Conversations

With Paul Theroux ("Blinding Light")

Paul Theroux was 36 in 1977 when he published The Great Railway Bazaar: By Train Through Asia, the book that in some ways ignited the travel book industry. Now 64, some 40 books later, he has come out with a novel, Blinding Light, featuring a travel writer whose book ignited the travel book industry. The difference is that Trespassing is Slade Steadman’s sole opus, and while it also sparked a clothing line that’s made him a rich man, he’s been tortured by a nasty case of writer’s block in the ensuing decades. Can a rare hallucinogen found in the jungles of Ecuador cure him, in combination with highly fraught sex with his physician girlfriend Ada? Or will the side effect of blindness stop him before he’s seen the light? Daniel Asa Rose caught up with the famously irascible author via e-mail on a yoga vacation in India, where he’s been collecting himself before the wave of publicity due to greet the publication of Blinding Light this week. It didn’t take long to get under his skin.


Steadman, the travel-writing narrator of Blinding Light, is famous for traveling light – with only what’s in his pockets. How many bags have you with you in India?

PT: I am in Ananda, 20 miles above Rishikesh in the lower slopes of the Himalayas, with one carry-on size bag and a briefcase with books in it (“Bandits” by EJ Hobsbawm and the complete “Parade's End” by Ford Madox Ford).

Increasingly disgusted by your travels, you seem to have been moving for some time into explorations of darker territory. By evidence of this book, would the reader be right in thinking that sex and hallucinogens offer more rugged terrains for you to explore?

PT: Fiction is an interior journey - the nearest equivalent in travel would be, say, traveling overland through Angola. As I have gotten older I think I have developed a taste for more risks rather than fewer. I am bewitched by the experience of ecstatic states.

You've always struck me as a writer with almost supernatural insight into people. Pardon me if I'm conflating you with Steadman (something you don't seem to discourage, saying at one point "a man in a mask is most himself"), but do you find drugs lend you even greater penetration?

PT: No. Good health has always worked best for me. I don't trust drugs at all - nearly all of them are dirty in some sense. But there are benign psychotropic drugs, and ayahuasca is one of them. Like the main character in my book I was inspired in the 1960's by William Burroughs' “The Yage Letters” - yage is the same as ayahuasca - a magic potion.

Does travel still excite you?

PT: I have one great worry in travel - that someone in (say) Angola or even Kenya or Venezuela will do to me what we have been doing a lot of lately - arrest me and hold me without being charged, deprive me of sleep and kick me in the head and then send me to a third country for interrogation. My worry is that I will then confess to anything I am accused of. The United States government by violating moral and ethical codes of war has made the world unsafe for travelers like me - and you, too.

Given your remarkable acumen, I'm curious as to whether you ever think you're fooled by people.

PT: Probably all the time. I often think everything is fiction.

Steadman has "no close friends." You yourself had Naipaul, before your notorious falling out, and other old pals like Anthony Burgess. Do you have close friends today?

PT: Enough, I suppose. My experience with Naipaul was salutary though, since even a moron in a big hurry would have seen him as a complete wanker and somehow I gave him the benefit of the doubt. This is an impertinent question, though the advice that Axel Heyst gets from his father in Conrad's “Victory” is wise - something like: go your own way, trust no one.

And yet there's a lot of name dropping in Blinding Light. John Belushi, Walter Cronkite, Bill Clinton, etc. What's up with that?

PT: The novel is explicit about people and places - I am against deliberate obfuscation. But Bill Clinton is a national treasure! His secret history fascinates me, and is pivotal to the secret history of my character Steadman, who meets him and reads his mind. Clinton is both transparent, obvious (traveling with Kevin Spacey, boosting Bono?) and at the same time an utter human mystery.

You've never laid your sexual nature out like this before. What convinced you to lay yourself bare at last?

PT: Excuse me, not "my sexual nature" but that of the man - and other people - in my book. I had hoped this also to be an erotic novel - a modest ambition. I lament the fact that movies aren't sexy anymore, that even fiction is rather thin on sex. Sex is magic, so is baseball. I want to emphasize the ecstatic nature of sexuality, not the cork-in-bottle variety.

If I remember right, you once disparaged slow, over-cautious writers as "word-pickers" or "word-squeezers" or some such. How do you yourself manage to write so fast, with such virile imagery?

PT: I don't write fast, as a matter of fact, but I am fairly steady and have no parasitical interests - the bane of urban or college town writers. Living in the sticks concentrates the mind. I have not had a real job since 1971.

Is one of your secrets that, deep down, you're a poet?

PT: No. Though oddly enough William Faulkner said that he was a failed poet. I don't get it, really. My favorite modern poets are Wallace Stevens and Philip Larkin. They intimidate me. And maybe you are influenced in this question by my felicitous, not to say sonorous, and perhaps lapidary prose style.

I notice you repeat yourself a lot in Blinding Light. Is that because you hurried, or was there a lack of editorial attention, or what?

PT: This is a weasily question, a journalistic needle. Never mind! What repetition there is in Blinding Light is deliberate.

I've always thought you write better about the tropics. Do sweatier climes inspire you?

PT: I love being outside. [Thus] the incurable Boy Scout you see. (Mike Bloomberg and I were Eagle Scouts together in Medford Mass in the 1950's.) I think urban life is nasty. The trouble with writing is that you have to spend so much time inside the house. I lived for 17 years in London. After that, who wouldn't want to go to Angola? Or here in Ananda getting an ayurvedic massage under the peepul trees.

How did you (or OK, Steadman) stay fit through this strict regimen of sex and drugs?

PT: I would have thought the answer was pretty obvious - that a combination of sex and the right drugs would keep you fit, though not as robust as sex and carrot juice.

Steadman gains a bunch of charisma from losing his sight, kind of a bravado of the blind. How much were you influenced by Al Pacino in "Scent of a Woman"?

PT: Much more influenced by Oliver Sax's writing and Jorge Luis Borges.

Steadman is annoyed when he sees fellow travelers reading his book. How do you yourself feel when you come across someone reading one of yours?

PT: Delighted and riveted. I once spent an hour in an airport watching someone reading a book of mine - watching him turn the pages and chew his lips.

Steadman is described as "thin-skinned." Have you yourself found a cure for such a condition?

PT: Thin-skinnedness is a great aid to memory and is probably the chief characteristic of fiction writers or most creative people.

I've always sensed you're at war with the world. In your advancing age, are you more at peace?

PT: No - I am appalled with my experience of the observable world, and it is getting worse. Ask any intelligent person over fifty. He or she will laugh at you if you express optimism. But of course the disturbing vision is the vital force of (though I hate this word) art.