Paul Theroux on Samuel Beckett

"Biographies of [Samuel] Beckett suggest not. You would not know from his work that Beckett was an excellent athlete—cricketer, golfer, swimmer, with a strong forehand in tennis. He loved watching rugby. In his twenties, he was intensively psychoanalyzed. For years, he lived on a stipend from his mother. He took holidays in Tunisia and Morocco. He romanced a number of lovely women—in fact, he had an affair on the go with a young English rose when, at the age of fifty-five, he married his French fiancée. (The love triangle in his later drama Play does not do this situation justice.) He loved to gamble, he played billiards, and, though his work is full of Descartes and Dante, he was a dedicated reader of detective novels—Agatha Christie and many others. Yes, there is a detective in Molloy, and Camier, in Mercier and Camier, is a private investigator, but he solves no crimes.

"Beckett’s essence is in his work, and it is bleak. His life was even grimmer at times—deprivation, the war, his courage in the French resistance, being stabbed by a pimp on a Paris street. But, in many respects, he was more Irish bloke than existentialist, his life much happier and more various and satisfying than you’d guess from his writing, which, by the way (and to his sorrow), his mother denounced as trash."

~~ from The New Yorker's "Facing Ka'ena Point: On Turning Eighty" by Paul Theroux

Paul Theroux at 80

"Volodin, the hero of Solzhenitsyn’s 'In the First Circle,' says, 'A great writer is, so to speak, a second government in his country. And for that reason no regime has ever loved great writers, only minor ones.'"

~~ from "Facing Ka'ena Point: On Turning Eighty" by Paul Theroux

Naipaul and Theroux

I've been reading essays from Paul Theroux's Figures in a Landscape: People and Places and V.S. Naipaul's The Writer and the World.

Finnegans Pidgin

 "Later, speaking it—saying the days of the week for example—I felt that I had talked my way onto the pages of Finnegans Wake, where Joyce writes the days of the week as moanday, tearsday, waitsday, thumpsday, frightday, shatterday. In Pidgin, they are mande, tunde, trinde, fonde, fraide, sarere, sande."

~~ from The Happy Isles of Oceania: Paddling the Pacific by Paul Theroux

a way of dealing with my life

"Lo que más me gusta de mi trabajo," I began, and thought hard, because no one in fifty years had ever asked me this question. And what was it that I most liked about my work? That I had no boss, no employees, no rivals, no competition—the freedom of being a writer? That it was a way of dealing with my life, transforming my experiences, finding ways to understand it—recording life's joys, making its tribulations bearable, and also, in writing, easing the passage of time? Making a living this way, my own way, self-employed—that was something to like. Curious to know more about Mexico, I could get in my car and drive from home to the border, and from the border to Mexico City, and then here, making notes at the end of the day answerable to no one."

~~ from On the Plain of Snakes by Paul Theroux

the example of Chekhov

"In making these snapshots of migrants at the Comedor, I intended to follow the example of Chekhov, who, on his trip through Sakhalin Island in 1890, did the same, composing small portraits, before describing the place as a whole."

~~ from On the Plain of Snakes by Paul Theroux

Rick Steves's On the Hippy Trail: Istanbul to Kathmandu and the Making of a Travel Writer

In the early a.m., I finished Rick Steves's On the Hippy Trail: Istanbul to Kathmandu and the Making of a Travel Writer, and I'd describe it as a fun, glossy memoir or travel narrative. Others would say that it is primarily a collection of journals. In any event, the journey from Southeastern Europe through Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, and Nepal occurred in 1978, only a year before the Iranian Revolution and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Reading it reminded me of reading several of Paul Theroux's travel narratives early in the pandemic after only having read one of his brother Alexander's novels previously. It's good to get away, and travel writers offer an opportunity to do so when we're anchored in domestic environs.

the condition of the lower orders

"It was in Bogota, one gray afternoon, that I read the following passage: Where a great proportion of the people are suffered to languish in helpless misery, that country must be ill-policed and wretchedly governed: a decent provison for the poor is the true test of civilization.—Gentlemen of education, he observed, were pretty much the same in all countries; the condition of the lower orders, the poor especially, was the true mark of national discrimination."

~~ from The Old Patagonian Express by Paul Theroux

on the road in Mexico

"'La única gente que me interesa es la que está loca, la gente que está loca por vivir, loca por hablar, loca por salvarse,' it began, and anyone who has read On the Road will easily recognize it as the mission statement of the man who inspired my generation to hit the road: 'The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved.' (The end of the book, seldom quoted, was a soberer reflection:  'Nobody knows what's going to happen to anybody, besides the forlorn rags of growing old,' a condition that Kerouac was never to know, dying in Florida at the age of forty-seven.)"

~~ from On the Plain of Snakes by Paul Theroux

More than anything, I wanted to read a book.

"But my chief reasons for taking the Puntarenas train had nothing to do with travel. More than anything, I wanted to read a book. And I had a good book. Twice in San Salvador and once in Limon I had opened Poe's Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym; each time it had been night and, while I had read the novel with fascination, on turning off the light the horrors of the story returned to me and made me wakeful. It was, without any doubt, the most terrifying story I had ever read: claustrophobia, shipwreck, thirst, mutiny, cannibalism, vertigo, murder, storm—it was a nightmare journey, and it produced nightmares in me. At home it might not have seemed so bad, but in three Central American hotel rooms--hot, stifling, narrow; the bulb-blistered lamp shade, the strange bed, the rat gnawing the ceiling—the book was an experience of pure terror. I put it away, and I vowed that I would not open it again until I was in a sunny railway compartment. It did not matter where the train was going; what mattered to me was that I should read the book under ideal conditions, on a train, with my feet up, my pipe drawing nicely. This was my reason for going to Puntarenas on that train."

