Sunrise with Seamonsters

A Mariner Book
HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY
BOSTON • NEW YORK

Copyright © 1985 by Cape Cod Scriveners Company
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

For information about permission
to reproduce selections from this book, write to
Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Company,
215 Park Avenue South, New York,
New York 10003.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Theroux, Paul.
Sunrise with seamonsters.
I. Title
PS
3570.
H
458 1985 813'.54 85-2343
ISBN
0-395-41501-2 (pbk.)

Printed in the United States of America

QUM
17 16 15 14 13 12 11

To my Parents,
Albert and Anne Theroux,
With Love

"Words, words, words! There were no deeds," interrupted Rudin.

"No deeds! What kind of—"

"What kind of deeds? Supporting a blind old granny and all her family by your hard work—remember Pryazhentsev? There's a deed for you."

"Yes, but good words can also be deeds."

—Ivan Turgenev,
Rudin
(translated from the Russian by Marcel Theroux)

Introduction
 1

The Edge of the Great Rift [1964] 7

Burning Grass [1964] 9

Winter in Africa [1965] 12

The Cerebral Snapshot [1965] 15

State of Emergency [1966] 18

Leper Colony [1966] 21

Scenes from a Curfew [1966] 23

Tarzan is an Expatriate [1967] 31

Cowardice [1967] 40

Seven Burmese Days [1970] 48

The Novel is Dead, Allah Be Praised! [1971] 58

The Killing of Hastings Banda [1971] 63

Lord of the Ring [1971] 76

A Love-Scene After Work [1971] 83

V. S. Naipaul [1971 and 1982] 91

Kazantzakis' England [1972] 101

Malaysia [1973] 106

Memories of Old Afghanistan [1974] 109

The Night Ferry to Paris [1975] 123

Stranger on a Train [1976] 126

An English Visitor [1976] 136

Discovering Dingle [1976] 140

The Exotic View [1977] 146

Homage to Mrs Robinson [1977] 152

My Extended Family [1977] 156

A Circuit of Corsica [1977] 166

Nixon's Neighborhood [1977] 171

Nixon's Memoirs [1978] 177

The Orient Express [1978] 182

Traveling Home: High School Reunion [1979] 185

Rudyard Kipling: The White Man's Burden [1979] 195

John McEnroe, Jr. [1979] 206

Christmas Ghosts [1979] 212

Henry Miller [1980] 215

V. S. Pritchett [1980] 218

The Past Recaptured [1980] 229

Railways of the Raj [1980] 234

Subterranean Gothic [1981] 239

Easy Money—Patronage [1981] 259

Mapping the World [1981] 278

The Last Laugh [1981] 284

Graham Greene's Traveling Companion [1981] 289

Summertime on the Cape [1981] 297

His Monkey Wife [1983] 303

Being a Man [1983] 309

Making Tracks to Chittagong [1983] 313

Introducing
Jungle Lovers
[1984] 328

Dead Man Leading [1984] 331

What Maisie Knew [1984] 335

Sunrise with Seamonsters [1984] 346

Afterword 363

For the past twenty years I have been writing with both hands. I thought: I'll write a few more pieces and then I'll work on my novel. I never dared to entertain great hopes for my novels—or my travel books, either. But I always expected to be fairly paid for my journalism, which these fifty pieces are. This was specific labor of short duration that would finance my more ambitious, or at least more time-consuming, books. I assumed that one day I would gather some of these pieces together, but I never guessed it would be other than a motley collection, and certainly not a book in any symmetrical sense. This was, mainly, writing for money—paying bills.

I think I was wrong. For one thing, the money for this work was not much. I had thought of including the fee I got for each piece: "The Killing of Hastings Banda,"
Esquire,
1971—$600; "Malaysia,"
Vogue,
1973—$70; "A Circuit of Corsica,"
The Atlantic,
1978—$350; and so forth, as an instructive joke and a severe warning to anyone who intended to make a living this way. But then I decided that it would distract attention from the pieces themselves, and the price-tags might demean them. Anyway, these pieces hardly paid my bills. It was my books that saved me from dropping back into the schoolroom, or into the even more dire profession of writing applications for grants and fellowships ("My creative writing project is a novel about..."). And as for the question of symmetry, I hope this book is something more than a rag-bag anthology. I have waited this long so that it might have the proportions of a better book—four dimensions and even a kind of narrative.

