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This is an intimate portrait of a friendship, its beginning, middle, and end. And it describes that rarest and most fragile of alliances, a literary friendship. One year before he published his first book, Paul Theroux met V. S. Naipaul--Vidia, as he was known. For thirty years both men remained in close touch, even when continents separated them. Sir Vidia's Shadow is a double portrait of the writing life, but it is much more, for travel and reading and emotional ups and downs are also aspects of this friendship, which is powerful and enriching and often a comedy--and, ultimately, a bridge that is burned. The two writers' paths crossed in 1966 in Uganda, which Naipaul saw as a dangerous jungle and Theroux regarded as a benign home. Theroux became Naipaul's driver, interpreter, and apprentice--he was twenty-three and Naipaul thirty-four. Theroux was guided by the older writer, but as the years passed their positions were frequently reversed, as Naipaul sought Theroux's guidance and advice. They became each other's editors, confidants, and teachers. From Singapore to London, India to South America, the United States and back to Africa, the writers corresponded and crossed paths. Naipaul's brother, Shiva, is part of the story, and so is Margaret, Naipaul's Anglo-Argentine companion. A formidable and intensely private figure, who was later knighted by Queen Elizabeth and is often cited as a contender for the Nobel Prize, Naipaul was close to few others except his first and second wives and Theroux himself. Naipaul was the first to read and champion Theroux's earliest efforts. Over time, they witnessed each other's successes and failures. Built around exotic landscapes, anecdotes that are revealing, humorous, and melancholy, and three decades of mutual history, this is a very personal account of how one develops as a writer, how a friendship waxes and wanes between two men who have set themselves on the perilous journey of a writing life, and what constitutes the relationship of mentor and student. Told with Theroux's impeccable eye for place and setting and his novelistic instinct for character and incident, Sir Vidia's Shadow recalls Nicholson Baker's U and I: A True Story, Rainer Maria Rilke's classic Letters to a Young Poet, and Boswell's Life of Johnson, but it is nearly without precedent in anatomizing the nature of writing as well as the nature of friendship itself.
- Sales Rank: #1808219 in Books
- Published on: 1998-11-04
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: .0" h x .0" w x .0" l,
- Binding: Hardcover
- 288 pages
Amazon.com Review
In several of his recent fictions, Paul Theroux has visibly mined his own experience for raw material, going so far as to provide the protagonist of My Other Life with his own name and curriculum vitae. Now, in Sir Vidia's Shadow, he casts a cold and cantankerous eye on his friendship with V.S. Naipaul. The two first met in Uganda in 1966, when the 23-year-old Theroux was teaching at the local university and trying, with only limited success, to transform himself into a writer. The arrival of Naipaul--at 34 already a world-class novelist, with A House for Mr. Biswas under his belt--was a signal event in Theroux's life: "I had been working in the dark, just groping, until I had met Vidia."
After being squired around Uganda, Kenya, and Rwanda by the author, Naipaul returned to London. Their correspondence continued, and the relationship--in which Theroux was very much the junior partner and acolyte--deepened. During a holiday visit to London the next year, he realized that their rapport "was as strong as love. He was my friend, he had shown me what was good in my writing, he had drawn a line through anything that was false." And indeed, over the next three decades the two exchanged a steady stream of letters, visits, phone calls, and authorial confidences. Yet this most productive of literary friendships came to an abrupt end in 1996, when Naipaul--now knighted and recently remarried--burned a number of bridges and tossed his relationship with Theroux into the conflagration.
All of which brings us to Sir Vidia's Shadow, a peculiar mixture of autobiography, Boswellian chronicle, and poison-pen letter. In many ways, it's a fascinating and devilishly skilled performance. For starters, Theroux spent more time in his subject's company than Boswell ever spent in Johnson's, which gives his portrait a widescreen verisimilitude. He documents Naipaul's loony fastidiousness, his passion for language, "the laughter in his lungs like a loud kind of hydraulics," and the very sound of his typewriter (which, just for the record, goes chick-chick-chick). Theroux also gives a superb sense of how such literary apprenticeships can function to the mutual benefit of master and disciple--and how they can erode. By 1975, after all, Theroux had become the bestselling author of The Great Railway Bazaar, while Naipaul remained an under-remunerated critics' darling. Out of habit, Theroux stayed in the older man's shadow. Still, as the book progresses, it becomes harder and harder to tell precisely who's got the anxiety and who's got the influence.
