TRAVEL:Paul Theroux has a magpie-like mind that jumps from subject to subject. His travel writing enjoys acclaim and no small amount of notoriety, and he also does a good line in public spats. He talks to ROSITA BOLANDabout the art of travel, the scourge of modernity, and what it's like to have sons more famous than he is
THE AMERICAN TRAVEL WRITER Paul Theroux has tattoos. Two very noticeable tattoos, one of a bird, on his right hand, and another of a snake swallowing its own tail, around his left wrist; something he tells me is an ouroboros. For some reason, the tattoos are a surprise. I don’t quite know why it’s a surprise, but I do know that I can’t stop looking at them.
Theroux is having coffee in a Dublin hotel, informally dressed in black Patagonia shirt and trousers, with a cream linen jacket. He’s 70 this year, and somehow, that’s a surprise too. When a writer stitches themselves into the time-line of their narrative as distinctly as Theroux does, in a curious way their persona remains fixed in that particular time.
Before we start, he wants to know if I have a copy of today's Irish Timeson me. "I'm always really pleased when I get a good review in the Irish Timesbecause you're literary people."
At this early point in the interview I start fretting that Theroux has done his homework on me. I've been reading his travel books for many years, and greatly enjoyed most of them. However, I did not enjoy his Africa book, Dark Star Safari: Overland from Cairo to Capetown, finding it both excruciatingly dull and unfocused and wrote a review of it to that effect a decade ago in this newspaper. I'm half wondering if he is going to pull a copy of the review out of his pocket and start publicly berating me (this happened with another writer).
Thankfully, this does not happen. Instead, while I’m staring at his tattoos in fascination, and quietly fretting about my long-ago review, Paul Theroux is staring likewise at my very ordinary three-year-old digital recorder. Can I plug it directly into my computer, he asks, picking it up. Where did I get it? How much was it? How does it work? I tell him. It’s only as the conversation progresses that I realise these random asides – and there are many – are indicative of the way Theroux’s curious, alert, magpie mind works. The digressions are all part of a larger conversation; a trademark way of observing and collecting information. The conversation is never just about one thing, but many.
Early on, Paul Theroux understood the importance of having a brand as a travel writer. In his first travel book, the 1975 classic, The Great Railway Bazaar: By Train Through Asia,the framework for his narrative was a succession of train journeys. Ever since, he has continued to use this format for his books, among them travel by rail in China for Riding the Iron Rooster, in South America for The Old Patagonia Express, and in Africa for Dark Star Safari. There has been the occasional diversion, including The Happy Isles of Oceania,where he took to paddling a kayak, but it is his observations from the windows of a train that have defined his career.
Apart from a couple of short essays, Theroux has not written about the Republic of Ireland. Is it a country he has ever considered travelling in?
“I wouldn’t dare,” he replies. “I wouldn’t dare because the Irish are so good at describing their own country. It would be futile.”
His favourite book of his is The Happy Isles of Oceania, for which he spent 18 months paddling around the Pacific Islands. "My wife and I had split up. I wanted to find my smile again," he explains. "The book starts off very sad. I started off that journey depressed and ended up happy, and there's all that kayaking." Then he says in a throwaway comment: "To write the book was nothing – five months, something like that."
It's never "nothing" to write a book, and the fact that all of Theroux's travel books remain in print is their own testimony. He has also written many novels, twice as many as his travel output, but although The Mosquito Coastwas made into a film, it's for his reputation as a travel writer that he remains best known.
One of the distinctive features of Theroux’s books is how downright mean he can be about fellow passengers who aggravate, disgust or upset him in any way. Even though it’s often entertaining, he is thoroughly merciless in his unkindness. He never says anywhere in his books – to my knowledge – that he has changed these people’s names. What about the ethics of including information about and conversations with people who have no idea they will be quoted?
“That’s a fair question,” he says, totally unperturbed. He has heard all this before, it’s clear. “But travellers are heartless and travelling is trespassing.” He explains that he does not openly carry a notebook. “When travelling, whenever I’ve been talking to a stranger, I don’t write anything down. As soon as I’ve finished talking to them I go and I cudgel my brain and I write down as much as I can remember of what he or she said.” This doesn’t stop Theroux from putting these “cudgelled” conversations into direct quotes.
“You and I know who each other are, but let’s suppose I was a stranger,” he says. “If I was a stranger and you and I were talking in this hotel lobby, and I was writing this down, I might be less candid with you. I would be more cautious.” Exactly. As would be the person he was talking to, because of course they would ask, “What are you writing?”
“Generally speaking, I do give people other names, and I sort of make it plain that’s the case. Unless what I write is very complimentary, I don’t use their real names. I do think it is all fair game when you’re travelling,” he insists.
He segues into a riff about Bruce Chatwin, and how Chatwin fictionalised, or embroidered, much of his work, a fact that is well known. The Songlinesand In Patagoniaare still classic books, but they consistently play with the borders between fact and fiction. What Chatwin created was a genre in itself. The truth is, all travel writing is a fluid genre. What's certain is that you're getting the writer's perspective, and what is also likely is that you are only ever getting part of what happened.
Since the early 1970s, when Theroux first started writing his travel books, the whole world of communication has changed. How has the fact that we can now be online pretty much at any time shaped the way he travels? In Ghost Train to the Eastern Starin 2008, where he retraced as much as he could of his Great Railway Bazaar, he carried a Blackberry with him.
