A Writer's People: Ways of Looking and Feeling Read online

  This rescued me from destitution. I got eight guineas a week minus deductions, and I was required to attend for three half-days a week. In fact, I went in every day, for the excitement, the company of the people at the BBC, and to get away from my two-room lodgings (with shared bathroom) in the Irish area of Kilburn, at the back of the great brick wall of the Gaumont State cinema, said to be the biggest cinema in the country.

  I got to know the Caribbean Voices archive. I got to know a lot more about Henry’s talents as an editor. He was a melancholy man, in some ways too good for the work he was doing; some of his foolish colleagues said he was arrogant. He had had literary ambitions himself at the university, and in the Caribbean Voices archive I felt I could see these ambitions sublimated in his work as editor. He took the writing from the islands very seriously. He saw virtue and point where none or perhaps little existed (and it was no accident that, a few years after he left the programme, it faded away, together with the romantic idea of Caribbean writing as a new force in English letters). Henry had a feeling for poetry and language which I didn’t have. He might have wanted to be a poet himself; I don’t know. His quarterly round-ups of work done on the programme were marvellous; I could never match them. And it was through his quite extraordinary appreciation that I at last came to Walcott and his 25 Poems, the famous book of 1949, a copy of which I now managed to get.

  The copy I got was of the second printing, done in April 1949, three months after the first. I would have left Queen’s Royal College by then, and I didn’t know at the time that there had been this second printing. It proved now, in a changed time in London, that my memory of the poet’s success was not exaggerated. His book (the second printing would have been like the first) was plain and paperbound and thin, almost without a spine, with cream-coloured covers and thirty-nine pages of text. It had been produced without any kind of style or typographical flourish by the Advocate newspaper press of Barbados: a Goudy bold typeface for the titles, a standard news-page font for the poems themselves. A poor job; but the very simplicity was impressive.

  My judgement in poetry was good enough for most of what came to Caribbean Voices, but it was still crude. I still didn’t go to poetry out of choice. But I had a little more confidence now. At the university I had over four years read nearly all Shakespeare and Marlowe, some of the plays many times. This had been an education in itself, training me out of my old idea that poetry dealt in declamation and obvious beauty: some of the plainest lines in Shakespeare and Marlowe had been full of power.

  And now, when I went to the Walcott, I was overwhelmed. The poems I could enter most easily were the shorter poems in the collection. They were the ones whose argument I could manage. I lost my way in the longer poems; I thought what was being said prosy and difficult and I stumbled over the poetic diction. I left those poems to one side and concentrated on the ones I liked; the poet and his book, short as it was, did not suffer.

  Henry Swanzy had opened my eyes to the beauty and often the mystery of some of Walcott’s opening lines. So now I could savour the ambiguity of Inspire modesty by means of nightly verses, the first poem in the collection, where the modesty could be sexual or poetic, and the verses could also be prayers; the riddle of I with legs crossed against the daylight watch; the delicious word-play of a poem about the recent burning down of Castries, the capital of St. Lucia: When that hot gospeller had levelled all but the churched sky. I learned that last poem by heart; though it would be truer to say that I read it so often that it fixed itself in my mind, and parts of it (a little jumbled) have stayed there to this day.

  It seemed to me quite wonderful that in 1949 and 1948 and doubtless for some years before there had been, in what I had thought of as the barrenness of the islands, this talent among us, this eye, this sensitivity, this gift of language, ennobling many of the ordinary things we knew. The fishermen rowing homeward in the dusk are not aware of the stillness through which they move. We lived in Trinidad on the all but shut-in Gulf of Paria, between the island and Venezuela; that sight of fishermen, silhouettes in the fast-fading dusk, so precisely done, detail added to detail, was something we all knew. Reading these poems in London in 1955, I thought I could understand how important Pushkin was to the Russians, doing for them what hadn’t been done before. I put the Walcott as high as that.

