Paul Theroux's Sir Vidia's Shadow and Norman Podhoretz's Ex- Friends
Packer, George
THESE REVENGES dressed up as memoirs are untrustworthy, not necessarily in the facts presented, but in the sense Orwell meant when he wrote, "Autobiography is only to be trusted when it...
...But the first hundred pages of Sir Vidia's Shadow have some good descriptions of East African travel and of expatriate life in Uganda, where Theroux, age twenty-four, and Naipaul, a very old thirty-four, met at the university in Kampala in 1966...
...It also figured in the work of serious thinkers like the psychologist R.D...
...PODHORETZ is one of the last survivors of what he calls the Family...
...Norman P., seven years younger, wanted to be more like Norman M. Knowing that he couldn't, he enjoyed Mailer's high-voltage companionship enormously...
...Diana Trilling was tolerated only because she was Lionel's wife...
...Naipaul leaves Africa, and eventually Theroux does too...
...They suffer from the problems of tone and meaning that arise when books claim to be doing something other, and higher, than what they're really doing...
...At one point in Making It, Podhoretz drew a nice distinction between pre-Freudian hypocrisy, which took the form of nobility—"the ascription of purer motives to oneself than one was actually acting upon"—and the Freudian kind, which took the form of honesty—"ascribing baser motives to oneself than one is in fact being driven by...
...Ginsberg was a rival and enemy almost from the start...
...I wanted always to be his friend...
...Yet he could only bring himself to an expression of this repugnance by a route so convoluted and difficult to follow that many readers were at a loss to figure out what he was trying to say...
...Perhaps this literary style is as much a self-betrayal as sitting by while Naipaul condescended to Mrs...
...I have a friend...
...Diana was the teacher's wearisome wife...
...treat him handsomely and there was a chance he would be kind...
...But if similar parties are being held today, I think rumors of them would have reached me, and so I can only conclude that they are as much a thing of the past as the intellectual life out of which they originally emerged...
...It is not virtue at all to be cruel in this way...
...They present themselves as dispassionately truthful remembrances...
...In a way it is late for Theroux the writer as well, for his own books owe something of their strain of sourness to the teacher's example (without the teacher's brilliant vision...
...And in Breaking Ranks: He allowed me to publish a section of Sincerity and Authenticity which I featured even though I found it characteristically muffled in its attack on the idea of insanity as a species of rebellion against the spiritual oppressions of middle-class society...
...He would inform some perfectly ordinary and uninteresting girl that she could have been a great madam running the best whorehouse in town . . If you're going to change your mind about a friend, at least you could find new prose for the occasion...
...Even my obituary for his wife was dishonest...
...Maybe not—but it is clear that after the hurtful experience of 1967-1968 Podhoretz's cherished entry to Family gatherings lost a good deal of its pleasure...
...FRIENDSHIP between writers is inherently unstable: the basis of friendship is also the source of rivalry...
...This idea had been from the beginning—in Allen Ginsberg's declaration that "the best minds" of his generation had been driven mad and in Norman Mailer's celebration of the psychopath (about which more later)—a central element of the new radicalism...
...Lawrence, whom he had discovered...
...His posthumous wins have begun to seem hollow...
...And yet remembering Mailer et al...
...Near the end of the 1967 book this passage appears: Like most famous writers, [Mailer] was surrounded by courtiers and sycophants, but with this difference: he allowed them into his life not to flatter but to give his radically egalitarian imagination a constant workout...
...Yet the two books are suffused with a kind of critical warmth that makes every well-made sentence glow...
...Cherish him and he was yours...
...Or in the words of Joseph Conrad: "The pity of it is that there comes a time when all the fun of one's life must be looked for in the past...
...Blood of the Liberals will appear in 2000...
...This friendship I now realized was as strong as love...
...By now we knew each other well and had arrived at that point at which friends realize they cannot know each other any better...
...To stay in this man's good graces I flattered and lied...
...Ex-Friends gets the last self-justifying word into arguments with half a dozen people, all but one dead...
...Thus, in Ex-Friends: All [Trilling] ever did was allow me to publish one of the lectures he delivered at Harvard that were subsequently brought together in his book Sincerity and Authenticity...
