A Way in the World

  He had receded a little since, not having built on that good pre-war start. In the mid-1950s his name was still around, but it was attached to reviews, to talks on the radio; it was no longer the name of a book-writer. Still, it was a name in the papers and on the radio. And over and above that—however muffled his name in England, however little found in articles or books about the thirties—he existed for me in a special way, an important figure from the past, someone from my childhood, someone who had come to us in Trinidad from the void around us.

  I had a small part-time job in the BBC in 1955, working on a half-hour weekly literary programme for the Caribbean. Some book about post-war English fiction had to be reviewed, and the producer said, “I think this would be something for Foster Morris.”

  I could hardly believe it, hardly believe that my producer could speak the name so casually, and that the man was so accessible.

  The producer said, “It’s the kind of thing Foster could do standing on his head.”

  I was living in an old house in Kilburn, just behind the Gaumont State cinema. There was a public library not far away, in a couple of houses on a side street on the other side of the main road. It was a good place to use. The better books were hardly touched, and the art books were as good as new. And when I went to the library I found that in spite of the war, in spite of everything else, and after seventeen or eighteen years, The Shadowed Livery was still on the shelves. It had been taken out quite a few times before the war and during the war, but then it had been left alone.

  It was strange to touch the faded cloth-bound book which I had read, in another climate, with other thoughts and ambitions in my head. Strange to see the name stamped on the spine, to see the good-quality pre-war paper, the pre-war date, the list of the author’s books. And embarrassing and moving at the same time, flicking through the pages, to see the references to the names and incidents of the great Butler strike. The title of the book came—I had forgotten this—from The Merchant of Venice, from the speech of the Prince of Morocco, one of Portia’s suitors:

  Mislike me not for my complexion,

  The shadowed livery of the burnished sun,

  To whom I am a neighbour, and near bred.

  I began to get an idea. Foster Morris knew what I had come from. I would turn to him for help. I needed help very badly at that time.

  I was holding on by my fingertips in London. In the Kilburn house I had a two-roomed second-floor flat, sharing bathroom and lavatory with everybody else. Not that this was bad; in fact, I thought I was lucky; few people let rooms to non-Europeans in those days; and what I had in Kilburn was better than what I had had in my last two years at Oxford. But I couldn’t see a future. My BBC job was very small and uncertain. Everything depended on my writing—that was the whole point of my being in London, living that life—and, for many months now, so far as my writing went, I had lost my way. I was as far away as ever from getting properly started.

  In Trinidad, at that time of optimism between leaving school and waiting to go to England and Oxford, I had started, light-heartedly, like a man with all the time in the world, on a novel, a farce with a local setting. I had thought—sitting in the Red House, in the midst of the African clerks gossiping portentously about this and that—of a local African who for political reasons had given himself the name of an African king. It was a good thing to think about in 1949; but at that age, seventeen, I really didn’t know what to do with the material. But I wrote on, and I took what I had written to Oxford. Two years later, in the dreadful solitude of the long summer vacation, I pushed the work to its end. It wasn’t of any value (though there would have been things hidden in it); but the fact that I finished the book—two hundred or so pages of typescript—was important to me.

  When I left Oxford and went to London I started on something else. Not farce this time, but something very serious. The character I fixed on was someone like myself, working as a clerk in the Registrar-General’s Office in Port of Spain. I didn’t know what attitude to take to the character or the setting. I couldn’t see it clearly; I must have lied and boasted a lot, must have tried very hard in the colonial way to separate my character from his setting, to set him up a little higher. And all I could think of in the way of narrative was a day in the life of this character. The pages piled up.

  The fact was that at the age of twenty-two, unprotected, and feeling unprotected, with no vision of the future, only with ambition, I had no idea what kind of person I was. Writing should have helped me to see, to clarify myself; but every day as I wrote my novel (when I wasn’t doing little things for money at the BBC), the fabrication, the turning away from the truths I couldn’t fully acknowledge, pressed me down further into the little hole I had created for myself.

  Just six years before, at the door of the vault of the Registrar-General’s Department in Port of Spain I had—with what pleasure, what a vision of the future—pretended in my spare time in the office to be a writer, filling paper, correcting, making a page look like a page of manuscript. Now it was a desperate matter.

  This was my mood when in the Kilburn library I looked at The Shadowed Livery, the work of a published writer, and decided to turn to Foster Morris for help.

  On the day of the recording I went to the studio and sat behind the glass with the studio manager and the producer.

  Foster Morris was a stockyish, grey man with a broad face, dim-eyed, withdrawn. I suppose he would have been fifty. The dimness of the eye, the withdrawal, the man removed—that made an impression on me, as did the story he told when he was asked to speak some words to the microphone for the voice-level test.

