I spat at her between the legs until I had no more spit.
The difficulty I always had with Vidia’s scenes of sex or violence became almost overwhelming. Was it because I did not want to read such scenes for what they disclosed about my friend? A writer is never more unconsciously confessional than when he writes of sex. Vidia’s scenes were aggressive, strange, joyless. Women’s bodies were pathetic and frail; they smelled. He was forever finding women leaky and damp, in sadly wrinkled clothes, creases at the crotch, stains at the armpits. Even when they tried to correct the condition, they could not win. In In a Free State, Bobby finds a sachet in Linda’s room. “It was a vaginal deodorant with an appalling name. The slut, Bobby thought, the slut.”
And in The Mimic Men there had been the whore in Spain whom Ralph Singh brought to his hotel room: “A figure from hell with a smiling child’s face.” She is very fat. The act of love is like a visit from a proctologist. “Nails, tongue, breath and lips were the instruments of this disembodied probing… The probing went lower. I was turned over on my belly. The probing continued with the same instruments.”
Disgust and desire were mingled with a distinct hostility towards women in Guerrillas. The “white liberal” woman, Jane, becomes aroused when she is viciously slapped, “so hard that her jaw jarred… and then she was slapped again.” She discovers “to her dismay and disgust that she was moist.” Odd that Vidia, of all people, found any veracity in the misogynistic cliché of slapping as foreplay and a beating as an aphrodisiac. Later, in a Black Power commune, Jane is raped by Jimmy Ahmed, who is the commune’s leader. Jimmy has a hair-trigger problem: “Just like that, without convulsions, his little strained strength leaked out of him, and it was all over.” But forget hanky-panky: Jane is more aroused by being slapped around. And Jimmy is actually homosexuaclass="underline" “He longed for the feel of Bryant’s warm firm flesh and his relieving mouth and tongue.” Nevertheless, Jane stays in the commune, only to be violently sodomized by Jimmy, who taunts her: “You didn’t bring your Vaseline.” In this act, his ejaculatio praecox is apparently cured: “He drove deeper and deeper until he was almost sitting upright on her.” Very soon after, at Jimmy’s command, Jane is hacked to death with machetes.
In his essay on Evita Peron, Vidia mentions Evita’s full red lips, hinting at “her reputed skill in fellatio.” He describes the machismo of Argentine males and their single-mindedness on the subject of sodomy. “The macho’s conquest of a woman is complete only when he has buggered her… La tuve en el culo, I’ve had her in the arse… a kind of sexual black mass.” Elsewhere in his writing he would describe a man with a complexion “like risen dough” and imply, and sometimes assert, it to be the clear indication that the man was an ardent masturbator, much as Dickens had implied the same nocturnal autoeroticism by giving Uriah Heep circles around his eyes. If it is fair to regard the passions and fantasies of a writer’s characters as those of the writer himself — and why not? — then I found Vidia’s observations unsettling.
“In the old days I would have grown dizzy with excitement here,” Vidia wrote recently in Beyond Belief, describing the crowds of Pakistani whores in the red-light district of Lahore. “Up to my mid-thirties I had been attracted to prostitutes and sought them out.” If that was true, how did it square with his looking me in the eye in Kampala, when he was thirty-four, and saying, “I have given up sex"? It did not square at all, of course, and I now believed the later statement, of his having been a whore-hopper, which was why I was convinced that only with the passage of time did one know the truth.
But I had A Bend in the River in my hand. The spitting scene stayed in my mind, as well as that unpromising first sentence. The rest I liked. We met for tea. I brought the typescript.
“What do you think, Paul?”
“You’re right. It’s Major.”
“No suggestions?”
“The first sentence is wonderful,” I said. “But there is an even better one in the sixth paragraph.”
“Show me.”
It was in the middle of the paragraph. It ran, “The world is what it is; men who are nothing, who allow themselves to become nothing, have no place in it.”
It was certainly a mouthful for a semi-educated Indian shopkeeper in the Congolese bush, yet it seemed to me the most effective way of starting the novel.
Vidia circled it, made a balloon for it, and indicated where it should be inserted, at the top of the first paragraph.
“You’re right, Paul,” he said. “I’m sure that’s better. It will sell more copies this way.”
“One other thing. Salim eats an awful lot of beans. He never eats meat.”
“Patsy said something about that.”
“Give him some meat, I think.”
A Bend in the River was shortlisted for the Booker Prize that year. I was one of the Booker judges. I reread the book, one of many submissions for the important prize, and saw that Vidia had transposed the sentence, as I had suggested. He had also made Salim a credible carnivore. But when it came to the decision, I voted against it. Mine was the deciding vote. I preferred Patrick White’s novel, The Twyborn Affair.
“Patrick White? Over my dead body,” one of the panelists said.
Another said to me, “I thought Naipaul was your friend.”
“So what? I didn’t like the spitting. I wasn’t convinced by the ending — all that to-ing and fro-ing, the visit to London.”
In the end, we compromised on Offshore, by Penelope Fitzgerald, and most people jeered at our choice. They said Naipaul should have won. But Vidia had already won the Booker Prize with In a Free State. It was thought that because I was a judge, Vidia would be a shoo-in. Not at all.
Though Vidia maintained that writing was fair and that books always made their own way, he had been impressed by the effectiveness of Shiva’s agent. I had introduced Shiva to this agent, who was also my agent. Vidia asked for an introduction and very soon afterwards became a client. Vidia’s advances and the terms of his contracts were greatly improved. He might soon have his million.
“I am not happy with my publisher,” Vidia said on another occasion.
I introduced him to my publisher.
“What can I do to tempt him?” my publisher said.
“Give him a million pounds.”
“Out of the question.”
“Then get a table at a fabulous restaurant for dinner. Not lunch. ‘Dinner is grander.’ Then let Vidia order the wine. It’s not a guarantee of success, but at least he won’t get up in the middle and stalk away.”
“Do you think he would have the temerity to do that?”
“It has happened before.”
I was invited to the dinner. My publisher was nervous. Vidia ordered a white Burgundy and a prawn entrée. But the prawns were bad. Vidia said he had to leave. I drove him back to Kensington just in time for him to be nauseated in the privacy of his own home. He found another publisher. It wasn’t the food, however, it was the money — he was still aiming at a million.