At the close of his best-selling travel book, The Great Railway Bazaar (1975), Paul Theroux reflects that... "the difference between travel writing and fiction is the difference between recording what the eye sees and discovering what the imagination knows. Fiction is pure joy...." In emphasizing recording and discovering, in making fidelity to the truth a standard for the writer, Theroux has obligingly provided a way of discussing his own work. He is a realist in the same sense that painters are representational. He offers us something recognizably human and does not disrupt fictional conventions in doing this. The characters and incidents of his travel books could find themselves (and frequently do) in his novels. And, yes, his fiction is joy, but certainly not "pure" in the Sixth Commandment sense of the word.
Theroux was born in 1941 in Medford, Massachusetts, one of seven children of a French-Canadian and Italian Catholic family. In his essay collection Sunrise with Seamonsters, he tells us of his happy home life, his indifferent high school education ("I was a punk"), his large, extended family, and of a father who happily invited Paul's many friends, rechristening them "Jack," into the family. (The scenes he recounts of the family's summer house on Cape Cod show a warmth which should caution anyone who wishes to read the seemingly confessional novel, My Secret History, as an autobiography). He went on to the University of Massachusetts and, since "[he] distrusted anyone who had not traveled," soon found his way as a college teacher to Africa and then, five years later, to Singapore and, finally, to London, where he started the trek by train that was to become The Great Railway Bazaar. He has been traveling from London, often to Cape Cod and a house which brings him near to his family, ever since. When, in 1985, the successful Theroux looked back at his early career, he saw "incompleteness being outside the current of society" as a motive driving him to a life as a writer. He admits, "for years, I felt that being respectable meant maintaining a sinister complacency, and the disreputable freedom I sought helped make me a writer."
Paul Theroux at fifty-three has written twenty-nine books, more than one a year from the time he started to publish. This prodigious output can be divided roughly into fiction and travel books; the fiction seems to follow the travel, at least for locale and incident. There are the Africa books, the Singapore books, and United Kingdom books. His reputation was made, however, not by the fiction but by The Great Railway Bazaar and consolidated (as a travel writer) by five succeeding works. The novel, The Mosquito Coast (1982), transformed into a feature film, gave him the final push into international standing, confirmed by Ozone (1986), My Secret History (1989), Chicago Loop (1991), and Millroy the Magician (1994). His fiction ranges as widely as his travel; we find a futuristic dystopia touching its end covers with a children's book, tales of murder in the Midwest next to trials of a Chinese merchant in Africa, expatriates all over the shelf, and, ultimately, first-rate story-telling
Few can resist Theroux the genial traveler. The pleasures of rereading The Great Railway Bazaar are great, especially since his route in 1974 took him through what is now a very different political landscape. Yugoslavia, Iran, the Soviet Union appear from the other side of a historical dividing line; and we read with the wisdom of hindsight. Theroux sets his own high standard for travel, associating it with inconvenience, danger, bad food, sleepless nights, and sees his success as a function of providing that experience vicariously for the reader.
Indeed few people could or would hazard what he encounters. His ability to capture landscape, his eye for architectural detail, and has unfailing willingness to engage his fellow passengers make us want to travel through him, if not with him. Perhaps Theroux's greatest gift is his ability to record dialogue. As he confesses, "conversationally I am a masochist, and there is nothing I like better than putting my feet up, tearing open a can of beer, and auditing a railway bore an full cry." No one can have nothing to say to Paul Theroux, and he recounts for us the great voice of the traveling human road show, be it by rail, sea, or air.
The novels sometimes offer far less congenial pilgrimages of the imagination. His self-confessed desire to travel and for a freedom which defies complacency characterize the thematic draft of Theroux's fiction. But it should be said that unlike a writer such as Graham Greene (with whom he has often been compared), Theroux seldom finds the tensions of his works arising from the tensions of being a Catholic. Indeed, his heroes exercise the disreputable freedom that he sought and, presumably, found in fiction. The earnest novel, Waldo (1967), is funny, picaresque, and prophetic. Waldo, the eponymous hero, does not get beyond the borders of the state of Massachusetts, but he inhabits frontier regions. Waldo begins in a reform school and ends in a freak show. And, with typical disreputable freedom, the nineteen-year-old hero has a graphically described affair with an older woman, achieves notoriety by publishing an article on the freakish death of a neighbor, and reaches a resolution of his difficulties by murdering his lover and, encased in a glass booth, suspended above the heads of has audience, by retyping the story which won him fame.
