‘We’ll talk,’ Vidia had said, but it was not possible. I wrote to him, but for almost a year I was seldom in one place long enough to receive a letter or a fax. I was on the move – more than two months in the African bush, drinking the rivers again: on the Angola border of the upper Zambezi, in Barotseland, camped in the compound of the Litunga, the Lozi king; sick in a tent in the remote Dinde Marsh of southern Malawi, with acute dehydration, not drinking enough of the muddy river; and paddling in Mozambique, near where Mrs Livingstone lay buried under a baobab tree at Chupanga. On the lower Zambezi I saw a lion’s paw prints in the dust of the riverbank. The creature had paused to relieve herself.
‘Female,’ I said.
My observation was challenged by one of those aggressively skeptical Australian women you meet in such places.
‘How do you know that?’
‘Females are retromingent. You probably are.’
‘What’s that supposed to mean?’
‘Piss backwards.’
Then I was in Hong Kong, mugging up on the Chinese take-away. I had kidney problems and gout brought on by the African dehydration.
All this I faithfully reported to Vidia in my usual way: postcards, air letters. I could not phone. It did not strike me as unusual that Vidia did not respond. I knew he was still writing Beyond Belief, the sequel to his Islam book. You will say: But you corresponded with him and wrote his blurbs and read his manuscripts while you were working on a book. Yes, but he had different rules. I found rules, in general, an inconvenience.
We no longer had any friends in common. I had no idea what was happening in his life. This was strange, since for thirty years I had had a pretty good idea of the ebb and flow of his affairs.
There was a piece in the magazine supplement of India Today (Delhi) early in 1997, an interview with Vidia and Nadira, a portrait of their new life together. Nadira had taken charge. For one thing, she had closed his archives in Tulsa. Vidia said, ‘Nadira is more encouraging. Pat could be very stubborn and critical.’ And: ‘I think I made a great error. I took writing far too seriously.’ The author of the article found Nadira imperious and wrote, ‘She likes to be called Lady Naipaul.’
Then, about a year after Hay-on-Wye, when I was in Hawaii in an angle of repose, I received by mail a catalogue from a Massachusetts bookseller who specialized in modern first editions. Some items caught my attention:
#336 THEROUX, Paul. Fong and the Indians. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1968. His second book … This copy is inscribed by Theroux to writer V. S. Naipaul: ‘For Vidia/ & Pat/ with love/ Paul.’ Near fine in a very good dust jacket … Theroux and Naipaul met in east Africa in 1966, presumably about the time and place that constitute the setting for this novel, and their friendship extends over three decades, dating from a time when both were relatively young writers, and neither had achieved the degree of literary renown that both enjoy today … An excellent association copy. $1500.
#337 THEROUX, Paul. Sinning with Annie. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1972. His first collection of stories. This copy is inscribed by Theroux to V. S. Naipaul in the month of publication: ‘To Vidia & Pat/ with love/Paul.’ … An excellent association copy, inscribed at approximately the time that Theroux’s book on Naipaul would have been approaching publication. $1500.
#338 THEROUX, Paul. V. S. Naipaul: An Introduction to His Work. (London): Deutsch (1972). An early book of criticism of Trinidadian author V. S. Naipaul … Scarce … $850.
No inscription on that last one. I had sent it through the publisher, who was Vidia’s friend, so that Vidia could see the earliest possible copy. I hoped that he would like it. He had, as he had said in several effusive letters. There were several more of my books in the catalogue, and probably they too were from the shelves of Dairy Cottage, Salterton, Wiltshire. Someone was cleaning house.
The prices were extortionate. And I knew that Vidia would have received only a fraction of that – modern firsts is one of the adjuncts to the rag-and-bone trade, and its practitioners are little better than junk dealers. To twit him about this, I faxed him the bookseller’s catalogue pages, and I asked, ‘How are you?’
