Rahman, whatever family or personal secrets were buried in his heart, would have taken to Surinam an idea of India as a perfect place. That idea, of the good place that was his, to which he might return if he had to, would have supported him all his life. A fair number of indentured emigrants, when they had served out their five-year term, did go back to India (this return was provided for in their indenture agreement); and many of them ended badly, frightened of what they saw when they went back, never getting beyond the docks of Calcutta, and living out their days as city paupers.
Rahman was not among them. He never went back to India, though he lived very long and (from what he says or suggests) had the money to get out of any mess. Perhaps some deep-buried idea of the reality that would have awaited him kept him from going back, something beyond the memory of the gorgeous fairs and festivals, and the maharaja’s palace, and the magical healers of home with their wonderful remedies (tortoise urine mixed together with two or three baked earthworms): things far grander and more mysterious than the drab, flat estates of Surinam, where the plantation houses matched the fields and were petty and poorly built (rusty corrugated-iron roofs, grey weathered boards), where the local African witchdoctors knew only what they knew, and where from time to time ghostly balls of fire rolled over the Dutch-built dykes.
Some idea of India as a vanished perfection might have been with my grandmother’s mattress-maker as well. For him, in 1944 or 1945, India was beyond reach, more than it was for Rahman; and it was easy for this unreachable India of fading memory to be turned to myth. What was true for the mattress-maker was true for the generation that came immediately afterward, my mother’s generation. This generation reverenced India. There was nothing political in this reverence; the great names of the independence movement were known, but only as half-deified names; there was no knowledge of the course of the independence movement, and no knowledge of Indian art or history. Indian culture was the Indian cinema and what survived of the religion and the religious festivals. In some patriotic Indian houses I knew—which would have thought it too crude for words to put up pictures of Hollywood actors—there were framed photographs of Indian film stars. Visitors from India were adored. There was something pure and grand about anything or anyone that came from the far-away sacred land.
This adoration, this idea of India as a land of myth, lasted while India was beyond reach. After the Second World War travel became easier. You could travel the well-worn path to England and from there you could go on by steamer or by plane to India. As soon as a few people had done this India became something else. It became a place that, for the first time for sixty or seventy years, people among us could see in the clear light of day.
This way of looking didn’t come to everyone at the same time. Some of my mother’s sisters went to India. They would have gone to see their father’s family in the distressed Gorakhpur area. They had that address by heart: the name of the village, the name of the thana, the name of the district: the names were like lines of poetry—they would no doubt have sung in that way in my grandfather’s head, and been enough of a guide, in all the frightening vastness of India, to home. In my grandmother’s house the lines were known, as a kind of claim on the great land, which not everyone in the community was privileged to have.
So my mother’s sisters, the proud travellers to India, would have known where to go. They also thought it would be a good idea to use this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to change their local jewellery, made from the gold of Guiana, for jewellery made with proper Indian gold. They did so, and when many weeks later they came back and went to local jewellers with their good news, they found that their Guiana gold had been horribly diluted. The story made the rounds. The India of their father still stood high, but the India they had been to took a knock.
Little by little the India of myth was chipped away, and India became a place of destitution from which we were lucky to have got away. I went myself when I was twenty-nine. I went from England; at that time I was eleven years out of Trinidad. And still I went to that second India, the India from which we had had to get away, and not to the India of independence and the great names of the independence movement. I went with jangling nerves, which became worse the closer the ship got to Bombay.
With all that, unavoidably, the idea of the ancestral land was with me. The water in the harbour had the usual harbour litter, orange peel, a fine web of seemingly dusty, semi-iridescent scum hung with small leaves and bits of twig. It made me think of classical lands and of people making long journeys in ancient times to famous cities, to study rhetoric or philosophy or to put a question to the local oracle. The harbour water would always have been like this, ordinary, unremarkable, until it had been left behind on the journey out.
At the end of that hard year in India, after one or two false beginnings, and after a long period of doubt, I wrote my book which, when it did come, came very fast.
My mother never read anything I wrote. She took it all on trust. And when, fifteen years after my own journey, she thought she should go to India (holding fast to her Guiana gold), it was without any knowledge of what I had gone through or done.
She came in due course to what had been her father’s district, and had become the last line of the address-poem the family all carried in their head. After the district—flat as a board, coated all over with dust, with very long views in which it would have been easy to get lost—came the thana, and after the thana the village, romantically named: “Mahadeo Dubeka.”
There they all fell on her, the relations of eighty or a hundred years before. They were now well trained in welcoming these people from far away claiming kinship. They offered a chair or a stool. They offered food, but my mother was sufficiently far away from India to be nervous of food in that crowded village: food there would have been like the gold of India to someone who possessed Guiana gold.
If she wouldn’t have food with them, they said, three or four speaking at the same time, and all clearly relieved that no food was to be offered, she would at least have tea. And my mother, thinking it a safe substitute, said yes, she would have tea. There was a kind of flurry in the background, excited hushed voices, and in the meantime conversation about ancient family matters and my mother’s journey was made with my mother, who was thinking all the time about the tea and was not on her best form.
