Vidia 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 or New Zealand, 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. 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.
He had no ideas for a novel. ‘Creatively, I continue barren.’ He was healthier than he had felt for a while, but he feared the future. He maintained that my most productive years and best work were ahead of me – I had that to look forward to. That promise excited me. As for himself, ‘At forty, I have the sickening sensation that my work is behind me.’
The very sight of his books irritated him. He hated talking about them. He felt like a fraud. He was pretty gloomy, he said. ‘In this profession, is satisfaction ever attained?’
The words were harsher than the tone he used in the rest of the letter. He seemed energetic, like a mountaineer cheerfully grumbling about the steepness of the ascent as he skipped from ledge to ledge. He even sounded hopeful. ‘If I write again, though, I think it will be a new man writing.’ Up till then, writing had been his ‘therapy.’ It had given him confidence, he said. Now he suggested that he was starting over.
Already he seemed like a new man. No novel, true, but he had pieces to write and travel plans. And he was full of insights. He said that a girl he had met in Argentina had copied two pages from a Thomas Hardy novel in which a heroine reflects on the melancholy of her life and situation. One of the Hardy lines, ‘meanest kisses were at famine prices,’ was frightening, Vidia said, commenting on the shocking juxtaposition of ‘famine’ and ‘prices’ and ‘kisses.’
He did not quote more than this, and he gave me only the title of the novel, The Return of the Native, but I found the pages and, moved by what I read, marked several paragraphs with a red pen.
To be loved to madness – such was her great desire. Love was the one cordial which could drive away the eating loneliness of her days. And she seemed to long for the abstraction called passionate love more than for any particular lover.
She could show a most reproachful look at times, but it was directed less against human beings than against certain creatures of her mind, the chief of these being Destiny, through whose interference she dimly fancied it arose that love alighted only on gliding youth – that any love she might win would sink simultaneously with the sand in the glass. She thought of it with an ever-growing consciousness of cruelty, which tended to breed actions of reckless unconventionality, framed to snatch a year’s, a week’s, even an hour’s passion from anywhere while it could be won. Through want of it she had sung without being merry, possessed without enjoying, outshone without triumphing. Her loneliness deepened her desire. On Egdon, coldest and meanest kisses were at famine prices; and where was a mouth matching hers to be found?
Fidelity in love for fidelity’s sake had less attraction for her than for most women: fidelity because of love’s grip had much. A blaze of love, and extinction, was better than a lantern glimmer of the same which should last long years. On this head she knew by prevision what most women learn only by experience: she had mentally walked round love, told the towers thereof, considered its palaces; and concluded that love was but a doleful joy. Yet she desired it, as one in a desert would be thankful for brackish water.
She often repeated her prayers; not at particular times, but, like the unaffected devout, when she desired to pray. Her prayer was always spontaneous, and often ran thus, ‘O deliver my heart from this fearful gloom and loneliness: send me great love from somewhere, else I shall die.’
‘So I feel about love and writing,’ Vidia wrote to me. Waxing uncharacteristically lyrical, he said he needed passion and comedy and relief from the past. If he were not vitalized, he feared he would die at a time when he was capable of writing brilliantly.
This astonished me – the sudden outburst, the yearning, the passion, the appeal. It sounded like the fear of unrequited love. He then quoted some lines from Derek Walcott. He had quoted Walcott before; the man was a neighbor islander, a man close to his own age. He said the words had scared him in 1954 when he had first read them: ‘But my talent grew bad and my wit turned stale / – but I sprang from my mind –’
I reread the lines. I reread the Hardy: ‘meanest kisses.’ Vidia closed, saying, ‘See how this jolly letter has turned out. Strange things happen when a writer sits down on an off day to write to a friend.’
That was like a poem (‘See how …’). Vidia’s lines were more mellifluous and rhythmic and meaningful than Walcott’s, with its weak second line. Once again, by his using the word ‘friend’ and his affirmation of friendship, I was bucked up. That same day, in spite of the radio and the squawking child and my debts, I had the confidence to work. I began plotting my next novel, The Black House.
One other thing I noticed. His letter had been tampered with. He had done the tampering, had torn off half a page. He explained it in a teasing parenthesis: ‘Last half of that first page censored. I must keep some secrets.’
When Pat wrote a month later from Trinidad to say that she liked my book about Vidia’s work, I was pleased; and she added, ‘Vidia cannot be detached from it. He read with great absorption and smiled or laughed often,’ which delighted me.
