In Conversation
Finding the way home
PARVATHI NAYAR
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Paul Theroux, who has just done a re-run of his 1973 train journey through Asia, talks about truth, fiction, real and imaginative journeys.
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Paul Theroux: Writing about his own fantasies and experiences.
IN 1973, a traveller-writer took a trip, a journey through Asia, which gave him the raw material that was shaped into the beautifully observed and written The Great Railway Bazaar: By Train Through Asia. Earlier this year, Paul Theroux decided to re-do the journey, the classic "in his footsteps" genre, travelling to see/ experience what someone else had seen/ experienced. The twist, of course, was that Theroux was retracing the paths trodden by his own younger self. Some 33 years on, the world is different in every sense: politically, economically, culturally. But then, so is the traveller.
"If there is one constant in travel, it is that nothing stays the same," says Theroux, when I catch up with him right at the end of his Bazaar trip. This time, he's been on the road for "two-and-a-half months straight. The first time it was four-and-a-half months," he offers.
Seminal book
Why Bazaar? Well, probably because it was such a seminal book, his first travel book, a bestseller that established Theroux's reputation as one of the most evocative travel writers of our time. Bazaar, actually, is more travel diary than travelogue, written with the intimate pleasure of someone who loves riding on trains. He doesn't fall into the trap of playing helicopter-journalist, deciding that the few days spent in a country qualifies him to be its commentator. Theroux is content to describe the people he meets and his experiences, both of which he does with immediacy and colour. As he writes in Bazaar, "I sought trains; I found passengers."
Theroux, born in 1941, began life as a teacher, first in Africa where he was involved in a failed coup in Malawi and then, in 1968, at the University of Singapore, before turning to fulltime writing and travelling. That the decision suits him is evident if only from his high book count — over 40 books in roughly as many years. He says: "The more you write, the more you are capable of writing. Only amateurs wait for inspiration, the rest of us go to work, writing is work."
And this work isn't self-indulgent. A novel isn't simply made-up stuff, but the truth about a specific time and place, "nothing is more truthful than the fiction of a place." The truth of things. Time. Growing older. Change. All these are ongoing preoccupations with the author today, and recurring themes in our conversation.
"When you are young, you don't see patterns in how the world is changing. I've thought about this quite a lot, that many writers such as Scott Fitzgerald or Hemingway haven't made it to my age. I'm — knock on wood — lucky, I got here. It's one of the bonuses of growing old, that you see the world in a different way." Time is a pretty impartial judge of what remains, what fades. As Theroux says, "The wheel of fortune turns, if you live long enough, you can see the truth of the world."
Theroux has experienced some of this already in his life, with books of his that were banned now becoming part of reading lists in schools in Africa. That's encouraging, sure, but Theroux isn't optimistic about where our world is headed with problems such as Third World population explosion, global warming or nuclear proliferation and "self-interested governments" at the helm of things. "The fact that some countries are well-fed doesn't impress me, because most of the world I've seen is poor, most of the world doesn't have a chance. Yes, I'm impressed by the advances in technology in India — but am more interested in the people that it hasn't affected."
On other writers
Our talk moves on to some of the authors who have affected him. For starters, there is V.S. Naipaul, a famous love-hate relationship that's recorded in Sir Vidia's Shadow. "Naipaul is an awful person, a tyrannical uncle, but also a mentor, in the sense of a guru who forces you to sit for long periods of time in uncomfortable positions so you can understand yourself better." Naipaul, he says, was "cruel, critical, brutal in criticism, hard to please, vain, a colonial, acquisitive, avaricious, disloyal, fickle, but highly intelligent, with a great taste in books, and how much I profited from knowing him. The book I wrote on him would rank high on my list of top 10."
Theroux also talks about Graham Greene, who "validated my belief that it is possible to lead a sedentary life, sit in a chair for two years writing a book, and after that when you wonder what to do, you can go somewhere to look for a subject to write about. A writer, in my opinion, is a free man, no one owns you. If you are a really balanced person you won't become a writer; to be a writer you need to be broody, quarrelsome, discontent."
Theroux's most preferred form of writing is neither the travelogue nor the novel, but the short novel or novella. It's not easily published, he grants, but enjoys its length of some 100 pages, where it's possible to control it, so it's just right. Of his dozen or so short novels, he picks out one written while travelling in Africa. "I was sexually frustrated, alone and wrote an erotic novella, just to satisfy my own fevered imagination — it's called the Stranger at the Palazzo D'Oro."
Apart from travel, the erotic has been another element in his writing, often provoking criticism from reviewers and readers alike. There's also an element of self-reflexivity, with the author mining his life and the lives of those close to him for inspiration. These strands are present in Theroux's latest, Blinding Light. It is the tale of a remarkably successful travel writer suffering from writer's block, who travels to Ecuador to partake of a native hallucinogen; the drug unleashes his creativity and his libido, but also leaves him temporarily blind. "I'm not prudish," Theroux says matter-of-factly. "I try to write as naturally as possible in a way that expresses a feeling that I have. There is a lot of revelation in sexuality if it is expressed in a free and not-vulgar way; the Indians had the right ideas, with the notion of an ecstatic state, and symbols of the lingam and yoni in temples."
As for the self-reflexivity: "At a certain point, I realised that I only have myself to write about, this little life. I can pretend that I write about other people but in reality, I'm writing about my own fantasies, my own experiences." It's an idea that he expresses in Picture Palace, that those who create, irrespective of the subject matter, express who they are through the work. Even photographers who shoot subjects by pointing the camera away from themselves: "Photographs appear not to be revealing of the person taking it, but in reality, says everything about the photographer."
Theroux himself never travels with a camera, "looking through a camera is an obstruction to seeing." He would like to believe that his writing is pictorial: "I'm very much of the view that writing is about seeing; I want to make you `see' what I'm writing about India, Singapore, Bangkok, London." So Theroux takes notes and sometimes does sketches. He pulls out the current notebook he is filling up, a black book, which he lets me look at upside down; I can't actually read what he's written, but notice that nothing is crossed out and that the easy, sloped writing falls into patterns.
Apparently, Theroux writes his first drafts in longhand. To actually write things by hand "is one of the pleasures. I believe writing is one of the plastic arts; it's more visual than it is given credit for. Calligraphy interests me. When you write by hand you carve something out on a page. It's aesthetically very pleasing to me, and it has got me interested in looking at pictures."
The urge to collect
His collecting instincts are geared towards the pictorial arts. He has collected different kinds of art over the years, from Japanese woodblock prints to his "latest enthusiasm, over the past three years or so, glass paintings from India." The figurative subjects of these reverse painted glass pictures vary from goddesses to nautch girls. Another previous collecting interest was "watercolours by travellers, generally British, many of whom went to India before the era of photography." For him, "art isn't about `great' artists, art is about people expressing themselves in a particular way, as travellers for example."
Theroux travels, "to know myself better and know the world better, it's that simple. If there is a reason to travel, it is the hope that something is revealed to you." But now, at the end of his Bazaar journey, he's looking forward to flying home. Home is currently split between Cape Cod and Hawaii, with his wife and his books, raising some individualistic but co-operative sounding geese, bee keeping and growing tomatoes. He muses that all the years of hard travel later, "I might get to the point where I'll stay home." As he writes somewhat prophetically towards the end of Bazaar, "All travel is circular... After all, the grand tour is just the inspired man's way of heading home."
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