Writers can be cordial, charming, social ornaments, but their talent for retaining friends is, on balance, less than impressive. They are notable for touchiness, a want of reciprocity, self-protectiveness—qualities conducing less to the preservation than to the ruin of friendships, at least of the kind that endure. The degree to which these qualities derive from the fact that writers spend too much time alone, dwelling upon their fantasies and their failure to achieve them, or are inherent in the activity of molding the penury of their actual experience into publishable works, varies from case to case. And this is not, of course, to speak of the drunks, neurotics, and pure creeps who sometimes appear to preponderate among contemporary authors.
Not only do they seem unsuited for friendship in general, writers are even more lamentably ill-equipped when it comes to dealings with their fellow writers. “People can be friends,” says a character named Izzy Thornbush in John Updike’s recent Bech at Bay. “Writers, no. Writers are condemned to hate one another.” Rivalrousness, envy, ideological argumentativeness, and Schadenfreude being their reigning emotional states, these nicely pave the way for inconstancy, infidelity, and straight-out betrayal. Having mastered the means of expression, and having at their disposal the modes of publication, writers differ from the normally irritable and resentful by being all too ready to go public with their spleen.
Exceptions have existed, large-hearted writers with a genuine gift for friendship: John Keats was one such, Chekhov another; Turgenev and Henry James also qualify. And one can also find discrete acts of unmotivated generosity or kindness on the part of writers toward other writers: Edith Wharton secretly slipping funds into Henry James’s royalty account at Scribner’s; Ezra Pound generously promoting the career of T. S. Eliot and, through skillful editing, helping to bring The Waste Land into print in its best possible form; F. Scott Fitzgerald going out of his way to get the editor Maxwell Perkins to take on the work of the young Ernest Hemingway.
Generally, though, the record is one of almost unrelieved unpleasantness. The causes of this unpleasantness, Norman Podhoretz shows in his artful and penetrating new memoir, Ex-Friends,1 can occasionally involve political or ideological conviction, as in the case of Podhoretz’s own breaks with writers and intellectuals to whom he was once close, or their breaks with him. More often, the causes are petty and “merely” personal.
Bad feeling was first planted between Thackeray and Dickens, for example, when the latter chose not to use the former as his illustrator for The Pickwick Papers, and the bad feeling was exacerbated over Dickens’s belief that Thackeray was spreading rumors of his love affair with Ellen Ternan. D.H. Lawrence, a man of nearly perpetual testiness, broke with nearly all his literary friends, perhaps with none more crushingly than Katherine Mansfield and her husband John Middleton Murry. Hemingway, in A Moveable Feast, lined up the various writers who had aided him when he was a young man in Paris and shot them down with the most vicious tales he could contrive about each of them: John Dos Passos, Gertrude Stein, Ford Madox Ford, with Fitzgerald, whom he wrote off as a sexually insecure drunk, getting the roughest treatment of all. The critic Edmund Wilson, after being initially helpful to Vladimir Nabokov when he first arrived in this country, later had the temerity to question Nabokov’s grasp of Russian (!) in so aggressive a way as to cause a permanent rupture in their friendship.
When two writers inhabit the same family, the unpleasantness is often only more intense: a vivid example is the critic and novelist Anthony West’s book attacking his mother Rebecca for her selfish neglect of him—which must, for her, author of The Meaning of Treason, have given treason itself a whole new meaning. Fallings-out among brothers are especially common. There is reason to believe that so sterling a character as William James felt animosity toward his younger brother Henry: turning down membership in the American Academy of Arts and Letters, William offered, not altogether facetiously, the consideration that “my younger and shallower and vainer younger brother” was already a member. To balance this, there is evidence in his letters that Henry did not appreciate William’s rather philistine views on his own exquisite literary art. The Mann brothers, Thomas and Heinrich, were divided by politics and Heinrich’s envy throughout their professional lives.
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A couple of years ago, the novelist Alexander Theroux wrote an article blasting his better-known brother Paul, also a novelist as well as a travel writer, for, among other things, cowardice, pretentiousness, and celebrity-chasing. The following sentence conveys the scorched-earth quality of Alexander’s treatment of his brother: “Paul has bowel worries and eats prunes for breakfast and once made inquiries of me about platform shoes.” In his own words, or quoting others, he indicts Paul for snobbery, Anglomania, cheapness, idiotic opinionatedness, self-importance, prickliness, and betrayal: for being “a terrible enemy but . . . much worse as a friend.”