...he fell out with some of the subjects of his Portraits, including D.H...
...Making It is similarly pilfered—with a twist...
...In doing so he violated one of the teacher's most important maxims: "The man must never precede the book...
...He summoned these ghosts to get in the last word and ends up missing them...
...What a high price for this nettled attention...
...It only implied a mean heart...
...Norman Podhoretz's new book provides an inadvertent guide to the pathology of literary relationships...
...If my wife's memory was accurate, then Diana was simply lying, and not fantasizing when she accused me of lying about Lionel's advice...
...It seems late for these recognitions...
...Now, he says, "I remain proud of the part I went on to take in the fight against the political ideas and attitudes in whose service she corrupted her work and brought, as I now see it, lasting dishonor upon her name...
...I was who I was in some part because of my friendship with them, and I am who I am in larger part because we ceased being friends...
...104 DISSENT / Winter 1999...
...In punishment, the book became the object of venom and rebuttal before it had even come out...
...Long passages quote or closely paraphrase without attribution Podhoretz's previous books (this was also the case with Breaking Ranks...
...Lionel Trilling was the teacher...
...I am reasonably sure," Podhoretz writes, in the syntax of pre-Freudian hypocrisy, "after conscientiously probing the region surrounding the lower depths of critical integrity, that not even a minor contribution has been made to my harsh judgment of [Mailer's] later work by a lingering resentment over his article on Making It...
...So that you know where a man DISSENT / Winter 1999 • 99 stands...
...and Theroux cannibalizes old articles in Sir Vidia's Shadow...
...The form of faithful recollection is more and more undermined by a tone of unacknowledged hostility in the choice of incidents...
...Perhaps coincidentally, Podhoretz can't summon much admiration for any of Mailer's books since The Armies of the Night—which appeared around the same time as the piece in Partisan Review—and as for Mailer's criticism of Making It, Podhoretz elaborated a theory in Breaking Ranks, recycled in Ex-Friends, that Mailer couldn't bring himself to defy the verdict of the literary establishment (Trilling's disapproval of the book is given essentially the same account: he didn't have the stomach to fight the increasingly radical New York Intellectuals...
...Laing and in more popular form in a novel like Ken Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, which, as a measure of its by then mass appeal, was turned into a very successful movie...
...But revisited three decades on, and compared to Ex-Friends, it reads a little like the early passages in Sir Vidia's Shadow—almost winning in its frank hungers (maybe the problem with literary friendships is that writers get older...
...And Theroux compounded the damage post-publication, in an exercise of blunt self-justification, by writing more Naipaulia for the New York Times Book Review, like a machine that can't be turned off...
...He did not become a neoconservative because Making It was rejected by his friends, but their rejection made the move less wrenching than it might have been...
...One would like to honor Podhoretz for what was, after all, a principled sacrifice, though this is made difficult by the fact that his sense of humor was lost along with his friends...
...With its bald confession of success worship, Making It brought down the contempt of almost everyone he admired on Podhoretz's head when it appeared in 1967...
...For Theroux, at the start of his career, encountering in that unlikely place this uncompromising, "almost unlovable," yet curious and intimate man, who encouraged him and then pronounced him a writer, was one of the "miracles" that Naipaul told him sometimes happen...
...Naipaul's protégé has been made out to be a worse book than it actually is, and Theroux himself is to blame for this...
...As Ford Madox Ford said of his own divorce, it hurt him in his dinner invitations...
...But why did Podhoretz write it...
...For three decades Theroux lived for Naipaul's praise, or even his presence, and received more of both than almost anyone...
...A footnote explaining how she called Podhoretz a liar for claiming in Breaking Ranks that Trilling had warned him not to publish Making It gives you an idea of the airless, joyless atmosphere of this third autobiography: One reason my wife was so angry was that she recalled a conversation during our trip together to Germany—a conversation at which Diana had been present and in the course of which Lionel repeated what he had previously told me tete-a-tete about publishing Making It...
...There is a quality of exhausted ideas, even intellectual deterioration, in its prose...
