I knew the accents, they couldn’t fool me — London, Birmingham, the West Country, Cornwall, Wales, the North. They were important in America and part of the system and moaned or boasted like everyone else. When had I ever been part of the English system? I had always been an alien, like almost every other immigrant. The people who had been kind to me had also been waiting for me to leave.

I said some of this to Vidia. He was crouched near the wine racks, hovering over his selection.

“But England has been good to you,” he said.

“Of course. I suppose it’s been the making of me.”

“About the other thing,” he said. He meant the separation. “You don’t have to leave. It’s your house. Your property. You can stay.”

“I don’t care about the house. Why do material things seem so sad just now? I get depressed just being in it.”

“God.”

He was so shocked by my news that I felt awkward pursuing it. I said, “This has become quite a wine cellar. It’s so much bigger than the last time I saw it.”

“These are my clarets,” Vidia said, sounding relieved that I had changed the subject. He indicated bottles on racks and in cut-open cases, the necks protruding. “These are my Burgundies — white Burgundy here, red there. This year’s reds are big fruity wines. My Bordeaux are tannic. I’m laying them down. Last year’s Sauternes are perfect — rich, concentrated.” He picked out a bottle. “This is big.”

I looked at the label: a Bordeaux.

“This is fleshy. I am waiting a bit,” he said. He replaced it. He brought out another bottle. “This is crisp. A little fruity but soft. You’ll like it. It’s classic.”

That word an echo from the Connaught lunch all those years ago. Easy to remember the day, not because we discussed knighthoods but because the bill had cleaned me out and I had gone back to Dorset broke. This classic was also a white Burgundy, each sip a taste of destitution.

“It might be better not to say anything to Patsy,” he said. “About the other thing.”

“She’s not looking well.”

“She’s all right,” Vidia said.

Lunch was the same meal we always had: poached fish, parsleyed potatoes, salad. And the wine, small measures of it. Vidia sipped. He kept the bottle out of my reach. He was the pourer. He ate with precise manipulation of knife and fork, and it was apparent that he was still having trouble with his teeth. Just behind him on the wall was the Hockney etching of the hairy naked man in the rumpled bed.

As at so many other meals with Vidia, I used the occasion to verify stories I had heard: Did you really say that? Did you really do that? And he usually said yes, or he corrected the elaboration that gossip had given a story. I wanted to ask him finally about the Ved Mehta tale, but something held me back, my old wish to believe that every word was true. I asked him about the dinners: Those are not my vegetables, and Those vegetables are tainted. Totally true. A mutual friend had reported Vidia’s saying over and over, I want to be immensely famous! But that was too sensitive an utterance to ask him to verify.

Talk about cricket turned to talk of cricket fans, and then Harold Pinter. Vidia had been to Pinter’s recently; their link was Lady Antonia. Pinter’s son, he said, was very unhappy — and wouldn’t you be, with a case of alopecia as bad as his? Pinter had shown Vidia a photo of the boy as much younger, years before, with all his hair, smiling, the son he had once been, now a fantasy. Vidia found this a telling denial.

“How are your boys?”

“Marcel got a First at Cambridge and is now at Yale. Louis is at Oxford.”

“God.”

We talked about a newspaper owner. Vidia said, “He is a very stupid man. His problem, of course, is that he can’t read. He is a monkey.”

Pat said, “He has done some very good things. Everyone predicted he would fail.”

“His successes mean nothing. He thinks publishing is the same as printing. He might as well be selling bags of rice as newspapers. Or shoes. He has no idea.”

Pat was protesting, and in seconds tears were running down her cheeks. She sobbed, telling Vidia he was unfair, while he continued his meal, using his knife and fork like a lab technician, dissecting the fish.

The first time I had witnessed such a quarrel was in Uganda twenty-five years before, and it had been repeated at various times in the intervening years. It was always a surprise, always upsetting. Tears made me helpless. And to see a woman so obviously ill in tears was much worse, because the tears seemed to arise from a different source, not the petty argument but something deeper that was almost despair.

“I won’t have a row,” Vidia said sternly. “Do stop chuntering.”

“Let’s change the subject,” I said. “Have you been to any art auctions, Vidia?”

“Just to look,” Vidia said, while Pat sniffled. “Christie’s had some delicious botanical things. I’ve changed my mind about all that Company art. I’ve seen so much that’s rubbish.”

He was expert on the subject of Indian art, all periods, from the Moguls to the East India Company to the last years of the raj. He had a large collection. This was not only a safe subject, but also one in which I wanted enlightenment. I had learned from him in the past and had myself bought watercolors and aquatints.

I maintained this conversation until Pat recovered. Even as I sat there, it seemed the basis of a good short story. A man goes to his best friend to tell him of his marital woes and that he will soon be separated. The friend protests — he must stay married, it is the best outcome — but all the while the friend quarrels with his wife in a more acrimonious way than the man has ever done with the wife from whom he is separating. Perhaps he changes his mind…

“Excuse me,” I said.

“It’s at the top of the stairs,” Vidia said, having divined the purpose of my apology.

Heading to the bathroom, passing Pat’s room, I saw on her bedside table Ibn Battuta’s Travels and John Locke’s Two Treatises on Government. I had read Ibn Battuta, one of the world’s greatest travelers, but I did not know the Locke book. If I read it, I thought, I might know Pat better.

She was in the kitchen when I came downstairs.

Vidia said, returning to my troubles, “You will know what to do when the time comes.”

Once before, after a heart-to-heart talk, he had written to say, “The sexual nature of the relationship that is exercising you does, I fear, go with the fatigue and the irritation. The fatigue and the irritation prove the strength of the relationship… You simply have to live with it, as you have lived so far; there is no way now that it can be neatened.”

We had coffee in the living room — Pat, very quiet now, serving; Vidia, thoughtful; and I felt simply desperate. I needed a formula from him, not the old one of “You’ll be all right,” but something subtler.

Pat said, “Why don’t you take Paul for a walk? It will be dark soon.”

“Paul has expressed not the slightest interest in going for a walk.”

“I’d like to go for a walk,” I said.

The last time I visited, I had come by car. Vidia had suggested a drive, and we went up the road to Wilsford Manor. Barmy Stephen Tennant had died and the manor had been sold. It was being torn down and the estate bulldozed to be turned into a housing development. Seeing us surveying the property, a woman approached Vidia and said, “Are you Mr. Naipaul?” Vidia shook his head and said “No.”

The little red Japanese maple I had given him to plant had been on my mind. I sometimes laughed when I thought of it. How was I to have known that he had planted a green garden? A green garden was unheard of, and so was his dictum that large lawns make the viewer feel tired at the thought of all the grass that has to be cut.

We looked at the tree, no longer little but now spreading, with a thickening trunk and strong limbs and spindly branches.

“The leaves start out red, of course, but their final color is green. So that’s lovely.”

We walked behind the house, down the narrow descending track to boggy land and the small swift stream that flowed under the flat wooden footbridge.

“Things will work out,” Vidia said.

“I’ve lost my way.”

“This is a natural thing. It is not a calamity. Look at your life.”

“It doesn’t look like anything. It doesn’t seem to matter.”

He was staring at the stream. “All that water, rushing. It simply gathers here. There are good-sized fish in it.”

I said, “I feel dreadful. I shouldn’t have come.”

“No,” Vidia said. “You have something on your mind. Very well, leave her.”

“He was relieved,” Vidia used to say after he had given someone advice like this: “Don’t ever write again,” or “Go away from Uganda,” or “Leave her.” He wanted me to say I was relieved. What had at first seemed a depressing possibility had, with his encouragement, become an act of liberation.

“You will gain perspective,” Vidia said.

I thought,

Sometimes you hear, fifth hand,

As epitaph:

He chucked up everything

And just cleared off,

And always the voice will sound

Certain you approve

This audacious, purifying,

Elemental move.

We were walking along a path beside the dark, greasy-looking stream. I wondered whether my presence had provoked his quarrel with Pat, for Pat felt weak and needed witnesses. Perhaps she felt overpowered when she was alone with him.

Vidia walked ahead. I had the sense I would never see him again, never see Pat, would never come back. The English had been right to keep me at arm’s length. I was unreliable, uncommitted, hideously skeptical, a mocker. And now I was bolting.

On the riverbank I remembered walking with him in Africa in places like this — sodden, untidy grass flopped over and flattened; twisted trees and a brimming river gurgling past — like the highlands of Kenya and those walks on the Rwanda trip and in fields outside Kampala, up the Bombo road. We had grown older and closer in age, the way middle age converges, and now never talked about writing. He hated hearing about writers and books, and I did too.

Out of the blue I said, “I have never had a worse problem than this.”

Vidia said, “Problems are good. You’re a writer. You’ll do something with them.”

“I’d rather not have them,” I said. Something in me was protesting.

“Problems are good,” he said again, and kept walking through the damp grass.

I took this to mean he did not want to hear about it. I did not blame him. It was not that he had refused to offer a solution. There was no solution, except for me to go.

“Leave her,” he said. “You know my rule.”

His rule was: Never give anyone a second chance. It had been explained by his narrator Ralph Singh, in The Mimic Men. It stated that if someone let you down — failed you, offended you, broke a promise — you sent the person away. It was over. And if the person who let you down had been a dear friend or lover or a great employee, there was even more reason to end the relationship, because there had been so much more at stake. Friends were the last people who should fail you and so were the last people to whom you should give another chance.

Vidia seemed preoccupied, or perhaps he was being cautious. I was uncertain of his mood and somewhat wary. We were now, twenty-five years later, still strangers to each other in some respects — still had secrets. That kept us watchful and a little remote when we were alone with each other.

I said, “I like the way your trees are filling in. It’s beautiful.”

“That was my plan. To hide the house with some shrubs and trees and that high hedge.”

Hiding was what all of us did, so that we could work. I had lived here once, not far away, in Dorset. That was the past. I had visited him with the sense of something beginning for me, and on this last visit my life here was ending.

Cake had been cut for us at the house, apportioned on plates, with tea and a tray. Pat poured and apologized, a white-faced old lady now, whom I had once desired in the garden of the Kaptagat Arms, long ago in Africa.

Vidia showed me some slides he had taken on the Rwanda trip. I had never seen them before. One showed me in my horn-rimmed glasses and tweed jacket, when I had scorned travelers in Africa who wore desert boots and safari khakis. I was twenty-something, among the Virunga volcanoes.

Vidia said, “It is an amazing image, not only for the background, but also because you have changed so little.”

That proved one of his theories, that I was truthful and still had all my marbles. If I had gotten fat or changed physically in any other way, it would have showed I was morally weak.

“Don’t be sad,” Vidia said when I left, wheeling my bike to the gate. “You’ll be all right.”

But as I went down the country lane at dusk, I thought: Problems are not good. I don’t need them. I don’t want them. I have had enough problems.

There was something so melancholy on this dark afternoon. It was me, a big man on his bicycle, trying to lull myself with the faint click inside the axle as I pedaled alongside the battered briars and hedgerows and black trees, under a sky like cat fur. At the same curve in the road a pair of pheasants flew up, and this time they frightened me. I uttered a cry, and a pain creased my heart. But just after that I saw the birds flying. I felt better and a little hopeful.

17. A Wedding Is a Happy Funeral

I SEEMED TO EVAPORATE. I died. I disappeared. I left London, left my home and family. As the ghost of the man I had been, I traveled across half the world looking for a simpler place and sunshine and no memories. Two years I spent wandering the Pacific. I went back to Africa to look at where my writing life had begun — but before Vidia, before Yomo even — no specific memories, only the reminder of big dusty African plains and dusty feces and mud huts. A slim, quiet girl I had taught in Malawi was now enormous and jolly in a wide loose dress, three of her seven children goggling at me from the door of her hut. I could not find Yomo. In the north of Malawi I saw elephants, a family herd, devouring the bush, chewing on trees. I went to Mexico and Ecuador. I did no writing. I asked myself, Are problems good?

