A Writer's People: Ways of Looking and Feeling

by V. S. Naipaul

  Religion in the early poems is as much a feature as race, and has a similar kind of simplicity. The island is like the Patmos of St. John; and that is a surprising and beautiful conceit. But it is something else when after the great Castries fire Christ walks in the smoking Caribbean sea: this is like the flambeau-lit street-corner preacher of the islands with his white-clad women followers, promising damnation below the shop eaves. The great fire shakes the poet’s faith, but only for a few lines; faith returns when he sees the new leaves on the hill, a flock of new faiths; it is as simple as that. The harder questions of belief are left alone; and the reader can feel that without religion, without that pool of enthusiasm, that idea of a whole world of love, balancing the pain of the black idea, the plantation New World island, with an unmentionable past, would be utterly bare, a spiritual emptiness that would be hard to write about.

  The poet must surely have felt the spiritual emptiness about him. That is probably why, in the early poems, the landscape is unpeopled. It would have been a great problem for the poet, knowing how to go on; and it explains why in 1955, six years after his first book, he seemed (from the material he sent to Caribbean Voices) to have come to a kind of halt. The spiritual emptiness was a problem for everyone from the plantation territories who wanted to write. Many were destroyed or silenced by it.

  Walcott found his own way around that emptiness. He began to fit his island material to older, foreign work. He might take an old Spanish play, say, and re-work it as a local play: Shakespeare’s method. You could say that this kind of borrowing—at its simplest, turning St. Lucia for a few lines into the island of Patmos—gave a solidity to the setting which it didn’t have before. It would also have, profoundly, falsified. There is a specificity to writing. Certain settings, certain cultures, have to be written about in a certain way. These ways are not interchangeable; you cannot write about Nigerian tribal life as you would write about the English Midlands. Shakespeare when he borrowed was exchanging like against like. It is the better and truer part of the labour of a writer from a new place to work out what his material is, to wring substance from the unwritten-about and unregarded local scene.

  Walcott was lucky in his early audience. They were middle-class people mainly of mixed race who had begun to have some idea of the spiritual emptiness in which they lived. They would not have been able to define that emptiness. Yet it was there, all around them. The beaches of which they were proud, almost as of a personal possession, might have given them an idea of the beginning of the emptiness. If they could have looked at those beaches in another way they might have seen the past in a simple picture: New World islands scraped clean of the aborigines Columbus and his successors saw. This was history, though, far off, not to be looked at too closely, not to be felt in the bones. The unhappy middle-class people would have thought mainly of the later colonial set-up and their place within it, the secure but petty civil-service jobs, the small pay, the general absence of grandeur, the need always to look outside for anything—a film, a book, the life of a great man—that might lift a man out of himself.

  The competing empires of Europe had beaten fiercely on these islands, repeopled after the aborigines had gone, turned into sugar islands, places of the lash, where fortunes could be made, sugar the new gold. And at the end, after slavery and sugar, Europe had left behind nothing that could be called a civilisation, no great architecture, no idea of local beauty, no memory of style and splendour (the splendour created by the sugar wealth would have occurred elsewhere, in Europe), only the smallest small change of civility. Everything that remained was touched with the pain of slavery: the brutalities of the popular language, and the prejudices of race: nothing a man would wish to call his own. And when in the 1940s middle-class people with no home but the islands began to understand the emptiness they were inheriting (before black people claimed it all) they longed for a local culture, something of their very own, to give them a place in the world.

  Walcott in 1949 more than met their need. He sang the praises of the emptiness; he gave it a kind of intellectual substance. He gave their unhappiness a racial twist which made it more manageable.

  Then he went stale on them. He exhausted the first flush of his talent; nothing more seemed to be coming; and he became ordinary, a man in need of a job.

