The City at Three P.M.

by LaSalle, Peter;

  Because maybe, just maybe, there is an entity in this world thoroughly magnificent and thoroughly indescribable, and it’s called Under the Volcano.

  2005, FROM TIN HOUSE

  WORLD LIT—

  MY EARLY CLASSES

  1. JAMAICA, 1976

  2. CAMEROON, 1979

  3. IRELAND, 1971

  1. JAMAICA, 1976: HOW FAR THE POET’S WRIT RUNS

  The actor Sir Alec Guinness once said jokingly that he struck from his travel list any country in which his friend Graham Greene had set a novel. In Guinness’s opinion, Greene’s nose for political discord was keen and if trouble already hadn’t erupted there, it would soon enough. The Quiet American by Greene is probably the best proof of the theory. In the novel, Greene fathomed and foretold, with his examination of one personal case, the tragedy of American involvement in Vietnam a decade before most future protesters even realized it was happening.

  During a trip to Jamaica in January, I kept thinking of Guinness’s observation on Greene. The week before I left, I had finished reading V. S. Naipaul’s Guerrillas and submitted a review to a newspaper in Vermont where I live. I was preoccupied with plans for my own coming trip. So the logical way to start the review was to say that the book held special interest for me because I was about to visit a country which appeared very similar to the lush, unnamed Caribbean island that is the setting for Guerrillas. I didn’t know then the full implications of the statement.

  V. S. Naipaul is Trinidadian. According to some reviewers, the story of the novel, in which a young woman is raped and viciously murdered, can be traced to the killing in 1972 of a British woman who became involved with a local pimp turned black activist in Trinidad. But, in a way, the fictional territory could just as well be Jamaica, the other large independent Caribbean island that is still part of the Commonwealth. Naipaul does make an effort to disclaim Trinidad’s being the setting by having the characters talk about having left Trinidad to settle on the novel’s island. In fact, the novel’s island shares much with Jamaica. A major industry is bauxite mining, as in Jamaica; cricket is the great pastime (the avidly followed West Indies test matches with Australia were going on last month); Kingston-born reggae rock music blares on street corners, again as in Jamaica.

  One purpose of my visit, besides escaping the northern New England deep freeze and also doing some research for fiction, was to stop by at Kingston recording studios to gather background material for an article on reggae. A cab ride to one studio took me through the heart of the quarter of hungry children, open sewage, and corrugated tin shacks that is the West Kingston slum of Trench Town. I remembered detailed descriptions of such areas in Naipaul’s novel. I myself was staying at a guesthouse in admittedly posh Liguanea at the foot of the Blue Mountains. It is a locale not unlike the Ridge in Guerrillas, with its neat British-style bungalows and its location above the congested city center.

  In Naipaul’s novel, a member of a slum neighborhood gang is shot, and deadly rioting begins. Two politically liberal white visitors—Roche from South Africa and Jane from London, the woman eventually murdered by the novel’s black-power leader and head of a failing commune, Jimmy Ahmed—watch the slum burn from their vantage point of the Ridge. A few days after I landed in Kingston, these were the headlines on the front page of the Kingston Daily Gleaner: “Man Shot Dead, Four Persons Wounded, Hundreds Flee Homes...Fires Rage in Rema Area. Firemen Retreat Under Attack by Armed Gangs. Blockades Hold Up Police, Soldiers Entering the Area.” The trouble started with confrontations between local youth gangs. They were said to be politically at odds as radical supporters of either the rival People’s National Party (the majority party) or the Jamaica Labour Party. But before long, the police and army seemed their common enemy. In related violence, a constable on duty at the United States Embassy was shot. A BBC broadcaster says in Naipaul’s novel, “.the disturbances were sparked off by radical youth groups protesting against unemployment and what they see as continued foreign domination of the economy.. ”

  I took the train up to Montego to spend the last several days of my stay in the resort town on the beautiful northern coast. I bought the Gleaner every morning to read the reports from the other end of the island. The headlines kept tabs on the deaths of policemen and gunmen. There were photographs of some people fleeing amid the rubble and other people looting. In Guerrillas, Roche tells Jane, “Yes. One day there’s going to be an accident. I hope it doesn’t get to that. It’s so odd. When you’re out in the country, the old estates, and you see country people walking to church or rocking in their hammocks or drinking in their little bars, you don’t think it’s that kind of a country.... People would be frightened if they know how easily it comes.”