The tea at length appeared, a murky dark colour, in a small white china cup. The lady offering the cup, for the greater courtesy and the better show, wiped the side of the cup with the palm of her hand. And then someone from these relations of a hundred years before remembered that sugar had to be offered with tea. My mother said it didn’t matter. But the grey grains of sugar came on somebody’s palm and were slid from the palm into the tea. And that person, courteous to the end, began to stir the sugar with her finger.
This was where my mother ended her journal entry about her visit to her father’s ancestral village. She ended in mid-sentence, unable to face that sugar-stirring finger in the cup of tea. The land of myth, of a perfection that at one time had seemed vanished and unreachable, had robbed her of words.
FOUR
Disparate Ways
FLAUBERT AND SALAMMBÔ
FIRST IN SCHOOL you have English Composition, maybe a page or two in an exercise book, with perhaps an occasional piece of précis running to half a page; and then many years later, in a graver place, you have Essays, literary pieces, of many foolscap pages. The pen runs along the ruled page, with hardly a correction. This can give an illusion of maturity and power. But you may not find it easy to move from those essays, full of required reading, full of other men’s ideas and language, to what you may already have begun to think of as proper writing, writer’s writing, something personal, with authority, something you might imagine printed in a book.
That was how it happened to me. I left the university when I was twenty-two. I had five or six pounds, no more, the remnant of my scholarship money. I went to London, to a cousin’s basement
flat in Paddington (in a street soon to be pulled down for road improvements), and set up as a writer. It was as easy as that. Writers often say they need time. I had all the time in the world. My cousin, who honoured my ambition, was paying the bills. (He was working in a cigarette factory somewhere in the East End, and studying law, dreaming of the day when as a magistrate back home he might take money from both sides. As much as the money he liked the professional style of the thing. I believe he was modelling himself on some big man.)
All that my setting up as a writer required was a table, an exercise book, a pen (I would have preferred a typewriter), and a small acting talent, so that I could think of myself as a writer and stay at the table. I filled pages, writing as fast as I had done when doing my essays. I had no idea what I was doing and where I was going. I believed in my star, believed that my great ambition guaranteed a talent, and went on. Six months later—a dark time, all this period: deep down, I wasn’t fooling myself—I realised I didn’t know how to do this other kind of writing. If I had had even a little money I would have stopped, put an end to the unwelcome, debilitating playacting at the writing table, and looked for something else to do.
I was full of grief for some weeks, and often (especially when I was on a bus) close to tears. The idea then came to me one day, from some unsuspected source of new energy (perhaps, really, from the depth of my despair), that I should forget everything I knew or thought I knew about writing, that in anything new I might attempt I should start from scratch, seeking to do a narrative only out of simple, direct statements. This was what I did. I saved my soul and got started as a writer. For three years I stayed with the hard rules I had made for myself; and then there was no need: as a writer I was always in control, no longer hoping for magic.
I have written of this before. I repeat it here, to lead into what follows. If it is hard as a writer to make the leap from university essay-writing to writer’s writing, it is many times harder for a reader—since reading is a common attainment—to arrive at a true, even a visionary, idea of a master’s quality. People who think they know about prose-writing might look for a special language and rhythm. But that is only part of the story. Again, I speak for myself. It was in late middle age, after I had written many books and after I had spent some years as a novel-reviewer, that I was granted a vision of Flaubert’s narrative splendour in Madame Bovary.
I had read an abridged version at school, and then in my twenties or thirties I had read the full text—read it in my fast, gobbling-up way. The book had made an impression. I remembered some of the details: Charles Bovary’s terrible, mistaken surgery on somebody’s ankle, for instance: Charles not a properly qualified doctor or surgeon, even in those days (perhaps the 1840s), only a health officer with a licence to practise medicine. Other details faded with time, as details of a novel do, but I never ceased to think of Bovary as a book I knew.
What did I possess of the book? There was the impression, increasingly ghostlike, of background and people, that had come to me at that first, fast reading. As a novel-reviewer I depended on that kind of impression. It told me as much as I needed to know about a writer’s mind or sensibility. That was what I wished to write about in my column. And—a small technical point—I found it helped if in a review I didn’t mention the names of the characters; in that way I got nearer to a book’s essence; certain books condemned themselves. I had no further reviewing scheme. Other people, seeking (so to speak) to sovietise the critic’s indefinable function (and to please publishers), thought a novel should be judged according to its plot, characters and style, and marks given under each of those heads. In this way all novels were “product,” more or less the same, and novel-reviewing, always painful, became a vale of tears. I didn’t allow that to happen to me.
Reviewing was many years behind me when I came upon Madame Bovary again. I was between books and I was travelling. I was in an easy, receptive mood, and one morning I found in the house where I was staying an old green-bordered Penguin Classics translation.
I opened the book near the beginning. And there, in five paragraphs at the end of the first chapter, Charles with the help or superintendence of his mother was marrying his first wife: thin, bony, forty-five, a bailiff’s widow from Dieppe, in demand because she is thought to have money. To win this bride for her son, Charles’s mother has had to defeat a scheming butcher. All this in five paragraphs: so much that Flaubert would have enjoyed creating, and so much that I had forgotten.