The Pacific drew me back. I paddled a kayak among whales and slipped into the sea to hear them singing. Dawn over the volcano cone on Haleakala; a Trobriand Islander whispering “Meesta Boll"; the fragrance of gardenias, the total eclipse of the sun, the taste of honey from my own bees, the heat in my bones from sleeping at noon on the sand at Waimea Bay; birdsong, blue skies. I saw the connections in all this and thought, God is a fish. And so I came back from the dead.

But everything else had ended, not just my other life but — was it my age? — friends and relations began to die. In the past, people fell ill and recovered, but now they got sick, they declined, and the next thing I knew they were dead. Five women from breast cancer, one from leukemia, and my best friend in Hawaii, ailing but saying “I’ll be fine,” and dropping dead. After long illnesses two uncles and two aunts; several neighbors — heart attacks, cancer, and AIDS.

None of these were drownings or road accidents or plane crashes or blunders in the home. They were not preventable. In each case the body failed: it was death as doom, the limit of mortality. I never went to so many funerals. And still I was not prepared for what was to come.

One morning my mother called me in Hawaii to say that my father, who had been frail for some years, had been taken to the hospital on Cape Cod. I had gotten out of bed to answer the phone. She would keep me posted, she said. I lay down again and the piercing fragrance of a gardenia in a dish near my bed sweetened a reverie of my father. It was a real reverie, a dreamlike sequence of images: my father’s face, the aroma like a sunburst of pollen, the perfumed flower (a bouquet of which my mother had held, next to my father, in their wedding portrait), the whiteness of the petals, the fullness of the blossom, the dark green leaves, the sweetness of the dish near me — following the whole sequence of associations from my father to the cut stem.

When I got to the image of the snipped-off stem and ached remembering my father’s sweet nature, I realized that no matter how vital he might seem, he was dying.

The phone rang again, my mother. “Come quickly. He hasn’t got much time.”

My father was smiling the day he died. He even laughed proudly. He said, “You look good, Paul,” and seeing the whole family gathered near his bed, grateful at the moment of his death — could anyone be more humble? — he said, “What a wonderful reunion.”

I stayed with him to the end, with my brothers Gene and Joe, and after twenty minutes of agonal breathing he drew his last breath, almost on the stroke of nine o’clock. Nothing on earth I had ever seen had filled me with such desolation as watching my father die in his hospital bed in Hyannis.

“Grief is pure and holy,” a woman of ninety-seven wrote to me. “You will find out that your father has not left you but will continue to live within you and seem to guide you.”

This was accurate. I felt my father’s presence strongly afterwards. But I missed him as a friend. We had had no “issues.” He was proud of me, and I loved him — loved him most of all because he had set me free. When I told him I was going to Africa for two years, he was delighted for me. And: “No one owes you a thing.” He wrote to me often. I was in Africa more than five years. He encouraged me to explore. He had freed me because he was free himself. He had been loved by his parents. He knew how to love.

Vidia wrote. I had sent him my father’s obituary. “He sounded an immensely strong man, and his going will create a gap, whatever age he was.”

We were discussing by mail the appearance in The New Yorker of a number of letters Vidia had written me. They were “Letters to a Young Writer.” He reported the reactions. Only two. One letter from a friend. Another from a fool.

He had published A Way in the World. In it was the story about Raleigh, an old man on the Orinoco, under siege by the Spanish, hoping to find gold so that he would not be executed. Vidia had told me this story in New York, that snowy day twenty years before. He said he was planning a new journey for a book. It was to be a sequel to his Islamic travels of 1979 which resulted in Among the Believers— peregrinations in Malaysia, Indonesia, Iran, Pakistan.

He hoped he had the stomach to write the book. He had been visited again by the intimation that he was a has-been. He complained that in his writing life he had had few well-wishers and little practical help. He said that his had been a solitary struggle. “I have had to do it all out of my own reserves.”

That last part was inexplicable. Hadn’t he had plenty of encouragement? Not just the literary prizes — every English book prize that was winnable he had won. His friends were distinguished and adoring. His advances were substantial, far outweighing his sales, which were never great. With this prestige he had sold his archives, including hundreds of my letters, to the University of Oklahoma at Tulsa for $640,000.

One of his American acquaintances had said to me, in a reproving way, “Vidia wants everything.”

But everything means everything, for when wishes are granted, answered prayers are not sorted into two piles, good and bad, and always there are consequences: you had forgotten that asking for everything in the sack includes the sack itself. Vidia said this was the lesson of Salman Rushdie. He had set out to be original and shocking. He wished for fame. He became the most famous writer in the world, the origin of his fame the price on his head, like a cruel fable of wishes granted.

At this point, Vidia — Sir Vidia — had his wish: he too had everything. He had been very specific. He had wished for a place to call home. He now had three, two flats in London and a house in Wiltshire. He had wished to live in a manner that was “uncompromisingly fashionable” and to be “immensely famous.” He had Kensington and his knighthood. He had wished for a million pounds in the bank. Surely he had his million now.

When he returned from his Islamic journey, he was devastated by what he had found. He wrote urgently to tell me that Pat was on her deathbed. “It is more than I can bear,” he said. “She has been with me since January or February 1952. I cannot endure the knowledge that in another room of this house she is suffering without any hope of relief, except the very final one.” He implored me to write her obituary, in the form of a reminiscence. He reminded me that I had known her a very long time. He knew of my affection for her. He did not want her to be forgotten. His implication was that he himself was incapable of writing anything about her. Yet it seemed to me that we study the art of writing for, among other things, moments like this.

Now I understood the quarrels. “We row all the time now,” Vidia had told me. Pat, whose mocking maiden name was Hale, knew she was dying; she was raging — sorrowful, indignant. How unfair that someone who had asked so little of life, who had spent so much time waiting, attending, being silent, speaking ill of no one, constantly apologizing, excusing herself — the very model of intelligence and simplicity; frugal, frail, humble, full of compliments, saying sweetly, I thought of you, and almost the only person on earth who sent me a birthday card; modest, a little timid, always indoors — how unfair that death was stalking her.

More than anyone, Pat had had the darkest experience of Vidia’s shadow. Even if she had not known about his passion for prostitutes, which Vidia had claimed had lasted into his mid-thirties, she had been painfully acquainted with the facts of his relationship with Margaret, how he had traveled with her and taken her to parties. Everyone knew. Vidia did not conceal his affair with Margaret, and it had lasted as love.

Why didn’t the Naipauls just split up? Was it purely because Pat allowed him to have a lover, and his lover had not made marriage a condition? But life was more complicated than that.

In every sense, Pat was left behind. I had suspected this early on, seeing her as a worried woman of an old-fashioned sort who in another century would have been called neurasthenic. Her ill health was the result of the way she lived, as a captive wife, a shut-in, fluttering in whatever cage of a house Vidia devised for her. And of course, because the way she lived made her ill, and her lifestyle never changed, she got worse. “A case of nerves,” a quack would say. She was trembly, she was inward, introverted, a stay-at-home, afflicted with insomnia, a fretful and hesitant sort, and yet in the same room with Vidia she could seem maternal towards him — overprotective, solicitous, weepy, long-suffering. Vidia played the wayward demanding child to this wounded mother.

Everyone liked her, with an affection that bordered on pity. When Vidia was away — and he was probably with Margaret — Pat ran his affairs. It made me think that Pat was stronger than most people guessed. It was Vidia who could not function alone. What bothered me most about his “travel books” was that he seldom traveled by himself and never revealed his traveling companion. I suspected Vidia’s travel narratives to be extensively varnished, because Margaret was nowhere in them.

What was the challenge in traveling with a loving woman? To me, all such travel was just a holiday, no matter the destination. There were no alien places on earth for the man who had his lover to cling to at night and tell him he was a genius. I had, always avoided reading about the journey in which Mr. and Mrs. First-Class Traveler were embarked on a satisfying adventure (“My wife found an exquisite carving…”). That sort of vacation interested me only if it truthfully reported the cannibalism in the marital woe of the traveling couple: bitter arguments, jealousy, sex, pettiness, infidelity, unfounded accusations, culture shock, or pained silences.

If Pat was dismayed to be left out of Vidia’s trips and Vidia’s writing, she never spoke about it to anyone except Vidia. She covered for him. She was the Lady Naipaul the newspapers mentioned. She stuck by him like the steadfast wife of a prominent politician, fulfilling her role as the loyal helpmate, letting no criticism show. Vidia often told me about their quarrels, and I imagined floods of tears, but in spite of that friction, and considering the circumstances, they seemed to get on remarkably well.

Pat was well educated and extremely well read. She did little but read books. She had had an ambition to write, but the few finished pieces I saw — a visit to Trinidad, an account of a political meeting in London — were not very effective. They were like her, bloodless and a bit pedestrian and terribly nice; she had no guile, not much humor, she was shy. Vidia was the shouter and the prima donna. She was not as weak as she seemed, however, nor was he as strong as he pretended to be. They were mutually dependent. Perhaps he needed her to be at home in the way that some men can be sexual only if they are unfaithful: it was the need to betray Mommy and, in a larger sense, the need for Mommy to know it and permit it.

Pat loved him — loved him without condition — praised him, lived for him, delighted in his success in the most unselfish way. She had lived through each book, and even when Vidia was traveling with Margaret — in the Islamic world and in the American South — she took pride in the books that resulted, Among the Believers and A Turn in the South. She stayed home, she read, she tended to the household — hired painters, oversaw renovations, did donkey work, paid bills — and prepared for Vidia’s return. She awaited him in a way that suggested all the quaint and comforting props of the hearthside: roomy slippers, the favorite cushion, the pipe and hand-knitted comforter, the kettle of vegetable soup simmering on the hob.

In Africa years before, in his disarming fashion, relying on his shocking candor to do the job, Vidia volunteered the fact to me that there was no sex in the marriage. I knew they slept in separate rooms. I did not want to know more than that. But how was it that, knowing what she knew, she still spoke of his books in terms of great praise, and that the marriage had worked for so many years — indeed was still working?

The answer was that she adored him. Possibly there was an element of fear in it — the fear of losing him, the fear of her own futility and her being rejected. More than that, she was unselfish; love sustained her, which was why anyone who pitied her was misled. Pat had strength — that was evident in her ability to be alone. She was discreet. She was kind, she was generous, she was restrained and magnanimous; she was the soul of politeness, she was grateful; she was all the things Vidia was not. It was no accident that they had been married for forty years, but the marriage was a great strain on her health.

Death does not discriminate, but as the most efficient predators demonstrate — the lion, the hyena, and, most successful of all, the wild dogs of central Africa — victims are chosen for their weakness. Death shadows the innocent, the ones who stumble or look the wrong way. Death, the opportunist, skips past the strong to pounce on the feeble and the unwary.

A death watch began, and soon after that letter sending news of Pat’s illness, Vidia wrote again: “Now just five days on, her brain has gone. It can focus on only the most immediate thing.” Though she was almost a corpse, she seemed to Vidia almost youthful — there was still a brightness in her face. He was remorseful. He said, “I took her too much for granted. I am surprised [by] my own grief — even while she is silent and alive in her room.”

That was all it took to make me hurry my piece. Her brain has gone. I wrote and faxed my memory of Pat and told Vidia to give her my love.

Two days later it happened. I read it on the paper headed Dairy Cottage scrolling through my chattering fax machine: Pat had died just a matter of hours before. Vidia had been summoned by the nurse to witness Pat’s final moment of life. “It was shattering.” After that, the funereal functionaries took over — the night nurse, the day nurse, the doctor, and very soon the undertaker’s assistant, who seemed to Vidia “Dickensian.” Vidia did not watch, not even when Pat’s body was taken from the house in the coffin. Only a week before, Pat and he had visited the doctor in Southampton.

