Paul Theroux and the Bicycle

 The prolific travel writer Paul Theroux came into prominence in 1975 with his first foray into travel writing with “The Great Railway Bazaar,” his account of thirty or so train trips over four months, from London to Japan and back.  Five of his subsequent travel books continued the train theme, interspersed with books about travel by foot (“The Kingdom by the Sea,” a walk around the perimeter of Great Britain), paddling among the islands of Oceania (“Happy Islands of Oceania”), sailing 1,500 miles down the Yangtze River (“Sailing Through China”)  and driving around the South (“Deep South”) and along the Mexican border and into Mexico (“On the Plain of Snakes”), among others.

Unfortunately, he has never availed himself of the pleasure of traveling by bike. He has contemplated it, but could never summon the resolve for the most noble and independent and engaging form of travel.  It was an option for his trip around Great Britain in 1981 after two books on train travel, but he thought it would be “too dangerous and too difficult“ and also a “stunt,” lame excuses for not having to overly exert himself. 

Twenty-five years later he seemed to have overcome his resistance to travel by bike, when as he passed through Tibet on a train trip around China (“Riding the Red Rooster”) he felt the urge to bike around Tibet.  He wrote that he’d even begun to plan the trip, but in the fifteen years since he has yet to fulfill that urge, actually resorting to the automobile, the antithesis of the bike, for his last two travel books.  Since he is less than six months from turning eighty, there is little likelihood that he has a bicycling book in him. 

He does express great admiration for Dervla Murphy, the intrepid Irish cyclist, who he devotes a chapter to in “The Tao of Travel.”  He commends her as “a wanderer in the oldest tradition.”  Traveling by bike was no stunt for her. In her many bicycle touring books she is always fulfilling a natural inclination, doing something she genuinely longed to do, beginning with a ride from Ireland to India in 1963, recounted in “Full Tilt.”

If anything was a stunt, it was Theroux’s first travel book.  He didn’t simply take a long train trip through exotic lands, but rather he searched out unique train trips all over Asia, hopping from here to there by plane and boat to connect to his next trip in Vietnam and Japan and Siberia and elsewhere.  He was not a traveler fulfilling some inner need, but rather a writer seeking material for a book. 

He had written nine little-read books (a criticism of V.S. Naipaul and eight novels), some the fruition of his time in Africa with the Peace Corps.  Out of desperation for something to write about that might find an audience and get him out of debt, he pitched the idea of the train book to a publisher, despite his strong aversion to travel writing, calling it “the lowest form of literary self-indulgence,” written by “second-rate writers waffling on about themselves and looking for trouble.”  And in his subsequent decades of travel writing he contributed to rail against it. In the introduction to a collection of his travel writing, “To the Ends of the Earth,” published in 2011 he said of travel books, “A bore wrote it and a bore read it.”

Even though he suddenly had a best-seller on his hands (the book went through three printings due to bookstore demand even before it was released), enabling him to achieve financial solvency, he has no fondness for the book,  as it only reminds him that he was “deeply melancholy” for much of his travels, being away from his wife and two young sons for over four months, just missing making it back for Christmas, and having to write about material that wasn’t in his heart.  Compounding his agony was learning that his wife had an affair while he was away.  When he found out, he wanted to kill her.  Though it is the book that launched him and that he’s most famous for, it isn’t always included in the biographical blurb on book jackets of his subsequent books while more recent ones are.

It is almost an embarrassment to him that he is known as a “travel writer,” as his aspiration has always been to be regarded as a novelist. His success with “The Great Railway Bazaar” turned him into a reluctant travel writer.  His heart never seems to be in it. He bemoans travel as “a horror and always a nuisance...It is in the nature of travel to be uncomfortable, if not scared silly.” 

Through it all, he has persisted with his fiction—novels and short stories—to little avail. He had to eventually admit he was a “second-rate writer” like all the travel writers he disdains.  It is little consolation that the polish he gained from writing fiction put a shine on his travel writing, elevating it above most, earning him the acclaim of one of the better travel writers of his time.

