Fresh Air Fiend (67 page)

I said something about such a small hole not being yet finished, and his reply was, "
Ha Sahib, Sircar ke-kam hai
"—"It is Government work, sir."

It struck me on hearing those words that it was not the first time I had met that boy.

 

Simpson made two more visits to India, but by this time he was a "special artist" on retainer from the
Illustrated London News,
and under its auspices Simpson went as far afield as Afghanistan (he covered the First Afghan War and later the Afghan Boundary Commission) and China. In 1873 he went completely around the world, the journey he recorded in
Meeting the Sun,
a delightful travel book full of adventures, off the beaten track (up the Yangtze River, among the Modoc Indians in northern California) and on the beaten track (the marriage of the emperor of China and Niagara Falls).

Simpson was happier among outlaws than he was among royalty. As a guest of the prince of Wales in a royal residence, he worried that the servant assigned to him (because he hadn't his own) would take a dim view of his darned socks and his plain old hair brushes, and he cringed at the thought of "a gorgeous creature in blue plush breeches" unpacking his portmanteau. He preferred the dervish in the caravansary or the floor mender in Kashmir. This is the reason his pictures are full of telling detail, and it also accounts for the fact that Simpson, not a natural writer, produced good travel books. Simply, he talked to everyone and reported accurately what they said.

That Modoc business turned him into a listener. It was a bitter war, and especially bloody for its being so far from any large settlement. Simpson was not put off by the remoteness of this bloodbath. When the railway ran out, he took a stagecoach, stopping at settlers' log houses on the way. He met all the usual pioneer belligerence, but typically he reported it with irony:

 

In one place, an old settler expressed the usual warm desire to see the Modocs exterminated, and included the whole race of Indians in the same merciful sentiment. When he came to the place first there were lots of Indians about—they were as plentiful as ground-squirrels, and every fall white men used to go out and shoot a hundred or two of them. At the present moment he was sorry he could not get away.... I reported this valiant warrior's wish at the camp, and there was a great regret that such valuable services were not to be had.

 

That twinkle and tone of voice and light touch, and even some of the expressions, are Kiplingesque. Though their paths did not cross, Kipling and Simpson traveled many of the same routes in the world, and their enthusiasms, their pawky humor, and the colors they favored are very similar. Both shared an interest in biblical history and classical scholarship, and they were machine-mad, too, loving the mechanisms of locomotives and tunneling equipment.

Although Simpson was born almost forty years before Kipling, their experiences of India overlapped, and their sympathies were much the same—not the pink, princely India, but India outdoors, its streets, hills, and bazaars. Kipling's father illustrated some of his son's work, but how much more appropriate Simpson's pictures would have been. In his passions and sympathies as well as his limitations and quirks, William Simpson is the Kipling of watercolorists.

W
E MADE OUR
introductions through our work, and met in person later, which is the right sequence for writers to get acquainted. Rajat's magazine,
Transition,
had recently begun in Uganda, and I was writing poetry and fiction in Malawi. Africa was a small place then—or so it seemed, because it was one place, where writers were eagerly signaling to each other: Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka, Christopher Okigbo, and Ulli Beier from Nigeria; Cameron Duodu from Ghana; Dennis Brutus, Nadine Gordimer, and others from South Africa; Ezekiel Mphahlele and James Ngugi from Kenya; David Rubadiri and I from Malawi; and yet others in the Sudan, Ethiopia, Zambia, Tanzania. Nearly all these signals were directed toward Uganda, where Rajat edited them for publication in
Transition.

It is hard to imagine a little magazine becoming so influential on such a vast continent, but that is what happened with
Transition.
Rajat began his magazine at just the right time, and it became a rallying point throughout the 1960s. It helped that Rajat was a local boy, with Africa inside him as well as the experience of a British university. It all showed in the way he spoke, moving from Swahili to Hindi to English. Kampala in the mid-sixties was a small green city, and Uganda was prosperous and full of distinguished writers (Achebe, Mphahlele, V. S. Naipaul, Ali Mazrui), artists (Michael Adams, Jonathan Kingdon), and anthropologists (Raymond Apthorpe, Colin Turnbull) from Makerere University. Rajat had lived through Uganda's later colonial years and through its independence and hopeful years. He was also to experience its disintegration and terror.

