A Way in the World

by Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul

  It was strange that a man so much in search of his own voice should have been the one to help me find mine. But perhaps it wasn’t strange. He would have seen at once, when he looked at my manuscript, where my difficulty lay, how I had chopped and changed between various modes. In that first, long letter he would have been like a man half talking to himself.

  More than twenty years after that strange literary dinner, when he was very old, he appeared to make some amends. A book of mine had been published when I was out of England, travelling. When I came back some months later I found that the publisher was using a favourable quotation from a Foster Morris review.

  It left me cold. I never thought to look for the review itself; and it is only now that I wonder whether I shouldn’t have taken notice of the old man’s gesture. I think, though, that my instinct was correct. To meet Foster Morris again would have been to repeat the lunch I had had with him, to expose myself to his courtesy and beautiful old-fashioned voice (not unlike Greene’s), and to find, below that, even in old age, I am sure, the intellectual uncertainty of the unfulfilled writer, with his disapproval of all the people he had said goodbye to.

  IN THE late thirties (when my memories of them begin) the cruise ships, from Europe and the United States (and the United States cruise ships continued for some time after the war), would dock in Port of Spain in the morning. My father, or some other journalist from the Trinidad Guardian, would go aboard with a photographer to do something about the more famous passengers. Sometimes they could be very famous: Lily Pons, Oliver Hardy, Annabella, the wife of Tyrone Power. The photographs and the stories would come out in the next day’s paper. By that time the ship would have left, so the visit of these great people from the great world would have been like something one had missed, a blessing in the night.

  I never thought then that we were at a great turn in history, and that one day I would be able to look from the other side, as it were, at these visits. I never thought I would be able one day to understand what Foster Morris had come out of, and to follow him in all his uncertainties as a writer out to Trinidad.

  His book was incomplete but not bad. In its direct presentation of subject people as whole, belonging to themselves, it was even original, and it can be fitted into the great chain of changing outside vision of that part of the world. That chain might begin in 1564 with John Hawkins’s precise and fresh accounts of aboriginal life (down to the taste of the potato: somewhere between a parsnip and a carrot); might go on to Sir Walter Raleigh in 1595 miraculously rescuing, and naming, the tortured and half-dead Amerindian chiefs of Cumucurapo who had been dispossessed by the Spaniards; might then lead through the high spirits and cruelties of the early nineteenth-century naval novels of Captain Marryat; to the Victorians, Trollope, Kingsley, Froude. The Shadowed Livery has a definite place between the decadent imperial cruise books and the books of post-colonial writers like James Pope-Hennessy and Patrick Leigh Fermor. Over four centuries the vision constantly changes; it is a fair record of one side of a civilization.

  CHAPTER 5

  On the Run

  I

  AT OUR lunch in his South Kensington club in 1959 Foster Morris had spoken of Lebrun, the Trinidadian-Panamanian communist of the 1930s, as one of the most dangerous men around Butler, the oil strike leader.

  That was news to me. Lebrun wasn’t one of the names I had heard about. But then I didn’t know much about the strike. I was five when it happened; it was some years before I could begin to understand about it.

  Leb run’s name I got to know only in 1947, when I was in the sixth form at Queen’s Royal College, a full ten years after the strike. And then it was a name connected with a book he had written. A name—like Owen Rutter and Foster Morris—with a local connection, and with the glamour of print.

  This book of Lebrun’s was on a bottom shelf of our sixth-form library: two or three rows of glass-cased shelves above a cupboard. The shelves to the left held the school’s small lending stock: popular books (Sabatini, Sapper, John Buchan, the William books) expensively re-bound and gilt-stamped (in England, we were told: that was where the dies were) with the college arms and motto: unyielding, shiny leather spines providing an elegant front for cheap paper furred and worn with handling, with the print itself a quarter rubbed off.

  Lebrun’s book was on a shelf next to that, below textbooks and dictionaries. The purple-brown binding had grown so dark that the name on the spine was almost illegible.

  The book was about Spanish-American revolutionaries before Bolívar. I never read it, and knew no one who had. Thirty years later people were to write about it in radical journals as one of the first books of the Caribbean revolution; but people doing research in university libraries, where everything is accessible, sometimes see progressions that didn’t exist at the time. There would have been very few copies of Lebrun’s book in Trinidad. There were none in the shops or the Central Library. The only copy I knew about was on the library shelf at school, and it was just there, unread, hardly known, its dark spine illegible.

  Still, it was a book, published in London. It gave an aura to the man. It suggested a life of unusual texture. I asked a boy a year ahead of me—he had won a scholarship and was going to Cambridge—about Lebrun.

  He said, “Oh, he’s a revolutionary. He’s on the run somewhere in the United States.”

  That was dramatic, the exotic black man, Trinidadian-Panamanian, on the run. But I didn’t believe it. I could understand, from the films, how a John Garfield character could be on the run. But I didn’t understand it about Lebrun. I suppose—I was fifteen—I didn’t believe in his character as a revolutionary; didn’t believe such a character was possible for a black man from Trinidad and Panama; and didn’t see how such a man could be thought dangerous enough to be hunted down.

