A Way in the World

  Windmills and tall factory chimneys were a feature of the landscape of the islands, he had said; they had been for more than two centuries. The large-scale production of sugar had always been an industrial process. Sugar-cane was a perishable crop. It had to be cut at a certain time and it had to be processed within a certain time; in the making of sugar many things could go wrong. This meant that the black people of the islands were among the earliest industrial workers in the world, obeying the discipline of a complex manufacturing process. For this reason they escaped standard racial categorization; they were not like the peasantry of Africa and Asia and large areas of Europe. They were a very old industrial proletariat, and the history of slavery had shown them to be always a revolutionary people. Now they were destined to be in the forefront of the revolution in the New World.

  People hadn’t understood what he had said, but he had spoken with passion and fluency, and this had made it appear to be part of the great movement of the square; and he had been applauded. (And the photograph of him on the Victorian bandstand in the square, addressing the crowd below the trees, had been used on the cover of the two or three books of his speeches that had been published in Czechoslovakia or East Berlin.)

  This was the view of the region he had offered. This was the currency—this news of the coming revolution, his place within that revolution—with which, as it were, he had paid his way among revolutionaries abroad.

  When I had heard him talk in the square in 1956—not absolutely knowing about his Russian sympathies, knowing about him only vaguely as a far-off black revolutionary of the region—I had been as puzzled as anyone by his stress on the industrial nature of slavery in the Caribbean. Later I thought of it as ideology for ideology’s sake, a man on the periphery over-staking his claim.

  Now, in the New York house, catching fragments of his views and rhetoric and even his voice in what was being said to me, I saw this stress as part of the “political resolution” he had talked about at the Maida Vale dinner. He had said that that resolution had enabled him to lay aside the shame he had grown to feel because of his mother’s uncle, the old coachman, who looked back to a time nearer slavery as the good time, when white people and black people were one.

  The confession had been impressive: every black man, he had said, had some tormenting secret like that. Yet the words, “political resolution,” had appeared to conceal something. And now I felt—with shame, grief, sympathy, admiration, recognizing something of myself in his struggle—that, as much as the uneducated old coachman of ninety years before, and the middle-aged black man in bowler and pin-stripe suit stepping out of the bus queue in Regent Street in 1950 to show me photographs of his house and English wife, Lebrun had always needed to find some way of dealing with the past. With his fine mind, and his love of knowledge, his need might even have been greater.

  The ideology he had found (and his interpretation of it) enabled him to do more than most. There was a type of revolutionary (or merely protest) writing which found it easier to move imaginatively in the time of slavery, with its fixed structures, its clear enemy, its clear morality. This kind of writing saw the period of slavery as a time of almost continuous guerrilla war; it relished that drama, but was unable to deal with the period after the abolition of slavery, which by comparison was flat, directionless, without moral issues. Lebrun’s political resolution was very far from this sensationalism. It enabled him, not to embrace the period of slavery, but to acknowledge it without pain, and, presenting it in his own way, to make a claim for its universality, and even its precedence.

  “THE MAN want to take you over,” the chief minister had said, over the stained tablecloth in Government House. And I began to feel something of that in the house in New York. I was using Lebrun’s introductions and I suppose it was to be expected that they should think I was a revolutionary too. But after a while I couldn’t help noticing that I was being regarded as part of Lebrun’s revolution. They all knew about the article in the Russian magazine. And somehow my work ceased to be strictly mine; it was as it were contained in Lebrun’s vision of the region. I began to feel that in their vision I was incidental to my own work: I was an expression of Lebrun’s will. I didn’t like the assumption but didn’t know how to speak against it. I had allowed them to talk and never spoken up; I had allowed them to go too far.

  I could see that they were willing to make room for me, as once no doubt they had made room for Lebrun. No words about this were spoken, but I could sense that I was being invited to shed my racial or cultural burdens and to be part of their brotherhood. And they were so nice and attractive, and the house was so pleasant, and the thought of the film work in the hotel was so disagreeable, it would have been marvellous, it would have been less trouble, if I could have pretended to be a convert. And I had a sense that years before, in much harder times, Lebrun might have made such a deal, would have shed one smarting skin and felt himself reborn in another.

  Few of us are without the feeling that we are incomplete. But my feelings of incompleteness were not like Lebrun’s. In the things I felt myself incomplete Lebrun was—as I thought—abundantly served: physical attractiveness, love, sexual fulfilment. But there were other yearnings that no shedding of skin could have assuaged: my own earned security, a wish for my writing gift to last and grow, a dream of working at yet unknown books, accumulations of fruitful days, achievement. These yearnings could be assuaged only in the self I knew.

  No other group would ever again make me an invitation so wholehearted or so seductive. But to yield was to cease to be myself, to trust to the unknown. And like the chief minister, I became very frightened.

  We went to a smaller room for the dinner. The walls were of plain brick, rose-coloured, pale, seemingly dusted over, very attractive. Eventually the gefilte fish, which had been promised since the afternoon, came. I didn’t like the way it looked, and have no memory of it. The idea of something pounded to paste, then spiced or oiled, worked on by fingers, brought to mind thoughts of hand lotions and other things. I became fearful of smelling it. I couldn’t eat it. With the coo-coo or the foo-foo in the Maida Vale flat I had been able to hide what I did to the things on my plate. That couldn’t be done here: everyone knew that the gefilte fish had been specially prepared for Lebrun’s friend from London.

