The Mimic Men (27 page)

And there in the Roman house – where I had prepared the scene for an occasion with an altogether different issue – our agreement was made. The blue-and-white Hong Kong raffia chairs and table, the drinks, the illuminated swimming-pool, the Loeb edition of Martial: all this had been meant less to overawe Browne than to create the picture of a man who, whatever might be said about recent events in his private life, had achieved a certain poise. The Martial can be easily explained. I had taken up my Latin again. It was my own therapy. The acquisition in easy stages of a precise, dead language, through an easy author, was curiously soothing. It called for effort; it filled the time; it led from one day to the other.

My mood might explain the excitement I felt, my ready acceptance of an idea which to so many on the island might have seemed absurd and which to me a few months before would have seemed affronting. But I was also a prisoner of my special relationship with Browne, that understanding which began, continued and faded away in misunderstanding. A burdensome relationship, a boyhood uneasiness never quite forgotten when we met. Now it was flattering. He needed alien witness to prove his reality. For me a similar proof was offered by his literalness, which was like generosity. For him I had been, ever since Isabella Imperial, a total person. He remembered phrases, ideas, incidents. They formed a whole. He presented me with a picture of myself which it reassured me to study. This was his generosity; it was a relief after the continual challenge and provocation of relationships within the group that had been Sandra’s and
mine. So between Browne and myself the old relationship was resumed. He invited me to share distress. He presented me with my role. I did not reject him. How can I regard what followed as betrayal?

Even at that first meeting in the Roman house my uneasiness was not wholly suppressed. Where once I carried a name that was like a deformity, so now I felt I had a past to which Browne might at any moment refer. He asked me no questions about Sandra, though; and he made no reference to the Roman house. It was my own uneasiness which made me think, even while we spoke, how little I knew of his private life, how unable I was in imagination to see him at home, relaxed. One detail sharpened this. His beard appearing to be causing him some irritation. He wiped the bumpy skin around his Adam’s apple with his handkerchief, placed it against his neck, and let the beard rest on it. A disturbing mannerism: the perspiration on my own neck began to smart. I made some remark about the beard. He dismissed it in his brisk, self-satirizing way as ‘a Negro’s beard’. I didn’t know what to make of this. He then said that in his three years in London he had never been to a barbershop. It had been no problem; hair like his never really grew long.

I thought he was joking. I still don’t know whether he wasn’t: it is hardly the subject for casual query. But with this amazement at a physical fact which would have caused no amazement to most of the people on the island which I was now claiming as mine, there went the dim knowledge that I was now committed to a whole new mythology, dark and alien, committed to a series of interiors I never wanted to enter. Joe Louis, Haile Selassie, Jesus,
that black jackass,
the comic boy-singer: the distaste and alarm of boyhood rose up strongly. But already Browne had turned the talk to his nationalist publishing house; the fountains splashed, recalling me to the solidity of the Roman house; the twinge of
tribal alarm passed. It was a detail, a drowning man’s second: it stayed with me.

The essay about my father for
The Socialist
wrote itself. It was the work of an evening. It came easily, I realized later, because it was my first piece of writing. Every successive piece was a little less easy, though I never lost my facility. But at the time, as my pen ran over the paper, I thought that the sentences flowed, in sequence and without error, because I was making a confession, proclaiming the name, making an act of expiation. The irony doesn’t escape me: that article was, deeply, dishonest. It was the work of a convert, a man just created, just presented with a picture of himself. It was the first of many such pieces: balanced, fair, with the final truth evaded, until at last this truth was lost. The writing of this book has been more than a release from those articles; it has been an attempt to rediscover that truth.

So, pettily and absurdly, with the publication of the anniversary issue of the new-look
Socialist,
our political movement started. Consider the stir we made. Consider the peculiar power of my name. Add to this my reputation as a dandy and then the more forbidding reputation as a very young ‘Isabella millionaire’ who ‘worked hard and played hard’. Consider Browne’s licensed status as a renegade and romantic, a ‘radical’, for whose acknowledged gifts our island provided no outlet. See then how, though as individuals we were politically nothing, we supported one another and together appeared as a portent no one could dismiss. Certain ideas overwhelm by their simplicity. In three months – just six issues of the new
Socialist,
its finances and organization regulated by me – we found ourselves at the centre less of a political awakening than a political anxiety, to which it was left to us merely to give direction.

