Sir Vidia's Shadow (29 page)

My twenty pounds was carried away on the plate by the now deferential waiter. I had bus fare and enough left over for a pint of Double Diamond on the train. But dinner was out of the question, and so was the Ladybird book.

“Shall we go?” Vidia said.

We walked through Berkeley Square to Piccadilly, talking about books some more. I listened without hearing or understanding. I felt that peculiar weakness, almost a frailty, familiar to me whenever I lost a bet or discovered an overdraft. This time it was the effect of having spent all my money on lunch. Vidia was sprightly, for the opposite reason: I was broke, but he was restored. He was actually energized, and it was almost worth what it had cost me to see him so bright and to hear him.

“Don't worry about your book,” he said. He was chatty and encouraging. “You won't know what it is about until you finish it.”

He was jaunty, but this was also his old intense teaching method, which had helped me in Africa. He was well fed, he had drunk most of the white burgundy, it had cost him nothing. His chatter was a form of gratitude.

“Each day you will make breakthroughs as you write. You'll make discoveries all along the way. When you finish you'll be amazed to see where you've got to—you'll probably have to go back and fix the first part of your book, because you'll have discovered what your subject really is.”

At Duke Street, near Fortnum & Mason, he turned and urged me to go partway down the hill, where an art dealer had two Indian prints in his shop window.

“I want you to come back here sometime and look at these pictures. Buy some when you have the money. They are Daniells, aquatints of India. Aren't they delicious?”

But I could not concentrate. I still felt weaker, lamer, frailer, even slightly deaf, the loss of twenty pounds like an amputation.

“What are your plans, Vidia?”

“I am going to the London Library. It's just round the corner in St. James's Square.”

“I mean future.”

“Trinidad,” he said. “Queen-beeing it there. Then South America. Argentina.”

He went glum and uncertain, looking ahead, seeing nothing discernible in the mist.

“I would like to write nothing. I feel I have said all I wished to say.”

Taxis clattered down Duke Street as we stood on the narrow sidewalk. An auction had just ended at Christie's down the street, Vidia said, and there was a commotion, like an audience leaving a theater, a sudden mob, dressed alike.

“I may fall silent,” Vidia said.

He looked at the pair of aquatints. One showed the Union Jack flying in an Indian landscape: a handsome building, like a pavilion, with Indians, Europeans, and horses around it.
The Assembly Rooms on the Race Grounds, Near Madras
.

“Yes, I may fall silent.”

“I'll be in Dorset,” I said. My fists were jammed into my empty pockets.

“You're going to be all right, Paul.”

“If I don't see you...”

I put out my hand, but Vidia was preoccupied with the possibility of falling silent. Anyway, he seldom shook hands, and when he did his grip was limp and reluctant, as though fearing a taint.

“I'm going down this way,” he said.

“I'll hop a taxi to
The Times
.”

That was bluster on my part—I didn't have the money. I took a bus to Blackfriars and turned in my review, and then I walked from Blackfriars to Waterloo along the Thames, to save my bus fare. With no money for dinner, I took an early train to Dorset so that I could eat at home. It puzzled me that I had spent so much on lunch. I hated having to think about such things. That single lunch had cost me the equivalent of one month's rent.

Back to The Forge and my lovely clamoring family, back to my room upstairs, back to my novel. Vidia was right. I wanted to finish the book to discover what it was about.

But that night, without the new Ladybird book, I lay between my children and read them a story from one of their older books of fairy tales, this one by Hans Christian Andersen. Outside, the wind from the sea at the end of the road tore at the bare boughs of our black oaks.

With the children snuggled against me, I read, “‘You don't understand the world, that's what's the matter with you. You ought to travel.' And so they traveled, the shadow as master and the master as shadow, always side by side.”

