Making an Elephant

by Graham Swift

  Tea with Ish, 1990.

  IN THE BAMBOO CLUB

  WITH CAZ

  TORONTO, 1986

  That ‘next room’ where writers go to get away from writing can take many forms. I once met a Spanish author who said that his perfect writing circumstances would be these: a remote, idyllic desert island, on which there would be a single, peaceful house. In the house would be a room, with a desk, in which absolute, monastic calm would reign. But in this room would be a door, and it would lead to a nightclub.

  Not all writers have such domestic dreams, but maybe most writers have the experience of discovering places—hideaway places, loud or quiet, bright or dim—where they’ve felt suddenly, temporarily at home, while in another sense gratefully absent from home: places they’d never have found, perhaps, if they weren’t writers (and they’re not always sure how they did find them), but once they’re there the whole point, really, is that they don’t have to be writers for a while.

  Toronto may seem an unlikely setting for such a happy bolt-hole and, sadly, the last time I found myself there I discovered that the Bamboo Club no longer existed. Even the site of its former entrance, among the clutter of frontages on Queen Street West, was hard to discern, though it’s true that the Bamboo had never given itself away. It was one of those Alice-in-Wonderland places you had to burrow into from the street. Once you were in, it opened up on you even as it gathered you in a surprise embrace. But, so I was told, it was gone, and since it was gone, I was rather glad there was no sign of its ever having been there. It preserved its mirage-like, iconic status.

  I first met Caryl Phillips—Caz—in Toronto in October 1986 when we were both guests of the Harbourfront International Festival of Authors; but it would be fairer to say we met in the Bamboo Club. We certainly tracked it down. I actually first saw Caz when his head, under a baseball cap, poked gingerly round the door of the room in the Harbourfront Hilton reserved as the Festival’s hospitality suite. The atmosphere when a lot of writers are packed into one room can be charged, and it sometimes became known as the Hostility Suite. Caz must have rapidly picked up on the latent tension, because his head quickly ducked back behind the door and it seemed some time before he steeled himself to try entering again.

  Things were altogether more congenial in the Bamboo Club—on relatively shabby Queen Street West, in downtown Toronto, away from the showy aura of the Hilton and the new complex of buildings on the Harbourfront strip along the lake shore. So, throughout our visit, we stayed in the Bamboo quite a lot. This was no reflection on the Harbourfront Festival, which in those days was a well-organized, prestigious event which genuinely gave its invited authors the star treatment—I’ve never encountered a better literary festival, in fact. But it says something for the Bamboo Club. The writers at the Festival were required to give one solo reading and to take part in one or two other panel events. While there was no hard rule about attending events in which you weren’t directly involved, there was a sort of understanding that it would be good to be around. Caz and I were among the more conspicuous truants.

  The Bamboo Club, if you took it apart, was nothing special: the bottleneck entrance, a long wooden bar, some tables, a dance space, a small stage for musicians, several tropically themed decorative touches which never quite toppled over into kitsch. It clearly aimed to create the mood, in the middle of often dour, often very cold Toronto, of some exotic and vibrant oasis—an aim that might have fallen on its face. But put it all together and it worked. You were in Ontario, but you were in that nationless place of magic refuge that could be anywhere in the world.

  The guest musicians that week were from Ghana: Pat Thomas and his Native Rhythm Band. I can hear them now.

  Ten years later, in 1996, I was in Toronto again for a book publication, to be celebrated, naturally—there was now an established link—at the Bamboo Club. But my publishers had kept back a surprise. At the bar when we walked in was Caz. He’d flown up specially from the States where he was now living. ‘Couldn’t miss the occasion,’ he said, taking a nonchalant sip of his beer. He looked as if he’d been sitting there for the whole ten years.

