Literary Occasions Page 9

  Disorder within, disorder without. Only my school life was ordered; anything that had happened there I could date at once. But my family life—my life at home or my life in the house, in the street—was jumbled, without sequence. The sequence I have given it here has come to me only with the writing of this piece. And that is why I am not sure whether it was before the upheaval of our move or after our return to Port of Spain that I became aware of my father writing stories.

  In one of the drawers of the desk there was a typescript—on Guardian “copy” paper—of a story called “White Man’s Way.” It was an old story and it didn’t mean much to me. A white overseer on a horse, a girl in a cane-field: I cannot remember what happened. I was at sea with this kind of story. For all my reputation in the house as a reader of books—and my interest in books and magazines as printed objects was genuine—there was an element of pretence, a carry-over from the schoolroom, in much of the reading I did on my own. It was easier for me to take an interest in what my father read to me. And my father never read this story aloud to me.

  I remember that in the story there was a phrase about the girl’s breasts below her bodice; and I suppose that my father had grafted his sexual yearnings on to an English or American magazine-style tropical story. In the desk, hoarded with his other papers, there was a stack of these magazines, often looked at by me, never really read. My father had done or partly done a correspondence course with a London writing school before the war—some of the letters were in the desk. The school had recommended a study of the “market.” These magazines were the market.

  But “White Man’s Way” was in the past. The stories my father now began to write were aimed at no market. He wrote in fits and starts. He wrote in bed, with a pencil. He wrote slowly, with great patience: he could write the same paragraph over and over again. Liable to stomach pains, and just as liable to depressions (his calls then for “the Epictetus” or “the Marcus Aurelius,” books of comfort, were like calls for his stomach medicine), my father became calm before and during his writing moods.

  He didn’t write a great deal. He wrote one long story and four or five shorter stories. In the shorter pieces my father, moving far from my mother’s family and the family of his uncle by marriage, re-created his own background. The people he wrote about were poor, but that wasn’t the point. These stories celebrated Indian village life, and the Hindu rituals that gave grace and completeness to that life. They also celebrated elemental things, the order of the working day, the labour of the rice-fields, the lighting of the cooking fire in the half-walled gallery of a thatched hut, the preparation and eating of food. There was very little “story” in these stories. But to me they gave a beauty (which in a corner of my mind still endures, like a fantasy of home) to the Indian village life I had never known. And when we went to the country to visit my father’s own relations, who were the characters in these stories, it was like a fairytale came to life.

  The long story was quite different. It was comic; yet it dealt with cruelty. It was the story of an Indian village thug. He is taken out of school at fourteen in order to be married: a boy of high caste, as the protagonist is, should be married before his whiskers grow. In the alien, Presbyterian school the boy is momentarily abashed by the idea of his early marriage; at home he is proud of the manhood this marriage confers. He terrorizes and beats his wife: strong men should beat their wives. Secure in his own eyes as a brahmin and the son of a landowner, he disdains work and seeks glory. He uses his father’s money and authority to establish and lead a village stick-fighting group, though he himself has no skill in that exacting and elegant martial art. None of this is done for gain; it is all done for glory, a caste idea of manhood, a wish for battle, a wish to be a leader. The quality of the ambition is high; the village setting is petty. The would-be caste chieftain ends in the alien police courts as an uneducated country criminal, speaking broken English.

  I was involved in the slow making of this story from the beginning to the end. Every new bit was read out to me, every little variation; and I read every new typescript my father made as the story grew. It was the greatest imaginative experience of my childhood. I knew the story by heart, yet always loved to read it or hear it, feeling a thrill at every familiar turn, ready for all the varied emotions. Growing up within my extended family, knowing nothing else, or looking at everything else from the outside, I had no social sense, no sense of other societies; and as a result, reading (mainly English books) was difficult for me. I couldn’t enter worlds that were not like mine. I could get on only with the broadest kind of story, the fairytale. The world of this story of my father’s was something I knew. To the pastoral beauty of his other stories it added cruelty, and comedy that made the cruelty just bearable. It was my private epic.