Waldo nods to Nathaniel West's The Dream Life of Balso Snell but certainly marks out Theroux's own territory—sexual relations, violent and irrational impulses, freakish happenings, and the role of the writer and connecting the real and the fictional. Theroux's thematic range can be found on the pages of tabloids at the supermarket checkout, but his is a compelling moral fiction. Where is the legacy of his Catholic boyhood? We might see it in his concern with sexuality and guilt, or in the acute self-consciousness which he associates with the sinner in the confessional, but perhaps most of all in the sense of pilgrimage which characterizes his vocation as a writer: one who travels to give witness.
The pursuit of fictional truth is really, in the structured way of art, the working out of the premise. What would life be like if Theroux's "what ifs?" run to conclusions as one of the famous trains does to a terminus. The joumey has an alpha and an omega, which spell extremes of personality and experience. But, as he also says, rail journeys always end where they begin, and to achieve this rounding of life in art, to take endings to beginnings, Theroux often uses the doppleganger or double figure made most familiar by a literary mentor, Joseph Conrad, in The Secret Sharer. The impact of meeting a second self has for Theroux many fictional ramifications, the doppleganger device not only provides a taut plot structure but becomes a way of explaining the relationship between writer and subject and writer and reader. In My Secret Htstory, for example, the double helps to define the creative process. How does this device with the peculiar German name work such magic? To answer, we must allow books to talk to books and understand Theroux by way of Conrad.
In The Secret Sharer, the narrator, a ship's captain on his first command, gives help to an escaped prisoner with whom he finds affinity and, later, identity. The narrator is forced to confront himself, to recognize in the "secret sharer" his own capacity for evil—in this case murder—and face a moral decision, keep the double's emstence secret, and be comphcat in the crime, or reveal ham and betray him to injustice. The narrator "saves" his double and so expands and integrates his sense of self. The process is cathartic in the strict sense of the word: the narrator must internalize the double's crime and take responsibility for his flight and escape. He experiences pity, fear, and a liberating purgation. In many of Theroux's later novels, this plot structure and this process work as at did for Conrad. Theroux uses it, often ruthlessly, to explore "what the imagination knows" but would rather not speak.
And there is another complication. If the double is read as a projection of the narrator's own consciousness, the device is a metaphor for the activity of the novelist as well. In Theroux's own words, "discovering what the imagination knows" comes about by meeting the possibilities inherent in the double's life. In this sense, Theroux continues the role ascribed to a novelist like Dickens, one in which the writer is cast as reporter of the real yet unfamiliar, a guide to the underworld hidden from ordinary daylight. Theroux is not a Dickensian stylist, nor is he a social reformer, but his moral imagination can be seen to offer us a truth otherwise inaccessible. For example, Jungle Lovers (1971), provides us with considerable knowledge of Africa. Here is the initial premise. What happens if Calvin Mullet, a Massachusetts insurance salesman, opens a branch office in Malawi at the moment a revolution starts? He lives a life which is doubled with Marais, a Canadian ideologue gone Maoist in revolt. Their fates are paralleled and give us two ends of a spectrum: white people trying to understand and, in some sense, use Africans. The book is about not understanding Africa, or about regretting mistakes in interpreting the "parish" of Malawi—a country that exists only as an act of faith.