It also becomes harder and harder to ignore Theroux's late-breaking animus toward his subject. His goal--stated not only in the book but in various tailgunning replies to his critics--was to write an accurate account of a long, rich friendship. "This narrative is not something that would be improved by the masks of fiction," he declares. "It needs only to be put in order. I am free of the constraint of alteration and fictionalizing." Yet every book has a tendency to break free of the author's intentions, and Sir Vidia's Shadow is no exception. For each reverent (and convincing) passage about his subject, there's another in which Theroux seems to be administering some deeply ambivalent payback. He contrasts Naipaul's sexless misogyny with his own erotic enthusiasm, and his own generosity with his hero's miserly behavior (although Naipaul's penny-pinching and check-dodging can make him strangely endearing--the Jack Benny of contemporary letters). At times Theroux seems determined to explore all seven types of ambiguity, which makes for both deliberate and not-so-deliberate hilarity. He also sounds uncannily like a spurned lover. And perhaps that residue of expired passion accounts for both the brilliance of Sir Vidia's Shadow and its disturbing, sometimes queasy pathos. --James Marcus
From Publishers Weekly
The subject of considerable attention well ahead of its publication date (which the publisher has now moved up), this frank and revealing study of two writers, longtime friends and mutual supporters, who finally come to a decisive parting of the ways, is sometimes sad, often funny and occasionally touching. Such is Theroux's apparently effortless recall of conversations, scenes and currents of feeling that it reads more like a novel with a particularly vivid central character than a memoir. That central character is of course the novelist V.S. Naipaul, seen here as brilliant, eccentric, irascible, often, it seems, purposefully outrageous. The two met in Africa in 1966 when Theroux was just beginning as a writer and Naipaul was already an acknowledged star. Theroux, who portrays himself as much more accommodating than Naipaul, puts himself in the background, delighted with each crumb of approbation from the master. There were many things Theroux found odd about his friend: his snobbishness, his apparent racism, his selfish willingness to let other people take care of his every need. (He recalls one especially costly meal with Naipaul, for which he paid, as usual, that left him without the fare home.) But it seems to have been Pat, Naipaul's long-suffering English wife, who finally came between them; Theroux, who confesses to having once pondered an affair with her, remained always an admirer of her decent stoicism, and wrote a touching tribute on her death. This was then seized upon by Naipaul's hastily married second wife (a Pakistani newspaper columnist who would seem, in her bumptiousness and careless writing, the antithesis of everything Naipaul cherished) to create a rift with Theroux. A last chance meeting in the street produced Naipaul's memorable line "Take it on the chin and move on," and the indefatigable Theroux had himself the theme for this vastly readable book. Is it fair to Sir Vidia? Impossible to be sure, but it is an enthralling examination of a seldom-treated subject, a thorny literary friendship. First serial to the New Yorker; author tour.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
Noted travel writer/novelist on best friend V.S. Naipaul.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Most helpful customer reviews
12 of 12 people found the following review helpful.
A fascinating personal memoir
By William J. Fickling
In many ways, this is Theroux's best book (at least of those I have read), because it is his most personal. I am amazed at some of the criticisms I have read of this book, especially the allegation that it is a "poison pen" document. It is nothing of the sort. It is a coldly objective, detailed, and analytical chronicle of the author's thirty year friendship, with the writer V.S. Naipaul, that ended abruptly. Naipaul ended it; the termination of the friendship was totally unilateral.
Some of the editorial reviews would give you the impression that the reader will be left totally clueless as to why the friendship ended. Not so. The reason it ended can be summed up in two words: new wife. Naipaul's wife of thirty or so years, with whom Theroux was friends and with whom he once fantasized having an affair, died of a lingering illness, and Naipaul, to everyone's astonishment, remarried within two months, to a woman that no one in Naipaul's inner circle even knew existed. The new wife apparently took an instant dislike to Theroux and let him know it. Soon all communication stopped. Theroux later runs into Naipaul on the street; Naipaul tells him to "take it on the chin and move on." Naipaul also discarded his long term mistress, whom Theroux quotes in an afterward as affirming that every word in the book is true. Naipaul appears to have been cleaning house and to be starting over in every respect.
Theroux portrays Naipaul as, in my view at least, a thoroughly repugnant person. Arrogant, racist, ill-mannered to the point of rudeness at times, Naipaul has an incredible sense of entitlement. He is in effect a moocher, letting Theroux pick up the lunch tab at an expensive restaurant at a time when Theroux had little money. However, Theroux never does what I think most people would have done in similar circumstances, which is simply to point to the check and say, "shall we split this?" Theroux comes across as essentially a wimp in the presence of Naipaul. Perhaps he believes this is the price he has to pay for Naipaul's mentorship of his budding writing career. However, this fawning continues long after Theroux has become an established writer with best sellers to his credit. Theroux appears to have been well aware of Naipaul's nasty side, yet overlooked it for the sake of having the friendship of someone he thinks is a great writer. Only when Naipaul ends the friendship does Theroux go public with a portrayal of Naipaul's true nature. But this is hardly poison pen; it is honest, warts and all biography. Boswell clearly revered Johnson, yet he doesn't flinch from portraying Johnson accurately, including much that is unflattering.
This book is an excellent read if you are interested in either of these two authors, or even if you just like a well-written, flowing narrative. Highly recommended.