“I felt relieved when she left,” Vidia wrote. “I telephoned some people. I even thought I would start working. But then I felt very tired, and it occurred to me to send this note to you.”

My obituary appeared in the Daily Telegraph, under the heading “Lady Naipaul.”

In the many books that V.S. Naipaul has published, Pat Naipaul is mentioned only once, and obliquely (the prologue to An Area of Darkness, where she is referred to as “my companion”). But her intelligence, her encouragement, her love and her discernment are behind every book that Naipaul has written.

“She is my heart,” he told me once. She was also that most valued person in any writer’s life, the first reader.

In Uganda, 30 years ago, in what I considered to be highly unusual circumstances, I met Pat Naipaul and was immediately impressed. The Naipauls had been given a house in the grounds of Makerere University in Kampala, and Vidia was asked by the Building Department how he wished his name to read on the sign. He said he did not want his name on any sign. He was told he had to have something. He said, “All right then, letter it ‘TEAS.’”

As he told me the story, Pat burst out in appreciative isn’t-he-awful? laughter. And then — this is the unusual part — Vidia continued to do what I had interrupted. He was reading to Pat from the last chapter of The Mimic Men, a novel he was just finishing.

I felt privileged to be a part of this intimate ritual. He read about two pages — a marvellous account of a bitter-sweet celebratory dinner shared by the guests in a hotel in south London. Brilliant, I was thinking, when the reading was over.

“Patsy?” Vidia said, inquiring because she had said nothing in response. Pat was thinking hard.

Finally she said, “I’m not sure about all those tears.”

She was tough-minded and she was tender. For more than 40 years, in spite of delicate health and in latter years serious illness, she remained a devoted companion. It is a better description than wife. (In The Mimic Men, the narrator says that wife is “an awful word.”) The Naipauls made a practice of not reminiscing, at least in front of me, but I knew from casual remarks that in those early years they had to put up with the serious inconvenience of a small and uncertain income and no capital; Vidia used to laugh about the only job he had ever held as a salaried employee lasting just six weeks. Pat laughed too, but she had worked for a number of years as a history mistress at a girls’ school.

While she was still in her thirties, she resigned from her teaching post to spend more time with Vidia, which she did as a householder in Muswell Hill, in Stockwell, and in Wiltshire; as a traveler in India, in Africa, in Trinidad, and America. She helped in the research for The Loss of El Dorado, and she became involved in the complex issue that Vidia described in The Killings in Trinidad.

As the first reader, highly intelligent, strong-willed and profoundly moral, Pat played an active part in Vidia’s work. She understood that a writer needs a loyal opposition as much as praise. She enjoyed intellectual combat and used to say, when Vidia and I were engaged on a topic, “I love to see you two sparring.” She always said it in a maternal way, and it touched me.

I loved her for her sweetness and her unselfishness, for the way she prized great writing and fine weather and kind people. She had no time for their opposites. (“Life’s too short,” she said.)

I see her always as I first knew her, in the garden of the Kaptagat Arms in up-country Kenya, where Vidia took refuge from our political troubles in Uganda, to finish his novel. Pat sat smiling, reading in the sunshine, sometimes writing, and always alert to — just beyond the hedge of purple and pink bougainvilleas — the sound of typing.

“Thank you for the lovely and generous note about Pat,” Vidia wrote. “I told her you had sent your love. I will write more later.”

But there were no more letters, only rumors. I dismissed them as outrageous. I should have known better. In the rumors that circulated about Vidia, the most outrageous ones were usually the truest.

A little over two months after Pat Naipaul died, Vidia married again. He had fallen in love. He was unembarrassed about such passions. Even while Pat was alive, he had spoken publicly — in The New Yorker—of his pleasure in having found sexual satisfaction in middle age with Margaret in Argentina. In this same piece he also delivered himself of some choice Naipaulisms: “I have an interesting mind” and “I can’t bear flowers” and “I have no more than a hundred months left” (that was in 1994; in 1979 he had also said he had only a hundred months left) and “I can’t stand the sound of women’s voices.”

Margaret was actually named in the New Yorker piece as Vidia’s long-time lover, and was then still in the picture. “The sexual ease came quite late to me,” Vidia said to the interviewer, of Margaret, while Pat toiled in the kitchen making lunch. “And it came as an immense passion. Conrad has a lovely line: A man to whom love comes late, not as the most splendid of illusions, but like an enlightening and priceless misfortune.’”

But the new Lady Naipaul was not Margaret. She was Nadira Khannum Alvi, who had begun life in Kenya, the daughter of two transplanted Pakistanis. More than thirty years before, Vidia and I had encountered a small girl who resembled her on the verandah of a dukawallah’s shop in Nairobi. Vidia had loathed her on sight, but then, he disliked most children.

Nadira was now forty-two, a divorced mother of two teenagers. Vidia had met her at a dinner party at the home of the American consul-general in Lahore, Pakistan, in October 1995, as Pat lay dying in Wiltshire.

As with many stories about Vidia, at least two versions of their meeting existed. The first described Mrs. Alvi as an admirer of his work who approached him at the party and said, “Can I kiss you?”

“I think we should sit down,” Vidia said.

Three weeks later they decided to get married. It only remained for Pat to die before the marriage date could be fixed. In the event, it was to be April 15, 1996.

All this — the place, the name of the woman, the admiration, and “Can I kiss you?”—I read in the Daily Telegraph, which published an account by a reporter, Amit Roy, of the wedding lunch in London. The piece was neither corrected nor contradicted, something the scrupulous and insistent Vidia would have done if he had been misrepresented, so I took it as a record of facts, until someone who had been at the party in Lahore, the man who had brought them together, told me the second version.

“I introduced them at the U.S. consul’s dinner,” he said. “I wanted Naipaul to meet some characters for his book. I saw Nadira sitting at another table. I went up to her and said, ‘Guess who is here?’ and ‘I want to introduce you to him.’ She told me she did not know the name V.S. Naipaul and had never read anything by him. I then accompanied her to meet him. She went up to him at the dinner table where he was serving himself, and as I introduced them, she said, ‘How fantastic’ and ‘What an honor’ and ‘I know your work’ and then plonked a big kiss on his cheek. He blushed, but he was taken. They were together for the whole evening. The very next day he phoned me and said, ‘I don’t need your help because Nadira is taking me around and we are leaving for Bahawalpur.’ Nadira was with Naipaul in the hotel when he phoned me.”

The marriage lunch was at an Indian restaurant in South Kensington. Vidia and his new wife sat holding hands at the table. This was a new Vidia. I had never seen him hold Pat’s hand. This was a smitten Vidia, a far cry from the man who once said to me that he turned away if he saw two people kissing on television. He was also a reticent Vidia. The new Lady Naipaul did most of the talking, and her talk sounded very similar to what Vidia always referred to as “chuntering.”

“It was amazing for him to have a woman in an Islamic country walk up and kiss him,” Nadira said, explaining her unorthodox manner of introduction. “I astounded a lot of people, but I tend to do that a lot in Pakistan anyway.” (This kiss received further revision two years later in an interview in London’s Sunday Times of May 10, 1998, in which Nadira was quoted as saying, “My kiss was not some silly bimbo, fluff-headed thing… It was an act of reverence.”) Going on to describe their travels in Pakistan after they met, she said, “I think we fell terribly in love with each other.”

Nadira was a bit surprised by the suddenness. “There can be dichotomy between the writer and the person, someone you don’t want to meet again. I found the writer was the person. Here I had met a combination of a wonderful man and a man who had a vision, tremendous compassion, someone who reminded me of my past. He was my soul-mate. He was someone I had always looked for. I am madly in love with him. I think I shall always be madly in love with him.”

There was more. But knowing Vidia, this was the moment for him to cry, “Stop chuntering!”

Instead, Vidia said to the man from the Telegraph, “Do you know about Nadira, her reputation and her work? She is very famous.”

During the wedding lunch Nadira clutched Vidia’s hand and whispered, “I want you,” as the guests tucked into King Prawn Curry and Chicken Badami Korma. Among them were his agent, his old Oxford tutor, a couple of literary critics, a fellow whom Vidia unfailingly referred to as “that epicene young man,” and Harold Pinter and Lady Antonia Fraser. I was ten thousand miles away, on the slopes of Mount Haleakala.

Vidia and I had often talked about Philip Larkin. We had both bought High Windows when it was published, in the summer of 1974. Larkin’s poetry — mordant, sour, funny, right wing, cynical, elegiac, mocking, contemptuous of fame, fearful of death — matched exactly many of Vidia’s moods. In “The Whitsun Weddings,” Larkin had written of the faces at weddings,

…each face seemed to define

Just what it saw departing: children frowned

At something dull; fathers had never known

Success so huge and wholly farcical;

The women shared

The secret like a happy funeral…

Vidia had referred to Nadira’s “reputation and her work,” and had said, “She is very famous.” But surely Nadira’s celebrity was similar to that which I had enjoyed when I had been famous in Kampala and in Bundibugyo. Nadira had been famous in Bahawalpur, a small town on the Sutlej River about two hundred miles south of Lahore. She wrote a “Letter from Bahawalpur,” which appeared each week in The Nation (Lahore). Her picture accompanied the column, a passport-quality full-face halftone of a vague, unsmiling woman with bobbed hair and dark raised brows like diacritical marks over her staring eyes.

To verify Vidia’s high opinion, I got hold of a sequence of Nadira’s dispatches from Bahawalpur.

In “Pardon Sir, Your Slip Is Showing!” she wrote, “Words are wonderful things. They are extremely useful, even indispensable at times; you can use them to communicate, to beguile, to frustrate, to berate, to admire, to flatter, to fool…” And she ended, “If words loose [sic] their meaning, life looses [sic] its meaning.”

“Remembering the Old of the Sadiqians” was Nadira’s lament for the fact that the retired teachers of Sadiq Public School in Bahawalpur had small pensions or none at all. Conclusion: “No wonder our education system is in shambles.”

A week later, in “Computer Blues,” Nadira deplored the rise of computer technology. Her then husband made an appearance in this piece: “The early days of his computer mania were quite a strain on our marriage.” Nadira hated her computer. Nothing worked as it should — disks, printer, fonts, spell checker; power outages in Bahawalpur did not help. Also, “I keep loosing [sic] articles from the disks, sometimes loosing [stc] the disks,” and so on.

Lovable, ungrammatical, clumsy, audacious — had such pieces turned Vidia’s head? Nadira had been married to a man who was living the more or less feudal existence of a wealthy Pakistani farmer-landlord. That sort of life — you see it in India also — is like a glimpse of old Russia, something Tolstoyan in the landlord’s experimental farm, with his many peasants and tenants and his money, for this man lived on the same premises with Nadira and his first wife, a German woman, and the children from both marriages.

The rest of the story, too, is like a Russian novel. Nadira acquires some local fame as a columnist. She revolts. She leaves for Lahore. She is squired around town by several men, who woo her but stop short of being suitors. She has no money except for the insignificant fees for her “Letter from Bahawalpur,” and she no longer lives in her town. On her divorce, it is said that her husband does not even return her dowry. She is living precariously when she receives an invitation to meet Sir Vidia Naipaul.

She says to my friend in Lahore, “Who is he? Has he written anything?”

It is impossible not to admire her pluck.

Later, people said, “Have you heard about Vidia? He got married.”

Vidia had sounded happy in the piece describing his wedding curry lunch. It did not surprise me that I hadn’t been invited. I was in Hawaii, half a world away, and I had still not gotten over the death of Pat or the sad news that there had been only a handful of people at her funeral.