  Eight years later I saw him for the first time. He was among the speakers on the bandstand in Woodford Square, outside the Red House, part of the new politics that had come to the island while I had been in England. Almost twenty years had passed since the Butler strike, and Lebrun was now in his fifties, slender, fine-featured. Words poured fluently out of him. He spoke in complete sentences.

  The working people of the West Indies, he said, had been engaged for centuries in the mass production of sugar. This meant that they were among the earliest industrial workers in the world: the fact of slavery shouldn’t be allowed to conceal this truth. So the people of the West Indies were readier than most for revolution. He had waited for twenty-five years for this moment. He had never lost hope that the moment would come, that the people could be marshalled for political action.

  He talked—I heard him more than once during the few weeks I spent in Trinidad at that time—as though the whole movement was an expression of his will and his ideas, as though he had brought it into being.

  Yet he was not one of the people trying to get into the new politics. He had no local base. He was not one of the men to whom power came. After the elections he disappeared, as he had disappeared after the Butler oilfield strike.

  That was all that I knew of Lebrun when Foster Morris talked of him three years later. For both of us he was a man from the past. What we didn’t know was that Lebrun—the sexual taunter in the oil-lamp shadows of the little Trinidad country house in 1937, as yet unknown as writer or agitator, the man to whom Foster Morris as a London writer might have shown patronage—was going to be another person to whom Foster Morris was going to say goodbye.

  In extreme old age Lebrun fetched up in England, and in a world greatly changed, where black men were an important subject, he was “discovered” as one of the prophets of black revolution, a man whose name didn’t appear in the history books, but who for years had worked patiently, had been behind the liberation movements of Africa and the Caribbean. So a kind of fulfilment came to him. It was very much the idea of himself he had had, and had promoted, for much of his life. It had anchored him, had been a kind of livelihood, that idea. But it had also got him into
trouble, with the very people whose cause he thought he served.

  ONCE HE was declared to be an undesirable immigrant by the chief minister of one of the smaller West Indian islands. In the long run this didn’t do Lebrun’s reputation any harm, but at the time—this was at the start of decolonization, and this chief minister was one of the lesser men of the region—it was a humiliation: the old black revolutionary barred from the revolution he claimed as his own.

  Not long after, I went to this island. I sent in my name to the chief minister’s office—as a courtesy, and an insurance against trouble. To my surprise, the chief minister asked me to have lunch with him at Government House. He wanted to talk about Lebrun.

  He said, “Let him come here and try to walk the streets.”

  Street-corner talk in Government House. Lebrun wasn’t at all a street-corner man, but as a revolutionary—even in the Butler days—he had always thought that the strength and roughness of the crowd were things he might call on. Now they were being used against him.

  The new politics had thrown up people like the chief minister in almost every territory. Most had started as trade-union organizers; and many of them, like Butler in Trinidad, had a religious side.

  This man now lived in Government House. It was a modest house, but it was the best in the small island. The uniformed sentry, the local abstract paintings, the heavy locally made furniture—it was all there, the inherited pomp, as in other territories. But the chief minister was already bored. He had already got to the limit of what he could do with power. Power had already begun to press him down into himself, and he now lived very simply, as though it was a needless strain to do otherwise. He didn’t make many speeches now. He seldom went out.

  The person closest to him was a middle-aged black woman called Miss Dith, a woman of the people, someone you wouldn’t notice on the street. She was said to be his spiritual adviser, his housekeeper, his cook, his protection against poison.

  For the lunch Miss Dith had prepared shredded saltfish in a tomato sauce, sliced fried plantains, rice. You couldn’t get simpler food on the island. She brought out the dishes herself. The food was cold. The tablecloth was stained.

  Once the man who was now chief minister would have been flattered by Lebrun’s attentions. He would have loved the big, technical-sounding words Lebrun would have used to describe the simple movement he had got going. He would have loved Lebrun’s introductions to more prominent leaders in other islands. But Lebrun had other ideas about what power might be used for, and the chief minister wanted no part of that. The chief minister didn’t want to undo the world he knew; he didn’t want to lose touch with the power he had risen to.

  He said of Lebrun, “The man want to take you over.”

  Lebrun was an impresario of revolution. That was the role he had fallen into; it had become his livelihood. He had no base of his own, no popular following. He always had to attach himself to other leaders, simpler people more directly in touch with the simple people who had given them power, and with a simpler idea of that power.

  It had always been like that. It had been like that for Lebrun even in the days of Butler. Butler hadn’t achieved power—he had emerged in colonial days, when such power was not to be had. But in his own eyes Butler had achieved something that wasn’t far short of that power: he had achieved the headmanship or chieftaincy of his particular group. And then, after the excitement of the strike and the marches and the Charlie King affair, he had become bored. He was interned during the war. That might have suited him. His political activity afterwards never amounted to much. He became a member of the legislative council, but he preferred to spend his time in England, far away from his followers—doing no one knew what, perhaps doing nothing, perhaps just letting the days pass. Leadership and action no longer had any meaning for him. All that mattered—as it mattered to the chief minister who had roughed up Lebrun—was his chieftaincy, his position; that was what he was keen to protect.

