A new biography of VS Naipaul (The World Is What It Is: The Authorized Biography of V.S. Naipaul,) by Patrick French (Picador) details what Vidia Naipaul really thought of Paul Theroux (Malawi 1963-65) who he met when Theroux was 25 and teaching at Makerere University in Kampala, Uganda. Theroux had been kicked out of the Peace Corps and returned to Africa to work as a teacher.
Naipaul wanted to see Africa and had by invited by the Farfield Foundation to be writer-in-residence at Makerere. Naipaul went to Africa with his first wife, Pat.
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Patrick French writes in his book, “Theroux was 25 years old, an enthusiastic former Peace Corps volunteer with a Nigerian girlfriend named Comfort Iruoje and ambitions to become a writer himself. Theroux was in awe of Vidia, happy to play the part of bag-carrier and disciple, and Vidia responded to the admiration by playing up to his own caricature as someone who would do and say outrageous things. They shared a willingness to upset the academic and social conventions of Makerere. Theroux noted the way that Vidia would be funny and provocative, teasing and twitting people for his own enjoyment, or to obtain information, and using archaic place names such as 'the Gold Coast' in order to outrage liberal sentiment; asked to judge a literary competition, he awarded only a third prize.”
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While they had had something of a mutual friendship at Makerere, taking trips together, for example, Naipaul quickly dismissed Theroux once out of Africa. In February 1967, while on his way to India, Naipaul sent Theroux a sarcastic letter of dismissal on the crested writing paper of the Bristol Hotel in Beirut, a missive designed to brush off a more sensitive man. He attacked Theroux use of language as inaccurate, claimed his classical knowledge was imperfect and said that his editor Diana Athill's decision to turn down Theroux's novel was right. French writes in his book, “He (Naipaul) wrote a cruelly dismissive line to a would-be novelist: 'I am happy that your journalistic ventures thrive; in this and in your other endeavours I wish you the best.'”
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Theroux didn’t take the hint that any friendship they had was over. French writes, “For Paul, a more open and abrasive personality who had grown up in Medford, Massachusetts and been roughened by four years in Africa, it was no more than a bad-tempered letter, characteristic in its peculiar way of Vidia.”
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Up to 1972, Paul wrote Vidia Naipaul 54 letters and received 32 in response; from 1973 to 1980, Paul wrote Vidia 22 letters and received no replies, except by telephone, but this seems not to have dented his faith in the friendship. He saw Vidia's behaviour as a mark of his eccentric talent, rather than as rudeness, indifference or rejection.
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Theroux disillusionment final came in the late nineties when he discovered that V.S. Naipaul’s new wife, Nadira, had thrown out all of his books he had sent Naipaul. When confronting Vidia about this, Naipaul simple told Theroux to “grow up.”
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Theroux responded with his book Sir Vidia’s Shadow (1998) that detailed in fact and fiction his friendship with Naipaul. (Earlier, in 1972, Theroux had written another book about Naipaul, an introduction to his works that was more praising of the author.)
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V.S. Naipaul's response to Sir Vidia's Shadow was to ignore it. He did not read the book, and his later remarks are consciously theatrical and Olympian, reconstructing the friendship: 'He (Theroux) spread this idea that I was his great mentor and adviser, but since Africa, since 1966, we've hardly met. He came here twice. He was infinitely amusing to me in that jungle, this rather common fellow who was in Africa teaching the Negroes, he pestered me and pestered me, wrote me letters all the time... In the 19th century there were serious travellers who went to unknown places and did reports on it. Travel has become a plebeian, everyday matter, it has become a lower-class adventure, and there are books now written for lower-class travellers. I think Theroux belonged to that category: he wrote tourist books for the lower classes.”
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One last story about Naipaul and Theroux from French’s book.
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In February 1996, Pat Naipaul died of cancer. Vidia did not know what to do. Having spent a lifetime shunning friends, he had no network of support. So that very day he wrote to Paul: 'The doctor came; and half an hour later the undertaker's assistant, very Dickensian; and Pat was taken out of her room by this assistant and the day nurse. I didn't watch. I felt relieved when she left. I telephoned some people. I even thought I would start working.'
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Paul's short, moving obituary of Pat was published in The Daily Telegraph. 'As the first reader, highly intelligent, strong-willed and profoundly moral, Pat played an active part in Vidia's work. She understood that a writer needs a loyal opposition as much as praise... "She is my heart," he told me once.'
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Two months later, Vidia married Nadira Khannum Alvi, a Pakistani journalist he had recently met in Lahore. Three days later, they held a celebratory dinner in London. Unsure how to proceed in this unlikely situation, Vidia invited the likes of his old Oxford tutor Peter Bayley, the critics Karl Miller and Francis Wyndham, and Antonia Fraser and her husband Harold Pinter as wedding guests. Paul Theroux was not invited.