Yet I continued to worry about what was to become of me. My strategy had been to write and survive that way; my strategy was not working. A novel, a book of criticism, scores of book reviews, a collection of short stories – this in less than a year had produced such a paltry income that I was grateful to my wife for getting a job. Now I was at work on my seventh novel, and still doing journalism, and it did not seem as though I could make a living. All this in spite of burning the midnight oil and getting wonderful reviews.
In this profession, is satisfaction ever attained?
I thought, Yes. I was satisfied, but I had no money. It was all the more important that I had Vidia as a friend.
Pat said she saw the love and understanding in my book V. S. Naipaul, and the depth of this feeling had given me unusual insights into Vidia’s work. She confessed that she had thought of writing something personal about Vidia. During the writing of In a Free State, he had read a biography of Tolstoy and a book about Dorothy Wordsworth and other writers’ lives. Literary biography was something Vidia often read, as if peering through a window to compare his life with the lives of fellow sufferers. Listening to him read aloud from the diaries of Dorothy Wordsworth and Sonya Tolstoy, Pat Naipaul marveled at the perceptions, and she thought she might do something similar.
She began making notes, describing Vidia’s progress on his book, keeping a diary, writing down his comments. But she lost heart. She had never been strong, and it was hard to write in a household where the central figure was V. S. Naipaul. She felt she lacked profundity and passion; she suspected that she was trivial. There was something wrong about her – Vidia’s wife – using him as the subject for a candid or intimate portrait. It was intrusive and bordered on vulgarity.
That was why, she said, my book meant so much to her, because I expressed many of her own feelings about Vidia’s work. She said she was delighted I had done the book, since she was so similarly affected by his writing.
Another success, another good review, but I had no income. I was angry and bewildered. I had not asked for much, only a simple living. I did not dare think about getting rich. I wanted to get by, nothing more.
In the midst of my bewilderment, a letter was pushed through the letter slot of this rented place, asking me if I would consider being a writer in residence at the University of Virginia, starting in two months. I said yes. If I went alone and lived like a monk, I could finish my novel and pocket most of my salary. I would be away four months, the first semester.
My wife said, ‘I’ll miss you.’
She understood. She was happy working at the BBC, and this fulfillment made her sympathetic about my frustration. But there was something especially galling about returning to a university a year after quitting my Singapore job and saying I would never teach again. I should have been consoled by my grandiose job title, writer in residence, but it mocked me. A writer was supposed to be free of any employer – Vidia had said so.
In Virginia, living my monkish life, I received a letter from Vidia describing his trip to New Zealand. He was back at The Bungalow. He had passed through Trinidad again, visited Argentina again, finished writing his pieces. He had read my book and wanted to reread it, because he had been distracted by work. He had also felt self-conscious, being written about. He was his usual paradoxical self: ‘But I don’t think it matters what I think (and I don’t know what I think).’
He wanted to meet, to talk about England and how I was adapting. Was I disappointed? After my eight years in the tropics, what did I think of this ‘industrial reality’?
Africa was on his mind, because the Indians had been thrown out of Uganda by Idi Amin. As he had predicted so often, he said, Uganda was turning into a jungle. He blamed the white expatriates, who would take no responsibility for Amin – yet they had created the situation that had produced Amin. In the end they would go away and allow Uganda to become a forgotten horror.
I had not heard Vidia denounce a situation so thoroughly for years, but his anger was doubtless deepened by the fact that all his dire warnings had been fulfilled. He had predicted the rise of the dictatorship, the expulsion of the Indians, the bolting of the whites, the decline of Kampala into bush.
‘It is an obscene continent, fit only for second-rate people. Second-rate whites with second-rate ambitions, who are prepared, as in South Africa, to indulge in the obscenity of disciplining Africans.’ You either stayed away or you remained, with a whip in your hand. Uganda proved that the only survivors in Africa were second-raters and savages, masters and slaves.
This was the most severe condemnation he had ever made. He was raging as eighty thousand Indians – men, women, and children – were being loaded onto planes, their valuables being snatched from them by African soldiers. They were losing homes and land and businesses, and in many cases their life savings. Most were allowed into Britain, but they really did not want to live in a cold and hostile climate. They had few defenders in Britain and the United States; they had none in Africa. Africans heckled them, and the white expatriates, as Vidia had said, stood by and watched.