The reply came from his new wife. It was one of the strangest looking messages I had ever received, printed in big wobbly letters like a child’s school essay. I watched, squinnying at it, as it scrolled out of my fax machine. My first thought was that the chuntering woman from Pakistan had lost her marbles.
Just the look of it, the way it was set out on the page – the oversized printing, the crazily toppling paragraphs, the random punctuation and nineteenth-century notion of capitalizing, the odd locutions and even odder grammar – was slipshod even by Bahawalpur standards. There was another telling thing. You can judge a person by the manner in which, over the course of a two-or three-page letter, the handwriting breaks down. Vidia had taught me that. Nadira’s began at the top of the first page as big accusatory capitals and then sloped and tottered and, as though a new person had taken over the scribble on page two, collapsed into a slant, which I read as the sort of italics you would use to indicate a hoarse nagging. And I could see that it was indeed a nagging letter.
My immediate reaction was deep embarrassment for Vidia.
She began with a startling non sequitur, asserting that I would not be writing her obituary. As I was murmuring ‘What?’ I read on. She wanted to make a few things clear, and she rambled a bit. It was babu English, but I got the point.
The obituary I had written of Pat Naipaul was a pretty poor job, Nadira said. It was not an obituary at all. It belonged in the realm of fiction and was more about me than about ‘poor Pat.’ And I reread ‘poor Pat’ in the block letters of the woman who had been with Vidia in Lahore as the unlucky woman lay dying in Wiltshire.
If my writing the obituary had been a favor, Nadira went on, the favor was reciprocated by Vidia’s agreeing to appear at the Hay-on-Wye festival. She then rubbished Bill Buford, who had arranged the event. She rubbished the event. She accused me of trying to make Vidia seem fanatical and extreme on the subject of Africa. In two novels, she said, Vidia had told the truth about Africa. I had not followed his example. I had misrepresented Africa.
Elaborating on this last point, she said that she had read something I had written about Africa – she did not identify the work by name. She implied that I had quoted Vidia out of context. I had to understand that his life would soon be made public. She hinted at a forthcoming biography. Therefore – and this constituted a type of warning – I should be a better and more responsible friend, for did I not know that Vidia set himself apart from the pettiness of liberals?
Affirming her friendship for Vidia’s literary agent, she signed off, ‘Nadira.’
This was crazy, I thought, and I began to laugh and crinkle the fax paper in my hand. She’s nuts! Going absolutely barking mad in Wiltshire! It was predictable. The woman was a highly visible person who would have been denounced or ridiculed on sight as ‘colored’ or a ‘Paki’ in most of Britain. Wiltshire was the haven of crusty right-wing retired military men and xenophobic farmers. This was, surely, a kind of nightmare for the lady letter writer from Bahawalpur.
This was crazy, for there was nothing I had done to provoke the letter. Certainly my role as Patricia Naipaul’s obituarist did not justify this abuse. And the festival business was misdirected – since when did anyone force Vidia to say or do something against his will? He was a man of iron resolve. Vidia had asked for the obituary. He had thanked me afterwards. I had his letter – only gratitude and grief in it.
At first I put her letter down to a need to prove herself to Vidia. She had decided to take charge, to clean house in all senses. She had to have been the one to get rid of the books with the loving dedications that had predated her. This was the inevitable revisionism of the new wife. She had turned into Carrie Kipling, Fanny Stevenson, and was aiming at being Jane Carlyle, the martyr of Craigenputtock, humoring and defending her wayward husband. Nadira was seeing me off.
The more I reflected on her letter, the louder I laughed. Its obsessional style and bad grammar and clumsy handwriting were proof that Vidia had not seen it before she sent it. He was scrupulous in matters of punctuation. Poor grammar set his teeth on edge. I had seen him scream at such an ill-conceived thing, like a man howling at a filthy rag. He was put off by the slightest gaucheries. I remembered how, in Stockwell, he had whimperingly told Pat and me that he had seen a workman sit on his bed – the thought of the man putting his bum on the place where Vidia slept was too much, and he nearly sobbed. This abusive note would be just such a horror to a man who saw English departments as representing corruption and the decline of civilization. It was a weird, shame-making letter. I thought he should see it.
