Sir Vidia's Shadow: A Friendship Across Five Continents [Hardcover]

Paul Theroux (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: November 4, 1998

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.

Editorial Reviews

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.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 288 pages
• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin (November 4, 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0395907284
• ISBN-13: 978-0395907283
• Product Dimensions: 9.5 x 6.2 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (75 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,540,077 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Paul Theroux's highly acclaimed novels include Blinding Light, Hotel Honolulu, My Other Life, Kowloon Tong, and The Mosquito Coast. His renowned travel books include Ghost Train to the Eastern Star, Dark Star Safari, Riding the Iron Rooster, The Great Railway Bazaar, The Old Patagonian Express, and The Happy Isles of Oceania. He lives in Hawaii and on Cape Cod.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

19 of 20 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars An exhilirating, bumpy ride, December 4, 1998

By A Customer

This review is from: Sir Vidia's Shadow: A Friendship Across Five Continents (Hardcover)

Sir Vidia's Shadow contains all the queasy excitement of Theroux's trademark train trips, but this time we're clattering along with him over 30 years of friendship with VS Naipaul -- and bumpy ones at that. We get several books here: first, the Theroux travel book. Readers who complain of Theroux's crankiness will find his loving descriptions of Uganda (where "even the crops were pretty") refreshing. Second, we get a minutely detailed book about the writing life. There is Naipaul the perfectionist demanding an explanation for each word in an early Theroux essay, weeding out every piece of obfuscating extra baggage. My favorite anecdote concerns the memorable first sentence of Naipaul's Bend in the River ; anyone who has savoured this quintessential Naipaulism will be enlightened on the subject of tedious re-drafting and the editor's role in all good writing. Then there is the book about Naipaul himself: I can't imagine that anyone who's read and enjoyed Naipaul will be too offended -- or even much surprised -- by Theroux's portrait. The neurotic obsession with food and hygiene, the fear of "the bush", the ever-deepening melancholy and misanthropy, the overcompensations and fears of a "barefoot colonial" -- Naipaul himself has given us all this in his novels and travelogues. Theroux reveals this side, but also unexpected glimpses of Naipaul's kindness (especially as mentor to PT), self-doubt, childish good humor (Naipaul singing calypsos!) and even physical bravery (Naipaul fending off wild dogs in Kampala). It would be easy to turn Naipaul into a "character" (Naipaul loathes "characters"), and Theroux never stoops to this. I certainly think no less of Naipaul as a writer, and now understand his writing and motivations more clearly. There are certainly other Naipaul's -- we all reinvent ourselves for different people -- but here we get Theroux's Naipaul, and it is a fascinating, albeit troublesome portrait. Finally, we get a book which takes us through the entire course of a friendship. Theroux ends the book in shrill and often unfair condemnation of Naipaul (one cannot easily dismiss the writer who gave us Mr Biswas or Bend in the River), but such is the aftermath of many meaningful friendships which die. At one point, Theroux advises Naipaul to return to a land he visited and write with a perspective freshened by time. In the same way, perhaps we will get another look at Naipaul from Theroux's perspective after the wound has set. In any case, SVS is far more substantial than the literary cat-fight which we might have expected from the early press releases.

12 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars "I had admired his talent. After a while, I admired nothing else [about him]. Finally, I began to wonder about his talent.", August 16, 2008

By 

Mary Whipple (New England) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Sir Vidia's Shadow: a Friendship Across Five Continents (Paperback)

What began as a mentoring relationship between established novelist V. S. Naipaul and Paul Theroux, a young writer working on his first novel, went on to endure as a "friendship" for thirty years as both writers traveled the world but remained in touch. They met when Theroux was a young ex-Peace Corp worker teaching in Uganda at the university in Makerere in 1966, and Naipaul, nine years his senior, became "writer-in-residence" there, though Naipaul hated teaching and mocked the writing of his students and the Makerere faculty. He did, however, recognize Theroux's talent, and he did help and encourage him to get his novel published. Theroux, in turn, was an astute reader of Naipaul's work, and both benefited from the relationship, at least at first.

