Sir Vidia's Shadow (24 page)

Departing from the blue Chinese-style air-letter forms, Vidia wrote across two sheets of note paper to congratulate us on our new baby. He also congratulated me on leaving Africa after more than five years. He frankly disapproved of the fact that I was going to Singapore to teach English literature, and he claimed never to have heard of the course I was to teach: Jacobean literature—Shakespeare's contemporaries in the age of James I. But—and here came a Naipaul curve ball—“perhaps you might get me out there as a visiting idler.”

It was just like Vidia to scorn the job I had taken in desperation, and to repeat his contempt for the study of literature, but at the same time to ask me to find him a slot as a visiting writer of the sort he had been, disastrously, in Uganda. It was a paradox he himself admitted. He tried to be high-minded, yet he was the first to confess his contradictions. The example of his candor was his greatest lesson.

Knowing that I needed to establish myself in England, he suggested to the literary editor of
The Times
that I become a regular reviewer. The money was not the point—I would get £10 for each review—it was, rather, the chance to become part of the London reviewing and writing coterie. I had to be seen as someone who was serious, who had judgment and wit, who was not above reviewing books.

Vidia said that he was traveling, leaving London, but not sure where he was going. He had sold his house. He still wanted to go to the United States. He repeated his request for my brother to find him a house, somewhere in rural America. He still had some journalism to do.

My wife and I moved from Uganda to Singapore with our baby son. This was in the autumn of 1968. I resumed teaching. I wrote some short stories and published them. I began reviewing books for
The Times
. My third novel was done, and I had an idea for another, more ambitious novel, about life in an African dictatorship. I still had no money. But it was not only poverty that kept me from returning to the States; it was also my curiosity about Southeast Asia—the echo of the gunfire from Vietnam, the effects of the war on nearby countries. And I found that I could teach and write. Teaching was not difficult; I found Shakespeare's contemporaries illuminating and undemanding, and the violent vengefulness in the plays made sense to my Chinese students, some of whom were ardent supporters of the Cultural Revolution.

Even in Singapore I had regular air letters from my friend Naipaul, who believed in me.

“What lovely Bongo-Wongo addresses you are picking up on the way!” he wrote in a letter with my exotic Singapore street address. A Trinidad stamp on that letter looked equally exotic to me.

In the past, when he was feeling frail from having worked hard, he said, “I feel like a bird with a broken wing.” Now his broken wing was healing, he said. He was in Port of Spain. He had finished his historical narrative, pleased with it for being so contemporary. Even Pat had liked it. He implied that she was often one of his worst detractors. After two years,
The Loss of El Dorado
was done, and when it appeared it would explain a great deal about the modern world, in which race and class were primary issues. “The book is good.”

From Trinidad, he was embarking on some journalistic assignments in the United States. Needing a visa, he had gone to the U.S. consulate in Port of Spain and been treated with lavish courtesy and deference. He said to me, “Guilt will make my hand shake if I ever write an unkind word about the U.S.”

He had been greeted at the consulate as an important writer. He was granted two visas: one to enter the country, the other to work as a journalist for four years—he underlined the four. The visas had been presented with style, the consul-general emerging from his office to extend his congratulations, the whole consulate staff beaming. “The natives goggling on their benches.”

It mattered a lot to him that he had been singled out from the other islanders and treated with respect. He did not take it for granted. He said he left the consulate feeling weak.

He reported that the literary editor of
The Times
liked my work and was using the reviews regularly, in spite of having to send the books all the way to Singapore. But the
Washington Post
was doing the same thing. What with my teaching and my short stories and the novel I had started, I had never worked so hard for so little money. My wife got a job at the Chinese university to keep us afloat, but still we had no savings.

Money was on Vidia's mind. He complained of high taxes and low standards in Trinidad. He would soon be leaving for New York City. A few months later, in March 1969, he wrote me from the New York apartment of Robert Lowell, where he was a houseguest. Lowell, he said, was the only writer in New York who had read his work. One of his bits of journalism was an interview with Lowell.