  In Jamaica, I got that feeling of “how easily it comes”—in this case, how a developing country could find itself suddenly on the brink of outright fighting and confused civil war. Or, as another of Naipaul’s characters says when he brings up the possibility of such fighting leading to assassinations, “It’s going to be South America for a couple of generations.”

  The uprising in Guerrillas ends when soldiers without uniforms, dropped from U.S.-marked helicopters, brutally quell it to protect foreign investment in the bauxite mines. The trouble in Kingston that began in January ended—at least for a while—without outside intervention.

  Shelley was a dreamer indeed to call poets “the unacknowledged legislators of the world.” However, that doesn’t mean that we should continue to ignore some of the best minds of any generation—the poets, playwrights, and novelists—when their fictions offer some of the best political analysis of the times. Naipaul shows in Guerrillas that he understands enough about the roots of Caribbean volatility to create a fictional explosion essentially identical to an actual one that happened several months after the book appeared. I suppose one could hope (and it seems a farfetched hope) that the real legislators—maybe local Caribbean leaders, bauxite industry representatives, and even American State Department people—would avail themselves to Naipaul’s knowledge. His novel, finally pessimistic, offers no solutions, but he wisely probes where the uneasiness lies, socially and economically.

  I can’t help but believe that our painful involvement in Vietnam might have had a different character and a different outcome if more of those supposedly best and brightest administration members of the time had taken to heart Graham Greene’s convincing story of how one idealistic, concerned young American in Vietnam in the 1950s went sadly wrong in his concern.

  1976, FROM THE NATION

  2. CAMEROON, 1979: BUMA KOR & CO.

  I received a formal invitation.

  It came to me because a poet friend in Yaoundé had mentioned to Buma Kor that there was an American in the Cameroonian capital researching African literature and interviewing writers (I’d already conducted several such tape-recorded sessions). The card was the variety of summons that could cost a bit of money here—printing rates are high in this African country and there are heavy taxes on paper imports.

  On the occasion of the inaugural opening of the

  BILINGUAL BOOKSHOP

  The Management and Staff of

  BUMA KOR & CO.

  cordially invite the presence of________

  to their premises at Mvog-Ada, behind the Dispensary

  to witness the official

  Cutting of the Symbolic Ribbon

  at 3 p.m. on Saturday 13th July, 1979

  R.S.V.P.

  Next to it was the same invitation in French. The bilingualism was important. The United Republic of Cameroon in Central Africa was formed from French and British territories, a rare such union on the continent. True, the Francophone section is larger and the French language predominates. But the first article of the nation’s constitution proclaims French and English as the two official tongues (there are just too many tribal languages for any of them to be official) and all secondary school students study both. Buma Kor’s shop would be the first totally bilingual outlet for bo
oks in Yaoundé. Established by the French, the inland capital is cut out of the mountain jungles, a sprawling city of tin-roofed houses and a central cluster of stately buildings left over from the colonial regime, plus a few new high-rises for hotels, government ministries, and banks.

  I arrived early that Saturday afternoon, to give myself plenty of time to find my way around Mvog-Ada. It turned out to be a noisy neighborhood on a hill peppered with bars and record shops. Chickens pecked at mounded garbage heaps; people stood on corners and waited for the sputtering Toyota ramassage (group pick-up) taxis, the way everybody always seemed to be waiting for taxis in Yaoundé. The day itself was one of the absolutely brightest sunshine, with a gusty breeze kicking up the dust and rattling the clumps of banana palms growing everywhere.

