We ordered. We talked. We drank. We ate. Vidia kept returning to the subject of Wesleyan. It was corrupt, a con, a cheat, the soft option of writing courses, the laziness of students.
“It’s crummy, man. Crummy. I should never have come.”
“Why did you?”
“I believed they were doing some good. And the pence, of course.” He made his rueful face. “But, you see, I have only myself to blame. I broke one of my rules.”
From time to time he lifted his eyes to look behind me, at a table where some people were speaking excitedly. I thought he might go over and tell them to shut up or stop smoking. But he was considerate: just a glance and then we kept talking, now about New York writers and how they were self-regarding. Vidia saw New York writers as shallow, cliquey, and envious, uninterested in the world, needing local witnesses, frenzied, not even very bright.
“I have my students reading Conrad. They don’t know him at all. They read — who? Kurt Vonnegut? But they respond to An Outpost of Progress’ and The Secret Agent. Some nice things in that.”
“I used to teach it in Singapore. Winnie’s a good character.”
“Of Winnie, Conrad says, ‘She felt profoundly that things do not stand much looking into.’”
“I also used to have the students read your Mr. Stone and the Knights Companion. I love that book.”
“You’re so kind, Paul. You know, I am assigning my students your Family Arsenal, for its depiction of London and bombers — excuse me.”
Interrupting himself as he looked up, he went to the table behind me while I held my breath and prayed that he would not make a scene.
When I looked around, I saw three people sitting at a table, sharing a bottle of wine, not eating, but all of them smoking cigarettes. A man and two women, and one of the women was Margaret from Argentina.
“Hello.”
She smiled and raised her glass. She looked a bit tipsy and rumpled. I had last seen her on a hot day in London, wearing a summer dress. On this freezing night in New York she was blotchy from the cold air and wore a thick dress. Her hair was windblown and damp. Yet with all this dishevelment she was as pretty as ever — perhaps prettier, the way some women look when their clothes are slightly awry, a blouse untucked, a button undone.
I got up to speak to her, and when I approached she introduced me to the others, her brother and sister-in-law. Vidia said nothing.
“How about this snow?” I said.
“Vidia adores it, but it makes life impossible,” Margaret said. “We live so far in Connecticut.”
Vidia said, “Paul, this has been splendid, but I think we must be going. We do have a long way to go. Margaret?”
“Just a minute.”
“Shall I see to the bill?” Vidia said, a trifle wearily.
“No. I’ll get it,” I said.
“Oh, good.”
Margaret frowned at him.
“I’ll be back in a moment,” he said.
Once again, Margaret and I were together, but unexpectedly. I gave the waitress my credit card.
“It must have been quite a ride from Connecticut,” I said.
“I did the driving. Vidia hates to drive.”
Really? But I said, “If I had known you were here, I would have asked you to join us.”
“Vidia wanted to talk to you. You’re his friend. You never quarrel!”
“That’s us. Dos amigos,”
“Claro.” She laughed. “He has the students reading your book. I don’t know which one, I’m afraid.”
“I used to tell my students to read Mr. Stone.”
“It’s one of his books he doesn’t like.”
This was news to me. “Which others doesn’t he like?”
“Suffrage of Elvira. A Flag on the Island.”
“I thought he liked those. And Mr. Stone’s a little masterpiece.”
“He doesn’t think so.”
Seeing Vidia hurrying towards us, I thought of asking him: What was it that he didn’t like about these novels of his? But it was late and they were leaving, and I was the wiser for seeing my friend’s friend materialize in this distant place.
We said goodbye in the snow outside and I left wondering, but also feeling profoundly that some things do not stand much looking into.
Later that year, in London, I visited him at his tiny apartment and we had tea. Pat was in the country, at Dairy Cottage. I did not mention New York, or Wesleyan.
“I’m going to South America,” I said.
“I am thinking of going to the Congo,” he said.
“A travel book?”
“Not exactly that. Call it travel with a theme.”
I said, “I’m planning to leave my house in Medford, Massachusetts, and just take trains, heading south, until I get to Patagonia.”
“It’s a delicious idea. I know you’ll do it well.”
“I’ll be spending some time in Buenos Aires,” I said. He did not react, and so I went on, “I don’t know a soul there.”
“Really.”
“Or in Argentina, for that matter.”
This seemed a natural inquiry, because Vidia had been to Argentina many times over the past seven years, had written about it extensively — about Borges and Evita and the culture of politics and terrorism. He had been fierce in some of his statements: “There is a certain ‘scum’ quality in Latin America. They imagine that if you kill the right people everything will work. Genocide is their history.” But he was frowning at me now, as if I had mentioned a place that was foreign to him.
“Do you know anyone there I might meet?”
“There are so many fraudulent people there,” he said. “Stay away from the ones that wear white shoes. And the ones who wear wristwatches that light up.”
“I was thinking of particular people I might call on.”
He thought hard. At last he said, “No. No.” And he stood up. Tea was over, the visit was at an end. He said with a trace of bitterness, “You’ll be all right, Paul. You’ll be all right.”
I took my Patagonia trip. I wrote my book. He took his trip. He wrote his Congolese pieces — journalism. After a time, he wrote a novel, A Bend in the River, set in Africa, about an Indian there who has a passionate affair with a married woman. And he wrote something else. I saw it listed in a bookseller’s catalogue, a privately printed book called Congo Diary: “In a limited edition of 330 copies. Three hundred are numbered, twenty-six lettered, and four bear the printed name of a recipient.”
Mine was not one of the printed names. I bought copy number 46 for $200. It was signed by Vidia. The dedication was “M. M.”
13. Death Is the Motif
BROTHERS are versions of each other, a suggestion implicit in the word itself, the “other” in “brother.” Seeing Shiva Naipaul was always an oblique encounter with Vidia, as though I had bumped into someone similar, not an identical twin; the rough draft, not the finished article.
Brothers are like that. The wit in one is craziness in another; one is an original sculptor, another is “good with his hands,” a third is a klutz who drops things, and a fourth might be a brutish criminal, even a destroyer. Three or four flawed prototypes for the man of achievement. You discern the thin one in the fat one, the artist in the con man. What are the roots of this variety, so many exotic blossoms on the same stem? No one knows their past; and the brothers resent the blurring of these convergent echoes and resemblances, because such resemblances can be so misleading.
The history of scribbling brothers is full of conflict, which ranges from hurt feelings and petty grumbling (“Why does he get all the attention?”) to vicious attempts at literary fratricide (“Take that, you bastard!”). One of the brothers is always the other’s inferior. Look at the brothers William and Henry James, Oscar and Willie Wilde, James and Stanislaus Joyce, Thomas and Heinrich Mann, Anton and Nikolai Chekhov, Lawrence and Gerald Durrell — there are no intellectual equals here, and, being writers, they are borderline nutcases.