  In time he began to work on the Trinidad Sunday Guardian, doing a weekly cultural article. He was too good for the job; and in 1960, when I was in Trinidad on a visit, he told me that someone had said to him, “Walcott, you’ve been promising for too damn long, you know.” He told it as a joke, but it wouldn’t have been a joke for him. From this situation he was rescued by the American universities; and his reputation there, paradoxically, then and later, was not that of a man whose talent had been all but strangled by his colonial setting. He became the man who had stayed behind and found beauty in the emptiness from which other writers had fled: a kind of model, in the eyes of people far away.

  • • •

  OTHER WRITERS FROM THE REGION were not so lucky. I will mention three: Edgar Mittelholzer, Samuel Selvon, and my own father.

  Edgar Mittelholzer, born more than twenty years before Walcott, in 1909 in Guyana, had a hard, wandering early life. His well-received novel, A Morning at the Office, now vanished, was published in London by the Hogarth Press in 1950, the year after Walcott’s 25 Poems was privately published in Barbados. Like Walcott, Mittelholzer was a mulatto, of old mixed race; but, unlike Walcott, he didn’t put himself on the black side. Mittelholzer made a great play with his name, sometimes spelling it with the umlaut on the “o.” Sometimes he spoke in a general way of a Dutch ancestor, sometimes (towards the end, like a man who had done research on the subject) he spoke of a Swiss ancestor who migrated to Guyana in the eighteenth century. Some of this would, of course, have been true.

  The office of Edgar’s novel was in Trinidad, the characters a gallery of racial stereotypes, quite shocking to local people; but that was Edgar’s Dutch or Swiss way in these matters. Two novels later, Edgar moved to the publishing house of Secker and Warburg. It pleased him then to find that he was not too much darker than his publisher Fred Warburg; it was an unexpected way of judging a publisher. He had begun to write slave-plantation melodramas (race and sex and the whip) set in Guyana, and he wrote as a planter and a Dutchman. His books, Children of Kaywana, Kaywana Blood, The Harrowing of Hubertus, had a kind of vogue. But it was or became a crowded field, and Edgar’s books have now disappeared.

  Every writer of the region has to find a way of going on, of not drying up, of overcoming the limitations of the place. Walcott borrowed Spanish plays and did them over with local characters. The plantation novel was Edgar’s way. It gave him room; he liked the idea of the large narrative. He couldn’t stay with the quiet Trinidad material of A Morning at the Office. That novel, with its simplicities, had said all that he wanted to say, from his special point of view, about the colony. And Edgar might have said that the simplicities, his way of dealing only with the externals of things, matched the setting and the material. There was no depth to go into.

  Some time in early 1965—I had long moved away from Caribbean Voices and the BBC Caribbean Service and from radio generally—Edgar sent me a little green-covered booklet that had been printed in Trinidad in the late 1940s. The booklet, closely printed and only a few pages long, contained work that had been read to a local writing group. This writing group was the idea of an Irish judge who had arrived in the colony not long before. He provided the drink and the encouragement and would have paid for the printing of the little booklet. There was a story by Edgar in this booklet; a piece by George Lamming, I believe; and a story by my father.

  I knew the story well. My father had written it in painful circumstances. We had been reduced at the time to living in one room in my grandmother’s house in Port of Spain. It was quite a short story, but I remember how my father had laboured on the writing. The material was precious to him, part of his small store as a writer: an accoun
t (which he would have had from his mother) of the wretchedness that attended his birth: his mother chased away by his father and going in her destitution, perhaps walking all the way, to have her child at her mother’s. Everyone in this story of 1906 was very poor indeed, unprotected, close to helplessness, no one truly a villain. My father handled this background of poverty and heartache in his own way. He overlaid it with the beauty of the old ritual that had to follow the birth of a child. This would have made it easier for him to write; yet at the same time he must often have thought (though he said nothing) that more than forty years after the time of his story he was still unaccommodated in the world.

