A Writer's People: Ways of Looking and Feeling Page 5

  In due course a letter or a card came from Tony Powell. He was literary editor of Punch at the time, and they had done a kind review of my first book. We arranged then on the telephone to meet at El Vino. It was the journalists’ bar in Fleet Street. Tony was attractive, easy to talk to. I thanked him for the kind review in Punch. It turned out that he had not only sent the book out for review; he had read it. This was more than I expected. He then said something which I thought very wise, and was to use many times, and finally appropriate. He said that, whatever its flaws, a writer’s first novel had a lyrical quality which the writer would never again recapture. This was at a higher level of critical appreciation than I had met.

  He told me that three or four years before he had also met Kingsley Amis for the first time at El Vino. This was before Amis’s great success with Lucky Jim. Tony had liked Amis’s reviews and had been moved to get in touch with him. At that first meeting Amis said he couldn’t stay as long with Tony as he would have liked; he had arranged to meet, at that very place later that day, “a very foolish man.” This gave a piquant touch to that first meeting, with Tony wondering who Amis’s foolish man could be. In time the innocent arrived: it was Terence Kilmartin, literary editor of the Observer, future reviser of Scott-Moncrieff’s Proust, and not a foolish man at all.

  It was Amis’s little joke, and it was typical of Tony to cherish it. He delighted in his friends, saw them all as special, liked as it were to walk round them, to see all sides of their character; and he did so without malice. The absence of malice was the great revelation. He kept the letters of all his friends, and could so easily pull out from his little office a John Betjeman or Constant Lambert of the 1930s (the Betjeman classical and cramped, the Lambert bold, with a broad, flat nib) I suspected his letters were filed alphabetically.

  He was, it might be said, a collector of people, like the seventeenth-century “character”-writers, or the John Aubrey of Brief Lives. During the war he wrote a book about John Aubrey. You might have thought that the match between author and subject was perfect; but Tony’s book was dull, as Graham Greene said to Tony in some exasperation one day; and Tony, who told the story in print, didn’t (in this account) make a reply. You felt that the Aubrey book was a chore; and again it was strange that for a man who lived the author’s life to the full so many of his books gave that impression, of being a chore. Before the war it was the labour of a man trying hard to make his way; after the war it was the labour of a man starting up again, being very careful, and anxious not to fail, until he felt he had succeeded.

  I loved the Tony who was like John Aubrey, the collector of people and their oddities, the man who seldom censured, and thought that people and especially his friends made the world glamorous. Without formulating it, that breadth of vision, that kind of welcome, was one of the things I had actually been hoping to find in the larger society of England. I had longed to get away from the easy malice of the small place I grew up in, where all judgements were moralistic and hateful and corrupting, the judgements of gossip. But so far I hadn’t been lucky in England. I had expected much from the university; but I had found little there. At my college they were for the most part provincial and mean and common; and it was like that at the BBC as well.

  There was Henry Swanzy and, quite recently, Francis Wyndham. But these were exceptional men. And now, so soon after Francis, I had found Tony Powell. This was the England I had wanted to find, and had given up looking for. The “lyrical quality” of a first book: I had never heard any literary judgement so profound spoken so easily; there was a depth of civilization there. And there was that depth, too, in Tony’s attitude to people. I consciously began to copy that; it became part of my own personality. It was the glamorous rather than moralistic thing I needed, to set against the smallness and jealousy that ruled the world. (Many years later I was to meet a successful European publisher who, as a matter of strong principle, it was said, was jealous of everyone.) But without Tony’s example I would not have known what I was looking for. In time I was to find out that there was little in his books for me; but Tony was, more than he knew perhaps, an important part of my education, and part of my training as a writer.

  At the time of my meeting with him the only thing I knew of his work was a radio adaptation of What’s Become of Waring, one of the pre-war books. It was published in 1939 and Tony would say it sold 999 copies, suggesting that its further fruitful career was scuppered by the outbreak of the war. The idea of the book was a simple one, that of a travel writer who doesn’t actually travel, an idea so simple that it wouldn’t be surprising to learn that it had furnished half a dozen books before and after. The narrative, such as it was, was muffled in its radio adaptation by a torrent of words. So it was in the book itself, with everything over-explained, in the Powell manner.

  I couldn’t say I hadn’t liked the radio adaptation. So I asked Tony what he had made of it. This piece of literary guile—throwing the ball into the other man’s court, as it were, useful in similar circumstances in later years—had come to me on the spur of the moment.

  He said he liked it, but actors invariably over-acted. They couldn’t say a simple thing like “Would you have a cigarette?” without trying to inject drama into it. And I suppose that was one of the other things that had wearied me.

  IT IS AMAZING TO ME—leaving aside the radio version of What’s Become of Waring—how often I was baffled by famous novels of the time. I didn’t understand Graham Greene’s The Quiet American, which was a hit in 1955. It was set in Indo-China and was about the war to come; it established his reputation as a man who saw things that were about to happen. I didn’t understand the book partly because I didn’t read the newspapers, or read them in a selective way. I didn’t read American news; I read nothing about the presidential campaigns, and pitied journalists who had to follow them. I didn’t read about English politics; I had never voted. When De Quincey (like Tony Powell in his wish to collect great or unusual men) met Wordsworth he was disappointed that the great man, a poet after all, was interested in something as ordinary as a newspaper.

  I wonder what an enquirer like De Quincey would have made of me. I would have said, if I was asked, that though I knew nothing about American politics I took an interest in the world. I read the Manchester Guardian and The Times. Graham Greene used to tell interviewers (it is their habit to read the previous interviews and they all then ask the same questions) that what they saw as his foresight about Vietnam and other places came from his careful reading of newspapers. My attitude to detailed newspaper-reading was different. I saw it as a form of idleness. Things ran their course; elections took place, and the United States and Great Britain continued much as they had done; to read about what was happening in the interim was a waste of time; and so, too, was to read articles about, say, the best prime minister we never had.

  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 Anecdot
es, 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.