A Writer's People (3 page)

I was full of Walcott at this time. I told Piper about him, and recited the poem about the burning down of Castries, “A City's Death by Fire.” He, handsome and grave behind his desk, listened carefully and at the end said, “Dylan Thomas.” I knew almost nothing about contemporary poetry, and felt rebuffed and provincial. It was a let-down: perhaps, after all, I didn't truly understand poetry. But it didn't lessen my feeling of kinship with Walcott or my pleasure in the lines I liked.

I recited another poem one lunchtime to Terence Tiller, a Third Programme producer I used to see in a BBC pub and had got to know. He drank Guinness in quantity at lunchtime, standing at the bar; he said it was food. He had been a minor poet in the 1940s; I had seen his name in illustrious company in various magazines; and to me in 1955 that was achievement enough. I respected his education and intelligence and generosity. The poem I recited to him was “As John to Patmos,” in which, quite wonderfully, as I thought, again ennobling us all, Walcott had equated the light and clarity (and fame) of the Greek islands with what we had always seen about us. It was a poem about the splendour of our landscape, and Henry Swanzy had picked out the extraordinary phrase
the sun's brass coin in my cheek
, which everyone among us who had been to the beach would have recognised.

Terence, like David Piper, listened carefully. The Guinness flush left his face; his eyes were intent behind his thick-rimmed glasses; he was all at once a man to whom a poet's words mattered. His admiration was more wholehearted than David Piper's, and at the end his only comment was on the last two words of the twelfth line:
For beauty has surrounded / These black children and freed them of homeless ditties
. The poet, he said, hadn't yet earned the right to use a word like “ditty.”

I was puzzled by this, which seemed a very fine kind of poetic judgement, beyond me, but I respected it, and over the next few weeks I worked out that Terence perhaps meant that “ditty” belonged to a more popular style of writing and could be used to proper poetic effect only in a more sophisticated context. The idea of the physical glory of the islands in the poem was done with standard tropical properties, so to speak, and done without irony; and after all the work the poet had done—the mysterious title, “As John to Patmos,” and
the sun's brass coin in my cheek, where canoes brace the sun's strength—
after all that, the “beauty” surrounding the black children had been a strangely lazy word. Picking the poem to pieces in this way, I had to acknowledge that “black,” too, had always been difficult for me, embarrassing to recite. This sentimental way of looking and feeling was not mine; “children” would have been enough for me.

But I didn't mind. I could look away from this sentimentality, almost brush it aside. The poet I cherished was the user of language, the maker of startling images, intricate and profound, a man only two years older than I was, but already at
eighteen or nineteen a kind of master, casting a retrospective glow on things I had known six or seven or eight years before.

In 1955 I used everything that he sent to the
Voices
, though it was clear that six years after his book the first flush of his inspiration had gone, and he was now marking time, writing to keep his hand in, looking for a way ahead. He did an imitation of a Keats narrative poem; he did something in the manner of Whitman (I believe, but I may be wrong). They were both linguistically accomplished, but they were only exercises, without the island landscape that fed his imagination and was so much part of his poetic personality.

In one poem he tried for a reason I don't remember to recreate Ireland, which I don't think he had visited. I felt I knew why he had done that, and was sympathetic: he would have wanted to be more universal, to break away from the social and racial and intellectual limitations of the island, where, as he had written,
the fine arts flourish on irregular Thursdays
.

It was something we with literary ambitions from these islands all had to face: small places with simple economies bred small people with simple destinies. And these islands were very small, infinitely smaller than Ibsen's Norway. Their literary possibilities, like their economic possibilities, were as narrow as their human possibilities. Ibsen's Norway, provincial as it was, had bankers, editors, scholars, high-reaching people. There was nothing of this human wealth in the islands. They didn't give a fiction-writer or a poet much to write about; they cramped and quickly exhausted a talent which in a
larger and more varied space might have spread its wings and done unsuspected things.

