Theroux’s Close Shave

Three years ago, Paul Theroux ended his birthday card to himself—“Facing Ka‘ena Point: On Turning Eighty,” published in The New Yorker and probably the closest thing to an autobiography he will ever offer—with the perfect vignette.

He was sitting, scribbling in his favorite place to write—a folding chair on a Hawaiian beach he has watched erode away for years. A young man comes towards him, limping from a war wound. He said he remembered seeing Theroux in the same place before he went off to Afghanistan. “And you’re still here,” he said, “in that chair!”

“I’m not finished,” Theroux replied.

And he wasn’t, (likely isn’t still). In the same essay Theroux describes his life as writing one book after another since 1963—amassing thirty-two of fiction, twenty nonfictions, and one play about Rudyard Kipling in Vermont. His newly released novel at the time, Under the Wave at Waimea, about a big-wave surfer gone to seed, was soon followed by fiction number thirty-three, The Bad Angel Brothers, a puzzling duel between two middle-aged brothers hell bent on destroying each other, set in a quaint old town in New England. (I make it to be Lakeville, Connecticut, for what that’s worth).

Now comes fiction number thirty-four, Burma Sahib, an imaginary account of young George Orwell’s five-year stint as a supervisor with the India Imperial Police in Burma from 1922 to 1927. He was still Eric Blair at the time and would not adopt the pseudonym George Orwell until 1933, at the age of 30, with the publication of his first book, Down and Out in London and Paris.

But we don’t know that yet. In fact, the reader doesn’t officially know, isn’t officially told, that Eric Blair would morph into the Literary Titan of Dystopia. Theroux drops a hint with the inscription but doesn’t spell it out until a brief postscript in the final pages of the book. It’s fun to wonder if Theroux is being playful here with those readers who haven’t been paying attention or doing their homework and don’t know that Eric will become George, saving the revelation for a “gotcha” zinger at the very end. If so, then the jacket copy kind of spoils whatever fun that might have been.

But as we read and learn about the struggles and doubts and dreams that mold Eric Blair, it’s a writer other than Orwell that seems to emerge.

We first meet the gangly, shy, awkwardly tall 19-year-old Etonian Eric Blair on the deck of a steamer heading across the Red Sea for India—and with that, the table is set for a literary adventure. Blair’s got Kipling on his mind as he heads to “Where the best is like the worst / Where there aren’t no Ten Commandments and a man can raise a thirst.”

Hidden under his arm is his worn copy of H.G. Wells’ masterpiece Tono-Bungay, the “Romance of Commerce” about a glorious, family-run snake-oil scam. Of course, our young Blair is leaving home to dive head first into one of the most colossal scams in world history—the Raj. He’s already nervous, hesitant, worried he won’t cut it. The pop tunes the ship’s band plays make him piney and nostalgic. Passing a steamer heading back to England, he wonders if he shouldn’t be on it.

All he really wants is to be left alone to read his books and smoke cigarettes. 

Anyone who knows the lore of Theroux’s prolific career might already start picking up on the parallels suggested here before Eric Blair even gets to Rangoon. As Theroux writes in his “Ka‘ena Point” essay, “Coming from a large family, I wanted to assert my own identity… the only way to do this was by leaving home (the suburbs of Boston), going far away, and staying far away.” He managed this by joining the Peace Corps in 1963 and getting himself shipped off to Africa, where his first novels are set, but it could have just as easily been South America or Asia. 

It was in Africa, he says, that he first learned how small he was, how much he had to learn of the world. “Living in the bush, I found something to care about that was not selfish or suburban”—writing books for one. He wasn’t the first or only aspiring writer to adopt the guise of a well-meaning, do-gooder to get sent off to the Third World— expense free but with zero pay—to see what embracing poverty and deprivation and uncertainty can make of you. Moritz Thomsen, author of Living Poor: A Peace Corps Chronicle, comes to mind. Thomsen, even though he started his Peace Corps service in Ecuador the same year Theroux finished his first two-year stint in Malawi in 1965, was a close friend and inspiration to Theroux. His Mosquito Coast, he said in a letter to this reviewer, “was in part inspired by stories Moritz told me about his father… Meeting Moritz helped me see it as the story of a father who was inspirational and also tyrannical.”

The two-year Peace Corps experience can be intense and foundational. As in Burma Sahib. “There is a short period in everyone’s life when his character is fixed forever,” Theroux has a British governor in Rangoon tell Blair (quoting George Orwell’s yet-to-be-written Burmese Days). “You’re young—you’ll see. It’s an education.” His father’s “asinine promise”—that the job would make a man of him—still pesters him.

One of the main reasons Eric Blair has taken this job is because he is not from a moneyed background. He only got through Eton thanks to a King’s scholarship and could never afford to tag along with his classmates to Oxford; his father was a bureaucrat with the Opium Department of the Government of India. Blair was never much of a scholar anyway and getting rich never seems to concern him here. He’s more concerned with figuring himself out. And reading, always reading. 