  I added to my income in those days by doing little five-guinea five-minute radio scripts for a magazine programme on the BBC Caribbean Service. I thought I would do something about the National Portrait Gallery, and I went to see David Piper, the director, who also wrote novels under the name of Peter Towry (one of which I was to review three years later for the New Statesman). For some weeks the previous year, 1954, when I was stiff with asthma and a general anxiety, I had done a petty cataloguing job for the Gallery (of Vanity Fair caricatures by Spy and Ape and the others, fascinating to me) for a guinea a day, or half a guinea a half-day. David Piper rebuked me now—gently, but it was a rebuke—for showing no interest in the pictures in the Gallery when I worked there. I told him I had not been well; he was magnanimous, and helpful with my little radio script.

  I was full of Walcott at this time. I told Piper about him, and recited the poem about the burning down of Castries, “A City’s Death by Fire.” He, handsome and grave behind his desk, listened carefully and at the end said, “Dylan Thomas.” I knew almost nothing about contemporary poetry, and felt rebuffed and provincial. It was a let-down: perhaps, after all, I didn’t truly understand poetry. But it didn’t lessen my feeling of kinship with Walcott or my pleasure in the lines I liked.

  I recited another poem one lunchtime to Terence Tiller, a Third Programme producer I used to see in a BBC pub and had got to know. He drank Guinness in quantity at lunchtime, standing at the bar; he said it was food. He had been a minor poet in the 1940s; I had seen his name in illustrious company in various magazines; and to me in 1955 that was achievement enough. I respected his education and intelligence and generosity. The poem I recited to him was “As John to Patmos,” in which, quite wonderfully, as I thought, again ennobling us all, Walcott had equated the light and clarity (and fame) of the Greek islands with what we had always seen about us. It was a poem about the splendour of our landscape, and Henry Swanzy had picked out the extraordinary phrase the sun’s brass coin in my cheek, which everyone among us who had been to the beach would have recognised.

  Terence, like David Piper, listened carefully. The Guinness flush left his face; his eyes were intent behind his thick-rimmed glasses; he was all at once a man to whom a poet’s words mattered. His admiration was more wholehearted than David Piper’s, and at the end his only comment was on the last two words of the twelfth line: For beauty has surrounded / These black children and freed them of homeless ditties. The poet, he said, hadn’t yet earned the right to use a word like “ditty.”

  I was puzzled by this, which seemed a very fine kind of poetic judgement, beyond me, but I respected it, and over the next few weeks I worked out that Terence perhaps meant that “ditty” belonged to a more popular style of writing and could be used to proper poetic effect only in a more sophisticated context. The idea of the physical glory of the islands in the poem was done with standard tropical properties, so to speak, and done without irony; and after all the work the poet had done—the mysterious title, “As John to Patmos,” and the sun’s brass coin in my cheek, where canoes brace the sun’s strength—after all that, the “beauty” surrounding the black children had been a strangely lazy word. Picking the poem to pieces in this way, I had to acknowledge that “black,” too, had always been difficult for me, embarrassing to recite. This sentimental way of looking and feeling was not mine; “children” would have been enough for me.

  But I didn’t mind. I could look away from this sentimentality, almost brush it aside. The poet I cherished was the user of language, the maker of startling images, intricate and profound, a man only two years older than I was, but already at eighteen or nineteen a kind of master, casting a retr
ospective glow on things I had known six or seven or eight years before.

  In 1955 I used everything that he sent to the Voices, though it was clear that six years after his book the first flush of his inspiration had gone, and he was now marking time, writing to keep his hand in, looking for a way ahead. He did an imitation of a Keats narrative poem; he did something in the manner of Whitman (I believe, but I may be wrong). They were both linguistically accomplished, but they were only exercises, without the island landscape that fed his imagination and was so much part of his poetic personality.

  In one poem he tried for a reason I don’t remember to recreate Ireland, which I don’t think he had visited. I felt I knew why he had done that, and was sympathetic: he would have wanted to be more universal, to break away from the social and racial and intellectual limitations of the island, where, as he had written, the fine arts flourish on irregular Thursdays.

