As a novelist, Theroux is attracted to the dark, the haunted, the hidden; he is also attracted to the theme of childhood, though more for its terrors than its exhilarations. As a literary odd-jobber, however, as a left-handed gun, he is breezy, temperate and mild — often downright sunny. Nothing makes him blue. A tour of a crammed and rotting madhouse in Afghanistan can’t spoil his spirits. He contrives to have a fun-filled week on the New York subway, strolling among the mangled Morlocks with the transit police. He even hits it off with John McEnroe.
Sunrise with Seamonsters is full of jaunts and larks and treats and sprees, obsessions, hobbies, self-indulgences. First, there are the trains. Theroux has already written two whole books about trains, but the choo-choos and chuff-chuffs feature prominently in this one too. The Aztec Eagle, The Lake Shore Limited, The London Ferry, The Frontier Mail, The Izmir Express – The Nine Forty-Five! The whistles, the manifests, the long waits and chance buttonholings still provide endless fascination for this dark-spectacled Bradshaw, train-spotting from the wrong side of the glass. Perhaps the most reckless piece in the book is a seduction fantasy (young man, mature woman – ‘her sobs of pleasure’, etc.), followed by an essay in praise of the older ladies. ‘At her age she could know every trick in the book and, if it weren’t for her pride … she could probably make a fortune as a hooker.’ Cor. The seduction takes place in the South of France. On a train.
The book bristles with other enthusiasms. Theroux dabbles in photography; he is crazy about maps; he writes and then personally publishes a special Christmas story for his kids; he goes ‘harbour-hopping’ round the Cape in his boat, Goldeneye. Mr Thoreau (I mean Mr Theroux, but is there any relation?) is a Cape Cod buff, a true-blue Cape Codder, romping and gambolling there annually with his extended family. ‘I get sad’, moons Theroux, ‘thinking that the summer is about to end.’ After dinner there are parlour games: Kemps, Up Jenkins, The Parson’s Cat, and Murder. Or else he rows along the coast to his folks’ house, and horses around with his middle-aged brothers. ‘We were not writers, husbands, or fathers. We were three big boys fooling in front of their parents.’
About a dozen of the pieces collected here are about writers; but the approach remains personal rather than literary. A couple (on S.J. Perelman and V.S. Naipaul) are warm pen-portraits inspired by friendship. Others get in as one-time idols (Henry Miller, Kipling, James) who have influenced or liberated Mr Theroux. And occasionally his pen will flash from its scabbard to defend undervalued heroes and neglected favourites (Joyce Gary, John Collier, V.S. Pritchett’s Dead Man Leading). Theroux praises Pritchett’s criticism for its non-academic slant, and obviously sees himself as following in this line himself. But I don’t think Pritchett is ever quite as non-academic as his young admirer. A naturally alert and energetic reader, Theroux is nevertheless much happier with the particular rather than the general. When he does venture into theory (‘from the Jacobeans onward [there are] villains who are truer and vastly more enjoyable than saintly heroes who never put a foot wrong’), you get a sense of something callow and furtive, as if Mr Theroux still does his reading in the small hours – under the blankets with a flashlight.
In his travels, both mental and actual, Theroux does of course address himself to harsh truths and ugly realities. He could hardly avoid them, having spent his twenties in the equatorial Third World, with the Peace Corps: ‘it was a way of virtuously dropping out and delicately circumventing Vietnam’. In a brave piece called ‘Cowardice’ Theroux makes an amusing boast of his own gutlessness. But all travel is brave, in a sense. To some writers, leaving the house can seem quite an exploit. And, boy, Mr Theroux certainly gets around.
Uganda, Mozambique, Malawi, Tanzania, Burma, India, Malaysia: these are among the poorest and most chaotic countries on earth, and Theroux confronts them with what strikes me as an entirely boyish intrepidity. Beady-eyed, sensual and unflinching, he writes with concern, with feeling, with pity — but with no obvious distress. It is possible that his early experiences in Africa inured him to such spectacles. Certainly his one attempt at a compassionate High Style, ‘Leper Colony’ (1966) — ‘limbs are clubs to thump dirt pits for trash, to wish for knives’ — is the only example of literary posing, and the only profound embarrassment, in this engaging and endearing book.