One of the chores of book publication is the writing of jacket copy. This copy is also recycled in the publisher’s catalogue. When he received the proposed jacket copy for A Turn in the South, Vidia pronounced it unsuitable. He did not rage. He wrote a long, patient letter to his publisher, Viking, explaining his intentions. He closed the letter: “A writer sets out to do a particular thing. He should do that thing, and should feel that he has done it. But every real book catches fire, goes beyond a writer’s intention. So it happens that readers and critics find other meanings in a real book. I was hoping that someone at Viking might have said something interesting in the blurb.”
But no one had, and the agent called me, saying, “Paul, Vidia asked me to ring you. We need a favor.”
This was in the month of August. I had just ended a book tour for Riding the Iron Rooster, my book about China. I was working on a novel, My Secret History. I listened with a sinking heart.
“Would you, as a favor, write the jacket blurb for A Turn in the South?”
It meant putting my novel aside to perform the most menial and thankless work in publishing. It meant closely reading Vidia’s entire book, then writing the blurb — in effect a short, insightful, and persuasive rave — and sending it to the publisher, who was probably on vacation. It was a monumental intrusion into my writing life, something no writer — and certainly not Vidia — would consider for an instant.
“I’ll do it,” I said.
The agent laughed at my pliability. He was grateful, of course, and also surprised. But Vidia felt he was in a spot, and I remembered his saying years before, “That’s what friends are for.”
A bound proof was sent to me. I read it with interest and I liked it, the apparent simplicity of the journey in the American South: Vidia’s appreciation, something resembling humility in his approach, with no bombast and a genuine curiosity. He defined the sort of travel book he was writing and in so doing made helpful distinctions between other sorts. It was not possible to write a conventional travel book about the United States — a book in which, as Vidia explained, the traveler said, “This is me here. This is me getting off the old native bus and being led by strange boys, making improper proposals, to some squalid lodging. This is me having a drink in a bar with some local characters. This is me getting lost later that night.”
That kind of book, very common, depicted the traveler “defining himself against a foreign background.” He added that “depending on who he is, the book can be attractive,” but it worked only if the traveler was “alien or outlandish in some way.” Yet this method seldom worked for the traveler in the United States. “The place is not and cannot be alien in the simple way an African country is alien. It is too well known, too photographed, too written about; and, being more organized and less informal, it is not so open to casual inspection.”
This was to me an inspired lesson in the varieties of travel writing. Vidia also seemed, once again, to be speaking directly to me, a traveler on native buses, a buyer of drinks for local characters, making a meal of my losing my way. Twenty-three years on, I was still learning from him.
So I began my blurb, “A Turn in the South is a completely fresh look at an area and a situation which have become caricaturish for some and incomprehensible for others.”
Knowing that Vidia would be scrutinizing every word, I wrote carefully, self-consciously, with the sort of precision and invention Vidia expected, struggling to make it right: a forty-eight-year-old man revisiting the humility and strain of his apprenticeship. The three hundred words took me two days. I sent the piece, via the agent, to Vidia, like a student submitting a crucial essay to his professor. It was both a test of friendship and a test of skill.
The reply came back from the agent, a scribble: V. very grateful.
A more unusual favor was asked of me by Vidia when he was writing The Enigma of Arrival. The germ of the book was old. In 1966 Vidia had shown me some pages of a story he intended to return to again. “I warm up this way,” he said. To get into a writing mood, he copied and recopied the pages, describing a classical scene pictured in a painting by De Chirico. Alter two decades he was using those same pages as part of a novel.
I met him for tea in his tiny flat in Queen’s Gate Terrace.
“I was assaulted in Gloucester Road,” he said. “A Negro approached me. He made as if to walk by and then hit me hard on the side of the head—whack!”
“That’s terrible, Vidia.”
“It was a shock.”
But he was calm. Beside him was a large file folder containing a four-inch stack of paper, undoubtedly a typescript.
“I am at a very delicate point in my book,” Vidia said. He glanced at the file folder.
“Is that it?”
He nodded gravely. “It’s Major.”
He did not say that it was a continuation of his old story; he said nothing about it other than that it was Major. He only mentioned that he had not finished it.
“I may never finish it.”
What a funny thing to say, I thought. I said, “But you have to.”
“What if my brain is damaged?”
“Your brain is fine, Vidia.”
“What if someone else assaults me? One of these idlers one sees on the Gloucester Road. He might do serious damage. I would then be incapable of finishing the book. How could I, with a damaged brain?”
“In that case, I see, you’d be mentally unfit. But that’s just speculation.”
“It is a real possibility! I tell you, I was attacked by a Negro!”
“Maybe you should stay in Wiltshire.”
“I shall. But one comes up for the odd errand. One’s bank manager. One’s publishers. One’s haircut,” he said. “Paul, I want you to read this typescript. Read it closely.”
“Of course. I’d be happy to.”
“And if my brain is damaged and I cannot continue, I want you to finish writing the book.”
I leaned back to give myself perspective and to see whether he was smiling. But no, he was stern and certain, and he was brisk in his certainty, like a warrior making a will.
“You’ll notice there are many repetitions. Those are intentional. Keep the repetitions. And the rhythm, the way the sentences flow — keep that. You’ll see how the narrative builds. Keep building, let it flow.”
From the way he spoke, I had already, it seemed, been commissioned to finish writing The Enigma of Arrival, and he was brain damaged, sitting by while I scribbled, the ultimate test of the Sorcerer’s Apprentice, his snarelike shadow falling over me.
“What do you think, Paul?”
“It would be an honor, of course. And a challenge. A bit like Ford Madox Ford and Conrad collaborating on a novel, or Stevenson and his stepson Lloyd writing something together.”
“No, no. This is Major.”
I went home with the heavy typescript. I read it — three quarters of the book — and at the end my confidence was gone. There was no way I could finish the book or comment on it. I didn’t even like it. It seemed a studied monotony — repetitive, as he had said; indistinct, allusive, but fogbound, enigmatic in every way, a ponderous agglomeration of the dullest rural incidents. I had never read anything like it. It might be a masterpiece like Finnegans Wake, the sort of book people studied but could not read consecutively, an ambitious failure, something for the English Department to explicate and defend.
The Bungalow and Wilsford were in it, and so was a glimpse of Stephen Tennant — his plump pink thigh, his straw hat. Not very funny, though. The nutter seemed to represent the decline of Englishness rather than (as I thought) the apogee of the landlord as drag queen. Julian Jebb was in the book. He was unmistakable, his “little old woman’s face.” He was called Alan. I knew him to be an accomplished television producer. Vidia depicted him as a drunken flatterer, rather pathetic and hollow. He was “theatrical.” Jebb’s suicide was in it, in the middle of a dismissive paragraph, with less compassion than if Jebb had passed a kidney stone. “And then one day I heard — some days after the event — that he had taken some pills one night after a bout of hard drinking and died. It was a theatrical kind of death.”