  It was something we with literary ambitions from these islands all had to face: small places with simple economies bred small people with simple destinies. And these islands were very small, infinitely smaller than Ibsen’s Norway. Their literary possibilities, like their economic possibilities, were as narrow as their human possibilities. Ibsen’s Norway, provincial as it was, had bankers, editors, scholars, high-reaching people. There was nothing of this human wealth in the islands. They didn’t give a fiction-writer or a poet much to write about; they cramped and quickly exhausted a talent which in a larger and more varied space might have spread its wings and done unsuspected things.

  It was a kind of literary blight that in varying ways affected other places as well: big countries that for political or other reasons had become hard to write about as they were. So Camus in the 1940s could cleanse Algeria of Arabs; and twenty or thirty years later some South African writers, fatigued by the theme of race, with its inevitabilities, its pressures to do the right thing, could seek to create a race-free no man’s land to give room to their private imaginings.

  I gave up Caribbean Voices in 1956. I lost that intimate connection with Walcott’s development, and had no idea how he moved away from the imitative quagmire of 1955. That he would have left that behind I had no doubt.

  I met him for the first time in Trinidad in 1960; he was thirty then. He told me one morning in a cafe in central Port of Spain how poems came to him. He did so in a very full and generous way, but what he said was complicated and I couldn’t understand. I had looked at a few of the later poems. They did not stir me, though the poet might have said they were profounder than the early poems I knew. The island landscape was there again, but the simple old idea of its “beauty” was dropped; the imagery and the language were more tormented; meaning was elusive. I began to feel—as I used to feel in the old days about all poetry—I was not equipped to deal with this poet.

  I met him again in Trinidad in 1965. He was more tormented than before by his job on the local Sunday paper; it would have been humiliating for him to be bossed around by people he saw as his inferiors, in what was still a colonial setting. Yet he had become a kind of local figure. He was doing plays, and they were staged. He took the plots of old Spanish plays (I believe), gave them a local setting, and redid the characters as local Negroes. He was pleased to be asked to do the “book” of a fantasy (for a musical) I had written for a small American film producer. I don’t know what he did for that project; the film was never made.

  I didn’t see him again. He was on the brink of his international career: a wonderful new black voice in the United States: his poems published in New York and London, and called out from the islands to teach in American universities.

  THE BOOK OF 1949 is beside me now. The cream soft cover is brown at the edges; though the pages with the poems are in fair condition. The very narrow spine is frayed: more the effect of bookshelf light than of handling. Fifty years on, I see more than I did in 1955.

  One of the miraculous phrases Henry Swanzy had singled out for special mention in 1949 was brown hair in the aristocracy of sea. I hadn’t been able to find that phrase in 1955 in the poems I liked. I found it the other day, more than fifty years later. It occurred in one of the longer poems I hadn’t been able to enter. And the phrase wasn’t romantic at all, as I had thought, no vision of a young girl seen and loved: it occurred in some coarse lines of rage about white people, foreigners, doing black people away from what was theirs, buying up the beaches of St. Lucia, a local heritage, where the very waves now “kowtowed” to strangers.

  Henry Swanzy—a friend of Africa in an old-fashioned way: I heard him speak once of “the enemies of the African race”—would not have wanted to make much of this side of the poetry. Caribbean Voices was for the Caribbean; the BBC short-wave transmission was picked up by various island radio stations and re-broadcast by them; the decencies had to be observed. And it was left to me now, fifty years later, to read more deeply. The brown hair that had stirred the poet was not always in the aristocracy of the alienated sea, beside the private beach. In one poem it was also the hair of a local girl, white or blonde or fair, who had mocked a letter of the poet’s. A young man’s unrequited interest, important enough (at that time of limited experience) to be worked into a poem: there was a wound there.

