What the imagination knows

...But he is seduced by the call girl he has hired to bait the trap for the general who, in the interim, has found his own whore Mimesis moves to interesting climaxes as Jack sees that if he were to incriminate the general he would condemn himself...

...He was as pitiless and enigmatic as most of the adults I knew—they all spoke for Him anyway—and He said no just as often...

...He murders grotesquely a woman who answers his ad and then assumes that woman's life Chicago Loop has the psychological nightmare quality of Crime and Punishment, and a similar plot— but there is no Sonia to redeem Raskolnikov Parker's is not a crime instigated by inhuman pride, the mind over heart which gives the superman his place in history This is libido as explosive and demanding At one point Parker and his wife visit the Mapplethorpe exhibit and discuss the photographs It is characteristic of Theroux that he should explore the morality of art in his work, asking, as we are told Mapplethorpe's photographs ask, for recognition that people do terrible things to each other And in fictional fashion Theroux can both affirm and deny that assertion by allowing the plot of the novel to exhibit the moral horror of what people do to each other, as aggressors and victims The truth of this novel is Dionysian...

...The most phys21 ical way of coming out of ourselves or of accepting another is also the most isolating—except, as Theroux suggests on occasion, for the joy of procreating children Most readers cannot match in breadth or intensity the experiences Paul Theroux presents, yet it is the burden of realist fiction to convince us that the characters matter, that their conflicts and emotions are meaningful, and that the pattern of art in some way contains the ragged ends of life The success of his travel books indicates how well he convinces others of the truth of what he has seen...

...The narrator is forced to confront himself, to recognize in the "secret sharer" his own capacity for evil—in this case murder—and face a moral decision keep the double's existence secret and be comphcit in the crime, or reveal him and betray him to injustice...

...To answer, we must allow books to talk to books and understand Theroux by way of Conrad In The Secret Sharer the narrator, a ship's captain on his first command, gives help to an escaped pnsoner with whom he finds affinity and later identity...

...Theroux reminds us of the peculiar feel of ritual Latin on the tongue, the loony tensions of altar boy solemnity (the litany of altar boy gaffes is worth reading in its own right), the tussle over who rings the bells, the routine of funeral Masses...

...In Theroux's own words, "discovenng what the imagination knows" comes about by meeting the possibilities inherent in the double's life It this sense, Theroux continues the role ascnbed to a novelist like Dickens, one in which the wnter is cast as reporter of the real yet unfamiliar, a guide to the underworld hidden from ordinary daylight Theroux is not a Dickensian stylist nor is he a social reformer, but his moral imagination can be seen to offer 19 us a truth otherwise inaccessible For example, Jungle Lovers (1971), provides us with considerable knowledge of Africa Here is the initial premise What happens if Calvin Mullet, a Massachusetts insurance salesman, opens a branch office in Malawi at the moment a revolution starts...

...And yes, his fiction is joy, but certainly not "pure" in the Sixth Commandment sense of the word Theroux was born in 1941 in Medford, Massachusetts, one of seven children of a French-Canadian and Italian Catholic family...

...In emphasizing recording and discovering, in making fidelity to the truth a standard for the writer, Theroux has obligingly provided a way of discussing his own work He is a realist in the same sense that painters are representational, he offers us something recognizably human and does not disrupt fictional conventions in doing this The characters and incidents of his travel books could find themselves (and frequently do) in his novels...

...The narrator "saves" his double and so expands and integrates his sense of self The process is cathartic in the stnct sense of the word: the narrator must internalize the double's cnme and take responsibility for his flight and escape, he expenences pity, fear, and a liberating purgation In many of Theroux's later novels, this plot structure and this process work as it did for Conrad Theroux uses it, often ruthlessly, to explore "what the imagination knows" but would rather not speak And there is another complication If the double is read as a projection of the narrator's own consciousness, the device is a metaphor for the activity of the novelist as well...

...and not just events, but people and their passions Forgetting was much worse than failure it was an act of violence For all writing aimed at defeating time...

...Other concerns shape the narrative...

...Paradoxically, everything that links Paul Theroux and Andre Parent also points to that which separates them The constraints of fact or the confessional honesty we would expect from autobiography are not required in such a work...

