Sunrise with Seamonsters Read online

  Sunrise with Seamonsters

  A Paul Theroux Reader

  Paul Theroux

  * * *

  A Mariner Book

  HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY

  BOSTON • NEW YORK

  * * *

  Copyright © 1985 by Cape Cod Scriveners Company

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

  For information about permission

  to reproduce selections from this book, write to

  Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Company,

  215 Park Avenue South, New York,

  New York 10003.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Theroux, Paul.

  Sunrise with seamonsters.

  I. Title

  PS3570.H458 1985 813'.54 85-2343

  ISBN 0-395-41501-2 (pbk.)

  Printed in the United States of America

  QUM 17 16 15 14 13 12 11

  * * *

  To my Parents,

  Albert and Anne Theroux,

  With Love

  * * *

  "Words, words, words! There were no deeds," interrupted Rudin.

  "No deeds! What kind of—"

  "What kind of deeds? Supporting a blind old granny and all her family by your hard work—remember Pryazhentsev? There's a deed for you."

  "Yes, but good words can also be deeds."

  —Ivan Turgenev, Rudin

  (translated from the Russian by Marcel Theroux)

  * * *

  Contents

  Introduction 1

  The Edge of the Great Rift [1964] 7

  Burning Grass [1964] 9

  Winter in Africa [1965] 12

  The Cerebral Snapshot [1965] 15

  State of Emergency [1966] 18

  Leper Colony [1966] 21

  Scenes from a Curfew [1966] 23

  Tarzan is an Expatriate [1967] 31

  Cowardice [1967] 40

  Seven Burmese Days [1970] 48

  The Novel is Dead, Allah Be Praised! [1971] 58

  The Killing of Hastings Banda [1971] 63

  Lord of the Ring [1971] 76

  A Love-Scene After Work [1971] 83

  V. S. Naipaul [1971 and 1982] 91

  Kazantzakis' England [1972] 101

  Malaysia [1973] 106

  Memories of Old Afghanistan [1974] 109

  The Night Ferry to Paris [1975] 123

  Stranger on a Train [1976] 126

  An English Visitor [1976] 136

  Discovering Dingle [1976] 140

  The Exotic View [1977] 146

  Homage to Mrs Robinson [1977] 152

  My Extended Family [1977] 156

  A Circuit of Corsica [1977] 166

  Nixon's Neighborhood [1977] 171

  Nixon's Memoirs [1978] 177

  The Orient Express [1978] 182

  Traveling Home: High School Reunion [1979] 185

  Rudyard Kipling: The White Man's Burden [1979] 195

  John McEnroe, Jr. [1979] 206

  Christmas Ghosts [1979] 212

  Henry Miller [1980] 215

  V. S. Pritchett [1980] 218

  The Past Recaptured [1980] 229

  Railways of the Raj [1980] 234

  Subterranean Gothic [1981] 239

  Easy Money—Patronage [1981] 259

  Mapping the World [1981] 278

  The Last Laugh [1981] 284

  Graham Greene's Traveling Companion [1981] 289

  Summertime on the Cape [1981] 297

  His Monkey Wife [1983] 303

  Being a Man [1983] 309

  Making Tracks to Chittagong [1983] 313

  Introducing Jungle Lovers [1984] 328

  Dead Man Leading [1984] 331

  What Maisie Knew [1984] 335

  Sunrise with Seamonsters [1984] 346

  Afterword 363

  * * *

  Introduction

  For the past twenty years I have been writing with both hands. I thought: I'll write a few more pieces and then I'll work on my novel. I never dared to entertain great hopes for my novels—or my travel books, either. But I always expected to be fairly paid for my journalism, which these fifty pieces are. This was specific labor of short duration that would finance my more ambitious, or at least more time-consuming, books. I assumed that one day I would gather some of these pieces together, but I never guessed it would be other than a motley collection, and certainly not a book in any symmetrical sense. This was, mainly, writing for money—paying bills.