From 1967 - 1977, Theroux published ten successful novels and short story collections, all of which Theroux describes in this book, and all were praised, at least privately, by Naipaul. Somewhat less attention is paid here to the almost equal number of works published by Naipaul, some of which Theroux read and helped proofread. A crusty, critical, and often cruel man, full of contradictions, Naipaul was a difficult "friend," and when he decided that he did not like someone, there was no turning back, no forgiveness for human failings. Theroux managed to navigate that minefield of hostility for thirty years.

In fact, shortly before the first of Naipaul's novels was published in the United States, Theroux (in 1972) wrote an introductory biography and critical assessment of Naipaul's work, full of praise for Naipaul, and helped to create an audience for Naipaul's work in the United States. After this somewhat effusive work was published, however, Theroux refused further interviews or commentary about Naipaul, insisting that "I will never [again] write about Naipaul. He is my friend." That declaration is belied by the publication of this book, the last twenty-percent of which is an uninterrupted excoriation of Naipaul and his second wife at the end of the friendship with Theroux. Here Theroux shows that he is at least as unforgiving as Naipaul, with a mean streak of his own.

In time Theroux would become a literary star with over forty novels and books of non-fiction. Naipaul, a painstaking, often philosophical writer, eventually won the Nobel Prize in 2001, and was knighted. Though this book is fascinating for its picture of the mentoring process and of a friendship which managed to survive despite the pettiness and frequent mean-spiritedness of Naipaul, it is also a portrait of Theroux, who published this book as his own enduring form of payback. n Mary Whipple

In a Free State: A Novel With Two Supporting Narratives, Naipaul's Booker Prize winner
A House for Mr. Biswas, one of Naipaul's most popular works
Dark Star Safari: Overland from Cairo to Capetown, recent Theroux travelogue
The Great Railway Bazaar
The Mosquito Coast, one of Theroux's most popular novels.

11 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Fascinating, but recommended with some reservations, May 5, 2005

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chefdevergue (Spokane, WA United States) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

This review is from: Sir Vidia's Shadow: A Friendship Across Five Continents (Paperback)

I have never been a Naipaul fan. While he is unarguably one of the finest 20th century writers in the English language, his books nonetheless have always left me cold. He seemed so cantankerous & generally misanthropic, ready to pass scathing judgement at the drop of the hat & sometimes with precious little reflection. With this in mind, I rather enjoyed great portions of Theroux' assault on his former friend, as it seemed to comfirm everything I had long guessed to be true about Naipaul. Also, the narrative flows along quite nicely, making the book easy to read. Some reviewers have scored Theroux for not having the necessary literary gifts to make this book work, and that he should stick to his travel books. I did not find this to be the case.

However, when all is said and done, I have a hard time seeing Paul Theroux as the victim here. Innumerable instances of Naipaul being the supreme jerk are recounted for the reader, and yet Theroux' loyalty to his friend never seems to have been seriously challenged. Occasionally, Theroux will describe how he "winced" at his friend's appalling behavior. How can this be? What motivates a man to endure a friend's sometimes horrible treatment of the people around him...people who often did not deserve the disrepect they got from Naipaul?

Evidently, Theroux was willing to tolerate Naipaul's behavior and remain his friend for 30 years because the man is a brilliant writer, or at least this is what he tells us. I cannot help but suspect that Theroux, at the time, saw nothing wrong with this behavior (probably because Theroux himself is renowned for his own rather difficult nature) until, finally, he was on the receiving end of it. Then, so it would appear, all the unsavory aspects of Naipaul's personality suddenly snapped into focus, after three decades of exposure. Hmmmm, I cannot say that I was convinced by Theroux' description of that particular epiphany.

However, I think Theroux' descriptions of his former friend largely hit the mark, and there is something that is just fun about poison-pen works. Just remember that the while Theroux may have some legitimate scores to settle, he was willing to look past those scores for an awfully long time because it served his own interests.