...Challenge him and he was an enemy...
...THESE REVENGES dressed up as memoirs are untrustworthy, not necessarily in the facts presented, but in the sense Orwell meant when he wrote, "Autobiography is only to be trusted when it reveals something disgraceful...
...Most of these were friends in the Naipaulian way, and in the case of the one exception, cause and effect seem more appropriately reversed: Podhoretz lost his radical faith because he lost his friend...
...Naipaul's later works, his whole literary project, his very soul, now come in for harsh review...
...Hadn't I cherished him...
...His post-sixties politics made Podhoretz a pariah in the literary circles to which he had coveted admittance...
...I was a part of his writing life now, and he was certainly part of mine...
...Between Making It and Ex-Friends Podhoretz has reverted from Freudian to preFreudian hypocrisy...
...These pages are vivid with the rush of youthful good luck, of guileless ambition and libido, in a landscape at once seductive and menacing...
...Quoting a letter in which Lawrence gives his first impression of Ford—"fairish, fat, about forty"—he omitted the next phrase: "and the kindest man on earth...
...Both men made out well, and the end should have prompted profitscounting and not debt-collecting...
...These words are quoted in Joseph Conrad, A Personal Remembrance by Ford Madox Ford...
...If a book had a face, Ex-Friends would be thick-featured with dull wary eyes, its mouth ajar over some old wrong, the last idiot child of too much Family inbreeding...
...In other words, this is an account of friendships that ended over principle...
...No one should underestimate the price this exacted from the author of Making It...
...He would look into the empty eyes of some vapid upper-class girl and announce to her that she could be the madam of a Mexican whorehouse .. . Thirty years later, here is what's become of the passage in Ex-Friends: Like many famous people, Mailer liked to surround himself with a crowd of courtiers, many of whom had nothing to recommend them that I could see other than their worshipful attitude toward him...
...And now that he has cut me off, I want revenge for the lifelong mark my teeth have left in my tongue...
...And here perhaps we arrive at the real motive for digging up these old quarrels in Ex-Friends: Podhoretz wants to convince himself that the losses were worth it...
...Scene after scene—so much improbably remembered dialogue—with no apparent purpose...
...that writers might not be able to remain good friends but in remembering can at least remain good writers...
...By the last sentences the conflict between ostensible and true motives is utterly, almost movingly, apparent: "I owe my ex-friends a perverse debt...
...Ford collaborated with Conrad on three novels before falling out...
...In all truth, I much prefer who I am to who I was...
...The strength of one diminishes the other...
...We shall be left with the Trillings and the Podhoretzes quarreling in Germany over a book, and then quarreling in another book over the first book, and then still quarreling over the second book in yet another DISSENT / Winter 1999 101 book...
...This idea had been from the beginning (in Allen Ginsberg's declaration that the "best minds" of his generation had gone mad and in Norman Mailer's celebration of the psychopath) a central element of the new radicalism, and it still figured in the work of serious thinkers like the psychologist R.D...
...This clash produces a characteristic tone, with its own roundabout syntax, a tone of high-minded insult, as when Podhoretz ("after a long debate with myself") turns down an invitation to Norman Mailer's seventy-fifth birthday party: "I had no wish to put myself in the false position of participating in the celebration of a career that had so bitterly disappointed my literary expectations...
...The slight changes are baffling...
...I let him stick me with an expensive dinner bill and went home to my son without the storybook I'd promised to buy him...
...that outliving friends-turned-enemies gives you, along with the last word, a burden of trustworthy portraiture...
...It's a comfort to think so anyway...
...It was also an idea profoundly repugnant to Trilling, and yet, as in the case of his Jefferson Lecture, he could only bring himself to an expression of this repugnance by a route so convoluted and difficult to follow that many readers were lost on the way...
...But this self-plagiarism also gives the writer away...
...This faith [that you will be all right in the end] your friends cannot give you: it is something you have to discover in yourself...
...Here we see contrasted as vividly as possible the generous, excitable, somewhat sycophantic Norman Podhoretz of 1967 and the dismissive, soured man he became...
