Naipaul is a vile creature, as vile as Paul Theroux, so they deserve each other.
Yoshie
***** New York Times September 27, 1998
The Writer's Writer
Paul Theroux recalls his turbulent friendship with V. S. Naipaul.
By SARAH KERR
Imagine what Henry James could have done with this plot: An ambitious young man becomes friends with a celebrated writer, a brilliant but crankish eccentric. Their bond deepens, eventually spanning decades and countless exotic locales; the young man establishes his own writing career, and his mentor rises even higher. But after years, the mentor begins to change in disturbing ways. He grows moody, neurotic. Cruelty that had lain dormant bursts into full flower. One day he cuts his protege off, leaving the younger man to realize the entire friendship was a sham. What a portrait James would have painted of the shifty mentor! What troubling themes he would have wrung out of this allegedly grand fellowship, which vanished in a single poof. What fatal flaws he would have spotted in the naive protege, who invested so much in a chimera.
Unfortunately, James is dead. We live in the age of the quickie memoir and the public prosecution of grudges, and so the tale comes to us as one half of a real-life cat fight. If you read the papers, you may already know that the mentor is the Trinidadian-Indian-turned-Englishman V. S. Naipaul and that our hero, the wronged younger man, is the American Paul Theroux. ''Sir Vidia's Shadow'' begins 30 years ago in Kampala, Uganda, where Theroux is teaching and waiting out the Vietnam War, when Naipaul arrives, his meek wife, Pat, in tow, to lecture at the local university. At this point Naipaul is in early midcareer, somewhat well known but not famous. Already he behaves like an impudent prince. He ridicules Africans, orders Pat around, dismisses everything he sees as fraudulent and common.
Yet for some reason Theroux is strangely drawn to Naipaul -- perhaps because Naipaul praises him and encourages his writing. And so the friendship evolves to the level of back scratching. Theroux devotes a book to Naipaul's work, Naipaul introduces Theroux to London literary society and so on. Years pass. Travel and writing commitments keep them apart (Theroux plays catch-up, writing several novels and the best-selling travel book ''The Great Railway Bazaar''), but they stay in touch by mail, and whenever possible they meet in England. Naipaul remains the soul of impoliteness at these reunions. In London, he insists on going to fancy restaurants and sticking Theroux with the bill. At dinner parties, he demands persnickety vegetarian meals and then refuses to eat them. His penchant for racist remarks has grown more pronounced, his hunger for honors and awards more unseemly. His behavior toward Pat declines a couple of notches, from callous to unforgivable. With her full and grief-stricken knowledge, he takes an Argentine mistress on his travels, leaving Pat behind to handle his correspondence. When she contracts cancer, he neglects her. (Theroux also points out Naipaul's morbid aversion to sex, crediting himself with a far more enlightened attitude. But this last point seems open to debate: the only sensitivity Theroux demonstrates here is that of an unreconstructed swinger, prowling bars around Kampala, picking up lucky African prostitutes and driving them crazy, so he informs us, with pleasure.)
The first question is whether Theroux's picture of Naipaul is at all accurate. I can't know for certain but I fear that it is. Theroux has a flair for portraiture that is not to be denied. He writes with a poker-faced blankness that lends his ghastly anecdotes a court reporter's authority. And, sad to say, the Scrooge we meet here fits with the Naipaul we've come to know in books. The high-handedness, the perverse flattery of ''civilized'' British Empire, the suspicion that people of color have the ethics and mental powers of rabbits: it's all too familiar. Nor is it just a question of being mean in private. Naipaul's influence has dominated modern travel writing, in part because he seems to offer a moral vision. The writer must make his own way in the world, he argues, submitting to no one's dogma. There is much to admire in this commitment, but there's also a blinding egotism. At times, Naipaul's impulse to judge overwhelms what he's judging; sympathy becomes verboten, embarrassing, a sign of weakness. So it seems relevant and discouraging to be told that in real life he has been heard to call Africans ''bitches.''..." *****