  In those ten years, and since, I’ve probably—no, definitely—had more beers with Caz than with any other writer-friend, and the Bamboo Club, transporting its spirit, has transmuted itself into numerous other haunts in many parts of the world. The territorial analysis of our friendship is interesting. I’m a more or less rooted Englishman and Londoner. Caz is a medley of influences. Born in the Caribbean, he was brought up in England and is a British citizen by way of St Kitts (as part of the Commonwealth), Yorkshire, Oxford and Shepherd’s Bush. Anyone first encountering Caz on their travels will detect a puzzling, hard-to-place accent in his voice. I found it oddly hard to identify in Toronto. It’s the accent of Leeds.

  Caz now lives mainly in New York, but it might be better to say New York is his base. When he shows up in London, every few months or so, you never quite know where he’ll have been beforehand. He’s the most peripatetic writer I’ve met, and, though I’m not nearly as ready or as frequent a traveller as he is, I may well have spent more time with Caz outside of Britain than in it. I haven’t exactly totted it up, and the memories have a characteristic haze: Toronto, of course; New York and various other American cities; Scandinavia, the Low Countries (arguably, when with Caz, the High Countries); Amsterdam, Stockholm, Cologne, New Delhi, Singapore … But this is nothing to the ground Caz himself has covered.

  Of the writers I know Caz has, in his mindset and his very way of life, the most openly, if always sceptically, global view. He’s not Anglocentric, Eurocentric, America-centric or Caribbean-centric. Uprootedness, the disjunction of cultures and histories, is perhaps his abiding theme, but not merely as it might stem from the facts of his birth and the colour of his skin. Uprooted himself, he handles, adumbrates the condition of having no fixed abode, no single country, with style and poise. In his work he explores it with great insight and compassion. I know, or I can guess, that he’s suffered from his uprootedness more than he’s ever likely to say, and there’s a way in which his self-made success and independence as a writer may have added their own twists and pressures to that uprootedness. But his writing, if it can be uncompromising, tough or sad, is without any underlying tone of bitterness, just as bitterness is absent from his personal repertoire. I know of no other writer who is so serious in his work while at the same time, in life, having such a serious sense of fun.

  The interview that follows—published by Bomb in New York, but based on a public interview with Caz at the ICA in London in 1991—brings up in my final question this mixture of private fun and authorial seriousness, even pessimism. To some, such a mixture may seem not so much a mixture as an irreconcilable discrepancy, as if writers who take a hard look at the human condition shouldn’t be allowed to have fun, as if a pessimist should be barred from enjoying life.

  Caz and I are not of that puritanical school. Near the end of the interview I rather unfairly pin the label ‘pessimist’ on him, aware of its being sometimes pinned on me, and I share Caz’s reaction of surprise to it. Elsewhere in these pages I say that all fiction, in its fundamental creativity, is affirmative—at most a celebration, at least a glow in the dark. This doesn’t mean it should be a constant romp, or shrink from hard truths. And one effect of acknowledging those hard truths, along with respect for human resilience (Caz’s answer is a good one) and the possibility of compassion, is that weight and warmth are added to the real joys of being alive. Anyone who looks thinkingly around for a while at the world and at human history will be a pessimist, but this isn’t, as we all know, the end of pleasure and cheer. Even my namesake Jonathan Swift, whose work sometimes verges on the misanthropic, could make the distinction that he hated ‘that animal called man, although I heartily love John, Thomas, Peter and so forth’.

  And there remains the commonplace fact that writers, like anyone else, after their sessions of cooped-up toil, like to go out and have fun. With
Caz the fun has often reached a high, anarchic, surreal pitch hard to recount and perhaps best not recounted. I think, for example, of another incongruously, exotically named club—the Kilimanjaro Club in, of all places, Washington DC. But this was only where we ended up late one night after a very long couple of days. We’d met, two days before, in Boston, when we were each on separate legs of US book tours. I was near the end, Caz was halfway through, but we’d both clearly reached that point, not difficult to reach on US book tours, of having had enough. We then had to fly on to Washington where we had separate schedules the next day, but were due to read together in the evening at a well-known bookstore, best left unnamed. We decided to ignore our schedules, but we did make it to the bookstore.

