A Way in the World

by V. S. Naipaul

  He said, “They didn’t treat people well.” Then he went back to his own thoughts. “You couldn’t go away and write that Butler was a crazy black preacher. That was what the oilfields people were saying. Perhaps it’s the kind of thing you might write nowadays. I don’t know.

  “Let me tell you about something that happened not long after the burning of Charlie King. Butler had been arrested, and people were confused. Though I should tell you this: some of them were a little bit on a high after the Charlie King business, wanting things to go forward, even if they didn’t see where they were going. At the same time everyone was frightened. In fact, things were beginning to wind down pretty fast. You could feel that people were getting quieter in themselves.

  “There was a little gathering of Butler people one evening. Nothing to do with the strike this time. The opposite, in fact: this was to give people a chance to be together and drink a little rum and forget the trouble they were in.

  “We were in a small Trinidad wood house in the country somewhere. Black old wood, corrugated iron, gaps in the plank floors. Oil lamps. In spite of everything, the atmosphere was good. I made notes. Then I simply enjoyed myself. I had got to like the local rum. It was light and nice. And then—it was as if time had jumped—I became aware that the half-white people and the brown people and the one or two Indians had gone away, and that everybody in the little room was black, except for me.

  “Why did I feel that? Simple: they made me feel it. I knew a lot of those people very well. They knew where I stood, and once or twice in difficult situations with English officials I had been able to help them. But now the people around me were making racial jokes about me and they weren’t letting go of those jokes. This went on and on. They were like schoolboys. They were ganging up on me. I began to find it hard to keep on smiling. The room was full of big criss-crossing shadows from the oil lamps. The thought came to me that one of those black men might reach out and touch me in this new aggressive way, and then anything might happen. I might be the white Charlie King.

  “One of the men was called Lebrun. He was a Trinidadian, but he had grown up in Panama. His family had gone there to work on the Canal, just as the Grenadians had come to Trinidad to work on the oilfields. Lebrun was a communist of a kind you got in the thirties. I actually thought he was the most dangerous man around Butler. He was a fluent Spanish speaker and his business was to travel round Central America and the West Indies and West Africa and talk révolution. He knew how to talk to local people, and at the same time he was able to pitch everything he did and said at some very special people in Moscow or wherever who were his patrons. He was actually a very handsome man, very educated and polished.

  “In this dark little house now Lebrun began to taunt me sexually. I wasn’t ready for that at all. I was white: women came easily to me: that was what he was banging away at. Can you imagine?”

  After more than twenty years, the comment of Lebrun’s—the taunting, as Foster Morris saw it—still rankled, and when I looked at Foster Morris’s dim eyes, cobwebbed by the thin strands of dry hair falling over his forehead, the rather flat, wrinkled, pasty face, his air of withdrawal, I thought I could still see the emotional incompleteness that Lebrun had tried to play on.

  “The taunting got worse and worse. I thought I would have to leave. Lebrun began to say that black men lived with sexual deprivation. That was a pretty original thing for a black man to say in 1937, though it was strange to hear it from Lebrun. He was very good-looking and I’m sure he did very well that way. A strange idea came to me, with the rum and the surprise and with all those men so close to me: it was that Lebrun was really a white man, imprisoned in this other body. As soon as I thought that, I found words for it. Almost as soon as I began to speak the words, I thought I was making a big mistake. The words would have been good in the Oxford Union ten years before, but they were going to be terrible here. I said, ‘I’m sorry, Lebrun. I can’t kiss you and make you a prince.’

  “To my surprise, everybody laughed. It was a joke with a delayed charge, you might say, because the key word was missing. Some people caught on later than the others, and the laughter went on. The taunting stopped, people pulled away. I could breathe again, and it was all right. It was as though nothing had happened, and we were as we had always been. But I knew that something had happened. I knew I had been close to something nasty. And I knew that Lebrun would never forgive me.

