Beyond Belief / Sir Vidia's Shadow
Theroux, Paul & Naipaul, V.S.
In Vidia's Debt: The Price of Literary Friendship Beyond Belief: Islamic Excursions Among the Converted Peoples V.S. Naipaul Random House /408 pages / $27.95 Sir Vidia's Shadow: A Friendship...
...Through trade, the rule of law, the exchange of ideas, colonialism had introduced the peoples of the world to each other, and now it was for all of them to make of their culture what they could...
...Danielle Steele again pipes up: "I rejoiced in pleasing him...
...Like almost everyone of his age and background, he might have made victimhood his central theme...
...14 82 October 1998 • The American Spectator...
...There is no subject here...
...However much Naipaul gave, he was taking more away...
...Friendship with Naipaul was a privilege, and should have been a liberation...
...Unlike Naipaul, Theroux has children, and he loves them...
...Theroux did not witness Naipaul's cruelties to publicity girls, waiters, and other defenseless bystanders, but he repeats second-hand gossip about them...
...Even when whites were granting independence to others and offering integration at home, they were at fault...
...Islam is an Arab religion, for Arabs primarily...
...Apparently Naipaul enjoyed little satisfactory sex whereas Theroux by his own account was a sexual athlete, reveling in affairs with Yomo, Heather, innumerable African women willingly taken home for one-night stands...
...Among them was his English mistress, whom he murdered...
...But he saw other strengths in me...
...The world, he found, did not match the stereotypes of it then being offered...
...This was to be the central theme of Naipaul's mature writing...
...The two were still able to smooth over differences of opinion...
...It was all he could do to restrain himself from making advances to Pat with her heavy breasts (she was the most loyal of wives, I must say on her behalf, but flat-chested...
...On inspection of the past, Theroux depicts himself as the victim of Naipaul...
...Naipaul and Theroux had been colleagues for a while at Makerere University, in Uganda...
...A child of the Raj, then, dispossessed materially and above all culturally...
...The man was a bully at heart...
...The former was already famous, clever and confident enough to defend any opinion and its opposite...
...His life was full, Naipaul's was empty...
...The peoples of these countries are genuine victims of their own culture, and they are greatly to be pitied for it.44 His every word and gesture are taken literally, as if there were no humor to him, no insecurity...
...The word masterpiece is hung round Naipaul's neck twice in the opening paragraph...
...Theroux believed that all was well with Africa, he learned two African languages and sprinkles them about dramatically...
...It is not a book of opinions...
...Born in Trinidad in 1932, Naipaul DAVID PRYCE-JONES is the author of The Closed Circle: An Interpretation of the Arabs...
...Naipaul's every word and gesture are to be taken literally, as if there were no humor to him, no trying things on for effect, and no insecurity...
...Making every allowance, deferring politely, he did not deserve the least little slight...
...Aim high, the former master had said, tell the truth...
...Integration is a delusion, and the universal values in Naipaul's work, it follows, really are a sellout...
...something in my heart...
...This is a book about people," Naipaul begins...
...In common with the people Naipaul writes about with such concern, Theroux is trapped in unhappy and self-injuring fantasies...
...He predicted that much of the continent would soon revert to the bush...
...The free play of intellect and reason must one day liberate these unfortunate people, as it liberated him...
...Naipaul: An Introduction to His Work, which is more like a slim volume of poetry than a critical appreciation...
...my ambitions and moods in the slope and stroke of my handwriting...
...They seem to have been selected by chance, but others would have had similar stories to tell...
...After four years on a scholarship to Oxford, Naipaul established a base in London...
...In the grip of emotion, Theroux, actually a talented writer, melts into Danielle Steel...
...Naipaul's account of this crime stopped in its tracks the incipient Black Power movement in Britain...
...In his perspective, mankind can, must, and eventually will think its way out of the present impasse...
...As the self-appointed new master, Theroux is ordering Naipaul to his rightful place, inescapably classified with the shopkeepers and "nigrescents...
...Although mindlessness is laying waste the culture, for Naipaul there has to be hope and compassion...
...In 1963, as literary editor of a weekly magazine in London, I asked Naipaul to contribute...