  I think I was wrong. For one thing, the money for this work was not much. I had thought of including the fee I got for each piece: "The Killing of Hastings Banda," Esquire, 1971—$600; "Malaysia," Vogue, 1973—$70; "A Circuit of Corsica," The Atlantic, 1978—$350; and so forth, as an instructive joke and a severe warning to anyone who intended to make a living this way. But then I decided that it would distract attention from the pieces themselves, and the price-tags might demean them. Anyway, these pieces hardly paid my bills. It was my books that saved me from dropping back into the schoolroom, or into the even more dire profession of writing applications for grants and fellowships ("My creative writing project is a novel about..."). And as for the question of symmetry, I hope this book is something more than a rag-bag anthology. I have waited this long so that it might have the proportions of a better book—four dimensions and even a kind of narrative.

  The early pieces sound a little forced and clumsy to me. I was twenty-two or twenty-three, and if the prose is harshly old-fashioned, then so was the setting. I wrote most of the early pieces in Africa—the old Africa, with muddy roads and dusty faces; "Yes, Master," the elderly "houseboys" would say. This was Malawi, an ex-British Protectorate that was to turn into a franker kind of black dictatorship. It was not merely that there were no African members of the Blantyre Club, or that I had a cook and a gardener and they earned about $15 a month between them; and it was not the signs in the butcher shops advertising "Boys' Meat" (cheap mutton you were supposed to buy for your "houseboy"); no, stranger and more startling, it was the sight of African women who fell to their knees in the dust by the roadside as I passed on a motorcycle or a car, because of my white face—but it was whiter for having seen that. It was the Africa of leper colonies and Home Leave; and it was not regarded as inhuman but only bad manners for a white person to say, "Exterminate the brutes!"

  I remember another day in Mozambique, in a terrible little country town, getting a haircut from a Portuguese barber. He had come to the African bush from rural Portugal to be a barber. What was so unusual about that? Mozambique had been a colony for hundreds of years—the first Portuguese claimed it in 1489. If I had asked, I am sure this barber would have said he was following in the footsteps of Vasco da Gama. He did not speak English, I did not speak Portuguese, yet when I addressed his African servant in Chinyanja, his own language, the Portuguese man said, in Portuguese, "Ask the bwana what his Africans are like." And that was how we held a conversation—the barber speaking Portuguese to the African who translated it into Chinyanja for me; and I replied in Chinyanja which the African translated into Portuguese for the barber. The barber kept saying—and the African kept translating—things like, "I can't stand the blacks—they're so stupid and bad-tempered. But there's no work in Portugal." It was grotesque, it was outrageous, it was the shabbiest, darkest kind of imperialism. I could not believe my good luck. Twenty years ago in parts of Africa it was the Nineteenth Century, and living there I was filled with an urgency to write about it. I like the word "pieces". I wrote about it in pieces.

  It has given me, in an overlapping way, two writing lives; in one I have been writing books, a lengthening shelf of them, and in the other life I have been writing these pieces. I regarded a book as an indulgence
—I mean a "vision" but the word sounds too pompous and spiritual. These pieces I meant to be concrete—responses to experiences, with my feet squarely on the ground; immediate and direct, written to fulfill a specific purpose, and somewhat alien to the meandering uncertainties of the novel. They were also a breath of air. In the middle of writing Picture Palace I went to San Clemente and wrote about Nixon (and some of Picture Palace I wrote in the San Clemente Motor Inn); and the piece reprinted here which is an introduction to the O.U.P. paperback edition of His Monkey Wife I wrote during a break from The Kingdom by the Sea. In the middle of The Mosquito Coast I went down the Yangtze River from Chonqing to Shanghai and wrote about it for a British newspaper (a fuller account of the trip appeared as a small book, Sailing Through China). I never really minded writing with both hands. I usually needed a break—I am sure The Mosquito Coast is the better for my experiences in China. I require a certain amount of undemanding interruption in order to maintain my concentration. I start every day by writing letters, and even when I am working on a novel I answer the phone.

