A Writer's People (7 page)

The virtue of this was that when I began to travel I saw places fresh. But it was the only virtue. I had longed for years to be in the great world. I was there now, but I stayed away from its affairs. I lived as I had lived in Trinidad. I had criticised others from my background for their lack of curiosity. I meant curiosity in cultural matters; but the people I criticised would have had their own view of the relative importance of things and they would have been astonished by my lack of
political curiosity. As soon as I begin to examine the matter I see that this ignorance of mine (there is no other word for it), this limited view, was an aspect of our history and culture. Historically, the peasantry of the Gangetic plain were a powerless people. We were ruled by tyrants, often far off, who came and went and whose names we very often didn't know. It didn't make sense in that setting to take an interest in public affairs, if such a thing could be said to exist. What was politically true of the Gangetic plain was also true of pre-war colonial Trinidad; in this respect at any rate the people who had made the long journey by steamship from India found nothing to jolt them.

That outer world, out of our control, was oddly echoed for the children of the house in our inner world. In my grandmother's house, even when we lived in Port of Spain, there were constant religious occasions, readings from the Indian scriptures that might last for a morning or a day or two days or sometimes for a week.

Pundit Dhaniram (whom no one particularly respected) might arrive from the country on his motorbike. He was a handsome, slender man with a shining brown skin and a far-away look. His forehead was freshly marked with sandalwood paste; but apart from this he didn't look at all like a pundit. The motorbike gave him a rakish air; he might have been (like some pundits) a man who was holding down a well-paid job on one of the American bases, driving a truck for five dollars a day (ten dollars if you owned the truck). But when Dhaniram had changed into the things which he had brought in a little box strapped to the carrier of his bike, his dhoti and white
tunic and beads and stylish tasselled scarf, and when he lolled on the white cotton spread that had been laid out for him, and talked wisely in his soft voice of this and that, he looked good and it sounded all right.

I didn't know Sanskrit or the Hindi of religious discourse and had (like the ancient Romans) learned to live with the idea that our religion, though personal to us, a private possession, was a mystery, conducted in a language which we children couldn't now understand, the emblems of some of its rituals at once village-like and familiar and far away: the plasteredearth altar, our version of the turf altar of the classical world, planted with a cut-down young banana tree, with the sacrificial aromatic fire of pitch-pine chips fed with clarified butter and brown sugar.

That was the half-world in the privacy of our extended family. There was another, little-known world outside, always there, always visible when you went out, and mysterious in a different way. In Trinidad we grew up with the simplest idea of society or human association: outside the family, the sugar estates, the oilfields, the government buildings. Politics at one time meant a bearded Grenadian called Tubal Uriah Buzz Butler, a Bible-crazed Negro with ideas of the racial apocalypse. He had brought about a big strike on the oilfields in 1937 (during which a black policeman had been burned alive), and he really had no idea what to do next. Politics might also mean Albert Gomes, the Portuguese fat man in Port of Spain, with his Stalin moustache, dreaming of being the leader of the three hundred thousand blacks of Trinidad.

To read, in this setting, about the court of Louis XIV (in
the “Teach Yourself History” series in order to get background for Molière and the others), or the French Revolution, or the baffling political changes of the nineteenth century in France, was to read about a fairyland. No one seemed real. What was a court? What were courtiers? What was an aristocrat? I had to make them up in my mind, though for the most part I left them as words. In this way I picked up many facts, insubstantial, hard to get a grip on, but I lived in a cloud of not-knowing, and the world around me, in my grandmother's house during its religious occasions, and in my school books, was a blur. I lived easily with this; it had come to me, strangely, with my education, my little learning; and I thought only that was how it was.

This was the lack of vision I took with me to England with my bright boy's scholarship. I had first to understand the lack and had then to read and write myself out of it.

But I feel that the writers I couldn't read were also partly to blame. If in 1955 I didn't know what
The Quiet American
was about, and had to leave the book two-thirds of the way, it was because Graham Greene hadn't made his subject clear. He had assumed that his world was the only one that mattered. He was like Flaubert in
Sentimental Education
, assuming that the complicated, clotted history of mid-nineteenth-century France was all-important and known. Not all metropolitan writers were like Flaubert and Greene, though. Maupassant in his stories, with little room to manoeuvre, but with his details of time and place always concrete, giving even minor figures a name and a family history (he always deals with a whole life), made his far-off world complete and accessible, even universal. You
didn't need to know the history of nineteenth-century France to understand the awfulness of his peasants or the wounds of the Franco-Prussian War. The Russians (with the exception of Turgenev) were always clear. Mark Twain from far-away Missouri was always clear. And it seemed, in a strange way, that at the end, when the dust settled, the people who wrote as though they were at the centre of things might be revealed as the provincials.

In 1955, the year of
The Quiet American
, Evelyn Waugh published
Officers and Gentlemen
, the second volume of his war trilogy. This gave me trouble too. I felt, in spite of the usual disclaimer, that it was too close to fact. It required some knowledge of the course of the war and of a small campaign in a small place; and it was written in a mannered, flippant way. There were many lines of unattributed dialogue: you had to work back to find out who the speaker was. The mode might have been meant to be a form of understatement, but it was also a lazy carry-over from the pre-war comedies, suited to idle chatter, and not suited to the early stages of a terrible war. Above all, this book was laden with a strange vanity, not a national vanity, which would have been understandable in a book about war, but a social vanity within that, as of a man, melancholy before the war, who then in the middle of the war had found higher values: comradeship among people he recognised as his superiors. This was strangely like Kipling, and it made the work very private.