He may not have a compulsion to travel, but he certainly has a compulsion to write, with some fifty books to his credit, including a couple of children’s books, and attempts at science fiction and fantasy and four compilations of short stories and several collections of his magazine pieces.   Wading through his more than thirty books of fiction, one can’t help but feel that his writing is often only the fulfillment of trying to meet a certain quota of words a day.  I found myself, time after time, as I persisted at my task of reading them all, asking, “Why am I reading this drivel?”  Of only minimal interest were his semi-fictionalized confessional memoirs “My Other Live,” “My Secret History” and “Motherland,” all a version of one another.

What an ordeal it was reading them all, especially when he all too often lapses into an adolescent preoccupation with sex.  His novels are populated with mopes burdened by a pathetic craving for coupling.  And his travel books aren’t complete without encounters with prostitutes, only observing without admissions of indulging, though he did while in the Peace Corps, as it was intrinsic to the African culture he found himself in, as he confesses in “Sir Vidia’s Shadow,” an unrestrained undressing of his former friend and mentor, the Nobel laureate V. S. Naipaul.

He just writes and writes, perplexed by those who complain of writer’s block, actually wondering if those who don’t complain about the agony of writing are “second-rate.” Even when traveling, especially during those long hours on trains when he is trying to avoid irritating passengers, if he’s not jotting notes or reading, he can be struck by an idea for a short story, that may or may not turn into a novel, and begins scribbling away. 

It is hard to conceive how he has managed to write so much, as he is a prolific reader as well as writer.  He doesn’t read books, but rather authors.  His books, travel and novels, are full of literary allusions, rattling off the heights of authors and other stray details, such as Aldous Huxley dying the same day as JFK. Such drop-ins lend a veneer of depth and intelligence to his travel books. 

Though he can often strike a sour note, his travel writing is still a pleasure, especially in contrast to his fiction.  He is particularly adept at dialogue, sometimes going on for a page or more.  His facility with dialogue has led to nine  screenplays, including for his novels “Saint Jack” and “The Mosquito Coast.” It is writing he places in even lower regard than travel-writing, calling it “a waste of time.“

His frequent carping about being known only as a travel writer, and his slightly veiled lack of enthusiasm when he does travel, have earned him the not-undeserved reputation of being a grump, having a chip-on-his-shoulder, aggravated by one and all.  One can trace it to his childhood, where he bore the burden of being a third-born son, picked-on and competing with two older brothers, including Alexander, who became a distinguished and respected writer, nominated for a National Book Award and earning a Fulbright Grant and a Guggenheim Fellowship.  He taught at Harvard and Yale.  Paul‘s teaching credentials don’t go much beyond a stint in Uganda after being kicked out of the Peace Corps and another in Singapore until his contract was ignominiously not renewed.

Alexander wrote a scathing review in 1996 in “Boston Magazine” of Paul’s semi-autobiographical novel “My Other Life,” dismissing him as “a poseur, a hack, a whore, a slob and a meretricious scribbler...at best a beach read.”  Paul was appalled, responding that “in the long history of literary brothers there was no precedent for this attack...No one in history has ever done this, a guy writing that his brother’s book is crap.  Even Hemingway’s brother didn’t do it.”

He never won the favor of his parents either.  He devoted a 500-page novel, “Motherland,” to his contentious relationship with his mother and his six siblings, who regarded him with ridicule.  His mother did not approve of his writing, wishing he’d become a doctor, as he once aspired to be and regretted he hadn’t.  She  damned his first book, “Waldo,” about a juvenile surviving a dysfunctional family.  She wrote him a letter, that he has kept to this day, calling it “unfunny, sordid, cheap and vulgar.”

He claimed that his father never admitted to reading any of his books.  He blames his cynicism on his family, all of whom were imbued with a sour trait. They shared a “glee at seeing the worst in people, the confirmation that all of us were dogs.”  Such is his portrayal of most of the people he encounters in his travels.  He belittles and mocks, though with enough restraint that it’s not as offensive as it could be, only antagonizing a small percentage of his readership. Unlike most travel writers whose adjective of choice is “glorious,” his is “lugubrious.”   

