Paul Theroux often makes enemies of those he writes about. Now he has written about VSNaipaul, once his close friend. Tim Adams reports
Paul Theroux has had more than one existence. “You have as many lives as you want,” he says. “But you have to take them. You have to be up to it. The reason people are unhappy is that they exhaust one life but never want to start again.”
Even a conventional reading of the Theroux biography breaks down into four distinct chunks. First up is the nerdy little boy growing up in sedate Medson, Massachusetts, a boy with big undirected ambitions. Second, there is the good man in Africa, one of the first Kennedy Peace Corps volunteers, teaching English to Ugandan army officers and doing his bit for the natives (“I had everything I wanted: unlimited and guiltless sex. And because this was Africa, and the women were black, it was not only a pleasure, it was an act of political commitment”). Third, there is the man on the Clapham omnibus, banging out novels and travel books and reviews and essays from a house in south London, hungover from bad wine at literary parties, helping to support a wife and two young sons. Finally, currently, there is the castaway, beached in Hawaii with only his new Chinese wife (a PR for Robert Redford) and a kayak.
These four lives might be quite enough for most people, but Theroux is not a man who puts too much faith in “quite enough”. Along the way, he has constructed in his writing – 20 novels, 10 travel books, hundreds of stories – numerous other existences for himself, some real, some fictive, some of them wanting to be both. (Theroux discovered that travel writing was a way of writing about yourself, that the most exotic journeys were always voyages of self- discovery.)
In these lives a character called Paul Theroux has slept with more women, black and white, than appears humanly possible; he has pictured himself on the run from his first wife, hunted “like Eichmann on Garibaldi Street in Buenos Aires”; he has buried his head between the breasts of Queen Elizabeth II.
Most interviewers of the author get frustrated in their attempts to make “the real Paul Theroux” stand up. Their inquiries should perhaps go back a stage: what is it that has continually made him want to invent himself?
There seem to be two relevant answers. The first is Theroux’s own often repeated claim that “writers are disturbed people. They are people who are compensating for some kind of deficiency, a loneliness or a kind of insecurity”. Theroux likes to think of himself as damaged in some way (when you meet him, of course, few people seem as likeable or sane). He tends to put his own sense of absence, his normality-shaped hole, down to the fact that he came from a large family, that he “wanted to get away from my town, my school, my family. I didn’t want people breathing down my neck.”
But there is another spur to his inventiveness. It was sparked initially – or at least given substance – by a chance meeting when he was teaching at the department of extramural studies at Makerere University in Uganda in 1966. The writer VS Naipaul, wearing a floppy hat and carrying a walking stick, arrived to teach for a year. Theroux was 25, Naipaul was 34.
Pictures of the time show Theroux looking sardonically through his tinted glasses, in sandals, very much the son of a Quebecois shoe salesman travelling the world. Naipaul, brilliant and witty and terrifyingly honest, was, as he admits, unlike anyone he had ever met. “I needed him because he saw something in me I did not see. He said I was a writer.”
Naipaul made Theroux take more care over what he wrote, told him to slow down; told him most pertinently that “style’s nothing really, but a book needs a reason for being written”. “It was as if,” Theroux has remembered, “he had come all the way to Africa to remind me what writing really was.”
Naipaul also presented Theroux with a whole way of life: “Vidia was the first writer I met who had a total sense of mission,” he says. “He asked me once or twice, `Are you sure you’re up for it? Are you sure you want to live this terrible life?’ I said, `I’m up for it.'” He described Naipaul as being “merciless, solitary and unassailable”, qualities that appealed to Theroux. “No one had a claim on him,” Theroux once wrote approvingly. “I have no masters, no rivals, no employees, no enemies,” Naipaul said, “I don’t compete.” Naipaul’s only fidelity was to his writing.
Taking his friend as his example, Theroux has pushed this position to its logical extreme. One way of viewing his subsequent, often wonderful, books is as a mission to leave nothing of his life, or of all his possible lives, out of his work.
As a result, there are stories of his first wife Anne learning of his affairs through reading his books. And if he sought to apply this principle to himself (though often obfuscating the boundaries of fact and fiction), he also extended it to those around him. Explaining the idea of his novel, My Other Life, Theroux suggested that: “The whole premise was to take real people and put them through their paces. I assumed that if I could take liberties with myself, I could take them with other people.”
Anne Theroux responded to being “put through her paces” in a semi-factual piece about a dinner with Anthony Burgess by writing to The New Yorker, where it appeared, to complain that “the very unpleasant character with my name said and did things I have never said and done”. She is reportedly working on a novel about living with a confessional travel writer.
Theroux’s “liberties” extended to revealing the secret lives of friends. In an odd, affecting memoir of Bruce Chatwin, Theroux went some way to outing his fellow writer, who had recently died of Aids, referring to his marriage as a “mariage blanc” and all but assuming his homosexuality. Many of Chatwin’s friends viewed this as a betrayal of trust.
Theroux’s justification was that “I wanted to know more about his homosexual life, not because I am prurient but because if I like someone I want to know everything … He never wrote about his sexuality, and some of us have laid our souls bare.”
It seems somehow inevitable that sooner or later, Theroux would apply the master’s method to the master and write about Naipaul. That memoir has just appeared in The New Yorker, and will be published as a book later in the year. It details the early friendship between the two writers and then, in breathtaking detail, the reasons for that friendship breaking down: a suspected, and denied, liaison between Theroux and Naipaul’s first wife; the sale of inscribed copies of his books that Theroux had given Naipaul as a gift (some valued very highly); the suggestion that Naipaul was with the woman who became his second wife while his first wife was dying.
If there is a standard trajectory to Theroux’s books, it is the visionary who sees his ideals founder against reality. This is the fate of Allie Fox, who takes ice to Africa in The Mosquito Coast, and of Millroy the prophet of peristalsis in Millroy the Magician. It is the trajectory too of Theroux’s account of his friendship with Naipaul. By revealing such painful detail about his former friend’s life it could be said that Theroux is simply taking Naipaul at his word, that he recognises no bond except to his writing.
What is harder to reconcile, though, is how Theroux can equate this honesty with his own riddling persona. If he is frank about other people’s lives, why not come clean about where the fact begins and the fiction ends in his account of his own? He may have “laid his soul bare”, but which of his naked souls should we believe?
He thinks he can have it both ways, as in his introduction to My Other Life: “As for the other I, the Paul Theroux who looks like me – he is just a fellow wearing a mask. It was the only area in which I took no liberties. The man is fiction but the mask is real.” Elsewhere he has been more candid: “I’ve written two books which are purportedly autobiographical. But the fact is that anyone reading those books won’t know me at all.”
Theroux’s brother Alexander once pointed out in a vitriolic review that Paul could be a terrible enemy, but a much worse friend. You can’t help feeling that Naipaul might agree.