...No one could become a writer—no one would even care about it until he or she expenenced the impartial cruelty of time passing Redeeming time sounds suspiciously sotenological and the Trinitarian formulations point to a notion of the artist in some way religious We can recall here Theroux's assertion that a travel writer undergoes ordeals which his readers could never brook, he is the servant who suffers and then brings order...

...dark and bloody drives move the hero to consume his victim, and then in the act of expiation and rebirth take on her identity Parker becomes a victim of men, in his transvestite meandenngs through Loop-land, he suffers what men do to women and he knows what men want because he did once so want Parker can release himself only in suicide, a spectacular rejection of his body in a leap off the Sears Tower The artistic patterning which constrains the violence of the plot asks a reader to reconsider notions of truth and the morality of fiction The writer takes on the burden of experience, this fallen world, and with the imagination's guidance, he discovers for and with us "what the imagination knows...

...His self-confessed desire to travel and for a freedom which defies complacency characterize the thematic drift of Theroux's fiction But it should be said that unlike a writer such as Graham Greene (with whom he has often been compared), Theroux seldom finds the tensions of his works arising from the tensions of being a Catholic Indeed, his heroes exercise the disreputable freedom that he sought and presumably found in fiction The earliest novel, Waldo {1967), is funny, picaresque, and prophetic Waldo, the eponymous hero, does not get beyond the borders of the state of Massachusetts, but he inhabits frontier regions Waldo begins in a reform school and ends in a freak show And with typical disreputable freedom, the nineteen-year-old hero has a graphically described affair with an older woman, achieves notoriety by publishing an article on the freakish death of a neighbor, and reaches a resolution of his difficulties by murdering his lover and, encased in a glass booth, suspended above the heads of his audience, by retyping the story which won him fame Waldo nods to Nathaniel West's The Dream Life ofBalso Snell but certainly marks out Theroux's own territory—sexual relations, violent and irrational impulses, freakish happenings, and the role of the wnter in connecting the real and the fictional Theroux's thematic range can be found on the pages of tabloids at the supermarket checkout, but his is a compelling moral fiction Where is the legacy of his Catholic boyhood9 We might see it in his concern with sexuality and guilt, or in the acute self-consciousness which he associates with the sinner in the confessional, but perhaps most of all in the sense of pilgrimage which characterizes his vocation as a writer one who travels to give witness The pursuit of fictional truth is really, in the structured way of art, the working out of the premise What would life be like if...

...Undoubtedly this is one way a public figure like Theroux deals with himself in that double role as private person and writer...

...There was no such thing as my privacy If someone didn't spy on me it wasn't out of respect, but because they thought I had no secrets...

...The "Altar Boy" section, which opens the novel, grounds the concept of secret history in a scene, the sacristy before Mass, and a situation, cassock and white surplice covering the sinner inside Theroux's Andy hears "an interminable whisper of suggestion that I was weak and sinful, and the sense that I was always wrong .There was something natural and unavoidable about being bad...

...Theroux's 1991 work, Chicago Loop, is in many ways his most difficult...

...The journey has an alpha and an omega which spell extremes of personality and expenence But as he also says, rail journeys always end where they begin, and to achieve this rounding of life in art, to take endings to beginnings, Theroux often uses the doppleganger or double figure made most familiar by a literary mentor, Joseph Conrad, m The Secret Sharer The impact of meeting a second self has for Theroux many fictional ramifications, the doppleganger device not only provides a taut plot structure but becomes a way of explaining the relationship between writer and subject and wnter and reader In My Secret History, for example, the double helps to define the creative process How does this device with the peculiar German name work such magic...

...Saint Jack (1973) replays The Secret Sharer even more closely, Jack, an Amencan expatriate in Singapore, finds a new sense of integration when he recognizes the essential similarity between himself and his double...

...Theroux has his ex-U.S sailor also tell us of the crisis of middle age, of the fears of young Amencan servicemen on R&R from Vietnam, and of the machinations of the CIA...

...The scene of moral crisis and triumph is typical of Theroux's fiction Jack has contracted to supply incriminating photographs of an American general...