‘The melancholy thing about the world is that it is full of stupid and common people; and the world is run for the benefit of the stupid and the common.’
As for plans, Vidia had none. He had been back in England for only four days, and he felt he was living through an uncertain, purgatorial period. He spoke of his four years without a house. He feared a stock market crash. He wanted to write a book but had no ideas. It was his old feeling of emptiness and insecurity, of his life’s being over, the dusty intimation of the scrap heap.
He was low and feeling adrift. It was his alienated mood of What country? What passport? He was placeless in The Bungalow and this was another reason he wanted to talk about England with me. He wanted to find out what I liked and didn’t like. He saw me as another wanderer.
But I was in Virginia, dreaming of my wife and two children, like a sailor in a storm at sea, vowing that I would never do this again. Vidia spoke of going back to Trinidad to cover the violent murders that had taken place at a Black Power commune.
His verdict on my book about his work was just what I wanted. He said he had read it ‘with amazement, delight and great humility. It seems marvelously responsive and humane; it reminds me and informs me of things that I had forgotten and perhaps had never realized.’ He spoke of my generosity and thoroughness. Reflecting on so much labor in the past (‘gone, gone’), he became apprehensive about the future. He was sad and fearful, he said.
He had won the John Llewelyn Rhys Memorial Prize, the Somerset Maugham Award, the Hawthornden Prize, the W. H. Smith Award, and, with In a Free State, the Booker Prize. Already he was being spoken of as the greatest living writer in the English language. Yet it was little comfort to him to know that his reputation was formidable. He pined for better sales and more money.
While he regarded his life as over, mine had, I felt, hardly begun. He made a few corrections in my book, small ones, all of them factual. He talked about In a Free State, how ‘tightly constructed’ it was. He wrote about a dream the main character had that he decided to leave out. ‘I dreamed all the dreams myself, for him, during the writing.’ The book had possessed him; he had been ‘deeply immersed – almost to the point of neurosis’ in it.
I had felt so close to In a Free State that I could not evaluate it. In the book I recognized Haji Hallsmith and the besieged African king; I knew some of the Africans; Vidia’s Colonel was the Major of the Kaptagat Arms – the same man, the same shouting; the waiters were his waiters, and, as Vidia had remarked at the time, ‘The boy was big and he moved briskly, creating little turbulences of stink.’ The roads were the roads we had traveled down; the well-marked sign the same Beware of Fallen Rocks; the coming-of-age boys I had seen myself. I had been frightened by those same dogs barking. Much of it was our safari in Rwanda, but made into a quilt: I saw the stitches, and what another reader would see as a large, harmonious design seemed to me a mass of patches. But that is what happens when you have a writer for a friend and you travel the same road.
He said, ‘I do hope that your book will show you some reward for your great sensitivity, labor and love.’
My reward was his saying that. I had begun the book as a labor of love, a favor to him, a lesson for me. I learned a great deal in the writing, but there was no material gain. Perhaps it interested some people in his work and found him new readers. But I suspected that in many ways Vidia’s life was even more interesting than his work. He had made this observation about Somerset Maugham, how Maugham’s life was complex and rich, even though the old man always denied it. As for V. S. Naipaul: An Introduction to His Work, it hardly sold and was not reprinted. Twenty-five years later it was still out of print. The advance was spent the day I received it. There were no royalties in twenty-five years, nor did I ever get a sales statement from the publisher. I never discovered how many copies were printed. A few thousand, perhaps. It met the worst fate that can befall a book: it became a collector’s item, pretty much unread and uncirculated, celebrated only for its scarcity.
Vidia also needed money at this time, so he said. He had no assets apart from his manuscripts and papers, an entire record of his career to date. He had gone to the British Museum and discussed the matter, mentioning a figure of £40,000, which would include letters, manuscripts, pictures, mementos, maps, sketches, notebooks, everything in his paper-rich life. It was quite a large stack, for he had told me he was superstitious and never threw away a piece of paper with his handwriting on it, as one might keep nail parings or locks of hair. It was possible that after his gathering up all his papers, the British Museum would change its mind and not pay even the agreed-upon minimum. He needed a backup plan.
