A Writer's People (5 page)

My father damaged his material when he tried to fit it to what he thought of as “story”: the trick ending, say. It was his pathetic wish to get his far-away stories into the magazines in England or the United States, and he thought the trick ending would help. So it happened that in the actual writing he could aim high and then aim low. Because he could think of so few trick endings, and because “story” eluded him, he felt he had little material, and he worked and re-worked the few things he did finish. In fact, if he could have taken a step back, he would have seen that there were more things to write about. If he could have taken a step back from his stories about the beauty of old ritual, and considered the colonial setting, other ideas might have come to him. But probably that step back into the bad colonial setting would have caused him pain, and pain was something he didn't wish to face in his writing.

I often asked him to write about his childhood. I wanted to know. He was a fatherless poor boy farmed out among relations; and from time to time he gave me comic glimpses of that
childhood. But he never wrote about it, and he never gave me anything like a clear account. So I never got to know. If we had lived in a place where there was a tradition of writing, the confessional autobiography might have been one of the forms, and my father might not have been so shy of doing his own. But there was no audience for that kind of writing or any other; in a place like Trinidad, with all its past cruelties, to write of personal pain would have been to invite mockery. There is a dreadful story to be told about this kind of mockery. In 1945, when newsreels of concentration-camp sufferers were shown in Port of Spain cinemas, black people in the cheaper seats laughed and shouted. Perhaps behaviour like this—and not always fear or sorrow—attended the bad punishments of slave times.

There was a tradition of complaint in Negro poetry, like the tradition of the blues. It seemed right that this should be so. I was also aware for a long time at school, from books we came upon, about Martiniquan poetry and the like, that this poetry was written about in a special way: not judged as verse so much as expounded, with long quotations establishing the poet's grief or anger. This was the tradition into which the young Walcott was received.

There was no tradition of Indian writing or colonial writing or confessional writing into which my father might have been received. And all the pain of his early life, the material that in another society might have been his making as a writer, remained locked away.

T
HIS WILL NOT
be an easy chapter for me to do. I got to know Anthony Powell in 1957. He was fifty-two, at the peak of his reputation, and I was twenty-five and awkward, poor in London, with one book published. For a reason I couldn't understand—there was every kind of difference between us—he offered his friendship. It took me some time to believe in this friendship, but it was real, and it continued until 1994, when he was old and bent and walked slowly. He said goodbye then, at the front door of his house in Somerset, and he said so with a certain ceremony that let me know that this was to be our last meeting. So indeed it was, though he continued to see other people.

Six years later he died. I was asked by a television news programme to be interviewed about him. I agreed willingly but then, in the studio, found to my dismay that I had very little to say about his writing. I had to bluff; it couldn't have been
a very good item on the evening news. I had been the great man's friend for all those years but had read little of his work.

I cherished his friendship and generosity, delighted in his conversation, thought him well read and always intelligent, but kept on putting off a serious connected reading of his work. Until 1974 he had been writing a many-volumed autobiographical novel,
A Dance to the Music of Time;
after that, when he was past seventy, he had done bits and pieces of fiction and drama. In what seemed like the remote past I had read the first couple of volumes of the big novel. Very little had remained with me. I thought that might have been because the matter, an English upbringing, was too far away from me. Powell was proud of being an English writer; he thought it something delicate and special, something to which people would at some time want to return; and from those two novels an impression (which I didn't trust because of its strangeness) had stayed with me that the writer had wished to show how much he knew of English manners.

A long time afterwards I read the third volume of the series. I was deeply impressed, by the care of the writing, the management of various moods, and the pace. I wrote him a letter of admiration, and I promised myself that one day, when I had the time, I would do that connected reading of the work which I hadn't yet done.

When he died I was asked by the editor of a literary weekly to write about him. I was working on a book at the time and couldn't do anything just then. But the idea of writing about Powell attracted me, and I asked the editor to wait a little. When I was free I settled down to read. I got two of the paperback
omnibus volumes, and read six connected books from the middle. I was appalled. Powell had had a little American success with one book, and I felt that this perhaps had corrupted him. There was none of the shape I had expected to find in the longer book. There was less and less care in the writing; everything was over-explained; the matter became more nakedly autobiographical; and there was a strange new vanity in the writer, as of a man who felt he had made it, and could now do no wrong, could now like a practised magician pull his old comic characters out of his hat and feel he had to do no more.

There was no narrative skill, perhaps even no thought for narrative. A moment comes during one of the middle books when a number of the earlier characters are consumed in one evening in a bombing holocaust. In the main narrative, which is full of coincidences that eternally bring many of the old characters together again in every book, this holocaust is like yet another private event, a private blitz, another partial assembling of the cast: two hit-and-run bombers almost without warning destroy two of the houses or places the writer-narrator knows well: two bombers, two houses, no more.

Such a strange event has to be handled carefully by a writer; hints of the calamity and the oddity have to be dropped beforehand, perhaps even for a book or two in advance. It is no use saying that during the war people died like this, and without warning. A book is a book; it has to have its own logic. And the book anyway is being written long after the event, when the awfulness should have been reflected upon and digested. What happens in the book is that some of the
people who are going to die behave strangely: they appear to be yielding to some psychic prompting and are saying a long goodbye. And when later in the evening, by accident, the writer learns of the calamity, he, normally retiring, content to be a listener and observer, behaves with unusual energy, finding ways in the blackout of getting to the two bombed houses, one after the other, and confirming what he already knows.