What is interesting about this catalogue of accusations is that it roughly parallels the one leveled by Paul Theroux himself against V S. Naipaul in Sir Vidia’s Shadow: A Friendship Across Five Continents2 This book treats its subject to an act of personal scrutiny as sustained and punishing as any I know. Sir Vidia’s Shadow has itself come in for its own share of punishment at the hands of reviewers, having been roundly attacked as an expression of bad temper, resentment, and deep envy. “Mr. Theroux emerges as a petty, vindictive man,” runs a characteristic comment in a review in the Wall Street Journal. Yet I myself found Theroux’s account convincing on various fronts, and never less than full of interest, even when dubious; perhaps most interesting when most dubious.
Paul Theroux is an American, born in 1941, who has lived the greater part of his adult life outside the United States. V S. Naipaul, born in 1932, is of Indian heritage; he was raised in the former British colony of Trinidad in the West Indies, won a scholarship to Oxford, and has lived chiefly in England ever since. Both men are in the tradition of the restless writer who travels to find his subjects; in the modern era, this tradition is largely English, associated with such names as Graham Greene, Somerset Maugham, Evelyn Waugh, Patrick Leigh Fermor. Traveling has for the most part taken both men to third-world countries where the terrain tends to be exotic, the squalor quotient high, the indigenes not necessarily friendly, and the journey often a touch dangerous.
Africa, in fact, was the scene of their first meeting. The year was 1966, and Paul Theroux was a twenty-five-year-old teacher at the University of Makerere, in Kampala, Uganda—this was before the tyrant Idi Amin wrecked the country. Naipaul and his wife arrived for one of those teaching stints that serious but financially less than successful writers take on to make ends meet. At thirty-four, Naipaul was already a published and critically celebrated writer—his novel The Mimic Men would win the 1967 Booker Prize—and one painfully exacting in his standards and utterly confident in his point of view.
“I had never met anyone,” Theroux writes, “so certain, so intense, so observant, so hungry, so impatient, so intelligent.” And, miraculous as it seemed to Theroux, then still a yearning, would-be author who had composed only poems, this stimulating, difficult man not only seemed to like him but thought he had in him the makings of a writer. Naipaul took him seriously and regaled him with advice. A friendship, though not one between equals, was under way.3
One of the first things that impressed Theroux was Naipaul’s utter independence of mind and opinion. In matters literary, he openly expressed distaste for the work of Jane Austen, Mark Twain, Henry James, Emily Dickinson, and George Orwell, not to mention most contemporary English and American writers then of high repute. He had his doubts about Camus. He thought contemporary African literature, including the novels of Wole Soyinka and Chinua Achebe, little more than acts of mimicry, saying: “You can’t beat a novel out on a drum.” He himself read the Latin poet Martial and the Bible.
Outside the realm of literature, Naipaul claimed to hate music, all music; he also hated jokes. He disliked flowers. He despised children, telling Theroux: “I do not want children. I do not want to read about children. I do not want to see them.” The Kenyan politician Tom Mboya, then greatly admired among Western intellectuals, he referred to as “a fat thug.” Of Ian Smith, the leading political figure in Rhodesia, he said that “he is qualified to mend bicycles in Surrey [England]. Nothing more than that.” His word for the people he encountered in Uganda who had intellectual pretensions was “infies,” short for inferior persons. But, then, most people for Naipaul were “infies.”
Nor was Naipaul’s outrageousness confined to his opinions. Complaint was his natural note, his sole melody. He caused difficulties wherever he went. He was cold to his wife, with whom, Theroux reports, he did not sleep. He was a vegetarian, but a vegetarian who refused to eat salad. He was merciless to the students he taught, telling one young woman that her work was hopeless but her handwriting very nice, and suggesting that a literary contest offer only a third prize since no one could possibly be worthy of first or second. He wrote harsh put-down letters, and in all relationships was touchier than a fresh burn.
