A Writer's People (6 page)

I wonder what Edgar Mittelholzer would have made of my father's story in the green-covered booklet (if in his mood of final Buddhist resolve he could have broken off to look at it). I don't think he would have made much of it. Edgar's greatest wish was to be a popular writer in the style of the 1930s or even earlier, and, amazingly, he half succeeded. Just as house-brokers talk of situation, situation, situation, so Edgar believed in story, story, story (he actually used these words to me once). He also with his uncertain Dutch-Swiss-Guyanese past had his own idea of what was universal. He would have seen my father's story as folklore, Indian local colour, far away, and to a certain extent he would have been right; my father should have written of the 1940s world around him and not gone back to a misty world of 1906.

Edgar, and other people who at various times have asked me about my influences, would have been puzzled by the importance I attached to those stories. They not only gave me an example of literary labour; they gave me an idea of my background and my past. I was born in the Indian countryside of Trinidad, but I very soon began to live away from it. My father's stories peopled that countryside for me, gave me a very real kind of knowledge. Without this knowledge in colonial Trinidad I would have been spiritually adrift like so many of the people around me whom I observed later. I suppose I would have been like Edgar and others, fabricating an ancestry for myself—the colonial neurosis—or even like Sam Selvon, who was Indian and handsome, but had been cut off from
his background (in his stories his ignorance of Indian ways was like a kind of illiteracy), and had only the race and the good looks to show.

Perhaps my father's stories matter more to me than to anybody else. My father first brought them out in a little blue-covered booklet in 1943, rather like Walcott's
25 Poems
six years later. Walcott's book was printed by the Advocate newspaper press in Barbados, my father's by the Guardian Commercial Printery in Trinidad, the printing press of the
Trinidad Guardian
. Both books were sold for a local dollar, about twenty-one pence, at that time a labourer's daily wage. There was no great fuss made about my father's book, much less than that made for Walcott's; even in Trinidad the material was thought to be too far away. But the thousand copies that were printed were sold, mainly to Indians who, I imagine, liked reading about themselves, liked seeing Indian names in print, and liked seeing everyday Indian life given a kind of dignity. So the book was a success in 1943–44. It didn't have anything like that success later.

In 1976 André Deutsch did a volume with a long preface by me and enthusiastic jacket copy by Diana Athill. It was remaindered. Heinemann tried again, with a shorter, elegantly produced volume, in 1994. I haven't heard about it; I suppose there was nothing to report; and I haven't pressed. It was done ten years later in India. Even by the low standards of Indian publishing this was an awful job, with not a descriptive line about the text; the book might have been a book of magic, a cookbook, or a book of wise Indian sayings; the publisher said he was busy. The stories, if the publisher had had an hour to
spare, might have been offered as pioneer work from the diaspora. But materialist India is materialist India, with no idea of its history or literature, and though there is now much talk of the Indian diaspora, the only diaspora Indians care about is the one through which they might get a green card or a son-in-law or daughter-in-law with American citizenship. Every Sunday, in newspapers north and south, you can see the frantic needs advertised in the classified matrimonial columns.

I have to accept now that the stories are dead and live only for me. Walcott's island was like mine, but we were worlds apart. Two important facts made for this difference. I was born in Indian Trinidad in 1932; and from about the age of seven I saw my father writing his stories. This meant that from an early age I began to inhabit a distinct mental world—distinct from the rest of the island, and distinct even from the rest of my mother's extended family. There was this further great difference between Walcott and myself. I could, when my vision grew wider, beyond our small community, comprehend his needs and yearnings (the black children freed from homeless ditties, the brown hair in the aristocracy of sea); but there are parts of me that will be a puzzle to him.

His vision of the island is not mine; and a man with Walcott's island deep in his head and heart will look at the rest of the world in his own way. He will not (to give an extreme example) be interested in Tony Powell's England, or feel sufficiently connected to it, to be able to judge the writing that comes out of it. The artificiality of P. G. Wodehouse and Agatha Christie is another matter; these writers, who seem very English, can be assessed by anyone; the books themselves are modern fairytales,
a form in which for various reasons the myth-making English excel.

