by Diana Athill
* * *
* His editor at Editions du Seuil, Paris
** His editor at Random House, New York
V. S. NAIPAUL
GOOD PUBLISHERS ARE supposed to ‘discover’ writers, and perhaps they do. To me, however, they just happened to come. V. S. Naipaul came through Andrew Salkey who was working with him at the BBC, and Andrew I met through Mordecai Richler when he took me for a drink in a Soho club. When Andrew heard that I was Mordecai’s editor he asked me if he could send me a young friend of his who had just written something very good, and a few days later Vidia came to a coffee bar near our office and handed me Miguel Street.
I was delighted by it, but worried: it was stories (though linked stories), and a publishing dogma to which André Deutsch strongly adhered was that stories didn’t sell unless they were by Names. So before talking to him about it I gave it to Francis Wyndham who was with us as part-time ‘Literary Adviser’, and Francis loved it at once and warmly. This probably tipped the balance with André, whose instinct was to distrust as ‘do-gooding’ my enthusiasm for a little book by a West Indian about a place which interested no one and where the people spoke an unfamiliar dialect. I think he welcomed its being stories because it gave him a reason for saying ‘no’: but Francis’s opinion joined to mine made him bid me find out if the author had a novel on the stocks and tell him that if he had, then that should come first and the stories could follow all in good time. Luckily Vidia was in the process of writing The Mystic Masseur.
In fact we could well have launched him with Miguel Street, which has outlasted his first two novels in critical esteem, because in the fifties it was easier to get reviews for a writer seen by the British as black than it was for a young white writer, and reviews influenced readers a good deal more then than they do now. Publishers and reviewers were aware that new voices were speaking up in the newly independent colonies, and partly out of genuine interest, partly out of an optimistic if ill-advised sense that a vast market for books lay out there, ripe for development, they felt it to be the thing to encourage those voices. This trend did not last long, but it served to establish a number of good writers.
Vidia did not yet have the confidence to walk away from our shilly-shallying, and fortunately it did him no real harm. Neither he nor we made any money to speak of from his first three books, The Mystic Masseur, The Suffrage of Elvira and Miguel Street, but there was never any doubt about the making of his name, which began at once with the reviews and was given substance by his own work as a reviewer, of which he got plenty as soon as he became known as a novelist. He was a very good reviewer, clearly as widely read as any literary critic of the day, and it was this rather than his first books which revealed that here was a writer who was going to reject the adjective ‘regional’, and with good reason.
We began to meet fairly often, and I enjoyed his company because he talked well about writing and people, and was often funny. At quite an early meeting he said gravely that when he was up at Oxford – which he had not liked – he once did a thing so terrible that he would never be able to tell anyone what it was. I said it was unforgivable to reveal that much without revealing more, especially to someone like me who didn’t consider even murder literally unspeakable, but I couldn’t shift him and never learnt what the horror was – though someone told me later that when he was at Oxford Vidia did have some kind of nervous breakdown. It distressed me that he had been unhappy at a place which I loved. Having such a feeling for scholarship, high standards and tradition he ought to have liked it . . . but no, he would not budge. Never for a minute did it occur to me that he might have felt at a loss when he got to Oxford because of how different it was from his background, still less because of any form of racial insult: he appeared to me far too impressive a person to be subject to such discomforts.
The image Vidia was projecting at that time, in his need to protect his pride, was so convincing that even when I read A House for Mr Biswas four years later, and was struck by the authority of his account of Mr Biswas’s nervous collapse, I failed to connect its painful vividness with his own reported ‘nervous breakdown’. Between me and the truth of his Oxford experience stood the man he wanted people to see.
At that stage I did not know how or why he had rejected Trinidad, and if I had known it, would still have been unable to understand what it is like to be unable to accept the country in which you were born. Vidia’s books (not least A Way in the World, not written until thirty-seven years later) were to do much to educate me; but then I had no conception of how someone who feels he doesn’t belong to his ‘home’ and cannot belong anywhere else is forced to exist only in himself; nor of how exhausting and precarious such a condition (blithely seen by the young and ignorant as desirable) can be. Vidia’s self – his very being – was his writing: a great gift, but all he had. He was to report that ten years later in his career, when he had earned what seemed to others an obvious security, he was still tormented by anxiety about finding the matter for his next book, and for the one after that . . . an anxiety not merely about earning his living, but about existing as the person he wanted to be. No wonder that while he was still finding his way into his writing he was in danger; and how extraordinary that he could nevertheless strike an outsider as a solidly impressive man*.
This does not mean that I failed to see the obvious delicacy of his nervous system. Because of it I was often worried by his lack of money, and was appalled on his behalf when I once saw him risk losing a commission by defying The Times Literary Supplement They had offered their usual fee of £25 (or was it guineas?) for a review, and he had replied haughtily that he wrote nothing for less than fifty. ‘Oh silly Vidia,’ I thought, ‘now they’ll never offer him anything again.’ But lo! they paid him his fifty and I was filled with admiration. Of course he was right: authors ought to know their own value and refuse the insult of derisory fees.
