Literary Occasions: Essays Read online

  Only the shattered walnut and the mutilated mug are like the younger Dickens. The other details will not create revolutionary Paris (of seventy years before); they are building up more into the symbolism of the political cartoon.

  Literature is the sum of its discoveries. What is derivative can be impressive and intelligent. It can give pleasure and it will have its season, short or long. But we will always want to go back to the originators. What matters in the end in literature, what is always there, is the truly good. And—though played-out forms can throw up miraculous sports like The Importance of Being Earnest or Decline and Fall—what is good is always what is new, in both form and content. What is good forgets whatever models it might have had, and is unexpected; we have to catch it on the wing. Writing of this quality cannot be taught in a writing course.

  Literature, like all living art, is always on the move. It is part of its life that its dominant form should constantly change. No literary form—the Shakespearean play, the epic poem, the Restoration comedy, the essay, the work of history—can continue for very long at the same pitch of inspiration. If every creative talent is always burning itself out, every literary form is always getting to the end of what it can do.

  The new novel gave nineteenth-century Europe a certain kind of news. The late twentieth century, surfeited with news, culturally far more confused, threatening again to be as full of tribal or folk movement as during the centuries of the Roman empire, needs another kind of interpretation. But the novel, still (in spite of appearances) mimicking the programme of the nineteenth-century originators, still feeding off the vision they created, can subtly distort the unaccommodating new reality. As a form it is now commonplace enough, and limited enough, to be teachable. It encourages a multitude of little narcissisms, from near and far; they stand in for originality and give the form an illusion of life. It is a vanity of the age (and commercial promotion) that the novel continues to be literature’s final and highest expression.

  Here I have to go back to the beginning. It was out of the colonial small change of the great nineteenth-century achievement that—perhaps through a teacher or a friend—the desire to be a writer came to my father in the late 1920s. He did become a writer, though not in the way he wanted. He did good work; his stories gave our community a past that would otherwise have been lost. But there was a mismatch between the ambition, coming from outside, from another culture, and our community, which had no living literary tradition; and my father’s hard-won stories have found very few readers among the people they were about.

  He passed on the writing ambition to me; and I, growing up in another age, have managed to see that ambition through almost to the end. But I remember how hard it was for me as a child to read serious books; two spheres of darkness separated me from them. Nearly all my imaginative life was in the cinema. Everything there was far away, but at the same time everything in that curious operatic world was accessible. It was a truly universal art. I don’t think I overstate when I say that without the Hollywood of the 1930s and 1940s I would have been spiritually quite destitute. That cannot be shut out of this account of reading and writing. And I have to wonder now whether the talent that once went into imaginative literature didn’t in this century go into the first fifty years of the glorious cinema.

  1998

  PART ONE

  East Indian

  IT WAS ABOUT thirteen or fourteen years ago. In those days Air France used to run an Epicurean Service between London and Paris. The advertisements taunted me. Poverty makes for recklessness, and one idle day in the long summer vacation I booked. The following morning I went with nervous expectation to the Kensington air terminal. There was another Indian in the lounge. He was about fifty and very small, neat with homburg and gold-rimmed spectacles, and looking packaged in a three-piece suit. He was pure buttoned-up joy: he too was an Epicurean traveller.

  “You are coming from—?”

  I had met enough Indians from India to know that this was less a serious inquiry than a greeting, in a distant land, from one Indian to another.

  “Trinidad,” I said. “In the West Indies. And you?”

  He ignored my question. “But you look Indian.”

  “I am.”

  “Red Indian?” He suppressed a nervous little giggle.

  “East Indian. From the West Indies.”

  He looked offended and wandered off to the bookstall. From this distance he eyed me assessingly. In the end curiosity overcame misgiving. He sat next to me on the bus to the airport. He sat next to me in the plane.

  “Your first trip to Paris?” he asked.

  “Yes.”

  “My fourth. I am a newspaperman. America, the United States of America, have you been there?”

  “I once spent twelve hours in New York.”

  “I have been to the United States of America three times. I also know the Dominion of Canada. I don’t like this aeroplane. I don’t like the way it is wibrating. What sort do you think it is? I’ll ask the steward.”

  He pressed the buzzer. The steward didn’t come.

  “At first I thought it was a Dakota. Now I feel it is a Wiking.”

  The steward bustled past, dropping white disembarkation cards into laps. The Indian seized the steward’s soiled white jacket.

  “Steward, is this aircraft a Wiking?”

  “No, sir. Not a Viking. It’s a Languedoc, a French plane, sir.”

  “Languedoc. Of course. That is one thing journalism teaches you. Always get to the bottom of everything.”

  We filled in our disembarkation cards. The Indian studied my passport.

  “Trinidad, Trinidad,” he said, as though searching for a face or a name.

  Before he could find anything the Epicurean meal began. The harassed steward pulled out trays from the back of seats, slapped down monogrammed glasses and liquor miniatures. It was a short flight, which perhaps he had already made more than once that day, and he behaved like a man with problems at the other end.

  “Indian,” the Indian said reprovingly, “and you are drinking?”

  “I am drinking.”

  “At home,” he said, sipping his aperitif, “I never drink.”