Tony would have liked, as part of his Englishness, that delicate and special thing, to be taken up into that myth-making scheme. After the war, towards the end of the big novel, there is a tremendous thanksgiving service in St. Paul's. The narrator attends. He hasn't actually had much of a war, but at this moment he is like Henry the Fifth after Agincourt. He quotes the whole of the original version of “God Save the King” sung at the service. This is meant, fraudulently, and rather too easily, I feel, to cast a retrospective epic quality on all that has gone before, much of which has been trivial. It was Tony's play for the English myth. It was what he expected would come to him, some recognition of him as the twentieth-century English myth-maker; and his little American success, when he was deep in the sequence, seemed to point finally in that direction. But his autobiographical novel was just that: autobiographical and private, full of particularities, appreciated best by people who knew the ins and outs of the life; and his little American success didn't last.

I
T WAS
F
RANCIS
W
YNDHAM
, a reader at Deutsch, who wrote to Tony Powell about me in mid-1957. Francis had been the first reader of my first book. He liked it but Deutsch wanted a novel. I provided that quite soon (the days seemed longer then) and when a year or so later it was published I met Francis with Diana Athill one morning in the new Gaggia coffee house in Dean Street, not far from the Deutsch office.
Francis had a space, rather than a room, in that office, a space so small between partition and partition that he had to ease himself in to sit at his table; and he said he was paid so little by Deutsch that if it was any less Deutsch would go to jail. I had no idea then or till much later that Francis was a man of widespread connections. It is possible that this innocence of mine made our friendship easier. I liked him for his intelligence and wit; I suppose he was the first bookman and the first true intellectual I had got to know. For some time after that first meeting we met once a week.

In due course a letter or a card came from Tony Powell. He was literary editor of
Punch
at the time, and they had done a kind review of my first book. We arranged then on the telephone to meet at El Vino. It was the journalists' bar in Fleet Street. Tony was attractive, easy to talk to. I thanked him for the kind review in
Punch
. It turned out that he had not only sent the book out for review; he had read it. This was more than I expected. He then said something which I thought very wise, and was to use many times, and finally appropriate. He said that, whatever its flaws, a writer's first novel had a lyrical quality which the writer would never again recapture. This was at a higher level of critical appreciation than I had met.

He told me that three or four years before he had also met Kingsley Amis for the first time at El Vino. This was before Amis's great success with
Lucky Jim
. Tony had liked Amis's reviews and had been moved to get in touch with him. At that first meeting Amis said he couldn't stay as long with Tony as he would have liked; he had arranged to meet, at that very place later that day, “a very foolish man.” This gave a piquant
touch to that first meeting, with Tony wondering who Amis's foolish man could be. In time the innocent arrived: it was Terence Kilmartin, literary editor of the
Observer
, future reviser of Scott-Moncrieff's Proust, and not a foolish man at all.

It was Amis's little joke, and it was typical of Tony to cherish it. He delighted in his friends, saw them all as special, liked as it were to walk round them, to see all sides of their character; and he did so without malice. The absence of malice was the great revelation. He kept the letters of all his friends, and could so easily pull out from his little office a John Betjeman or Constant Lambert of the 1930s (the Betjeman classical and cramped, the Lambert bold, with a broad, flat nib) I suspected his letters were filed alphabetically.

He was, it might be said, a collector of people, like the seventeenth-century “character”-writers, or the John Aubrey of
Brief Lives
. During the war he wrote a book about John Aubrey. You might have thought that the match between author and subject was perfect; but Tony's book was dull, as Graham Greene said to Tony in some exasperation one day; and Tony, who told the story in print, didn't (in this account) make a reply. You felt that the Aubrey book was a chore; and again it was strange that for a man who lived the author's life to the full so many of his books gave that impression, of being a chore. Before the war it was the labour of a man trying hard to make his way; after the war it was the labour of a man starting up again, being very careful, and anxious not to fail, until he felt he had succeeded.

