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

  Six years later he died. I was asked by a television news programme to be interviewed about him. I agreed willingly but then, in the studio, found to my dismay that I had very little to say about his writing. I had to bluff; it couldn’t have been a very good item on the evening news. I had been the great man’s friend for all those years but had read little of his work.

  I cherished his friendship and generosity, delighted in his conversation, thought him well read and always intelligent, but kept on putting off a serious connected reading of his work. Until 1974 he had been writing a many-volumed autobiographical novel, A Dance to the Music of Time; after that, when he was past seventy, he had done bits and pieces of fiction and drama. In what seemed like the remote past I had read the first couple of volumes of the big novel. Very little had remained with me. I thought that might have been because the matter, an English upbringing, was too far away from me. Powell was proud of being an English writer; he thought it something delicate and special, something to which people would at some time want to return; and from those two novels an impression (which I didn’t trust because of its strangeness) had stayed with me that the writer had wished to show how much he knew of English manners.

  A long time afterwards I read the third volume of the series. I was deeply impressed, by the care of the writing, the management of various moods, and the pace. I wrote him a letter of admiration, and I promised myself that one day, when I had the time, I would do that connected reading of the work which I hadn’t yet done.

  When he died I was asked by the editor of a literary weekly to write about him. I was working on a book at the time and couldn’t do anything just then. But the idea of writing about Powell attracted me, and I asked the editor to wait a little. When I was free I settled down to read. I got two of the paperback omnibus volumes, and read six connected books from the middle. I was appalled. Powell had had a little American success with one book, and I felt that this perhaps had corrupted him. There was none of the shape I had expected to find in the longer book. There was less and less care in the writing; everything was over-explained; the matter became more nakedly autobiographical; and there was a strange new vanity in the writer, as of a man who felt he had made it, and could now do no wrong, could now like a practised magician pull his old comic characters out of his hat and feel he had to do no more.

  There was no narrative skill, perhaps even no thought for narrative. A moment comes during one of the middle books when a number of the earlier characters are consumed in one evening in a bombing holocaust. In the main narrative, which is full of coincidences that eternally bring many of the old characters together again in every book, this holocaust is like yet another private event, a private blitz, another partial assembling of the cast: two hit-and-run bombers almost without warning destroy two of the houses or places the writer-narrator knows well: two bombers, two houses, no more.

  Such a strange event has to be handled carefully by a writer; hints of the calamity and the oddity have to be dropped beforehand, perhaps even for a book or two in advance. It is no use saying that during the war people died like this, and without warning. A book is a book; it has to have its own logic. And the book anyway is being written long after the event, when the awfulness should have been reflected upon and digested. What happens in the book is that some of the people who are going to die behave strangely: they appear to be yielding to some psychic prompting and are saying a long goodbye. And when later in the evening, by accident, the writer learns of the calamity, he, normally retiring, content to be a listener and observer, behaves with unusual energy, finding ways in the blackout of getting to the two bombed houses, one after the other, and confirming what he already knows.

  This is how death and knowledge of death comes. The moment should be profoundly tragic. But some emotional charge is missing. What is missing is that we don’t truly know the people who have died; we don’t know them as well as the writer knows them or their originals; we know only their names. That is one of the consequences of the unwieldy way the book is organised. It is done in the first person from beginning to end, and much of what we learn about people comes through dialogue. It is a ponderous form of narrative and, since every dialogue starts from scratch (and though Powell is a master of the different ways of English speech), it wastes time, giving equal weight to the trivial and the important.

  Every volume begins with a piece of what we might call actuality; and every occasion of actuality ends in the most predictable way as a kind of party, where we are given little glimpses of the central people of the narrative and learn how they have fared since we have last seen them. We learn especially about their current mating. In the beginning this provided surprise; but then there is no surprise in this game of musical chairs. And then, too, we begin to feel that these people, though they were new to us in the beginning, part of a social knowledge which we might not have had, are only one-dimensional, not interesting enough for us to follow. Their interplay doesn’t become profounder with age and the passage of time. The writer gives them a lot of attention, but we feel somehow that he sees more in them than he makes us see.

  This failure is extraordinary. Powell worked for some time as a film script-writer before the war, and in early conversation with me he often used his script-writing experiences to demonstrate how writing should not be done. He and his script-writing colleague (he said) might need to introduce a character at a certain stage. To give this character an identity they might concentrate on externals; that was the easiest way. They might give the man a limp or a blinking eye; or the man might wear a certain kind of clothes, or smoke a certain kind of cigarette or cigar. This method worked in film scripts; it was shoddy in books. And yet it can be said that this in some way was Powell’s method in his big book.

  My feeling at the end was that this man, my friend, might have written books, might have lived the literary life, but wasn’t the kind of writer he wished to be.