  The booklet was precious to me. I kept it longer than I should. I suppose I had some idea of having it copied, not as easy then as it became later, and didn’t know how to go about it. And then there came a furious letter from Edgar. He wanted the booklet back. He was quite enraged. He couldn’t be denied. I sent the booklet back with an apology.

  Not long after there came a shocking piece of news. Edgar, who lived in a southern suburb of London, had one day soaked himself with petrol and set himself alight, like a Buddhist monk in Vietnam. I never got to know what had driven him to this, or how he had got the courage and resource. There was a story that he had become a Buddhist, which I would have thought the most difficult thing for an outsider to be; but I don’t know how true that was and what it meant, or how it could have converted into the final horror. In this horror there was yet so much awful method: going through his papers, putting them in order (or perhaps wishing only to destroy them), going to the trouble of sending me the green booklet, and then remembering waspishly to ask for it back.

  A writer lives principally for his writing. Edgar, whatever might be said about his work, was a dedicated writer. And I wonder whether an idea at the back of his mind during those last days of pain and resolve wasn’t that he had got as far as he could with his writing.

  Samuel Selvon was a Trinidad Indian. He was born in 1923. He didn’t come (like my own family, say) from the more rooted rural Indian community, where an India of sorts could be said to survive. Selvon’s Indians were semi-urban people shaken loose from the rural community, and losing their traditions fast. After various wartime jobs Selvon joined the Trinidad Guardian and for a time did columns for the evening paper under the name of Michael Wentworth, very suave, very smooth, more like a disguise than a pen-name. In 1950 (four or five months before me) he went to England. In 1951 he published his first novel, A Brighter Sun, a simple reconstruction of wartime Trinidad life for a semi-urban Indian. It is hard to be the first with any kind of writing, and Selvon in this book burnt up his simple material.

  Trinidad was the subject best suited to Selvon’s talent. In far-off London it faded, or he lost touch with it. He had trouble with his second book, An Island Is a World. When at last it came it was wordy and absurd, full of poor man’s philosophizing about the beauty of the simple life in a simple setting (Selvon denying in this way the purpose of his own migration to England in 1950). He continued in much the same vein in the Caribbean Voices studio, where we had asked him to record an interview. The prosiness and piety and self-regard were intolerable. I was young, not yet twenty-three. I heard myself saying, like a pompous Oxford don, “Most laudable.” That was the don, and it would have passed. Then, however, I went on with something of my very own: “But getting back to your wretched book—” The words had slipped out. Apology was useless (in spite of Sam’s forgiving sweet smile). We were recording on disc, and editing was not easy. The interview had to be scrapped. Forty years later I saw the offending book in an outside stand of the Gloucester Road Bookshop. It was being offered for five pence. I bought it, in a modest act of expiation, and put it on my shelves.

  Selvon would have fallen silent if he hadn’t alighted on the subject of the black West Indian immigrant in London. He was good with the popular black language; he could make it sing; and in his attractive natural way he did picaresque tales (The Lonely Londoners, 1956) which seemed drawn from life but were in fact formal, with their own rules, like Damon Runyon’s New York stories or like W. W. Jacob’s night-watchman stories from London’s old dockland. There was real comedy; the inventive things Selvon did with the Caribbean English language (he did not merely record it) should at least have earned him a place in the anthologies. But this new material, like the old Trinidad material, was limited. There were the same black characters, it seemed, and variations on the same joke (black people knocking hopelessly on white doors in London); and then characters and jokes were overtaken by social change in the black community and in England itself. Eventually Selvon left London and went to Canada. I imagine there would have been some kind of job or subvention there; but for him as a writer this third home would have been a desolation. He died in 1994. He left behind no solid body of work.

  My father, Seepersad Naipaul, the third of the writers I wish to mention here, did only a handful of stories. He was born in 1906 and died in 1953. Like Walcott and Selvon many years later, he worked for the Trinidad Guardian. Unlike them, he never got away. He started as a country correspondent in 1928 or 1929, specializing in Indian matters, became a general writer, and then with two short breaks stayed with the paper until he died. He began to write stories in 1939, but it was only in the last three years of his life that he found an audience, and modest financial reward, in Henry Swanzy and Caribbean Voices. Until then his serious writing was done for himself and out of personal need.

