Paul Theroux speaks, etc.

Paul Theroux relates that he’s been to the Philippines at least four times, most memorably when he undertook a kayak expedition solo along Palawan’s coastline.

During one of his stops, he heard of an offshore islet that offered lodging. He sought out the place, where a young Westerner who ran the modest resort welcomed him ashore most appreciatively.

The guy pointed at the kayak and said that it was evidently a special one, in fact he had known or read of only one guy who used a kayak like that, this writer he admired named Paul Theroux.

One can imagine how the islander’s jaw must have dropped when the famous writer introduced himself — this followed by a vigorous handshake and hearty laughter from both. 

It was one of those chance encounters that Paul Theroux, best-selling author as travel writer and fictionist, has a knack for stringing up in his decades of perambulation.

Singaporean poet Aaron Lee reading from his new book, Coastlands

In our conversation with three other media guests as arranged by organizers of the Singapore Writers Festival 2014, Paul Theroux also let on that in the Hawaii farm he now calls home, where he has an apiary and raises many varieties of bamboo and exotic plants, his two farmhands are Ilocanos. 

We touched on other matters, mostly literary, but some of these he had already covered in a lecture he had conducted a day earlier at a jampacked hall in SMU, aptly titled “The Roads I’ve Travelled.”

Much of it was rambling honesty, with the audience appreciating personal background and historical context, especially as how these had helped form the featured writer who was also seen as coming “back home” to Singapore, where he wrote his first novel.

Paul Theroux recounted how he was one of seven children. “I wanted to leave as soon as I was able to go. I went to university at 17. Once I left I never came back.”

The hallmarks of his youth now sound like vintage clarion calls: atomic testing, conflicts inherent in school integration in Alabama, the civil rights movement, the Vietnam War… “The times, they were a-changing,” twanged a certain Bob Zimmerman. 

Cultural revolution simmered in many other parts of the world, such as in Mao’s China. Questioning authority became a template for young people.

Paul joined the Peace Corps, wound up in Africa in 1963, where he also felt the wave of rebellion that was then engulfing the continent. Decolonization was on its waxing phase. While gaining other work there for the next five years, he also wrote for magazines, until his employers told him to stop, else he be regarded as a troublemaker.

The following insight was born of that conundrum.

“A spirit of individualism is very important for a writer. It is good to be assured that you are not hired to do something, that you are doing it for yourself.”

He came to Singapore in 1968 and taught English in a university. His boss was “a wonderful man,” J.R. Enright, a charismatic teacher who headed the English department, but whose literary preferences he didn’t always agree with, as they included D.H. Lawrence, ha-ha. Paul preferred Twain, Emerson and Thoreau, whose Walden had been, uhh, seminal.

Through all those years, Paul recalled, he kept asking himself: “What’s my role? The insight I had in Singapore was that I needed to see things as they are, to describe things as they are, and that would make me free.”

He wrote the novel St. Jack, which jumpstarted his literary career. Among many images he documented in what seemed to him then an insular island-city were those of the sailors that congregated on Bugis St. which was a fabled gay center at the time, the funeral scenes in Chinatown, the Hilton Hotel that was the first tall building that rose on Orchard Road, and the shophouses all over that started getting torn down.

“Singapore was about to change. My mission then, as now, was to write what I saw. With fiction, it’s different, it’s as we wished them to be.”

He and his first wife initially raised their two sons in Singapore, before they moved to England. One day in London, he just thought of excusing himself from family and taking the train to Paris, where he imagined he could push on by rail to Istanbul thence Iran and Afghanistan, crossing which he could then move all the way to Southeast Asia, to Burma, Thailand, and back to Singapore.

He followed the urge, only to find out when he reached West Afghanistan that the country had no trains, only buses. He took one, until he crossed the border and went on with the rest of his planned itinerary. He completed the dream route and suddenly turned up one evening to surprise his former buddies at the Singapore Swimming Club. This was in 1973.