  With the encouragement, and possibly the help, of my mother’s elder brother, my father printed the stories. That was another excitement. And then somehow, without any discussion that I remember, it seemed to be settled, in my mind as well as my father’s, that I was to be a writer.

  On the American base at the end of the street the flag was raised every morning and lowered every evening; the bugle sounded twice a day. The street was full of Americans, very neat in their shiny starched uniforms. At night the soundtrack of the open-air American cinema thundered away. The man in the yard next door slaughtered a goat in his back gallery every Sunday morning and hung the red carcase up, selling pieces. This slaughtering of the goat was a boisterous business; the man next door, to attract customers, made it appear like a celebration of the holiday. And every morning he called out to the man in the servant room in our yard: “Bogart!” Fantasy calling to fantasy on our street. And in the two rooms to which we had been reduced, our fantasy was dizzier. I was eleven; I had given no sign of talent; but I was to be a writer.

  On the window frame beside his bed, where he did his writing, my father had hung a framed picture of O. Henry, cut out from the jacket of the Hodder and Stoughton uniform edition. “O. Henry, the greatest short story writer the world has ever known.” All that I know of this writer to this day are the three stories my father read to me. One was “The Gift of the Magi,” a story of two poor lovers who, to buy gifts for each other, make sacrifices that render the gifts useless. The second story (as I remember it) was about a tramp who decides in a dream to reform and then wakes up to find a policeman about to arrest him. The third story—about a condemned man waiting to be electrocuted—was unfinished; O. Henry died while writing it. That unfinished story made an impression on me, as did the story of O. Henry’s own death. He had asked for the light to be kept on and had spoken a line from a popular song: “I don’t want to go home in the dark.”

  Poverty, cheated hopes and death: those were the associations of the framed picture beside my father’s bed. From the earliest stories and bits of stories my father had read to me, before the upheaval of the move, I had arrived at the conviction—the conviction that is at the root of so much human anguish and passion, and corrupts so many lives—that there was justice in the world. The wish to be a writer was a development of that. To be a writer as O. Henry was, to die in mid-sentence, was to triumph over darkness. And like a wild religious faith that hardens in adversity, this wish to be a writer, this refusal to be extinguished, this wish to seek at some future time for justice, strengthened as our conditions grew worse in the house on the street.

  Our last two years in that house—our last two years in the extended family—were very bad indeed. At the end of 1946, when I was fourteen, my father managed to buy his own house. By that time my childhood was over; I was fully made.

  THE WISH to be a writer didn’t go with a wish or a need actually to write. It went only with the idea I had been given of the writer, a fantasy of nobility. It was something that lay ahead, and outside the life I knew—far from family and clan, city, colony, Trinidad Guardian, negroes.

  In 1948 I won a Trinidad government scholarship. These scholarships were meant to give a man a prof
ession and they could last for seven years. I decided to use mine to do English at Oxford. I didn’t want a degree; I wanted only to get away; and I thought that in my three or four scholarship years at Oxford my talent would somehow be revealed, and the books would start writing themselves.

  My father had written little. I was aware now of the trouble he had finding things to write about. He had read little, was only a dipper—I never knew him to read a book through. His idea of the writer—as a person triumphant and detached—was a private composite of O. Henry, Warwick Deeping, Marie Corelli (of the Sorrows of Satan), Charles Dickens, Somerset Maugham, and J. R. Ackerley (of Hindoo Holiday). My own reading was not much better. My inability to understand other societies made nonsense of the Huxley and the D. H. Lawrence and the Evelyn Waugh I tried to read, and even of the Stendhal I had read at school. And I had written scarcely at all. If the O. Henry trick ending stood in the way of my father’s writing, Huxley and Lawrence and Waugh made me feel I had no material. But it had been settled that I was to be a writer. That was the career I was travelling to.

  I left Trinidad in 1950. It was five years later, in the BBC freelances’ room, that I thought to write of the shout of “Bogart!” That shout came from a tormented time. But that was not how I remembered it. My family circumstances had been too confused; I preferred not to focus on them; in my mind they had no sequence. My narrator, recording the life of his street, was as serene as I had been when we had first moved to Port of Spain with my father.

