I poured him a glass of wine. “How’s teaching?”
The tables were turned. Twelve years before, I had been the teacher and he the writer. He had warned me against teaching jobs. It was acceptable to travel to Singapore, but teach there? As you know, I disapprove of the means… A writer ought to have no job, no boss, no teacher, no students; ought to follow no one else’s routine; ought to have no masters, no servants. The essential point was that writing was not a job at all but, in his own phrase, a process of life.
I knew from eight years of slogging in the tropics that it was not possible for me to teach and also to write well. Many people did it, and some succeeded, but even when the writing was fluent, something was missing, because colleges were so far from the world. Vidia himself had taught me this lesson — Vidia now a poorly paid writer in residence and teacher of creative writing in a snooty college. He had recently given an interview in the London Sunday Telegraph in which he had said, “I would take poison rather than do this for a living.”
All this went through my mind because Vidia had not answered my question. He was frowning at his glass of wine.
“I didn’t know that writing courses were a soft option!” he said in a voice of mock astonishment, slightly overdoing it out of anger.
“Neither did I,” I said. “You’re a tough teacher, aren’t you?”
“Not tough enough,” Vidia said. “The students take my course because they want A’s without having to work. They seldom do the assignment. They hardly write. They lie to me. I try to goad them into work and they glare at me. They are deeply offended. ‘But this is a writing course! This is supposed to be easy! You are making us work!’”
He raised his hand in resignation, and sipped, and looked miserable. In the Telegraph piece, one of his students had described her reason for dropping out of his course: “He was simply the worst, most close-minded, inconsiderate, uninteresting and incompetent professor I have ever met.”
“That’s supposed to be a good university,” I said.
“They’re all corrupt. It’s all a con.” The students were lazy, the other teachers were inferior, the place was intolerable. His own mind was being damaged from being in close contact with people so inferior.
“What about the weather?”
“The weather is very nice,” he said. “Let’s not talk about the corruption. This wine is not bad. May I see the cork?”
Twitching the cork with his thumb and forefinger, he uncovered the details of the vineyard. He revolved the cork again, and again twitched the dusty residue, like an archeologist with a helpful artifact.
“California wine is vastly underrated,” he said, almost to himself, and then, “What brings you to New York?”
“I was in Vermont, visiting Kipling’s house outside Brattleboro,” I said. “I want to write about him — his American wife, his American residence, the way it ended.”
“And how did it end?”
“In a huge kerfuffle. His drunken brother-in-law threatened to kill him. It was just bluster, but Kipling decided to bring a case against him. His brother-in-law was popular, a good old boy. Kipling was regarded as a snob and an interloper, a limey. It ended badly. Kipling went back to England and sulked.”
“He was immensely famous,” Vidia said. “Immensely famous.”
“I think it would make a terrific play — the arguments, the rivalries, the court hearing, all that. I have a transcript of the case. And he was writing The Jungle Book at the time — you know, the law of the jungle.”
“It’s a lovely idea,” Vidia said. “Very attractive.” He brooded a bit. He sniffed the cork.
“Shall we eat? There are some restaurants near here that aren’t bad. An Indian one near the Plaza.”
“Let’s try the Oyster Bar, shall we?” he said with a note of insistence.
We walked out of the hotel and the fifteen blocks to Grand Central station, all the while marveling at the silence. By now some streets had been cleared, and a few taxis moved slowly through the whiteness.
“I have an idea for a play,” Vidia said. “Raleigh is sixty-four, in Guyana. He has been let out of the Tower so that he can find El Dorado and redeem himself. It is a risk, and now he has found himself at a dead end. But he can’t admit defeat. He is old and lost.”
He told me the story of Raleigh on the Orinoco, the play he intended, as we kicked through the snow.
In the light of a building entrance, a woman stood waiting in an area that had been shoveled. She wore a fur hat and a coat with a fur collar, so her foxlike face was framed by the soft pelts, the warmth of fur and skin. She turned away from us, not wishing to make eye contact, and just as we passed, an important-looking car swung to the curb and she rushed to it, seeming relieved.
“Did you see that woman? Pretty, don’t you think?”
When he did not answer me, I took his silence to mean that I had asked a silly question. But no, he was thinking.
“All women are built differently.” He spoke slowly, as though delivering a piece of news.
Closing his fingers, like a man plucking fruit, he made a scooping gesture with his hand. I took “built” to mean something more complex than their shape. He was suggesting contours, not an interior mechanism peculiar to each woman; he was implying something more urological.
“But you knew that, didn’t you?”
It was pleasant to be in a big city with him. We were both free, the snowfall had given New York a holiday, emptied of people and most cars. So the city was ours.
And after all these years I never took this friendship for granted. I felt lucky to know him, privileged to be with him, blessed for all his good advice, cautioned by his mistakes, stimulated by his intellect, enlightened by his work. I was aware of his contradictions. More than anything, I was inspired by the dignity of his struggle. Writing tormented him, he suffered through each book. And where were we now? I was thirty-six, he was forty-five, we were both working hard. I was writing a play and contemplating a trip to South America, and he was teaching — though he had said “Never be a teacher,” here he was, a creative-writing teacher in Connecticut. There could be only one reason: he needed the money. Our positions had been reversed so dramatically, I had to be careful not to wound his dignity by mentioning it or saying to him (as he had said to me so often), “You teachers make lots of money!”
We walked along — he was thinking about Raleigh, I was thinking about Kipling — and we told each other that these were great ideas.
The reassurance, the intellectual vigor of his friendship, made me happy. What perhaps mattered most was the trust, the mutual compassion, which was also forgiveness, and the fact that we understood one another. By now we knew each other well and had arrived at that point at which friends realize they cannot know each other any better, His friendship was a pleasure and a relief.
I was still reflecting on “All women are built differently” when he said, “So you see, we are seriously talking about whether the president of the United States knows how to read a book!”
“Jimmy Carter?” He must have been gabbling about Carter while I was thinking.
“Yes. Does he know how to read? I have seen no indication of it.”
“He talks about Dylan Thomas a little.”
“Oh, God.”
The philistinism of the U.S. government occupied us for the time it took to travel the short distance east from Fifth Avenue to Grand Central. We descended the stairs to the warmth and light of the Oyster Bar — not busy, another casualty of the blizzard.