  Manners never frayed. Conversation revived. But the embarrassment that began in the dining room lasted until I was taken back to the Manhattan hotel.

  • • •

  THE ART collectors we know about and envy are the successful ones, like those who a hundred years ago bought Van Gogh and early Cézanne for very little. The people we don’t know about from that period are the people who—perhaps with equal passion—collected works by contemporaries who have faded. I once asked a London dealer about such collectors. Did they get to know at a certain moment that they had been wrong? The dealer was unexpectedly vehement. Bad collectors, he said, were a type: they believed in themselves more than in the art they paid for.

  I wonder whether that was also true of Lebrun’s New York patrons, or whether they had to find other ways over the next few years of acknowledging that the news he had been giving them was wrong, that the special revolution he had promised in the islands wasn’t going to happen.

  The politics of the islands never really changed. The leaders who had come to power at the end of the colonial time—like the chief minister who had ordered Lebrun off his little island—remained in power. It didn’t matter that many of them were bored and didn’t do much. They were all in their different ways racial leaders, and the first successful ones. They were very local, and for that reason special, each man embodying in his territory the idea of black redemption. In the almost mystical relationship between these very local men and their followers there was no room for Lebrun.

  He was now old and very poor, a revolutionary without a revolution, occasionally flourishing (as his enemies reported) on the bounty of women admirers from the past, but at other times living a har
d bohemian life, lodging in other people’s houses or apartments in the Caribbean and Central America, in England and Europe, and always moving on. I grew to feel that at some stage he had given up, lost faith in his cause—though nothing was said, and though, earning his keep, he continued to write communist-slanted articles in small-circulation left-wing magazines.

  Lebrun and I never met after that evening in the Maida Vale flat; but I saw him a few times on television when he was very old, and because of that I have the feeling I witnessed his ageing and physical decay. We kept up the courtesies after the New York embarrassment. We exchanged letters; sometimes he sent me magazines containing articles he had written in which he referred to my work. Those references became fewer; finally they stopped.

  In 1973 he sent me his last book, The Second Struggle: Speeches and Writings 1962–1972. It was printed in East Germany, and the cover carried the 1956 photograph of him in Woodford Square in Port of Spain, standing at a microphone on the bandstand, before the crowd. He had inscribed the book to me as to “a fellow humanist.” And he had added, “To understand that is at any rate to make a beginning.” A touch of the old charm, the way with words. It didn’t mean anything, but I was moved to see his shaky hand.

  It was a dreadful book. It had nothing of the brilliance and the underground emotions of his article in the Russian magazine. In spite of the cover photograph I doubted whether many of the pieces had been speeches. There was an undercurrent of defeat and rancour. There was little subtlety, no sly humour. In certain articles he used stock communist words—“opportunists,” “petit-bourgeois nationalists,” “reformists,” “Blanquists”—almost in a personal way, to denounce his Caribbean enemies, the successful politicians, the men in Government House.

  The decline (which might have been partly due to age) was more noticeable in the hack work he had chosen to reprint, the pieces in which, as a colonial, he compared non-European communist countries with imperialist client states—Kazakhstan, for instance, with the Philippines or Pakistan, Cuba with Brazil or Venezuela. Official facts and figures for the communist country, of rising industrial production, of rising numbers at school and universities; and then a simple expository account (like something taken from a simple encyclopaedia) of the backwardness of the Philippines or Brazil or Iran, population figures and areas in square kilometres always given, where feudal landlords owned much of the country and almost no one went to school; the whole essay locked together with a couple of academic-looking tables and a quotation (excessively documented) from an unknown “professor” or “doctor.” Did he believe in those articles? Or were they written by a man who knew that such articles only filled space in official magazines?

  Thinking now of his decay, into which he had been led by his cause, the cause that had appeared years before to rescue him from racial nonentity, thinking of that and his poverty, his dependence on others, for lodging and livelihood, I thought how strange it was that he had turned out to be like the people he had written about in his very first book, the one that had lain unread at the bottom shelf of the cupboard in the sixth form at Queen’s Royal College in Port of Spain.

  HE HAD written in that book about some of the Spanish-American or Venezuelan revolutionaries before Bolívar, and he had concentrated on those with Trinidad connections.

  For some years after it had been detached from Venezuela and the Spanish empire and had become a British territory, Trinidad was used as a base by revolutionaries on the mainland, across the Gulf of Paria.

  One embittered Spanish official, a refugee in Trinidad, had plotted with an associate on the mainland to start a slave revolt in Venezuela. A hopeless idea: Trinidad was still full of Venezuelans and a number of them were Spanish agents. And then this plot, like so many Caribbean slave plots, was betrayed to the authorities by a slave. The rebels were hanged and quartered, and the quarters of the hanged were displayed on the highway over the mountains between La Guaira on the coast and the inland valley of Caracas. This attempt at revolution never really became famous: everything happened too fast.