  And the feeling was strengthened when I looked at one of the pre-war books, From a View to a Death. An artist goes to a country house to paint a portrait. English country manners are carefully described: this might almost be the point of the book. The artist then decides to take the country gentry on at what he sees as their own game. He gets on a horse and falls and is killed. And, as in the later books, everything is over-explained; there are too many words. But what is the point? Is it that artists should stick to what they know best? It is mysterious, and perhaps there is no point apart from the display of social knowledge.

  There is a kind of writing that undermines its subject. Most good writing, I believe, is like that. A View to a Death, for all its care in the delineation of county manners, leaves English social life just where the writer found it. And the same is true of The Music of Time.

  A COMMON DEVICE OF FICTION is like this. A great man dies, covered in honour. Someone then, usually an admirer, goes into the life to do a biography and discovers all sorts of horrors. Ibsen uses this device a lot, but without the death; every Ibsen great man has near-murder in the background. I felt like a fictional character, but I didn’t know how to do the story. I didn’t know how to present myself to people who knew Powell. I didn’t think anyone would believe that after all the years of friendship I had not read Powell in any serious and connected way, had only just done so, and didn’t now think of him as a writer. It was a piece of Ibsen-like horror. It wasn’t something I could put to the editor who had asked me to write about him. So I did nothing. I said nothing. But somehow the idea got around that I had dishonoured a friendship.

  And it would not have been easy to put to people that the friendship remained of value, was not diminished by the horror. I had met him in 1957 as a great English writer, was flattered by his attention, and through all our friendship I never ceased to think of him as a great writer. It may be that the friendship lasted all this time because I had not examined his work.

  MY PURPOSE IN THIS BOOK is not literary criticism or biography. People who want to kn
ow about Powell or Walcott can turn to the critical works that have been done about these writers. I wish only, and in a personal way, to set out the writing to which I was exposed during my career. I say writing, but I mean more specifically vision, a way of seeing and feeling.

  Romantic and beautiful though the idea is, there is no such thing as a republic of letters where—as in an antechamber to a fairly judged afterlife of reputation or neglect, and in the presence of a literary St. Peter—all bring their work and all are equal. That idea of equality is of course false. Every kind of writing is the product of a specific historical and cultural vision. The point is uncontentious. National histories of literature make it all the time, and no one minds. But the self-serving “writing schools” of the United States and England think otherwise. They decree that a certain artificial way of writing narrative prose (which is a general way now and in twenty or thirty years will almost certainly appear old-fashioned) is the correct way.

  Let me see whether I can give a short guide. You begin (at the risk of using too many words, like Hemingway) with language of extreme simplicity (like Hemingway), enough to draw attention to your style. From time to time, to remind people, you can do a very simple, verbose paragraph. In between you can relax. When the going gets rough, when difficult or subtle things have to be handled, the clichés will come tumbling out anyway; the inadequate language will betray itself; but not many will notice after your very simple beginning and your later simple paragraphs. Don’t forget the flashback; and, to give density to a banal narrative, the flashback within the flashback. Remember the golden rule of writing-school narrative: a paragraph of description, followed by two or three lines of dialogue. This is thought to make for realism, though the dialogue can’t always be spoken. Chinese and Indian and African experience sifted down into this writing-school mill comes out looking and feeling American and modern. These writing-school writers are all given the same modern personality, and that is part of their triumph.

  I grew up on an island like Walcott’s. Other races were close, but for my first five or six years, in the 1930s, I lived in a transplanted peasant India. This India was being washed away by the stringencies of our colonial life, but it still felt whole, and this gave me a base of feeling and cultural knowledge which even members of my family who came later didn’t have. This base of feeling has lasted all my life. I think it is true to say that, in the beginning, living in this unusual India, I saw people of other groups but at the same time didn’t see them. This made me receptive to my father’s stories of a self-contained local Indian life and the healing power of Indian ritual. I was more than receptive to these stories; I was greatly moved by them. I saw them being written and was dazzled by them. They were among my first literary experiences, together with a roughly done country Ramlila, a pageant-play based on the Ramayana epic.

  I wonder what Edgar Mittelholzer would have made of my father’s story in the green-covered booklet (if in his mood of final Buddhist resolve he could have broken off to look at it). I don’t think he would have made much of it. Edgar’s greatest wish was to be a popular writer in the style of the 1930s or even earlier, and, amazingly, he half succeeded. Just as house-brokers talk of situation, situation, situation, so Edgar believed in story, story, story (he actually used these words to me once). He also with his uncertain Dutch-Swiss-Guyanese past had his own idea of what was universal. He would have seen my father’s story as folklore, Indian local colour, far away, and to a certain extent he would have been right; my father should have written of the 1940s world around him and not gone back to a misty world of 1906.