  For the audience and bookstore staff it proved to be a memorable evening of which Caz and I have very little distinct memory at all. Some years after the event I had a letter from the States from Caz saying that he’d revisited, with some caution, the bookstore in question and they not only still vividly recalled the event, but they still had the glasses. That is, the glasses we’d apparently been holding in our hands when we entered the bookstore and which belonged to the (again nameless) Washington hotel in whose bar we’d spent most of the day.

  Further details are irretrievable, including how we got to (or left) the Kilimanjaro Club. But those two glasses had been preserved, it seems, in situ, as crystalline evidence of the grosser effects of a US tour. When I found myself in Washington again more recently, reading not at a bookstore but at the Press Club on 14th Street—and this would now be well over a decade since the original episode—one of the organizers gave me a strange look. She explained that she’d been there, ‘that evening’, working at that bookstore all those years ago. ‘You can’t have forgotten,’ she said. Well, yes and no.

  I don’t need that Spanish writer’s special amenity—the quiet room with its door opening onto a nightclub. I don’t think even Caz does. There are other ways, after all, of getting away from writing than nightclubs. Then again, there are plenty of sad, admonitory tales of writers who’ve made increasing use of the nightclub to the point where they can no longer get back to their desks. But I do need, as I think most writers need, to set alongside the seriousness of writing a place—or some ever relocatable territory—of forgetful fun. It shouldn’t be a place (God forbid) where writers ordinarily convene, but it will be a place where one’s happy to have the company of a like-minded (or like-mindless) writer or two.

  Caz for a long time now has been such a companion, and the place, wherever it’s to be found and though its archetype is no more, is called the Bamboo Club.

  Bamboo Club flier, October 1986.

  An Interview with Caryl Phillips

  [The occasion of the original interview, before an audience in London in 1991, was the publication of Caz’s fourth novel, Cambridge.]

  GS: Caryl Phillips—Caz, as I’ve come to know him—was born in St Kitts in the Leeward Islands in 1958. He came to England when still a babe in arms and was brought up and educated here. He’s since travelled extensively and made his temporary home in many parts of the world, including his native St Kitts. Nomadic himself, it could be said that one of the main themes of his work is that of the journey—or of human displacement in a variety of forms. The journey behind his first novel, The Final Passage (1985), was the one Caz himself took part in, albeit unwittingly—the immigration of the post-war years from the Caribbean to England. The journey that lies behind both Caz’s last novel, Higher Ground (1989), and his new novel, Cambridge, is a more historic, primal and terrible journey; the journey of the slave trade westwards from Africa.

  In Higher Ground, a novel in three parts, we travel from Africa in the slave-trade days to North America at the time of the Black Power movement, and finish in a Europe still nursing its wounds from the last war. In Cambridge Caz has reversed the general direction to bring a European consciousness face to face with Europe’s global perpetrations. He does this through the person of Emily, an Englishwoman of the early nineteenth century, who escapes an arranged marriage by travelling to her father’s estate in the West Indies (her father being an absentee landlord). There she is exposed to and indeed exposed by the effects of slavery and colonialism.

  Cambridge is also in three parts, the first and longest of which is Emily’s own account of her journey and her observations when she arrives. From what seems at first to be an inquisitive, self-consoling travelogue there emerges a drama revolving around a handful of characters including Emily herself; Brown, an Englishman whom we understand has somehow ousted the previous manager of the estate; and the Cambridge of the title, a negro slave who’s suffered the singular but equivocal fate of having lived in England and having been converted to Christianity.

  The second part of the book is Cambridge’s own account of how he came to be Anglicized and Christianized. The third, written in the form of a report (which we guess to be far from reliable), describes how Cambridge comes to be executed for the murder of Brown.

  A final brief epilogue tells us the effect of all this on Emily. These last few pages, coming at the end of a novel of enormous accumulative power, are particularly astonishing. Written in a prose of tense intimacy, they show how facile it would be to assess either Caz’s heroine or his work as a whole by any simple cultural or racial analysis. Caz is interested in human beings. Emily’s plight at the end of the novel plainly has its cultural or racial dimension, but it’s essentially one of personal trauma—psychological, sexual, moral and (a word Caz will no doubt love) existential.