I faxed it to him with this message: ‘I have just received the attached fax from your wife. I will reply to her, but of course am rather puzzled about it and wonder what could possibly have motivated her to write to me in this way.’
There was no reply from him. That was odd, but at least – unless she had intercepted the fax – he had seen her crazy letter, accusing me of writing a self-serving obituary and browbeating him into going to Hay-on-Wye more than a year before.
He was my friend. He had been my friend for over thirty years! He was not by nature a bridge burner – there weren’t enough bridges in his life for him to develop any skills of this sort. He was, if anything, a mushy soul afflicted with a cruel streak, and like many severe men, something of a sentimentalist. He was depressive. He cried easily.
After a suitable interval, I wrote to Nadira. I curbed my instinct to fill my letter with sarcasm or write a parody of one of her Letters from Bahawalpur, a name I had begun childishly to enjoy murmuring for its nearness to the word ‘bowel’ – ‘Bowelpur,’ as I thought of it, the quintessential shitty little town. She would not find that funny. And if I parodied her in the style of the Bowelpur columns, with their sententious theorizing and garbled English and frequent references to her husband and her characteristic ‘loose’ for ‘lose’ and the shortage of definite and indefinite articles, she would, I was sure, miss the point. So I wrote:
Dear Mrs Naipaul,
I had not written to you, but to Vidia, and was therefore surprised to receive your fax today, and rather startled by its confused and rather combative tone.
You object to my obituary of Pat Naipaul. I wonder why. She was a woman I loved deeply; the piece was not ‘a favor,’ as you put it, but a labor of love. You accused me of writing a self-serving obituary of, as you termed her, ‘poor Pat.’ How inappropriate that you should mention her name in this way, since you were associated with Vidia as the woman lay dying. I attach a letter written to me by Vidia afterwards which begins, ‘Thank you for the lovely and generous note about Pat …’
I did not make Vidia go to Hay-on-Wye, though I recall your urging him to go. Vidia was at center stage, speaking his mind. He says and does exactly what his brilliance dictates. It is folly to think that I have any influence over him.
‘Having read your African piece,’ you say. Again, I do not know what you are talking about. Over the past 30 years I have written a great deal about Africa. Though I understand your intention is to be offensive to my work your entire paragraph is obscure to me.
You obviously intended your message to me to be provocative. You can see that I am not provoked but only fascinated by your tone, your mistaken assumptions and your odd references.
In almost 32 years of friendship with Vidia I have asked for little and have given a great deal, because I admired Vidia’s writing. You should not have written to me in those terms. Yet I am still smiling at your mention of my not writing your obituary.
You are newly arrived. You ought to be more careful. Others have been in your position and have felt just as certain and been just as mistaken.
Believe me, should I wish to write your obituary – or anything else – I shall do so, without needing to be asked.
There was no reply. Perhaps this silence was not so strange. In Africa, when an expatriate got married his new wife fired all his servants and discouraged his old friends from coming around. This was a species of that behavior, but without, I was almost certain, Vidia’s shadow over it. Vidia was my friend.
In spite of We’ll talk, and our not meeting, still I knew what he was up to. I saw his recurring photographs, two in Indian magazines that showed him to be greatly changed: darker face, bristly bearded, swollen eyes, frowning mouth, grayer hair – long crazy hair that looked as if it had been nagged at with a jagged implement. As he said, You carry your life in your face.
Often, hearing secondhand his eccentric views and outrageous opinions, I laughed, though sometimes uneasily, as when I read that he had told an interviewer, ‘French is now of no account, no consequence, a language spoken by some black people and some Arabs’ – and of course spoken by the dusky Vidia himself. In a restaurant in San Francisco, he looked at the next table and said to his companion, ‘Aren’t those the ugliest people you’ve ever seen? Do you think they were put there to punish us?’