...Podhoretz says that he lost his famous friends—Ginsberg, the Trillings, Arendt, Hellman, and Mailer—because he lost his radical faith...
...has left him unexpectedly nostalgic...
...Which does not prove, I hasten to add, that my wife's memory was faulty...
...As a sequel to Making It and Breaking Ranks (from which it exhumes long passages), Ex-Friends ought to have been called Settling Scores...
...and unlike the other ex-friends, the quality of the other Norman's relationship with him appears to have been a real friendship...
...To depend on an earlier passage for phrasing and observation while making small changes that give it, unacknowledged, an entirely different coloring, strikes me as deeply dishonest...
...His friendship was a pleasure and a relief...
...self-justification was not his motive...
...Even more than 100 DISSENT / Winter 1999 Theroux, who buries his spite in the raw clay of narrative, Podhoretz's writing suffers from the clash of ostensible and true motives...
...After all, the material in Ex-Friends is not fresh...
...Over and over, with the ardor of a lover, Theroux speaks of Naipaul as his friend...
...Aim high...
...And it was, finally, an idea profoundly repugnant to Lionel...
...Decades of political combat have not had an elevating effect on the temperament of this former literary critic...
...What started fresh has become dull, a transcription bent on exposure, like the Starr Report...
...The New Yorker beckoned and Theroux obliged with his nastiest gossip fodder...
...Paul Theroux's account of his three decades as V.S...
...Naipaul and Theroux were never friends...
...If so, all the fierce battles of the New York Intellectuals, from Stalinism and the Pound award to Eichmann and Vietnam, shall have ended in this byzantine footnote...
...There are letters exchanged across continents, reunions over dinner in London, and Theroux marries and has children and begins to publish his work, prolifically enough for Naipaul to cease giving advice and start expressing envy, and the two become neighbors again in the English countryside, and Naipaul's behavior grows insufferable, and Theroux spends three decades listening with a smile on his face, and something goes wrong with this book...
...He did himself a disservice by allowing the New Yorker to run a version before the book appeared that squeezed together the choicest slices of incriminating detail: Naipaul's contempt for Africans and white "infies," his cruel treatment of his long-suffering wife Pat, his affairs, his monumental prickliness, his cheapness, his second marriage to a domineering Pakistani woman—who apparently prevailed on him to cut Theroux off...
...I was inspired by his work and his conviction...
...Lillian Hellman gave access to glamour and fun...
...GEORGE PACKER'S most recent novel, Central Square (Graywolf Press), was published last fall...
...Tell the truth...
...The book is his Sir Vidia's Shadow...
...I featured it as a lead article even though it disappointed me in being so muffled in its attack on the idea of insanity as a species of rebellion against the spiritual oppressions of middle-class society...
...Naipaul in return enjoyed many favors done and was made to feel like a master...
...Laing and in more popular form in a novel like Ken Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest which, as a measure of its by-then mass appeal, was subsequently turned into a very successful movie...
...UNTIL 1967—when Making It appeared to denunciations from the Family, and Mailer, having expressed private approval to Podhoretz, wrote a good-tempered but ultimately critical review of the book for Partisan Review...
...The flattering was especially in evidence with women, not only or even primarily as a means of seduction but mainly as a way of romanticizing and thereby inflating the sig1O2 DISSENT / Winter 1999 nificance of everything that came into his life...
...If he were to reflect, he would have to admit something like this: "I am recording these scenes because for three decades I said nothing while this man reduced his wife to tears or insulted the waiter or spoke ill of children...
...Nonetheless, it would be wrong to speak of betrayal in the ordinary sense...
...And his change of mind about Mailer gives us a clue to why he would choose, nearing old age, to turn back and declare himself well rid of the friends of his youth...
...Because these two books call into question the very notion that literary friendship itself is possible, the real betrayal here is not of the subject-targets but the self...
...and Portraits from Life is his Ex-Friends...
...Naipaul was free with literary advice of a grimly bracing sort, and his wintry aphorisms are perhaps the most valuable thing in the book...
...Read his literary memoirs and you will see that age can bring generosity...
...Mailer is in many ways this book's exception, and its key...
...Its lack of generosity and wisdom is almost astonishing...