  At the end of the book my narrator left his street. I left them all and walked briskly towards the aeroplane, not looking back, looking only at my shadow before me, a dancing dwarf on the tarmac. That line, the last in the book, wrote itself. It held memories of the twelve years, no more, I had spent with my father. The movement of the shadows of trees and houses across the street—more dramatic to me than the amorphous shadows of Chaguanas—was one of the first things I had noticed in Port of Spain. And it was with that sudden churlishness, a sudden access of my own hysteria, that I had left my father in 1950, not looking back. I wish I had. I might have taken away, and might still possess, some picture of him on that day. He died miserably—back at the tormenting Guardian—three years later.

  To become a writer, that noble thing, I had thought it necessary to leave. Actually to write, it was necessary to go back. It was the beginning of self-knowledge.

  3

  IN 1977, after twenty-seven years, I saw Bogart again. He hadn’t been important in our family; he had always liked to hide; and for more than twenty years I had had no news of him. I had grown to think of him as a vanished person, one of the many I had left behind for good when I left Trinidad.

  Then I discovered that he too had left Trinidad, and not long after I had left, not long after I had done the sign for his tailoring shop in Carenage. He had gone to Venezuela. There he had been for all this time. As a child, considering his disappearances and returns, I had divined his dreams (because they were also partly mine) of sensual fulfillment in another land and another language. And then, in the story I had devised for him in one afternoon, I had cruelly made him a bigamist. He had been part of my luck as a writer. My ignorance of his true story had been part of that luck. I had been free to simplify and work fast.

  I was going now, in 1977, to spend some weeks in Venezuela. And when I passed through Trinidad I tried to get Bogart’s address. That wasn’t easy. He still apparently caused embarrassment to his close relations. And then there was some confusion about the address itself. The first address I was given was in the oil town of Maracaibo, in the west. The second was on the former pearl island of Margarita, three or four hundred miles to the east, on the Caribbean coast. That was like the old Bogart: a man on the move. He seemed, from this second address, to be in business in Margarita, as “international traders” or an “international trading corporation” or an “import-export corporation.”

  Venezuela was rich, with its oil. Trinidad was now also rich, with the oil that had been discovered off-shore. But when I was a child Trinidad was poor, even with the American bases; and Venezuela was a place to which people like Bogart tried to go.

  Many went illegally. In a fishing boat it was a passage of a few hours, no more than a drift with the strong current, across the southern mouth of the Gulf of Paria. In the mixed population of the villages in the Orinoco delta, far from authority, Trinidadians who were protected could pass. Some acquired Venezuelan birth certificates; so it happened that men whose grandfathers had come from India sank into the personalities, randomly issued by the migration brokers, of Spanish mulattoes named Morales or García or Ybarra.

  These men didn’t go only for the money. They went for the adventure. Venezuela was the Spanish language, South America: a continent. Trinidad was small, an island, a British colony. The maps in our geography books, concentrating on British islands in the Caribbean, seemed to stress our smallness and isolation. In the map of Trinidad, the map which I grew to carry in my head, Venezuela was an unexplained little peninsula in the top left-hand corner.

  True knowledge of geography, and with it a sense of historical wonder, began to come sixteen years after I had left Trinidad, when for two years I worked on a history of the region. For those two years—reading in the British Museum, the Public Record Office, the London Library—I lived with the documents of our region, seeking to detach the region from big historical “over-views,” trying only to understand how my corner of the New World, once indeed new, and capable of developing in any number of ways, had become the place it was.

  I saw the Gulf of Paria with the eyes of the earliest explorers and officials: I saw it as an aboriginal Indian lake, busy with canoes, sometimes of war. To those Indians, crossing easily back and forth, Trinidad was Venezuela in small. There was a mighty Caroni river in Venezuela; there was a small Caroni, a stream, in Trinidad. There was a Chaguaramas in Trinidad; there was a Chaguaramas in Venezuela.