Would I please, therefore, spread the word that he was thinking of selling his archives? An American university would be convenient because he wished to consult them in the future. In a cardboard box in Trinidad he had found letters and notes he had written in the distant past: ‘penciled notes I made in the PAA aeroplane as soon as I got off the ground in July, 1950.’ Rereading the many letters had suggested to him that he might write an autobiography. But what if the papers were destroyed in a riot (‘not unlikely in Trinidad’)? He needed them to be in a safe place.
Also, the money. He wanted to convert the papers into a flat in central London.
The chairman of the English Department at the University of Virginia was also a friend. He was the man who had offered me the writer-in-residence job. I asked his advice. He said I should see the university’s librarian. The librarian was the assiduously orderly sort of person – more orderly than intellectual – you find running libraries. He had the peculiar baldness that went with an orderly disposition; he was close-shaven, with pink cheeks, and so tidy and well turned out that I doubted he was much of a reader.
‘I wonder if you’d be interested in buying the archives of V. S. Naipaul,’ I said.
‘I know that name,’ the librarian said. ‘He wrote The Man-Eater of Malgudi.’
‘That was R. K. Narayan,’ I said. So I was right: this clean, clear-eyed man was really thick. I listed Vidia’s book titles, none of which rang a bell, though the man kept smiling.
‘What is he selling?’
‘Everything. Every piece of paper he has. Letters, books, manuscripts, pictures, the lot.’
‘Would he have any interesting letters from well-known writers? Those are usually pretty valuable.’
I felt this conversation was not going well, and I was glad that Vidia was being spared the indignity of explaining that he was not R. K. Narayan.
‘I’m sure he has lots of letters of that kind. Anthony Powell is one of his closest friends.’
The librarian smiled, but not with pleasure. It was the uneasy smile that indicates incomprehension, as if I had slipped unconsciously into a foreign language.
‘What sort of figure does he have in mind?’
‘Forty thousand pounds.’
‘How much is that in real money?’
‘Maybe ninety grand.’
‘You’re joking.’
I said nothing. The librarian clamped his jaw shut and bit on his teeth. The university didn’t have that kind of money, he said. I sensed his triumphant smile grimly heating my back as I left his office.
Surely other libraries or universities would be interested. I wrote letters. I made phone calls. Sometimes I mentioned the price, other times I solicited a price. There were no takers. Many people I spoke to were only dimly aware of the name Naipaul. How was this possible? It did not surprise me that Vidia was little known in the United States; it was the reason I had written my book about his work. But I was astounded that academics and librarians were so clueless.
I broke the news gently to Vidia, but perhaps it was my delicacy and tact that made it obvious I had been rebuffed. Sensitive to rejection, Vidia took it badly. He sent a brief note and lapsed into silence.
Judging from my classes at the University of Virginia, American universities were vastly inferior to Makerere University and the University of Singapore. My Charlottesville students had read little – hardly any of them had read the short stories of Joyce or Chekhov, but they wanted to write short stories themselves. Sometimes they handed in work they had done the previous year, for another course. Usually they handed in nothing. They were pleasant but intellectually lazy. Some were graduate students. When I gave them low marks they objected.
‘Hey, Paul. You don’t get it. I need a B in this course,’ one grad student said to me.
I told him that his C was generosity on my part. He was in the master’s program. He had done very little work.
‘Look, I need a B,’ he said in the snarling voice of someone demanding my wallet.
This was new to me: teachers who did not read, students who could not write. One semester of this was enough. I took my savings and went back to London.
We moved from west London to south London. We had a whole house in Catford, but the area was much grimmer than Ealing. It was full of lawbreakers – petty burglars, pickpockets, car thieves, bag boosters, second-story men, muggers, and hoisters of all descriptions. But Catford was so poor these villains had to take a train to other boroughs or up to the West End, the more salubrious parts of London where the pickings were better, to commit their crimes.
In the spring of 1973, having finished The Black House, I cycled to Waterloo, put my bike on the train, and went to Salisbury, cycling from there to Wilsford Manor. Vidia could see that my finances were as miserable as ever, but I told him why I had left the University of Virginia.
‘You had said you’d never teach again,’ Vidia said. ‘You broke your own rule. If you make a rule, keep to it.’
We walked to Stonehenge, through the fields, and he explained the water meadows once more.
‘You’d like Virginia,’ I said. ‘The countryside is beautiful – rolling hills and meadows.’
‘I’m afraid that America is not for me. I don’t think I could live in a rural setting.’
‘In some ways it’s a bit like this.’
