Why Paul Theroux Hates Ernest Hemingway

[mallorys_camera]

I do love Trumansburg. Even under grey skies with crusts of dirty snow on the sidewalks.

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On the long drive between Trumansburg and the Hudson Valley, I finally finished Dark Star Safari. It’s a good thing I didn’t read it but listened to it instead. Fascinating travel chronicle but repetitive in parts (sloppy editing), and Paul Theroux is a cranky old man. I don’t think I would have finished it had I been reading it.

Dark Star Safari is about a crisis. Not the African crisis – although the African crisis confronts you from every page. No. Clearly, something happened in Theroux’s own life before the book opens that he wants to run away from.

Out of touch in Africa was where I wanted to be, Theroux writes early in the book. The wish to disappear sends many travelers away. If you are thoroughly sick of being kept waiting at home or at work, travel is perfect: let other people wait for a change. Travel is a sort of revenge for having been put on hold, having to leave messages on answering machines, not knowing your party’s extension, being kept waiting all your working life—the homebound writer’s irritants.

This is kind of a bizarre statement (if beautifully written) because much of the latter part of the book is taken up with Theroux's increasing indignation at being forced to dally in various remote African outposts where he clearly does not want to be.

He communicates rarely if ever with his wife or other intimates during the whole three- or however many months-journey. He savors the existential present tense that is the traveler’s true reward with a kind of Nixonian relish: They won't have me to kick around anymore!

Theroux turns 60 in Malawi. Malawi was his first taste of Africa, 38 years before this book commences. Slowly, he dribbles enough information to allow the reader to connect the dots: As a very young man, he joined the Peace Corps in order to avoid the Vietnam draft. He was assigned to be a schoolmaster at a place called Soche Hill, and there he taught more-or-less happily for two years until he made the rather foolish decision to drive a car belonging to his headmaster, a man named David Rubadiri, to Uganda. David Rubadiri was involved in political machinations in Malawi; by aiding him, Theroux was involved in a kind of sedition. Never mind, if Rubadiri was virtuous and pure, and Hastings Banda – Malawi’s dictator at the time – was corrupt and devious. If you are the agent of an outside country, you do not take sides in what is essentially a civil war.

Theroux was kicked out of the Peace Corps but landed on his feet with a university post in Uganda.

But the bitterness lingers in his explosive tirades against aid workers of all sorts.

Bitterness and also a kind of romanticism. He desperately wants to see Soche Hill again. To revisit the haunts of a remote youth.

In that way, this book is kind of a much longer version of Death in Venice with Africa subbing as Tadzio.

I do wish Theroux had simply provided us with this information upfront. It would have allowed me to focus better on his African chronicle – which is simply marvelous as a chronicle, as a highly personal account of a journey that’s so subjective that the reader is riding atop Theroux’s brain rather as though it were an elephant, seeing things through Theroux’s eyes. When you know and understand what a writer’s biases are at the start, you’re less irked by that writer’s obvious idiosyncrasies – in Theroux’s case, this would be his immense dislike of the whole foreign aid community.

As someone who studied economics, I get where his distaste is coming from. It is horrifying when foreign aid becomes a line item in a continent’s budget, and, of course, none of it trickles down to the people who live on this continent itself, whose Presidents-for-Life all maintain fleets of well-polished Mercedes. But I think his rage would best be spent on the African aid organizations that are actually profiting from this appalling state of affairs rather than on the young idealists who – however mistakenly – feel called upon somehow to try and alleviate the situation. As Theroux himself once felt called upon to alleviate the situation.

Fiona and Rachel … were on their weekly trip up from the south. They were in their mid-twenties, damp-faced from the heat and their long drive. They had a driver, however, and a high-tech vehicle that was worth a fortune. Am I imagining that the logo on the side showed a weeping continent and the slogan Shed Tears for Africa?

“We have a wet feeding tomorrow,” Fiona said.

Rachel said, “Ninety underweight children, some of them malnourished, infants up to four-year-olds.”

“What is a wet feeding?”

“That’s porridge. Unimix for nutrition—maize, beans, oil, some sugar and fat. Americans “call it Corn-Soy Blend.”

“You are going to a village to dump Unimix in a trough for people to eat.”

“I wouldn’t put it that way,” Fiona said.

I said, “We used to say, ‘Give people seeds and let them grow their own food.’”

“The rains have been unreliable,” Rachel said.

“Maybe they should relocate. If they relocated they might find work, and they might plant gardens if you weren’t feeding them.”

“We save lives, not livelihoods,” Fiona said, and it sounded like a phrase from a brochure that might have been drafted by Mrs. Jellyby.

I said, “Or family planning advice—you could give them that.”

“We don’t discuss family planning,” Rachel said. “We feed children under five and lactating mothers. Why are you looking at me like that?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “Something about ‘supervising a wet feeding.’ It sounds like something you’d do in a game park.”

