I don’t know quite what to make of Paul Theroux. I think his resume is very interesting – a Peace Corps volunteer who taught in Malawi (falling afoul of the mad Classicist-Dictator Hastings Banda and getting kicked out of the country), teaching for a few more years before getting a book published and then winning himself some acclaim as a travel writer. His travel exploits are quite enviable: he rode trains from the Boston T down to Patagonia for The Old Patagonian Express; he walked nearly the whole coast of England for The Kingdom by the Sea; he explored Eurasia, and then China, by rail in The Great Railway Bazaar and Riding the Iron Rooster; he encircled much of the Mediterranean in The Pillars of Hercules – still a surprisingly dangerous task even today – and toured the Pacific islands – doing the shorter runs in a kayak – in The Happy Isles of Oceania. And this is not nearly all of his books.
I have read The Old Patagonian Express, The Pillars of Hercules, The Kingdom By the Sea, and now Deep South, and each time, I have finished his books without any particular certainty that what I had just read was real literature. The closest I have seen him come to literature is the passage in The Old Patagonian Express where he meets the blind Borges, who makes him read Poe’s Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym to him. But of course one is left with the impression that it was Borges that made that encounter literature. It was Borges who wanted Theroux to read, rather than merely exchange pleasantries; it was Borges who picked such a fabulous and unusual book; it was Borges’s passion to hear Poe in an American accent, a touch which is simultaneously tender and purposeful – not at all the kind of modernist absurdity that clutters our minds today.
It may be the case that Theroux’s travel writing is done merely for fun and money, and I should look to his fiction for something deeper – after all, Mosquito Coast did make a fine and thoughtful movie. That proposition may end up being true – that his best work is his fiction – but somehow I don’t have any instinctive confidence in it.
I will return to that idea, but first let’s take a look at Deep South, Theroux’s latest book. It is a badly edited, somewhat lazy book; right at the beginning he wishes to offer by way of prologue a meditation on the difficulty of American travel writing – because there really are no difficulties, travel in America being so easy – but he just blunders about the topic, repeating himself several times, as if he just decided to throw in all his false starts – hell, I wrote ‘em, why not use ‘em. The same thing happens elsewhere, where he makes the point about the South reminded him of Africa about fifteen times, in much the same words, and where he repeats himself about Southern hospitality, Southern churches, etc. The impression you get is that Theroux launched himself into his observation about the importance of Southern churches multiple times, but no one read the book closely enough to catch it, and so it ended up in multiple places.
It has been noted before, that telling us that Southern churches are important in their communities is hardly a new or profound observation. It sounds like a trite truism even before you look at Theroux’s terrible – indeed amateurish – handling:
A church in the South is the beating heart of the community, the social center, the anchor of faith, the beacon of light, the arena of music, the gathering place, offering hope, counsel, welfare, warmth, fellowship, melody, harmony, and snacks. (3)
Indeed, there is almost nothing new or unusual in Theroux’s entire book: the South he goes out to find consists of shotgun shacks, rusted-out trailers, rotting farmhouses, Indian-run motels, baptist churches; discussions about slavery, the Civil Rights Movement, segregation, and Faulkner; gun shows, college football, soul food diners; and not much else. He confines his visits to rural poor South Carolina, rural poor Alabama, rural poor Mississippi, and rural poor Arkansas. There is not even an attempt to get to the complexity of the region now: the gay culture of Charleston, the expensive eco-alt chic of Asheville, the corporate elite of Atlanta, the exurbs of Birmingham and Charlotte, and a million other topics that could be covered.
