SIR VIDIA’S SHADOW:
A Friendship Across Five Continents
By Paul Theroux
Houghton Mifflin, 358 pages, $25
The story of the Theroux-Naipaul breakup made newspapers and The New Yorker over the summer. In 1966, Paul Theroux, a 24-year-old American teaching at Makerere University in Kampala, Uganda, met V.S. Naipaul, a 34-year-old Trinidadian native of Indian descent and writer of several novels and a collection of short stories. The would-be writer and the world-famous writer made an instant connection–or so Theroux claims in this book about his relationship with Naipaul–because the younger man quoted a line from the elder’s “The Mystic Masseur” back to him. It takes Theroux a little while to understand Naipaul’s “utter faith” in himself, “but the day I did, and acknowledged that his writing was unique, . . . was the day our friendship began.” Thirty years later, the day he fails to understand Naipaul’s faith in himself, that friendship comes to an end.
Despite the familiarity of the plot, I found myself embarrassed reading “Sir Vidia’s Shadow,” as if I were watching a White House intern declaring puzzlement at why her boss didn’t return her devotion after all she had done for him. So, too, Theroux writes this book to come to terms with his rejection by the mentor whose intimidating, grim shadow has contoured his identity.
One wishes Theroux had listened to his son, who warns, ” `You’re obsessing, Dad.’ ” But, hell hath no fury like Theroux, scorned by the end of a relationship he has never understood except in mythic terms: He is the sorcerer’s apprentice, he is squire to Sir Vidia’s knight (Naipaul, whose first name is Vidiadhar, was knighted by Queen Elizabeth in 1989), his driver, spear carrier, flunky, gofer, Sir Vidia’s shadow, etc. And so he insists on writing this disastrous memoir.
One wants to warn Theroux against protesting too much, but of course it is too late. The book is published. One wants to ask him to go back and delete pages of sophomoric certitudes on “friendship”: “At its most profound, friendship is . . . a solemn understanding that is hardly ever discussed. . . . Friendship arises less from an admiring love of strength than a sense of gentleness, a suspicion of weakness. It is compassionate intimacy, a powerful kindness, and a knowledge of imperfection.”
An absence of self-criticism and self-reflection mark not only this but some of Theroux’s other non-fiction. The women who populate his beds in Africa and England, the disintegration of his marriage and of his own primary family–all these seem to demand no investigation. And I learned little about Naipaul that I didn’t know before–a self-protective, self-absorbed, often nasty, always fastidious man who often made outrageous pronouncements, but more importantly a brilliantly passionate writer of elegantly thoughtful prose, of sentences that circled and probed with a surgeon’s persistence getting just under the skin of truth with a precision that gave me goose bumps. Naipaul may be rude to friends, strangers and family, but his novels don’t celebrate that behavior, or himself, or his narrators, who are always as damaged as the deformed, postcolonial characters about whom he writes.
One wonders why Naipaul put up with Theroux for so many years. They share nothing as writers, Theroux’s protests to the contrary (“I listened with Vidia’s ears and saw with his eyes.”) Yes, Theroux, like Naipaul, traveled, including India on the breathlessly careless trek recounted in “The Great Railway Bazaar,” but only as an occasion for self-aggrandizing observations. In contrast, after the terror and anxiety of his first visit, Naipaul returns repeatedly to an India that defeats his gaze and mastery, an India worthy of many returns during which he reflects and struggles, through interviewing different groups of people, to understand a fraction of its million mutinies.
By his own admission, Naipaul is “desperately” concerned about the disintegration in the countries to which he travels–a postcolonial world that seems to repeat the breakdown of his own family. Like his father, these countries seem to live in the ruins of a present blasted by the promises of modernity and progress. Naipaul’s books on the world have to do with his conversations with people who have lived through the nitty-gritty of history, who represent lived local and global truths.
Theroux’s writing is marked by its inability to see a world beyond himself as a sexy monarch of all he surveys. If one sees absence and lack in the mirror held up by Naipaul’s writing, in Theroux’s we see the reflection of only himself.