He well knows his reputation for grumpiness and does his best to put some restraints on it. He doesn’t entirely object to how some regard him, as a blurb on the book jacket of “Hotel Honolulu” quotes a review stating “full of Theroux’s unashamed crankiness.”  A blurb on the book jacket for “The Pillars of Hercules” stated, “His portraits are pleasantly tinged with malice.”  

He is liable to snap at any slight or behavior that irks him.  When an Israeli border official asked him to sit down, he replied, “Only if you say please.”  At the Singapore border he was told by an official with a bad accent, “Your hair is radda rong.”  He replied, “And yours is rather short.”

His low self-regard comes through time after time.  When his oldest brother, a successful lawyer, expressed envy for the life Theroux has led, Theroux couldn’t understand why, as he feels as if he’s been a failure, never realizing his full potential.  In “Ghost Train to the Eastern Star,” a repeat of his first train travels over thirty years later, a woman tells him, “I want to live your life.”  He thinks, “Really!  My nagged childhood, my undistinguished career as a punk, no good at games, bewildered in college, terminated early in the Peace Corps, disgraced in Singapore when my contract wasn’t renewed, hard up in London, refused a credit card by American Express at the age of 32 because I had no visible credit, divorced.”  He has led the dream life of many and he can’t accept it, preferring to bemoan his shortcomings than be proud of what he has accomplished.

One of the revelations in Alexander’s condemnation was that his brother is obsessed with his bowel movements and eats prunes at breakfast.  That explained why he devoted his ridiculous 1994 novel “Millroy the Magician” to a religious movement founded on having regular bowel movements.  The preacher had a Trumpian motto of “I can make America regular once again.”  The novel is narrated by a 14-year old girl who had been seduced by the preacher in the days when he was merely a small-time magician before he was recruited for a morning children’s television show and developed a following that made him a national sensation.  This was another of his novels that one has to ask, “Why would you want to write such a story?  Who could possibly be interested?”

Theroux pretty much keeps his preoccupation with bowels to himself, though his years in Africa and third world countries must have led to more than a few cases of “the runs.” He lets slip his preoccupation here and there.  In his driving venture around Mexico, his latest book, he acknowledges a spell of two days when he had “the squitters.”     In “Waldo” he writes, “Nothing is so underrated as a good crap.”  In his 1978 novel “Picture Palace,” narrated by a 70-year old woman photographer who has Theroux’s  contempt for everyone she encounters, she remarks that Somerset Maugham was known to be constipated. Constipation is hinted at in “Millroy,” as the preacher forbids the term “toilet,” as it implies toil.  In his novel “The Black House” a character comments “travel bores me, constipates, all those bad meals.”

Maybe if Theroux had gotten out on a bike from time to time his digestive tract might not have been such an issue. He did go for a bike ride around a city in Vietnam when he had a free afternoon in “The Great Railway Bazaar,” but he made no comment on what an eye-opening experience it had to have been floating through neighborhoods he never would have seen and how glorious it was to roam, almost soaring like a bird.  But not much is “glorious” in the world of Theroux.

He writes at more length about a bike ride he took with Robin Williams in a profile he wrote of him for “Talk” magazine, one of thirty mostly non-travel  pieces collected in his book “Figures in a Landscape.”   Williams was an avid cyclist and friend of Lance Armstrong, who he would ride with on Rest Days at The Tour de France and elsewhere. Theroux acknowledged that Williams was a better cyclist than him, but “he didn’t rub it in.”   He doesn’t say whose idea it was to go for the ride, but Theroux deserves kudos for making it a strand of his story.  

In “Motherland” he says he turned down doing a magazine story on cycling in the Scottish Highlands, scoffing at the very idea of “a big man on a bike, pedaling up and down Scottish hills looking for something to write about.”   Too bad he didn’t more fully embrace the bicycle.  It could have tempered his life-long malaise, clearing his head, accelerating his heart rate, unclogging his arteries.  A good long bike ride always leaves one with a sense of accomplishment and fulfillment, like finishing a good book.