This is how death and knowledge of death comes. The moment should be profoundly tragic. But some emotional charge is missing. What is missing is that we don't truly know the people who have died; we don't know them as well as the writer knows them or their originals; we know only their names. That is one of the consequences of the unwieldy way the book is organised. It is done in the first person from beginning to end, and much of what we learn about people comes through dialogue. It is a ponderous form of narrative and, since every dialogue starts from scratch (and though Powell is a master of the different ways of English speech), it wastes time, giving equal weight to the trivial and the important.

Every volume begins with a piece of what we might call actuality; and every occasion of actuality ends in the most predictable way as a kind of party, where we are given little glimpses of the central people of the narrative and learn how they have fared since we have last seen them. We learn especially about their current mating. In the beginning this provided surprise; but then there is no surprise in this game of musical chairs. And then, too, we begin to feel that these people, though they were new to us in the beginning, part of a
social knowledge which we might not have had, are only one-dimensional, not interesting enough for us to follow. Their interplay doesn't become profounder with age and the passage of time. The writer gives them a lot of attention, but we feel somehow that he sees more in them than he makes us see.

This failure is extraordinary. Powell worked for some time as a film script-writer before the war, and in early conversation with me he often used his script-writing experiences to demonstrate how writing should not be done. He and his script-writing colleague (he said) might need to introduce a character at a certain stage. To give this character an identity they might concentrate on externals; that was the easiest way. They might give the man a limp or a blinking eye; or the man might wear a certain kind of clothes, or smoke a certain kind of cigarette or cigar. This method worked in film scripts; it was shoddy in books. And yet it can be said that this in some way was Powell's method in his big book.

My feeling at the end was that this man, my friend, might have written books, might have lived the literary life, but wasn't the kind of writer he wished to be.

And the feeling was strengthened when I looked at one of the pre-war books,
From a View to a Death
. An artist goes to a country house to paint a portrait. English country manners are carefully described: this might almost be the point of the book. The artist then decides to take the country gentry on at what he sees as their own game. He gets on a horse and falls and is killed. And, as in the later books, everything is over-explained; there are too many words. But what is the point? Is
it that artists should stick to what they know best? It is mysterious, and perhaps there is no point apart from the display of social knowledge.

There is a kind of writing that undermines its subject. Most good writing, I believe, is like that.
A View to a Death
, for all its care in the delineation of county manners, leaves English social life just where the writer found it. And the same is true of
The Music of Time
.

A
COMMON DEVICE OF FICTION
is like this. A great man dies, covered in honour. Someone then, usually an admirer, goes into the life to do a biography and discovers all sorts of horrors. Ibsen uses this device a lot, but without the death; every Ibsen great man has near-murder in the background. I felt like a fictional character, but I didn't know how to do the story. I didn't know how to present myself to people who knew Powell. I didn't think anyone would believe that after all the years of friendship I had not read Powell in any serious and connected way, had only just done so, and didn't now think of him as a writer. It was a piece of Ibsen-like horror. It wasn't something I could put to the editor who had asked me to write about him. So I did nothing. I said nothing. But somehow the idea got around that I had dishonoured a friendship.

And it would not have been easy to put to people that the friendship remained of value, was not diminished by the horror. I had met him in 1957 as a great English writer, was flattered by his attention, and through all our friendship I never
ceased to think of him as a great writer. It may be that the friendship lasted all this time because I had not examined his work.

M
Y PURPOSE IN THIS BOOK
is not literary criticism or biography. People who want to know about Powell or Walcott can turn to the critical works that have been done about these writers. I wish only, and in a personal way, to set out the writing to which I was exposed during my career. I say writing, but I mean more specifically vision, a way of seeing and feeling.

Romantic and beautiful though the idea is, there is no such thing as a republic of letters where—as in an antechamber to a fairly judged afterlife of reputation or neglect, and in the presence of a literary St. Peter—all bring their work and all are equal. That idea of equality is of course false. Every kind of writing is the product of a specific historical and cultural vision. The point is uncontentious. National histories of literature make it all the time, and no one minds. But the self-serving “writing schools” of the United States and England think otherwise. They decree that a certain artificial way of writing narrative prose (which is a general way now and in twenty or thirty years will almost certainly appear old-fashioned) is the correct way.

Let me see whether I can give a short guide. You begin (at the risk of using too many words, like Hemingway) with language of extreme simplicity (like Hemingway), enough to draw attention to your style. From time to time, to remind people,
you can do a very simple, verbose paragraph. In between you can relax. When the going gets rough, when difficult or subtle things have to be handled, the clichés will come tumbling out anyway; the inadequate language will betray itself; but not many will notice after your very simple beginning and your later simple paragraphs. Don't forget the flashback; and, to give density to a banal narrative, the flashback within the flashback. Remember the golden rule of writing-school narrative: a paragraph of description, followed by two or three lines of dialogue. This is thought to make for realism, though the dialogue can't always be spoken. Chinese and Indian and African experience sifted down into this writing-school mill comes out looking and feeling American and modern. These writing-school writers are all given the same modern personality, and that is part of their triumph.

I grew up on an island like Walcott's. Other races were close, but for my first five or six years, in the 1930s, I lived in a transplanted peasant India. This India was being washed away by the stringencies of our colonial life, but it still felt whole, and this gave me a base of feeling and cultural knowledge which even members of my family who came later didn't have. This base of feeling has lasted all my life. I think it is true to say that, in the beginning, living in this unusual India, I saw people of other groups but at the same time didn't see them. This made me receptive to my father's stories of a self-contained local Indian life and the healing power of Indian ritual. I was more than receptive to these stories; I was greatly moved by them. I saw them being written and was dazzled by them. They were among my first literary experiences, together
with a roughly done country
Ramlila
, a pageant-play based on the Ramayana epic.