Literary Occasions (8 page)

Having done that with Ernest, I should say that my own typing posture in those days was unusual. My shoulders were thrown back as far as they could go; my spine was arched. My knees were drawn right up; my shoes rested on the topmost struts of the chair, left side and right side. So, with my legs wide apart, I sat at the typewriter with something like a monkey crouch.

THE FREELANCES’
room was like a club: chat, movement, the separate anxieties of young or youngish men below the
passing fellowship of the room. That was the atmosphere I was writing in. That was the atmosphere I gave to Bogart’s Port of Spain street. Partly for the sake of speed, and partly because my memory or imagination couldn’t rise to it, I had given his servant room hardly any furniture: the Langham room itself was barely furnished. And I benefited from the fellowship of the room that afternoon. Without that fellowship, without the response of the three men who read the story, I might not have wanted to go on with what I had begun.

I passed the three typed sheets around.

John Stockbridge was English. He worked for many BBC programmes, domestic and overseas. Unlike the rest of us, he carried a briefcase; and that briefcase suggested method, steadiness, many commissions. At our first meeting in the freelances’ room three or four months before, he hadn’t been too friendly—he no doubt saw me as an Oxford man, untrained, stepping just like that into regular radio work, taking the bread out of the mouths of more experienced men. But then his attitude towards me had become one of schoolmasterly concern. He wanted to rescue me from what, with his English eyes, he saw as my self-neglect. He wanted me to make a better job of myself, to present myself well, to wear better clothes, and especially to get rid of my dingy working-class overcoat. (I knew nothing about clothes, but I had always thought the overcoat was wrong: it had been chosen for me, before I went up to Oxford, by the Maltese manageress of an Earl’s Court boarding house.) Now, after he had read the story, John made a serious face and spoke a prodigious prophecy about my future as a writer. On such little evidence! But it was his way of finally accepting my ambition and my London life, and giving me a little blessing.

Andrew Salkey was a Jamaican. He worked in a nightclub, was also trying to get started as a writer, and had just begun to do broadcasts, talks and readings. He compared learning to write with trying to wrap a whip around a rail; he thought I had begun to make the whip “stick.” He detected, and made me take out,
one or two early sentences where I had begun to lose faith in the material and had begun to ridicule, not the characters, but the idea that what I was doing was a real story.

The most wholehearted acceptance came from Gordon Woolford. He was from British Guiana. He came from a distinguished colonial family. He said he had some African ancestry, but it didn’t show. Some deep trouble with his father had kept Gordon away from his family and committed him, after a privileged pre-war upbringing in Belgium and England, to a hard bohemian life in London. He was an unusually handsome man, in his mid-thirties. He had married a French girl, whom he had met when she was an assistant in one of the big London stores. That marriage had just broken up. Gordon was writing a novel about it,
On the Rocks;
it wasn’t something he was going to finish. He changed jobs often; he loved writing; his favourite book—at least it was always with him during his drinking bouts—was
Scoop.

Something in the Bogart story touched Gordon. When he finished reading the story he folded the sheets carefully; with a gesture as of acceptance he put the sheets in his inner jacket pocket; and then he led me out to the BBC club—he was not on the wagon that day. He read the story over again, and he made me read it with him, line by line, assessing the words and the tone: we might have been rehearsing a broadcast. The manuscript still has his foldmarks and his wine stains.

During the writing of the Bogart story some memory—very vague, as if from a forgotten film—had come to me of the man who in 1938 or 1939, five years before Bogart, had lived in his servant room. He was a negro carpenter; the small sheltered space between the servant room and the back fence was at once his kitchen and workshop. I asked him one day what he was making. He said—wonderfully to the six-year-old child who had asked the question—that he was making “the thing without a name.”

It was the carpenter’s story that I settled down to write the
next day in the freelances’ room. I had little to go on. But I had a street, already peopled; I had an atmosphere; and I had a narrator. I stuck to the magic of the previous day: the non-rustle BBC paper, the typewriter set at single space. And I was conscious, with Gordon Woolford’s help, of certain things I had stumbled on the previous day: never to let the words get too much in the way, to be fast, to add one concrete detail to another, and above all to keep the tone right.