...77 Beyond Belief, his new book, covers the same ground, and sometimes the very same characters...
...Repudiating his literary debts, rubbishing Naipaul as a man and a writer, he hopes to leave himself the undisputed master...
...He saw my soul in my face, my art in the lines of my palm...
...Too much was never enough...
...Theroux is the victim only of himself...
...On three occasions over a number of years, the two had meals together, and each time Naipaul left the much poorer Theroux to pay the bill, and once without enough money to take a cab to the station...
...Footloose, he spent long periods from the late fifties onwards in India and Africa, exploring the social and historical developments that had made him what he was...
...She comes from Bahawalpur, or Bowelpur, in another of Theroux's ideas of a joke...
...He became my friend...
...Naipaul thought little of his African students, and even less of the expats...
...He sold inscribed copies of Theroux's books...
...In 1972, Theroux published V.S...
...Naipaul was abrupt with his wife and his brother Shiva, also a writer, indeed with all his friends, including Margaret, a lover...
...Exploitation and slavery, for instance, were not unique to modem whites, but had existed immemorially in societies, from the Greeks to the Arabs and of course the Africans themselves...
...In novels set in the West Indies and in Africa, he depicted hitherto oppressed blacks who at the first opportunity prove oppressors themselves...
...But as a result of his deepening perception that in defense of their culture people rely on prejudice rather than on the available tools of intellect and reason, his books have become more and more tragic, and their implication more and more universal...
...So a list of petty grievances descends to personal remarks and prejudices...
...There are different awards of knighthood, but no degree among them, so Theroux's joke that it was "cut-price" is meaningless...
...Under a surface of continuing friendship, though, Theroux was building up a grudge...
...By definition, the powerful are imperialist...
...The damage is lasting...
...At the time, erg` the process of decolonization was encouraging huge numbers of Indians, Africans, Arabs, and others to blame an abstraction called imperialism for all their political, social, and personal ills...
...It was an act of liberation to reject victimhood so absolutely...
...Accidents of time and place had introduced a disciple to a master...
...Natural writer that he is, he treats contacts and relationships as raw material, he understates or exaggerates, trying things on for effect, perhaps insecure himself at some level...
...He had nobody and nothing to rely on as he made his way, arriving in England in the postwar wave of West Indian immigrants...
...As they speak, Naipaul hears in the background "the steady grinding down of the old world...
...As for Nadira Naipaul, she is "the big dusky woman from Pakistan," who writes "babu English" and whose "purple belly" features in his nightmares...
...Not Arabs at all, Iranians, Pakistanis, Malays, and Indonesians have their own cultures, complete with sacred sites, from a quite different past of Buddhism, Hinduism, and animism...
...Naipaul's success, then, is not success at all but the misconceived and absurd consequence of turning his back on victim-hood, his sole true vocation, as racist critics in the Third World have long The American Spectator • October /998 been saying...
...Many upper-class whites backed him...
...It is a book of stones...
...In his opinion, the obituary he wrote of Pat was not properly appreciated by Naipaul or his new wife Nadira...
...The pristine sense of comedy survives, as Naipaul writes about so much that is pretentious or ridiculous...
...Since these stings were so searingly traumatic that Theroux keeps on referring to them, could he not have resorted to the time-honored strategy of going Dutch...
...Anyone in search of a good or even entertaining row will not find it...
...Much in the manner of Naipaul, he wrote reviews, novels, travel books...
...He had edited some of Theroux's work...
...It was then that Third World intellectuals began to campaign against him...
...Hardly connected at all with classical Islam, the phenomenon derives from the retreat out of history into myth, and from ignorance, and pride shattered by the encounter with modernity...
...Notepad in hand, one question leading to another, Naipaul pressed his interlocutors to reveal themselves and their lives, and the part played by Islam...
...In contrast, Theroux was invariably kind and generous...
...Round about 1965, he brought to my house the young Paul Theroux, and whispered in my ear, "He works for the CIA...
...What had Naipaul done...
...Aim high, he had told Theroux, tell the truth...
...His work serves to extract reality from the indeterminate mess of human life...
...I remember everything," Theroux asserts, putting conversations of long ago into consecutive pages of direct speech...
