CAPE COD, Mass. - Even seekers of the human beings need a return address or deuce, and Paul Theroux has settled well between the Hawaii home where he raises honeybees and this scenic retreat that allows him room to grow tomatoes, swim, play bocce ball and organize his memories from across the time zones.
"For me to write, I need sure conditions, i of quiet, isolation, not a city," says Theroux, a former London house physician who has since at large the "gondola alarms, police alarms, voices, laughter, radios" and other music of metropolitan life.
"I was born not far from here, so this weather is familiar. I like the weather, I like the growing season. It's a good place to work. It's genuinely pleasant. When I'm non here, I think close to it."
Theroux, known for such travel workings as "Sailing Through China" and novels such as "The Mosquito Coast," bought this two-hectare estate in the early 1980s, restoring a "wreck" of a main house out of red cedarwood pine, then adding a guest house, writing bungalow, children's wendy house, along with a tiled swimming pool, bocce court and a pebble paseo that winds like a brook throughout.
He has the inevitable collectibles of world travel - masks, carvings and paintings - only when he does sit down and speak, it's non on an exotic stool, but a pale, green armchair in his piece of writing house that could let been purchased at a local yard sale.
"He's a genuinely enthusiastic traveller with his feet on the ground," says Martin Dunford, a cofounder of the Rough Guide travel books. "He sees places for what they are."
It's a muggy morning on the Cape and Theroux, 67, is dressed for leisure, in a polo shirt and drawers and Boston Red Sox cap. He sips from a mug of green tea, talking of home, abroad and fellow authors. His part is a kind of shuttle express between New England Brahmin and British pub, his face round and strong, his eyes dark and plaintive, suggesting yearning and regret, a kind of anxious curiosity.
As he industrial plant on a new novel, set in India, and plans his first-ever misstep to Scandinavia, Theroux has also been thinking around the past, returning to the route of his breakthrough book, "The Great Railway Bazaar," and finding that looking back is a way of spotting up. In "Ghost Train to the Eastern Star," just published, Theroux retraces his far-famed train ride from Europe to Asia and support. The idea came from a late work, "Dark Star Safari," in which he revisited the African countries he had lived in during the 1960s.
"I realized how much was revealed - everything is revealed - its political realities, economical realities, its human condition, how I felt around a place in the past and how I feel now," he says.
"With that trip, I felt such a continuous signified of find, self-discovery and discovery. I thought perhaps the ultimate in this would be to take the same trip once more, a tripper that had meant a lot to me in 1973."
Published in 1975, "The Great Railway Bazaar" was a grounded, inquisitive, more or less grumpy ride from India and Iran to Siberia ("The sort of place that gives rise to the impression that the Earth is flat") to Vietnam, then still very much at war, although with a functioning power of tourism. He covered thousands of miles, mostly by trail. "Anything is possible on a prepare," he wrote, "a not bad meal, a binge, a visit from card players, an intrigue, a good night's sleep, and strangers' monologues framed like Russian short stories."
"Railway Bazaar" was completed under crisis. His earlier works had sold modestly, his then-wife had a lover. He was in transportation from his own life and from the whole travel genre. "I wanted to put in everything that I found deficient in the other books - duologue, characters, uncomfortableness," he later wrote.
Bob Shacochis, an acclaimed novelist and travel author, calls Theroux "the godfather of innovative American move around writers," an inspiration to Paco Iyer, Tom Bissell and others, and a pioneer of the type of written material found in the Rough Guide and Lonely Planet books.
"Everything opened up after 'The Great Railway Bazaar,"' says Shacochis, citing the rise of inexpensive airfare and the end of the Vietnam War as catalysts for international travel. "And Theroux happened to be in that location at the start, expression, 'I'm opening up the door to this itchy feet in the American soul."'
Born in Medford, Mass., matchless of sevener siblings, Theroux says he took up travelling because in a "large crime syndicate you're incessantly trying to make your mark." Medford itself, a colonial-era urban center just outside of Boston, wasn't worth returning to on newspaper publisher or in person. Theroux's literary heroes were Graham Greene, Mark Twain, Joseph Conrad - writers world Health Organization travelled and were divine by travel.