We have hardly met this first wife when—such is the pace of the opening narrative—we are introduced to the woman who will be the second wife. It happens like this. One winter night, at about eleven, when Charles and his first wife are in bed they hear a horse stopping outside the house. The maid opens the window of her attic, calls down to the street; there is a conversation; and then the maid comes down, shivering in the cold, undoes the lock and the various bolts of the front door (the effects up to this point are all of sound), and lets in the visitor. He comes into the main bedroom directly behind the maid. Charles props himself up on his pillow to see who it is; his wife, out of modesty, turns her face to the wall.
The visitor has come with a written message. It is wrapped in cloth and tucked inside his grey woollen cap and has a blue-wax seal. He takes out this precious message and hands it ceremonially to Charles. The maid holds the lamp for Charles to read. Someone has broken a leg in a farm eighteen miles away. A cross-country journey on a rainy night, and the moon not yet up: Charles’s wife thinks it too dangerous for Charles on his own: better to send the stable-boy to prepare the way, and to get the farm to send a boy to meet Charles. (If Charles is only a health officer and not a real doctor, there are further gradations all the way down.)
Fully four hours later Charles starts out, rehearsing what he has learned about fractures. Little birds, their feathers fluffed out, are silent on the bare apple trees. Trees around farmhouses are dark violet. Charles, on his horse, drowses: now in his fantasy he has just left his marriage bed, now he is still a student. He sees a boy sitting on the grass next to a ditch. The boy says, “Are you the doctor?” And when Charles says yes, the boy takes up his wooden shoes and runs ahead all the way to the farm. (This, about the boy and the wooden shoes, is a magical, unexpected detail: it fixes the cross-country ride in the imagination. It is more than a rustic detail; it gives a pre-industrial edge to what has so far been a modern story.)
At the farm the boy dives into a hole in the hedge, reappears on the other side, and opens the farm gate for Charles. The farm is done in swift detail: watch dogs barking and pulling on their chains, big plough-horses in the stable feeding peaceably off new racks, a steaming dunghill with peacocks pecking at the top, carts and ploughs in a shed with their tackle discoloured by the dust floating down from the loft.
A young woman in a blue merino dress welcomes Charles at the door and takes him into the kitchen, where there is a big fire—the sun coming up, now, showing through the window—and breakfast is being cooked for the farm people: a lot of sturdy kitchen equipment here, and clothes drying in the fireplace.
The patient, the farmer with the broken leg, is upstairs. He is sweating below his blankets and—a nice curmudgeonly touch—he has thrown his nightcap to a far corner of the room. There is a carafe of brandy on a chair beside the bed. He has been using that to keep his spirits up; for twelve hours, since he sent his message to Charles, he has been cursing. Now that Charles has come he begins to groan. It is a simple fracture, without complications. Charles can deal with it. He uses a lath from the cart-shed to make splints; the maidservant tears up a sheet to make bandages; and the job is done.
Before he goes, though, he has to have something to eat; it is the farmer’s courtesy. He goes down to the sitting room below: a big bed there, with a canopy of Indian cotton, and with sacks of wheat standing upright in the corners, an overflow from the store-room, which is to one side of the room, up three stone steps. At the foot of the bed there is a little table set with
two silver jugs, and there Charles eats with the farmer’s daughter, the woman in the blue merino dress. She is running the farm while her father is ill, and they talk easily about the patient, the weather, the frosts, the marauding wolves. Charles then goes up to say goodbye to the patient. When he comes down Charles sees the woman in blue again. She is looking out at the wintry garden, with her forehead against the window: the bean poles have blown down. She is surprised to see him. She says, “Are you looking for something?” He says he is looking for his riding crop. They both start looking.
She sees where it has fallen between the sacks of wheat and the wall and she bends down to get it; at the same time, in a reflex of courtesy, to save her the trouble, Charles reaches down for it; and so it happens that while she is bent below him his chest touches her back.
She straightens up; she is embarrassed; she hands him the crop. It is a bull’s pizzle, a nerf de bœuf. They are both country people; the detail may not matter to them. But that intimate moment with Emma is full of meaning for Charles. It brings him back to the farm the next day, and thereafter twice a week and more. He wears black gloves and his new waistcoat for these visits and wipes his shoes on the grass before he enters the house.
When Charles’s wife, the middle-aged Dieppe widow, finds out that there is a young woman at the farm, and a convent-educated woman, she is enraged. She tells Charles that for all Emma’s airs and graces and the silk dresses she wears to church, Emma’s grandfather was a shepherd, her father is not as well off as he seems, and there was a cousin who nearly went to the assizes on a charge of wounding. She makes Charles swear on the prayer-book that he will stay away from the farm, and the awful scene she has created ends with sobs and kisses and love. She is in control, after all; she has the money.
A Writer's People: Ways of Looking and Feeling Page 11