  I have often found the writing of occasional pieces to be valuable in unexpected ways—inspirational even. Not simply going to California or reading Joyce Cary or looking in Vermont for traces of Kipling's family feud—each experience a pleasure all its own; but rather carrying out an ambiguous assignment and in so doing making discoveries that change my outlook for good. These are the excitements of a writer's life. Writing about the New York subway was one of the most illuminating experiences I have ever had, and the memory of riding all those trains continues to suggest to me new ways of looking at the metropolitan world. Going to my high school reunion was another such memorable experience: it altered my thinking about myself and the past. I saw that it was not education that made me a writer, but perhaps its opposite—my sense of incompleteness, of being outside the currents of society and powerless and unprivileged and anxious to prove myself; that, and my membership in a large family, with childhood fantasies of travel and, in general, being if not a rebel then an isolated and hot-eyed punk. For years I felt that being respectable meant maintaining a sinister complacency, and the disreputable freedom I sought helped make me a writer.

  In the course of writing these pieces I was forced to draw conclusions, sometimes brutal ones. If I had not been asked to write them—most of them are responses to editorial requests—I would never have had to face these truths. I needed that discipline and I needed the encouragement of regular work—of writing. I was put in touch with the world, and drawn away from my desk, and given the illusion of writing as a profession: so I felt businesslike and orderly and purposeful. I needed all those illusions to keep up my morale.

  I had once thought that these pieces fell naturally into categories: Travel, Photography, Books, Writers, Family, and Trains. I realized that I habitually mixed these topics together: travel was not only an experience of space and time, but had its literary and domestic aspects as well. Travel is everything, and my way of travelling is completely personal. This is not a category—it is more like a whole way of life. And it is impossible to write about a subway without alluding to The Waste Land, or to deal with Burma without mentioning Orwell. My piece about my family—"My Extended Family"—owes a great deal to my having lived in Africa. They are all personal.

  There was only one arrangement of this book that made any sense. Set out chronologically these pieces seemed to me to form a narrative of having lived through two interesting decades in a number of different countries; and not just lived through, but grown up in. This is what I was writing when I was also writing my books. Even if they don't shed light on those books—but I think they do—perhaps they explain why I never had time for anything else; why I am so poor at tennis and inexperienced as a film-goer, and why I raise my voice so quickly when the Guggenheim Foundation ("We regret to inform you...") is mentioned. That is what I mean by a narrative. For example, it ought to be easy to understand, after thirty-eight pieces and seventeen years (and seventeen books), and no Fellowship, why the thirty-ninth piece, in 1980, was an attack on patronage.

  And I think I was wrong about book reviewing. I wrote 356 book reviews in this time. None of them is included here. It seemed to me that they were insubstantial and that to include them would be asking for trouble. I believed that they were likely to antagonize any reviewer of this book. "I can do better than that," I imagined a reviewer murmuring, and I saw him doing precisely as he had said, demolishing me in a stylish way. It is a hard living—book reviewing—and except in the rarest cases it is seldom a livelihood. That was another misapprehension of mine twenty years ago—that if all else failed I would be able to make ends meet this way. I suppose I might have managed, hacking away on the Entertainment Page, where book reviews generally appear these days.

  I must say I have very little time for the academic who regards a book review as a "publication", to be listed in his or her curriculum vitae in the hopes of securing tenure. A book review is, or ought to be, a notice—a response. It is not an essay, not even a piece. If it is reprinted at all it ought to have a certain period charm. How else can it be justified? The sheer fun of the vicious attack, the mocking review or the assault on a bubble reputation are not long-lasting. Something more judicious is needed, and in rereading my book reviews I saw that it was usually lacking. I was writing "notices". If a book was good I wanted it to have readers; if it was bad I tried to discourage interest in it. If I felt it was overrated I tried to get its true measure.

