His happy isle

By ROBERT W. BONE

© St. Petersburg Times, published August 13, 2000

Writer Paul Theroux is generally hard to please. Yet, despite the shortcomings he notes, he seems content in his secluded Oahu home as he works on another novel, this one set in Hawaii.

HONOLULU -- Every now and then visitors to Hawaii -- Hollywood celebrities, retirees, working stiffs -- decide that a week or a month in the islands is simply not enough. So they try to put down roots in the 50th state.

One of the more surprising of these transplants to Hawaii in recent years is author Paul Theroux, an intellectual and peripatetic curmudgeon with a reputation for grumbling in print about every place he's ever visited.

Theroux, who dislikes being called a travel writer, indicates that his inspiration for a Pacific home came partly from Robert Louis Stevenson. He quotes a wistful rhyme written by a youthful Stevenson, long before the poet left the cold, gray world of Edinburgh for destinations in the Pacific:

I should like to rise and go
Where the golden apples grow
Where beneath a sunny sky
Parrot islands anchored lie. . . .

Paul Theroux, who has lived, and written critically about, locales as disparate as England and Africa, is settled in Hawaii now -- but not without complaints.

Like Stevenson, Theroux eventually made his way to Hawaii. Here on the island of Oahu, indeed an island of golden pineapples if not parrots, the author of 37 novels and travel books says he intends to live and work for the rest of his days. That said, he also indicates that creative folk should take caution in this kind of decision.

"To me, Hawaii is a dream of youth that should be fulfilled in later life," he said in a recent interview. "It's a big mistake for a writer under the age of 40 to come here to live."

Theroux, who recently turned 59, continued: "If you come too soon, you'll be destroyed. But if you come at the right time, it energizes you, it enlivens you, it vitalizes you.

"For your early life, you want to be moving mountains. I mean, I have been arrested, I was shot at, I got terrible diseases in my travels elsewhere.

"I was in Siberia in the winter; I was in Singapore in the summer; I lived in Africa during the hot seasons. I've had some very tough times.

"For about 10 years in England, I was living in a very marginal way -- that stifling, suffocating, cold, dark life that people live there. . . ."

Today Theroux is swathed in sunshine and caressed by trade winds. He is also remarried, this time to a public relations executive from Hawaii. He still maintains his longtime home on Cape Cod, where the two spend much of the summer.

But for about eight months of the year, they live in a comfortable house uphill from Oahu's hip North Shore, far from touristy Waikiki and near a group of beautiful white sand beaches that many visitors never see.

Theroux willingly spoke about his reputation for digging up and writing about the less pleasant aspects of travel, explaining that he believes the duty of a good writer is to be "unsentimental" about his subject matter.

"Lots of people take exception to that," he acknowledged, adding that one of the unfortunate difficulties of travel writing is that "so many expect it to be forever upbeat in tone.

"This is a great handicap, and sometimes it's just not possible. Occasionally I have gotten some (logistical) help from PR people. Then (after publication) they never spoke to me again! I guess this is why I don't really think of myself as a travel writer."

Theroux offered unsparing descriptions in his 1992 travel book on the Pacific, The Happy Isles of Oceania. In it, the naive, backward or apparently wrongheaded attitudes of some residents of Australia, New Zealand and other Pacific landfalls were baldly exposed.

"There was a vote in the Solomon Islands to declare me a prohibited immigrant," following publication of that book, he said. "But one Solomon member of parliament stood up and said, "That's ridiculous; he can write what he wants.'

"And there was a big fuss for a while in New Zealand because I painted a rather unflattering portrait of the governor general there, but that was a storm in a teacup, too.

"The only place where I am really in bad odor is Singapore. I think my books are banned there. The movie made of Saint Jack has only been shown there once, very late at night, at a film festival."

One of two films made from Theroux novels (the other is The Mosquito Coast), Saint Jack told of a dissipated expatriate American living in Singapore, a place where Theroux taught for a few years.

"Singapore is a paranoid place," Theroux declared.

He acknowledges that life for him is much better in Hawaii than anywhere else he can think of, but he is quick to offer his problems with the state.

"Politically, it's backward. It's not a Third World country, of course, but you can recognize certain aspects of that: Cars rusting by the side of the road is not paradise.

"In spite of all the statements people make about the environment, it's the least environmentally conscious place in the United States.

"It has that in common with the rest of the Pacific, and Africa. People are terrible litterers here.

"But bad as things may be at times, you know they're worse somewhere else. . . .

"This is not a bookish place. Very few people read. ... My joke now is that here people ask, "What do you do?' and I reply, "I'm a writer." Then they say, "Oh, you're a waiter! Where are you a waiter?"'

Pointing out a thick stack of paper at the end of a small desk where he pens everything in longhand, Theroux added: "I'm working on a book now. It's a novel set in Hawaii. I've been writing it for three years."

He said he has often left the manuscript to complete other projects, yet "No one ever says, "How's the book coming, Paul?' "

Theroux will sometimes drive 40 miles to Honolulu to see an opera or a film. "But if the choice is walking on a beach, reading a good book until the sun goes down, versus getting in a car and into traffic, generally, I'd rather hit the beach.

"Yesterday I had a copy of the Muriel Spark autobiography, and I was reading it on the beach. I stopped for a moment and thought to myself, "This is heaven. It's a sunny day, and I'm reading a great book!"'

As he spoke, he sipped coffee sweetened with honey from his own beehives. Beekeeping is a hobby appropriate to the author's casual life in Hawaii, but he's far from a fanatic about it. On his way down the hill to show a visitor his beehives, he stopped at a rectangular gazebo, out of sight of any other structure and in the midst of tall grass and weeds.

"This was my original place for meditation," he explained with a smile. "I designed it to look like a bus stop."

It was hard to imagine this busy intellectual, wading through the damp grass wearing shorts and sandals, as the proprietor of a honey farm -- much less such a contented inhabitant of the Happy Isles.

Robert W. Bone is a free-lance photojournalist living on Oahu.