  “That was something else you couldn’t write about. It may be that there are some things you can’t write about. I tried later to make a story of that episode. Once I set it in pre-war Berlin. It became too Isherwood. Then I set it in France, and Lehmann published it during the war. But the transposition was difficult. I was never happy with it. The thirties were a difficult time for a writer, and one of the big problems about going to a place like Trinidad was that black people were simply not a subject. No one was interested in the subtleties. I don’t think Graham managed it in his Liberian book—he didn’t know whether he was Somerset Maugham or Sanders of the River. Perhaps it’s easier now. Perhaps it will be easier in twenty years. I don’t know.

  “In Port of Spain, when they were talking down south about shooting niggers, there was a Potogee trade-union feller who had a moustache and smoked a pipe and tried to look like Stalin. You could do that in farce. But then you can’t recover and do something serious. You just become sentimental. Like Evelyn. In The Shadowed Livery I had to tone it down. I had to make the Stalin man more serious.”

  I HAD GONE to the lunch out of a sense of duty, out of a sentimental regard for the man who had appeared at such a bad moment in my life and set me right. I had expected a stiffish occasion with a much older man. But he had made it reasonably enjoyable. I was overwhelmed by his fluency and knowledge, the subtlety of some of the things he had said; and, unexpectedly, by the beauty and measure of his old-fashioned voice.

  But when I “played the newsreel back”—a metaphor I used in those days for the memory drill I instinctively practised (and had done since childhood) after every meeting: trying to remember words, gestures and expressions in correct sequence, to arrive at an understanding of the people I had been with and the true meaning of what had been said—when I played the newsreel back a few times, I began to feel that he had not spoken as spontaneously as I had thought.

  He had come prepared to defend the incompleteness (or the simplicity) of his Trinidad book, which at our first meeting he had appeared—so grandly, in my eyes—to dismiss. Perhaps that also contained a defence of his other work in the thirties and forties, which I didn’t know about.

  Later, still playing back the newsreel, I saw that, almost as an aspect of this defence of the things he had chosen not to do, there was with Foster Morris a final disapproval even of those writers—like Graham Greene—whom he appeared to admire.

  And then—how could I have missed it at the time?—I saw that though in his letter he had said that he had loved my book, and though no one could have been more courteous as a host, there had run right through our lunch a constant indirect criticism of what I had written.

  The book itself he had mentioned only as we were leaving the club. He said, “You have written a very funny book. What I like about it is that I can look through its surface and see some of the things I saw all those years ago. You know, the way you can train yourself to see through the surface of a trout stream, the sky, the clouds, the reflections.”

  A writer’s simile: perhaps he had prepared it, perhaps he had used it before. It struck a false note. But at the moment I thought it was his way of taking up something I had written in my letter. It was only some days later that I saw that, when it was added to the other things he had said, about farce and sentimentality, and the need to be serious about what was serious and wretched in the world, he was really putting me in my place.

  AND I DIDN’T actually mind. After four years I had come to the end of the way of writing I had arrived at as a result of the letter from Foster Morris:
the language discipline (increasingly a constriction), the comedy. Together they had given me confidence; but they had also given me a writing character I had begun to grow out of. With confidence I had begun to see that the comedy that had become my writing tone, the ability to make two or three jokes to the page, the jokeyness that was my double inheritance from my Trinidad background, however good, however illuminating, was also a way of making peace with a hard world; was on the other side of hysteria. This was true of the colonial society I was writing about; it was also true of my own position in London, which was full of uncertainty.

  Unwilled, this anxiety or hysteria, the deeper root of comedy, had become my subject. Both my language and writing personality had changed as a result. This had happened in the actual writing of a book I had been working on for about a year (the time of six-week books had gone) when I went to have lunch with Foster Morris.

