Sir Vidia's Shadow (42 page)

“When I wrote this book I wore out a pen. The nib was worn down to the gold. It was a little stump. Imagine the labor.”

He signed, I stacked.

“What is the good of signing books? It simply inflates their value in a bogus way. I will never see the profits. Someone else will get it. All these people who call themselves publishers—they are no better than people who sell books off a barrow.”

I pushed the books at him. He signed quickly, making his initials and his surname into a single calligraphic flourish.

“These will go for big money,” he said. “They will be resold. Why am I doing this?”

And he stopped signing. He put the cap on his pen and stood up. He was done.

“There's more,” I said.

“That's enough,” he said, having convinced himself that signing the books was a mistake.

Later that day, we went to my house for tea. My two boys were upstairs in their rooms, doing homework. I called them down so they could say hello. I was proud of them; I wanted Vidia to see them. Now they were the right age. Vidia could not deal with young children—he rather disliked children—but he took to my boys as he had taken to me, long before.

“And what homework are you doing, Marcel?”

“English prep. And a Russian essay.” He swallowed and went on. “On Ivan the Terrible.”

“Tell me about Ivan the Terrible.”

Marcel said, “I'm reading a book about him by Henri Troyat.”

“I know Troyat's
Tolstoy
. You say this book is about Ivan the Terrible?”

“It's his new one. It hasn't come out here yet.”

“You have the American edition?”

“No. The French one.”

“But this is your Russian essay?”

“My essay's in Russian. The book's in French.”

“Yes, yes, yes, yes,” Vidia said, liking the answer. “And what about you, Louis?”

“English essay. My Phillimore.”

“What is a Phillimore?”

“It's the big essay of the year. It's supposed to be pretty long and serious.”

“Is yours long and serious?”

“It's not done yet. It's about the attraction of evil.”

“Yes,” Vidia said, concentrating hard and murmuring, “the attraction of evil.”

“Ahab,” Louis said. “Richard the Third.”

“You should read
Old Goriot
.”

Louis nodded, not sure whether a book or an author was being recommended.

After the boys had gone upstairs Vidia said, “You are so lucky to have your sons. They're intelligent. They're polite. They are nice boys.”

Agreeing with him, I deliberately positioned myself near the shelf in the bookcase where all of Vidia's books were lined up, from the ones I had bought with Yomo, in Kampala, to the latest ones.

I said, “Vidia, would you mind signing these books?”

“Not now. Some other time,” he said.

He had convinced himself in the course of signing all those copies of
Biswas
that book signing was a cheat. Other people made money from signed books, not the author, who was invariably swindled. He consoled me with a joke about the writer who had signed so many books that the rarest books of all, and the most valuable, were the ones without his signature.

 

Every October, around the time the Nobel Prize was announced, Vidia was named in confidently speculative articles as the likely recipient. He never mentioned the prize, nor commented on the speculation. On the contrary, he seemed to make a point of ignoring it. It was I who brought up the subject. In 1973, when Patrick White had won, I told Vidia how pleased I was—I liked Patrick White's fiction, his humorous and sometimes hallucinatory prose style. Besides, he conveyed very specific and vivid images of Australia.

Vidia said, “I've read him. I don't think there's much there.”

Three years later, Saul Bellow won. Vidia claimed he had never read him. And he laughed when William Golding won in 1983.

“Tell me, what did Golding do to win it?”

The Nigerian writer Wole Soyinka won the Nobel Prize in 1986.

“What do you think, Vidia?”

“Did he write anything?”

Vidia did not wait for my reply. We happened to be walking down Cromwell Road towards the V and A, and from the way he stiffened his legs in a marching manner and planted his feet more firmly I gathered that he had something on his mind. Perhaps it had unsettled him to think of Wole Soyinka, wearing a crown of laurel leaves, with $190,000 in his pocket. In any case, Vidia became agitated or sad when he thought about Africa.

“The Nobel committee are doing it again,” he said, striding down the sidewalk.

“Doing what?”

“Pissing on literature, as they do every year.”

I started to laugh.

“Pissing from a great height,” he said. “On books.”