...Similarly, in the story "Dr Demarr" in Half Moon Street (1984), we encounter twins who are tied m the womb to identical fates...

...His fiction, and I borrow here from his own reference to Mapplethorpe's exhibit, frequently forces us to admit that people do do such things to one another The earlier novels, Fong and the Indians (1968) in particular, have a lightness of tone which beguiles...

...He was the observer, the witness to all this...

...and not just events, but people and their passions " For that courage to follow his imagination we are in his debt...

...The vividness of the detail and the ease of the telling show mastery...

...and we read with the wisdom of hindsight Theroux sets his own high standard for travel, associating it with inconvenience, 18 danger, bad food, sleepless nights, and sees his success as a function of providing that expenence vicariously for the reader...

...apparent revelations about the real Paul Theroux come as a halted strip tease—we suspect that the bare truth is inaccessible but would be rather ordinary if we were to get beyond the imaginative make-up...

...But the pattern of the novel uses the secret life for ends other 20 than nostalgia " . at that age I belonged to no one, and then to everyone, because I didn't matter...

...Indeed few people could or would hazard what he encounters His ability to capture landscape, his eye for architectural detail, and his unfailing willingness to engage his fellow passengers make us want to travel through him, if not with him...

...Its narrator, Andy or Andre Parent, tells his life story which apparently doubles that of his creator, Paul Theroux...

...I suppose this is what novels do best, explain us to ourselves We rely on Theroux in Jungle Lovers to explain our responses to Africa...

...God was always glaring at me out of a hot sky...

...Theroux's "what ifs9" run to conclusions as one of the famous trains does to a terminus...

...Theroux uses this bit of yarn to look at drug addiction, problems of identity, and nasty betrayal of brother by brother...

...the fiction seems to follow the travel, at least for locale and incident There are the Africa books, the Singapore books, and United Kingdom books His reputation was made, however, not by the fiction but by The Great Railway Bazaar and consolidated (as a travel writer) by five succeeding works The novel, TheMosquito Coast (1982), transformed into a feature film, gave him the final push into international standing, confirmed by OZone (1986), My Secret History (1989), Chicago Loop (1991), and Millroy the Magician (1994) His fiction ranges as widely as his travel...

...In other novels we come to know Singapore and Central America, and, moving within, the mind of a murderer, a pimp, a Ph.D call girl, an American in self-exile on the Honduran Mosquito Coast The distance Theroux maintains from the protagonists, Calvin in Jungle Lovers, for example, offers leeway he swings in arcs of perspective moored to a sympathetic if limited consciousness We warm to Calvin, see as he sees, and learn from him, but ultimately see beyond him: the novel's close suggests his newborn son might not be his, yet Calvin imagines a stunning return to Hudson, Massachusetts, with his black African wife and "tar baby" child...

...This anchors the writer's sense of identity one who is detached yet open to experience, the observer, never the observed My Secret History offers intriguing insight into the way writers work, a particular yet fictional examination of conscience of the self who thinks and acts The successful man of letters, Andy, leads a secret and finally a double life, two countries on two continents, two houses, two women, two selves A chance notice of his reflection in a train window (naturally) causes this other sort of reflection' . I saw there was a third person...

...One can't but admire the powerful libidos of various characters, but there is seldom joy in the telling: Calvin Mullet comments on the anonymity of sex and the many graphic scenes lead characters not so much to the sadness after coition but to self-reflection...

...In his essay collection Sunrise with Seamonsters he tells us of his happy home life, his indifferent high school education ("I was a punk"), his large, extended family, and of a father who happily invited Paul's many friends, rechnstenmg them "Jack," into the family...

...He redeems self and other Sex is grace in this novel, dispensed by Saint Jack in his role as "ponce" or procurer, and saving sexual grace is ultimately visited on him...

...The double life is the single topic of My Secret History...