  But as all my book reviews have turned out to be ephemeral things, I begin to wonder why I went to such trouble. A book review was a two-day job—one day to read the book, another to write the review. The book reviewer does not choose the books: they are sent to him by the literary editor. That is part of the book reviewing code; and another part of it is that the reviewer resists influence and usually reacts violently against hype. It is to my mind one of the most decent areas of journalism and probably the worst paid. There are foolish and vain and self-serving book reviewers, but I have never known a corrupt one, nor have I been aware of any suggestion that a book reviewer was in the pay of a publisher.

  There is immense value in reviewing, though there is no denying that it is often a great nuisance, too. The reviewer is forced to judge a work; he must articulate his reaction; he must learn to read intelligently. I think reviewing tends to make a writer a bit more open-minded, less self-regarding and precious. It could be argued—I certainly believe it—that reviewing is one of the duties of the profession, too, and a much greater necessity for a writer than teaching how to write at a university, or leading seminars on literary culture. I have a comradely feeling for novelists who review books, and those who don't—who turn their refusal into a sort of loathsome boast—I find lazy and contemptible.

  And yet I cannot bring myself to reprint all that stuff. I know they would have a weak warmed-over flavor, and I am satisfied that they have served their purpose. Looking through them, just before I decided to chuck them all, I was somewhat startled by their dated ferocity. This is the beginning of my review of Fear of Flying:

  With such continual and insistent reference to her cherished valve, Erica Jong's witless heroine looms like a mammoth pudendum, as roomy as the Carlsbad Caverns, luring amorous spelunkers to confusion in her plunging grottoes. On her eighth psychoanalyst and second marriage, Isadora Wing admits to a contortion we are not privileged to observe and confesses, "I seem to live inside my cunt," which strikes one as a choice as inconvenient as a leaky bedsitter in Elmer's End...

  This crappy novel...

  At the time of the Royal Wedding in London, when Prince Charles married Lady Diana Spencer, an ambitious Australian who was also one of the nastier television critics, wrote a slurping poetic tribute to the prince. Perhaps he deserved this:

  It is not true that all bad poetry springs from genuine feeling. Look at this book, for example. It is about as awful, as lame and as lifeless as can be, and yet it clearly springs fro
m spurious feeling, self-boosting facetiousness and back-handed social climbing which, in Clive James's couplets, turn into fawning mockery, as he hitches his trundling wagon of assorted poetic styles to the Royal Coach in the hope of someone catching sight of his bumpy head and inefficient eyes, so he can wave hello in his own way...

  It went on in this way for eight more paragraphs.

  Another waspish review, far too long and far too cruel to quote, was the one I wrote of John Updike's Rabbit Redux. I read the book and wrote the review when I was in Indonesia, living among some of the poorest people I have ever seen in my life. This was on the fringes of Djakarta. In my lap was the complacent Rabbit Angstrom and his hysterical wife and the sexual tangles that Mr Updike seemed to be insisting were serious problems; and out of the window—I could see them by glancing up—were people living in cardboard shelters, drinking black water and actually starving to death. To say that I took a dim view of Rabbit is an understatement; I said it was immoral and asinine. I am sure I overreacted, but I still think it is a silly book.

  I had my fill of reading bad books and giving damaging reviews. I decided that if a book was no good I did not want to read it, much less review it, and for the past eight years or so I have stuck to that. No one is sure whether reviews play much of a part in the selling of a book, and this uncertainty is a salutary thing—it has at least kept book reviewing honest. One of the happiest results of a book review I wrote was my receiving, a few years ago, a copy of the local newspaper of Wilton, Connecticut. Just under the paper's title, at the top of page one—where you might expect to find a quotation from Deuteronomy or one of Pudd'nhead Wilson's Maxims—was the line: "I never knew a snob who was not also a damned liar"—Paul Theroux. From a book review—bless them! I thought then, maybe someday I'll collect those reviews. But I have read them all. Some made me laugh, some made me cringe. What a lot of work! But they have served their purpose. There are none here.