It was a kind of literary blight that in varying ways affected other places as well: big countries that for political or other reasons had become hard to write about as they were. So Camus in the 1940s could cleanse Algeria of Arabs; and twenty or thirty years later some South African writers, fatigued by the theme of race, with its inevitabilities, its pressures to do the right thing, could seek to create a race-free no man's land to give room to their private imaginings.

I gave up
Caribbean Voices
in 1956. I lost that intimate connection with Walcott's development, and had no idea how he moved away from the imitative quagmire of 1955. That he would have left that behind I had no doubt.

I met him for the first time in Trinidad in 1960; he was thirty then. He told me one morning in a cafe in central Port of Spain how poems came to him. He did so in a very full and generous way, but what he said was complicated and I couldn't understand. I had looked at a few of the later poems. They did not stir me, though the poet might have said they were profounder than the early poems I knew. The island landscape was there again, but the simple old idea of its “beauty” was dropped; the imagery and the language were more tormented; meaning was elusive. I began to feel—as I used to feel in the old days about all poetry—I was not equipped to deal with this poet.

I met him again in Trinidad in 1965. He was more tormented than before by his job on the local Sunday paper; it
would have been humiliating for him to be bossed around by people he saw as his inferiors, in what was still a colonial setting. Yet he had become a kind of local figure. He was doing plays, and they were staged. He took the plots of old Spanish plays (I believe), gave them a local setting, and redid the characters as local Negroes. He was pleased to be asked to do the “book” of a fantasy (for a musical) I had written for a small American film producer. I don't know what he did for that project; the film was never made.

I didn't see him again. He was on the brink of his international career: a wonderful new black voice in the United States: his poems published in New York and London, and called out from the islands to teach in American universities.

T
HE BOOK OF
1949 is beside me now. The cream soft cover is brown at the edges; though the pages with the poems are in fair condition. The very narrow spine is frayed: more the effect of bookshelf light than of handling. Fifty years on, I see more than I did in 1955.

One of the miraculous phrases Henry Swanzy had singled out for special mention in 1949 was
brown hair in the aristocracy of sea
. I hadn't been able to find that phrase in 1955 in the poems I liked. I found it the other day, more than fifty years later. It occurred in one of the longer poems I hadn't been able to enter. And the phrase wasn't romantic at all, as I had thought, no vision of a young girl seen and loved: it occurred in some coarse lines of rage about white people, foreigners,
doing black people away from what was theirs, buying up the beaches of St. Lucia, a local heritage, where the very waves now “kowtowed” to strangers.

Henry Swanzy—a friend of Africa in an old-fashioned way: I heard him speak once of “the enemies of the African race”—would not have wanted to make much of this side of the poetry.
Caribbean Voices
was for the Caribbean; the BBC short-wave transmission was picked up by various island radio stations and re-broadcast by them; the decencies had to be observed. And it was left to me now, fifty years later, to read more deeply. The brown hair that had stirred the poet was not always in the aristocracy of the alienated sea, beside the private beach. In one poem it was also the hair of a local girl, white or blonde or fair, who had mocked a letter of the poet's. A young man's unrequited interest, important enough (at that time of limited experience) to be worked into a poem: there was a wound there.

I began to understand, all these years later, that the “black” theme of these early poems—those children freed of homeless ditties by the beauty of their island—that Terence Tiller had worried about, and which I had brushed aside in 1955, would have been more important in 1949 both to the poet and the propagators of island “culture” than I knew; and that for those people—poor old fat Albert Gomes with his Stalin moustache, and all the others—the Walcott I had a feeling for perhaps hardly existed: the young man like myself, carrying in his head the landscape I knew, able to fit words to quicksilver emotions, better as a proven writer than I was (who even in prose had hardly written, and was full only of the large ambition
in which everything was still possible, a kind of never-never land of literary judgement).