But I was thinking: It is much more beautiful than this funny fenced-off part of Salisbury Plain, with a highway running alongside this weird ancient monument, belittling it.
‘I have to stick with what I have,’ Vidia said. ‘It’s too late for me to transfer to another country.’
We kept walking toward the big biscuit-colored cromlech that lay on the other side of the whizzing cars on the motorway.
‘So what’s the plan?’
‘I’m still looking for money,’ he said.
‘Are you serious about buying a place in London?’
‘Yes. I think it’s just what I need.’
‘I’m sure you could get something for less than forty thousand.’
He said, ‘No. I want something uncompromisingly fashionable.’
He said this while looking at the sky.
A few days after I returned to London, my editor at The Bodley Head, a cigar-smoking Scotsman and sometime poet named James Michie, invited me to lunch at Chez Victor. He said he wanted to discuss The Black House. He was very friendly when I met him, but it seemed ominous that we had finished the first course and most of the bottle of wine before he mentioned my book, and then he told me he did not like it at all.
‘I’m afraid I can’t publish it,’ Michie said.
‘You mean you’re turning it down?’ I could not believe this.
‘It will hurt your reputation,’ he said.
‘I have no reputation.’
‘I think if you reread the book you will agree with me,’ he said.
‘I don’t have to reread the book. I wrote the book. If I thought it was no good I wouldn’t have submitted it.’
My voice was shrill, and I think that surprised him. I was hurt and angry. Probably he thought he was softening the blow, because Londoners are such eager lunchers, but it seemed callous to turn lunch into an occasion for such a rejection. And why was I being rejected? The novel was good, surely?
‘I let William Trevor look at it. He agreed with me.’*
Trevor was one of his authors, a talented one, I thought.
I said, ‘My last novel got great reviews. You paid me two hundred and fifty pounds. I assumed you’d give me the same for this. You’d be getting it for a pittance.’
‘It’s the principle of the thing,’ he said. He had lit a cigar and, feeling defensive, he had stopped eating. ‘I don’t believe in the book. I can’t publish something I don’t believe in.’
‘You publish lots of crappy books,’ I said.
I guessed he saw the truth of this, because he hesitated, at least looked uncertain.
I said, ‘If you turn this down you’ll lose me as an author. I’ll go to another publisher. I’ll never let you publish another book of mine. And all it’s costing you is two hundred and fifty quid. This lunch is costing you thirty!’
Michie was bald but he had a hank of hair that grew from the side of his head that he arranged over his pate to give the semblance of hair. This damp, fussed-with strand had slipped down and hung by the side of his ear like a strange Hassidic sidecurl. It made him look desperate.
‘If you twist my arm, I’ll publish it,’ he said.
‘That’s it, then. That’s all. Forget it – I want my manuscript back.’
Feeling ill, I finished my meal and walked back to his office, wishing the whole way I could push him in the path of a car. He gave me the typescript and still seemed surprised and somewhat embarrassed by my anger.
I found another publisher, but in the meantime seriously wondered how I would ever make a living as a writer. I told Vidia. He invited me to tea at the Charing Cross Hotel.
‘You should have shown the book to me. Why didn’t you?’ he said.
‘I didn’t want to bother you with my problems.’
‘That’s what friends are for,’ Vidia said.
He could not have said anything truer or kinder. After eight years he was still on my side, still a well-wisher.
‘He gave it to William Trevor to read. Apparently Trevor didn’t like it either.’
‘Who is William Trevor?’
That was what I needed, the old corrosive contempt.
‘He is no one,’ Vidia said coldly. ‘Something similar happened to me when I was starting out. Deutsch told me to put the book aside. It was Miguel Street. He didn’t know what to do with it. And one still gets the odd foolish remark about one’s work.’
‘Why do they do it?’
‘They do it because they are common, lying, low class, and foolish. That is why they do it.’
He was so angry he could not continue the conversation. He sipped his tea, looking around at the other tables. He saw a heavily pregnant woman moving slowly across the shabby room, bracing herself by resting on chairs and with one hand pressed for balance on the small of her back.
‘To me, one of the ugliest sights on earth is a pregnant woman.’
This astonished me. I did not know what to say. He turned away from the woman.
‘I have an idea for a book,’ I said.
‘Tell me.’
‘A long railway trip.’