  Buma Kor & Co. was in a freshly whitewashed building at an intersection of streets that combined patches of asphalt and rutted red dirt in just about equal part. A yellow satin ribbon as wide as your hand flapped across one open side of the airy shop. At the front of the other open side, a table had been set up and a woman was arranging bottles and hors d’oeuvres on the white tablecloth. Some guests were already browsing among the shelves within, waiting for the ceremonies to begin. I entered from the side sans the ribbon and joined them.

  I was soon shaking hands with Buma Kor, a smiling, goateed young man in a rather too big suit of French cut. He told me he was a native of Bamenda in the English-speaking part of the country. He explained that besides selling books he would publish titles under a Buma Kor imprint—in fact, there were already three books to its credit. The publishing house would operate out of the bookshop premises and it, too, would be fully bilingual. Personable and energetic, Buma Kor struck me as a natural businessman. He is also a poet himself and—according to information I received later—a former preacher. What better credentials for heading a successful publishing venture?

  Looking around on my own, I saw that Buma Kor had stocked a good selection of books in French, including the literary series put out by CLE, a well-known Cameroonian publisher of the works of Central Africa’s poets and novelists. The offerings in English were more spotty: two or three Shakespeare plays in paperback, some novels in the Heinemann African Writers Series, and a large rack of decidedly racy fare, several books here by a certain Rosie Dixon— typical was Confessions of a Baby-Sitter, a garter-belted blond teenage beauty toting a feather duster shown on the cover, ready for sport—that attracted more than their fair share of pre-ceremony browsers. In the small textbook section, the Effective English series offered by Evans Publishers, of London and Lagos, Nigeria, caught my eye. The uniform jacket design had the expected photos of African students engaging in various scholarly pursuits, at desks or in the lab—and also, high above all the rest, a long and sleek Mercedes automobile. Were the Evans people offering this contemporary African power symbol as an incentive for high schoolers? Which is to say, if you study hard, you, too, can become a high-living businessman or politico, reminding everyone with a flashy car that you are unquestionably a cut above the common crowd? (Note the placement of the Mercedes at the very top of the cover.) The thought somewhat saddened me. Buma Kor’s shop also stocked a supply of tennis and ping-pong balls.

  My friend arrived, the polite and unassuming Cameroonian poet Ernest Alima. He pointed out some of the notables. The man in the blue suit was the Chancellor of the University, and the man in the gray suit was the Minister of Post and Telecommunications. Also on hand were the Minister of State for Territorial Administration and the Minister of Culture and Information, the latter accompanied by an entourage of his deputies. A skeptic might have concluded that with all the current government emphasis on promoting bilingualism and with complete adherence to that doctrine a top priority of the powerful (or “strong-arm,” to some) Cameroonian president, Ahmadou Ahidjo, the bigwigs maybe considered this a good place to be seen. But I like to think that these government types, and the professors and writers, came simply to wish the very best of luck to Buma Kor as he started out in the book business in their city—they came to tell him that they were behind him in his sales and publishing pursuits, that they felt his work would help the developing country develop something besides the usual cash crops and even military meddling for export.

  The guests assembled in the street, before the front steps, where a microphone and speakers had been set up. The sound system didn’t work. The huge speakers of the record shop across the way were working exceptionally well, however, and I feared the ceremonies would be hopelessly competing with tambour drums and pinging electric guitars, the African pop singers melodically wailing. But suddenly there was silence—the record shop proprietor obviously deduced from the look of the clientele that a big event was going on.

  The dedication speech was given by the Assistant Director of the Regional Book Promotion Center of Africa, an organization funded by several Sub-Saharan African countries. (Actually, Buma Kor works for the center, and, as he told me, he would be tending to his duties as head of Buma Kor & Co. mostly during the evenings.) The man spoke in French and couldn’t be heard too well even without the music. Beside him, waiting patiently, was a pretty little girl of ten or so dressed up in a red frock, her hair intricately braided. She held a pair of long scissors on a white porcelain plate.