  I was absolutely secure in this new book, and for the first time, since I had begun truly to write, felt the need for no one’s approval. I was weeks away from the end of the first draft, and was full of what I was carrying. I often wanted to say, as Foster Morris was talking (as I thought) about the problems of tone and tact in writing, “Yes, yes, I know exactly what you mean.” Once or twice I nearly told him about the new book I was close to finishing—so different from the street book I had sent him, and much closer to the kind of book of which he seemed to approve. I was held back only by the superstition that came to me just then that to talk about unfinished work was to run the risk of never finishing it.

  It was a good instinct. A little over two years later—after the book had been revised and handed in, and I had travelled abroad, and was deep in a new work about those travels—I sent him an early copy of the book I had been full of at our lunch. I reminded him in a letter of what he had said about farce and sentimentality and seriousness. And just as I had made an offering to him of the street book, so now I made an offering to him of this larger work.

  His reply was swift. It began: “I have looked at your new book. You have passed a stool. It is far prettier than Alan Sillitoe’s and those of recent young eminences …”

  I stopped reading, though his letter, typewritten, was long, as long as the one he had written six years before. I stopped reading, unwilling to allow any further word to fix itself on my consciousness, just as I might have stopped reading a poison-pen letter, one of those that came in small brown envelopes and were written on lined paper in a narrow’ cramped hand.

  I felt a fool to have sent the book to him. That was all. I felt no disappointment, no doubt, no rage; only something like relief, relief that I could set this disciple-guru relationship aside.

  But his letter had to be acknowledged. I wrote to his suburban address, saying that I was sorry he felt as he did, but that the book was still new enough for him to sell to Gaston. Gaston was a bookseller in Chancery Lane. He dealt mainly with libraries, and was a kind of patron of book reviewers. The basis of this reputation in the late fifties was that from known reviewers he bought any new book, regardless of its subject, publisher or saleability, for half the published price.

  It seemed a light enough reply, what I wrote about Gaston, but Foster Morris didn’t like it. Like Lebrun in Trinidad in 1937, I had touched a nerve. He wrote to say that he was getting by; he didn’t need Gaston. That, I thought, was the end of it. But two weeks later he wrote again. He had bought a ticket for a big dinner of some literary association. Now he found he couldn’t go, and he didn’t like the idea of wasting the ticket. Would I like it? If I did, I should telephone him at a particular number at a certain time.

  I telephoned. I said I would like to go to the dinner. I did so to let him know that I was indifferent to his abuse. On the telephone we talked only of the literary group. He said, in his beautiful, old-fashioned voice, that it was going to be very dull, full of suburban lion-hunters, but it might amuse me. It was as though his letter had been an aberration; that we were as we had been at the lunch. Then right at the end, before he put the phone down, he said, “I don’t like the idea of you being out of pocket.”

  The dinner card came, creased, smudged, as though it had been for some time in the fluff of a jacket pocket.

  Three or four days before the dinner I recognized the hand of Foster Morris in an anonymous review of my book. He had gone out of his way to make signals to me, to show his own knowledge of the background, his own attitude to the background. The review was full of abuse of the people I wrote about. To attempt comedy or profundity or universality about such people was absurd, the reviewer said; they were people of the estate barracks, living off the smell of an oil rag, sunk in superstition, without an intellectual life, without nobility or potential. This was the abuse of colonial days, the opposite of the attitude (and originality) of The Shadowed Livery. It took me back to the bad moment in the BBC lobby when he had asked me about the white-nigger man.

  I treated this review as I had treated his earlier letter. I didn’t read it to the end. But I went to the dinner. I went because I had said I would go; also, a little, for the experience. But I went mainly because I didn’t want him to think I was cast down by what he said about my book.

  So I went with his card and sat in the place marked with his name. The occasion was as dull as he had said it would be. I sat next to a middle-aged woman who was there because she had written a textbook of some sort. She was disappointed in me, too. This woman was obsessed with her family; that was where her mind and heart were, rather than at the dinner. We didn’t make much connected conversation. When I stood up to go I saw that I had sat all evening with my trouser zip undone.

  That was how my brush with Foster Morris ended. Then I realized that I hadn’t needed to go to the dinner at all.