But I don’t blame Theroux for this; he wanted small, beat-up towns – places where the church is still the only thing in town besides the post office – and he’s entitled to it. He’s definitely not making it up: the South has a lot of places like that. And since I take an interest in places like that, I enjoyed reading about them. Theroux is a good observer, and he captures some interesting dialogue, though none of it struck me as particularly amazing. His was an experience which was enjoyable enough and which anyone could have today – just hop into your car and go there. And if you can’t go there today – if you’re enjoying a spell on the couch – Theroux is a nice companion. He’s smart, usually acerbic, occasionally funny, and very well-traveled. He made me look up some words – which very few authors can do (“fossicking”?) and made me smile at his coinage of others (Bill Clinton turning the Arkansas governor’s mansion into a “fornicarium”).
But ultimately, literature is great human beings on paper, and for all the rooting Theroux does in the book for the good guys working for community development in these beaten-down towns, I never get much of a sense that Theroux is a deeply impressive human being. There is the egotism – many (maybe even most) of his analogies draw attention to his own travels rather than illuminating the thing being described; when he speaks of “the great travel writing of our day,” he has to include “nearly everything in travel that I have written.” The vague odor of pusillanimity never quite gets off his page. In his other books he always has the best of every conversation, which itself seems unlikely; but in this book it feels like the egotism has run so amok it even damages his ability to present himself well. At one point he starts speaking to a black preacher in Chaucerian English, because the preacher had the name Palmer; all very well, but he could have explained what Palmer meant in old English without reverting to Middle English. It feels like he is quoting it just to show that he knows it. Most smart people do this as adolescents; but Theroux looks a bit long in the tooth for this kind of behavior.
Then there is the negativity. It seems that all Theroux’s truly passionate energy resides in opposition. He is weakly benign towards all the good causes he comes across, and I laud him for it. But all the comparisons he makes with Africa lead him to the thing which truly galvanizes him, which is U.S. foreign aid to Africa, and how it should be spent here instead. Theroux may well be right, by the way – but at the very least, there is something to be said for the belief that more money should go to the poorest of the poor, who actually do reside in other countries. But in Theroux it appears as a constant harping: the kind of recurrent emotive obsession that powerless and misguided people have in lieu of meaningful work.
One of the themes of the harping is that it is the responsibility of the Clinton Foundation – or maybe the Gates Foundation, but no, really the Clinton Foundation – to do something about Southern poverty. He brings it up to almost every person he meets down South (if he had been clever, he would have reported that everyone else was bringing it up to him). Again, he may be right, but even if so, a single, well-argued paragraph making this case will do his cause more justice than repeated snipes. After the sniping, he visits Hot Springs, noting its seediness, and then goes into a seven-page biographical insinuation (it’s not really anything more than this) about Bill Clinton:
When Clinton was a teenager (and from his account he roamed freely in Hot Springs), gambling was rife, murders were common, gangsters were part of the scene, Maxine Jones’s brothel and many others were thriving, and the town, run by a crooked political machine, was alight with roisterers, whores, and high rollers. You’re bound to wonder what effect that ingrained culture of vice might have had on an impressionable schoolboy. (347)
It goes on for seven pages like this, but it never really amounts to anything. It’s just negativity, the kind of sniping you might find on Fox News. I’d love for Theroux to be able to paint a Tacitean portrait of Clinton through the gangster-spa of Hot Springs; such a thing could be a tour-de-force. But there is no weight behind anything Theroux says (with one exception: he claims that Clinton never mentions the black community of Hot Springs in his autobiography, which I do, in fact, find to be an interesting omission, if it’s true). It concludes by claiming, “The bird-dogger of chicks is also, inevitably, the most fervent sermonizer at the prayer breakfast.” This is the climax of seven pages of biographical tarring. Montes pariuntur, nascitur ridiculus mus.
Most of the book is not like this – mostly it is vaguely entertaining, generally benignant, and readable. But consistently, in Theroux’s books, it is the snippets of Theroux the man which peak through the narrative that seem most unappealing. There appears to be some kind of emptiness in him, which a lifetime of profitable writing has not filled. He wanders around the South, but his brain seems to be the large sort, and large brains are wounded by too much purposeless wandering. And while he has written much and sometimes written well, I cannot get past the sense that something is missing.
One Comment