A month after Vidia’s wedding, I had a call from Bill Buford, the literary editor of The New Yorker, telling me that the magazine was sponsoring an event at Hay-on-Wye, a well-known literary festival, in a pretty part of the Welsh border country.

“We want you and Vidia to appear,” Buford said. “Do a sort of literary dialogue.”

“Vidia hates literary festivals,” I said. “He has never been to one. And they seem like dog shows to me. Have you asked him?”

“We were hoping that you would, Paul.”

“Never. He’ll just scream.”

“He’s been very mellow since he got married. It’s a new Vidia, honestly.”

“He won’t do it,” I said.

“We figure he might if you ask him. He’ll listen to you. You’re his friend.”

“Believe me, he does what he wants.”

“Salman Rushdie will be there.”

“That’s no incentive to Vidia. He laughed when the ayatollah announced his fatwa. I tell you, he won’t want to go.”

“But Vidia’s new wife might.”

“I don’t know Vidia’s new wife.”

“Paul, if you ask Vidia to attend it will mean a lot to us.”

“He’ll want to be paid.”

“We’ll pay him. Within reason, of course. Will he want a lot?”

“Yes.”

“Paul, please…”

I cannot bear it when people plead with me. Perhaps they know that. Pleading always has the intended effect.

It was a deep-voiced woman who answered the telephone at Dairy Cottage. I knew just where she was: on the white sofa by the window, which gave onto the western side of the hedge, the green shrubs, the green trees, the red maple. It was where Pat always sat, because Vidia disliked answering the phone.

“And who is speaking?” she asked.

I told her my name.

As she passed the phone to Vidia, I heard her say, “It’s Paul Theroux. I want to meet him.”

I should have known that would be enough, but even then, I was not certain that Vidia would say yes to the festival.

18. Literature Is for the Wounded and the Damaged

IT HAPPENS TO BE a tic of mine as a traveler, on returning to any distant city, to take the same walk, make the same stops, eat the same meals at the same restaurants, look into the same stores, verify the faces of clerks or doormen, even touch the same posts and gates — go through a ritualistic renewal of familiarity along a known route before striking out and doing anything new. It is not compulsive. It eases my spirit. And in any new city I make a route and remember it.

It was a sunny morning at the end of May in England’s never-disappointing springtime. I was just a tourist now. Christie’s salesrooms were on my London trail. I walked from Brown’s Hotel to King Street in time to see the “Visions of India” pre-auction show.

“Your friend Naipaul was just here,” a Christie’s man said, greeting me. He knew me as a sometime bidder and Naipaul as a connoisseur. “He might still be somewhere in the building.”

We looked among the pictures but didn’t see him. I had wanted to surprise him, perhaps have lunch. He had agreed to go to Hay-on-Wye to do the staged dialogue. I would have enjoyed looking at these pictures with Vidia, who had a discerning eye for paintings of Indian landscapes. But he had gone.

I continued on my quasi-Tourettic walk, feeling like a practitioner of advanced mazecraft. I had arrived in London that morning and was happy with my first-class rail ticket to Newport, Wales, in my pocket. I left the next day from Paddington station, first reading the newspaper and then looking over the first chapter of Kowloon Tong, which I had just started to write. I had spent part of the winter in Hong Kong.

If things had been different in my life, I might have been writing the book in one of those Oxfordshire or Somersetshire houses — the Old Vicarage or Stride Manor, say. The house filled with the aromas of log fires and baking bread. “Dad’s working in the library.” It had been a dream of mine to end up in the West Country as a solvent escapee from London and part-time patriarch, my kids coming down with girlfriends or wives, maybe even grandchildren, on weekends. Wearing muddy Wellingtons, I would meet them at the local railway station with the other parents and country squires, leaning against our Land Rovers and listening for the train. I would be known as “the American” in the village and greeted with insincere and resentful jollity by the gruff locals in the pub, the Black Horse—“Evenin’, squire.” They would patronize me with archaisms and bore me stiff with country lore they’d got out of books. Behind my back I’d be called “the Yank.”

No matter! The West Country was one of the prettiest places in the world. I knew that now. I had been looking at it, off and on, for thirty-four years, but now I knew it would never happen. Just thinking of the word “never” and seeing these blue remembered hills made my eyes prickle with regret.

A taxi met me at Newport. The driver, a former teacher and Welsh speaker, took me to Abergavenny and across the Black Mountains past jumbled villages. Too far from London to be within commuting distance, the countryside looked unmodernized, like the England of the sixties and seventies. The village of Hay was on a hill, the river Wye below it. I dropped my bag at the innlike hotel and after lunch, on that afternoon of June 1, 1996, went to the festival.

Vidia and Nadira had arrived, having left Dairy Cottage that morning.

“Paul, this is Nadira.”

The skinny, scowling seven-year-old girl in her little princess sari on the Nairobi verandah had become a big woman. She was dark and tall — taller than Vidia — and watchful, with the sort of frank sizing-you-up stare that is never seen on the faces of Pakistani women. Her sari was loose at the hips, as if she had just lost some weight. She was waiting for me to say something. I spoke to Vidia.

“I just missed you at that Indian show at Christie’s yesterday.”

Before Vidia could reply, Nadira slapped his shoulder and said, “You bad man! You did not tell me you went there!”

She slapped his arm again and scolded him. This seemed a trifle presumptuous in a woman who had been married only a month. I had never seen anyone touch Vidia before.

“You will not buy any more pictures!”

“You’re telling my secrets, Paul,” Vidia said quietly, looking a little grim.

Salman Rushdie was being introduced to Vidia as I stepped up to a table to get myself a cup of coffee, and then I saw Bill Buford from The New Yorker beckoning, and we all headed to a big white circus tent.

As I passed Salman, he was smiling and shaking his head. He said, “I have never met him before.”

“What did he say?”

“He said, ‘Are you all right?’ I told him yes, I am all right. He said, ‘Good, good, good.’” Salman began to laugh.

We took our seats, Vidia, Bill Buford, and I, on the stage in the big circus tent. The audience was large, but still the atmosphere was that of a dog show. We were being asked to perform, to walk on our hind legs, jump through hoops, create a spectacle for the readers. Buford said, “What about questions afterwards?”

“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.”

“Oh, my God. My secrets given away,” Vidia said, and I knew it was a mistake to begin that way. But I kept on. “I wanted to ask you about pictures and writing. How is your imagination fed by images and a love of the pictorial and your writing?”

Sounding stubborn and doubtful, Vidia said, “I don’t think there’s any relation. I think words and the pictures of words are quite different. And the thoughts of words and the things that occur in the brain are different from the pictorial impressions. The talents are entirely different. I don’t think I’m a judge of art.”

“I think you’re being modest. You are a good judge of art. You’ve bought it, you have it on your walls. So?”

“But I don’t think it’s related, Paul.”

He was stumping me again, but I could not understand why he denied his pictorial gift. I said, “The images in your books are made out of words, but they begin as observations — describing someone’s shadow, the texture of skin, hair, sunlight, color, the shapes of things. Obviously the talent is different: Landseer could draw fur, but you can describe fur.”

“I think it is an intensity for observation with which I was born,” he said, admitting this. “I remember being aware of it when I was very young. Studying a face very carefully, for what it said. Studying hands and the shape of bodies, the parts of people.”

“Isn’t that what painters do?”

“I don’t know. I like the line in a painting. I like Hokusai’s invention. Velazquez, the way he handles paint. It’s quite different from writing a sentence or shaping a narrative.”

“But how can you write if you can’t observe? The gift of observation is transformed into writing.”

“You must observe,” he said, at last agreeing with what I had been hinting at all along. “I’ll tell you a story of the observing gift. One of the earliest memories I have, probably when I was about six or seven. I was at my grandmother’s house in a country town in Trinidad during the school holidays. And there’s a teacher, an Indian teacher from the school, and he’s moving his possessions in a box cart. My father stops him and they exchange a few words. And the teacher says, ‘I’m not like some people who will show off and get a proper cart or get a van to move my goods. I will move them and let people look at me and let them laugh!’ And I thought, ‘That is how the poor behave.’ A boy of six made this sad observation. ‘He’s like this because he’s a poor man. He’s a teacher whom one respects, but really he’s a poor man.’ So, it’s deep inside one. And it’s also related, perhaps, to my feeling for handwriting. You know, one judges people by their handwriting, or their parents, or the way you look, the way you walk, the way you talk. The whole person. No mysteries for me.”

“Aren’t those surfaces you’re talking about?” I asked.

“No, not surfaces, because we carry our life in our face. We carry our experiences in our face.”

“But they are surfaces — surfaces that reveal inner states?”

“Yes, we make ourselves.”

More confident over the flow of talk that had developed, something like a conversation, even if it was all made of my impatient questions and his reluctant answers, I said, “I want to ask you about universities. You once said that you were disappointed at Oxford. How do you think you would fare at a university these days?”

“I think they’re calamitous, these English courses,” Vidia said angrily. He shifted in his chair, looking combative, shooting from the hip. “They’re actively destructive of civilization and thought. When I was at Oxford in 1950, I think we all knew that English was not a serious subject for study, not worth a serious degree, not worth a physics degree. It was not worth a man doing medical research.”

The audience was restless, suspecting heresy but half agreeing with it, as Vidia warmed to his theme. Obviously I had struck a nerve.

“We knew that this business of doing English was a very soft option, an extension of the divinity courses of the last century. But that was what people went to Oxford for, to learn to hunt and to live this great social life, and later, endless divinity people were produced. Probably a hundred years ago or less, Professor Sweet — you know, who is the origin of Professor Higgins in the Shaw play” (he meant Henry Sweet, 1845–1912, phonetician and philologist)—“he and some other people established this English course, a form of idleness for simple people. So it was a kind of imperial statement about English literature, like English history, so it was a brand-new study. In 1950 the study stopped at 1830, people weren’t encouraged to go beyond that, and very few wanted to. They were content with the shallows of the eighteenth century.”

Vidia sat very erect, folded his arms again, and his voice became almost a shout.

“So that now what has happened is that this non-course, this non-subject, has been taken over by politically motivated people. Universities have become places where free thinking is not allowed, where your tutor does not ask for an original thought about a work. But it’s a political line! We were told at Oxford in 1950 that the best thing that happened to you occurred in the holidays. That’s when you did a lot of reading. The point of this course was that it allowed you to do an infinite amount of reading. Nowadays people read very, very little, and they have elaborate theories. And there have emerged whole generations from the universities who can’t think and who just parrot the phrases.”

There was applause from several sections of the audience. Who had ever heard English departments being attacked or subjects being evaluated this way? Physics more important than English — indeed, English study vastly inferior to all others.

“This has particularly damaged the newer countries, the lesser cultures, who at great cost have produced intellectuals. They send them to Oxford, Cambridge, they send them to American universities, and they come back parroting dreadful political tripe. They’re corrupt!”

The response, as his voice broke on the word “corrupt,” was tumultuous applause from every side of the circus tent. At last they had a performance worthy of such a tent, a raging novelist in full cry, an Indian performing an authentic rope trick.

“And I think that an English course ought to be recognized as a silly course!” he called out. “Not worth a physics course, or a medical research course, or astronomy! And there should be no support for it, and all the professors and all the lecturers should be withdrawn from that kind of work and put into some other job. I wonder what work they’ll do? What work will they do! In the old days we’d say, ‘Get them on the buses!’ But now we know that conducting a bus is a form of idleness.”

There was no point in my saying anything now. I waited for the laughter and applause to die down and then crept into his shadow once again and asked, “So you think that literature courses should be disbanded?”

“I think literature should be read privately,” Vidia said. “Literature is not for the young. Literature is for the old, the experienced, the wounded, the damaged, who read literature to find echoes of their own experience and balm of a certain sort.”

“The old and the damaged,” I said.