  GS: How did Cambridge arise? What was the germ, the idea behind it?

  CP: You know that period when you’ve finished a book and you don’t know what to do? We generally have lunch during these periods in that place around the corner from the British Library, as one of us is pretending to be ‘working’ in there. Well, true to form, I was doing little more than scrambling around in the British Library, having just finished Higher Ground, and having a month and a half on my hands before I was due to go down to St Kitts. It was during this period that I happened upon some journals in the North Library. One in particular caught my eye. It was entitled ‘Journal of a Lady of Quality’ and written by a Scotswoman, named Janet Schaw, who at the beginning of the nineteenth century travelled from Edinburgh to the Caribbean. What attracted me to this story was the fact that she visited St Kitts. Right beside what was once my brother’s place, up in the mountains in St Kitts, is a broken-down great house. Janet Schaw described going to dinner there when it was the centrepiece of one of the grandest plantations in the eastern Caribbean. I began to realize then that there was a whole literature of personal narratives written primarily by women who’d travelled to the Caribbean in that weird phase of English history between the Abolition of the Slave Trade Act in 1807 and the emancipation of the slaves in 1834. Individuals who inherited these Caribbean estates from their families were curious to find out what this property was, what it would entail to maintain it, whether they would get any money. The subject matter began to speak, but that’s never enough, for there’s another and formidable hurdle to leap; that of encouraging a character to speak to you. At the back of ’88 when we used to meet, I was concerned with the subject matter and research, but as yet no character had begun to speak.

  GS: And how did the character of Cambridge evolve?

  CP: Actually, he came second. Emily, the woman’s voice, came first, partly because for the last ten years I’d been looking for a way of writing the story of a Yorkshirewoman. I’d grown up in Yorkshire and I’d also read and reread Wuthering Heights, so I had this name in my head, Emily. Emily, who wasn’t anybody at the moment.

  GS: The novel’s called Cambridge, but Emily certainly has more prominence in terms of pages. I wondered whether you’d ever thought of Cambridge as the main character, or indeed if you’d still think of him as the main character?

  CP: No. Emily was always going to be the main character, but Cambridge was conceived o
f as a character who would be ever-present. He doesn’t appear often in the narrative, in terms of time, but he’s always in the background of what she’s doing and what she’s saying and what she’s thinking. And then, of course, in the second section of the novel, he has his own narrative.

  GS: There’s a lovely irony to Cambridge’s narrative. We’ve had many pages of Emily and then we get Cambridge’s account: Emily figures in Cambridge’s mind merely as that Englishwoman on the periphery—scarcely at all, in fact.

  CP: There is a corrective in having Cambridge’s perspective. Cambridge’s voice is politically very important because it is only through painful application that he has acquired the skill of literacy. There are so few African accounts of what it was like to go through slavery, because African people were generally denied access to the skills of reading and writing. Reading and writing equal power. Once you have a language, you are dangerous. Cambridge actually makes the effort to acquire a language. He makes the effort to acquire the skills of literacy and uses them to sit in judgement on himself and the societies he passes through.

  GS: Did your feelings about Cambridge change as you wrote the novel? He is a very ambiguous character.

  CP: You know you cannot be too judgemental about your characters. Novels are an incredibly democratic medium. Everyone has a right to be understood. I have a lot of problems swallowing most of what Emily says and feels. Similarly, I have difficulties with many of Cambridge’s ideas and opinions, because in modern parlance he would be regarded as an Uncle Tom. But I don’t feel I have the right to judge them.

  GS: Emily seems to be a mixture of tentative liberal instincts and blind prejudice. And it could be easy for us, with our twentieth-century complacent hindsight, to judge her quite harshly, but you are very sympathetic—and we can’t do anything but sympathize with her, pity her. I wondered if your feelings about her changed as you wrote her long narrative.