  I began to understand, all these years later, that the “black” theme of these early poems—those children freed of homeless ditties by the beauty of their island—that Terence Tiller had worried about, and which I had brushed aside in 1955, would have been more important in 1949 both to the poet and the propagators of island “culture” than I knew; and that for those people—poor old fat Albert Gomes with his Stalin moustache, and all the others—the Walcott I had a feeling for perhaps hardly existed: the young man like myself, carrying in his head the landscape I knew, able to fit words to quicksilver emotions, better as a proven writer than I was (who even in prose had hardly written, and was full only of the large ambition in which everything was still possible, a kind of never-never land of literary judgement).

  And that idea of the beauty of the islands (beach and sun and coconut trees) was not as easy as the poet thought. It wasn’t always there, a constant. It was an idea that had developed during the twentieth century. The British soldiers and German mercenaries who invaded Trinidad in 1797 (and luckily for them took it from the Spaniards without firing a shot) were landed in heavy winter overcoats on an awful black swamp west of Port of Spain, shallow for a long way out, and left to wade ashore. No idea there of local beauty. People who travelled to the islands before the Great War of 1914 didn’t go for the sun; they travelled to be in the waters where the great imperial naval battles of the eighteenth century had been fought; or they took in the islands on their way to see the engineering works of the Panama Canal before the water was let in. The sun in those days was something you had to protect yourself against. Photographs of English travellers in Trinidad from that time show the women with parasols and in full many-layered Edwardian dress.

  The idea of beach and sun and sunbathing came in the 1920s, with the cruise ships. (Consciously old-fashioned people, like the writer Evelyn Waugh, born in 1903, refused to sunbathe.) So the idea of island beauty, which now seems so natural and correct, was in fact imposed from outside, by things like postage stamps and travel posters, cruise ships and a hundred travel books. It was an overturning of old sensibility, old associations. Until then the islands were thought of as ancient plantations, places of the lash; and that was how, even until the 1950s and 1960s, island politicians, stirring up old pain and racial rage, sought to characterise them.

  The sea I always loved, and could be frightened by. It was always staggering, especially if you had to make a little journey to get there: that first sight of it, with the unexpected noise, at the end of a cliff or behind the crisscrossing grey trunks of a coconut plantation. Away from that the land was neutral, just there. I will tell this story. In 1940 my grandmother bought a wooded estate in the hills to the north-west of Port of Spain. The estate house was set in landscaped gr
ounds. My grandmother asked her extended family to come and settle. The first thing they did, for no good reason, and perhaps only out of idleness, was to cut down all the trees on the drive and in the grounds; then they slashed and burned a hillside and planted maize and peas. The land began soon to be eroded. In only a few years it became a black rural slum, little pieces rented out to poor black immigrants from the other islands; and no one grieved.

  I don’t think in Trinidad we felt as children that we walked in a liberating beauty, like Walcott’s black children; perhaps we felt the opposite. Though it might be said that Walcott came from a much smaller island, with the splendid sea always there; and when he thought of landscape it was natural for him to think of the sea and the lovely bays.

  It is an unpeopled landscape, though, in that first book. There are no villages, no huts, no local faces brought up close. The poet stands alone. He has a memory of his father, who is dead; a memory of a foreign painter instructor and friend, who is no longer on the island; and, of course, a memory of the rebuff of the fair girl. No one close: there are the far-off fishermen in the sea at dusk; there are the black children, undifferentiated, almost an abstraction, freed of homeless ditties; there are the faceless brown-haired foreigners in the sea, the occasion of jealousy and pain. The poet, churned up by his sensibility, walks alone. Even when for a whole day he walks among the ruins of his city of Castries, burnt down in a great fire, he walks alone, shocked at each wall that stood like a liar. He is a kind of Robinson Crusoe, but with the pain of a modern Friday. I, in my skin prison, in my very joys suffer. He doesn’t really tell us why: the fair girl is not really cause enough. The day you suddenly realised you were black. Too innocent really, not to say disingenuous, in 1947 or 1948, a time of segregation and the beginning of apartheid; and perhaps, but only perhaps, that moment of realisation was when he embraced the idea of the black children. It is actually possible to feel that without the black idea, the pool of distress, always available, in which the poet could refresh himself, the unpeopled landscape would be insupportable.