I mentally set the servant room in another yard.
The only thing that Popo, who called himself a carpenter, ever built was the little galvanized-iron workshop under the mango tree at the back of his yard.
And then scattered memories, my narrator, the life of the street, and my own childhood sense (as a six-year-old coming suddenly to Port of Spain from the Hindu rigours of my grandmother’s house in the country) of the intensity of the pleasures of people on the street, gave the carpenter a story. He was an idler, a happy man, a relisher of life; but then his wife left him.

Over the next few days the street grew. Its complexities didn’t need to be pointed; they simply became apparent. People who had only been names in one story got dialogue in the next, then became personalities; and old personalities became more familiar. Memory provided the material; city folklore as well, and city songs. An item from a London evening paper (about a postman throwing away his letters) was used. My narrator consumed material, and he seemed to be able to process every kind of material.

Even Gordon was written into the street. We were on the top of a bus one evening, going back from the BBC to Kilburn, the Irish working-class area where I lived in two rooms in the house of a BBC commissionaire. Gordon was talking of some early period of his life, some period of luxury and promise. Then he broke off, said, “But that was a long time ago,” and looked down through the reflections of glass into the street. That went to my heart. Within a few days I was to run it into the memory of a
negro ballad-maker, disturbed but very gentle, who had called at my grandmother’s house in Port of Spain one day to sell copies of his poems, single printed sheets, and had told me a little of his life.

The stories became longer. They could no longer be written in a day. They were not always written in the freelances’ room. The technique became more conscious; it was not always possible to write fast. Beginnings, and the rhythms they established, didn’t always come naturally; they had to be worked for. And then the material, which at one time had seemed inexhaustible, dried up. I had come to the end of what I could do with the street, in that particular way.
My mother said, “You getting too wild in this place. I think is high time you leave.”
My narrator left the street, as I had left Trinidad five years before. And the excitement I had lived with for five or six weeks was over.

I had written a book, and I felt it to be real. That had been my ambition for years, and an urgent ambition for the past year. And I suppose that if the book had had some response outside the freelances’ room I might have been a little more secure in my talent, and my later approach to writing would have been calmer; it is just possible.

But I knew only anxiety. The publisher that Andrew Salkey took the book to sent no reply for three months (the book remained unpublished for four years). And—by now one long year out of Oxford—I was trying to write another, and discovering that to have written a book was not to be a writer. Looking for a new book, a new narrative, episodes, I found myself as uncertain, and as pretending to be a writer, as I had been before I had written the story of Bogart.

To be a writer, I thought, was to have the conviction that one could go on. I didn’t have that conviction. And even when the new book had been written I didn’t think of myself as a writer. I thought I should wait until I had written three. And when, a year after writing the second, I had written the third, I thought I should wait until I had written six. On official forms I described
myself as a “broadcaster,” thinking the word nondescript, suitable to someone from the freelances’ room; until a BBC man, “staff,” told me it was boastful.

So I became “writer.” Though to myself an unassuageable anxiety still attached to the word, and I was still, for its sake, practising magic. I never bought paper to write on. I preferred to use “borrowed,” non-rustle BBC paper; it seemed more casual, less likely to attract failure. I never numbered my pages, for fear of not getting to the end. (This drew the only comment Ernest Eytle made about my writing. Sitting idly at his typewriter one day in the freelances’ room, he read some of my pages, apparently with goodwill. Then, weightily, he said, “I’ll tell you what you should do with this.” I waited. He said, “You should number the pages. In case they get mixed up.”) And on the finished manuscripts of my first four books—half a million words—I never with my own hand typed or wrote my name. I always asked someone else to do that for me. Such anxiety; such ambition.