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I have said that Sir Vidia’s Shadow is an attack, but it is one most artfully executed. Theroux slowly builds up to it. In the book’s early chapters, Naipaul’s reactionary opinions are shown to have a certain charm, deriving in good part from their outrageousness, which in turn derives from an absolute indifference to any sort of correctness, political or otherwise. Although Theroux records Naipaul’s idiosyncrasies, early in the book it is left to others to say critical things about him. When Theroux tells a young writer named B. S. Johnson that he is staying with the Naipauls, Johnson replies, “Naipaul is a prick.” As for Theroux, despite everything that seems rebarbative in Naipaul, he finds in him a quality of independence that he cannot but admire. “I don’t have a country,” he records Naipaul telling him at one point, and at another, “I have no home.”
He also has gravity, particularly about art, which he feels must be difficult, a struggle. Naipaul, writes Theroux, was “brilliant, and passionate in his convictions, and to be with him, as a friend or fellow writer, I had always to be at my best.” Later, when Theroux himself begins to write novels, “what mattered most was that Vidia, a brilliant writer, believed in me.” A letter praising Theroux’s novel Girls at Play “sustained me for the next two years.” No wonder that, as Theroux writes, friendship with such a man became “as strong as love.”
Soon, however, Naipaul’s charming outrageousness starts to take, in the pages of Sir Vidia’s Shadow, a more and more ugly turn. He is shown to be cruel to servants; never to pick up a check. He is tough on his younger brother Shiva—also a writer—because Shiva has long hair and is unpunctual. He expresses racist views: of George Wallace, the segregationist governor of Alabama, Naipaul remarks, “He has an awful lot of common sense.”
Subtly, the relationship between the older and the younger writer begins to shift. Theroux recounts how Naipaul, after setting up a grand lunch at the Connaught Hotel in London, stiffed him with the £20 bill. He makes him out to be a wine idiot: “I think you’ll like this,” Naipaul says, pouring a white burgundy. “It’s balanced, it’s firm, perhaps a bit fleshy, but smooth and, I think you’ll agree, round.” And he underscores his hypocrisy: Naipaul mocks the notion of a British knighthood, and the two friends share a joke about his changing his name to Sir V. S. Nye-Powell, OBE; but when knighthood is later offered, Naipaul of course accepts it.
At this stage in their friendship, things have not yet irreparably fallen apart. Although Theroux establishes himself as a frequently published novelist—eight books before he is thirty—he is not yet commercially or critically successful. He is still deep enough in thrall to his much-admired friend to publish, in 1972, V. S. Naipaul: An Introduction to His Work. He ends that slender volume by underscoring the integrity behind Naipaul’s talent:
He conceals nothing; his ingenuousness, his avoidance of sarcasm, and his humor—a delight that no essay can do justice to—make him very special among writers; there is no one like him writing today. . . . It is evidence of the uniqueness of his vision, but a demonstration of the odds against him, that no country can claim him.
When, in 1975, Theroux’s travel book, The Great Railway Bazaar, becomes an immediate bestseller, a deeper change is registered. Asking Naipaul’s help with a planned trip to India, he senses, for the first time, a reluctance. The days when, as Theroux says, “I listened: I was Boswell, he was Johnson,” are drawing to an end. Though Theroux continues to feel “blessed for all [Naipaul’s] good advice, cautioned by his mistakes, stimulated by his intellect, enlightened by his work”—and also “aware of his contradictions”—from here to the close of the book it is the darker side of those contradictions that gets emphasized.
Naipaul’s attitudes are now made to seem less amusing, more vicious. Theroux quotes his response to an interviewer’s question about the future of Africa: “Africa has no future.” When the poet Derek Walcott calls Naipaul a bigot in print, Theroux does not rise to his friend’s defense. He is particularly hard on Naipaul as a husband, portraying him as insensitive, demanding, bullying, the perpetrator of many mental cruelties. “Stop chuntering,” he is always telling his wife Pat whenever she expresses unhappiness. Yet Pat Naipaul, Theroux informs us, is all the things Vidia is not: discreet, kind, generous, polite, grateful, magnanimous. When she eventually dies of cancer, one is somehow reminded that cancer was once called the disease of the disappointed.
For a good part of his marriage, Theroux reveals to us, Naipaul had a mistress, whom he not infrequently took along when doing the legwork for his travel books. This, for Theroux, gives those books themselves a strong taint of fraudulence. “What was the challenge in traveling with a loving woman?” he asks. “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.” This negative opinion spreads, causing Theroux to revise his overall judgment of Naipaul’s literary gifts: the man who in 1972 was unlike anyone else writing today turns out to be “the monomaniac in print that he was in person.” Theroux even confesses, dramatically, that by 1979 his was the deciding vote that prevented Naipaul from winning the Booker Prize for A Bend in the River, a novel about an African country under the sway of revolutionary corruption and violence.