How different we were. Cut off from him, I saw it clearly. I had always known that he dealt with strangers by trying to shock them, while my manner was ingratiating – just listening politely. His views of women ranged from offensive to silly, but also (as eccentricities do) revealed a lot about him: ‘My experience is that very few women have experienced true passion.’ You had to smile at Vidia, of all people, considering himself a connoisseur of true passion. Much of the time, in these reported comments, he sounded very angry, but I read it as fear. This fear was in his soul. He was a man who, while a student at Oxford, had (as he put it) ‘fallen into a gloom’ that had lasted twenty-one months.
Long after, he attacked Oxford. He said he ‘hated’ his college. He had nothing but bad memories, and ‘I was far more intelligent than most people there.’ He said he had tried to gas himself at Oxford, but failed because ‘he ran out of coins to feed the gas meter.’ After I had read this disclosure, it was hard to resist the gibe that it was only his parsimony that stood between life and death; had someone else paid, Vidia would probably have succeeded in doing himself in. But in the event, he spent nearly two years in a state of nervous collapse. ‘One was terrified of human beings, one didn’t wish to show oneself to them.’
To be the guest of honor at a dinner party – that, for Vidia, was bliss, he said. This remark, made to another interviewer, rang true. He said he loved occasions ‘when one feels cherished.’ To be cherished meant more than flattery and good food and vintage wines; it meant attentive listeners who paid the bill, as I knew. ‘He likes paying,’ he said of any person who picked up a bill. ‘He wants to do it.’ And was there any more tangible expression of being cherished than the bestowal of a knighthood? It was the dream of the wily pundit Ganesh Ramsumair, in The Mystic Masseur, to be transformed into the unapproachable Sir G. Ramsay Muir. Someone who builds a life on being pleasured by honors and flattery can only have known great rejection and insecurity and a yearning to belong. But then, hadn’t Vidia reminded me long ago that in order to understand him I had to know his past as ‘a barefoot colonial’?
From my earliest attempts at writing, I had wanted security too. I knew when I had enough. ‘Don’t wish for too much’ was my father’s lesson. And he always said, ‘Be kind.’
Vidia’s temperament was a riddle. There seemed to me nothing lower than being beastly to book-tour escorts and nasty to secretaries, or to any underling who, out of nervousness, made gauche remarks. Did Vidia’s compulsion to intimidate such people arise from his having felt rejected himself? He did not make much of his experience of racism, but he acknowledged that he had known it in England. His attitude could have been a case of monumental payback, though it was anyone’s guess why his victims were innocent Americans and English flunkies and earnest Hollanders.
Vidia denied being Indian. He saw himself as ‘a new man.’ But he behaved like an upper-caste Indian. And Vidia often assumed the insufferable do-you-know-who-I-am? posturing of a particular kind of Indian bureaucrat, which is always a sign of inferiority. It had taken me a long time to understand that Vidia was not in any sense English, not even Anglicized, but Indian to his core – caste-conscious, race-conscious, a food fanatic, precious in his fears from worrying about his body being ‘tainted.’ Because he was an Indian from the West Indies – defensive, feeling his culture was under siege – his attitudes approached the level of self-parody.
He was mistaken about so much. He made confused statements about Africa and seemed to regard the continent as starting in south London and extending to the Caribbean, the whole of it a jungle of jitterbugging ‘bush men.’ These generalizations appeared to be no more than futile attempts to validate his novel A Bend in the River. It represented Vidia’s horror of the bush. But in the bush lay Africa’s essence, which Vidia never understood was more benign than wild.
In three books, he had changed his mind about India with each one. And he was still wrong. I didn’t dispute his views. Challenge him and he was an enemy; treat him handsomely and there was a chance he would be kind. Cherish him and he was yours. Hadn’t I cherished him? So we had never quarreled.
‘To grow up in a large extended family was to acquire a lasting distaste for family life,’ he told an interviewer in 1983. ‘It was to give me the desire never to have children of my own.’ But he disliked children anyway. There are hardly any children in his books, and no happy ones.