The early pieces sound a little forced and clumsy to me. I was twenty-two or twenty-three, and if the prose is harshly old-fashioned, then so was the setting. I wrote most of the early pieces in Africa—the old Africa, with muddy roads and dusty faces; "Yes, Master," the elderly "houseboys" would say. This was Malawi, an ex-British Protectorate that was to turn into a franker kind of black dictatorship. It was not merely that there were no African members of the Blantyre Club, or that I had a cook and a gardener and they earned about $15 a month between them; and it was not the signs in the butcher shops advertising "Boys' Meat" (cheap mutton you were supposed to buy for your "houseboy"); no, stranger
and more startling, it was the sight of African women who fell to their knees in the dust by the roadside as I passed on a motorcycle or a car, because of my white face—but it was whiter for having seen that. It was the Africa of leper colonies and Home Leave; and it was not regarded as inhuman but only bad manners for a white person to say, "Exterminate the brutes!"

I remember another day in Mozambique, in a terrible little country town, getting a haircut from a Portuguese barber. He had come to the African bush from rural Portugal to be a barber. What was so unusual about that? Mozambique had been a colony for hundreds of years—the first Portuguese claimed it in 1489. If I had asked, I am sure this barber would have said he was following in the footsteps of Vasco da Gama. He did not speak English, I did not speak Portuguese, yet when I addressed his African servant in Chinyanja, his own language, the Portuguese man said, in Portuguese, "Ask the bwana what his Africans are like." And that was how we held a conversation—the barber speaking Portuguese to the African who translated it into Chinyanja for me; and I replied in Chinyanja which the African translated into Portuguese for the barber. The barber kept saying—and the African kept translating—things like, "I can't stand the blacks—they're so stupid and bad-tempered. But there's no work in Portugal." It was grotesque, it was outrageous, it was the shabbiest, darkest kind of imperialism. I could not believe my good luck. Twenty years ago in parts of Africa it was the Nineteenth Century, and living there I was filled with an urgency to write about it. I like the word "pieces". I wrote about it in pieces.

It has given me, in an overlapping way, two writing lives; in one I have been writing books, a lengthening shelf of them, and in the other life I have been writing these pieces. I regarded a book as an indulgence—I mean a "vision" but the word sounds too pompous and spiritual. These pieces I meant to be concrete—responses to experiences, with my feet squarely on the ground; immediate and direct, written to fulfill a specific purpose, and somewhat alien to the meandering uncertainties of the novel. They were also a breath of air. In the middle of writing
Picture Palace
I went to San Clemente and wrote about Nixon (and some of
Picture Palace
I wrote in the San Clemente Motor Inn); and the piece reprinted here which is an introduction to the O.U.P. paperback edition of
His Monkey Wife
I wrote during a break from
The Kingdom by the Sea.
In the middle of
The Mosquito Coast
I went down the Yangtze River from Chonqing to Shanghai and wrote about it for a British newspaper (a fuller account of the trip appeared as a small book,
Sailing Through China).
I never really minded writing with both hands. I usually needed a break—I am sure
The Mosquito Coast
is the better for my experiences in China. I require a certain amount of undemanding interruption in order to
maintain my concentration. I start every day by writing letters, and even when I am working on a novel I answer the phone.