“This is my Oxford, sir. The police,” Blair tells a superior who is disappointed to learn that his young Etonian charge didn’t follow through at The University.

Like so many Westerners who suddenly find themselves, as Blair does, in “the bowels of [a] beastly place,” he is shocked by so much strangeness and disheartened to despair when the natives back away from him, “a look of hatred or fear in their eyes—it made him hate himself.” I shouldn’t be here, he tells himself. I will never succeed.

Many are the Peace Corps volunteers who will remember moments like this. As a former volunteer in East Africa, this reviewer recalls a burly Vietnam vet named Steve St. Michael, who, after a month or two at his bush school, once said over a beer in Nairobi: “I get two reactions from my students: one is hatred and the other is fear.” Literally the same two terms. (Incidentally, St. Michael was also famous for offering the best answer to the eternal question “Why did you come to Africa?” He said: “Cause I always wanted to eat a pickled elephant with a giant pimento up its ass.”).

Self-doubt and bewilderment are constant companions. “I am not cut out for this,” Blair writes in a letter home that he never sends. Stranded in such strange environs, so many things can happen that one could never write home about. In Theroux’s telling, Blair gets his footing and starts acting like the proper colonial policeman he thinks he should be, kicking indolent servants, caning surly street urchins. More than once enraged by the rabble, he pictures himself as a giant Gulliver surrounded by furious Lilliputians. He drinks gin at the club, finds his own way to and from the brothels for a wee “bit of how’s-your-father,” a quaint Briticism for the old Bouncy-Bouncy.

The book is rife with insider Briticisms, which Theroux is a master at (and could do with a glossary of definitions). Blair himself apparently took honors at Eton for caning, both in receiving (once for being late for prayers) and facilitating by helpfully escorting dread-filled students to their appointments with “the wisdom of the whip.” (Again, not to over-inject one’s self, but the brutality of caning was part and parcel of the British-fashioned, post-colonial secondary school system in Kenya in the 1970s. I was once ordered to cane four Maasai students who had staged a riot to protest the Ministry of Education’s move to replace the school’s British headmaster with a politically connected Kikuyu. When I refused, I was ordered to stand as witness. I lasted two or three swats—each was sentenced to 12—before rushing out of the office and demanding a transfer).

Blair’s role with The Raj in Burma was “to agree, to take orders” and always “stand apart from the native.” When a visitor casually asks him what exactly his job entails, he quips with a glibness worthy of Lord Kitchener: “Supervision, keeping the peace, cracking skulls when necessary, making arrests… for king and country.” He can even quote the penal code verbatim. A fine specimen of a colonial supervisor indeed.

“We are trying to teach [the Burmese] our ideals, to show him how superior is our civilization,” the governor explains to Blair. “When we shall have succeeded, we shall have spoiled the pleasantest country and most delightful people in the world.” In Blair’s eyes, “Wherever there were people in Burma there was blight and crime and stink.”

But Blair’s pith helmet and polished buttons are a ruse that soon wears thin. “I’m not a true policeman,” he eventually concedes to himself and it’s his secret life that proves it. He is really a book fanatic who may want to be a writer someday. Yet somehow he must remain an enigma. Someone asks him if he is much of a reader. “Once in a way,” Blair said, attempting to be phlegmatic about his greatest passion—the only activity he truly cared about, verging on a sacrament. “Passes the time.”

And what a time to be a reader. Back home, the cauldron of English literature was bubbling away on high, in full Bloomsbury, one might say. (Maybe not). Lawrence, Joyce, Conrad, Woolf, Eliot, Lewis, Galsworthy, Maddox Ford, Forster were churning out masterworks and we watch as Blair’s eye grows increasingly critical. He’s beginning to know what he is destined to do and reading books that he hates makes him all the more determined to get started. “Kipling dealt in hyperbole and allusiveness, Maugham knew nothing of women, the recent Forster novel about India sounded like touristic tosh.” 

A posting at a terrifying prison makes for a crucible, his turning point. And with what he witnesses there, it becomes harder to avoid what we know the future holds. The Panopticon (All-Seeing) prison is a circular structure, with cellblocks around the periphery, a watchtower in the center and connecting corridors like the spokes of a wheel. “A fanciful design,” Blair decides, “but without a scrap of privacy, in reality a human zoo.”

“What if a whole society was a panopticon,” he tells his lover, the sultry, brash (and married) Mrs. Jellicoe, “with a tyrant at its center in the watchtower? He would see us—he would see everyone—there would be no privacy!” The vision of something dark starts to take shape, “like the futuristic nightmare of a Wellsian superstate.”

Blair begins to explore the belly of the beast. One day he wanders into the cellblocks on his own, a no-no, and chats with some of the imprisoned Buddhist insurgents. He develops a “new mood… a perverse brotherhood [with the prisoners, who are] mostly subdued… pacing their cells like zoo animals.”

An Indian prisoner calls out to him, using the informal second person, an insult. “You are in prison with us, sahib!”