  Trinidad sat in the mouth of the Orinoco, beyond the “drowned lands” of the delta that Sir Walter Raleigh saw: now a refuge for people from the mainland, now a base for attack. To the Spaniards Trinidad guarded the river that led to El Dorado. When that fantasy faded, all that province of El Dorado—Trinidad and Guiana and the drowned lands—was left to bush. But the Indians were ground down. One day in the British Museum I found out about the name of my birthplace Chaguanas.

  Raleigh’s last, lunatic raid on “El Dorado” had taken place in 1617. Eight years later the Spaniards were settling accounts with the local Indians. On 12 October 1625 the King of Spain wrote to the Governor of Trinidad: “I asked you to give me some information about a certain nation of Indians called Chaguanes, who you say are above one thousand and of such bad disposition that it was they who led the English when they captured the town. Their crime hasn’t been punished because forces were not available for this purpose and because the Indians acknowledge no master save their own will. You have decided to give them a punishment. Follow the rules I have given you; and let me know how you get on.”

  I felt that I was the first person since the seventeenth century to whom that document had spoken directly. A small tribe, one among hundreds—they had left behind only their name. The Chaguanas I knew was an Indian country town, Indian of India. Hindi-speaking Indians had simplified the name into a Hindu caste name, Chauhan. It had its Hindu districts and its Muslim districts; it had the religious and caste rivalries of India. It was where my mother’s father had bought many acres of cane-land and rice-land and where he had built his Indian-style house. It was also where, from a reading of my father’s stories of village life, I had set my fantasy of home, my fantasy of things as they were at the very beginning: the ritualized day, fields and huts, the mango tree in the yard, the simple flowers, the lighting of fires in the evening.

  Trinidad I knew too well. It was, profoundly, part of my past. That past lay over the older past; and I couldn’t, when I was in Trinidad again, see it as the setting of the aboriginal
history I knew and had written about. But I had written about Venezuela and its waters without having seen them. The historical Venezuela—as it existed in my imagination—was vivid to me. And, when I went on to Venezuela from Trinidad in 1977, all that I saw as the aeroplane tilted away from the island was fresh and hallowed, the land and sea of the earliest travellers: the great froth-fringed stain of the Orinoco on the Gulf, the more local, muddier stains of small rivers from the Paria Peninsula (the unexplained peninsula in the left-hand corner of the school map of Trinidad). In 1604, sixteen years after the defeat of the Spanish Armada he had led against England, the Duke of Medina Sidonia had been sent here by the King of Spain, to report on the best way of defending this coast and especially the salt-pans of Araya (into which the Paria Peninsula ran, after 150 miles). Such a task! (And, when I got to know it later, such a desolation still, Araya, on its Caribbean coast: thorn trees and cactus in a hummocked red desert beside the murky sea, life only in the long, slack waves, the vultures in the sky, and the pelicans, all beak and belly and wings, undisturbed on their rock-perches.)

  To land at La Guaira airport, on the Venezuelan coast, was to come down to a different country. Scores of bulldozers were levelling the red earth to extend the airport. There were yachts in the marina beside the big resort hotel. The highway that led to Caracas in its inland valley had for stretches been tunnelled through the mountains.

  Venezuela was rich. But in its oil economy many of its people were superfluous. The restaurants of the capital were Spanish or Italian, the hotels American. The technicians in the industrial towns that were being built in the interior were European; people spoke of a second Spanish conquest. Oil money—derived from foreign machines, foreign markets—fed a real-estate boom in the towns. Agriculture was neglected; it was like something from the poor past. The descendants of the people who had been brought in long ago to restock the Indian land, to work the plantations, were no longer needed. Still pure negro in the cocoa areas (fragrant with the scent of vanilla), old mulatto mixtures elsewhere, they had been abandoned with the plantations. And to travel out to the countryside was to see—on a continental scale—a kind of peasant dereliction that had vanished from Trinidad: shacks and a few fruit trees in small yards, rough little road-side stalls offering fruit from the yards.