Vidia felt awkward being in New York, where no one cared about his work. He said. “It makes me feel an intruder.”

He was out of sympathy with the writers and intellectuals he met in New York: Baldwin, Bellow, Roth, Trilling. He had no patience with their views. He saw them as obsessed and, ultimately, trivial-
minded. Half the time he had no idea what they were writing about. They were publicity seekers, he said; their writing was Teutonically wordy. It was better to grow slowly as a writer and to build a reputation book by book. He meant himself, and I guessed it was also a hint to me.

There were aspects of New York that he liked. The wine was good and inexpensive. The city had energy. He envisioned making a life in New York, buying an apartment and spending part of every year there. Indians—not “dot Indians” but “feather Indians”—were on his mind. “I alternate between great happiness and great rage at the violence done to the American Indians,” he said. “I feel the land very much as theirs at dusk, the sky high above Central Park.”

I had told him that I was getting on in Singapore; in spite of the financial narrowness, it was a new place with new people, and it gave me the chance to travel in Burma and Indonesia. I had begun to write
Jungle Lovers. Fong
had appeared—a small advance, good reviews, but no steady income. I said to myself, If I write a book every year for the next ten years, I am sure I can make a living. I could not think beyond ten years.

Vidia wrote back from New York to wish me well. He said he had been thinking fondly about my wife and son. That touched me at a time when I felt burdened and overworked. I lived in a small, hot semidetached house and wrote in an airless upstairs room. I could write only after my lectures had been delivered, my papers marked, and my wife and child were contented. After eight months in Singapore I had settled into a routine, but this, I swore, would be my last job. I fantasized about quitting, but I had no place to go. I had no plans, except that I was embarked on my fourth novel. My third,
Girls at Play,
was about to be published in England.

Vidia had plans, he said. He had written a piece for the
Telegraph
in London and another for
The New York Review of Books
, about Anguilla. He was planning to spend the spring and summer in the United States and then travel back to London in September, when
The Loss of El Dorado
came out—not return for his own sake but to give some moral support to his publishers. Then, after London, perhaps Spain, to work on a book—he did not say what he had in mind—because Spain would be inexpensive.

He took an oblique and somewhat credulous interest in astrology and palmistry. The lines on my palm had impressed him. In New York he had met an astrologer who, noting that Vidia was a Leo, gave him a reading and predicted unending travel, both mental and physical. Vidia welcomed the prophecy. He was eager for a phone call that would send him abroad. The astrologer had said that no sooner would Vidia put his suitcase down than he would pick it up again.

Accompanying Norman Mailer in his campaign to be mayor of New York had occupied some weeks of Vidia's time. That was another piece of journalism. Vidia found Mailer energetic and attractive. He was reading Mailer's book about the political conventions,
Miami and the Siege of Chicago
. Mailer had called it “a bazaar of metaphors.” Vidia corrected this: surely Mailer meant similes. Nevertheless, Vidia liked the book, and he liked Mailer. It was strange to hear Vidia praising a living writer and a new book. I had never heard him do this before.

By the way, he wondered, had I read Henry James's study of Hawthorne? I immediately got it out of the library and read it with pleasure. I wrote back, thanking him for the suggestion. He was still my teacher, my friend.

A month later, he read my new novel and praised me extravagantly. This was the middle of 1969. The book had just appeared in London, but a copy had been sent to Vidia in New York.
Girls at Play
was a dark book, set in a girls' school in upcountry Kenya. Though I denied the fact for legal reasons, the school was based on the one where my then fiancée had taught in Embu, in the bush about eighty miles northeast of Nairobi.

Vidia told me he had pounced on the book, and he congratulated me and said it was “very very good”—all this in the first two lines of his air letter.

