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PHOTO: V. GANESAN

INTERESTED IN PLACES AND PEOPLE Paul Theroux

Paul Theroux advocates leaving home. The celebrated writer certainly got his start by taking off to see the world. Unfortunately, you would find it quite challenging to travel the way he did: joining the Peace Corps in Central Africa, for starters, where he unwittingly got involved in a coup to kill the Dictator President in Malawi when the ambassador asked him for a favour. Theroux ended up driving across Africa, taking back roads watched by lions, to transport the ambassador's mother, crockery and letters to Uganda, as a result of which he was `terminated' from the Corps. "I was just a foolish young man delivering letters - who ended up with a really good story," he grins.

The writer, who was recently in Chennai in association with the American Consulate General, conducted a workshop for unpublished writers at their premises, and then addressed a gathering at Landmark, meticulously deconstructing what it takes to be a successful writer. "I became a writer by thinking about travel," he says, "and the essential thing I did was leave home."

His fascination for India began around then. "Central Africa was my first introduction to Indian life. Lots of people were from Gujarat. I got my first taste of gulab jamuns, laddos and rasagullas when I was in Africa. Not idlies, there were very few South Indians in Africa."

He also taught in Italy, and was a lecturer of English in Uganda, then Singapore. He's travelled through Asia, China, India, Latin America, the Pacific Islands and the Mediterranean, and still loves jumping on trains, "Though my sons keep saying, `Aren't you a little old for that?"

Credited with reinventing the travel genre, Theroux has 14 works of non-fiction and 27 works of fiction to his credit. "People say I'm a grumpy traveller," he laughs, "You can see that I'm not. I'm a Hobbitlike, happy, lovable, embraceable person."

"I've written something _ a novella, a story, a novel _ every year since 1967," he says, "I had a family to support and a lot of ideas in my head." That resulted in 40-odd books in 40 years. "I'm prolific," he says. "But you know it isn't easy. Sometimes it can take months. Sometimes a book takes years - and that's the greatest test."

Not even Ernest Hemingway had it easy. "I knew Hemingway's third wife," says Theroux. ("I think he was married 4 times, and he died when he was younger than me, at 64 or 65. That's a lot of action!") She told Theroux that Hemingway would rather do anything than write. "She told me that he didn't really like writing and found it very difficult, very slow. _ He liked drinking with his friends, he liked fishing_ he was an accident-prone man. If he was driving he'd have an accident. If he was drinking, he'd fall off a stool. I'm sure his writing was an extension of himself."

Writing, after all, is a way of releasing your inner life. "I discovered what it was I intended to write about. It was somewhere in my imagination and I needed to release it," he says, "Imaginative writing is groping toward a conclusion of which you are unaware. You're going into a place that is dark, that you're shining a light into. The struggle of writing is that you don't know everything." His intense interest in people is what makes his books, liberally peppered with quirks and qualities of various characters he meets on his travels, so real.

"When I was young people said, go to India and see the Taj Mahal. Go to France and see the Louvre. I was not interested in that kind of architecture," he states. "I was interested in human architecture. The shapes of people, their minds_ The way my fate, my destiny intermingles with yours. That's why I became a writer and why I continue to be a writer."

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