  The speaker emphasized that Buma Kor was certainly well qualified, though he prudently cautioned that one shouldn’t expect success too soon. Then he quoted the slogan Buma Kor was using for his publishing house, “Our Literature Is Not Dead” (an observation originally applied specifically to the literature of Anglophone Cameroon, where there are understandable worries of being overshadowed by the larger Francophone side, as Buma Kor had earlier explained to me). The little girl in red handed over the scissors, the satiny yellow band dropped gracefully in two, and Buma Kor announced, smiling, “We can now enter, and look, and”—he hesitated, smiling wider—“buy.” Laughter and cheers of approval.

  I guess I decided then that, yes, Buma Kor & Co. was definitely going to make it.

  How like a cocktail party for literati anywhere were the goings-on afterward. There was refreshment. The champagne went first and fast, then the good golden Harp lager brewed at the local Guinness plant, then the not-so-good Cameroonian brand beer, then the Fanta orange soda, then the not-so-good Cameroonian brand orange soda. The breeze had at last died down, replaced by a welcome stillness; the guests sipped and chatted in the equatorial sunlight so bright and strong you could almost touch it. A young novelist, whose first book had recently come out under the CLE imprint, complained to me that the publisher had not given him a second look at the proofs. No, he said, he couldn’t really explain what his novel was about, as I felt amiss for even asking—a novelist should never be able to flatly explain what a novel is about. A university prof who had joined us spotted a lovely actress from the national theater group, and he politely—yet rapidly—excused himself, to try to intercept her and chat her up. A noisy, heavyset man in sunglasses, a floor-length powder-blue boubou, and an embroidered skullcap came up to me and made sure I knew that he was the Director of the Regional Book Promotion Center. In an authoritative baritone, he informed me that he would have delivered the dedication speech himself and not delegated it to his assistant if it hadn’t been for another very important engagement, which meant his arriving late. A scruffy guy lugging a suitcase-sized “portable” radio/ tape player wandered over from where he must have been browsing in the record shop across the street and, with the graceful cheek of any determined crasher, tried to talk his way into a free drink. He had no luck, having to settle for a purchased beer at the open-air La Pirogue bar next door.

  That evening and all day Sunday, the national radio (Cameroon has no TV yet) broadcast news of the opening. When the national daily newspaper came out on Monday, it carried a couple of stories with photos. In a small country like Cameroon even the launch of a bookshop rated headlines, and there was no denying this particular event represented a true cultural
milestone for this wonderful emerging nation, in Buma Kor & Co.’s mission of bilingualism, if nothing else.

  As for me, an appreciative visitor from very far away, I couldn’t remember when I had spent a more thoroughly delightful afternoon.

  1980, FROM WORLDVIEW MAGAZINE

  3. IRELAND, 1971: ABOUT CHRISTY BROWN

  Christy Brown’s novel of the bittersweet life of a boy growing up in the Dublin backstreets in the early 1940s, Down All the Days, not only was a bestseller on both sides of the Atlantic, but has been labeled by many critics as a surely lasting piece of literature. And everyone knows that lately the two seldom go hand in hand.

  Christy is an accomplished painter as well, and this summer he’ll take a bundle of his oils, most of them depicting the striking natural beauty of the rugged West of Ireland, on a tour of European exhibitions.

  Not resting on his laurels, Christy is already well into a second novel. It’s set in America, and hopefully it will become the middle installment in a projected trilogy, of which he has mapped out the entirety in his head. And don’t forget the volume of poems scheduled for publication this spring or the play he is hard at work on that was commissioned by the national Abbey Theatre of Dublin, which is certainly the highest honor that can be paid to any playwright in Ireland, a country of master playwrights.

  Oh, yes, there’s probably something else that should be added here to this success story, though Christy doesn’t particularly like to have critics harping on it all the time—he has suffered since birth from cerebral palsy. It has left him with the full use of only one limb, his left foot, with which he both typewrites all his manuscripts with the toes—using an old electric Smith Corona, the bulky, well-worn beige contraption set on the floor—and holds his artist’s brushes. He has never had a day of formal education in his thirty-eight years, but get to know him a bit and you’ll learn that his reading background challenges that of the best literature professors anywhere.