 

In time, we changed from lunch to dinner. “Dinner is grander.” Also, it did not break up the day, as lunch did. Yet our dinners were no more frequent than our lunches had been. One or two, then nothing for a year. He was away—on the long journey for his Islam book, or in India, or, quite often, in Buenos Aires.

I was traveling too, in China and Africa, in the United States, and on book tours. Almost everywhere I went I was asked about Vidia: What influence did V.S. Naipaul have on your writing? or How did Naipaul help you as a writer? There was no simple answer, at least none shorter than would fill a five-hundred-page book. It was understood that we were friends, that we had had a teacher-student relationship when I had started writing. Because Vidia usually avoided book tours (“The book will find its own way”), people wondered what he was like. I told them truthfully that I had never met anyone like him.

“Writers are crankish,” Vidia said. “You get crankish from being alone.”

Often, I heard stories about him—people sought me out to tell me the stories, believing that I had to know everything about my friend.

When something disgraceful was rumored of Vidia, there were often several versions of the story. Vidia's hasty exit from Amsterdam is a good example of the mutation of a simple tale. In the first version I heard, a Dutchman in Amsterdam told me of Vidia's disastrous visit of a year before. Vidia had arrived from London to see his Dutch publisher and had agreed to a week of publicity. About an hour after his arrival, a press conference was arranged: Naipaul on a stage, the Dutch audience waiting to ask him questions; cameras, tape recorders, journalists.

The first question, phrased as antagonism, was from a woman who asked him to explain his offensive attitude towards Africans.

Vidia said, “I have no comment on this.”

The woman demanded an answer.

“I don't have to listen to this,” Vidia said.

With that, he walked off the stage. Cameras and lights followed his progress out of the hall. He went back to his taxi, which still held his bag, and back to the airport. He returned that same day to London, without ever having unpacked or seen his hotel, his whole visit torpedoed by a single question that he had found impertinent.

The second version of Vidia's Amsterdam exit was reported in the Dutch paper
Het Parool
, under the headline “Naipaul Came, Got Angry and Disappeared.”

In this story Vidia was to have spent five days in the Netherlands, but departed “in anger” after two days. For a public discussion at the Amsterdam PEN Center, Vidia asked that questions be submitted in writing, but he ridiculed them when he looked at them. A sample question he hooted at was “How do you see the future of our world in ten or twenty years?” To save the situation, the Dutch host asked a question, about how terms like “fascism” and “communism” describe European ideas that cannot necessarily be transposed onto societies fundamentally different from our own. When Vidia expressed mild agreement, a woman from Amsterdam's Free University asked, “If terms like ‘fascism' and ‘communism' are not applicable, then how about using ‘rich' and ‘poor' as yardsticks?”

“Why ‘rich' and ‘poor'?” Vidia said. “Why not ‘lazy' and ‘ambitious,' ‘learned' and ‘illiterate,' ‘good' and ‘bad'? It's about time we started looking at other aspects of people.”

Hearing this blunt reply, a Dutch author, Margaretha Ferguson, began (so the paper said) “an endless story about Naipaul's negative attitude towards Islam,” and attacked him for saying that Dutch had virtually disappeared from the Indonesian language.

“Why do you ask me such things?” Vidia said (“irritatedly”). “To show that you know better? Of course you know better!”

“But if you are talking about intellectual clarity—” Miss Ferguson replied (“sputtered”).

“I don't think you know what intellectual clarity is.”

Vidia rose from his chair, muttered something about the gathering's being “senseless,” and decided to leave for the airport, where he handed back his fee for the afternoon (750 guilders) and flew home.

Which version was true?

“Does it matter when one is dealing with nonsense?” Vidia told me.

“What went wrong?”

I had had enjoyable experiences in Holland, where most people speak fluent English and are intellectually curious and widely traveled. They had not mythologized their colonial history, as the British and French sometimes had, making wog-bashing into a glorious mission to civilize. In the most provincial Dutch towns hundreds of people turned out to hear visiting novelists lecturing in English. But Vidia disagreed.