  Miranda was better known. He had left Venezuela early and had travelled about Europe and the United States. He gave himself the title of Count and got to know important people; in revolutionary France he even became a general. In exile he began to improve on the country he had come from. The blacks and mulattoes of the slave estates receded; the people of Venezuela became Incas, the original rulers of the continent, nature’s gentlemen, as noble as anything the eighteenth-century philosophers dreamed of. These were the people Miranda represented; all they needed was freedom. In middle age, finally, he came to Trinidad, his base, to start his revolution across the Gulf. He had money, a ship, arms, all he had said he needed. He also had the prospectuses of the London merchants who had subsidized him for years; he had promised to scatter these about Venezuela, after he had liberated it. He didn’t liberate Venezuela; he released a kind of anarchy, and was destroyed by the colonial pettiness he had run away from half a lifetime before. It had always been there, waiting for him.

  In order to write this book Lebrun had had to do some original work in the Venezuelan archives. His purpose in writing the book in the 1930s had been to prove his old point about the revolutionary nature of the islands; to give himself and his ideas a great past, to link the revolutionary stir of the 1930s to the stir caused in the region by the French Revolution; to lift the islands from the end-of-empire smallness in which they had been becalmed since the abolition of slavery, and to attach them once again to the great historical processes of the continent. He wished, above all, to make the point that revolutions do not simply happen: they have to be prepared for, the people have to be educated, there has to be a revolutionary political party.

  All that labour, and I doubt whether a dozen people in Trinidad or Venezuela had read his book. No one at school had read it. I hadn’t read it; I had handled it only as a book, a wonderful object.

  I read it one afternoon in the London Library not long after I had looked at The Second Struggle. I would have been the first person for ten years perhaps to take it from its shelf.

  What a spirit was locked in its pages! Always there, waiting to speak to me. In Trinidad in 1948 I wonder how much I would have been able to make of it. Not a great deal. I would have been then too much part of that end-of-empire smallness Lebrun had talked about. I would have been as baffled by it as I was when I was told that the writer was a revolutionary and on the run somewhere in the United States. I needed the passage of time, distance, experience, to understand what he had written.

  I was aware of the room in which I was reading, in London—how changed from the London in which the book had been published and, as the printed sticker said, presented to the London Library “by the publishers.” It wasn’t only that I had changed since I had seen the book at school. The world had changed; my presence in the London Library was an aspect of that change.

  Thinking of the ironies in Lebrun’s life, that at the end he should have been like the people he had written about in his first book, and feeling almost superstitiously that there was a circularity in human lives, I began to wonder where in my own writings I had marked out regions of the spirit to which I was to return. Just as Lebrun, who had sought to submerge his racial feelings in the universality of his political beliefs, had had that dream removed and in old age had been returned unprotected to heaven knows what private alarms.

  I thought of his capacity for talk. That gift had opened doors for him all his life. But there was hysteria there, as well, the hysteria of the islands, expressed most usually in self-satire, jokeyness, fantasy, religious excess, sudden spasms of cruelty. I thought of the burning of Charlie King at the time of the strike in Trinidad, and the almost religious, sacrificial regard for the victim ever afterwards. I thought of the taunting of Foster Morris in the old wooden house with the distorted shadows cast by oil lamps. I thought of the black man in the bowler who had stepped out of the bus queue in Regent Street to show me photog
raphs of his wife and house. How could one enter the emotions of a black man as old as the century?

  PRIVATE ALARMS, perhaps. But the world had changed. Lebrun wasn’t being returned to his beginnings. The Caribbean was independent. Africa was independent. He had been around for a long time; he was known. And now, near the end, his underground reputation began to alter. At one time he had been the man of principle, the man of the true revolution; the various politicians of the Caribbean had been the men who had sold out. Now, with subtle addition, he became the man of true African or black redemption, the man of principle there, the man who had held out against all kinds of enticements to give up the cause, unlike the false black leaders.

  So now he stepped in and out of his two characters, now the man of the revolutionary cause, now the man of racial redemption, the man always of principle. He appeared, in this new personality, to be going against the whole life of revolution he had lived; against the “political resolution” he had come to years before, the universality in which he had shed the burdens of race and shame; against the admiration of his New York supporters; against, even, the inscription to me, as to a fellow humanist, in the copy of The Second Struggle.

  His name didn’t appear in books about Africa or the Caribbean; writers and publishers didn’t want to offend the rulers. This added to his prestige; he could be presented on the radio or the television, in the programmes on which he was called to give his opinion about this and that, as the hidden black prophet of the century. He looked the part; he was very old now, almost saintly, the man without possessions.

  He never spoke against a black racial regime. He presented Asian dispossession in Amin’s Uganda and Nyerere’s Tanzania as an aspect of class warfare. Guyana in South America he defended in a curious way: since the days of slavery, he said on one radio programme, the Caribbean could be considered as black people’s territory. He put this racial statement in a vast, categorizing way—very much in the manner of the old Lebrun—on a television programme. He said, “The day the first African slave was landed, the region became black territory. If they had known that was going to happen, they might have thought twice.”