I have often found the writing of occasional pieces to be valuable in unexpected ways—inspirational even. Not simply going to California or reading Joyce Cary or looking in Vermont for traces of Kipling's family feud—each experience a pleasure all its own; but rather carrying out an ambiguous assignment and in so doing making discoveries that change my outlook for good. These are the excitements of a writer's life. Writing about the New York subway was one of the most illuminating experiences I have ever had, and the memory of riding all those trains continues to suggest to me new ways of looking at the metropolitan world. Going to my high school reunion was another such memorable experience: it altered my thinking about myself and the past. I saw that it was not education that made me a writer, but perhaps its opposite—my sense of incompleteness, of being outside the currents of society and powerless and unprivileged and anxious to prove myself; that, and my membership in a large family, with childhood fantasies of travel and, in general, being if not a rebel then an isolated and hot-eyed punk. For years I felt that being respectable meant maintaining a sinister complacency, and the disreputable freedom I sought helped make me a writer.

In the course of writing these pieces I was forced to draw conclusions, sometimes brutal ones. If I had not been asked to write them—most of them are responses to editorial requests—I would never have had to face these truths. I needed that discipline and I needed the encouragement of regular work—of writing. I was put in touch with the world, and drawn away from my desk, and given the illusion of writing as a profession: so I felt businesslike and orderly and purposeful. I needed all those illusions to keep up my morale.

I had once thought that these pieces fell naturally into categories: Travel, Photography, Books, Writers, Family, and Trains. I realized that I habitually mixed these topics together: travel was not only an experience of space and time, but had its literary and domestic aspects as well. Travel is everything, and my way of travelling is completely personal. This is not a category—it is more like a whole way of life. And it is impossible to write about a subway without alluding to
The Waste Land,
or to deal with Burma without mentioning Orwell. My piece about my family—"My Extended Family"—owes a great deal to my having lived in Africa. They are all personal.

There was only one arrangement of this book that made any sense. Set out chronologically these pieces seemed to me to form a narrative of having lived through two interesting decades in a number of different countries; and not just lived through, but grown up in. This is what I was writing when I was also writing my books. Even if they don't shed light on
those books—but I think they do—perhaps they explain why I never had time for anything else; why I am so poor at tennis and inexperienced as a film-goer, and why I raise my voice so quickly when the Guggenheim Foundation ("We regret to inform you...") is mentioned. That is what I mean by a narrative. For example, it ought to be easy to understand, after thirty-eight pieces and seventeen years (and seventeen books), and no Fellowship, why the thirty-ninth piece, in 1980, was an attack on patronage.

And I think I was wrong about book reviewing. I wrote 356 book reviews in this time. None of them is included here. It seemed to me that they were insubstantial and that to include them would be asking for trouble. I believed that they were likely to antagonize any reviewer of this book. "I can do better than that," I imagined a reviewer murmuring, and I saw him doing precisely as he had said, demolishing me in a stylish way. It is a hard living—book reviewing—and except in the rarest cases it is seldom a livelihood. That was another misapprehension of mine twenty years ago—that if all else failed I would be able to make ends meet this way. I suppose I might have managed, hacking away on the Entertainment Page, where book reviews generally appear these days.

I must say I have very little time for the academic who regards a book review as a "publication", to be listed in his or her curriculum vitae in the hopes of securing tenure. A book review is, or ought to be, a notice—a response. It is not an essay, not even a piece. If it is reprinted at all it ought to have a certain period charm. How else can it be justified? The sheer fun of the vicious attack, the mocking review or the assault on a bubble reputation are not long-lasting. Something more judicious is needed, and in rereading my book reviews I saw that it was usually lacking. I was writing "notices". If a book was good I wanted it to have readers; if it was bad I tried to discourage interest in it. If I felt it was overrated I tried to get its true measure.

But as all my book reviews have turned out to be ephemeral things, I begin to wonder why I went to such trouble. A book review was a two-day job—one day to read the book, another to write the review. The book reviewer does not choose the books: they are sent to him by the literary editor. That is part of the book reviewing code; and another part of it is that the reviewer resists influence and usually reacts violently against hype. It is to my mind one of the most decent areas of journalism and probably the worst paid. There are foolish and vain and self-serving book reviewers, but I have never known a corrupt one, nor have I been aware of any suggestion that a book reviewer was in the pay of a publisher.