“I took the train from Paris,” he told them. The experience formed the book that would establish the author as a household name among travel writers: The Great Railway Bazaar, published in 1975.

“I’ve kept to my mission of reporting on what I saw, a way of asserting what I was doing, which was seeing things as they were.”

Asked at the open forum if he read or liked Harry Potter, Theroux quickly acknowledged that he was “not interested in fantasy, much as there are two ways of being a writer.”

An expected question was on the difference between travel and tourism.

“Travel involves a lot of tough or bad times; with tourism it’s mostly good times. But there is that time constraint in being a tourist. A true traveler knows where he’s been, but doesn’t know where he’s going. With travel, one often decides on whether to flee or to pursue. It’s flight versus pursuit. But always you ask yourself whether you’re destined never to come back.”

Asked about legacy, he says he’s proudest of his two sons, now in their 40s, one of whom has also become a fine novelist, while the other helps poor people in Uganda.

“I’d be happy to have this as my epitaph: ‘I produced two children who helped change things.’”

We have a storehouse of other fine quotes from Mr. Theroux, and a recording of more observations and notes on current activities (he’s been traveling in the American South, and writing a book about it). But space defers any further sharing.

Wonderful as it was to listen to Paul Theroux, other highlights of our weekend in Singapore involved catching up with old friends and meeting new ones among the writers present.

One of the young Filipino poets was Eric Tinsay Valles, an Atenean who’s become a Singapore resident, and whose book After the Fall (dirges among ruins) was launched during the fest. Here’s an excerpt from one of his poems, titled “# Haiyan Posts”:

“A blue and red Noah’s ark/ Anchored to a hill of wooden splinters// its portholes dim, denizens drowned/ By salt waters reclaiming what they’d lost.// Like a beached whale, it didn’t belong/ in a city between a gulf and the ocean/ Where industrial fumes stirred the perfect storm.// Noxious winds bawled and rumbled,/ Battered houses of cardboard and corrugated sheets,/ Bulldozed everything in their path.// A video game gone terribly wrong./ Music clips downloaded, atonal,/ Tweeted and shared on loop…”   

Singapore’s venerable literary lion Edwin Thumboo writes a glowing blurb for Valles’ book: “After the Fall adds significantly to Southeast Asian Literaure in English and to our poetry, as much of the work is set here. Valles brings to the act of poetry a distinctly Catholic sensibility, grounded in its theology and metaphorical reach.”

I was also happy to note that the main Festival Tent had reserved a corner as “A Tribute to Gopal Baratham” as Festival Literary Pioneer. It included panels featuring excerpts from his works as well as photos. The main panel had a blurb from our very own Venerable Literary Artist F. Sionil Jose: “One of your finest writers, Gopal Baratham, has written the best Singaporean novel I have read so far.”

Gopal had been a friend of mine as far back as the late 1970s when I completed the text for the APA Insight Guide to The Philippines in an Upper Bukit Timah compound where I was hosted by publisher-designer-photographer Hans Hoefer. A top surgeon, Dr. Gopal would come in the middle of the night after an operation, confessing that it was after surgery when he got the shakes, and had to drink to calm down. We downed countless bottles together and discussed literature.

He began to write prose, and he did so proficiently, until he was hailed as a top novelist in the region. It was unfortunate that early demise had cut that literary career short.

I wish I had recorded another highlight: the program-featured conversation between poets George Szirtes and Alvin Pang, which proved the most memorable among those I listened to on that weekend. The UK poet and the Singaporean poet read their scintillating poems as well. Perhaps in a future piece in this space, I can quote from and revel critically on their poetry.

On our last night, meeting up with George and Alvin at the farewell party became a truly special occasion, thanks too to the bottle of Lagavulin Special Edition offered by Mr. Pang: friend and patron to numerous Pinoy fellow poets. 

From the Isle of Islay in Scotland to the campus of Singapore Management Unversity, the roads that that hallowed bottle traveled may be said to be no less than those pursued by writers and poets — the low road, the high road, and we’ll all meet in wondrous wordland by morning.