As a father, I was angered that he actively disliked children, because any parent has an animal awareness of that hostility. It made me protective. I also saw that the man who dislikes children and doesn’t have any of his own is probably himself childish, and sees other children as a threat. Vidia was the neediest person I have ever known. He fretted incessantly, couldn’t cook, never cleaned, wouldn’t drive, demanded help, had to be the center of attention.
Now, away from his influence, I saw all this – not that I dared utter it, or think it through as an indictment. I saw him as deeply flawed, and as a friend – our friendship was the consequence of his imperfections, for character flaws seem to inspire the sympathy that lies at the very foundation of friendship. I knew this but kept it to myself, and when I dared to think about it, I inverted it.
To maintain my self-respect and to defend Vidia, I often called him generous when I found him to be mean, and said he was eccentric when I felt he had been cruel. My obituary of Pat was a rosy picture of an adversarial marriage. I did this not to spare Vidia but to spare myself. I was ashamed to say that he treated people badly and that he was casual and presumptuous with me. Had I not repressed this, I would have had to admit that I was weak. But from the beginning I had known that I was a bit afraid of him. It is impossible to see a friend lose his temper with someone and not imagine that same fury turned on you.
I had admired his talent. After a while I admired nothing else. Finally I began to wonder about his talent, seriously to wonder, and doubted it when I found myself skipping pages in his more recent books. In the past I would have said the fault was mine.
I did not want to think about any of this. That was why I never contemplated writing about him, because writing meant scrutinizing character and giving voice to feelings of disappointment and being truthful. It was much simpler to overlook Vidia’s faults. Let someone else be Boswell and write the biography.
But there was that face. Some things I could not overlook, because they loomed too large and were too twisted. His personality dominated his face, which was forever contorted, twisted down in disapproval and misery and suffering, and his nose was thickened with anger. Seeing that face for the first time, Saul Bellow said, ‘After one look from him, I could skip Yom Kippur.’ The years had given Vidia a fixed and unimpressed mask, scored with the crow’s feet of skepticism. He had the blinkless gaze of a raptor. You never wanted to see that face turned against yours.
Once an interviewer mentioned to Vidia that I had said he was compassionate. Vidia rejected the description. He said it was a ‘political’ word. It is not political at all, of course. But Vidia was right to deflect the word. I had said it in my eagerness to please him.
His books had been part of my education, and were a broader education for showing what was good and what was lame – sometimes on the same page. Some of his books are excellent, even prophetic and wise, and others are unreadable and silly. Critics had used the infantile words ‘genius’ and ‘masterpiece’ in connection with Vidia and his work, but I had found his recent books odd and insufficient. He took down the laborious monologues of people, and these lengthy interviews were presented as documentary almost without any intervention by Vidia. Long ago he had impressed me by observing that Columbus never mentioned that it was hot in the New World. In Vidia’s India: A Million Mutinies Now there is little landscape and hardly any weather. There is no smell, no heat or dust, no sweating men, no lisping saris, no honking traffic, nothing except the sound of yakking Indians. The same is true of the Islam books, which is compounded by his naive grasp of Islam and his ignorance of Arabic, which kept him from understanding the Koran.
He was undeterred. ‘I hate the word “novel,”’ he told an interviewer. He had always ridiculed the word ‘story.’ He strongly implied that the novel was dead. I had never in my life heard an intelligent person state this opinion, only academic hacks who knew nothing of fiction. Perhaps his sort of novel was dead. Fair enough, but as always, in generalizing, he spoke for the world. When Vidia changed his mind, you changed yours, or else.