  The steward was back, with a clutch of half-bottles of champagne.

  “Champagne!” the Indian cried, as though about to clap his tiny hands. “Champagne!”

  Corks were popping all over the aircraft. The trays of food came.

  I grabbed the steward’s dirty jacket.

  “I am sorry,” I said. “I should have told them. But I don’t eat meat.”

  Holding two trays in one hand, he said, “I am sorry, sir. There is nothing else. The meals are not prepared on the plane.”

  “But you must have an egg or some fish or something.”

  “We have some cheese.”

  “But this is an Epicurean Service. You can’t just give me a piece of cheese.”

  “I am sorry, sir.”

  I drank champagne with my bread and cheese.

  “So you are not eating?”

  “I am not eating.”

  “I enwy you.” The Indian was champing through meats of various colours, sipping champagne and crying out for more. “I enwy you your wegetarianism. At home I am strict wegetarian. No one has even boiled an egg in my house.”

  The steward took away the remains of my bread and cheese, and gave me coffee, brandy, and a choice of liqueurs.

  The Indian experimented swiftly. He sipped, he gulped. The flight was drawing to a close; we were already fastening our seat belts. His eyes were red and watery behind his spectacles. He stuck his hat on at comic angles and made faces at me. He nudged me in the ribs and cuffed me on the shoulder and giggled. He chucked me under the chin and sang: “Wege-wege-wegetarian! Hin-du wege-tar-ian!”

  He was in some distress when we landed. His hat was still at a comic angle, but his flushed little face had a bottled-up solemnity. He was in for a hard afternoon. Even so, he composed himself for a farewell speech.<
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  “My dear sir, I am a journalist and I have travelled. I hope you will permit me to say how much I appreciate it that, although separated by many generations and many thousands of miles of sea and ocean from the Motherland, you still keep up the customs and traditions of our religion. I do appreciate it. Allow me to congratulate you.”

  I was hungry, and my head was heavy. “No, no, my dear sir. Allow me to congratulate you.”

  TO BE a colonial is to be a little ridiculous and unlikely, especially in the eyes of someone from the metropolitan country. All immigrants and their descendants are colonials of one sort or another, and between the colonial and what one might call the metropolitan there always exists a muted mutual distrust. In England the image of the American is fixed. In Spain, where imperial glory has been dead for so long, they still whisper to you, an impartial outsider, about the loudness of americanos—to them people from Argentina and Uruguay. In an Athens hotel you can distinguish the Greek Americans, back for a holiday (special words in the vocabulary of immigrants), from the natives. The visitors speak with loud, exaggerated American accents, occasionally slightly flawed; the stances of the women are daring and self-conscious. The natives, overdoing the quiet culture and feminine modesty, appear to cringe with offence.

  Yet to be Latin American or Greek American is to be known, to be a type, and therefore in some way to be established. To be an Indian or East Indian from the West Indies is to be a perpetual surprise to people outside the region. When you think of the West Indies you think of Columbus and the Spanish galleons, slavery and the naval rivalries of the eighteenth century. You might, more probably, think of calypsos and the Trinidad carnival and expensive sun and sand. When you think of the East you think of the Taj Mahal at the end of a cypress-lined vista and you think of holy men. You don’t go to Trinidad, then, expecting to find Hindu pundits scuttling about country roads on motor-cycles; to see pennants with ancient devices fluttering from temples; to see mosques cool and white and rhetorical against the usual Caribbean buildings of concrete and corrugated iron; to find India celebrated in the street names of one whole district of Port of Spain; to see the Hindu festival of lights or the Muslim mourning ceremony for Husein, the Prophet’s descendant, killed at the Battle of Kerbela in Arabia thirteen hundred years ago.

  To be an Indian from Trinidad is to be unlikely. It is, in addition to everything else, to be the embodiment of an old verbal ambiguity. For this word “Indian” has been abused as no other word in the language; almost every time it is used it has to be qualified. There was a time in Europe when everything Oriental or everything a little unusual was judged to come from Turkey or India. So Indian ink is really Chinese ink and India paper first came from China. When in 1492 Columbus landed on the island of Guanahani he thought he had got to Cathay. He ought therefore to have called the people Chinese. But East was East. He called them Indians, and Indians they remained, walking Indian file through the Indian corn. And so, too, that American bird which to English-speaking people is the turkey is to the French le dindon, the bird of India.

  SO LONG as the real Indians remained on the other side of the world, there was little confusion. But when in 1845 these Indians began coming over to some of the islands Columbus had called the Indies, confusion became total. Slavery had been abolished in the British islands; the negroes refused to work for a master, and many plantations were faced with ruin. Indentured labourers were brought in from China, Portugal and India. The Indians fitted. More and more came. They were good agriculturalists and were encouraged to settle after their indentures had expired. Instead of a passage home they could take land. Many did. The indenture system lasted, with breaks, from 1845 until 1917, and in Trinidad alone the descendants of those immigrants who stayed number over a quarter of a million.