After his wife’s death, Naipaul marries again—not his mistress but a younger Pakistani journalist. The overbearingness of this woman, in Theroux’s account, is the cause of the final rupture of his more than thirty-year relation with V S. Naipaul. The first sign of the end comes when Theroux discovers three of his own books, inscribed to his friend Vidia, for sale in a bookseller’s catalogue. When he queries Naipaul about this, he receives a harsh fax from the new Mrs. Naipaul making it plain that he, Theroux, can no longer expect to find himself welcome in Naipaul’s company.
“She’s crazy, I thought, and I began to laugh and crinkle the fax paper in my hand,” is how Theroux reports his response. He sends back an equally harsh letter, and, one thing leading to another, break-up becomes inevitable. When, some while later, the two men encounter each other on a street in London, Theroux asks if there is anything left of their friendship. “Take it on the chin and move on,” is all Naipaul can offer. “Before we got to the Cromwell Road,” Theroux writes, “I had begun this book in my head, starting at the beginning.”
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At some point in the course of this extraordinary work, one has to ask how reliable is Paul Theroux, not only in his general analysis of Naipaul’s character but in the matter of the words he ascribes to him. What means do we have of judging? None, really, except for the internal logic, by which I mean the consistency—or credible inconsistency—of comments and details as they build up through the course of the book. My own view is that, on this count, Sir Vidia’s Shadow passes the test. The V S. Naipaul who appears in its pages is a marvelous character; I have by no means read all of Paul Theroux’s fiction, but I do not believe he is a good enough novelist to have invented anyone quite so extraordinary.
Defending Naipaul, David Pryce-Jones, in a review of this book in the American Spectator, notes that “Theroux did not witness Naipaul’s cruelties to publicity girls, waiters, and other defenseless bystanders, but he repeats second-hand gossip about them” (emphasis added). And Pryce-Jones adds that Theroux is foolish to take everything Naipaul said literally, “as if he weren’t trying things on for effect or didn’t himself suffer insecurity.” Perhaps so. But Naipaul has said enough outside the pages of Sir Vidia’s Shadow—I recall an interview in which he allowed as how he thought all fat people were immoral—to convince me that nothing Theroux has him say inside the book is wholly invented or inconceivable.
Part of the glory of V. S. Naipaul as a writer has been, in fact, his willingness to speak his mind on subjects that in almost everyone else tend to cause cowering. As a “person of color,” he was for quite a long time granted a rare license to speak with candor about dealings between the first and third worlds, and he made the most of it. In his novels, essays, and larger works of nonfiction, he exposes the deep fraudulence that has tainted both sides in these dealings: the gauzy unreality of the Western liberal Left, the readiness to con on the part of “natives” being sucked up to, and betwixt the two more than a sufficiency of bad faith to go around. In A Bend in the River, a French couple working in a newly independent African country relax by playing the recordings of Joan Baez. Naipaul’s narrator acidly remarks:
You couldn’t listen to the sweet songs about injustice unless you expected justice and received it much of the time. You couldn’t sing songs about the end of the world unless . . . you felt that the world was going on and on and you were safe in it.
Only Naipaul has had the intellectual courage to tell such home truths.
Theroux writes of Naipaul that “really there was not a living writer he praised or any dead ones he acknowledged as exemplars.” But this is to overlook Joseph Conrad, about whom Naipaul has written in trenchant praise and whom he, at his best, can sometimes resemble. He is like Conrad in being a writer without one true society but who knows many societies very well from without. He is like Conrad, too, in seeming to speak on behalf of a wider, a larger, a higher civilization—what Naipaul himself, in a lecture in New York in 1990, called “Our Universal Civilization.”
This larger civilization, as he describes it at the end of his lecture, “implies a certain kind of awakened spirit,” containing “the idea of the individual, responsibility, choice, the life of the intellect, the idea of vocation and perfectibility and achievement.” Coming from a peripheral Caribbean culture, Naipaul believes that he has “seen or felt” certain of the core qualities of this civilization “more freshly than people for whom those things were everyday,” and in writing about “half-made societies that seemed doomed to remain half-made,” he has emphasized the corruption that has kept them from attaining precisely the ideal of universal civilization. This great subject—an entirely modern and politically international subject—has lent Naipaul’s writing much of its impressive gravity.