Theroux remembers Naipaul saying, “Tell the truth.” Although Theroux’s facts may be true, his understanding of those facts remains thin. So does his understanding of Naipaul’s books. He confuses the writer with the narrator, condemns the writer’s crassness, and ignores what Naipaul has said about sex, love and romance in his novels. Theroux is quite simply a bad reader of Naipaul. He casts the negative vote as a Booker Prize judge denying Naipaul the award for the magnificent “A Bend in the River.” Why? Theroux, who likes lots of happy sex with lots of multicolored women, and is aroused by girls who say they want to be his ” `Christmas pudding,’ ” doesn’t like the ugly sex scene between Yvette and Salim: ” `I didn’t like the spitting.’ ” He can’t see further than his own sexual predilections to credit Naipaul with refusing to romanticize irresponsible sex between a married white Belgian woman (who plays Joan Baez while Africa burns) and an African-Indian.
When asked about the cruelty of relations and the ugliness of sex in his work, Naipaul explained some 20 years ago that politics is an extension of society’s ideas of human relationships, of the contract people make with each other. Anxious to avoid the easy answer, Naipaul will not allow desire or domesticity to offer hope to his politically powerless protagonists or to their messy history. Theroux, however, insists not only on conflating the writer and his protagonists, but on a willful blindness to Naipaul’s refusal to transcend political sordidness with the personal anesthetic. “Odd that Vidia, of all people, found any veracity in the misogynistic cliche of slapping as foreplay and a beating as an aphrodisiac.”
The frustration and meanness in Theroux’s book can be traced to his absolute incomprehension of the world that made Naipaul, and to his impossible and unquenchable need to be Naipaul’s beloved, his brother, his son and his heir. His girlfriends complain that he cares more for Naipaul than for them. Of course he does. He can’t be bothered hearing his girlfriend’s story about a former lover; he prefers to crush her Christmas invitation rather than miss the chance to be in on what he imagines are Naipaul’s plans to include him in a family Christmas. Theroux wants to make sure we know how much smarter he is than Naipaul’s younger brother, Shiva, or any of the women in Naipaul’s life: “I could not explain how Vidia mattered, and how his friendship was different from anyone else’s. I knew he loved Shiva, but he seemed to depend on me so much more than he did on his brother.” . “Poor Pat,” Naipaul’s first wife, isn’t much of a threat, and she dies of cancer. But the wife Naipaul chooses two months after her death, a wife whom he selects without Theroux’s approval, now she’s another matter. Theroux saves his most savage barbs for her: She is guilty of bad grammar, bad spelling and the bad taste not to fall for Theroux’s charms.
Unlike Theroux’s comfortable American world–in which his sweet-natured father, surrounded by his loving family, can smile even on the day of his death–a world Theroux can travel away from as a tourist, Naipaul’s world is that of the perpetually homeless exile who recognizes in the hysteria of his observations his own ontological insecurity.
Anyone who reads Naipaul’s autobiographical work must know that his vision of the world is armored, as it were, to insulate him against hysteria and disintegration–against the fate of his much-beloved father, who one day looked in a mirror, saw nothing, screamed and went mad–and against the panic that is specific, he says, to the deformed, conflicted and damaged colonized psyche. In a 1981 interview, Naipaul spoke of a life-long battle against “a hysteria” fueled by “the fear of being reduced to nothing, of feeling crushed. . . . (T)he old colonial anxiety of having one’s individuality destroyed.” A choral Naipaul line in Theroux’s book is, ” `I belong nowhere. . . . I have no home.’ “
Torn between colliding worlds of a shameful colonial history and postcolonial longings for repair, authenticity and affirmation, Naipaul builds serial defenses against “friends” who try to fence him into their Western bourgeois corrals. Angered by Naipaul’s refusal to play his game by his rules of friendship, Theroux ends his memoir still not understanding why Naipaul finally must re-establish his mastery over Theroux and his world by refusing to become what Theroux desired.
