He did not parody himself, but he had kept to his habit of thinking out loud. Saying “It’s Major” was his way of testing the possibility on me.
I took it that way. He was trying it out, and also, in his heart, he believed it to be true.
Another day he said, “Can you meet me in Kensington?”
I said yes, and met Vidia at the appointed place, a crimson telephone booth on a side street.
“Please make a phone call for me,” he said.
Following his instructions, I dialed the number, made the call, and asked for a certain woman; I had made no comment when Vidia told me the woman’s name was Margaret. She was summoned to the phone by the man who had answered me in a chilly voice, as though he suspected the ruse. I told Margaret that Vidia would call at a particular time.
“It’s much too boring to explain,” Vidia said after I hung up.
He did not have to explain. It was no mystery to me that such a wonderful writer could speak of his present work as Major, and be a guest at Garden Party at Buckingham Palace (The Lord Chamberlain is commanded by Her Majesty to invite…), and the next moment would implore me like a child to dial a telephone number, because — surely? — he feared his own undisguisable voice might provoke an unwelcome reaction. He didn’t want to be told off. He was human.
Now I knew, as only a friend can, that for all his apparent strength, he could also be weak and unsure, and even unfair, with a coldly sarcastic streak. He looked at the populous continent of Africa and said, “Bow-and-arrow men!” or “Cuffy!” He glanced across the English Channel at Holland and said, “Potato eaters!” He frowned at the whole of the Middle East and grunted, “Mr. Woggy.”
But he had also written subtly of Africa, and appreciatively of Europe, and as for the Middle East, he had written an entire book about Islam. So, while I tried to see him clearly, I kept from judging what I did not understand.
At its most profound, friendship is not a hearty, matey celebration of linked arms and vigorous toasts; it is, rather, a solemn understanding that is hardly ever discussed. Friends rarely use the word “friendship” and seldom speak of how they are linked. There is a sort of trust that is offered by very few people; there are favors very few can grant: such instances are the test of friendship. With your ego switched off, you accept this person — his demands, his silences — and it is reciprocal. The relationship does not have the hideous complexity of a family’s sibling rivalry — that struggling like crabs in a basket. Nor does it have the heat of romantic love or the contractual connection of marriage. Yet a sympathy as deep as love springs from the moment you detect any disturbance or intimation of inadequacy in this other person. You take the rest on faith. It is not belief but acceptance, and even a kind of protection.
Friendship arises less from an admiring love of strength than a sense of gentleness, a suspicion of weakness. It is compassionate intimacy, a powerful kindness, and a knowledge of imperfection. Conversely, the attraction of power seems to me purely sexual in origin, something to do with advancing and strengthening the symmetry in the species, and with animals looking for mates. In the natural world the weak or wounded are outrun and eaten by predators. There are plenty of robust courtships among animals, and the strong have flocking instincts and a pack mentality: animal species succeed because they reject the lame and the halt. Geeks and wimps in the animal world are left to die. Friendship is peculiarly human, and all the implications of friendship lead inevitably to the conclusion that friends make bad mates.
Humans like each other for opposite reasons, because although we might be weak and ineffectual, we are still kind. We have that in common, and much else: our intelligence and sympathy and self-respect. Vidia had liked me long ago in Africa. Before I had dared to admit that I wanted to write a book, he had said, “You’re a writer.”
How helpless I must have seemed. But he saw other strengths in me, something in my heart. He saw my soul in my face, my art in the lines of my palm, my ambition and moods in the slope and stroke of my handwriting.
I had thought he was very strong. We became friends. I saw that he had many weaknesses — and he saw mine. It made us better friends. Most writers are cranks, so friendship among them is rare, and they end up loners. I was lucky.
Friendship means favors. Our friendship had started with a favor, Vidia’s saying “Do you have a motorcar?” And soon after, he did me the favor of reading some things I had written. He was under no obligation; he hardly knew me; I was not his student. The favors were reciprocal. Often the same favor helped both of us. I read The Mimic Men in proof form for typos; that was my favor to him. He allowed me the first glimpse of The Mimic Men and I learned a great deal; that was his favor to me.
As the years passed, he would ask me for simple mysterious favors, like dialing the telephone number. Now and then he asked me to read the typescript of a book.
A writer asks a friend to read something in typescript — a smudged provisional form — in order to be encouraged. In this lonely and paranoia-inducing job we need friendly words. And unless a writer already thinks a piece of writing is very good, he does not hand it over for inspection and favorable comment. After that, with publication, there are many judgments, but by then the writer has moved on to something else. So the first look and the first praise is crucial, and often it is all that matters. It is a privileged peep into the heart of a writer at his most vulnerable. No writer would allow it unless praise was expected.
“I would like you to look at my new book,” Vidia said. “It’s Major.”
It was A Bend in the River, a bundle of typed pages. It was set in Africa. Even before I began reading it, I was apprehensive. Vidia was afraid of “bush people,” as he said, of “bow-and-arrow men.” Most of Africa seemed to represent his worst nightmare of brutishness and illiteracy. He was without much hope. “Africa has no future.”
I opened the book. I read, “Nazruddin, who sold me the shop cheap, didn’t think I would have it easy when I took over.”
The narrator of this perversely plain opening sentence, Salim, was a Muslim. That was something new. As a Brahmin, a half-believing Hindu, Vidia had never shown much interest in Muslims, and he had often been distinctly unsympathetic, blaming Islamic nationalists for the partition of India and for a repressive Pakistan. In Africa he had gravitated to the Hindu dukawallahs.
Right away I felt something was wrong, not just with that opening sentence but with some details. Salim ate nothing but beans. Surely a Muslim would eat meat and would make sure the animal had been slaughtered in the proper way, so that it was halal, the Islamic equivalent of kosher. Vidia had unconsciously imposed his own bean eating on his narrator. I made a note in the margin: Eats only beans?
The novel showed an intimate knowledge of Kisangani, at a bend in the Zaire River. In an earlier magazine piece about the Congo, “A New King for the Congo,” Vidia had written of how Stanleyville — Stanley Falls Station — had been the actual haunt of Mr. Kurtz, the heart of darkness, and “seventy years later at this bend in the river, something like Conrad’s fantasy came to pass.” He meant the tyrannical reign of Mobutu.
I found myself reading the typescript quickly, finding little to comment upon. It was a good book. It contained the somnolence as well as the random violence of Africa, and Vidia’s nose anatomized the stinks and putrefaction, the atmosphere of imperial failure and ruin. It was also a love story. Salim has an affair with Yvette, the wife of an expatriate. Salim is also a very prickly fellow. One day he feels slighted by Yvette, so he kicks her. She cries. Moments later she gets into bed, inviting him to join her. He realizes that it is the end of their affair. “Her body had a softness, a pliability, and a great warmth.” One expects that he will make love to her. He holds her legs apart. What Salim did next made me swing the typescript away from my face: “I spat at her between the legs until I had no more spit.” What? Yvette objects — naturally — and she shouts and struggles. So Salim hits her again. “Bone struck against bone again; my hand ached at every blow.”