I suppose this is what novels do best, explain us to ourselves. We rely on Theroux in Jungle Lovers to explain our responses to Africa. In other novels, we come to know Singapore and Central America, and, moving within, the mind of a murderer, a pimp, a Ph.D call girl, an American in self-exile on the Honduran Mosquito Coast. The distance Theroux maintains from the protagonists—Calvin in Jungle Lovers, for example—offers leeway. He swings in arcs of perspective moored to a sympathetic, if limited, consciousness. We warm to Calvin, see as he sees, and learn from him, but ultimately see beyond him: the novel's close suggests his newborn son might not be his, yet Calvin imagines a stunning return to Hudson, Massachusetts, with his black African wife and "tar baby" child. The white man will bring a most ambiguous burden home from the tropics.
Saint Jack (1973) replays The Secret Sharer even more closely. Jack, an American expatriate in Singapore, finds a new sense of integration when he recognizes the essential similarity between himself and his double. The scene of moral crisis and triumph is typical of Theroux's fiction. Jack has contracted to supply incriminating photographs of an American general. But he is seduced by the call girl he has hired to bait the trap for the general who, in the interim, has found his own whore. Mimesis moves to interesting climaxes as Jack sees that if he were to incriminate the general, he would condemn himself. He redeems self and other. Sex is grace in this novel, dispensed by Saint Jack in his role as "ponce," or procurer, and saving sexual grace is ultimately visited on him. Theroux has his ex-U.S sailor also tell us of the crisis of middle age, of the fears of young American servicemen on R&R from Vietnam, and of the machinations of the CIA. The arresting aspect of this novel is Theroux's projection of character: he imagines himself into the consciousness of a considerably older man. Similarly, in the story "Dr. Demarr" in Half Moon Street (1984), we encounter twins who are tied in the womb to identical fates. Theroux uses this bit of yarn to look at drug addiction, problems of identity, and nasty betrayal of brother by brother.
The double life is the single topic of My Secret History. Its narrator, Andy or Andre Parent, tells his life story, which apparently doubles that of his creator, Paul Theroux! We are warned at the start, however, that the narrator is not the author ("I am not I"—so Theroux in has epigraph quoting Evelyn Waugh, whose Gilbert Pinfold worked similar terrain.) Paradoxically, everything that links Paul Theroux and Andre Parent also points to that which separates them. The constraints of fact or the confessional honesty we would expect from autobiography are not required in such a work. Other concerns shape the narrative; apparent revelations about the real Paul Theroux come as a halted strip tease—we suspect that the bare truth is inaccessible but would be rather ordinary, if we were to get beyond the imaginative make-up. Undoubtedly this is one way a public figure like Theroux deals with himself in that double role as private person and writer.
The "Altar Boy" section, which opens the novel, grounds the concept of secret history in a scene, the sacristy before Mass, and a situation, cassock and white surplice covering the sinner inside. Theroux's Andy hears "an interminable whisper of suggestion that I was weak and sinful, and the sense that I was always wrong. There was something natural and unavoidable about being bad."
This is a wry and unsentimental look at a fifties Catholic boyhood. Andy listens, ears burning, to his co-server's sexual exploits as they swig altar wine, alcoholic Father Furty shows Andy a human warmth that incarnates the sacred, and the pastor, a terrifying martinet, acts as a surrogate angry-god and drives Andy into disreputable freedom. "God was always glaring at me out of a hot sky. He was as pitiless and enigmatic as most of the adults I knew—they all spoke for Him anyway—and He said no just as often."
Theroux reminds us of the peculiar feel of ritual Latin on the tongue, the loony tensions of altar boy solemnity (the litany of altar boy gaffes is worth reading in its own right), the tussle over who rings the bells, the routine of funeral Masses. The vividness of the detail and the ease of the telling show mastery. But the pattern of the novel uses the secret life for ends other than nostalgia "...at that age I belonged to no one, and then to everyone, because I didn't matter. There was no such thing as my privacy. If someone didn't spy on me, it wasn't out of respect, but because they thought I had no secrets." This anchors the writer's sense of identity: one who is detached yet open to experience, the observer, never the observed.
My Secret History offers intriguing insight into the way writers work, a particular yet fictional examination of conscience of the self who thinks and acts. The successful man of letters, Andy, leads a secret and, finally, a double life, two countries on two continents, two houses, two women, two selves. A chance notice of his reflection in a train window (naturally) causes this other sort of reflection.