It has happened in twenty countries. I don’t want to
exaggerate our achievement. Sooner or later, with or without us, something similar would have occurred. But I feel we might claim credit for our courage. The nature of the political life of our island must be understood. We were a colony, a benevolently administered dependency. So long as our dependence remained unquestioned our politics were a joke. A man like my father, extravagant as he was, had been a passing disturber of the peace. He fitted into the pattern of dependence, as did those who came after him, taking advantage of the limited constitution we were granted just before the end of the war. These politicians were contractors and merchants in the towns, farmers in the country, small people offering no policies, offering only themselves. They were not highly regarded. Their names and photographs appeared frequently in the newspapers, but they were slightly ridiculous figures; stories about their illiteracy or crookedness constantly circulated.

To go into politics then was not as simple a decision as it might seem now. We might easily have made the error of appearing to compete with the established politicians. And that would have been disastrous. We would have covered ourselves with ridicule. Instead, we ignored them. We said they were dead and unimportant. We not only made public a public joke; we were a demonstration of what was desirable and possible. We had the resources, in intellect and offers of support, to question the system itself. We denied competition; and indeed there was none. Simply by coming forward – Browne and myself and
The Socialist,
all together – we put an end to the old order. It was like that.

Courage: this is all I would claim now for our movement in its early stages. It takes courage to destroy any system, however shabby, which has permitted one to grow. We did not see this shabbiness as a type of order appropriate to our circumstances. That we were to see only when we had swept it away. And yet, equally, this shabbiness did not represent
us; it could not have lasted. Did we then act? Or were we acted upon? When we were done it was no longer possible for someone like my mother’s father, his money made, to be a nominated member of the Council, to hold this position by being ‘safe’, in a situation which when all was said and done called for little adventurousness; and from this position to strive, by charities and good works, after a decoration or a title.

I write, I know, from both sides. I cannot do otherwise. My mother’s father was no doubt an undignified figure, an object of easy satire. But at least at the end, within the framework of our old order, benevolence and service were imposed on him. And he was never as totally ridiculous as the men we put in his place: men without talent or achievement save the reputed one of controlling certain sections of the population, unproductive, uncreative men who pushed themselves into prominence by an excess of that bitterness which every untalented clerk secretes. Their bitterness responded to our appeal. And in this response we saw the success of our appeal, and its truth!

Yet how could we see, when we ourselves were part of the pattern? The others we could observe. We could see them in their new suits even on the hottest days. We could see the foolish stern faces they prepared for the public to hide their pleasure at their new eminence. We could see them coming out of restaurants with their ‘secretaries’. We could see them shirtsleeved – their coats prominent on hangers – as they were driven in government cars marked with the letter M, on which they had insisted, to proclaim their status as Ministers. The car, the shirtsleeves, the coat on the hanger: the fashion spread rapidly down the motorized section of our civil service and might be considered the sartorial fashion of our revolution. At sports meetings they went to the very front row of the stands, and over the months we could see the flesh swelling on the back of their necks, from
the good living and the lack of exercise. And always about them, policemen in growing numbers.

They were easily frightened men, these colleagues of ours. They feared the countryside, they feared the dark, they grew to fear the very people on whose suffrage they depended. People who have achieved the trappings of power for no reason they can see are afraid of losing those trappings. They are insecure because they see too many like themselves. Out of shabbiness, then, we created drama. At least my mother’s father, never requiring a vote, never required protection. At least he knew the solidity of his own position and understood how he had got there.

Courage, I have said. It takes courage to destroy, for confidence in one’s ability to survive is required. About survival in those early days I never thought. I never saw it as an issue. When I did see it, it was too late. Because by that time I had ceased to care.