He makes careful transcriptions of the speeches of a Buddhist insurgent named Sayadaw Wirathu and notes his use of “the simple but dramatic imagery of farm animals,” repeating the terms master and slave like a chant. (This is just around the time that the skinny little “pest Gandhi” is showing up on newsreels screened at the local clubs.)

“The British have made our paradise into a prison,” Wirathu says in his diatribes. “We are despised like animals.”

The Raj, Blair concludes, is a “beastly empire… cruel and inhumane, a bloody awful business, where men died miserably of their whippings, and there were two systems of justice—a lenient one for Europeans, a meaner sort for natives.” And it may be teetering.

At the same time, Mrs. Jellicoe is putting him in touch with the writer inside of him, someone he has already named George (another clue but no Orwell in sight). Blair sometimes asks prostitutes to call him that too, but it’s Mrs. J. who gives him the big leg up. “You will be a writer,” she says, one afternoon, groggy after sex. “You will make your mark.”  His “despotic novel will be a smashing success.”

And it’s already taking shape in his mind. It will be coarser than Forster (“No ants in Forster’s picnic. No rats in his novel. No corpses.”) and more explicit than Maugham. “I have seen a man humiliated. I have seen a man hanged. I have ordered a prisoner flogged till he bled. The empire is not a tea party or an echoing cave.”

In his autobiographical “Ka‘ena Point” essay, Paul Theroux dismisses the idea of ever writing an autobiography, citing V.S. Prichett, who says, in Midnight Oil, the second volume of his autobiography, “any writer who spends his time becoming other people and places, real or imaginary, finds he has written his life away and has become nothing… The true biography of this egoist is exposed in all its intimate foliage in his work.”

And so, to one who knows the outlines of both lives, Burma Sahib’s Eric Blair seems to have Theroux foliage all over him, the love of books being most prominent. “From the beginning,” he writes in his essay, “reading for me was enchantment as well as rebellion.” For his Eric Blair, reading was the real Oxford, sir.

And just as Theroux quotes D.T. Suziki’s definition of freedom—“seeing things as they are”— as his enduring motto, so his Eric Blair finally breaks free from the shackles of the Raj’s worldview:

“He studied them, men and women, who were powerless and without pretensions or artifice, Burmese who loved their families and doted on their children and admired their uncles and aunties. He envied them in their simplicity and decency. They were home. They were better than him.”

Again comes an echo from “Ka‘ena Point,” where Theroux describes the “great poverty” he has witnessed in his travels to blighted corners of the world, with “whole populations sitting in darkness… Those overlooked people, on back roads, in remote places, isolated and bewildered—from early on, I took them as my subject.”

Blair further strays from the “stand apart from the natives” directive by befriending an eloquent Indian merchant named Mahadev Thackeray, who desperately wants to become a member of one of the British social clubs—“not of course ever presume to visit club,” but just to let everyone know that he had a membership. The plan goes sideways and getting drunk with him one night, Blair blurts out: “Almost five years here, and what I’ve found is that to rule over barbarians, you’ve got to become a barbarian yourself.”

“The lie is that we’re here to uplift our black brothers instead of to rob them,” Blair says, adding, “I’m the iron heel.”

The Brit banter throughout is some of Theroux’s most clever and entertaining since Sir Vidia’s Shadow, his account of the death of his friendship with V.S. Naipaul, and this reviewer’s personal favorite. Scotsman Angus McPake’s brogue is ingeniously rendered, ringing as true as Robert Louis Stevenson’s. And the writing in some passages can stop you in your tracks, as when at breakfast an especially crass colleague describes the horror of the 1916 Battle of Mametz:

“Trenches were fuckin’ heaving with rats… I’ve been around rats so long I’ve made a study of the buggers… They can leap three feet from a standing position. They can climb anything, up a wall, up slippery bamboo. Squeeze through a crack the width of a farthing… I’ve seen them gnaw through lead pipe, chew through a brick. They can swim like a fish… I’ve heard rats laugh—it’s a queer kind of purring… But the rat has its uses. He consumes the corpses on no-man’s land, a task the rat alone is willing to undertake… Pass the poxy marmalade!”

In a preface to the Ukrainian edition of Animal Farm, George Orwell sums up his five formative years in Burma pretty succinctly, suggesting it was nothing worth writing home about:

Shortly after I left school (I wasn’t quite twenty years old then) I went to Burma and joined the Indian Imperial Police… I stayed five years in the service. It did not suit me and made me hate imperialism.

He did get his first novel, Burmese Days, out of it—and apparently, according to the Copyright Page, Theroux has used excerpts from it in his retelling. It would probably take a dissecting table and painstaking auditor to find where those excerpts are, where Theroux’s fiction of the real Eric Blair (A.K.A. George Orwell) interweaves with the imagination of one of our most brilliant writers—just as, in many ways, Burma Sahib’s Eric Blair may not only be George Orwell, but also another great writer, artfully pruning the foliage of his own life.

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Burma Sahib: A Novel
by Paul Theroux
Mariner Books, 2024
$30

Image by Ehteshamul Haque Adit.