Traveling Theroux

It was Alexander Pope (1688-1744) who first used the phase in his “An Essay on Criticism”, in 1709: "A little learning is a dangerous thing; drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring: there shallow draughts intoxicate the brain, and drinking largely sobers us again." This was the phase that kept running through my head as I sat listening to Paul Theroux give a talk at the National Library on 27 Apr 2006. The crowd was probably 200-strong, half of which sat on the carpet floor, including Koh Tai Ann.

The topic of his talk was how Time will proof the Truth of something. He gave examples of writers popular in their time but who had no literary longevity and unpopular writers who were post-humorously acclaimed. And political figures like Nelson Mandela who was vindicated late in life. At this stage in his life, the question of what survives him is understandably a pertinent preoccupation. But what irked me and evoked Pope’s phase was his simplistic asides. He compared himself with Dick Cheney, whose birthday he shares, and cites him as a man blinded by politics who cannot esteem the worth of Mandela. He wondered whether the audience knew that Lee Kuan Yew commended the Tianamen crackdown. (I did, and I also remember that while LKY said it was inevitable politically, he also felt it was too high-handed and overdone.)

Extensive traveling, in the case of Theroux, did not make him wiser, or indeed, humbler. He traveled with a blinkered view, and went around searching for anecdotes that reaffirms his preconceptions. It was as if his education had stopped before he began traveling. Curiously, some of the wisest men in history never traveled much. I can’t imagine Lao Tze, or Confucius or Homer for that matter (who is reputed to be blind) having ventured far from their surroundings. But their minds were open, and their thinking deep. Theroux, an unworthy comparison, is a writer looking for or getting into ironic situations that leads to easy generalization and quotable sound bites. He is prolific, courageous and adventurous. But he is anything but humane, when that is the quality I prize in a travel writer. His mind is made up before he arrives. At the heart of his philosophy is, “Power corrupts”. He is stridently anti-authority, and has trouble belonging to any form of organization, whether it is the Peace Corp or the University of Singapore. Is this the result of having been ‘inducted’ in that revolutionary decade of 1960s? In fact, one of his mottos is, “I want trouble. There’s something to write about here.” What little learning he acquired as a student; freedom is good, conformity is bad; became his life-long gospel.

Read how he belittles Singapore in The Great Railway Bazaar, and how he said he would never come back. And here he was, back again after 33 years, as part of a vanity project to “retrace” his footsteps undertaken some 3 decades ago. (Was it Nabokov who said only second rate writers write about themselves? And here we have a writer writing about himself going through the same journey that he himself had undertaken. At one point in the talk, he even congratulated himself on beating aspiring writers to this novel task.) “Singapore is unrecognizable today,” he said that night, “like a bloated man when one remembers the lean one.” Another wonderful quote. But the implication is clear; the Singapore he knew was better off than the one we inhabit today. And yet, here’s what he says to a journalist later. In a newspaper interview published in Today after the talk, Theroux said: "I never looked deeply into Singapore, and (now) I don't want to be negative. I don't want to be one of these people who comes and says: 'There's no culture'. I'm very impressed. It's the people who make a country, not the government or leaders. This is a place where people buy and read books, what could be better?" That’s another sly, glib quote; a negative compliment, in spite of himself.

In person, his voice is strangely high-pitched, somewhat like Woody Allen’s whine. This has the somewhat unintended effect of disarming his rudeness. It doesn’t sound as rude when spoken with a touch of high-strung nerves. One almost feels sorry for the speaker. But when the words are etched on hard paper, they acquire a bravado and finality quite detached from the real thing. They also occasionally achieve a poignancy and insight that hits close to the core, like his autobiographic account of his relationship with V.S. Naipaul, which I enjoyed because it was a subject that only he could be the expert on. I said “core” instead of Truth because Truth is easily abused with a little learning. (A broken clock is right twice a day.) Truth can also be relative, and it is the lack of relativity, the vision of a larger picture, that ultimately grates. A one-sided argument, like his take on Singapore, may be entertaining to read, but it should not be ennobled to the status of an enduring Truth, which Theroux seems to think he has a monopoly on when he travels.

Chup