...The scenes he recounts of the family's summer house on Cape Cod show a warmth which should caution anyone who wishes to read the seemingly confessional novel, My Secret History, as an autobiography ) He went on to the University of Massachusetts and, since "[he] distrusted anyone who had not traveled," soon found his way as a college teacher to Africa and then, five years later, to Singapore and finally to London, where he started the trek by train that was to become The Great Railway Bazaar He has been traveling from London, often to Cape Cod and a house which brings him near to his family, ever since When in 1985 the successful Theroux looked back at his early career he saw "incompleteness being outside the current of society" as a motive driving him to a life as a writer He admits, "For years I felt that being respectable meant maintaining a sinister complacency and the disreputable freedom I sought helped make me a writer " Paul Theroux at fifty-three has written twenty-nine books, more than one a year from the time he started to publish...

...what it does to us, and what we do with it, comes as part of the novelist's territory...

...the difference between travel writing and fiction is the difference between recording what the eye sees and discovenng what the imagination knows Fiction is purejoy...

...The white man will bnng a most ambiguous burden home from the tropics...

...This prodiEDWARD T WHEELER is chairman of the English Department at the Williams School in New London, Connecticut gious output can be divided roughly into fiction and travel books...

...Sex is one of the facts of life...

...But later works, Picture Palace (1978) and those which follow, have a seriousness and intensity which convince but also appall Theroux takes us into regions of the heart and mind we often would not go by ourselves "to make people understand and remember...

...Perhaps Theroux' s greatest gift is his ability to record dialogue As he confesses, "Conversationally I am a masochist, and there is nothing I like better than putting my feet up, tearing open a can of beer, and auditing a railway bore in full cry " No one can have nothing to say to Paul Theroux and he recounts for us the great voice of the traveling human road show, be it by rail, sea, or air The novels sometimes offer far less congenial pilgrimages of the imagination...

...The arresting aspect of this novel is Theroux's projection of character: he imagines himself into the consciousness of a considerably older man...

...we find a futunstic dystopia touching its end covers with a children's book, tales of murder in the Midwest next to trials of a Chinese merchant in Africa, expatnates all over the shelf, and, ultimately, first-rate story-telling Few can resist Theroux the genial traveler The pleasures of rereading The Great Railway Bazaar are great, especially since his route in 1974 took him through what is now a very different political landscape Yugoslavia, Iran, the Soviet Union appear from the other side of a historical dividing line...

...We are warned at the start, however, that the narrator is not the author ("/ am not I"—so Theroux m his epigraph quoting Evelyn Waugh whose Gilbert Pinfold worked similar terrain...

...This is a wry and unsentimental look at a fifties Catholic boyhood Andy listens, ears burning, to his co-server's sexual exploits as they swig altar wine, alcoholic Father Furty shows Andy a human warmth that incarnates the sacred, and the pastor, a terrifying martinet, acts as a surrogate angry-god and drives Andy into disreputable freedom...

...There is a high seriousness about Theroux's fiction that gives the wnter, stilling time and gathering for his audience that which might be forgotten, a status which is both sacred and priestly As Theroux's travel books live by their recreation of verbal intercourse, his novels seem to take their energy from the sexual sort Saint Jack and Chicago Loop represent the ends of the spectrum and Theroux travels with characteristic vividness along the continuum of changes that sex rings on us...

...the one who stood aside and made the notes and wrote the books His life was lived within himself...

...He was silent, he seldom gestured, he never argued, he dreamed, he saw everything and so he was the one who suffered This rather Chnstlike third person offers one version of the writer's vocation One of the greatest things that writers did, I thought, was to isolate an event, and light it with the imagination, to make people understand and remember...

...it exploits the double structure, almost chiastically, with the central crossing a murder Parker, the protagonist, lives as a successful architect and inner-city developer and a secret correspondent and solicitor in personal ads...

...WHAT THE IMAGINATION KNOWS PAUL THEROUX'S SEARCH FOR THE SECOND SELF EDWARD T. WHEELER At the close of his best-selling travel book, The Great Railway Bazaar (1975), Paul Theroux reflects that...

...He lives a life which is doubled with Marais, a Canadian ideologue gone Maoist in revolt Their fates are paralleled and give us two ends of a spectrum, white people trying to understand and, in some sense, use Africans The book is about not understanding Africa, or about regretting mistakes in interpreting the "parish" of Malawi— a country that exists only as an act of faith...