Paul Theroux picks up on this point, if indirectly, when, of Naipaul’s conversation, he notes: “He had that disconcerting way of turning chitchat into metaphysics about the human condition.” True enough. But that leads to a question: would Theroux allow that, between the two of them, Naipaul is the superior mind, and the superior writer? Not merely superior, but in another league, really? Theroux has undoubtedly had the greater commercial success—well-selling books, movie deals—but Naipaul has had the success of being taken with the greatest seriousness that has eluded Theroux just about completely.
He must feel this deeply—which may be the reason why, in my reading, at any rate, the one unbelievable character in Sir Vidia’s Shadow is the man who wrote it. Paul Theroux begins as the earnest acolyte, serving at the altar of an older and wiser and better writer. He remains for a good part of the early portions a happy naïf, amazed yet impressed by the man he is delighted to call friend; after the death, by heart attack, of Shiva Naipaul, “it was,” he writes, “as though I were the brother who survived.” The first real turning point, we are told, comes only after Naipaul is knighted in 1990, when Theroux realizes that all these years he has served as a perfect squire to a very faulty lord.
It so happens we know a great deal about Theroux’s own unpleasantness—not only from his brother Alexander but from the rather icily contemptuous self-portrait that emerges in many of his own travel books. Yet in regard to his friend Naipaul, we are asked to believe that Theroux’s behavior is always honorable, moral, exemplary. A serious mistake, this—in literature as in life, imputing undiluted virtue to oneself is of course one of the first signs of falsity.
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According to Theroux, “most writers are cranks, so friendship among them is rare, and they end up loners.” This may be even truer when there is a discrepancy in the literary reputation of the two writers. Theroux reports that in 1967 Naipaul asked him, as a favor, to read the galley proof of his novel The Mimic Men for typographical errors. If that was Theroux’s favor to Naipaul, then being permitted to read the novel, from which he claims to have learned much, was supposedly Naipaul’s favor to him. But why does this not seem quite the “reciprocal” transaction Theroux thinks it is?
I once had a friendship with a famous American novelist—a man, as I would one day learn, with a genuine gift for intimacy and none whatsoever for friendship—who treated me to a similar favor: he read aloud to me from a novel in progress. And I did at the time consider it a favor, though what I really felt, I now realize, was flattery at being thought perceptive enough to make this exercise worth his while. As for him, from my reactions he gained, aside from the occasional minor correction, perhaps a slightly stronger sense of what in his novel worked well and what did not. Again, who here was doing the favor for whom?
It is all too natural for the lesser party in such a friendship to get this element of power askew—which is why it can be so dismaying to learn how unimportant one’s friendship is to the more powerful party. My friendship with the novelist fell apart when he attributed to me an opinion about his work that I had never held. Paul Theroux’s friendship fell apart at the end because of a woman, Naipaul’s new wife, who rebuffed him—or perhaps really when he learned that Naipaul had consigned autographed copies of Theroux’s books to a bookseller. When something like this happens, when one realizes how much a friendship has meant to oneself and how little to the other person, one feels a double damn fool, and one’s resentment soon leads one to seek revenge. I tried to kill my man in a short story. Theroux, having had a much longer putative friendship and more vehement feelings about its sad conclusion, has allowed himself a full 288 pages for the job.
“The melancholy thing about the world,” V S. Naipaul once told Paul Theroux, “is that it is full of stupid and common people, and the world is run for the benefit of the stupid and the common.” Perhaps so. But after reading Sir Vidia’s Shadow, one feels that in the end this arrangement may well be for the best.
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1 Its subtitle is “Falling Out with Allen Ginsberg, Lionel and Diana Trilling, Lillian Hellman, Hannah Arendt, and Norman Mailer.” Free Press, 244 pp., $25.00.
2 Houghton Mifflin, 288 pp., $25.00.
3 An early expression of this friendship, as Theroux relates, took the form of help Naipaul gave him in composing an essay, “On Cowardice,” that would appear in the June 1967 COMMENTARY.
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