I
T
has happened in twenty places, twenty countries, islands, colonies, territories – these words with which we play, thinking they are interchangeable and that the use of a particular one alters the truth. I cannot see our predicament as unique. The newspapers even today spell out situations which, changing faces and landscapes, I can think myself into. They talk of the pace of postwar political change. It is not the pace of creation. Nor is it the pace of destruction, as some think. Both these things require time. The pace of events, as I see it, is no more than the pace of a chaos on which strict limits have been imposed. I speak of course of territories like Isabella, set adrift yet not altogether abandoned, where this controlled chaos approximates in the end, after the heady speeches and token deportations, to a continuing order. The chaos lies all within.

I will not linger on the details of our movement. I cannot speak of the movement as a phenomenon generated by my personality. I can scarcely speak of it in personal terms. The politician deals in abstractions, even when he deals with himself. He is a man lifted out of himself and separate from his personality, which he might acknowledge from time to time. I let Crippleville run itself; I gave up the study of Latin. I applied myself to
The Socialist
and our party organization. It was the sort of administrative work for which I was born. But – in spite of what has gone before – I will be less
than fair to myself if I do not say that my labours were sweetened by the knowledge that I had become a public figure and an attractive one. It was the personality Browne had seen: the rich man with a certain name who had put himself on the side of the poor, who appeared to have turned his back on the making of money and on his former associates, who appeared to have been suddenly given a glimpse of the truth: I was now aware of his attractiveness. So in unlikely circumstances the London dandy was resurrected. I knew the affection and kindly mockery he aroused, and it was pleasant in those early days just to be this self. I had known nothing like it.

Create the scenes then. Imagine Browne, the leader, in his shabby journalist’s suit, energetic, enthusiastic, frequently breaking into the local dialect, for purposes of comedy or abuse. Beside him set myself, as elegant in dress as in speech: I knew my role. Imagine the public meetings in squares, in halls. Imagine the tours along dusty country roads in the late afternoon and at night, the headlights illuminating the walls of sugarcane on either side. Imagine the developing organization in the Roman house, the willing black hands of clerks from business houses and our civil service. Imagine the lengthening reports of our speeches in the
Inquirer.
Imagine that other mark of success: the policemen in heavy serge shorts, becoming less aggressive and more protective as their numbers grew. Their amiability was pathetic: it was like the amiability of the gangster who finds himself in polite society. Add an enlivening detail: the yellow light on shining black faces, an old crazed woman somewhere in the crowd proclaiming her own message of doom, and here and there the flambeaux on stalls which now, because they are part of the people, one and entire, the police will not move on or break up.

Add the smell of Negro sweat as, to applause, we make our way through our followers, shining eyes in shining
faces, to the platform, they so squat and powerfully built, we so tall and slender. In this smell of heated sweat, once rejected, I tried to find virtue, the virtue of the poor, the labouring, the oppressed. Such is the vulgarity that mobs generate, in themselves and in their manipulators. The virtue I found in that acrid smell was the virtue of the protecting, the massed and heedless. It was Browne’s privilege to be less sentimental. ‘The old
bouquet d’Afrique,’
he would mutter. And sometimes, when we were on the platform: ‘Did you get the old booky?’

It was genuine, this sentiment, part of his ambivalence. But it was also, increasingly, an attempt to reassure me, to tell me, in the shorthand of speech we had evolved for use in public, that we were as one. For other scenes have to be created, other details added: casual estate labourers, picturesque Asiatics, not willing to share distress, lounging about a country road at dusk, unaroused, polite only because of my name. Someone in our party struggles with a microphone or a pressure lamp. The impassive shopkeeper in his dark shop sells sugar or flour to a young girl, who is indifferent to our mission; as afterwards he sells us beer. Then comes the drive back through the still land: weak lights in silent houses. The mud and deep ruts surprise us. We are aware of the remoteness of the safe town and those facilities we have taken for granted. We sympathize silently with the picturesque people we have left behind. In this sympathy we feel confirmed in our mission and our cause. Time was all that we needed, to bind all in distress.