He had praised me before, but this was different—he said that the book was wonderful and liberating to him. He praised details—that was the best of it, his close reading. In Singapore on hot buggy nights with the ceiling fan croaking, I needed this encouragement. I had written a few chapters of what I expected to be a long novel. I was still writing short stories. I was doing book reviews. I was teaching. How was it possible to work so hard and earn so little?

Never mind, my book was good. V.S. Naipaul said so. He was even grateful to me for having written it—that sounded odd—but he said he would explain this gratitude some other time. He promised that I would get good reviews.

I had managed to please the one person who mattered. And he was more than pleased. He was impressed by its fluency, the transparency of the prose, the dialogue, the opening paragraphs—nearly all of it he found arresting and powerful.

Music to my ears. And there was more: “Above all, this is the work of a man who has come to a
resolution
about a particular experience ... There is an attitude that comprehends and absorbs all the experience that is given.”

This seemed the greatest praise possible. He explained the point about resolution, which he said was an understanding of experience. Knowing what one was doing was an insight—so he said—that Norman Mailer did not have. He had apparently changed his mind about Mailer. He now said he found Mailer's writing supremely egotistical. I had gone beyond my ego to a stronger objectivity, “the true artist's detachment—which is not unconcern, far from it.”

He liked the passion, the humor, the nuances, the peculiar characters, the aspects of English decline and African strangeness, the landscape, the emotion. Because he was so positive, he said, he was confident that he could tell me what was less successful. He singled out the confessions. He said they were “stagey.”

I reread his letter. It was the best review I had ever had, from a wise man, who knew me, the man who always said, “Are you sure you want to show this to me? I'm brutal, you know.” Not only brutal but stingy and snobbish. Yet this was Vidia at his best, a subtle and generous man.

“Many congratulations again and again” was his way of signing off.

In the Singapore heat, on my low salary, battling with a new novel and feeling old at the age of twenty-eight, I was very happy. The letter lifted my spirits and sustained me for the next two years in Singapore. I worked with a will. I had been told I was doing the right thing.

I had written
Girls at Play
off my own bat, without a contract, starting it in Africa, finishing it in Singapore. Here I was, still in Singapore on publication day. Vidia's letter prepared me for good reviews, and over the following months I got them—praise in the London papers first, then in the provinces, and finally in the United States. The sales were modest, not substantial enough to liberate me from teaching, but it was all a good omen.

His next air letter came from Canada and was dated August 18. It was the day after his thirty-seventh birthday, but he didn't mention it. Again he had money on his mind. He didn't have enough, he wanted more, he was insulted when a fee was low. Money was a theme with him, which was fine with me—I needed consolation on that score too. He had invested a small amount in the stock market, but he failed to make a killing. “What I need now is a lot of money,” he said, explaining that if he became rich he would not have to write ever again.

For Vidia, as for me, journalism was money; fiction had to be supported by other work. We were paid for our books, but that money represented only a year's income at best. I had been turned down by the Guggenheim Foundation, I won no prizes, my advances were low—£250 for
Girls at Play
in England, a few thousand dollars from my American publisher. I published a book-length novella,
Murder in Mount Holly
, but that had not earned me much. Therefore, I needed my teaching job and my hack work.

Vidia was the soul of sympathy. He had no cash either. I put some money into stocks and they crashed. I moaned to Vidia. He said that the stock exchange underpinned Western civilization. You had to invest, but you needed to be wise. He analyzed the market, he denounced taxes, he described the fickleness of stocks, he deconstructed inflation, he cursed the necessity to spend.

He had just been in California, writing about John Steinbeck's Monterey. He doubted that I would like California. San Francisco was atmospheric but no match for New York. He had decided that New York was for him. He loved living in great cities—he was frank in his liking for the nightlife, the dinner parties, famous friends. The word “glamour” was used approvingly throughout his Mailer-for-Mayor piece. He found New York humor profoundly amusing. He put one such exchange into the article.