  Edgar, and other people who at various times have asked me about my influences, would have been puzzled by the importance I attached to those stories. They not only gave me an example of literary labour; they gave me an idea of my background and my past. I was born in the Indian countryside of Trinidad, but I very soon began to live away from it. My father’s stories peopled that countryside for me, gave me a very real kind of knowledge. Without this knowledge in colonial Trinidad I would have been spiritually adrift like so many of the people around me whom I observed later. I suppose I would have been like Edgar and others, fabricating an ancestry for myself—the colonial neurosis—or even like Sam Selvon, who was Indian and handsome, but had been cut off from his background (in his stories his ignorance of Indian ways was like a kind of illiteracy), and had only the race and the good looks to show.

  Perhaps my father’s stories matter more to me than to anybody else. My father first brought them out in a little blue-covered booklet in 1943, rather like Walcott’s 25 Poems six years later. Walcott’s book was printed by the Advocate newspaper press in Barbados, my father’s by the Guardian Commercial Printery in Trinidad, the printing press of the Trinidad Guardian. Both books were sold for a local dollar, about twenty-one pence, at that time a labourer’s daily wage. There was no great fuss made about my father’s book, much less than that made for Walcott’s; even in Trinidad the material was thought to be too far away. But the thousand copies that were printed were sold, mainly to Indians who, I imagine, liked reading about themselves, liked seeing Indian names in print, and liked seeing everyday Indian life given a kind of dignity. So the book was a success in 1943–44. It didn’t have anything like that success later.

  In 1976 André Deutsch did a volume with a long preface by me and enthusiastic jacket copy by Diana Athill. It was remaindered. Heinemann tried again, with a shorter, elegantly produced volume, in 1994. I haven’t heard about it; I suppose there was nothing to report; and I haven’t pressed. It was done ten years later in India. Even by the low standards of Indian publishing this was an awful job, with not a descriptive line about the text; the book might have been a book of magic, a cookbook, or a book of wise Indian sayings; the publisher said he was busy. The stories, if the publisher had had an hour to spare, might have been offered as pioneer work from the diaspora. But materialist India is materialist India, with no idea of its history or literature, and though there is now much talk of the Indian diaspora, the only diaspora Indians care about is the one through which they might get a green card or a son-in-law or daughter-in-law with American citizenship. Every Sunday, in newspapers north and south, you can see the frantic needs advertised in the classified matrimonial columns.

  I have to accept now that the stories are dead and live only for me. Walcott’s island was like mine, but we were worlds apart. Two important facts made for this difference. I was born in Indian Trinidad in 1932; and from about the age of seven I saw my father writing his stories. This meant that from an early age I began to inhabit a distinct mental world—distinct from the rest of the island, and distinct even from the rest of my mother’s extended family. There was this further great difference between Walcott and myself. I could, when my vision grew wider, beyond our small community, comprehend his needs and yearnings (the black children freed from homeless ditties, the brown hair in the aristocracy of sea); but there are parts of me that will be a puzzle to him.

  His vision of the island is not mine; and a man with Walcott’s island deep in his head and heart will look at the rest of the world in his own way. He will not (to give an extreme example) be interested in Tony Powell’s England, or feel sufficiently connected to it, to be able to judge the writing that comes out of it. The artificiality of P. G. Wodehouse and Agatha Christie is another matter; these writers, who seem very English, can be assessed by anyone; the books themselves are modern fairytales, a form in which for various reasons the myth-making English excel.

  Tony would have liked, as part of his Englishness, that delicate and special thing, to be taken up into that myth-making scheme. After the war, towards the end of the big novel, there is a tremendous thanksgiving service in St. Paul’s. The narrator attends. He hasn’t actually had much of a war, but at this moment he is like Henry the Fifth after Agincourt. He quotes the whole of the original version of “God Save the King” sung at the service. This is meant, fraudulently, and rather too easily,
I feel, to cast a retrospective epic quality on all that has gone before, much of which has been trivial. It was Tony’s play for the English myth. It was what he expected would come to him, some recognition of him as the twentieth-century English myth-maker; and his little American success, when he was deep in the sequence, seemed to point finally in that direction. But his autobiographical novel was just that: autobiographical and private, full of particularities, appreciated best by people who knew the ins and outs of the life; and his little American success didn’t last.

  IT WAS FRANCIS WYNDHAM, a reader at Deutsch, who wrote to Tony Powell about me in mid-1957. Francis had been the first reader of my first book. He liked it but Deutsch wanted a novel. I provided that quite soon (the days seemed longer then) and when a year or so later it was published I met Francis with Diana Athill one morning in the new Gaggia coffee house in Dean Street, not far from the Deutsch office. Francis had a space, rather than a room, in that office, a space so small between partition and partition that he had to ease himself in to sit at his table; and he said he was paid so little by Deutsch that if it was any less Deutsch would go to jail. I had no idea then or till much later that Francis was a man of widespread connections. It is possible that this innocence of mine made our friendship easier. I liked him for his intelligence and wit; I suppose he was the first bookman and the first true intellectual I had got to know. For some time after that first meeting we met once a week.