  He said, “I was lunching with Victor Gollancz the other day. He told me this joke. A farmer was had up for having sex with an under-age girl. The farmer told the judge he wasn’t to blame, because the village girls had been stealing his apples and he had warned them that he was going to screw any of them he caught stealing apples. The farmer got off. But then the judge said to him, ‘Mr. Roberts, you should be careful. Otherwise, you won’t get to see many of your apples.’ ”

  It wasn’t much of a joke, but the name of the publisher was impressive. So Foster Morris was more than a man from the past; he was a man still in casual touch with great names.

  In the shabby canteen, still with its rough-and-ready wartime feel, I said to him, “I’ve read The Shadowed Livery. And I looked at it the other day again.”

  His dim eyes lightened. He seemed even abashed. A kind of old-fashioned courtesy came to him. He said, “Oh, is that still around?”

  That was also impressive: dismissing a whole published book, a book that had required two two-week journeys by steamer and taken weeks of writing. And I remember thinking, “When my turn comes, this is how I must behave.”

  I walked out with him to the Oxford Street lobby.

  I said, “I’ve been writing a book for nearly a year. I don’t know how to go on. Will you have a look at it for me?”

  He agreed. He wanted me to send it to him at a publisher’s where he said he looked in once or twice a week, but then he said I should send it to his house. As he was writing out his address, he said, “Whatever happened to that white-nigger fellow?”

  I was stumped. I didn’t know who he was talking about, and I had never heard that combination of words in Trinidad. Probably the words came from another island; or probably Foster Morris had simply forgotten. But I understood—though he had been scrupulous in his book in the other direction, not appearing to notice a person’s race, and hardly mentioning it—he was making a heavy kind of local joke with me. I knew he would have been referring to some light-skinned mulatto—in Trinidad people like that were described as “red,” without insult—and then I understood he was talking about a well known radical who had taken part in the great Butler strike. Foster Morris had written in his admiring way about this man; and I felt I was caught a little off balance, not knowing about one of the important figures in The Shadowed Livery.

  This was a ba
d moment, but I let it pass. I sent him my manuscript. He didn’t keep me waiting. Within days he had sent it back, with a long typed letter, a page and a half in single spacing. The first sentence of his letter was: I have read your book and my advice to you is to abandon it immediately.

  He was right. I knew that. But I had been hoping—just a little—for some kind of magic. And I was full of anger and hurt. I remembered that bad moment with him in the lobby; I remembered the one-sidedness and subtle wrongness of The Shadowed Livery. I thought of his unimportance. But it didn’t help. I knew he was right.

  All my life I had felt myself marked, destined for achievement. I had known doubts, long depressions; but I had been a student then, not a man in my own right. Now at last I was in the world, a doer: my moment should have come.

  I spent a bad two or three weeks. I felt dreadfully abased. For some reason the moments on buses, going between Kilburn and the BBC on Oxford Street, were the worst. And yet at the same time I couldn’t help feeling relieved. I didn’t have to write that book. I didn’t have to face that manuscript.

  I read Foster Morris’s letter many times. It was really quite packed, and even at the first reading I had seen that, after the brutality of his first line, he wanted to help. His letter was full of instruction, of a sort no one before had given me. He wanted me to read certain writers—Chekhov, Hemingway, and his beloved Graham Greene—and he wanted me to pay attention to the way they wrote. He wanted me to think more about writing. And he was right. I had read only in a gobbling, inconsequential way. As for writing, I had thought of it as something that would come naturally to me. I hadn’t thought of it as something I would have to learn about and try to understand. I hadn’t foreseen the problem I was having with my material and the uncertainty of my writing personality.

  But I was at the age when every day is long. It is hard when days are so long to hold on to gloom. And it must have been just three or four weeks after receiving Foster Morris’s letter that, out of the misery of those bus rides up and down the Edgware Road, I decided to make a fresh start as a writer. I thought I would turn away from what I had done, and go back to the beginning: try to see whether I couldn’t make writing out of plain concrete statements, adding meaning to meaning in simple stages.

  At about this time something else happened. At tea in the BBC canteen one day we were talking about George Lamming’s autobiography, In the Castle of My Skin. The producer who had introduced Foster Morris to the programme wanted to talk only about a small, comic episode in the book—about a boy climbing up a tree. I noticed the producer’s laughter, his admiration, and I learned as a new truth what I really had always known, and what so far in my writing (veering between farce and introversion) I had suppressed: that comedy, the preserver we in Trinidad had always known, was close to me, a double inheritance, from my story-telling Hindu family, and from the creole street life of Port of Spain.

  Within days I had begun to write about Port of Spain street life, setting my narrator in a street such as the one where once (in my memory or fantasy) my aunt had fanned her coalpot and talked about Grenadians. And I set my narrator at the level of the street. I found an immense freedom in this touch of fiction. The material bubbled up; the stories bubbled up; the jokes made themselves, two or three to a page. Day by day my book grew; I felt myself becoming a writer, someone in control, someone more at ease. In six weeks, no more, my book was done. My life in London at last had purpose. And I blessed the name of Foster Morris, this unlikely figure from the past who had set me free.