I was right to admire that self-respect, at that time, but it was going to develop into a quality difficult to like. In all moral qualities the line between the desirable and the deplorable is imprecise – between tolerance and lack of discrimination, prudence and cowardice, generosity and extravagance – so it is not easy to see where a man’s proper sense of his own worth turns into a more or less pompous self-importance. In retrospect it seems to me that it took eight or nine years for this process to begin to show itself in Vidia, and I think it possible that his audience was at least partly to blame for it.
For example, after a year or so of meetings in the pubs or restaurants where I usually lunched, I began to notice that Vidia was sometimes miffed at being taken to a cheap restaurant or being offered a cheap bottle of wine – and the only consequence of my seeing this (apart from my secretly finding it funny) was that I became careful to let him choose both restaurant and wine. And this carefulness not to offend him, which was, I think, shared by all, or almost all, his English friends, came from an assumption that the reason why he was so anxious to command respect was fear that it was, or might be, denied him because of his race; which led to a squeamish dismay in oneself at the idea of being seen as racist. The shape of an attitude which someone detests, and has worked at extirpating, can often be discerned from its absence, and during the first years of Vidia’s career in England he was often coddled for precisely the reason the coddler was determined to disregard.
Later, of course, the situation changed. His friends became too used to him to see him as anything but himself, and those who didn’t know him saw him simply as a famous writer – on top of which he could frighten people. Then it was the weight and edge of his personality which made people defer to him, rather than consideration for his sensitivity. Which makes it easy to underestimate the pain and strain endured by that sensitivity when he had first pulled himself up out of the thin, sour soil in which he was reared, and was striving to find a purchase in England where, however warmly he was welcomed, he could never feel that he wholly belonged.
During the sixties I visite
d the newly independent islands of Trinidad & Tobago twice, with intense pleasure: the loveliness of tropical forests and seas, the jolt of excitement which comes from difference, the kindness of people, the amazing beauty of Carnival (unlike Vidia, I like steel bands: oh the sound of them coming in from the fringes of Port of Spain through the four-o’clock-in-the-morning darkness of the opening day!). On my last morning in Port of Spain I felt a sharp pang as I listened to the keskidee (a bird which really does seem to say ‘Qu’est-ce qu’il dit?‘) and knew how unlikely it was that I should ever hear it again. But at no time was it difficult to remember that mine was a visitor’s Trinidad & Tobago; so three other memories, one from high on the country’s social scale, the others from lower although by no means from the bottom, are just as clear as the ones I love.
One. Vidia’s history of the country, The Loss of El Dorado, which is rarely mentioned nowadays but which I think is the best of his non-fiction books, had just come out. Everyone I had met, including the Prime Minister Eric Williams and the poet Derek Walcott, had talked about it in a disparaging way and had betrayed as they did so that they had not read it. At last, at a party given by the leader of the opposition, I met someone who had: an elderly Englishman just retiring from running the Coast Guard. We were both delighted to be able to share our pleasure in it and had a long talk about it. As we parted I asked him: ‘Can you really be the only person in this country who has read it?’ and he answered sadly: ‘Oh, easily.’
Two. In Tobago I stayed in a delightful little hotel where on most evenings the village elders dropped in for a drink. On one of them a younger man – a customs officer in his mid-thirties seconded to Tobago’s chief town Scarborough, from Port of Spain – invited me to go out on the town with him. We were joined by another customs officer and a nurse from the hospital. First we went up to Scarborough’s fort – its Historic Sight – to look at the view. Then, when conversation fizzled out, it was suggested that we should have a drink at the Arts Centre. It looked in the darkness little more than a shed, and it was shut, but a man was hunted up who produced the key, some Coca-Cola and half a bottle of rum . . . and there we stood, under a forty-watt lamp in a room of utter dinginess which contained nothing at all but a dusty ping-pong table with a very old copy of the Reader’s Digest lying in the middle of it. We sipped our drinks in an atmosphere of embarrassment – almost shame – so heavy that it silenced us. After a few minutes we gave up and went to my host’s barely furnished but tidy little flat – I remember it as cold, which it can’t have been – where we listened to a record of ‘Yellow Bird’ and drank another rum. Then I was driven back to the hotel. The evening’s emptiness – the really frightening feeling of nothing to do, nothing to say – had made me feel quite ill. I knew too little about the people I had been with to guess what they were like when at ease: all I could discern was that my host was bored to distraction at having to work in the sticks; that he had been driven by his boredom to make his sociable gesture and had then become nervous to the extent of summoning friends to his aid; and that all three had quickly seen that the whole thing was a mistake and had been overtaken by embarrassed gloom. And no wonder. When I remember the Arts Centre I see why, when Vidia first revisited the West Indies, what he felt was fear.