...Literature has no higher purpose...
...He had himself driven by Theroux on long trips in Kenya and the Congo (much useful information here, incidentally, about the origins of Naipaul's African novels...
...Their white sympathizers believe that Third World violence is not violence at all but a retribution justified by history...
...After all these years, he could no longer contain himself...
...Theroux then settled in England, within reach of the master...
...Naipaul's originality, his greatness, lay in taking that crucial step, because afterwards the way was open to become a writer with universal values...
...Even when Third World populations were killing each other in tribal and national wars, whites were again at fault...
...Naipaul had been insufficiently consoling when Theroux's marriage broke up...
...Sir Vidia's Shadow is the result, a memoir that is also an explosion of resentment...
...Had this been so, I would have approved, but I was familiar with Naipaul's humor...
...they are who they are, no more and no less...
...This brew of guilt, condescension, and inverse racism creates a false history that is the equivalent of prison for those caught in it...
...G reat writers attract hangers-on, who more often than not become disappointed, and end as detractors, in the fashion of jilted lovers...
...England has rewarded Naipaul with prizes and honors, including a knighthood...
...Naipaul Random House /408 pages / $27.95 Sir Vidia's Shadow: A Friendship Across Five Continents Paul Theroux Houghton Mifflin / 288 pages / $24 REVIEWED BY David Pryce-Jones A t a time when books have dwindled to a function of mass-marketing, there is V.S...
...To Theroux, the title confirms that with a mixture of humbug and conceit Naipaul has anglicized himself, and is to be guyed for it as V.S...
...Nipple or Sir Vidia Nye-Powell...
...How helpless I must have seemed," the younger man recalls...
...the latter was an apprentice, unsure of himself and his subject matter...
...He had 80 October 19 9 8 The American Spectator given sound advice...
...I had thought he was very strong...
...Converts to Islam, even after a thousand years they remain victims of Arab imperialism, trapped in fantasies and a history more neurotic than factual...
...No doubt a politically correct liberal and multi-culturalist, Theroux is unable to allow that people like the Naipauls meet the English and everyone else on equal terms, absorbing the culture and contributing to it...
...He never did, but I have since been a friend of his, of his first wife Pat until her death,and of Nadira, his second wife...
...Culture and liberation everywhere were blocked by myths and fantasies, z The American Spectator • October 1998 79 the various self-serving apologetics whereby people never come to terms with what they really are, sinking back instead in victimhood...
...On a shared platform at a provincial literary festival, Naipaul spoke more than Theroux did...
...Instead, free from self-pity, his characters speak for themselves...
...Guerrillas, published in 1975, fictionalized the story of one Michael de Freitas, a black racist from Trinidad...
...So-called liberals in the West still subscribe to this caricature of whites as simple victimizers, and Third World populations as simple victims...
...At this point I must declare an interest...
...The unlikeliness of his career is marvelous...
...Naipaul's refusal of victimhood, as they saw it, was a denial of solidarity, and worse, a sellout...
...Interrupting his own work at a difficult moment, Theroux wrote a blurb for one of Naipaul's books, and he was to recommend his own agent and publisher to Naipaul...
...Essential to universal values, intellect and reason do not fail in the long run...
...Original in himself, and wide-ranging, he is a master of narrative and observation...
...Islamic fundamentalism has burnt out Iran, and threatens to do the same in the other countries...
...Some were prominent, others humble: farmers, a lawyer, an Iranian boy-soldier, a Marxist guerrilla from Baluchistan, and many more...
...is the descendant of indentured laborers shipped from India...
...Patronization of this kind destroys those they claim to be helping, and themselves too...
...I n 1981 he published Among the Believers, reporting on Iran, Pakistan, Malaya, and Indonesia, four countries troubled by the irrational frenzy loosely resumed under the label of Islamic fundamentalism...
...Rejecting the exclusive identities of tribe and race to which they clung, he was "fouling his nest," as one famous West Indian poet put it...
...Naipaul is only kidding himself, he is "creepy," pretending to be a thorough Englishman while remaining "a nigrescent West Indian," whom every English passer-by automatically sneers at as a shopkeeper, a dukawallah...
Vol. 31 • October 1998 • No. 10
