Figures in a Landscape: People and Places: Essays 2001-2016 by Paul Theroux Alex Clark
ALEX CLARK Figures in a Landscape: People and Places: Essays 2001-2016
The occasional pieces that make up Figures in a Landscape do double duty (at least) in Paul Theroux’s writing life. They provide him with money that means he doesn’t have to ‘enter a classroom, or apply for a fellowship, or be some sort of consultant’; and they also grant him a sort of alibi, in the form of ‘the encouraging illusion of respectable employment, that one is fully occupied and has work to do’. Otherwise, Theroux adds, the writer might find themselves so thoroughly bogged down that bookwriting ceases to look like work at all, and more like ‘a perverse hobby’.
All of which sounds perfectly rational until one notices this volume’s imprint page and the list of Theroux’s fifty books – an output that, even allowing for the author having reached his late seventies, indicates a high level of productivity.
No: I think this collection of close-up portraits, literary appreciations and odd bits of travel writing has more to do with pronounced graphophilia – or a sense that writing is the inevitable outcome of a tendency towards solitude and observation. Solitude rather than introversion – his profiles of Hunter S Thompson, Elizabeth Taylor and Robin Williams demonstrate Theroux’s ease in company – and observation rather than inspection; for Theroux is not so much of a prodder of situations as someone who enjoys watching them develop.
In Hawaii, for example, where Theroux lives for part of the time, he encounters an ebullient Thompson in a high-end hotel suite, genially creating chaos by beseeching his fiancée to get high with him while she’s trying to pack their bags, with beers and cigarettes and basketball all around.
Thompson actually becomes calmer and more cheerful after a few hits of cocaine and falls to persuading Theroux to set up a writing course at the University of Hawaii with him: ‘You and me up there in the lecture hall. Every goddamned student will want to take the course. It’ll be great. We’ll meet girls, we’ll make money, check out the surf.’
Back in Colorado, Thompson reveals his great discovery that, if you arrive
at an airport ‘really stoned – really mellow, really coked up’, you get plonked into a wheelchair and boarded first.
As this piece suggests, Theroux is fascinated by excess and by appetites, revealing little of his own predilections in that department, apart from the desire to document.
Even a short interlude – such as tea with Muriel Spark – alights on idiosyncrasy, contradiction and minor details. The same applies at greater length – as in a fascinating profile of a dominatrix (‘Nurse Wolf’) he met during his travels. She tells him about the man who gets off on watching her crush insects beneath a stiletto heel, and the man with Parkinson’s disease who bites her arms. Is there anything in that for her, asks Theroux?
‘You’ve got to realise my freak factor,’ she replies. ‘The thrill for me is I am exhilarated by Parkinson’s disease and dentures, and he’s out of this snowyhaired, poly-knit, Poligrip ad and, instead of playing tennis with his wife, he’s biting me and having cannibal fantasies.’
Alongside such exotic and erotic fossicking as this, pieces on Joseph Conrad and Graham Greene can seem a little more staid. But they are all, in a sense, part of Theroux’s abiding interest in how capacious and elastic literary forms must be, in order to encompass the breadth of human life.
And, of course, he’s funny when he doesn’t like someone, too. The rock star and philanthropist Bono, of whose interventions in Africa Theroux disapproves, becomes ‘Mrs Jellyby in a ten-gallon hat’.
In among all these figures, there is also the landscape, from Harare to Ulster to Albania. He likes to move around on the downlow, Theroux tells us, never availing himself of any official advice or being imprisoned by itineraries. It is, of course, a sort of wanderlust, but one that seems unimaginable without the writing-up.
A short but compelling piece that remembers a hideous Christmas in Zambia forty years ago introduces the idea that to travel off-limits is also to risk trespassing and its consequences. Nestling in the middle of this collection, it functions as a reminder of both the rewards of freedom – and its limits.