Three. And it is not only people like Vidia, feverish with repressed talent, who yearn to escape. There was the conversation I overheard in the changing-cubicle next to mine when I was trying on a swimsuit in a store in Port of Spain. An American woman, accompanied by her husband, was also buying something, and they were obviously quite taken by the pretty young woman who was serving them. They were asking her questions about her family, and the heightened warmth of their manner made me suspect that they found it almost exciting to be kind to a black person. When the customer had made her choice and her husband was writing a cheque, the saleswoman’s voice suddenly changed from chirpiness to breathlessness and she said: ‘May I ask you something?’ The wife said: ‘Yes, of course,’ and the poor young woman plunged into desperate pleading: please, please would they help her, would they give her a letter inviting her to their home which she could show to the people who issued visas, she wouldn’t be any trouble, and if they would do this for her . . . On and on she went, the husband trying to interrupt her in an acutely embarrassed voice, still wanting to sound kind but only too obviously appalled at what his entirely superficial amiability had unleashed. Soon the girl was in tears and the couple were sounding frantic with remorse and anxiety to escape – and I was so horrified at being the invisible and unwilling witness of this desperate young woman’s humiliation that I abandoned my swimsuit, scrambled into my dress and fled, so I do not know how it ended.
Vidia had felt fear and dislike of Trinidad ever since he could remember. As a schoolboy he had written a vow on an endpaper of his Latin primer to be gone within five years (it took him six). He remembered this in The Middle Passage, his first non-fiction book, published in 1962, in which he described his first revisiting of the West Indies and did something he had never done before: examined the reasons why he feared and hated the place where he was born.
It was a desperately negative view of the place, disregarding a good half of the picture; and it came out with the fluency and force of something long matured less in the mind than in the depths of the nervous system. Trinidad, he said, was and knew itself to be a mere dot on the map. It had no importance and no existence as a nation, being only somewhere out of which first Spain, then France, then Britain could make money: grossly easy money because of using slaves to do the work, and after slaves indentured labour which was almost as cheap. A slave-based society has no need to be efficient, so no tradition of efficiency exists. Slave-masters don’t need to be intelligent, so ‘in Trinidad education was not one of the things money could buy; it was something money freed you from. Education was strictly for the poor. The white boy left school “counting on his fingers” as the Trinidadian likes to say, but this was a measure of his privilege . . . The white community was never an upper class in the sense that it possessed superior speech or taste or attainments; it was envied only for its money and its access to pleasure.’
When this crude colonial society was opened up because the islands were no longer profitable and the British pulled out, what Vidia saw gushing in to fill the vacuum was the flashiest and most materialistic kind of American influence in the form of commercial radio (television had yet to come) and films – films at their most violent and unreal. (‘British films’, he wrote, ‘played to empty houses. It was my French master who urged me to go to see Brief Encounter; and there were two of us in the cinema, he in the balcony, I in the pit.’) Trinidad & Tobago was united only in its hunger for ‘American modernity’, and under that sleazy veneer it was split.
It was split between the descendants of slaves, the African Trinidadians, and the descendants of indentured labourers, the Indians; both groups there by an accident of history, neither with any roots to speak of. In The Middle Passage Vidia called the Africans ‘Negroes’, which today sounds shocking. Reading the book one has to keep reminding oneself that the concept of Black Power had yet to be formulated. Black people had not yet rejected the word ‘Negro’: it was still widely used and ‘black’ was considered insulting. And in this book his main criticism of Trinidadians of African descent is that they had been brainwashed by the experience of slavery into ‘thinking white’ – into being ashamed of their own colour and physical features. What he deplored – as many observers of West Indian societies had done – was precisely the attitudes which people of African descent were themselves beginning to deplore, and would soon be forcing themselves to overcome.
The Indians he saw as less unsure of themselves because of the pride they took in the idea of India; but he also saw that idea as being almost meaningless – they had no notion of what the sub-continent was really like. It was also dangerous in that it militated against attempts to bridge the rift. The Indians were ‘a peasant-minded, money-minded com
munity, spiritually static, its religion reduced to rites without philosophy, set in a materialist, colonialist society; a combination of historical accident and national temperament has turned the Trinidadian Indian into the complete colonial, even more philistine than the white.’
He sums up his account of racial friction thus: ‘Like monkeys pleading for evolution, each claiming to be whiter than the other, Indians and Negroes appeal to the unacknowledged white audience to see how much they despise one another. They despise one another by reference to the whites; and the irony is that their antagonism should have reached its peak today, when white prejudices have ceased to matter.’
This was a fair assessment: everyone, apart from Tourist Board propagandists, to whom I talked about politics deplored this racial tension, and most of them either said outright, or implied, that blame lay with the group to which they did not belong. No one remarked on the common sense which enabled people to rub along in spite of it (as they still do), any more than Vidia did. The rift, which certainly was absurd and regrettable, became more dramatic if seen as dangerous, and therefore reflected a more lurid light on whoever was being presented as its instigator. People did make a bid for the outsider’s respect – did ‘appeal to the unacknowledged white audience’. But to what audience was Vidia himself appealing? It was The Middle Passage which first made black West Indians call him ‘racist’.
