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In several of his recent fictions, Paul Theroux has visibly mined his own experience for raw material, going so far as to provide the protagonist of
My Other Life with his own name and curriculum vitae. Now, in
Sir Vidia's Shadow, he casts a cold and cantankerous eye on his friendship with V.S. Naipaul. The two first met in Uganda in 1966, when the 23-year-old Theroux was teaching at the local university and trying, with only limited success, to transform himself into a writer. The arrival of Naipaul--at 34 already a world-class novelist, with
A House for Mr. Biswas under his belt--was a signal event in Theroux's life: "I had been working in the dark, just groping, until I had met Vidia."
After being squired around Uganda, Kenya, and Rwanda by the author, Naipaul returned to London. Their correspondence continued, and the relationship--in which Theroux was very much the junior partner and acolyte--deepened. During a holiday visit to London the next year, he realized that their rapport "was as strong as love. He was my friend, he had shown me what was good in my writing, he had drawn a line through anything that was false." And indeed, over the next three decades the two exchanged a steady stream of letters, visits, phone calls, and authorial confidences. Yet this most productive of literary friendships came to an abrupt end in 1996, when Naipaul--now knighted and recently remarried--burned a number of bridges and tossed his relationship with Theroux into the conflagration.
All of which brings us to Sir Vidia's Shadow, a peculiar mixture of autobiography, Boswellian chronicle, and poison-pen letter. In many ways, it's a fascinating and devilishly skilled performance. For starters, Theroux spent more time in his subject's company than Boswell ever spent in Johnson's, which gives his portrait a widescreen verisimilitude. He documents Naipaul's loony fastidiousness, his passion for language, "the laughter in his lungs like a loud kind of hydraulics," and the very sound of his typewriter (which, just for the record, goes chick-chick-chick). Theroux also gives a superb sense of how such literary apprenticeships can function to the mutual benefit of master and disciple--and how they can erode. By 1975, after all, Theroux had become the bestselling author of The Great Railway Bazaar, while Naipaul remained an under-remunerated critics' darling. Out of habit, Theroux stayed in the older man's shadow. Still, as the book progresses, it becomes harder and harder to tell precisely who's got the anxiety and who's got the influence.
It also becomes harder and harder to ignore Theroux's late-breaking animus toward his subject. His goal--stated not only in the book but in various tailgunning replies to his critics--was to write an accurate account of a long, rich friendship. "This narrative is not something that would be improved by the masks of fiction," he declares. "It needs only to be put in order. I am free of the constraint of alteration and fictionalizing." Yet every book has a tendency to break free of the author's intentions, and Sir Vidia's Shadow is no exception. For each reverent (and convincing) passage about his subject, there's another in which Theroux seems to be administering some deeply ambivalent payback. He contrasts Naipaul's sexless misogyny with his own erotic enthusiasm, and his own generosity with his hero's miserly behavior (although Naipaul's penny-pinching and check-dodging can make him strangely endearing--the Jack Benny of contemporary letters). At times Theroux seems determined to explore all seven types of ambiguity, which makes for both deliberate and not-so-deliberate hilarity. He also sounds uncannily like a spurned lover. And perhaps that residue of expired passion accounts for both the brilliance of Sir Vidia's Shadow and its disturbing, sometimes queasy pathos. --James Marcus
Books in Canada
Sir Vidia's Shadow caused quite the commotion this past summer when excerpts appeared in
The New Yorker. Paul Theroux's then unpublished memoir of his friendship with V.S. Naipaul quickly became one of the year's hottest literary topics. There was not much in the way of actual controversy, but it did seem that everyone was eager to condemn the book-on moral grounds.
Sir Vidia's Shadow was written in the ashes of a thirty-year friendship that had suddenly and quietly crumbled. The two future acclaimed writers of prose fiction and literary journalism first met in Kampala, Uganda where Theroux was teaching at the university. This was just as Naipaul was starting his stellar rise as the author of A House for Mr. Biswas, Booker prizewinning In a Free State, and A Bend in the River, and before Theroux had penned his account of his long trans-Asian rail journey in The Great Railway Bazaar, the classic The Mosquito Coast, and novels like My Secret History, My Other Life, and Kowloon Tong. Between them, nearly all the inhabited world would fall within their literary ken for their global orient took them far beyond the closed Anglo-American vision of most contemporary writers. The two quickly formed a close and quite exclusive friendship that would weather extensive travels, long silences, and dire personal crises.