“In every case it interferes with my travels,” he sighs. “I think it’s great when you’re out of touch. It’s great when someone simply disappears and makes his or her own way in the world. If you’re in touch all the time, you’ve never really left home. I lived in Africa for six years and never once made a phonecall.
“Having the ability to communicate gives you a false sense of security. It reduces your sense of being alone to the point where you may not go out and make friends. You may not go out and learn the language. It becomes your lifeline. It’s like being in a swimming pool and keeping your toe on the bottom all the time instead of taking your toe off the bottom and floating.”
What does he plans to do with his archive of notebooks, letters, photographs and slides he has accumulated over the years? “I should put it somewhere. One of these days I’m going to find a really safe place for it. I’ll sell it, give it away, do something with it. I have stacks of notebooks.”
His archive is currently in a lock-up on Cape Cod, where he spends half the year. The other half of the year is spent in Hawaii.
“I also have boxes of literary letters. I have a big folder of letters from VS Naipaul.” Then he interjects, “Have you read my book about Naipaul?” He means Sir Vidia’s Shadow, about their infamous and public feud, that took off in 1996 when Naipaul placed a copy of one of Theroux’s books, which Theroux had personally signed for him, for sale online .
I say I have not read it.
“I recommend it. It’s about the beginning, middle and end of a friendship,” Theroux announces briskly, before continuing with his litany. “I have letters from VS Pritchett, I have letters from Martha Gellhorn. She took an interest in my work from the 1980s and she was a tremendous letter-writer. I have letters from Graham Greene. I must, yes, I must do something with it.”
If the name Theroux is familiar to you, yet you've not read any of Paul Theroux's books, that will be because he has two sons who also have public profiles. One is Marcel, a novelist. The other is Louis, a documentary-maker, known for Louis Theroux's Weird Weekends, and the When Louis Met. . . series. Louis, in fact, is now arguably more famous than his father, due to the fact that television is a mass-media outlet. Have they ever thought about collaboration?
They’ve talked about projects, but not yet done anything. Theroux the father is endearingly proud of his children. “Can you imagine that you have children who write and make films?” he marvels. “I get the chance to see what my children are thinking about. What they’re really thinking about. What’s happening to them. It’s a rare privilege to have a child who writes, or makes documentaries, because you see them in their most candid moments. You never get that usually. Except my father never read anything I wrote.”
He interjects this last line so quickly into the conversation, at the speed of an exploding cork, that I only pick up on it later when replaying the interview.
What I do pick up on is the fact that Theroux is wearing two gold rings on different hands. One is his own wedding ring. The other is also a wedding ring, set with two diamonds. “This is my father’s wedding ring,” he explains. “When my father died, I got it. A man in Bangkok put these two diamonds into it for $100. So they represent my father and myself, I guess.”
At present, Theroux is working on another novel set in Africa. The book he's currently promoting, The Tao of Travel, is an entertaining compendium of quotes filleted from other travel books, and meditations on travel in general by Theroux.
There is a passage he particularly wants to read out. It’s on page 70, written by Elias Canetti, while he was in Marrakesh in 1954: “Travelling, one accepts everything; indignation stays at home. One looks, one listens, one is roused to enthusiasm by the most dreadful things because they are new. Good travellers are heartless.”
The bird tattooed on Paul Theroux’s right hand, is, he tells me, a frigate. “They fly very high, then they just drift on the wind, and when they’re hungry, they look for another bird and take the food away from them.”
The Tao of Travel,edited by Paul Theroux, is published by Hamish Hamilton ( £16/€18)
Travel essentials: from 'The Tao of Travel'
Paul Theroux's Essential Tao of Travel
1. Leave home
2. Go alone
3. Travel light
4. Bring a map
5. Go by land
6. Walk across a national frontier
7. Keep a journal
8. Read a novel that has no relation to the place you're in
9. If you must bring a cell phone, avoid using it.
10. Make a friend
Place-names that have misled the credulous traveller
Shepherds Bush: "A gray, malodorous, overpopulated district, the opposite of its name. Noted for its shopkeepers, who when it's not raining, stand at their doorways voluptuously scratching themselves.
Tahiti:"A mildewed island of surly colonials, exasperated French soldiers and indignant natives, with overpriced hotels, one the world's worst traffic problems, and undrinkable water."
Mandalay:"An enormous grid of dusty streets occupied by dispirited and oppressed Burmese and policed by a military tyranny."
Timbuktu:"Dust, hideous hotels, unreliable transport, freeloaders pestering people, garbage heaps everywhere, poisonous food."
Samarkand:"Not the Silk Road fantasy of minarets and domes but a stinking industrial city in Uzbekistan, known for its chemical factories, fertiliser plants, and out-of-control drunkenness."
Biarritz:"A crowded French city of cement bungalows, labyrinthine roads, mediocre restaurants, and a stony beach of cold and dangerous surf."
Guatemala City: "A place that has continually been flattened by earthquakes and badly rebuilt. The majority of the population are slum dwellers, many of who are eager to emigrate from their failed state."
Ten places Theroux has never been to and wants to visit
Alaska. Scandinavia. Greenland. Timor. Angola. New Britain Island (off Papua New Guinea). Sakhalin (island off Russia). The Darién Gap between Panama and Colombia. The Swat Valley in Pakistan. The American South.