I loved the Tony who was like John Aubrey, the collector of people and their oddities, the man who seldom censured,
and thought that people and especially his friends made the world glamorous. Without formulating it, that breadth of vision, that kind of welcome, was one of the things I had actually been hoping to find in the larger society of England. I had longed to get away from the easy malice of the small place I grew up in, where all judgements were moralistic and hateful and corrupting, the judgements of gossip. But so far I hadn't been lucky in England. I had expected much from the university; but I had found little there. At my college they were for the most part provincial and mean and common; and it was like that at the BBC as well.

There was Henry Swanzy and, quite recently, Francis Wyndham. But these were exceptional men. And now, so soon after Francis, I had found Tony Powell. This was the England I had wanted to find, and had given up looking for. The “lyrical quality” of a first book: I had never heard any literary judgement so profound spoken so easily; there was a depth of civilization there. And there was that depth, too, in Tony's attitude to people. I consciously began to copy that; it became part of my own personality. It was the glamorous rather than moralistic thing I needed, to set against the smallness and jealousy that ruled the world. (Many years later I was to meet a successful European publisher who, as a matter of strong principle, it was said, was jealous of everyone.) But without Tony's example I would not have known what I was looking for. In time I was to find out that there was little in his books for me; but Tony was, more than he knew perhaps, an important part of my education, and part of my training as a writer.

At the time of my meeting with him the only thing I knew
of his work was a radio adaptation of
What's Become of Waring
, one of the pre-war books. It was published in 1939 and Tony would say it sold 999 copies, suggesting that its further fruitful career was scuppered by the outbreak of the war. The idea of the book was a simple one, that of a travel writer who doesn't actually travel, an idea so simple that it wouldn't be surprising to learn that it had furnished half a dozen books before and after. The narrative, such as it was, was muffled in its radio adaptation by a torrent of words. So it was in the book itself, with everything over-explained, in the Powell manner.

I couldn't say I hadn't liked the radio adaptation. So I asked Tony what he had made of it. This piece of literary guile—throwing the ball into the other man's court, as it were, useful in similar circumstances in later years—had come to me on the spur of the moment.

He said he liked it, but actors invariably over-acted. They couldn't say a simple thing like “Would you have a cigarette?” without trying to inject drama into it. And I suppose that was one of the other things that had wearied me.

I
T IS AMAZING TO ME
—leaving aside the radio version of
What's Become of Waring
—how often I was baffled by famous novels of the time. I didn't understand Graham Greene's
The Quiet American
, which was a hit in 1955. It was set in Indo-China and was about the war to come; it established his reputation as a man who saw things that were about to happen. I didn't understand the book partly because I didn't read the newspapers, or read them in a selective way. I didn't read
American news; I read nothing about the presidential campaigns, and pitied journalists who had to follow them. I didn't read about English politics; I had never voted. When De Quincey (like Tony Powell in his wish to collect great or unusual men) met Wordsworth he was disappointed that the great man, a poet after all, was interested in something as ordinary as a newspaper.

I wonder what an enquirer like De Quincey would have made of me. I would have said, if I was asked, that though I knew nothing about American politics I took an interest in the world. I read the
Manchester Guardian
and
The Times
. Graham Greene used to tell interviewers (it is their habit to read the previous interviews and they all then ask the same questions) that what they saw as his foresight about Vietnam and other places came from his careful reading of newspapers. My attitude to detailed newspaper-reading was different. I saw it as a form of idleness. Things ran their course; elections took place, and the United States and Great Britain continued much as they had done; to read about what was happening in the interim was a waste of time; and so, too, was to read articles about, say, the best prime minister we never had.