It was a relief, in a way, to understand from these books that as writer I was on my own. There is another memory from 1955, near the end of the year. It occurred to me, just
before I took in the novel that Deutsch had asked for, that I should check the way of a master with dialogue. I bought a copy of
The Painted Veil
from a W. H. Smith news-stand, read some pages standing up, and soon came to the conclusion that Maugham was not a writer I could go to for instruction. Not because Maugham was bad. My material was too far away from his; it was my own; I had to adhere to it and do the best I could with it, in my own way. (And, at the risk of getting too far ahead of myself, what a relief it was when this process of learning began to be accompanied by an ability to discard, what a relief it was to feel that I need never read another letter of sweet nothings from Henry James again.)

The other side of this, being on my own, was that it meant I was trying to make my way as a writer in a place which really had no room for me, which had its own ideas of what writing was, and where, contrary to what I had thought since concrete ambition had come to me, there was no republic of letters.

It made Tony Powell's friendship all the more remarkable.

I
HAD THOUGHT OF HIM
as immeasurably secure. But in 1957 he was having a hard time. His reputation was high, but his books sold only seven thousand copies. They didn't give him a living. He had to have a job. That was why he worked as literary editor for
Punch
, and that was a job full of humiliation for him.
Punch
had few literary pages, perhaps only two, and the editor, Bernard Hollowood, a banal cartoonist, often said he could do the literary pages himself. Tony said that someone in the office split Hollowood's name when he spoke it and
made it Hollow Wood. It is a story that tells a lot about the unhappiness of the
Punch
office.

Yet it was through Tony that at this time, 1957–58, I became a reviewer for the
New Statesman
. The
New Statesman
was by far the best weekly in England then. Its front pages were political and socialist and Labour. The arts pages, at the back, of high quality, could be anything politically. People liked the strange mixture. The
New Statesman
sold eighty thousand copies, a prodigious number for a weekly of that sort. To appear in its pages was to have a kind of reputation. Everything printed there went around the English-speaking world. When I went to India in 1962 many people, sometimes even sleeping-car attendants, were kind to me because I wrote for the
New Statesman
(the magazine was known to be a friend of India); and Satyajit Ray, the great film director, wanted to talk to me about the
Statesman
film critic.

It wasn't plain sailing, though, becoming a reviewer for the
New Statesman
. The first book I was sent, for a trial review (I think for a Shorter Notice), was
A Book of Anecdotes
, compiled by a much-loved bookman, Daniel George. It was really a book of jokes, and I didn't know what I could say about such a book. If I had to do three or four hundred words about a book like that today I would take a shortcut. I would pick out two or three of the more amusing items, write about them, and try to find something more general to say (I am not sure what) about anecdotes. I read all of the Daniel George book; what might have been pleasure became torment. Then I wrote the same little piece again and again over a couple of days. My head began to hurt. And then, because I had nothing to say, I
thought I should criticise Daniel George. I did so in a heavy, undergraduate way. Finally I took what I had written to Great Turnstile and dropped it off at the
Statesman
office. Not long after, I met someone I knew from the
Sunday Express
. I asked him about Daniel George. He said George was a sweet and generous man. I began to worry that my awful little piece might be printed. I dreaded looking at the
Statesman
for the next few weeks. There was no sign of the Daniel George piece. I was glad.

I thought that was the end of the
New Statesman
and me. But there was a benevolent spirit—it must have been Tony—watching over me at Great Turnstile, urging the assistant literary editor to give me another chance. I was sent other things, an academic book about John Lyly and euphuism (which I liked), some books about Jamaica which gave me the matter for a few jokes. I began to be published, the
New Statesman
even printing some jokes I made about Jamaica (“A banana a day will keep the Jamaican away”) which wouldn't pass today. Then I was moved to fiction-reviewing, once a month, for ten guineas a thousand-word column. Each column was a week's work. I did that for three years.

I was living at the time in an over-furnished, neglected attic flat in Muswell Hill. My elderly landlord and landlady had both been married before and the attic was full of their surplus furniture. A partitioned corner space in the sitting room, which was quite large, was for coal; it also had mice, bright-eyed and startled when you came upon them. The dormer window at the back overlooked a bowling green. From a house on the other side of the green there came on
some evenings the sound of someone practising “When the Saints Go Marching In.” Blackbirds raided the gardens all around and brought back their booty to the dormer roof. Sometimes a cherry escaped their beaks and rolled down slowly from tile to tile, and the disappointed birds squawked and scratched on the tiles with apparent rage.

I had given up a job I had taken principally to send money to my mother (her letters were only about money). I was trying in a hopeless kind of way to get going on a new book and for some reason—perhaps I felt the book was still only provisional—was writing by hand on unlined paper. It was a depressing time in that attic. Only the monthly
New Statesman
review gave me a lift. I used to go to the Muswell Hill public library on Friday, publication day, to see whether they had used my piece. There was always a slender dark-suited man in his twenties or thirties at a table in the reading room ahead of me, with the new issue of the
Statesman
, smiling with pure joy, cracking his long fingers over the opened magazine. When my turn came I looked first to see whether my piece was in. I was intensely ashamed if it was. And I took good care then not to read it or to look at the pages where it was. I held those pages together when I read the magazine. I have never got over this shyness or vanity at seeing my name in print.

After some time I began to travel, and that connection with the
New Statesman
couldn't be kept up. When after some years I settled down again I needed more than the ten guineas the
Statesman
paid. Tony got me a fiction-reviewing job on the
Daily Telegraph
. They paid thirty pounds, almost a living wage. But they had bureaucratic rules: a certain number of
books had to be reviewed and the title of the book had to be mentioned in the first sentence of the section devoted to it. These rules made it hard to do a proper article, as I used to on the
Statesman
. It made novel-reviewing more like hackwork, and no one seemed to read what I wrote. The
Telegraph
didn't add to one's reputation. But thirty pounds was thirty pounds.