The ways of my fantasy, the process of creation, remained mysterious to me. For everything that was false or didn’t work and had to be discarded, I felt that I alone was responsible. For everything that seemed right I felt I had only been a vessel. There was the recurring element of luck, or so it seemed to me. True, and saving, knowledge of my subject—beginning with Bogart’s street—always seemed to come during the writing.

This element of luck isn’t so mysterious to me now. As diarists and letter-writers repeatedly prove, any attempt at narrative can give value to an experience which might otherwise evaporate away. When I began to write about Bogart’s street I began to sink into a tract of experience I hadn’t before contemplated as a writer. This blindness might seem extraordinary in someone who wanted so much to be a writer. Half a writer’s work, though, is the discovery of his subject. And a problem for me was that my life had been varied, full of upheavals and moves: from my grandmother’s Hindu house in the country,
still close to the rituals and social ways of village India; to Port of Spain, the negro and G.I. life of its streets, the other, ordered life of my colonial English school, which was called Queen’s Royal College; and then Oxford, London and the freelances’ room at the BBC. Trying to make a beginning as a writer, I didn’t know where to focus.

In England I was also a colonial. Out of the stresses of that, and out of my worship of the name of writer, I had without knowing it fallen into the error of thinking of writing as a kind of display. My very particularity—which was the subject sitting on my shoulder—had been encumbering me.

The English or French writer of my age had grown up in a world that was more or less explained. He wrote against a background of knowledge. I couldn’t be a writer in the same way, because to be a colonial, as I was, was to be spared knowledge. It was to live in an intellectually restricted world; it was to accept those restrictions. And the restrictions could become attractive.

Every morning when he got up Hat would sit on the banister of his back verandah and shout across, “What happening there, Bogart?”
That was a good place to begin. But I couldn’t stay there. My anxiety constantly to prove myself as a writer, the need to write another book and then another, led me away.

There was much in that call of “Bogart!” that had to be examined. It was spoken by a Port of Spain Indian, a descendant of nineteenth-century indentured immigrants from South India; and Bogart was linked in a special Hindu way with my mother’s family. So there was a migration from India to be considered, a migration within the British empire. There was my Hindu family, with its fading memories of India; there was India itself. And there was Trinidad, with its past of slavery, its mixed population, its racial antagonisms and its changing political life; once part of Venezuela and the Spanish empire, now English-speaking, with the American base and an open-air cinema at the end of Bogart’s street. And just across the Gulf of Paria was Venezuela, the sixteenth-century land of El Dorado, now a
country of dictators, but drawing Bogart out of his servant room with its promise of Spanish sexual adventure and the promise of a job in its oil fields.

And there was my own presence in England, writing: the career wasn’t possible in Trinidad, a small, mainly agricultural colony: my vision of the world couldn’t exclude that important fact.

So step by step, book by book, though seeking each time only to write another book, I eased myself into knowledge. To write was to learn. Beginning a book, I always felt I was in possession of all the facts about myself; at the end I was always surprised. The book before always turned out to have been written by a man with incomplete knowledge. And the very first, the one begun in the freelances’ room, seemed to have been written by an innocent, a man at the beginning of knowledge about both himself and the writing career that had been his ambition from childhood.

THE AMBITION
to be a writer was given me by my father. He was a journalist for much of his working life. This was an unusual occupation for a Trinidad Indian of his generation. My father was born in 1906. At that time the Indians of Trinidad were a separate community, mainly rural and Hindi-speaking, attached to the sugar estates of central and southern Trinidad. Many of the Indians of 1906 had been born in India and had come out to Trinidad as indentured labourers on five-year contracts. This form of Indian contract labour within the British empire ended, as a result of nationalist agitation in India, only in 1917.

In 1929 my father began contributing occasional articles on Indian topics to the
Trinidad Guardian.
In 1932, when I was born, he had become the
Guardian
staff correspondent in the
little market town of Chaguanas. Chaguanas was in the heart of the sugar area and the Indian area of Trinidad. It was where my mother’s family was established. Contract labour was far behind them; they were big landowners.