He was brave, articulate and funny, and a tease. He had tremendous confidence, not the ranting and fearful bravado that was common among some Ugandans, but a stylish poise that was both intellectual and social. He was handsome, clever, and young. He used all his gifts. He traveled across Africa, and to London and New York. His magazine mattered. He liked me and published my writing—he was the first publisher of my work—and I felt lucky to know him.

One of his strangest requests to me—but typical Rajat—was that I agree to sign a paper saying that I had committed adultery with his Swedish wife, Lotte. This was 1965. Adultery was grounds for divorce in Uganda, and it had to be proven. "I wouldn't ask this of anyone else," he said. "I am asking you because you're my friend." Well, that was true, but Kampala was such a small place that I was afraid of the social consequences. I was not married, and I did not want to be known in town as a co-respondent, the legal term for the adulterous party. Rajat said he had a contact at the printer of the
Uganda Argus
— the firm also produced
Transition
— so he would see to it that my name would not appear in the court column, where divorces, criminal convictions, and bankruptcies were listed, once a week in small print.

Although I had never laid a hand on the woman, I agreed to be named as co-respondent and to admit to having slept with her on three occasions. Rajat's harassed attorney warned me that this admission was illegal—connivance, in fact. I was soon served with papers, and in court the magistrate said, "This Theroux chap—isn't he supposed to be a friend of yours?" Rajat admitted this was so. Magistrate: "Some friend!"

In spite of Rajat's promises, my name appeared in the
Argus,
and afterward, when I showed up at parties, people—expatriates or leathery ex-colonials—smiled at me knowingly. At the age of twenty-four, I had my first experience of celebrity. It was also one of the happiest periods of my life. I fell in love. Rajat approved of the woman, Anne Castle. He was a witness at our wedding—his elegant signature on our marriage certificate. Rajat married two more times and fathered six children, who are now scattered around the world.

During those years, because we were friends, because we were in Africa, I saw him every day. (I had started out as a lecturer at Makerere; a few years later, because of the rapid departures of expatriates, I became acting head of the Adult Studies Centre. "We have no one else in the pipeline," the chancellor, Y. K. Lule said.) Rajat was in his element at a large table—he could be found at the City Bar on Kampala Road, the Staff Bar at Makerere, or an austere vegetarian restaurant, Hindu Lodge. He sat, he talked, he teased, he encouraged; then he went back to his office and worked on his magazine. We all assumed that Uganda would just get better. Naipaul disagreed. The politicians were clearly opportunists and crooks, he said: "This country will turn back into jungle."

We did not really know what would happen You never do But it got worse, and many of us left. Rajat stayed and got thrown into jail for sedition—criticizing the Ugandan government, something he had been doing for years. His detention in prison might have broken him. Or was it disillusionment? It was revealed that for some years the magazine had been partly funded by the CIA, the grubby money dispensed by the clean hands of the Farfield Foundation (
Encounter
magazine was another recipient). He took
Transition
to Ghana in 1970 and edited it for two years. He then went to the United States, and he just about vanished. I saw him once: he looked frail, unsteady, and he had no interest in pursuing any conversation.

Rajat was found dead on December 3, 1995, in the San Francisco hotel that had been his home for a number of years. He was fifty-seven. After he left Africa, he was not the same. But when I knew him, thirty years ago in Africa, he was brilliant and his friendship meant everything to me.

A
TRAVEL BOOK
may be many things, and Moritz Thomsen's
The Saddest Pleasure
seems to be most of them—not just a report of a journey, but a memoir, an autobiography, a confession, a foray into South American topography and history, a travel narrative, with observations on books, music, and life in general—in short, what the best travel books are, a summing up.