Vidia had begun to laugh in a triumphant way. “Contented tribal societies don’t need literature. They pound their yams and they’re quite happy!”

“But people can’t abandon literacy, can they?”

“No, you can’t go back. You can’t pretend, you can’t unlearn what you’ve learned.”

“A moment earlier you sounded like Chairman Mao.”

Laughing, relaxing a bit after having delivered his tirade, Vidia said, “When did I sound like Chairman Mao? You mean ‘Get them on the buses’?”

“Learning by doing,” I said. “It’s one of his thoughts.”

“Like Mr. Squeers.”

“And also: Go into the countryside and learn how to pound yams.”

Vidia said, in a reasonable voice, “Literature will look after itself. People will have to read it. Now, apart from the universities you have the dreadful pressures of the prizes, which are a dreadful kind of corruption of publishing. As I said, when my first books were published there were no interviews, nothing, and books just trickled down and made their own way. If there had been all these prizes, and my books hadn’t got the prizes I would have been run out of town by the publishers.”

“But that is part of the selling mechanism,” I said. “Interestingly, universities are also a business.”

“And part of the contraction of the reading habit, because of certain approved texts,” Vidia said. “I am told that Francis Parkman is no longer taught, no longer approved in America. People are no longer encouraged to read his work. He’s a great writer. The Oregon Trail is a great work. But he’s not there, not available, because he is politically unacceptable. There is a kind of tyranny which this bogus English course has imposed on whole civilizations.”

“So reading should be a private activity.”

“Yes. A private activity. And your friends will tell you to read a book. And you’ll read it quietly. You don’t want people telling you what to think.”

“But if you went back to Oxford now, what would you study?”

“I would have to do something equally idle,” Vidia said, laughing softly, sounding West Indian again. “The whole point of doing English was a form of idleness, you know. It was a way of spending time — it wasn’t serious. So we need a place as a kind of decompression chamber, from adolescence to adulthood.”

I said, “But it was a crucial period for you as a writer.”

“No. No. No. It was not. Except if you consider what perhaps are the effects of solitude, or long solitude, or long unhappiness, but that probably would have occurred elsewhere.”

“You didn’t need to go to Oxford for that?”

“Didn’t need to go to Oxford for that, to be unhappy, or to be poor.”

Buford had been sitting by, laughing and occasionally looking shocked. He said, “You said something earlier which I found interesting, when you described travel writing as somehow more authentic than some fiction. Do you find your nonfiction now more honest or more satisfying to write?”

“Yes. I’d have a lot of trouble writing straight fiction now, because I’ve done my fiction,” Vidia said. “And I’ve been writing for forty years. I’ve handled my experience as best as I can. I can’t go back to doing this thing which I now reject, because I want to know why one should falsify a perfectly valid experience. Why, for the sake of drama, should one dress it up? In the last century, things moved quickly because of this swift modification that occurred, writer by writer, book by book, and the forms developed quickly. I think now that if your material is so varied, so many cultures meet, and the novel works best when you’re dealing with a monoculture — one culture with a set of norms that everyone can appreciate, almost like Jane Austen. It’s easier to write fiction like that. But when the world is moving together in all kinds of ways, that form doesn’t absolutely answer, and the ability to lie is so immense. When I read books from Southeast Asia, I worry about it. I think, ‘Where is this lie from? Why is this a lie?’ It’s like reading an autobiography, where you think, ‘What is being left out? What is being distorted?’”

I said, “So your response to this need for a new form is The Enigma of Arrival and A Way in the World!”

He said, “All great writing has its own new form. Montaigne’s essays — completely new. He began writing classical essays, and then it develops, he writes about himself, he writes about the war around him, he writes about cruelty, he writes about the discoveries of the world, and he writes in his mocking way about himself as well, this new modern man — absolutely new. That is why Montaigne is Montaigne. All great writers are new. They are not like other people.”

I liked this observation, not only for what it said about great writers but for what it revealed of Vidia’s own conceit about himself. He saw himself as one of these new men, and now I saw his reason: his role model was Michel Eyquem de Montaigne (1533–1592).

He said, “At the universities and the schools, people are not taught to be new. They are taught to copy other people. Copying becomes the highest virtue, and I don’t know how you can judge a derivative form. I don’t know how, if you get forms that are not original, not delivering new visions, how to go about judging them. People say, ‘Judge for the style. Judge for the characters.’ I don’t know.

Buford said, “Both of you have written strongly autobiographical novels. The thing about the autobiographical novel, whether it’s The Enigma of Arrival or A House for Mr. Biswas, My Secret History or My Other Life, is that once those stories are told, they’re told. The autobiographical novel is spent, therefore that kind of novel’s possibilities are exhausted.”

Vidia made a magisterial gesture, doing his Gradgrind impersonation, and said, “I feel I want to say that I am not against narratives fundamentally. We must deal in narrative. Without narrative there is no point.” He grimaced, he invited attention. He said, “So what can I say about novels now? Narrative writing is what we need, whatever form it takes. The reason Paul probably had to go in for the autobiographical fiction is that his experience has been unique. It has not been a simple Massachusetts childhood. He has traveled, he has gathered experience in different cultures, he has ventured and absorbed other cultures. And because of this special experience, he has to define himself in the books he is writing. He just can’t write a third-person narrative without defining who the participant, the viewer, who the ‘I’ and the ‘eye’ are. And probably more and more people, as the world gets more confused, will feel the need to define exactly who they are. Otherwise, with the third-person narrative one wonders, ‘Who is writing this?’”

It seemed a strange observation, a loss of faith in fiction that was akin to saying the novel was misleading and mendacious, if not dead. But it was not news. Almost three hundred years ago, Daniel Defoe had said as much in one of the sequels to Robinson Crusoe, after the first volume became a huge hit: “This supplying a story by invention is certainly a most scandalous crime, and yet very little regarded in that part. It is a sort of lying that makes a great hole in the heart, at which by degrees a habit of lying enters in.” I did not agree at all with this, and I felt that, like Vidia, Defoe was being self-serving, as well as pandering to puritanism.

I said, “But in The Mystic Masseur, your first book, you’re sometimes writing in the third person and sometimes in the first person. I thought that was the most amazing innovation. I had never read a book in which that happened. Where did that come from?”

“Ignorance!” Vidia shouted, and laughed. “And both people were fictions — that is, the narrator was an artificial figure too.”

“Could I ask you how your father influenced you?” Bill asked.

“We can’t go into this, Bill, because the subject of one’s writing — it’s too profound, and too personal.”

Almost an hour had passed. Buford thanked us, and as the audience applauded, Vidia repeated to Buford, “No questions.”

As we were led out, I said, “Are you staying at the hotel, Vidia?”

“I’m not staying. I’m going back to Wiltshire,” he said.

He looked pained — less irritated and edgy than he had onstage, but tired and unforthcoming.

“It seems quite a nice hotel,” I said. “We could have dinner later.”

“I get so lonely in hotel rooms.”

He spotted Nadira coming towards him through the departing crowd. He motioned to her, and seeing him, she picked up her pace. She moved quickly, marching like a soldier, swinging her arms. Her hands were fists.

“We’ll talk,” he said.

As Vidia and Nadira were escorted to their car, Salman Rushdie came up to me. His heavy-lidded eyes gave him a perpetually mocking look, and he had never looked more disdainful. He was holding a small notebook and peering at a scribbled-on page. Vidia would have read a great deal in Salman’s handwriting: it was upright, confident, closely printed, very black, un-English, linear on a page without lines. Even upside down it looks arrogant, Vidia might have said. He would have been impressed.

“I learned two things,” Salman said. “One, close the English departments. Two, literature is for the wounded and the damaged. Ha-ha!”

19. Exchanges

“WE’LL TALK,” Vidia had said, but it was not possible. I wrote to him, but for almost a year I was seldom in one place long enough to receive a letter or a fax. I was on the move — more than two months in the African bush, drinking the rivers again: on the Angola border of the upper Zambezi, in Barotseland, camped in the compound of the Litunga, the Lozi king; sick in a tent in the remote Dinde Marsh of southern Malawi, with acute dehydration, not drinking enough of the muddy river; and paddling in Mozambique, near where Mrs. Livingstone lay buried under a baobab tree at Chupanga. On the lower Zambezi I saw a lion’s paw prints in the dust of the riverbank. The creature had paused to relieve herself.

“Female,” I said.

My observation was challenged by one of those aggressively skeptical Australian women you meet in such places.

“How do you know that?”

“Females are retromingent. You probably are.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Piss backwards.”

Then I was in Hong Kong, mugging up on the Chinese take-away. I had kidney problems and gout brought on by the African dehydration.

All this I faithfully reported to Vidia in my usual way: postcards, air letters. I could not phone. It did not strike me as unusual that Vidia did not respond. I knew he was still writing Beyond Belief, the sequel to his Islam book. You will say: But you corresponded with him and wrote his blurbs and read his manuscripts while you were working on a book. Yes, but he had different rules. I found rules, in general, an inconvenience.

We no longer had any friends in common. I had no idea what was happening in his life. This was strange, since for thirty years I had had a pretty good idea of the ebb and flow of his affairs.

There was a piece in the magazine supplement of India Today (Delhi) early in 1997, an interview with Vidia and Nadira, a portrait of their new life together. Nadira had taken charge. For one thing, she had closed his archives in Tulsa. Vidia said, “Nadira is more encouraging. Pat could be very stubborn and critical.” And: “I think I made a great error. I took writing far too seriously.” The author of the article found Nadira imperious and wrote, “She likes to be called Lady Naipaul.”

Then, about a year after Hay-on-Wye, when I was in Hawaii in an angle of repose, I received by mail a catalogue from a bookseller who specialized in modern first editions. Some items caught my attention:

#336 THEROUX, Paul. Fong and the Indians. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1968. His second book… This copy is inscribed by Theroux to writer V. S. Naipaul: “For Vidia/ & Pat/ with love/ Paul.” Near fine in a very good dust jacket… Theroux and Naipaul met in east Africa in 1966, presumably about the time and place that constitute the setting for this novel, and their friendship extends over three decades, dating from a time when both were relatively young writers, and neither had achieved the degree of literary renown that both enjoy today… An excellent association copy. $1500.

#337 THEROUX, Paul. Sinning with Annie. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1972. His first collection of stories. This copy is inscribed by Theroux to V. S. Naipaul in the month of publication: “To Vidia & Pat/ with love/ Paul. “… An excellent association copy, inscribed at approximately the time that Theroux’s book on Naipaul would have been approaching publication. $1500.

#338 THEROUX, Paul. V. S. Naipaul: An Introduction to His Work. (London): Deutsch (1972). An early book of criticism of Trinidadian author V.S. Naipaul… Scarce… $850.

No inscription on that last one. I suspected it was a copy I had sent through the publisher, who was Vidia’s friend, so that Vidia could see the earliest possible copy. I hoped that he would like it. He had, as he had said in several effusive letters. There were several more of my books in the catalogue, and I wondered if they too were from the shelves of Dairy Cottage, Salterton, Wiltshire. Apparently someone was cleaning house.

The prices were, I thought, extortionate. And assuming that the books had passed through the hands of several booksellers, a common practice in the “collectibles” market, Vidia would have received only a fraction of that — Modern Firsts is one of the adjuncts to the rag-and-bone trade, and its practitioners are glorified junk dealers. To twit him about this, I faxed him the bookseller’s catalogue pages, and I asked, “How are you?”

The reply came from his new wife. It was one of the strangest-looking messages I had ever received, printed in big wobbly letters like a child’s school essay. I watched, squinnying at it, as it scrolled out of my fax machine. My first thought was that the chuntering woman from Pakistan had lost her marbles.