...Conceivably, there are lively parties today to which I am not invited that are similar to the ones I used to go DISSENT / Winter 1999 103 to and give," he speculates...
...Theroux...
...I was content to be Sir Vidia's shadow because his approval meant the world to me...
...A few of them I grew to like well enough...
...But even in the company of these, Mailer was always at his worst, and with the other hangers-on, who came and went and sometimes stayed, he could be positively intolerable—posing, showing off, bumping heads (another of his favorite sports), bullying, ordering about, and, underneath it all, flattering...
...Once Theroux is "freed"—rejected, but not for having challenged Naipaul, for he never did—the resentment flows...
...Nonetheless, it was a loss...
...Writers make friends with other writers because they are writers, and immediately they are in competition...
...Podhoretz felt betrayed—not in the lofty contest of ideas, but in the most humiliatingly personal way possible, kicked by a friend when he was down...
...In fact, the spirit of rancor is so corrosive that it strips the glamour off the back of the most stubbornly glamorous literary fantasies: the writer as traveler and exile, the circle of New York Intellectuals...
...The greatest writing is a disturbing vision offered from a position of strength—aspire to that...
...Theroux is fifty-seven...
...Don't use words for effect...
...Nevertheless, I cannot help feeling nostalgic about the 'old days' when I was, in Norman Mailer's authoritative estimation, so much 'merrier' than I am now, and I cannot help missing the people I admired, liked, enjoyed, and even (in a few cases) loved when I was young and they, though not so young, were all at their best and still in their prime...
...With Lillian Hellman, Podhoretz lied for years about his opinion of her writing and kept silent about his opinion of her politics so that he wouldn't lose his purchase on "the glamor and the glitter to which she offered easy access...
...He is still alive...
...And literary friendship is sometimes a pretty phrase for what amounts to mutual use—so that when friends becomes ex-friends it is generally because the use has been used up...
...He omitted the whole account of their rift from his book on Conrad...
...Just as Theroux's real feelings, shame and anger, erupt in the closing pages of his book, as Podhoretz says his last goodbye to his exfriends the tone of high-minded insult collapses and he comes clean...
...He is my friend, I thought...
...Theroux does not reflect on his material, because he cannot let himself reflect...
...The only consolation of the writing profession is that it is fair...
...The last few pages finally say as much...
...But I continued to give Diana the benefit of the doubt on this matter, because although I did remember a difficult conversation the four of us had in Germany about Making It, I did not recall Lionel's repeating his advice not to publish it...
...Ford did not write out of a grievance...
...We are supposed to believe that the new book examines "why it is so hard for friends who disagree about large and apparently impersonal subjects like politics or literature to remain friends...
...And that was the beginning of the end for the Normans...
...So we had never quarreled...
...Some of it is as stale as hardtack...
...You see this in Sir Vidia's Shadow: Naipaul wanes whenever Theroux waxes...
...It throws every other observation and interpretation into doubt...
...He had the true novelist's curiosity about people unlike himself—you could see him getting hooked ten times a night by strangers at a party—and his respect for modes of life other than his own was so great that it often led him into romanticizing people and things that might legitimately have been dismissed as uninteresting or mediocre...
...Conceivably this is the last memoir we shall have from a blood member...
...Allen Ginsberg, former Columbia literary pal, toward the end of his life tried to end their decades of mutual hatred, but Podhoretz rebuffed him in life and "still could not bring myself to forgive him, not even now that he was dead" for promoting drug use and sexual promiscuity...
...He knew what our memoirists have forgotten: justice demands that some things be omitted...
...Every good book suggests that the writer, however painful its subject, has arrived at some inward peace about it, some inner resolution, even of anger and despair, even though this peace and resolution is purely temporary...
...Hannah Arendt's company lent intellectual distinction...
...They were all primarily useful, whereas the "existentialist" Mailer of the late fifties and sixties, with his radical ideas about sex and success, caught Podhoretz's imagination in an uncalculated way...
...He was my friend, he had shown me what was good in my writing, he had drawn a line through anything that was false...
Vol. 46 • January 1999 • No. 1
