Biting the hand that rarely paid for lunch
Frederic Raphael
SIR VIDIA'S SHADOW by Paul Theroux Hamish Hamilton, £17.99, pp. 376 Writers' friendships are often written on water; their enmities are chiselled in stone. Disillusionment and betrayal are harpies that sup on scraps. Dickens broke with Thackeray; Wain with Amis; Scott Fitzgerald with Hemingway. Ernest was probably the shittiest of the breed: he viciously parodied his mentor, Sherwood Anderson, for the trivially pressing reason that he needed to get out of a contract with the publisher they shared. In Madrid, dur- ing the Spanish Civil War, he tried to shop John Dos Passos to the NKVD, perhaps because he feared that his might be a more durable talent. Love affairs between authors can last, as is proved by the raptur- ous, pretty well unruptured mutual admira- tion of Lawrence Durrell and Henry Miller (trust two ladies' men to wind up metaphorically in bed together). An older man sometimes patronises a younger, as Flaubert did Guy de Maupassant, or beds him without benefit of metaphor, as Ver- laine did Rimbaud, without gratitude turn- ing to spite. However, as Sir Vidia's Shadow proves, there is nothing like having sat at a man's feet for making one announce that they were made of clay.
Paul Theroux's friendship with quondam (now Sir) V. S. Naipaul is billed as being `across five continents' and this account of its grateful origins and bitter aftertaste is one of those I-wish-I'd-thought-of-that extensions of prose narrative of which its author is a master. It starts in Uganda, where the unpublished twenty-something Theroux is teaching and encounters the al- ready acclaimed and elderly-seeming Naipaul (a decade his senior) on one of the foreign tours to which he is grumblingly addicted. Outdoing his friend Kingsley Amis, who hated it anywhere but here, Naipaul proves to like it nowhere. His `native' Trinidad merely confirms that he is a displaced Brahmin, but India is never his Zion. He shares his younger brother Shiva's disdain for the so-called Third World and its sleazy morals, but neither fraternity nor common contempts make him sympathetic to the 'laziness' of his sib- ling, who died very young of heart disease.
Vidia endears himself to the young Ther- oux by the unfailing means of being the first to salute him as 'a writer'. This long, unfalteringly seductive, and/because bil- ious, non-fiction novel burns with the accu- rate rage of a scorned disciple. Judas and Theroux kiss with the same disappointed fury. Since Naipaul bad-mouths everyone and everything, Theroux seems immune to a charge of unwarranted betrayal. First, however, he makes us understand — if not quite share — his infatuation, despite his subject's want of any symptoms of charm, warmth or generosity. Naipaul is shown as being pitilessly cruel to his wife — whose breasts the young Theroux, quite a cocks- man in his hot African youth, fancies more keenly than does her separately-bed- roomed husband — and he remains cal- lous, we are promised, when she is dying of cancer.
Theroux is almost as harsh with himself as he is with Naipaul; as elsewhere, he does not confuse self-portraiture with narcis- sism, despite a sentimental spot for his `Those animal rights gnomes have released the reindeer!' juvenile ambitions. He takes warranted pride in having survived by his wits and the pen that makes them marketable. A key moment comes when he travels with Vidia to Oxford (about which Naipaul whinges as usual):
The train soothed and comforted me and stimulated my imagination . . . I had made a discovery; I would gladly go anywhere by train.
So is bestsellerdom conceived; since then Theroux has made a fortune by going pretty well everywhere accessible by rail, often with readably crotchety consequences which echo his old friend.
Theroux's literary and personal life have been bumpier than his preferred means of travel. His autobiography is snappy with things we have all, mutatis mutandis, been through. He is treated to a vinous lunch by a smug publisher who then rejects his new novel. He gets to know bitchy insiders:
`Stephen Tennant is the March Hare and the Red Queen rolled into one,' [Julian] Jebb said, and cupped his hand close to his mouth and whispered in my ear in his affected Amer- ican accent, 'Faggot'.
Poor Julian! He so wanted to be big and handsome and butch.
Theroux's own departure from London, and his wife, is slyly covered with an implic- itly endorsing quotation from Larkin. As for increasing fame and self-assurance, he emphasises them both by willingness to bite the hand which he used to feed (Naipaul is portrayed as being as reluctant to pick up the tab as our greatest living publisher) and by the increasing sententiousness of his obiter dicta: human friendship, he con- cludes,
arises less from an admiring love of strength than a sense of gentleness, a suspicion of weakness. It is compassionate intimacy, a powerful kindness, and a knowledge of imper- fection.
Fortunately, such verbose and questionable conceits are rare. What is deliciously evi- dent is vindictive joy in the writer's lonely, often vengeful trade. His desecrating depiction of a sacred monster (whose nov- els I have found to be little more than coy curiosities) culminates in, and was perhaps detonated by, the discovery that Sir Vidia had sold off the inscribed copies of Ther- oux's work presented to him on publication down the years. Their last, chance meeting in Gloucester Road is described with all the curt thoroughness of the emancipated slave: 'Do we have something to discuss?' No.' He had almost broken away. He was moving crabwise, crouching a bit, cramming his hat down. 'What do we do then?' Take it on the chin and move on.'
When Flaubert gave Boule de Suif his imprimatur, he acknowledged that his pro- tégé had come of age. So here Theroux proves to have nothing left to learn from the man whose shadow weighod.so heavily on him for so long. Gore Vidal, move over; never was gall more palatably served.
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