It’s not all bad news all the time here at Literary Smackdown. Sometimes, writers who have detested each other with a novelistic intensity just … get over it. This is what seems to have happened over the weekend at the Hay Festival, in Wales, when Paul Theroux and V. S. Naipaul ended a fifteen-year feud with a handshake and a little help from Ian McEwan. The Guardian reports:
Spotting Naipaul in the green room at the Hay festival, Theroux turned to McEwan and asked what he should do. “Life is short,” McEwan replied. “You should say hello.” And with that, handbags were holstered.
It really must have been some handshake. I’ve always thought that there are certain things a friendship never comes back from, and the Theroux-Naipaul spat seemed to have many of them. One of the things is suspecting a friend of seducing one’s spouse; one is selling a sentimental gift from a friend online for a hefty profit; one is writing an unflattering book about a friend; and one is coming to believe that a friend is a terrible person. These are the general contours of the spat, reported ad nauseam in the press and artfully by Theroux in the aforementioned book, “Sir Vidia’s Shadow: A Friendship Across Five Continents.” The story goes that Naipaul suspected Theroux of trying to seduce his wife, Pat, and retaliated by selling an inscribed copy of one of Theroux’s books online for $1,500, after which Theroux published his unflattering account of his friend. Even before all of these major dramas, though, the friendship was testy. Here's how Naipaul described it as it was in the late nineteen-sixties:
He was an absolute bore…. Theroux didn’t know what he thought about anything. He had no views…. But he pestered me with letters, long letters being written to me every two or three weeks at a certain time.
Nevertheless, the two kept up a relationship for decades. Perhaps they have a higher tolerance for brutal honesty than most of us? Theroux seemed to say as much in a response to Ian Buruma’s N.Y.R.B. review of Patrick French’s “The World Is What It Is: The Authorized Biography of V.S. Naipaul,” which touched on the spat, in 2009:
Mr. Buruma calls my book Sir Vidia’s Shadow a “rather bitter memoir.” He is entitled to his opinion. I think of it as an unsparing and accurate portrait of the man, minus the instances of racism and physical abuse that I was forbidden by lawyers to publish. Mr. Buruma speaks of Naipaul’s “great modesty.” In thirty years of knowing the man I was never privileged to observe this. I mainly saw his sadness, his tantrums, his envy, his meanness, his greed, and his uncontrollable anger. But I never saw Naipaul attack anyone stronger than himself; he talked big and insultingly but when he lashed out it was always against the weak—women who loved him, his wife, and waiters: people who couldn’t hit back, the true mark of the coward.
The question that comes to mind after reading that is why or how the two would want to put their dispute behind them. French’s biography holds a clue: it, too, contains extremely unflattering details about Naipaul (his extramarital affairs, his habit of hiring prostitutes, his hot temper), but it was, as advertised, authorized by Naipaul, who made no changes to the final manuscript. In his review of the biography in the magazine, James Wood wrote that it was “extraordinary” because French had access to “searching interviews with Naipaul, whose candor is formidable: as always, one feels that while Naipaul may often be wrong, he is rarely untruthful, and, indeed, that he is likely to uncover twenty truths on the path to error.” Buruma called the book the first entry in the genre of “confessional biography,” and I suppose it’s possible that Naipaul has come to view Theroux’s book as a sort of precursor to a story he himself wanted told. It will be interesting to see whether the handshake is the beginning of a full reconciliation or just a blip, the accidental meeting of two estranged friends who forgot for a moment—but only a moment—what all the fuss was about.