"I never sawing machine myself as someone like Faulkner, world Health Organization was composition about his home, the people he knew at home, his patch of landscape," he says. "I never actually felt that writing about Medford, Mass., had a future."
A graduate of the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, he took cancelled in 1963 for Africa with a young man's purpose, to find a better post, to get away not just from his family, but from a nation mourning the assassination of President Kennedy and committing itself fatefully to the Vietnam War.
He joined the Peace Corps and taught in Malawi, but his ideals were not the ideals of those in power. Theroux was thrown and twisted out of the country, and out of the Peace Corps, for helping a political dissident flee to Uganda. The source himself all over up in Uganda, running a rural studies program, but left after four years when a pack attacked Theroux and his pregnant wife. After commandment in Singapore, he stirred to London in the early seventies and lived there for a decade.
Since his first-class honours degree novel, "Waldo," published in 1967, he has written more than 40 books, including autobiographical fiction such as "My Secret History" and "My Other Life," and travel books around Africa, Central America and the Mediterranean. He is also known for a scandalous memoir, "Sir Vidia's Shadow," about his former friend and mentor, Nobel laureate V.S. Naipaul, whom Theroux pictured as comically boorish and self-absorbed.
Theroux has strong opinions about move around writing. He dislikes the "What I Did Last Summer" style of travelling, or authors who simply take to the road for the sake of a book. He prefers to travel alone, by train, to places where no tourer would think of going.
Shacochis calls it "a tolerant of one-upmanship on the way everyone else travels - museums bad, slums good; solitude good, companions bad; airlines bad, railways good. It is a code and he's very strict around it, and sometimes it seems so strict that I'm a little puzzled about the notion of purity it creates."
He formerly looked for Utopia, now he simply wants to know how we're getting on. In "Ghost Train," he finds the so-called boom of India a fraud, built on chintzy labour and senseless developing. "The longer I stayed in Bangalore the less I liked it," he writes of one of India's largest cities. "The place had not evolved; it had been artlessly transformed - less metropolis planning than the urban equivalent of botched cosmetic surgery."
Singapore, his former home, is "a place without solitude. Cameras everywhere, snitches, too." Japan, he reasons, is the "likeliest solution to survival in an overcrowded world - an almost robotic obedience, decorum, rigidity, order with no frills."
Asked if he wished he lived in a different time, or a different place, Theroux says he already has. He notes that the C206% States in the 1950s had around one hundred fifty million masses, half of today's population.
"That was another age," he says. "It didn't count like this, it didn't smell like this. It wasn't as crowded as this. ... At night the roads were totally empty, it was like 'The Twilight Zone,' going through and through the darkness."
He loves books in a way few love them anymore. In the main house, he keeps blanket volumes of Henry James, Dickens and Twain, along with framed pictures of Nabokov, Greene and Robert Louis Stevenson. In Theroux's writing study, he has books by such favoured writers as Jorge Luis Borges and Elias Canetti and maintains an up-to-date collection by Naipaul, whom he noneffervescent follows from a distance.
Theroux acknowledges that a great writer doesn't have to be a good person. In fact, he doubts that it's possible. Writers, he says, are by nature "unbalanced." And Paul Theroux does not count himself among those wHO have unbroken the scales even.
"Obviously non," he says. "Otherwise, wherefore have I written, as I ingest, there's some emptiness or disorder that one's nerve-wracking to fill or observe an order in? If you seem into history, you won't find many jolly, well-adjusted people wHO were writers. I mean, look at them.
"In a way, you can't be a author unless you have form of a personality problem. Balanced hoi polloi don't become writers, patently. Balanced people become gardeners, they raise happy families, they go to work every day, they smile. They possess noodle salad."
Theroux - beekeeper, tomato gardener, prolific generator, father of two now married for a second time - smiles, and so laughs. He will before long descend the stairs of his piece of writing house, walk at ease across the grounds and sit for lunch on the patio in back of the main house, where the entree is not bonce salad, but a intelligent plate of sushi.
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