Memory and invention

Finding a diary proves that there is no need for a diary.

Not long after my book Sir Vidia's Shadow was sent to the printer I was fossicking among some papers and found an old notebook labeled "Diary" with a date and a sort of title, "When I Was Off My Head". This was an unexpected discovery because, except for some letters and a few notes, I had depended on memory alone for my book.

Thirty-two years ago, in Africa, VS. Naipaul had made me promise never to keep a diary. Such an activity, he said, was an obstruction to the imagination. In the year or so it took to write my book about our friendship, I was amazed by how clearly conversations and scenes returned to me. I started each day with a period of meditation, pressing my fingers to my temples as though mimicking Johnny Carson's clairvoyant "Carnac". By degrees 1 could hear and see Naipaul. And the activity of writing an episode helped, since all writing is itself a memory-jogger. It seemed like a conjuring trick, to write such a book without any notes, yet it worked.

When I finished the book, I had two shocks. The first was that the friendship kept unspooling in my mind. I had developed such intense habits of concentration and remembering, I found I could not switch off my active memory. I recalled Vidia ritually pronouncing, "I am going to open an account with him"— meaning settle someone's hash; and "Women of 60 think of nothing but sex"; and how driving with him in Kampala he had once said about the road bumps that rocked my wheels, "They call those 'sleeping policemen' in Trinidad." Some of these memories were whole episodes rather than one-liners—for example, a fairly disastrous lunch in London with one of my relatives that did not surface into my consciousness until it was too late to include.

Then there was the diary. The many closely written pages in this newly disinterred notebook contained the feverish garrulity as well as the busy sentences of a troubled mind. It was not odd, in my experience, that I had forgotten having kept it. My diary-keeping is rare, and nearly always associated with distress. Far from being an aid to memory, a diary has often been my way of forgetting; the consigning of anxious thoughts to a notebook is akin to dumping them into a bottom drawer.

The self-mocking suggestion of derangement in the label "When I Was Off My Head" (which was framed in saner handwriting than the screwball scribble in the notebook) referred to a time of uncertainty in my life, one of those non-writing periods when I was penetrated to my soul with a sense of being superfluous. I was a wraith, a wisp, a leftover; I did not matter. At such times I have done no work and I have not been reassured when my older son, Marcel, a Russian speaker, has said to me: "It's a recurring theme in 19th-century Russian literature. Lishni chclovek. The Superfluous Man, Dad!"

Was that why this diary had a Russian texture and tone, a bleakness composed of cold streets, late nights, littered rooms and dusty answers, and the unanswerable "What is to be done?" I am smiling as I write this, seeing my disturbed other self as a version of a bulimic Oblomov; but I wasn't smiling then. The irony was that although I had made a solemn promise to VS. Naipaul not to keep a diary, this notebook was full of Naipaul encounters.

If keeping a diary was my technique for forgetting, then I had been successful. Here, in the notebook, described over four pages, was a dinner Naipaul and I had in Kensington that I had utterly forgotten. Naipaul sat down and at once told me that he was having problems with his agent.

"I want you to help me with my business problem, and then I'll listen to your sentimental problem."

His concern was money. He was being undervalued, he felt. He had a book idea. He was looking for a contract.

"Will you write to someone?" he asked me. All this was before we even had menus in our hands. I liked his directness, and said I would send a letter, offering his travel book idea to my own publisher. Then I told him my dilemma.

His advice was for me to go away—drop everything, leave the country, begin a new life. He was so certain about this that there was no discussion. He ignored my two cents' worth and pressed on, talking about his reading. He said that he wanted to write a piece contrasting Proust's essay "Contre Sainte-Beuve" and Somerset Maugham. I said that I found much of Maugham old hat and anaemic.

Vidia said snappishly, "I'm not interested in the work, I'm interested in the man."

In a sudden panicky non sequitui, I said I was thinking of seeing a psychiatrist.

Naipaul said, "No, no, no, no, no."

"Then what's the solution to my problem?"

"There is no solution. You will always be divided."

The next day (and this is the great thing about diaries, the punctilious chronology) he called me in the afternoon and asked me what he should do about his agent's dereliction.

I said, "Do nothing."

This was perversity on my part, just the sort of nonadvice he had been giving me. Perhaps he suspected this, because he alluded to my "sentimental problem".

"I'm worried," I said.

"Don't worry. Enjoy the drama of it."

Enjoy the drama of going off my head?

A few weeks later, the Nobel Prize in Literature was announced. Such announcements were
always hard for Vidia, who was constantly mentioned as a possible candidate. I remembered our discussing it: how the Nigerian Wole Soyinka had been given the prize, how Vidia had said that the Nobel Prize committee was, as usual, befouling literature "from a great height". But from my diary 1 saw that the conversation had been longer than 1 remembered.

"I am losing faith in the profession," he had gone on to say. "1 think 1 have been foolish. It's like suspecting your mistress has been unfaithful to you."

On a later page of the diary we talked about London bookstores, which in my state of mind were a source of solace to me.

Vidia said: "I go into bookstores. It's all rubbish! They are like toy shops!

Was anything lost, I wondered, by these afterthoughts and discoveries being missing from my book?

When I decided to write the book I realised that there was no model for it. Some books existed in which a writer described his or her friendship with another older writer, but these were always glowing accounts in the manner of the scrupulous diarist Boswell writing his Life of Johnson. Joseph Conrad, A Personal Remembrance, by Ford Madox Ford, was perhaps the closest of all to what I was attempting, for Ford's account of his friendship with Conrad described a similar age difference, he being young and on the make, as 1 had been when I first met Naipaul.

Long before its publication, mention of my book began to appear in gossip columns, for the notion of a quarrel between writers—or anything that looks like a quarrel—is like catnip to literary philistines. In one of these lazy accounts, a journalist used the word "feud" in connection with my book. But a feud is a protracted thing, with endless cuts and thrusts. The beauty of my book, as I saw it, was in the simplicity of the denouement. It was in effect a happy ending in which I was liberated to look back upon 30 years of friendship, and I saw them as "desperate, earnest and funny", as Conrad said of his years with Ford.

Other journalists have accused me of "revisionism." (How Maoist the language of criticism has become!) Of course, I saw some events differently in my book; but that is what happens with the towering vantage point of passing time. The word "betrayal" was also used. But that is just laughable in this regard. Meditating upon the world and what is most familiar is the preoccupation of writers. Sometimes that includes re-creating our nearest and dearest, and our secrets, as imaginative subjects.

Transforming is what writers do. Only the whole truth helps us to understand the world. The best writers are the most fanatical; so the truest portrait of a writer can never be a study of virtue. The hagiographer is a belittler. Any book that shrinks from the enchantments of this fanaticism and invites the reader to see its subject as simple and lovable is a confidence trick. I saw that my book had to be a truthful creation, made from memory. All memory is inevitably incomplete, which was why the discovery of the old diary had riveted my attention. But finding that diary proved that I had never needed a diary.