And that idea of the beauty of the islands (beach and sun and coconut trees) was not as easy as the poet thought. It wasn't always there, a constant. It was an idea that had developed during the twentieth century. The British soldiers and German mercenaries who invaded Trinidad in 1797 (and luckily for them took it from the Spaniards without firing a shot) were landed in heavy winter overcoats on an awful black swamp west of Port of Spain, shallow for a long way out, and left to wade ashore. No idea there of local beauty. People who travelled to the islands before the Great War of 1914 didn't go for the sun; they travelled to be in the waters where the great imperial naval battles of the eighteenth century had been fought; or they took in the islands on their way to see the engineering works of the Panama Canal before the water was let in. The sun in those days was something you had to protect yourself against. Photographs of English travellers in Trinidad from that time show the women with parasols and in full many-layered Edwardian dress.

The idea of beach and sun and sunbathing came in the 1920s, with the cruise ships. (Consciously old-fashioned people, like the writer Evelyn Waugh, born in 1903, refused to sunbathe.) So the idea of island beauty, which now seems so natural and correct, was in fact imposed from outside, by things like postage stamps and travel posters, cruise ships and a hundred travel books. It was an overturning of old sensibility, old associations. Until then the islands were thought of as ancient plantations, places of the lash; and that was how, even
until the 1950s and 1960s, island politicians, stirring up old pain and racial rage, sought to characterise them.

The sea I always loved, and could be frightened by. It was always staggering, especially if you had to make a little journey to get there: that first sight of it, with the unexpected noise, at the end of a cliff or behind the crisscrossing grey trunks of a coconut plantation. Away from that the land was neutral, just there. I will tell this story. In 1940 my grandmother bought a wooded estate in the hills to the north-west of Port of Spain. The estate house was set in landscaped grounds. My grandmother asked her extended family to come and settle. The first thing they did, for no good reason, and perhaps only out of idleness, was to cut down all the trees on the drive and in the grounds; then they slashed and burned a hillside and planted maize and peas. The land began soon to be eroded. In only a few years it became a black rural slum, little pieces rented out to poor black immigrants from the other islands; and no one grieved.

I don't think in Trinidad we felt as children that we walked in a liberating beauty, like Walcott's black children; perhaps we felt the opposite. Though it might be said that Walcott came from a much smaller island, with the splendid sea always there; and when he thought of landscape it was natural for him to think of the sea and the lovely bays.

It is an unpeopled landscape, though, in that first book. There are no villages, no huts, no local faces brought up close. The poet stands alone. He has a memory of his father, who is dead; a memory of a foreign painter instructor and friend, who is no longer on the island; and, of course, a memory of the
rebuff of the fair girl. No one close: there are the far-off fishermen in the sea at dusk; there are the black children, undifferentiated, almost an abstraction, freed of homeless ditties; there are the faceless brown-haired foreigners in the sea, the occasion of jealousy and pain. The poet, churned up by his sensibility, walks alone. Even when for a whole day he walks among the ruins of his city of Castries, burnt down in a great fire, he walks alone,
shocked at each wall that stood like a liar
. He is a kind of Robinson Crusoe, but with the pain of a modern Friday.
I, in my skin prison, in my very joys suffer
. He doesn't really tell us why: the fair girl is not really cause enough.
The day you suddenly realised you were black
. Too innocent really, not to say disingenuous, in 1947 or 1948, a time of segregation and the beginning of apartheid; and perhaps, but only perhaps, that moment of realisation was when he embraced the idea of the black children. It is actually possible to feel that without the black idea, the pool of distress, always available, in which the poet could refresh himself, the unpeopled landscape would be insupportable.

Religion in the early poems is as much a feature as race, and has a similar kind of simplicity. The island is like the Patmos of St. John; and that is a surprising and beautiful conceit. But it is something else when after the great Castries fire Christ walks in the smoking Caribbean sea: this is like the flambeau-lit street-corner preacher of the islands with his white-clad women followers, promising damnation below the shop eaves. The great fire shakes the poet's faith, but only for a few lines; faith returns when he sees the new leaves on the hill,
a flock of new faiths;
it is as simple as that. The harder
questions of belief are left alone; and the reader can feel that without religion, without that pool of enthusiasm, that idea of a whole world of love, balancing the pain of the black idea, the plantation New World island, with an unmentionable past, would be utterly bare, a spiritual emptiness that would be hard to write about.