  He wrote about Trinidad Indian life. He saw it as self-contained; that was how it would have appeared to someone born in 1906. Unlike Selvon he didn’t see the races flowing together, with the Indian side, the language and the ceremonies, gradually being washed away. In my father’s early stories the other races do not appear; the Presbyterian head teacher is Indian; so is the missionary. Old ritual is important. It heals pain; it brings together broken families again. This exercise of benign ritual is one of the functions of the village community. My father sees it all as whole, though in a generation or two it will go.

  He is possibly the first writer of the Indian diaspora, the first to write of its transplanted people, unprotected peasants, seeking as if by a necessary instinct to recreate the society they left behind, and to a large extent succeeding. It is actually a big, Willa Cather–like subject—my father boldly pushes the story back to 1906, the year of his birth—but it is an Indian subject, and India will never wish to know its history, literary or otherwise, and no one else will. He is nonetheless more of a pioneer than the other writers I have mentioned, and he is more original. To do what he did called for fine knowledge of the old ways, and a gift of modern expression. No one else could have done what he did; and it was all done, a great labour, as I can testify, without recognition.

  My father damaged his material when he tried to fit it to what he thought of as “story”: the trick ending, say. It was his pathetic wish to get his far-away stories into the magazines in England or the United States, and he thought the trick ending would help. So it happened that in the actual writing he could aim high and then aim low. Because he could think of so few trick endings, and because “story” eluded him, he felt he had little material, and he worked and re-worked the few things he did finish. In fact, if he could have taken a step back, he would have seen that there were more things to write about. If he could have taken a step back from his stories about the beauty of old ritual, and considered the colonial setting, other ideas might have come to him. But probably that step back into the bad colonial setting would have caused him pain, and pain was something he didn’t wish to face in his writing.

  I often asked him to write about his childhood. I wanted to know. He was a fatherless poor boy farmed out among relations; and from time to time he gave me comic glimpses of that childhood. But he never wrote about it, and he never gave me anything like a clear account. So I never got to know. If we had lived in a place where there was a tradition of writing, the confessional autobiography mi
ght have been one of the forms, and my father might not have been so shy of doing his own. But there was no audience for that kind of writing or any other; in a place like Trinidad, with all its past cruelties, to write of personal pain would have been to invite mockery. There is a dreadful story to be told about this kind of mockery. In 1945, when newsreels of concentration-camp sufferers were shown in Port of Spain cinemas, black people in the cheaper seats laughed and shouted. Perhaps behaviour like this—and not always fear or sorrow—attended the bad punishments of slave times.

  There was a tradition of complaint in Negro poetry, like the tradition of the blues. It seemed right that this should be so. I was also aware for a long time at school, from books we came upon, about Martiniquan poetry and the like, that this poetry was written about in a special way: not judged as verse so much as expounded, with long quotations establishing the poet’s grief or anger. This was the tradition into which the young Walcott was received.

  There was no tradition of Indian writing or colonial writing or confessional writing into which my father might have been received. And all the pain of his early life, the material that in another society might have been his making as a writer, remained locked away.

  TWO

  An English Way of Looking

  THIS WILL NOT be an easy chapter for me to do. I got to know Anthony Powell in 1957. He was fifty-two, at the peak of his reputation, and I was twenty-five and awkward, poor in London, with one book published. For a reason I couldn’t understand—there was every kind of difference between us—he offered his friendship. It took me some time to believe in this friendship, but it was real, and it continued until 1994, when he was old and bent and walked slowly. He said goodbye then, at the front door of his house in Somerset, and he said so with a certain ceremony that let me know that this was to be our last meeting. So indeed it was, though he continued to see other people.