Just the look of it, the way it was set out on the page — the oversized printing, the crazily toppling paragraphs, the random punctuation and nineteenth-century notion of capitalizing, the odd locutions and even odder grammar — was slipshod even by Bahawalpur standards. There was another telling thing. You can judge a person by the manner in which, over the course of a two- or three-page letter, the handwriting breaks down. Vidia had taught me that. Nadira’s began at the top of the first page as big accusatory capitals and then sloped and tottered and, as though a new person had taken over the scribble on page two, collapsed into a slant, which I read as the sort of italics you would use to indicate a hoarse nagging. And I could see that it was indeed a nagging letter.

My immediate reaction was deep embarrassment for Vidia.

She began with a startling non sequitur, asserting that I would not be writing her obituary. As I was murmuring “What?” I read on. She wanted to make a few things clear, and she rambled a bit. It was babu English, but I got the point.

The obituary I had written of Pat Naipaul was a pretty poor job, Nadira said. It was not an obituary at all. It belonged in the realm of fiction and was more about me than about “poor Pat.” And I reread “poor Pat” in the block letters of the woman who had been paddling palms with Vidia in Lahore as the unlucky woman lay dying in Wiltshire.

If my writing the obituary had been a favor, Nadira went on, the favor was reciprocated by Vidia’s agreeing to appear at the Hay-on-Wye festival. She then rubbished Bill Buford, who had arranged the event. She rubbished the event. She accused me of trying to make Vidia seem fanatical and extreme on the subject of Africa. In two novels, she said, Vidia had told the truth about Africa. I had not followed his example. I had misrepresented Africa.

Elaborating on this last point, she said that she had read something I had written about Africa — she did not identify the work by name. She implied that I had quoted Vidia out of context. Of course, Vidia was far too greathearted to care about being quoted, she said, but I had to understand that his life would soon be made public. She hinted at a forthcoming biography. Therefore — and this constituted a type of warning — I should be a better and more responsible friend, for did I not know that Vidia set himself apart from the pettiness of liberals?

Affirming her friendship for Vidia’s literary agent, she signed off, “Nadira.”

She’s crazy, I thought, and I began to laugh and crinkle the fax paper in my hand. She’s nuts! Going absolutely barking mad in Wiltshire! It was predictable. The woman was a highly visible person who would have been denounced or ridiculed on sight as “colored” or a “Paki” in most of Britain. Wiltshire was the haven of crusty right-wing retired military men and xenophobic farmers. This was, surely, a kind of nightmare for the lady letter writer from Bahawalpur.

This was crazy, for there was nothing I had done to provoke the letter. Certainly my role as Patricia Naipaul’s obituarist did not justify this abuse. And the festival business was misdirected — since when did anyone force Vidia to say or do something against his will? He was a man of iron resolve. Vidia had asked for the obituary. He had thanked me afterwards. I had his letter — only gratitude and grief in it.

At first I put her letter down to a need to prove herself to Vidia. She had decided to take charge, to clean house in all senses. She had to have been the one to get rid of the books with the loving dedications that had predated her. This was the inevitable revisionism of the new wife. She had turned into Carrie Kipling, Fanny Stevenson, and was aiming at being Jane Carlyle, the martyr of Craigenputtock, humoring and defending her wayward husband. Nadira was seeing me off.

The more I reflected on her letter, the louder I laughed. Its obsessional style and bad grammar and clumsy handwriting were proof that Vidia had not seen it before she sent it. He was scrupulous in matters of punctuation. Poor grammar set his teeth on edge. I had seen him scream at such an ill-conceived thing, like a man howling at a filthy rag. He was put off by the slightest gaucheries. I remembered how, in Stockwell, he had whimperingly told Pat and me that he had seen a workman sit on his bed — the thought of the man putting his bum on the place where Vidia slept was too much, and he nearly sobbed. This abusive note would be just such a horror to a man who saw English departments as representing corruption and the decline of civilization. It was a weird, shame-making letter. I thought he should see it.

I faxed it to him with this message: “I have just received the attached fax from your wife. I will reply to her, but of course am rather puzzled about it and wonder what could possibly have motivated her to write to me in this way.”

There was no reply from him. That was odd, but at least — unless she had intercepted the fax — he had seen her crazy letter, accusing me of writing a self-serving obituary and browbeating him into going to Hay-on-Wye more than a year before.

He was my friend. He had been my friend for over thirty years! He was not by nature a bridge burner — there weren’t enough bridges in his life for him to develop any skills of this sort. He was, if anything, a mushy soul afflicted with a cruel streak, and like many severe men, something of a sentimentalist. He was depressive. He cried easily.

After a suitable interval, I wrote to Nadira. I curbed my instinct to fill my letter with sarcasm or write a parody of one of her Letters from Bahawalpur, a name I had begun childishly to enjoy murmuring for its nearness to the word “bowel”—“Bowelpur,” as I thought of it, the quintessential shitty little town. She would not find that funny. And if I parodied her in the style of the Bowelpur columns, with their sententious theorizing and garbled English and frequent references to her husband and her characteristic “loose” for “lose” and the shortage of definite and indefinite articles, she would, I was sure, miss the point. So I wrote:

Dear Mrs. Naipaul,

I had not written to you, but to Vidia, and was therefore surprised to receive your fax today, and rather startled by its confused and rather combative tone.

You object to my obituary of Pat Naipaul. I wonder why. She was a woman I loved deeply; the piece was not “a favor,” as you put it, but a labor of love. You accused me of writing a self-serving obituary of, as you termed her, “poor Pat.” How inappropriate that you should mention her name in this way, since you were associated with Vidia as the woman lay dying. I attach a letter written to me by Vidia afterwards which begins, “Thank you for the lovely and generous note about Pat…”

I did not make Vidia go to Hay-on-Wye, though I recall your urging him to go. Vidia was at center stage, speaking his mind. He says and does exactly what his brilliance dictates. It is folly to think that I have any influence over him.

“Having read your African piece,” you say. Again, I do not know what you are talking about. Over the past 30 years I have written a great deal about Africa. Though I understand your intention is to be offensive to my work your entire paragraph is obscure to me.

You obviously intended your message to me to be provocative. You can see that I am not provoked but only fascinated by your tone, your mistaken assumptions and your odd references.

In almost 32 years of friendship with Vidia I have asked for little and have given a great deal, because I admired Vidia’s writing. You should not have written to me in those terms. Yet I am still smiling at your mention of my not writing your obituary.

You are newly arrived. You ought to be more careful. Others have been in your position and have felt just as certain and been just as mistaken.

Believe me, should I wish to write your obituary — or anything else — I shall do so, without needing to be asked.

There was no reply. Perhaps this silence was not so strange. In Africa, when an expatriate got married his new wife fired all his servants and discouraged his old friends from coming around. This was a species of that behavior, but without, I was almost certain, Vidia’s shadow over it. Vidia was my friend.

In spite of We’ll talk, and our not meeting, still I knew what he was up to. I saw his recurring photographs, two in Indian magazines that showed him to be greatly changed: darker face, bristly bearded, swollen eyes, frowning mouth, grayer hair — long crazy hair that looked as if it had been nagged at with a jagged implement. As he said, You carry your life in your face.

Often, hearing secondhand his eccentric views and outrageous opinions, I laughed, though sometimes uneasily, as when I read that he had told an interviewer, “French is now of no account, no consequence, a language spoken by some black people and some Arabs”—and of course spoken by the dusky Vidia himself. In a restaurant in San Francisco, he looked at the next table and said to his companion, “Aren’t those the ugliest people you’ve ever seen? Do you think they were put there to punish us?”

How different we were. Cut off from him, I saw it clearly. I had always known that he dealt with strangers by trying to shock them, while my manner was ingratiating — just listening politely. His views of women ranged from offensive to silly, but also (as eccentricities do) revealed a lot about him: “My experience is that very few women have experienced true passion.” You had to smile at Vidia, of all people, considering himself a connoisseur of true passion. Much of the time, in these reported comments, he sounded very angry, but I read it as fear. This fear was in his soul. He was a man who, while a student at Oxford, had (as he put it) “fallen into a gloom” that had lasted twenty-one months.

Long after, he attacked Oxford. He said he “hated” his college. He had nothing but bad memories, and “I was far more intelligent than most people there.” He said he had tried to gas himself at Oxford, but failed because “he ran out of coins to feed the gas meter.” After I had read this disclosure, it was hard to resist the gibe that it was only his parsimony that stood between life and death; had someone else paid, Vidia would probably have succeeded in doing himself in. But in the event, he spent nearly two years in a state of nervous collapse. “One was terrified of human beings, one didn’t wish to show oneself to them.”

To be the guest of honor at a dinner party — that, for Vidia, was bliss, he said. This remark, made to another interviewer, rang true. He said he loved occasions “when one feels cherished.” To be cherished meant more than flattery and good food and vintage wines; it meant attentive listeners who paid the bill, as I knew. “He likes paying,” he said of any person who picked up a bill. “He wants to do it.” And was there any more tangible expression of being cherished than the bestowal of a knighthood? It was the dream of the wily pundit Ganesh Ramsumair, in The Mystic Masseur, to be transformed into the unapproachable Sir G. Ramsay Muir. Someone who builds a life on being pleasured by honors and flattery can only have known great rejection and insecurity and a yearning to belong. But then, hadn’t Vidia reminded me long ago that in order to understand him I had to know his past as “a barefoot colonial"?

From my earliest attempts at writing, I had wanted security too. I knew when I had enough. “Don’t wish for too much” was my father’s lesson. And he always said, “Be kind.”

Vidia’s temperament was a riddle. There seemed to me nothing lower than being beastly to book-tour escorts and nasty to secretaries, or to any underling who, out of nervousness, made gauche remarks. Did Vidia’s compulsion to intimidate such people arise from his having felt rejected himself? He did not make much of his experience of racism, but he acknowledged that he had known it in England. His cruelty could have been a case of monumental payback, though it was anyone’s guess why his victims were innocent Americans and English flunkies and earnest Hollanders.

Vidia denied being Indian. He saw himself as “a new man.” But he behaved like an upper-caste Indian. And Vidia often assumed the insufferable do-you-know-who-I-am? posturing of a particular kind of Indian bureaucrat, which is always a sign of inferiority. It had taken me a long time to understand that Vidia was not in any sense English, not even Anglicized, but Indian to his core — caste conscious, race conscious, a food fanatic, precious in his fears from worrying about his body being “tainted.” Because he was an Indian from the West Indies — defensive, feeling his culture was under siege — his attitudes approached the level of self-parody.

He was mistaken about so much. He made confused statements about Africa and seemed to regard the continent as starting in south London and extending to the Caribbean, the whole of it a jungle of jitterbugging “bush men.” These generalizations appeared to be no more than futile attempts to validate his novel A Bend in the River. It represented Vidia’s horror of the bush. But in the bush lay Africa’s essence, which Vidia never understood was more benign than wild.

In three books, he had changed his mind about India with each one. And he was still wrong. I didn’t dispute his views. Challenge him and he was an enemy; treat him handsomely and there was a chance he would be kind. Cherish him and he was yours. Hadn’t I cherished him? So we had never quarreled.

“To grow up in a large extended family was to acquire a lasting distaste for family life,” he told an interviewer in 1983. “It was to give me the desire never to have children of my own.” But he disliked children anyway. There are hardly any children in his books, and no happy ones.

As a father, I was angered that he actively disliked children, because any parent has an animal awareness of that hostility. It made me protective. I also saw that the man who dislikes children and doesn’t have any of his own is probably himself childish, and sees other children as a threat. Vidia was the neediest person I have ever known. He fretted incessantly, couldn’t cook, never cleaned, wouldn’t drive, demanded help, had to be the center of attention.

Now, away from his influence, I saw all this — not that I dared utter it, or think it through as an indictment. I saw him as deeply flawed, and as a friend — our friendship was the consequence of his imperfections, for character flaws seem to inspire the sympathy that lies at the very foundation of friendship. I knew this but kept it to myself, and when I dared to think about it, I inverted it.