I saw there was a third person. He was the observer, the witness to all this—the one who stood aside and made the notes and wrote the books. His life was lived within himself. He was silent, he seldom gestured, he never argued, he dreamed, he saw everything and so he was the one who suffered.
This rather Christlike third person offers one version of the writer's vocation.
One of the greatest things that writers did, I thought, was to isolate an event, and light it with the imagination, to make people understand and remember; and not just events, but people and their passions. Forgetting was much worse than failure. It was an act of violence. For all writing aimed at defeating time. No one could become a writer—no one would even care about it until he or she experienced the impartial cruelty of time passing.
Redeeming time sounds suspiciously soterlological, and the Trinitarian formulations point to a notion of the artist in some way religious. We can recall here Theroux's assertion that a travel writer undergoes ordeals which his readers could never brook. He is the servant who suffers and then brings order.
Theroux's 1991 work, Chicago Loop, is in many ways his most difficult; it exploits the double structure, almost chiastically, with the central crossing a murder. Parker, the protagonist, lives as a successful architect and inner-city developer and a secret correspondent and solicItor in personal ads. He murders grotesquely a woman who answers his ad and then assumes that woman's life. Chicago Loop has the psychological nightmare quality of Crime and Punishment, and a similar plot—but there is no Soma to redeem Raskolmkov. Parker's is not a crime instigated by inhuman pride, the mind over heart which gives the superman his place in history. This is libido as explosive and demanding. At one point, Parker and his wife visit the Mapplethorpe exhibit and discuss the photographs. It is characteristic of Theroux that he should explore the morality of art in his work, asking, as we are told Mapplethorpe's photographs ask, for recognition that people do terrible things to each other. And, in fictional fashion, Theroux can both affirm and deny that assertion by allowing the plot of the novel to exhibit the moral horror of what people do to each other, as aggressors and victims.
The truth of this novel is Dionysian; dark and bloody drives move the hero to consume his victim, and then in the act of expiation and rebirth take on her identity. Parker becomes a victim of men. In his transvestite meandenngs through Loop-land, he suffers what men do to women and he knows what men want because he did once so want. Parker can release himself only in suicide, a spectacular rejection of his body in a leap off the Sears Tower. The artistic patterning which constrains the violence of the plot asks a reader to reconsider notions of truth and the morality of fiction. The writer takes on the burden of experience, this fallen world, and with the imagination's guidance, he discovers for and with us "what the imagination knows." There is a high seriousness about Theroux's fiction that gives the writer, stilling time and gathering for his audience that which might be forgotten, a status which is both sacred and priestly.
As Theroux's travel books have by their recreation of verbal intercourse, his novels seem to take their energy from the sexual sort. Saint Jack and Chicago Loop represent the ends of the spectrum and Theroux travels with characteristic vividness along the continuum of changes that sex rings on us. Sex is one of the facts of life; what it does to us, and what we do with it, comes as part of the novelist's territory. One can't but admire the powerful libidos of various characters, but there is seldom joy in the telling: Calvin Mullet comments on the anonymity of sex and the many graphic scenes lead characters not so much to the sadness after coition but to self-reflection. The most physical way of coming out of ourselves or of accepting another is also the most isolating—except, as Theroux suggests on occasion, for the joy of procreating children.
Most readers cannot match the breadth or intensity the experiences Paul Theroux presents, yet it is the burden of realist fiction to convince us that the characters matter, that their conflicts and emotions are meaningful, and that the pattern of art in some way contains the ragged ends of life. The success of his travel books indicates how well he convinces others of the truth of what he has seen. His fiction, and I borrow here from his own reference to Mapplethorpe's exhibit, frequently forces us to admit that people do do such things to one another. The earlier novels, Fong and the Indians (1968) in particular, have a hghtness of tone which beguiles. But later works, Picture Palace (1978) and those which follow, have a seriousness and intensity which convince, but also appall. Theroux takes us into regions of the heart and mind we often would not go by ourselves "to make people understand and remember; and not just events, but people and their passions." For that courage to follow his imagination, we are in his debt.