  So that contradiction between the complicated ideas of Lebrun and the simple politics he encouraged was always there; and couldn’t but be apparent to him. Foster Morris said he was the most dangerous man around Butler. And I suppose what he meant was that in another situation, at another time, Butler or someone like him might want to do more than win a chieftaincy, might want to turn the world upside down, and Lebrun would have been there to show him how.

  In the meantime he was a man still on the run, though often now from old associates; never living with the consequences of what he encouraged as a revolutionary. Others had to endure that: like certain middle-class brown people in that island where Miss Dith read the cards and kept in touch with the spirits and cooked for the chief minister. There were dozens of ways in which these brown people could be tormented. And they were; not as part of any programme of action on the chief minister’s part, but simply because this tormenting of people was an aspect of chieftaincy.

  “THE MAN want to take you over,” the chief minister had said over the stained tablecloth in Government House. And I knew what he meant, because Lebrun had tried to do something like that to me. This was at the time of my break with Foster Morris.

  He wrote an article about my books in one of the Russian “thick magazines.” He sent me the magazine, together with a translation (or the original) of his article, and a card. He gave a London address; from this I assumed he was still “on the run.”

  The article filled many pages of the thick magazine. No one had ever written at such length about my books. To tell the truth, I didn’t think the books I had so far published deserved it. I thought of myself as still a beginner whose big books were to come. I knew that there were people who disapproved of my comedy, some of them because they felt I was letting my side down, and I thought that Lebrun in this Russian magazine would be severe with me.

  He wasn’t. His method was original. He ignored the comedy, over which I had taken so much trouble—such care in the mounting of so many scenes, such judgement in the matter of language and tone. He looked through all of that to the material itself—the people, the background—and he considered that with complete seriousness. He said I was writing about people impoverished in every way, people on whom history had played a cruel trick. My characters thought they were free men, in charge of their own destinies; they weren’t; the colonial setting mocked the delusions of the characters, their ambitions, their belief in perfectibility, their jealousies. The books, light as they were, were subversive, the article said, and remarkable for that reason.

  It was a version of what Foster Morris had said, in elaborate metaphor, about my first book, as we were leaving his South Kensington club. As with a trout stream, he had said, you had to train yourself to look through the surface reflections to what lay below.

  I had said nothing to that, though I had thought the comment misplaced, and of no value to me, because it was denying me—who relished it so much—the gift of comedy (the discovery of which was still linked in my mind with getting started as a writer).

  Lebrun’s article, on the other hand, though different only in angle and emphasis from Foster Morris’s comment, was like a revelation to me. I knew immediately what he meant about the helplessness of my characters; I realized I had always known it; I had grown up with that knowledge in my bones.

  It was as though, from moving at ground level, where so much was obscured, I had been taken up some way, not only to be shown the petty pattern of fields and roads and small settlements, but also, as an aspect of that high view, had been granted a vision of history speeded up, had seen, as I might have seen the opening and dying of a flower, the destruction and shifting about of peoples, had seen all the strands that had gone into the creation of the agricultural colony, and had understood what simple purposes—after such activity—that colony served.

  The article seemed to me a miraculous piece of writing. It stuck closely to what I had actually written, but was about so much more. Reading the article, I thought I understood why as a child I fel
t that history had been burnt away in the place where I was born. I found myself constantly thinking, “Yes, yes. That’s true. It was like that.”

  The revelation of Lebrun’s article became a lasting part of my way of looking. I suppose I was affected as I was, not only because it was the first article about my work, but also because I had never read that kind of political literary criticism before. I was glad that I hadn’t. Because if I had, I mightn’t have been able to write what I had written. Like Foster Morris and others, I would have known too much before I had begun to write, and there would have been less to discover with the actual writing. The problems of voice and tone and naturalness would have been that much harder; it would have been harder for me to get started.

  I wrote to Lebrun to acknowledge his marvellous article, and a short time later there came an invitation to dinner, to meet Lebrun, from a common West Indian acquaintance.

  The acquaintance worked in a large insurance company. He was in his early thirties, a few years older than me. He did occasional scripts for the magazine programmes of the BBC Caribbean Service; that was how we had met. He came from one of the smaller islands, and I would have said he was a mulatto. He said he was Lebanese. His wife was like him, but with an accent more of the islands.

  They lived in a squashed mansion block flat in Maida Vale. It must have been rented furnished. There was a lot of fat upholstered furniture of the 1930s, a feeling of old dirt, of smells and dust ready to rise. The dim ceiling light in the sitting room was made dimmer by a frosted-glass saucer-shaped shade that hung on little chains and was full of dead moths and other insects.