To maintain my self-respect and to defend Vidia, I often called him generous when I found him to be mean, and said he was eccentric when I felt he had been cruel. My obituary of Pat was a rosy picture of an adversarial marriage. I did this not to spare Vidia but to spare myself. I was ashamed to say that he treated people badly and that he was casual and presumptuous with me. Had I not repressed this, I would have had to admit that I was weak. But from the beginning I had known that I was a bit afraid of him. It is impossible to see a friend lose his temper with someone and not imagine that same fury turned on you.

I had admired his talent. After a while I admired nothing else. Finally I began to wonder about his talent, seriously to wonder, and doubted it when I found myself skipping pages in his more recent books. In the past I would have said the fault was mine. Now I knew that he could be the monomaniac in print that he was in person.

I did not want to think about any of this. That was why I never contemplated writing about him, because writing meant scrutinizing character and giving voice to feelings of disappointment and being truthful. It was much simpler to overlook Vidia’s faults. Let someone else be Boswell and write the biography.

But there was that face. Some things I could not overlook, because they loomed too large and were too twisted. His personality dominated his face, which was forever contorted, twisted down in disapproval and misery and suffering, and his nose was thickened with anger. Seeing that face for the first time, Saul Bellow said, “After one look from him, I could skip Yom Kippur.” The years had given Vidia a fixed and unimpressed mask, scored with the crow’s feet of skepticism. He had the blinkless gaze of a raptor. You never wanted to see that face turned against yours. In another person, Vidia would have called it an ugly face.

Once an interviewer mentioned to Vidia that I had said he was compassionate. Vidia rejected the description. He said it was a “political” word. It is not political at all, of course. But Vidia was right to deflect the word. I had said it in my eagerness to cover myself, because in my heart I felt he lacked compassion.

His books had been part of my education, and were a broader education for showing what was good and what was lame — sometimes on the same page. Some of his books are excellent, even prophetic and wise, and others are unreadable and silly. Critics had used the infantile words “genius” and “masterpiece” in connection with Vidia and his work, perhaps for the same reason I had called him compassionate, because his recent books were just odd and insufficient. He took down the laborious monologues of people, and these lengthy interviews were presented as documentary almost without any intervention by Vidia. Long ago he had impressed me by observing that Columbus never mentioned that it was hot in the New World. In Vidia’s India: A Million Mutinies Now there is little landscape and hardly any weather. There is no smell, no heat or dust, no sweating men, no lisping saris, no honking traffic, nothing except the sound of yakking Indians. The same is true of the Islam books, with the additional handicap of Vidia’s naive grasp of Islam and his ignorance of Arabic, which kept him from understanding the Koran.

He was undeterred. “I hate the word ‘novel,’” he told an interviewer. He had always ridiculed the word “story.” He strongly implied that the novel was dead. I had never in my life heard an intelligent person state this opinion, only academic hacks who knew nothing of fiction. Perhaps his sort of novel was dead. Fair enough, but as always, in generalizing, he spoke for the world. When Vidia changed his mind, you changed yours, or else.

He insisted he was correct: that writing had to be one thing — his thing; that John Updike, who can be very funny and whose elegant sentences give pleasure for their sinuous intelligence — that Updike, whom he singled out, was somehow passé. “Golden sentences” was Vidia’s way of belittling Updike’s prose. He felt the same about Nabokov. No shining prose for Vidia, no excursions into the lapidary. “I don’t want [the reader] ever to say, ‘Oh my goodness, how nicely written this is.’ That would be a failure.” He commended only a style he termed “brambly.” He offered the Victorian Richard Jefferies, an obscure Wiltshire naturalist, as a model. Vidia’s insistence made me doubt him: I had become wary of his dogmatism.

We write as we can, not as we wish. Updike writes as Updike is able, and I am doing the best I can. I can’t choose to be “brambly” if, say, in describing Yomo’s sensuality, I am so sweetened by the mood of reminiscence that I write, “When she and Julian made love, which was often and always by the light of candles, she howled eagerly in the ecstasy of sex like an addict injected, and her eyes rolled up in her skull and she stared, still howling, with big white eyes like a blind zombie that sees everything. Her howls and her thrashing body made the candle flames do a smoky dance. Afterwards, limp and sleepy, stupefied by sex, she draped over Julian like a snake and pleaded for a child.” Let Vidia be brambly. He stopped trying to please the reader. He lost his humor, he blunted his descriptive gift, he denounced universities (as Richard Jefferies had done), he bemoaned readers, he tried to hold a funeral and bury the novel. But like the soothsayer who sees only evil because he is a miserable grouch, Vidia was not to be taken seriously.

He never denied that he was a crank, yet he elevated crankishness as the proof of his artistic temperament, which is irritating for anyone else who has to work for a living. It was a sorry excuse — and from someone who never tolerated excuses for an instant. He admitted being difficult, but instead of seeing this as a weakness, he implied that his difficult nature was a virtue, an aspect of his being special. It is no virtue at all.

I did not mind his contradictions. It is human to be contradictory. He had once claimed that England was second-rate; he spoke of crooked aristocrats and “bum politicians.” Then he accepted a knighthood. Was he acting logically, by hypocritically joining an establishment renowned for its hypocrisy?

I had found England narrow but far more benign. Vidia had not learned in forty years that the English are not blamers and are not a cruel people — indeed, the traits of passivity, shyness, and modesty predominate. Liking order, the English deplored people who groused—“whinged” was their wonderful word. “Mustn’t grumble,” they murmured when the going was hard. Vidia was the opposite of phlegmatic: he was an excitable Asiatic — his own word — the more volatile and wounded for his colonial experience, his being slighted by English landladies, and all the postcolonial humiliation a Trinidadian Indian must feel when rejected by blacks on the island.

It made him a blamer. He blamed society. He blamed the educational system. He blamed “stupid and common people,” people in general. He indulged himself in being fawned over and flattered. He became a regular at dinner parties and powerful American embassies.

This was the fierce-faced friend I saw now, but it was a mute vision. I neither wrote nor spoke about it: Vidia remained a vaguely menacing blur. But the world to me was clearer. Without his response — he didn’t answer my letters, he didn’t call, I was too far away to provide him any help — I was better able to understand my progress, from being his student to becoming his equal. In my heart, I suspected he was now much weaker and needier than me, which was why he valued my friendship.

Though I did not look into the future, I recalled his saying, “To all relations, every encounter, there’s always a time to call them off. And you call them off.”

After twenty-nine years he had left his publisher, André Deutsch. It is not unusual to change publishers, but it is rare to leave without some sort of farewell. He said nothing to Deutsch, who complained, “Not even a postcard!” And that was much more than an author-publisher relationship. It was a close collaboration and a friendship. Vidia told me he admired Deutsch for being tough, intelligent, and entrepreneurial, and for having the panache to send suspected dud bottles of wine back in restaurants. After the break with Deutsch, Vidia talked about him very differently.

And speaking of “you call them off,” what of the mysterious Margaret, who had dropped from view? She and Vidia had met in 1972. I had been introduced to her in 1977, and saw her again in 1979. Vidia had publicly celebrated their love affair and professed his ardor in The New Yorker in 1994. Pat had been upset, if not desolated, by Vidia’s enthusiastic candor and his telling the world of a sexual relationship that was, after two decades, still crackling away.

Margaret, his shadow wife, had accompanied him on trips while Pat stayed home. “His lady love,” Pat once said sadly, with a lump in her throat, of Margaret, who went to parties with Vidia. Margaret kept him company on his literary quests. I had not seen her for years, but I heard about her all the time. Because Vidia stayed on the American diplomatic circuit, I was always being told of his appearances. “Saw your friend Naipaul the other evening,” a diplomat would say. “We gave a little party for him.” And usually, “His friend Margaret was with him.”

That was the oddest part. I had heard this talk when he was writing his second Islam book, Beyond Belief. Twenty-four years later and he was apparently still passionate, still traveling with Margaret. Then he met Nadira: no more talk about Margaret. I had no idea how that had ended, except that it had to have been swift, and it must have been recent. Pat died. Margaret vanished. Vidia married Nadira. Margaret was in the shadows. An Indian friend of Vidia’s, Rahul Singh, wrote in an Indian magazine that Margaret was “an Argentinian companion” who “was devastated when he married Nadira.”

To all relations… there’s always a time to call them off. I took “all” to be his usual hyperbole for everyone but me. We were still friends. As for his silence, well, he was famous for his silences. All that had happened was that I had received a crazy letter from his excitable new wife. He probably knew nothing about it.

One thing in Nadira’s letter puzzled me: her mention of Vidia’s forthcoming biography. This as an imminent possibility had never occurred to me. I knew that Vidia had interviewed several prospective biographers but that nothing was settled. The project seemed inauspicious, for who but a masochist would take on the thankless and unrewarding job of being anyone’s official biographer? Access to letters had entertainment value — they had, to use a Vidia phrase, “horror interest.” But that sort of book always verges on hagiography.

The subtext of her letter was: Don’t write about him. This offended me. I had become a writer to be a free man, in Vidia’s own terms, not to take direction. And yet, when people asked me to write about him, I said no. I had no enthusiasm to write a biography. Until I received Nadira’s letter I had not even considered using Vidia as the subject of a book. I would pass my memories and letters to the designated Boswell and let that person do the work. Vidia was my friend. A book about such a friendship was an attractive idea, but it was impossible. Friendship had its rules.

And there was no model: such a portrait had never been done. In literary history no books that I knew about detailed this sort of friendship — say, young Samuel Beckett writing a book about his years with the older James Joyce. The subject of protégés and apprenticeship was one that had fascinated me since my earliest days with Vidia in Uganda. Henry James had written of his friendship with Turgenev in Partial Portraits, in the course of which he mentioned Flaubert in a way that brought Vidia to mind.

“But there was something ungenerous in his genius,” James wrote. “He was cold, and he would have given everything he had to be able to glow… Flaubert yearned, with all the accumulations of his vocabulary, to touch the chord of pathos. There were some parts of his mind that did not ‘give,’ that did not render a sound. He had had too much of some sorts of experience and not enough of others. And yet this failure of an organ, if I may call it, inspired those who knew him with a kindness. If Flaubert was powerful and limited, there is something human, after all, and even rather august in a strong man who has not been able to express himself.”

Young Gorky, also something of a protégé, wrote about old Tolstoy, saying, “Although I admire him, I do not like him… He is exaggeratedly preoccupied, he sees nothing and knows nothing outside himself.”

So, speaking strictly of writers, such a book had never been done. Anyway, how could one write a book about a friendship in progress? One of Vidia’s acquaintances urged me to, saying, “Not the authorized book, but a shadow biography.” I said no. As friends, our story was incomplete. Vidia himself had said, “One must write every book as though it is the final work, the summing up.”

“I would never write a book about Vidia,” I said. “He is my friend. It is impossible to write about him and remain in touch. Vidia himself said that a book must be written from a position of strength. A book celebrates an ending, a finale. When the friend, or the friendship, is dead. It needs a conclusion. It needs a death. I haven’t got one.”

20. Sir Vidia’s Shadow

SOMETIMES Vidia, looking like a laughingstock, calling himself V. S. Nipple, strutted in my dreams, tut-tutting, or in those informative early morning episodes of mumming that I saw just as I awoke, he appeared to rehearse my worst fears: black-faced Vidia, scowling West Indian with a walking stick and his funny floppy hat from Rwanda, scolding, sticking me with a restaurant bill I could not pay or giving demoralizing advice. You must leave her, Paul! Or, Problems are good!