Mrs. Jellyby is a character who haunts Dark Star Safari. She was originally conceived by Charles Dickens. She first appears in Bleak House as a woman who’s obsessed with African orphans at the expense of her own family’s needs.

Theroux’s extensive knowledge late 19th to mid-20th century English literature is one of the great joys of Dark Star Safari, in fact. At least to me: That’s the literature I’m most obsessed with. He actually alludes to a novel by Saki that nobody but him and me – yes, me! – has read in 50 years, a rather slight volume called The Unbearable Bassington, which evidently made a huge impression on him. (It impressed me rather less.) He’s really familiar with the early works of Evelyn Waugh – you know, the ones written before Evelyn Waugh discovered Catholicism, when Waugh was still an unrepentant racist writing comic parables about the African bush.

In fact, Theroux reminds me of Waugh in many ways. Waugh hated modernism. Hated it, hated it. And Theroux’s hatred of aid workers is only rivaled by his hatred of Ernest Hemingway. I think you could make a strong case that Hemingway was the beginning of modernism.

In Malawi I began identifying with Rimbaud and Graham Greene, and it was in Africa that I began my lifelong dislike of Ernest Hemingway, from his shotguns to his mannered prose. Ernest was both a tourist and a big-game hunter. The Hemingway vision of Africa begins and ends with the killing of large animals, so that their heads may be displayed to impress visitors with your prowess. That kind of safari is easily come by. You pay your money and you are shown elephants and leopards. You talk to servile Africans, who are generic natives, little more than obedient Oompa Loompas. The human side of Africa is an afternoon visit to a colorful village. This is why, of all the sorts of travel available in Africa, the easiest to find and the most misleading is the Hemingway experience. In some respects the feed-the-people obsession that fuels some charities is related to this, for I seldom saw relief workers who did not in some way remind me of people herding animals and throwing food to them, much as rangers did to the animals in drought-stricken game parks.

Theroux may identify with Graham Green, but he completely lacks Green's empathy.

The problem with this book is that Africa’s crisis is so much more important than whatever personal crisis compelled Paul Theroux to journey there. And if you’re there, witnessing it with your own eyes, and part of you isn’t ruminating on strategies to solve that crisis – however foolishly, however misguidedly – then you’re an intensely self-involved old fart who doesn’t have a heart.

And in the final analysis, that’s how Paul Theroux comes across.

I’m glad he made this trip to Africa and wrote so beautifully about it; I’d never want to spend five minutes in a room with him without alcohol.

Comments

[lifeinroseland.livejournal.com]

Like the "visitors" who hate tourists.

[chezsci.livejournal.com]

He's the other side of that Hemingway coin he hates so much. I read "Mosquito Coast" and "White Man's Burden" and found him to be a great travel writer but totally insufferable. I wouldn't want to be five minutes in a room with him while I was drunk for fear that I would try to give him a few left jabs and right hooks. Like him, I'm a 60ish rogue elephant myself and doing that sort of thing might cause me to break a hip. However, the burst of testosterone that a fight would provide might do something for my e-dysfunction launch time problem. Cut that time time down from an hour to maybe 15 minutes. So there's that.

[mallorys-camera.livejournal.com]

Well, naturally I wasn't thinking of you when I wrote that highly offensive thing in that other place. :-) But it is so interesting to me that he kept writing, But I slept alone! throughout this book. Right, Paul. Like anyone in his right mind would sleep with anyone who hadn't been tested on a continent where the AIDS incidence is +30%.

He is much more like Hemingway than he realizes. :-)

[mallorys-camera.livejournal.com]

Well, he lived in Africa for five years.

So in some part of his head, he's not really a visitor. :-)

[chezsci.livejournal.com]

I didn't think it was offensive so much as bawdy funny. I'm not all that pleased about certain facets of aging either but some dudes I know need to embrace it a little more rather than flail around trying to recapture whatever. That said - I could follow my own advice, but hell with that - age appropriate dress is for suckers and I'll pogo dance if I wanna.
If I'm able, that is.
Depends on the weather.

[bel-ebat.livejournal.com]

Reading the samples of his writing style here I can't believe he's so young/is not long dead. I gather from your post that he might be pleased to hear that, but it surprised me to think that and then to also have the association of, "Damn, that's kind of sad." Surprising, because I also love many, many old things.

[mallorys-camera.livejournal.com]

Yeah, Theroux's style is distinctly Joseph Conrad-y/Dickensian but with contemporary referents.

Of course, when one reads Dickens, one of the great shocks is that Dickens has a remarkably contemporary style! He just uses a lot of multisyllabic words.

[mallorys-camera.livejournal.com]

Oh, good!

I live in constant fear that my sense of humor is going to offend somebody I like. :-)