Finding a diary proves that there is no need for a diary.
Not long after my book Sir Vidia's Shadow was sent to the printer I was fossicking among some papers and found an old notebook labeled "Diary" with a date and a sort of title, "When I Was Off My Head". This was an unexpected discovery because, except for some letters and a few notes, I had depended on memory alone for my book.
Thirty-two years ago, in Africa, VS. Naipaul had made me promise never to keep a diary. Such an activity, he said, was an obstruction to the imagination. In the year or so it took to write my book about our friendship, I was amazed by how clearly conversations and scenes returned to me. I started each day with a period of meditation, pressing my fingers to my temples as though mimicking Johnny Carson's clairvoyant "Carnac". By degrees 1 could hear and see Naipaul. And the activity of writing an episode helped, since all writing is itself a memory-jogger. It seemed like a conjuring trick, to write such a book without any notes, yet it worked.
When I finished the book, I had two shocks. The first was that the friendship kept unspooling in my mind. I had developed such intense habits of concentration and remembering, I found I could not switch off my active memory. I recalled Vidia ritually pronouncing, "I am going to open an account with him"— meaning settle someone's hash; and "Women of 60 think of nothing but sex"; and how driving with him in Kampala he had once said about the road bumps that rocked my wheels, "They call those 'sleeping policemen' in Trinidad." Some of these memories were whole episodes rather than one-liners—for example, a fairly disastrous lunch in London with one of my relatives that did not surface into my consciousness until it was too late to include.