Now and then it was Nadira, nightmarish in a spidery sari, with a big intimidating face, the skin of her purple belly showing at her midriff, Indian fashion, like one of those hideous Indian burra memsahibs buying expensive chutney in the Food Halls of Harrods, shrieking at me. I was a nervous blushing store clerk in those fantasies, and she was a shrew, woggling her head and denouncing me.

I was not dismayed. “Often miracles happen,” Vidia used to say. He meant in writing, or in the rewards for writing — making the million, becoming “immensely famous.” So he said. The rest of life was doggedness and uncertainty.

If a person wishes to vanish from your life, there is really no miracle you can work to get him back. In a rational moment you think, Why would I want to see someone who does not want to see me? But urgency makes for confusion. You are stumped. You can’t get him to reply to a letter if he has no desire to respond. If you call, the phone simply rings, or else the same answering machine message mocks you in its implacable repetition: Leave your name after the beep and we’ll get back to you.

Silence is the stern reply, as the English say. Silence is like a darkness. Or was it all a horrible mistake?

I really did not know what to do. Nadira’s letter rankled because I was sure she had written it behind Vidia’s back. Making a fool of my friend! She sneaked it into the fax machine and then destroyed the original. I had faxed the thing back, and sent it by mail too, but such epistles were easily recognized and intercepted. Wives often roosted near fax machines, snooping and snatching. So the poor little man was still in the dark. She had abused me and forbidden me to write anything about him. As if I wanted to! As if I could! As if I had even dreamed of it!

Suspense is hateful. Hope deferred made my heart sick. I tried to put the matter out of my mind. More important than this, Hong Kong was passing from the hands of Britain into the hands of China, and my new novel, a black comedy taking place at the periphery of the Chinese take-away, was about to be published. I had agreed to a book tour, one week, Sunday to Sunday, in England’s reliable spring. April is not the cruelest month; it is the best, my birthday month, full of buds and hope: Whan that Aprille with her shoures sote.

It was no ordinary week. The British general election would take place while I was still in London. Great excitement and the premonition of a Labour victory after twenty-four years of demoralizing Tory smugness.

I arrived early on a Sunday morning of mist and sun — the sun in April like someone smiling through tears. My hotel was in Kensington, the Royal Garden, with a view east over Kensington Palace and Hyde Park and the rowboats in the Serpentine, the chestnut trees in blossom and the shrouded Albert Memorial.

I was happy being merely a visitor. I had fulfilled my goals: to leave London before I died there, to avoid ever getting a job. I had dreamed of the West Country, but my backup dream was to end up on an sunny island. I was now a man of fifty-five, a resident of Hawaii, a part-time beekeeper. “Are you the writer?” the immigration officer had asked me that morning. Sometimes such a stranger would also say, “How is your friend Naipaul?”

Most pleasurable for me was the prospect of seeing one of my children. Around noon, Marcel rang from the lobby and came up to my hotel room. He had just finished writing a novel of his own. He was nervous and proud, but not prouder than I was of him.

“Is there anything wrong, Dad?”

I had been telling myself I was happy, yet he knew there was a shadow.

“Naipaul,” I said.

I told him about Nadira’s letter of a month before.

He said, “No way!”

I told him the rest.

“She sounds stroppy.”

“Vidia would have stopped her if he had known. All that shit about my obituary of Pat.”

“Maybe he does know.”

“Nah. Poor English makes him crazy. The letter was a mess,” I said, and saw that sheet of paper before my eyes, all the printed characters, like a ransom note. “But I will never know for sure. It’s funny. Vidia used to look at someone’s essay and say, ‘Promise you’ll give up writing.’”

Marcel made an abrupt snoring sound, the signal that he had heard this anecdote many times and was already bored and half asleep.

“I know, I know,” I said. “But listen. What I want to say is that he used to talk about how relieved the person was when he said it.”

“You’ve told me that before.”

“How there would be a fracture in a friendship, or a divorce, and he would say, ‘Problems are good!’ ‘This is good for you.’ ‘You are now free.’ That?”

“All that.”

“Okay, what about lunch?”

“Let’s do it.”

That strange transition I always felt in an elevator, holding my breath to offset the pressure in my head from the descent, made me gabble.

I said, “He doesn’t know.”

“You’re obsessing, Dad.”

“But I will never know for sure.”

“It doesn’t matter. He’s the devil. Didn’t you say that he never paid for meals?”

“He was generous in other ways.”

Stepping out of the elevator, Marcel said, “I remember when he came to the house. ‘And what are you studying, little man?’”

“Was that the last time you saw him?”

“No. You asked me to deliver something to him. A manuscript. A big parcel.”

“The Enigma of Arrival.”

“He asked me a lot of questions. He was actually quite nice to me. I was at Westminster, my second year. It was winter. He gave me tea.” We were at the hotel entrance, at the top of a flight of stairs. “I started that book. It’s bollocks. Which way shall we go, left or right?”

Left meant the park and Gloucester Road, right was Kensington High Street and teashops. It had to be left: my first morning in London and left was on one of my ticcy routes, like a circuit printed on my nerves.

“Left,” I said. “We’ll head for Chelsea. The Kings Road is full of places to eat.”

“I think Labour’s going to romp,” Marcel said as we stopped at the crosswalk on Kensington Road, waiting for the light to change.

I said, “If only he would write to me. Then I would know whether he was aware of this whole stupid business. It’s amazing. The last time he wrote was after Pat died, over a year ago. This new woman thinks she’s Jane Carlyle—”

“Dad!”

“Just listen to me. Don’t shush me, I can’t stand that. I don’t know why this is bothering me.” Maybe it was my being in England again that was bringing it all back and making me short of breath. I had successfully ignored the whole thing in Hawaii. Nothing rang bells there, but London rang bells like mad. “Maybe she’s burning all his bridges, and he’ll wake up one morning with no friends.”

As he walked just behind me, I knew that Marcel was gritting his teeth, hating this monologue, but I could not help it. I was grateful I had a listener, even if he was unwilling. I was roused to talk.

“On the other hand, I know he’s working on his Islam book, so he is probably closeted with it while she runs his life. It seems so unfair, though. Her letter.”

Down Gloucester Road I was hunched over and ranting, turning from time to time to say, “Know what I mean? More than thirty years! It’s a friendship.”

“You used to say you had no friends.”

“I had a few. What about Jonathan? Vidia was another.”

“You could ring him.”

“Vidia doesn’t answer the phone.”

“Write him a letter.”

“I did that. If I do it again I’ll look pathetic. If only he—”

We had come to the crooked and perilous part of Gloucester Road where all the accidents happen, the dogleg that makes an almost blind curve where cars hurtle head on into each other, always a sprinkling of broken glass in the gutters. But I was already going numb.

On the word “he,” Vidia had appeared in that curve, his nigrescent face fixed and stony, walking fast towards me on the sidewalk. He was the scowling, strutting creature from my apprehensive dreams. All my talk had babbled him into being as, in a’séance, the murmurs of the medium produce a blob of acceptable ectoplasm that passes for the departed soul or the summoned-up loved one. It was Vidia, looking crazy, which was why I doubted that he could be real, for he was as unlike the man of a year ago as it was possible to be. He was G. Ramsay Muir.

What disconcerted me was that I stopped and he kept walking. He had not seen me. It was one o’clock on a Sunday afternoon, in blazing sunshine. He was thirty feet away.

I said to myself, in a fearful mutter, “What do we have here?”

Being conscious of the stagy line only made me more nervous, for it was like a line in a play that is spoken in a panicky situation. It does not advance the plot; it focuses and freezes the moment.

Still Vidia did not recognize me, nor see me, evidently. He had to be a vaporous apparition, and yet he seemed solid enough. His face was black, the rest of him looked gray. It was his newly grown beard, salt-and-pepper bristles. He was striding, thrashing the pavement with a walking stick; he wore a fruity little hat, floppy brim and all, a tweed jacket, a turtleneck. He was Ramsay Muir, a little old soldier marching madly north towards Hyde Park. But Marcel and I were on the same stretch of sidewalk. What the—?

Seconds had passed. Not even seconds — hundredths of seconds. He glanced in my direction, not at me, and turned from a little English veteran into a little Indian. Into Ganesh Ramsumair.

Small solitary Indians on London streets have a hunted vulnerable look. They know they are the prey of brutes and skinheads. And who will come to their aid should they be thumped? The littlest Indians were picked on and mocked. And so Ganesh did not make eye contact. To a frightened Indian, my son and I were two swaggering Paki-bashers, almost filling the sidewalk, threatening to lamp him.

Vidia! It was he. In a city of seven and a half million, our paths had miraculously crossed. He was fearful, looking at me — more than fearful, something as profound as horror, for he saw a dangerous double, a grim echo. And just a moment before, what had he been thinking? Undoubtedly his Ganesh paranoia had seen all the taunting faces: the Monkey, hairy book-hating beast; Mr. Woggy in his robes and sandals; Cuffy, the West African with the purple face, the ornamental scars, and the big dong; the infies up from the Home Counties to howl, “You write dishonest books!” Drunks and National Fronters and Mosleyites and immigrant-haters and the man who smacked him on the head on this very road at the time he was writing The Enigma of Arrival—all the creatures in his personal demonology who threatened his notion of civilization. He had been terrified. Now these wicked twins, bower boys and Paki-bashers, taking long strides towards him, to boot him up the arse with their Doc Martens.

“Vidia?”

“Paul!” It was a groan coming out of tired and smoke-tortured lungs.

He looked up at Marcel and almost lost his hat from the angle of his head, for Marcel was twice his size.

“And this is your son!”

“Marcel,” my son said, sticking out his hand.

“Where are you going?” I asked.

“I just had my lunch. I’m taking a little walk in the park,” he said in a prissy, nervous voice.

As he spoke he started to move forward again. I had last seen him almost a year before, but he seemed eager to keep going — agitated, anyway.

To detain him I said, “How is your book going?”

“One more month, one more month,” he said, and took a breath and seemed to strain forward. “It has been a tremendous labor.”

“I’ve heard it’s good,” I said, inventing a remark, clinging verbally, wanting him to pause so that I could think. I had something to say, but what was it?

“I must go. My walk…”

I was hot, I was nerved and trembly, I could hardly breathe. I stammered, saying, “Vidia, did you get a fax from me?”

“Yes. Now I must—”

“Do we have something to discuss?”

“No.” He had almost broken away. He was moving crabwise, crouching a bit, cramming his hat down.

“What do we do, then?”

He drew his mouth back. His face went darker. His mouth twisted down. It was the look of helpless suffering he wore the very first time I saw him in Uganda. His fingers on his cane went pale and prehensile.

“Take it on the chin and move on.”

The word “scuttled” came to mind as he moved. He was off, the mimic man personified. He was fearful and he was in a hurry.

He knew. It was over. It never occurred to me to chase him. There would be no more. And I understood the shock of something’s being over, like being slapped — hurt as the blood whipped through my body. “Like being hit by a two-by-four,” my friend had said when Vidia insulted her in Oregon.

Watching Vidia scuttle up the road towards Hyde Park, I noticed something amazing. On this bright day in April, the sun slanting into Gloucester Road, Vidia was very small, and shrinking fast, and it was as if he would vanish before he reached Kensington Road — so tiny, indeed, he cast no shadow. Without a shadow he seemed even smaller than he was, and darker, as though he had no substance. As though he were the shadow.

Take it on the chin and move on. It was, as always, challenging advice. But he talked tougher than he looked, because really he looked like Sir Vidia Nye-Powell.

Marcel was saying, “What a wally!”

I was dazed, because I was liberated at last. I saw how the end of a friendship was the start of an understanding. He had made me his by choosing me; his rejection of me meant I was on my own, out of his shadow. He had freed me, he had opened my eyes, he had given me a subject.

Before we got to Cromwell Road I had begun this book in my head, starting at the beginning. That is everything.