  But what were these immigrants to be called? Their name had been appropriated three hundred and fifty years before. “Hindu” was a useful word, but it had religious connotations and would have offended the many Muslims among the immigrants. In the British territories the immigrants were called East Indians. In this way they were distinguished from the two other types of Indians in the islands: the American Indians and the West Indians. After a generation or two, the East Indians were regarded as settled inhabitants of the West Indies and were thought of as West Indian East Indians. Then a national feeling grew up. There was a cry for integration, and the West Indian East Indians became East Indian West Indians.

  This didn’t suit the Dutch. They had a colony called Surinam, or Dutch Guiana, on the north coast of South America. They also owned a good deal of the East Indies, and to them an East Indian was someone who came from the East Indies and was of Malay stock. (When you go to an Indian restaurant in Holland you don’t go to an Indian restaurant; you go to an East Indian or Javanese restaurant.) In Surinam there were many genuine East Indians from the East Indies. So another name had to be found for the Indians from India who came to Surinam. The Dutch called them British Indians. Then, with the Indian nationalist agitation in India, the British Indians began to resent being called British Indians. The Dutch compromised by calling them Hindustanis.

  East Indians, British Indians, Hindustanis. But the West Indies are part of the New World and these Indians of Trinidad are no longer of Asia. The temples and mosques exist and appear genuine. But the languages that came with them have decayed. The rituals have altered. Since open-air cremation is forbidden by the health authorities, Hindus are buried, not cremated. Their ashes are not taken down holy rivers into the ocean to become again part of the Absolute. There is no Ganges at hand, only a muddy stream called the Caroni. And the water that the Hindu priest sprinkles with a mango leaf around the sacrificial fire is not Ganges water but simple tap water. The holy city of Benares is far away, but the young Hindu at his initiation ceremony in Port of Spain will still take up his staff and beggar’s bowl and say that he is off to Benares to study. His relatives will plead with him, and in the end he will lay down his staff, and there will be a ritual expression of relief.*

  IT IS the play of a people who have been cut off. To be an Indian from Trinidad, then, is to be unlikely and exotic. It is also to be a little fraudulent. But so all immigrants become. In India itself there is the energetic community of Parsis. They fled from Persia to escape Muslim religious persecution. But over the years the very religion which they sought to preserve has become a matter of forms and especially of burial forms: in Bombay their dead are taken to the frighteningly named Towers of Silence and there exposed to vultures. They have adopted the language of the sheltering country and their own language has become a secret gibberish. Immigrants are people on their own. They cannot be judged by the standards of their older culture. Culture is like language, ever developing. There is no right and wrong, no purity from which there is decline. Usage sanctions everything.

  And these Indians from Trinidad, despite their temples and rituals, so startling to the visitors, belong to the New World. They are immigrants; they have the drive and restlessness of immigrants. To them India is a word. In moments of self-distrust this word might suggest the Taj Mahal and an ancient civilization. But more usually it suggests other words, fearfully visualized, “famine,” “teeming millions.” And to many, India is no more than the memory of a depressed rural existence that survived in Trinidad until only the other day. Occasionally in the interior of the island a village of thatched roofs and mud-and-bamboo walls still recalls Bengal.

  IN BENGAL lay the great port of Calcutta. There, from the vast depressed hinterland of eastern India, the emigrants assembled for the journey by sail, often lasting four months, to the West Indies. The majority came from the provinces of Bihar and eastern Uttar Pradesh; and even today—although heavy industry has come to Bihar—these areas are known for their poverty and backwardness. It is a dismal, dusty land, made sadder by ruins and place names that speak of ancient glory. For here was the land of the Buddha; here are the cities mentioned in the Hindu epics of three thousand years ago
—like Ayodhya, from which my father’s family came, today a ramshackle town of wholly contemporary squalor.

  The land is flat, intolerably flat, with few trees to dramatize it. The forests to which reference is often made in the epics have disappeared. The winters are brief, and in the fierce summers the fields are white with dust. You are never out of sight of low mud-walled or brick-walled villages, and there are people everywhere. An impression of tininess in vastness: tiny houses, tiny poor fields, thin, stunted people, a land scratched into dust by an ever-growing population. It is a land of famine and apathy, and yet a land of rigid caste order. Everyone has his place. Effort is futile. His field is small, his time unlimited, but the peasant still scatters his seed broadcast. He lives from hand to mouth. The attitude is understandable. In this more than feudal society of India, everything once belonged to the king, and later to the landlord: it was unwise to be prosperous. A man is therefore defined and placed by his caste alone. To the peasant on this over-populated plain, all of India, all the world, has been narrowed to a plot of ground and a few relationships.

  Travel is still not easy in those parts, and from there a hundred years ago the West Indies must have seemed like the end of the world. Yet so many left, taking everything—beds, brass vessels, musical instruments, images, holy books, sandalwood sticks, astrological almanacs. It was less an uprooting than it appears. They were taking India with them. With their blinkered view of the world they were able to re-create eastern Uttar Pradesh or Bihar wherever they went. They had been able to ignore the vastness of India; so now they ignored the strangeness in which they had been set. To leave India’s sacred soil, to cross the “black water,” was considered an act of self-defilement. So completely did these migrants re-create India in Trinidad that they imposed a similar restriction on those who wished to leave Trinidad.