I could see what he disliked about the house. It was new and ugly, it smelled of fresh concrete and dust, it had no curtains.
“Paul,” he said in an imploring way, “do sit down.”
Pat said, “Go on, Vidia, please.”
“Listen to the bitches!”
“Vidia,” she said, trying to soothing him.
He continued to do what he had been doing when I entered, which was to read aloud from closely typed pages a scene about a farewell Christmas party in London, a meal at which presents were being given and toasts proposed. It was something from his novel, I supposed, the one he had brought to Uganda to finish. He went on reading, speaking of the tearful meal and the emotion, of people weeping.
Pat pressed her lips together when he finished, pausing before she spoke. The last time I had seen her was in the back seat of my car, when she had been sobbing openly and trying to speak (“Stop chuntering, Patsy”), her face contorted, her hair a mess, her cheeks and lips wet, her large breasts tremulous with her grief.
But today she was cool and very calm. In the most schoolmistressy way she said, “Too many tears.”
I was seated by a small table on which there lay a carefully corrected paragraph of small type, which I glanced at. The first words, in boldface, read Naipaul, Vidiadhar Surajprasad. It was his Who’s Who entry, with meticulous proofreader’s marks in the margin in black ink, Vidia’s precise handwriting, deleting a semicolon, adding a literary prize and a recent date.
He had only briefly interrupted the reading of his novel when I entered. I felt he wanted me to hear it, to mystify and impress me. I was impressed. He was admitting me to this ritual of reading; he trusted me.
He turned to me and said, “Do you hear those bitches and their bongos?”
No bongos, but I knew what he meant.
“Do you suppose we could flog them?” He knew it was an outrageous suggestion, but he wanted to gauge my reaction. He took a harmless pleasure in seeing people wince.
We went to the window and looked downhill at the roofs of corrugated asbestos, moldy from the damp, at the woodsmoke and the banana trees, at barking dogs, crying children, all the elements of urban poverty in Uganda.
“That’s what they need, a good flogging.”
“Vidia, that’s quite enough of that,” Pat said, strong again, no sign of the tears and sobs of the other day.
His reading from the typescript and his unembarrassed candor in allowing me to hear it encouraged me to ask him again about writers he liked. So far, all I knew was that he disliked Orwell and that for pleasure he read the Bible and Martial. I had Nabokov’s Pale Fire with me and told him how much I liked it.
“I read Pnin. It was silly. There was nothing in it. What do people see in him?”
“Style, maybe?”
“What is his style? It’s bogus, calling attention to itself. Americans do that. All those beautiful sentences. What are they for?”
His interest, his passion, was located solely in his own writing. He saw it as new. Nothing like it had ever been written before. It was an error to look for any influences, for there were none; it was wrong to compare it with any other work; nothing came close to resembling it. It took me a little while to understand his utter faith in this conceit, but the day I did, and acknowledged that his writing was unique, and that he was a new man, was the day our friendship began.
Some people mistook the apparent spareness of his sentences for a faltering imagination, or a lack of stylistic ambition, or sheer monotony. But he said he was deliberate in everything he wrote, calculating each effect, and the simplicity was contrived. In his view, he was like someone making a model of an entire city out of the simplest material, a Rome made of matchsticks, say, a Rome whose bridges a full-sized human could stand on and run carts over. He detested falsity in style, he loathed manner in writing. He said he never prettified anything he saw or felt, and “prettified,” a new word to me, like “chuntering,” was added to my vocabulary.
“The truth is messy. It is not pretty. Writing must reflect that. Art must tell the truth.”
But early on, I had kept after him for the names of writers he admired. He shrugged. “Shakey, of course,” he said. “Jimmy Joyce. Tommy Mann.”
What books, I wondered, and why?
“Forget Nabokov. Read Death in Venice. Pay close attention to the accumulation of thought. Notice how each sentence builds and adds.”
What about American writers? Surely there was someone he liked.
“Do you know the first sentence of the short story ‘The Blue Hotel’ by Stephen Crane? About the color blue?” he asked. “I like that.”
His own work served as a better example of how complex and yet transparent prose fiction could be. It was original, freshly imagined in both form and content. Its brilliance was not obvious — he did not use the word “brilliance,” but he was wholly satisfied with the work, had no misgivings, saw nothing false or forced in it.
“Miguel Street is deceptive,” he said. “Look at it again and you’ll see how I used my material. Look at those sentences. They seem simple. But that book nearly killed me, man.”
Marlon Brando had read Miguel Street with pleasure, he had been told by a mutual friend, the novelist Edna O’Brien, who had also reported that Brando was attracted to women with dark nipples. It pleased Naipaul to know that Brando admired the book, and that knowledge made Naipaul feel friendly towards the actor. The Teahouse of the August Moon was a film he had liked, he said. He had not gone to many films lately, but he had seen every film that had come to Trinidad between the years 1942 and 1950, when he left for Oxford.
“You know what Brando says about actors?”
I said I did not know.
“An actor is a guy who, if you ain’t talking about him, ain’t listening.” Naipaul laughed his deep appreciative laugh and repeated the sentence.
Yomo was in bed when I got back home.
“Bibi gonjwa,” the housegirl said in a low voice, sounding as though she had been scolded. “Your woman’s sick.”
Yomo said in a feeble voice that she was feeling awful and wished she had some kola nuts. I made a cup of tea for her and then rooted through my bookshelf and found an anthology of American short stories, which included “The Blue Hotel.”
This was how the story began: “The Palace Hotel at Fort Romper was painted a light blue, a shade that is on the legs of a kind of heron, causing the bird to declare its position against any background. The Palace Hotel, then, was always screaming and howling in a way that made the dazzling winter landscape of Nebraska seem only a gray swampish hush.”
Then Yomo was at the door, wearing the bed sheet like a toga, blinking in the lights and saying, “Please read to me.”
Naipaul complained so heartily about his house that I told him about my upstairs neighbors — newly married, a middle-aged man and a much younger woman — who giggled and chased each other around the house. They splashed in the bathtub and clattered plates and silver when they ate and called out constantly from room to room, “I can’t hear you!” But we could hear everything they said. It seemed at times they were carrying on for our benefit, using us as witnesses, proving something. They made love noisily — she was a screecher in her orgasms; it was a noise that built in volume and frequency, like someone working hard, pumping a tire, sawing a log. Their bed rocked and squeaked. At times it sounded like a muffled inquisition, the ordeal of someone whose confession was being painfully extracted.
“Who are they?” Naipaul asked.