Well before its publication, Sir Vidia's Shadow had been widely dismissed as little more than a petty act of literary violence-a "poison pen" biography and a betrayal of intimacy. Most critics construed it as Theroux's revenge for the failure of the friendship. The selection that appeared in The New Yorker exacerbated this impression by focusing on the memoir's juicier bits: the writers' meeting and falling out. With the bulk of the friendship excised, the result was a seriously unbalanced piece. And while the work does contain assaults on Naipaul's character and talent, it is not, however, the tract of unthinking invective that it has been made out to be.
The bulk of the book is actually a rather non-judgmental memoir that is told with all of the narrative apparatus of a decent novel. Theroux's portrait of Naipaul is unavoidably subjective, but most of it is far from being mean-spirited or one-sided. Naipaul appears as a fascinating, contradictory, and all too human personality: outspoken, occasionally racist, sometimes overly class conscious, and cheap (he never picks up the dinner tab). An example of just how disturbing his views can be is the official visit he makes to Indian and American diplomats in Kenya in an attempt to stave off further racial violence against the local Indian population. His solution: that the Indian government send its navy to shell Mombasa. This distressing suggestion is the extreme result of his deep concern for the fate of Africa's Indian population: he can see the ethnic violence coming and attempts to ensure that his fellow Indians are able to escape.
Although this is a story of a literary friendship, it reveals very little about the genesis of the literary works of either Theroux or Naipaul. A detail or two sometimes slips through, but these are generally well-known facts that will be news only to a casual reader. Theroux presents the effects of the books on the authors' lives, rather than the biographical details that are submerged in their works. When Theroux does quote one of Naipaul's remarks on the practice of writing, it is used invariably to comment on the memoir itself. A couple of these encapsulate the reasons for this book's existence:
"Don't prettify it," Vidia said. "The greatest writing is a disturbing vision offered from a position of strength-aspire to that, and tell the truth."
"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."
Theroux writes as though he were fulfilling Naipaul's request. At times, he even tries to convince the reader that he has done his former friend a favour by publishing Sir Vidia's Shadow.
This is hardly the case. The final chapters, concerning the death of Naipaul's first wife and his subsequent marriage to a Pakistani journalist, begin to pour on the vitriol. The last half of "Exchanges" reads like an anatomy of Naipaul's character flaws: it is a cruel passage that is further marred by a total lack of self-consciousness on the part of Theroux. Up until this point, the biographer had two subjects: V.S. Naipaul and Paul Theroux. This works beautifully until the moment of judgment when Theroux scuttles away under the cover of his authorial advantage, leaving Naipaul to be assessed alone. The dissolution of the friendship is a terribly sad thing, but we can do without Theroux's need to share his hurt. A depiction of the jilting without the angry commentary would have sufficed. His novelist's gift for controlling a narrative should have allowed him to retain the reader's sympathy without resorting to these smear tactics.
All the moral criticisms that have been aimed at Sir Vidia's Shadow have successfully obscured the fact that this is an honest, beautifully written, cleverly structured, and fascinating memoir, hardly deserving of the "poison pen" tag that has been too eagerly affixed to it. Theroux has much to say about friendship, and the strengths that it can develop and follies that it can provoke. The novelistic construction of the book works aesthetically, but makes the reader somewhat suspicious. It is frequently difficult to see where fact and fiction meet, how memory, invention, embellishment, and forgetfulness combine to create the almost too-perfect story that we are given.
Sir Vidia's Shadow is a portrait, not a biography. Even its flaws reveal truths about the friendship: Theroux's anxieties speak volumes about his own experience. It is a violent book, but the consequences of this violence must be left to the affected parties. While a skeptical reading is necessary, it would be foolish to dismiss this fine book out of hand. Jack Illingworth(Books in Canada)
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