~~ from The Old Patagonian Express by Paul Theroux

a hole in the floor about a foot across

"The toilet on the train looked as though a child had designed it, too. It was a hole in the floor about a foot across. Well, I had seen squat toilets before; but this one was traveling at about fifty miles an hour through the ice and snow of northern China. There was no pipe or baffle. If you looked down you saw ice streaking past. A gust of freezing air gushed out of the hole. Anyone fool enough to use this thing would be frostbitten on a part of the body that was seldom frostbitten. And yet the passengers trooped into this refrigerated bum-freezer. When they came out their eyes were tiny and their teeth were clenched, as though they had just been pinched very hard."

~~ from Riding the Iron Rooster: By Train Through China by Paul Theroux

the object of exaggerated scrutiny

"His work, and the results of his campaigns and philanthropy, could be seen everywhere, but the man himself was elusive. He hid from journalists, he hated to be photographed, he seldom gave interviews. He no longer attended his own openings, but instead sent his wife and daughter to preside over them while he stayed at home, unwilling to speak—a great example of how writers and artists should respond—letting his work speak for him, with greater eloquence.

"He was that maddening public figure, a person so determined to avoid being noticed and to maintain his privacy that he becomes the object of exaggerated scrutiny, his privacy constantly under threat. It is the attention seeker and the publicity hound who is consigned to obscurity--or ignored or dismissed. The recluse, the shunner of fame, the "I just want to be alone" escapee—B. Traven was one, so was J. D. Salinger—seems perversely to invite intrusion. Say 'Absolutely no interviews,' and people beat a path to your door."

~~ from On the Plain of Snakes by Paul Theroux

Klein on DeLillo

If you follow this blog, then you know that my pandemic reading consists mainly of Roberto Bolano's 2666, feminist memoir from the Soviet gulag, and Paul Theroux's travel narratives, but I recently enjoyed learning that novelist and translator Lee Klein has had literature fun forever with his return to the fiction of Don DeLillo. 

difficult to read and impossible to write

 "I find it difficult to read and impossible to write with another person nearby. If the person is staring at me over a quart of jam and a crumbling load of bread, I am driven to distraction. So I did nothing but watch him because there was nothing but that to do. He was odd in another way: if I glanced out the window, so did he; if I went into the corridor, he followed; if I talked to the boy next door, whose father lay dying among empty champagne bottles, the zombie was at my heels and then peering over my shoulder. I couldn't rid myself of him—and I tried."

~~ from The Great Railway Bazaar: By Train Through Asia by Paul Theroux

Greeneland

"There is in most literary biography a simple detail that speaks volumes about its subject. Thoreau never left home. Henry Miller was henpecked, Borges lived in fear of his mother, James Joyce was afraid of thunderstorms, Freud was angst-ridden on railway platforms, Wittgenstein was addicted to cowboy movies, Wallace Stevens to candy, Nabokov never once visited Moscow, Jack Kerouac had stacks of the National Review by his bed when he died."

~~ from Paul Theroux's "Greeneland," an essay included in Figures in a Landscape about Graham Greene and the biography Life of Graham Greene by Norman Sherry

see the real thing

 "I went to bed thinking how China exists so distinctly in people's minds that it is hard to shake that fantasy loose and see the real thing." 

~~ from Riding the Iron Rooster: By Train Through China by Paul Theroux

Faulkner and Bellow in Kyoto

"'So you concentrate on the classics?'

"'Yes, eight century, ninth century, also eleventh century.' He enumerated the works and put the [Henry] James away. He was, he said, a university professor. His name was Professor Toyama and he taught at one of the universities in Kyoto. He said I would like Kyoto. [William] Faulkner had liked Kyoto, and Saul Bellow—well, he had liked it too. 'Mr. Saul Bellow was not enjoying himself. Then we took him to a strip show. He liked it quite a lot!'"

~~ from The Great Railway Bazaar: By Train Through Asia by Paul Theroux

aimless travelers

"For the first time since leaving the United States on this aimless trip I saw other aimless travelers. I had been passing myself off as a teacher; they called themselves students. There were advantages in being a student: student fares, student rates, student hostels, student entry fees. Great, hairy, middle-aged buffoons complained at ticket counters and shouted, "Look, I'm a student! Do me a favor! He doesn't believe I'm a fucking student. Hey—" They were cut-priced tourists, idlers, vagabonds, freebooters, who had gravitated toward this impoverished place because they wanted to save money. Their conversation was predictable and was wholly concerned with prices, the exchange rate, the cheapest hotel, the cheapest bus, how someone ("Was he a gringo?") got a meal for fifteen cents, or an alpaca sweater for a dollar or bunked with some Aymara Indians in a benighted village. They were Americans, but they were also Dutch, German, French, British, and Scandinavian; they spoke the same language, always money. Their boast was always how long they had managed to hang on here in the Peruvian Andes and beat the system."

~~ from The Old Patagonian Express by Paul Theroux

of course I would be among them

 "And yet it was so natural. I thought of all the upstarts, know-it-alls, teachers, critics and book reviewers that I would love to have seen herded on to a train to Mongolia to shovel pig shit and live in barns. But of course I would be among them. In China, an intellectual is usually just someone who does not do manual labor. And there we would all be, digging holes, as a punishment for being so boring. It was an awful fate, but it was easy to imagine how the policy had come about. Everyone in his life has wished at one time or another for someone he disliked to be trundled off to shovel shit—especially an uppity person who had never gotten his hands dirty. Mao carried this satisfying little fantasy to its nasty limit."

~~ from Riding the Iron Rooster: By Train Through China by Paul Theroux