He insisted he was correct: that writing had to be one thing – his thing; that John Updike, who can be very funny and whose elegant sentences give pleasure for their sinuous intelligence – that Updike, whom he singled out, was somehow passé. ‘Golden sentences’ was Vidia’s way of belittling Updike’s prose. He felt the same about Nabokov. No shining prose for Vidia, no excursions into the lapidary. ‘I don’t want [the reader] ever to say, “Oh my goodness, how nicely written this is.” That would be a failure.’ He commended only a style he termed ‘brambly.’ He offered the Victorian Richard Jefferies, an obscure Wiltshire naturalist, as a model. Vidia’s insistence made me doubt him: I had become wary of his dogmatism.
We write as we can, not as we wish. Updike writes as Updike is able, and I am doing the best I can. I can’t choose to be ‘brambly’ if, say, in describing Yomo’s sensuality, I am so sweetened by the mood of reminiscence that I write, ‘When she and Julian made love, which was often and always lit by candles, she howled eagerly in the ecstasy of sex like an addict injected, and her eyes rolled up in her skull and she stared, still howling, with big white eyes like a blind zombie that sees everything. Her howls and her thrashing body made the candle flames do a smoky dance. Afterwards, limp and sleepy, stupefied by sex, she draped over Julian like a snake and pleaded for a child.’ Let Vidia be brambly. He stopped trying to please the reader. He lost his humor, he blunted his descriptive gift, he denounced universities (as Richard Jefferies had done), he bemoaned readers, he tried to hold a funeral and bury the novel.
He never denied that he was a crank, yet he elevated crankishness as the proof of his artistic temperament, which is irritating for anyone else who has to work for a living. It was a sorry excuse – and from someone who never tolerated excuses for an instant. He admitted being difficult, but instead of seeing this as a weakness, he implied that his difficult nature was a virtue, an aspect of his being special. It is no virtue at all.
I did not mind his contradictions. It is human to be contradictory. He had once claimed that England was second-rate; he spoke of crooked aristocrats and ‘bum politicians.’ Then he accepted a knighthood. Was he acting logically, by hypocritically joining an establishment renowned for its hypocrisy?
I had found England narrow but far more benign. Vidia had not learned in forty years that the English are not blamers and are not a cruel people – indeed, the traits of passivity, shyness, and modesty predominate. Liking order, the English deplored people who groused – ‘whinged’ was their wonderful word. ‘Mustn’t grumble,’ they murmured when the going was hard. Vidia was the opposite of phlegmatic: he was an excitable Asiatic – his own word – the more volatile and wounded for his colonial experience, his being slighted by English landladies, and all the postcolonial humiliation a Trinidadian Indian must feel when rejected by blacks on the island.
It made him a blamer. He blamed society, the educational system, people in general. He indulged himself and enjoyed being flattered. He became a regular at dinner parties and powerful American embassies.
This was the fierce-faced friend I saw now, but it was a mute vision. I neither wrote nor spoke about it: Vidia remained a vaguely menacing blur. But the world to me was clearer. Without his response – he didn’t answer my letters, he didn’t call, I was too far away to provide him any help – I was better able to understand my progress, from being his student to becoming his equal. In my heart, I suspected he was now much weaker and needier than me, which was why he valued my friendship.
Though I did not look into the future, I recalled his saying, ‘To all relations, every encounter, there’s always a time to call them off. And you call them off.’
After twenty-nine years he had left his publisher, André Deutsch. It is not unusual to change publishers, but it is rare to leave without some sort of farewell. He said nothing to Deutsch, who complained, ‘Not even a postcard!’ And that was much more than an author–publisher relationship. It was a close collaboration and a friendship. Vidia told me he admired Deutsch for being tough, intelligent, and entrepreneurial, and for having the panache to send suspected dud bottles of wine back in restaurants. After the break with Deutsch, Vidia talked about him very differently.
And speaking of ‘you call them off,’ what of the mysterious Margaret, who had dropped from view? She and Vidia had met in 1972. I had been introduced to her in 1977, and saw her again in 1979. Vidia had publicly celebrated their love affair and professed his ardor in The New Yorker in 1994. Pat had been upset, if not desolated, by Vidia’s enthusiastic candor and his telling the world of a sexual relationship that was, after two decades, still crackling away.