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful.
Shadowy
By Robert E. Olsen
There is something of Graham Greene in "Sir Vidia's Shadow," Paul Theroux's account of the end of his relationship with Nobel laureate V.S. (Vidia) Naipaul. What sustains the friendship between these two expatriate authors over 30 years? What eventually destroys it? How do place, class, calling, ideas, politics, and pheromones factor in their story? What is friendship anyway? These themes of Theroux also inspire Greene's "The End of the Affair."
Two authors -- one established, the other just starting out -- meet in Uganda in 1966. Naipaul, the established one, is crabbed, dismissive, paranoid, needy, fussy, rule-bound, misogynistic, cheap, but immensely talented and eager to mentor. Theroux is accepting, ingratiating, adventuresome, admiring, and willing to pick up every check. Like partners in a bad marriage, they complement each other. Over the years, as friends, they support each other through the usual crises of life. As artists, they read each other's work and carry on a dialogue about writing, books, and other authors. Their shared interest in the writer's craft sustains their friendship, despite their personal differences.
Naipaul's wife Pat also supplies some glue. Naipaul treats her shabbily, but Pat nevertheless "loved him -- loved him without condition -- praised him, lived for him, delighted in his success in the most unselfish way.... Possibly there was an element of fear in it -- the fear of losing him, the fear of her own futility and her being rejected.... She was discreet. She was kind, she was generous, she was restrained and magnanimous; she was the soul of politeness, she was grateful; she was all the things Vidia was not." (312) Theroux, who would acquire and lose a family of his own during the course of his relationship with Naipaul, desires Pat almost from the start. Naipaul rejects Pat's body, like a piece of undigestible sinew, in favor of prostitutes and other secret lovers. When Pat dies and Naipaul immediately remarries, his tactless new wife drives a wedge between old friends.
Or does she? "Sir Vidia's Shadow" -- part memoir, part biography, part domestic drama, part psychological study, part literary criticism -- is not so clear. Perhaps Theroux, the author of 22 books, simply outgrows his sycophant's role: by book's end, in fact, dueling faxes replace dutiful lessons over lunch, and Sir Vidia's shadow shrinks literally to nothing. Perhaps there is something more, a context to the friendship that, though hinted at, goes unverbalized, thus clouding the book's focus. In fact, Theroux's portrait of Naipaul is extensive, but Naipaul is an independent -- a secretive -- man, and Theroux's portrait of himself is more limited, more guarded still.
Besides Graham Greene, in other words, there is something of Henry James in "Sir Vidia's Shadow," but it is James without the information to clearly distinguish the protagonists from the victims.
3 of 4 people found the following review helpful.
The Mimic Man
By skd
For all its shortcomings, "Sir Vidia's Shadow" is a remarkable book.
It is indeed written in anger, and it does often lapse into ad hominem excess; thus "...his [Naipaul's] nigrescent face," or "...Nadira [Lady Naipaul], nightmarish in a spidery sari, with a big intimidating face, the skin of her purple belly showing at her midriff, Indian fashion, like one of those hideous Indian burra memsahibs buying expensive chutney in the Food Halls of Harrods...". Hilarious. Offensive too.
Nevertheless, Theroux helps to make Naipaul comprehensible to those who have read him with a sense of queasy discomfort.
My first encounter with Naipaul was an exercise in incomprehension, even disbelief. Like many Indians, I began with "India: A Wounded Civilization," Naipaul's account of his second visit to the country of his forbears. On the very first page, Naipaul describes how British troops billeted "... near a thousand-year old Hindu temple" during World War II reacted to the temple's "pet crocodile." Says Naipaul, "The soldiers, understandably, shot the crocodile." I certainly did not understand. The crocodile must have lived peacefully in the temple for many years without harming anyone. This casual contempt for the sensibilities of others made me wary of his work. The standards he upheld were alien to me, but whose standards could they possibly be? They certainly could not be the received standards of an Indian descended from the bonded labourers who tended the sugar plantations of the West Indies.
Naipaul has always behaved like the doorkeeper to an exclusive club - unable to belong, he can nevertheless deny entrance to others. Thus, repeatedly in his work, the Muslim is dismissed to his formalistic existence, the Black lured back into the bush, the South American relegated to the nightmare of unending tumult and revolution. No progress is possible for such people.
Theroux lays out the tangle of Naipaul's background and motivation. He allows us to see the insecurities, and the appetites, that make Naipaul denounce Britain's Honours List in one breath while quietly accepting a title in the next. Naipaul, Theroux suggests, is the ultimate mimic man, the G. Ramsay Muir of Naipaul's own troubled dreams.
Theroux should have waited a few years before taking up his pen. The hurt would have abated, perspective gained. I cannot, however, begrudge him the writing of Sir Vidia's Shadow. After thirty years of putting up with Naipaul's corrosive persona, a long, loud scream is probably in order.
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