9

V
IDIA SPOKE
about finding me, yet my conceit was that I had discovered him. Both could have been true. Friendship is often a case of mutual rescue. The previous year, in Singapore, I had written a book about his work because he was unknown in the United States. He had no American publisher; his American editions were out of print; there had never been paperbacks. I was grateful to him for his help in my writing, but I also thought he could use my help. And publishing my book in the States might bring both of us to the attention of readers. So
V. S. Naipaul: An Introduction to His Work
was a labor of love, done out of friendship, but like many gifts it was also self-serving.

The book was accepted by Vidia's publisher. The advance was small, surprisingly small—say, four lunches at the Connaught. I was counting on my novel
Saint Jack
to restore me to solvency.

Writing to me at The Forge from Trinidad, Vidia expressed his pleasure that the book about him was to be published. In spite of the tiny advance, he said, his publisher would stand by the book. If it sold well I would benefit; if it was a good book, it would cause many things to happen. A worthy book made its own way, and a gifted author never failed to be rewarded. And, sometimes, miracles happened.

I had complained to him that I was working too hard, combining work on my novel with writing book reviews. He said he understood my dilemma.

“You need to appear more often in the English papers, to broaden the base of your reputation,” he said. Practical as always, sound advice. “But they do pay appallingly.”

On the subject of drudging as a freelance, Vidia knew what he was talking about. He had trodden this same road, hacking away on Grub Street, twelve years before: the small rented house, tight money, the weekly review, hack work and honorariums. I knew from the bibliography I had made that he had reviewed many books while writing
A House for Mr. Biswas
. If he could write a masterpiece and review books at the same time, surely I could follow his example. He was sensitive to this burden, which was part of a writer's independence. Writers in residence never faced it, salaried magazine staffers and writers on fat contracts were oblivious of it, but for the freelance writer it is a constant dilemma, because the freelancer hates to say no to any request, for fear that the requests will vanish. At the same time, the freelancer knows that the true meaning of “hack” is “workhorse.”

A similar sort of problem had just arisen in Vidia's writing life. He intended to go to South America, on assignment for
The New York Review of Books
. But its rates were low. He wanted to write about Argentina—and the
Review
would print anything he cared to write—yet he felt there was no profit in it. So he was inclined to remain in Trinidad, at his sister's, queen-beeing it, so he said.

His usual discursive medical report was appended to this letter. He tended to go into minute detail when the subject was money or health. He anatomized insomnia, and his dealings on the stock market were another sort of fever chart. Writing exhausted him. Each time he finished a book he was close to collapse. He said he had been working steadily from 1965 to 1971, and he felt depleted by
The Mimic Men, The Loss of El Dorado
, and
In a Free State
, as well as by all the journalism—enough to fill another book. The potted history of his physical effort was just the inspiration I needed, though I was alarmed by the consequences he described: extreme torpor, fatigue, dizzy spells in public places, frayed nerves—“the mind, rather than the body, calling for rest and still more rest.”

In this burned-out state he stopped writing, and I remembered his saying, “I may fall silent.” I still wrote to him in Trinidad. I had more time now. I had finished
Saint Jack
and sold it to The Bodley Head in London. It had not solved my problems. My English advance was £250, half on signature, half on publication. For my year's work on the novel I now had £125, minus the agent's ten percent—five meals at the Connaught. “We wish it were more,” my editor had said. So did I.

All these tiddly, trifling numbers—but they mattered to me at the time because my life depended on them.

“And you say you don't want me to get a job?” my wife said. But she did not recriminate; she was gentle. This was a delicate subject.

She got a job with the BBC and we moved to London, wrenched from Dorset in the clammy English spring, with a damp summer looming. Instead of rural poverty, which I found bearable for its downrightness and sufficiently dignified for the amount of space we had—a whole house, the surrounding woods and meadows—we were now plunged into a dreary inner suburb, in a small apartment. It was nasty and uncomfortable, narrow, dirty, mean, and noisy. It smelled, it was cold. The seedy grumbling neighbors, the big cars flashing loudly past on the main road—every bit of it was like a reminder of failure.