I explained how, in Virginia, I had read Mark Twain’s Following the Equator, an obscure and out-of-print travel book, but lovable for its geographical non sequiturs and incidental mishaps. I liked the spirited jokes and the long journey. It was about nothing but his trip. A lot of it was dialogue. Twain did not pretend to be knowledgeable about the countries he passed through – Australia, India, and South Africa, among many others.
‘I checked the maps,’ I said. ‘I can leave Victoria Station and go to Paris, to Istanbul – to the border of Afghanistan. Then there’s the Khyber Pass, and trains all through India. Burma has railways, so does Thailand. Even Vietnam has trains. I would travel around Japan and come home on the Trans-Siberian, and then write about it.’
‘That’s a lovely idea,’ Vidia said. He was seriously concentrating on it, looking for a flaw or something suspect. But it was too simple an idea to have a flaw. Taking trains from London to Japan and back: it was surprising that no one had done it before.
‘I’m thinking of leaving in September,’ I said. ‘I would be in India in October. What’s the weather like then?’
‘Delicious.’
He seemed distracted; he was still thinking about my book, my trip. He saw something I did not see – I could tell from his reaction. He knew it was a good idea, but he saw something more. He saw a hugely successful book.
‘Who do you think I should visit in India?’
He thought a moment. He frowned. ‘You’ll find your way.’
For the first time in the years I had known him, I sensed a reluctance on his part to help me. Only a few minutes before he had said, ‘That’s what friends are for.’
‘Isn’t there anyone you could introduce me to?’
He had been to India six or seven times recently and had lived there for a year. He had written about it many times. It was his obsessive subject. He knew India intimately.
‘I don’t know. You might see Mrs Jhabvala when you’re in Delhi.’
As he was speaking, giving me the name with such reluctance, I vowed that I would not visit Ruth Prawer Jhabvala.
‘You’ll be all right,’ he said. But this time the statement was tinged with self-pity, almost resentment, a feeling I had never detected in him before. It was as though I were abandoning him. And why? This train-riding idea I had conceived out of sheer desperation, in the urgency to have a book to write and money from a publisher.
The bill was brought. I paid it, I left the tip. Vidia had not seen it. He did not see bills even when they were brought on the most expensive china and folded like origami and presented to him. It was one of his survival skills that a bill could come and go without ever being visible. Still, he looked disgusted.
‘This hotel used to be quite grand,’ he said in his pained voice. Perhaps the pain was due to the idea I had just divulged. ‘Having tea here was once something special. One was glamoured by it.’ He made a face. ‘No longer.’
I took the trip. I left London on September 19, 1973, on the train to Paris. I changed trains and went to Istanbul, changed again for Ankara, for Tehran, and for the holy city of fanatics, Meshed. And onward, through Afghanistan (by bus, no trains) and down the Khyber, up to Simla, down to Madras and to Sri Lanka, on the train and on the ferry. To Burma and Thailand and Singapore, along the coast of Vietnam (heavily bombed and still smoking), up and down Japan, a boat to Nakhodka, and the Trans-Siberian home. My heart was in my mouth the whole time. Out of fear I wrote everything down; in my misery I mocked myself, and a febrile humor crept into the narrative. In January of the following year I returned to London, still feeling miserable. I had missed Christmas. Everyone howled at me, ‘Where have you been?’ I propped up my notebooks and wrote the book, made a single narrative out of all those train trips. The title came from a road in Kanpur: the Railway Bazaar.
Sometimes miracles happen to a writer, Vidia had said. The Great Railway Bazaar was a small miracle. I was not prepared for it. While I was working on it, The Black House was published – the reviews were respectful – and I started The Family Arsenal after I finished the travel book. Even before publication, The Great Railway Bazaar was reprinted three times, to accommodate bookstore demand. It was an immediate bestseller. It was my tenth book. I had known Vidia for ten years. In that time I had published about a million words.
‘An agonizing profession,’ Vidia said. ‘But there are rewards.’
All windfalls are relative. I did not become rich with that book, but at last I was making a living. I paid my debts. I had enough to support me in my next book. I was out from under. I never again worried about money – that freedom from worry was wealth to me. No more drudging. I was free. I was thirty-two.
And at last I understood what Vidia meant when he had written, ‘I have never had to work for hire; I made a vow at an early age never to work, never to become involved with people in that way. That has given me a freedom from people, from entanglements, from rivalries, from competition. I have no enemies, no rivals, no masters; I fear no one.’