  IT WAS four years before that book was published. The publisher required something less unconventional in form first, something more recognizable by the trade as a novel. When the street book was published I sent a copy to Foster Morris, with a letter. I reintroduced myself; told him about his letter, the pain it had caused, the release it had given. The book, I said, was an offering to him. And there was this extra interest: the book embroidered on memories, my own, that began almost at the time of his visit to Trinidad for The Shadowed Livery. So, although he was nearly thirty years older, it could be said that as writers our paths had long ago crossed. He would have seen as an adult certain things—Port of Spain streets, houses, backyards—which I had seen with the freshness and wonder of a child, an Indian child moving from the country to the city.

  He replied beautifully. He was pleased that he had been of help. He had kept his eye on me. He had read reviews of the books I had published; he had read some of my own reviews in the New Statesman (sometimes, he said, he thought I out-Staggered the Staggers); and he loved the book I had sent him. He invited me to lunch. He belonged, he said, to something which no gentleman could call a club, but which he had become a member of because he had a “pash” on the waitress, who “must have been quite a hit at the Alhambra before the Great War.” I recognized his heavy joking style; I felt it might have been something he had picked up from an older person in his family.

  There was no sign of the waitress, but the place (it was in South Kensington, and when I next saw it, some years later, it had been turned into a second-rank hotel) was as decrepit as he had said; there had been no fresh paint or wallpaper since long before the war.

  There I noticed what I had noticed four years before: the thin long strands of hair that fell over his forehead and seemed slightly to cobweb his dim eyes. All the time I was with him I wanted to lean across and brush that hair away.

  We talked about writing and writers. We had the profession in common now. We could talk—or, at any rate, I could attend—in a more man-to-man way than when we had met four years before. He was contemptuous of C. P. Snow. Of Angus Wilson he said, “If you’re going to leave the British Museum and set up as a writer in the country, at least you should first learn to write a decent sentence.”

  Both those writers were very famous at the time. I had read four books by Angus Wilson and one by Snow. I had lost my way in the plottings of the Snow. The Wilson I had read with something like awe. The awe was really for his success. I felt as separate from his English world as—travelling between the BBC and my lodgings, working at the material from the quite different world I carried in my head—I was separate from London and English life.

  Literature wasn’t a neutral subject, after all. Background entered into it. So our talk at lunch was unbalanced. He had read an immense amount in the English writing of the century, and he still kept up. I didn’t feel this need. I was too concerned with my own writing, with finding ways of dealing with the—unwritten-about—material I had begun to glimpse four years before.

  The other side of this was that I wasn’t worried, as Foster Morris was, by the fame of C. P. Snow and Angus Wilson. And I remember how clearly the thought came to me—the first moment of uncertainty at our lunch, but perhaps really the second or third or fourth uncertainty about Foster Morris—that the careers of Angus Wilson and C. P. Snow were not going to be affected in any way by what was said of them in that dreary dining room.

  He gave off a gloom. It began to call up some of my own anxieties, never far away; it dulled the good mood I had brought to our meeting. I took him as I saw him: I didn’t then have the knowledge of England to make a pattern of what he had revealed of his life: the suburban address, the heavy old-fashioned jokes, the visits two or three times a week to publishers’ offices, the occasional review or BBC talk about the thirties. And at that time I didn’t have the gift of enquiry. Perhaps before you start enquiring it is necessary to have a certain amount of knowledge.

  I asked him about The Shadowed Livery.

  He said, “It was Graham’s idea.” Graham Greene. “He had gone to Liberia the previous year. He thought I should go to the other side of the Atlantic to see where the ex-slaves had come from. He thought I might find a book. I had run into a bad patch.” He paused. “They were a bunch of racial fanatics.”

  “Who?”

  “Butler and a lot of the crowd around him.”

  But he hadn’t written that.

&nb
sp; “How could one write that? You have no idea what it was like out there in 1937. The oilfields were like a colony within a colony. Few people outside understood that. A lot of people in Port of Spain didn’t know. Almost all the south of the island was one big oil reserve. There were a lot of South Africans there. I don’t know why. Some of them didn’t mind the strike at all. They loved it when the government asked for volunteers. They could hardly wait to start shooting niggers.”

  This touched a memory. One day in 1945—easy for me to date things at school—our English-history teacher, a white-mulatto man, began to talk about the 1937 strike, for no clear reason. I don’t remember all he said. I remember only the rage of his last words: “And I wasn’t going south to shoot niggers.” I had never before heard language like this in the classroom. The teacher was in his late forties. He loved the school, and was a great promoter of good manners and good form. His family was well known; a number of his relations were in good positions in the civil service and city council—in such positions as were open to local people. Something must have taken that sedate man out of himself just before he came into the classroom that day.

  Remembering him now, and what he said, I felt Foster Morris’s words about “shooting niggers” hadn’t just come to him, but must have been current among white people in Trinidad in 1937. And I understood again how much of my setting had been hidden from me as a child.

  I told Foster Morris about the teacher.