I wanted to start another novel. I had a good idea, based on a ghost story I had been told in Dorset by an old man in the Gollop Arms. My first impression of Dorset was of a weird landscape. I wanted to write about that, a place darker and stranger than anything I had known in Africa. Beyond the ghost story, the germ of my idea was of an English anthropologist who has thrived in Africa and then retires and returns home to this haunted place.

But in London I had no place to work. We lived in two rooms in a noisy, much subdivided house. I tried to write on a table in the bedroom but was disturbed by all the ambiguous memories and associations: a bedroom is charged with dreams and slumber and sex, and this one had all the residue of its previous tenants. It stank, too, as bedrooms in rented houses often do.

It was at ground level, and from where I sat, with my back to the room, I could see beyond the weedy front yard to Gordon Road, Ealing, under a gray sky. My two children were in the other room, staring at the rented television set. I could not work. I felt idle. I complained of this idleness to Vidia. His response was friendly and wise.

“The essence of the freelance life is freedom,” he wrote. And he spoke of indolence as an aspect of freedom, one that I should accept. He said that any freelancer needed the confidence to believe that in spite of occasional setbacks, everything was going to be fine in the end. But of course that was a problem. “This faith your friends cannot give you: it is something you have to discover in yourself.”

He went on to speak approvingly of my wife's job with the BBC World Service, which he listened to all the time. This second letter from Trinidad was more allusive than any I had received from him lately. He seemed refreshed by his trip to Argentina—he had taken the assignment after all. He had been back in Port of Spain for only two days and he was making plans. He would first write his pieces, one on the Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges, the other on Argentina itself, Evita and Peronism figuring strongly. After that, he had to choose whether to go to Brazil (for £400) or New Zealand (for £500), or head straight back to The Bungalow. He had recently turned down trips to Canada and Nigeria.

Perversely, being in demand reminded him of rejection. The very fact of this friendly attention and the many invitations gave him a gloomy vision of his future, when he would get no attention, nor any invitations. He could not contemplate acceptance without anticipating his being superfluous. In this mood he regarded goodwill as a curse and praise as the Evil Eye.

Preparing the collection of pieces that he was planning to call
The Overcrowded Barracoon and Other Articles
, he was opposed by Pat on his intention to include his pieces about India. She said that no one would be interested in them. The reviewers would use those pieces to attack the book for its monotonous insistence on Indian subjects, Indian elections, Indian deficiencies. Pat was correct, India was his obsessive subject, but the act of writing was obsessive and often irrational. So he resisted. He felt that in the end he would be all right. He often said so.

That was his greatest strength, his unwavering belief that writing was fair—that a good book cannot fail, that it will ultimately be recognized as good; that a bad book will eventually be seen as junk, no matter what happens in the short run. Only the long run mattered. There was justice in writing. If you failed, you deserved to fail. You had to accept your failure.

This belief was both armor and a sword, and by repetition he instilled this belief in me and made me strong. It was a little early to tell whether we would be rewarded for our work. The external signs were still ambiguous. He was living in a room at his sister's house, in 3 Woodlands Road, Valsayn Park, Port of Spain, Trinidad; and I inhabited, with my family of four, a pair of narrow rooms in 80 Gordon Road, Ealing, West London, with someone's radio playing and a child crying upstairs. It helped that I believed in my writing, and it helped as much—perhaps more—that he believed in me.

Even his asking favors was a form of giving me confidence. He wondered whether I would be willing to look over the proofs of his collection of articles. If anything dismayed me, I should tell him. This was the book I had suggested to him after I read all his magazine pieces in Singapore. I had made a list. He used some from the list but in the end did not include any of the book reviews I had found. That was another lesson. He said that book reviews served their purpose but had no lasting value, except for the jokes. “Too bad we can't keep the jokes and get rid of the rest.” He chose long, solid pieces. He had put enormous effort into his journalism, bringing to it the intensity of fiction writing. In this period, as he put it, no novel offered itself to him.