“The Dutch,” he said. “Potato eaters.”

The famous image in the Van Gogh painting said everything about the culture, he believed: ugly, moronic, famished peasants in a greasy kitchen, crouched over a basin of spuds and cramming them into their mouths.

I heard other stories that I did not bother to verify, because they had the ring of truth. There were many complaints about his behavior and even his writing. Vidia was used to complaints. He said, “I think unless one hears a little squeal of pain after one's done some writing, one has not really done much.” Any story related to fastidiousness, and especially food, was unquestionably true.

He was at a dinner party in New York City. He sipped his wine. It was satisfactory—he had insisted on choosing the wine. The dishes were passed by the waiter, people helping themselves. The main course was meat, but because Vidia was a guest, extra dishes of vegetables were also served. Vidia waved them away. He spent the entire meal sipping wine and nibbling a piece of bread.

“You haven't eaten anything, Mr. Naipaul,” the woman next to him said. She was Dame Drue Heinz, patroness of the arts and part of the Heinz food fortune.

“Yes, I'm a vegetarian,” Vidia said.

“There are vegetables in that bowl,” she indicated.

Vidia explained that he had watched all the vegetables being served and had seen someone—he did not say whom—using a serving implement that had come into contact with the meat dish.

“Those vegetables are tainted.”

At another dinner party, in London, something similar happened. The dishes were passed, Vidia took nothing for himself. He sipped wine, he nibbled bread. The hostess was surprised by Vidia's indifference, for knowing that he was a vegetarian she had made an effort to provide extra vegetables. She watched Vidia waving the steaming dishes aside.

The host, tipped off by his wife, approached Vidia quietly after the meal.

“Was there anything wrong with the food?”

Vidia said, “I didn't see anything for me.”

“There were vegetables,” the host said.

“Those were not my vegetables,” Vidia said. “Those were everyone's vegetables.”

Only a non-Hindu would find this behavior strange. One day in India I was approached by a beggar. I was seated under a peepul tree, eating a coconut that had just been cracked open for me by a street vendor. The beggar asked me for some rupees. He was starving, he said, and he looked it: ragged dhoti, hollow eyes, clawlike hands.

“You are hungry?”

“Yes, sahib.”

“Have the rest of this coconut.”

He refused. He was a high-caste beggar. I was a foreigner, an Untouchable. He could not eat coconut that had been tainted by my fingers. He wanted his own coconut. If he had been dying of thirst, he would not have drunk out of a container that had touched my lips. He was a Brahmin.

Naipaul is a Brahmin. He is also proud of what he has achieved. On another occasion, he was guest of honor at a dinner in London to which a large number of people had been invited. Before the dinner, a woman came up to him and said, “You wrote a dishonest book about London—
Mr. Stone
. Nothing in that book is true. You totally misrepresented the way we live.”

Vidia did not reply. Instead, he immediately left the party, before all the guests had arrived, before any were seated or the meal was served.

“What about the hostess? Didn't you say anything to her?” I asked, because Vidia himself had told me this story.

Vidia shook his head. “Let that foolish woman who insulted me explain why I wasn't there.”

At about the same time, he told an interviewer, “I can't be interested in people who don't like what I write, because if you don't like what I write you're disliking me.” It was after such an encounter that he said, “England is a country of second-rate people—bum politicians, scruffy writers, and crooked aristocrats.”

To people who found him demanding, insisting on high fees to speak or read, first-class airfares, five-star hotels, chauffeurs, minders, secretaries, and vintage wines, Vidia gave his usual reply: Treat me as you would a world-class brain surgeon or astrophysicist.

His sweeping generalizations and cutting remarks were widely quoted. What about Africa? one interviewer asked him. What was the future for Africa?

“Africa has no future,” he said.

Indians were treated no more gently by him. They did not read, he said. “If they read at all, they read for magic. They read holy books, they read sacred hymns—books of wisdom, books that will do them good.” He told me that it was very bad that Indian women kept their hair so long: “It encourages rape.” He became noted for pointing out that the red-dot caste mark that Indians wear on their forehead means “my head is empty.”