Sir Vidia's Shadow: A Friendship Across Five Continents

V S Naipaul was much admired as a writer, but the clarity of thought and uncompromising outspokenness that usually made him so interesting to read seem to have made him a very difficult person to get on with in daily life. He didn’t have any tolerance for people who failed to live up to his — sometimes rather arbitrary — standards, he had a great sense of his own importance, and he is often said to have behaved badly to people close to him, including his first wife Pat Hale, his long-term lover Margaret Murray Gooding, and his brother Shiva.

The young American writer Paul Theroux met Naipaul in Uganda in 1966 when they were both at the university in Kampala, Theroux teaching English Lit (and staying out of the way of the Vietnam show more draft after being thrown out of the Peace Corps) and Naipaul in Africa for a few months as a visiting writer. Theroux was given the responsibility of showing the Naipauls around, and he soon became friends with both of them, with Naipaul uncharacteristically taking the time to mentor Theroux as a writer. This book describes the course of their friendship over three decades. It isn‘t the usual kind of respectful memoir of “the great writer who mentored me” — Theroux makes a point of telling us about Naipaul’s faults and bad behaviour, whilst stressing how much the continued friendship and the feedback they were able to give each other about their respective work in progress mattered to him. It’s fascinating to follow his analysis of how we can care very deeply about another person despite their very obvious faults, as well as his speculation about how much Naipaul’s character was influenced by his experience of racism as a Caribbean immigrant to Britain in the 1950s and by a sense of Brahmin separateness he might have retained from his family background.

There’s a lot of lively description of their adventures in Africa and some amusing snippets about subsequent encounters in London and at the Naipaul’s country cottage on Stephen Tennant’s estate in Wiltshire (including a gloriously awful lunch party where the guests included Justin Jebb and Lady Antonia Fraser), so you could probably still read this as an entertaining novel even if you aren’t especially interested in either Naipaul or Theroux as writers.

The friendship ended in 1997 — Theroux blames the breach on Naipaul’s second wife, Nadira Alvi, who Is very much the villain of the book, but of course that’s his side of the story. Theroux was obviously very fond of Pat, and not inclined to give her successor much of a welcome. We don’t know what else might have been going on. show less

In this memoir, Theroux looks at his life through the lens of his 30-year friendship with fellow author V.S. (Vidia) Naipaul. The book is also one of Theroux’s travel writings and a treatise on what it means to be a writer. It is a book full of wonderful descriptions, scenes, thoughts, and meaning.
Throughout, Theroux describes an unmooring needed to observe and write, his mostly via travel and Naipaul’s due to lack of belonging to any particular culture. The artist Andrew Wyeth is an example of one who did not ever physically leave home, yet was deeply observant of life and the human experience. Wyeth did, though, unmoor himself from the artist father that he loved deeply, his work was a rejection and surpassing of his father’s show more work.

At its essence, this book is about that unmooring, the story of a son coming to terms with his relationship to his “father.”

The friendship began in Uganda when Theroux was a young man longing to be a writer. Naipaul believed in him, challenged him, demanded of him, and gave him what he needed to become the writer he became. Theroux doesn’t realize he has outgrown the relationship until Naipaul rejects him, and thereby frees him. And then Theroux writes this book, describing his journey in Vidia’s shadow, finally voicing his own reality.

Theroux closes with: “I was dazed, because I was liberated at last. I saw how the end of a friendship was the start of an understanding. He had made me his by choosing me; his rejection of me meant I was on my own, out of his shadow. He had freed me, he had opened my eyes. . . “

This book opened with the ending, as well: “It is a good thing that time is a light, because so much of life is mumbling shadows and the future is just silence and darkness. But time passes, time’s torch illuminates, it finds connections, it makes sense of confusion, it reveals the truth.” show less

A very nice hatchet job by Theroux on his former friend. I like the way Theroux writes. His books on travel have let me on many wonderful adventures. I found his fiction not as interesting for some reason although I did like his short stories. This book somehow falls between the thin line of memoir of a friendship and gossip.

The fact that the author put up with the world's most famous curmudgeon for nearly 30 year is telling something. Paul Theroux treated Naipaul as a mentor of sorts, always living in his shadow, despite the fact that he always had to pick up the lunch and dinner tabs. After all this closeness, the bridge is finally burnt when Naipaul fails to even acknowledge the author's presence on a bright and sunny london day.

The fact that the author put up with the world's most famous curmudgeon for nearly 30 year is telling something. Paul Theroux treated Naipaul as a mentor of sorts, always living in his shadow, despite the fact that he always had to pick up the lunch and dinner tabs. After all this closeness, the bridge is finally burnt when Naipaul fails to even acknowledge the author's presence on a bright and sunny london day.

I doubt that Paul Theroux's story of the trajectory of his friendship with V.S. Naipaul would please Sir Vidia, but I found it a remarkable tale, perhaps more revealed about Paul Theroux than about V.S. Naipaul.