  AN ANTHOLOGY (aimed at schools and universities) of contemporary criticism of the great nineteenth-century European novels, a Patrick Hamilton-like novel about Gerard’s Cross that didn’t get into paperback and sank, a scattering of small reviews—this was all that I noted about Foster Morris over the next five or six years. He was in his sixties now; there were fewer reminders of him. He became part of the past for me.

  At the end of 1967 I went to Antibes to interview Graham Greene for a London paper. The meetings with the writer were spread over two days. At one stage Greene talked of writers he had followed but who had then stopped writing or faded away. There were three such writers. Two were young; I had reviewed their work; they had tried to write Graham Greene novels.

  The third writer was Foster Morris. Just after the war he had published a novel that Greene thought was much better than his own England Made Me, published a few years before the war. The Foster Morris book was there on the shelves in Greene’s flat, part of his great collection.

  He took the book down and read without talking for a minute or two, with the expression of a man who was finding that memory had played him false. He said, as though addressing Foster Morris rather than me, “You see, you see.” And he read out a sentence from the Morris book: “The Easter drizzle persisted like remorse.”

  “Actually,” he said later, “he was a prodigy. At Oxford we thought him among the best. He was at Oxford when he was writing Seedtime.”

  The famous book was on the shelves. Greene took it down and showed it to me. Its yellow cloth binding had faded now to a very pale primrose.

  “The title seems tame now, but I loved it. It was full of meaning, full of ironies. It was from the Wordsworth line in The Prelude, ‘Fair seed-time had my soul.’

  “It was a running-away book. I cannot tell you how original and good it felt to us at the time. Foster ran away from his school for almost a whole term when he was sixteen. He used all his school money and survived quite well. He ran away as a protest against the school and his family. His family ran a small engineering firm in the Midlands. Seedtime was about that running away, the people he met, the poverty he saw, his sexual awakening.

  “Foster made the notes during the two months, but h
e didn’t write the book until he was at Oxford. He was an adult when he wrote, but still very young, and I suppose that gave the book some of its quality. It was precocious and knowing, and technically quite skilled, yet you have to say that it was also innocent. It was full of echoes that Foster didn’t know about. It felt very original, but of course running away is one of the great themes of literature. Huckleberry Finn, David Copperfield running away to Betsey Trotwood, Smike running away from Squeers, De Quincey. Foster said the only name that came to him, half-way through, was W. H. Davies, the super-tramp man. In some ways his book anticipated Orwell and that American book, Catcher in the Rye.

  “It sold eight thousand copies, a prodigious number in those days. It was famous for ten years—Connolly’s limit, you know. They keep on trying to revive it, but it doesn’t work now. The sexual awakening bit is silly, and the protest parts are very old-fashioned, a little bit like The Way of All Flesh. That’s the trouble with precocious things. They really belong to the earlier generation.

  “You might say Foster never recovered from that success. He floundered. If he hadn’t had that family firm to fall back on, he might have had to take a job, like the rest of us. But he had that little income. It wasn’t a great deal, but it was there. So he kept on at the writing. He was always looking for another piece of luck, that happy landing on a subject. He tried his hand at many other things. He did the Forster personal relationships, though no one knows what that means; he did the Marxist thing; he tried to do the Catholic thing. He tried to do the Auden and Isherwood travel book, but I always thought that Trinidad book was a lazy piece of work. Then he wrote that novel after the war, and I thought he had found his feet. I was wrong.”

  HE WAS precocious, as Greene had said. A precocious writer doesn’t have much experience to work on; his talent isn’t challenged. The quickness of such a writer lies in assuming the manner and sensibility of his elders. Foster Morris’s runaway adolescent experience and his “rebellious” style as an undergraduate had disguised his essential mimicry, and later made it hard for him to find himself. The contemporaries who admired him soon began to outpace him. For the rest of his writing life he was a man always saying goodbye to people. It couldn’t have been easy for him.