Thomsen, the most modest of men, writes at one point, "Though I have written a couple of books I have never thought of myself as a writer. I had written them in those pre-dawn hours when the land still lay in darkness, or in days of heavy winter rains when the cattle huddled in the brush dumb with misery....I had always considered that all my passion was centered around farming."

The books he refers to are
Living Poor
(1971), the best book I have yet read on the Peace Corps experience, and
The Farm on the River of Emeralds
(1978), which is a sort of sequel, and describes an exasperating series of reverses Thomsen had as part owner of a farm on the lush and muddy coast of Ecuador.

To my mind, this farmer is a writer to his fingertips, but he is an unusual man, and his writing life has been anything but ordinary. Writing for him is a natural and instinctive act, like breathing. It is obvious from
The Saddest Pleasure
and his other books that he loathes polite society and shuns the literary world (in meeting the writer João Ubaldo Ribeiro, in Bahia, he found a kindred spirit). Thomsen is no city slicker; he is not possessive or acquisitive. He mocks his physical feebleness and jeers at his old age and his sense of failure. He wishes to write well and honestly, and is not interested in power. A great deal of foolishness or a little wickedness makes him angry. He always tells us exactly what he thinks, in his own voice. He is the least mannered of writers, and he would rather say something truthful in a clumsy way than lie elegantly.

I liked him the instant I met him, and even then, eleven or twelve years ago, he seemed rather aged, frail and gray-haired, wheezing in the thin air of Quito. I could see he was a good man, tenaciously loyal to his friends, and a serious writer. He was in his middle sixties and had published his Peace Corps book, and he mentioned that he was working on several others, including a memoir of his father. He hated his father, he said, and since literature is rich in such hatreds, I encouraged him in his memoir.

Moritz tantalized me with stories of his father's odious behavior: the time he hanged his wife's pet cat, the time he tied a dead chicken around a collie's throat with barbed wire because the collie had been worrying the hens. In addition to this sadistic cruelty, his father was also a poisonous snob and a liar; this pillar of the community—for indeed he was—made poor Moritz's life a misery. Clearly it went on for a long time. We read in
The Saddest Pleasure
how, at the age of forty-eight, Moritz was still being berated by this paranoid maniac for joining the "communistic" Peace Corps. The only other person I have met in my life who hated his father as much was a German who told me that his father had been a member of the precursor of the SS—the Sturmabteilung, or SA—and, long after the war ended, was still ranting. Thomsen Senior and this Nazi would have gotten along like a house on fire.

I am happy to see this monster in the narrative. Whatever else travel is, it is also an occasion to dream and remember. You sit in an alien landscape and you are visited by all the people who have been awful to you. You have nightmares in strange beds. You recall episodes that you have not thought of for years, and but for that noise from the street or that powerful odor of jasmine you might have forgotten. Details of Thomsen's life emerge as he travels out of Ecuador, through Bogotá, and around Brazil: his childhood dreams, his shaming memory of a shocking incident one long-ago Halloween, his years in the war (twenty-seven combat missions flown in a B-17 in 1943 alone), his father's death and funeral, his disastrous farming ventures, and the outrages he witnessed in various coastal villages in Ecuador.

By the end of the book, you know Moritz Thomsen intimately, and what is more, he is a man well worth knowing. In many respects this is a self-portrait, but in this case the artist is painting himself naked. He is candid. He withholds nothing. When we get a glimpse of his body, he is never sentimental: he describes poor, weak human flesh. In Rio, for example, he is in a room with a mirror. (He has no mirror in Quito.) "I am looking at myself for almost the first time in ten years, and can see at last that I had been truly broken by that time in the jungle and that old age."

He was sixty-three at the time of the trip, but he had been very ill beforehand. His illness and his sense of failure make him morbid, but also ghoulishly humorous. He gives most people a lot of latitude, but he is always hard on himself. He laments that he doesn't look Latin. He reflects on his own appearance: "Pure gringo, but more bum than working man."

Moritz Thomsen is rare in an important way. He is a true Conradian, and his distant literary ancestor is someone like Axel Heyst in
Victory—
although I should quickly add that Heyst's father was a different sort of devil from the elder Thomsen.