Margaret, his shadow wife, had accompanied him on trips while Pat stayed home. ‘His lady love,’ Pat once said sadly, with a lump in her throat, of Margaret, who went to parties with Vidia. Margaret kept him company on his literary quests. I had not seen her for years, but I heard about her all the time. Because Vidia stayed on the American diplomatic circuit, I was always being told of his appearances. ‘Saw your friend Naipaul the other evening,’ a diplomat would say. ‘We gave a little party for him.’ And usually, ‘His friend Margaret was with him.’
That was the oddest part. I had heard this talk when he was writing his second Islam book, Beyond Belief. Twenty-four years later and he was apparently still passionate, still traveling with Margaret. Then he met Nadira: no more talk about Margaret. I had no idea how that had ended, except that it had to have been swift, and it must have been recent. Pat died. Margaret vanished. Vidia married Nadira. Margaret was in the shadows. An Indian friend of Vidia’s, Rahul Singh, wrote in an Indian magazine that Margaret was ‘an Argentinian companion’ who ‘was devastated when he married Nadira.’
To all relations … there’s always a time to call them off. I took ‘all’ to be his usual hyperbole for everyone but me. We were still friends. As for his silence, well, he was famous for his silences. All that had happened was that I had received a crazy letter from his excitable new wife. He probably knew nothing about it.
One thing in Nadira’s letter puzzled me: her mention of Vidia’s forthcoming biography. This as an imminent possibility had never occurred to me. I knew that Vidia had interviewed several prospective biographers but that nothing was settled. The project seemed inauspicious, for who but a masochist would take on the thankless and unrewarding job of being anyone’s official biographer? Access to letters had entertainment value – they had, to use a Vidia phrase, ‘horror interest.’ But that sort of book always verges on hagiography.
The subtext of her letter was: Don’t write about him. This offended me. I had become a writer to be a free man, in Vidia’s own terms, not to take direction. And yet, when people asked me to write about him, I said no. I had no enthusiasm to write a biography. Until I received Nadira’s letter I had not even considered using Vidia as the subject of a book. I would pass my memories and letters to the designated Boswell and let that person do the work. Vidia was my friend. A book about such a friendship was an attractive idea, but it was impossible. Friendship had its rules.
And there was no model: such a portrait had never been done. In literary history no books that I knew about detailed this sort of friendship – say, young Samuel Beckett writing a book about his years with the older James Joyce. The subject of protégés and apprenticeship was one that had fascinated me since my earliest days with Vidia in Uganda. Henry James had written of his friendship with Turgenev in Partial Portraits, in the course of which he mentioned Flaubert in a way that brought Vidia to mind.
‘But there was something ungenerous in his genius,’ James wrote. ‘He was cold, and he would have given everything he had to be able to glow … Flaubert yearned, with all the accumulations of his vocabulary, to touch the chord of pathos. There were some parts of his mind that did not “give,” that did not render a sound. He had had too much of some sorts of experience and not enough of others. And yet this failure of an organ, if I may call it, inspired those who knew him with a kindness. If Flaubert was powerful and limited, there is something human, after all, and even rather august in a strong man who has not been able to express himself.’
Young Gorky, also something of a protégé, wrote about old Tolstoy, saying, ‘Although I admire him, I do not like him … He is exaggeratedly preoccupied, he sees nothing and knows nothing outside himself.’
So, speaking strictly of writers, such a book had never been done. Anyway, how could one write a book about a friendship in progress? One of Vidia’s acquaintances urged me to, saying, ‘Not the authorized book, but a shadow biography.’ I said no. As friends, our story was incomplete. Vidia himself had said, ‘One must write every book as though it is the final work, the summing up.’
‘I would never write a book about Vidia,’ I said. ‘He is my friend. It is impossible to write about him and remain in touch. Vidia himself said that a book must be written from a position of strength. A book celebrates an ending, a finale. When the friend, or the friendship, is dead. It needs a conclusion. It needs a death. I haven’t got one.’