A Way in the World

by Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul

  I thought when I arrived that the come-down-in-the-world atmosphere suited the occasion. Lebrun had lost his access to other chief ministers, and was generally out of things in the Caribbean; there were many little towns where he couldn’t walk the streets. And I thought that this was going to be a melancholy little dinner in London for sentimental people who wanted to show solidarity with the old man.

  In fact, if I had thought about it, I would have seen that Lebrun, old and displaced as he was, was now at the start of the finest phase of his reputation, the one that would grow and grow until the end. People in most of the territories had lost faith in the first wave of populist politicians. The corruption of these men didn’t matter too much; what power had done was to show up their ignorance and unexpected idleness. Lebrun had been rejected by those men. He remained pure and principled, and educated; he could still speak the language of revolution and liberation. This was what many people—like the people who had come to the Maida Vale flat—still wanted to hear. So it was an air of conspiracy, rather than melancholy, that hung over our dinner.

  Black liberation was the principal theme. But we were a mixed group; that was part of the civility of the occasion. And Lebrun, when he came, was with a white American woman, of Czech or Polish origin, a good twenty years younger than he. That reputation, as a womanizer, or as a man successful with women, had always been Lebrun’s.

  Lebrun was now past sixty. He was slender and fine-featured; he took care of himself. Close to, he was delicate, smooth-skinned, with a touch of copper in his dark complexion that spoke of some unusual—perhaps Amerindian—ancestry.

  It was understood that we had come to hear him talk. And everything that occurred between his arrival and his settling down to talk—the general greetings, the brisk and colloquial exchanges with his Lebanese hosts to establish how well he knew them, his “don’t-mention-it” attitude to my acknowledgement of his article in the Russian magazine—everything was like an orchestra tuning up, to background chatter, for the evening’s big event.

  Soon enough—while our hosts went to their little kitchen and cooking smells came out to cling to the old curtains and the fat upholstered furniture—Lebrun was launched.

  He was born to talk. It was as though everything he saw and thought and read was automatically processed into talk material. And it was all immensely intelligent and gripping. He talked about music and the influence on composers of the instruments of their time. He talked about military matters.

  I had met no one like that from our region, no one who had given so much time to reading and thought, no one who had organized so much information in this appetizing way. I thought his political reputation simplified the man. And his language was extraordinary. What I had noticed in Woodford Square was still there: his spoken sentences, however in volved, were complete: they could have been taken down and sent to the printers. I thought his spoken language was like Ruskin’s on the printed page, in its fluency and elaborateness, the words wonderfully chosen, often unexpected, bubbling up from some ever-running spring of sensibility. The thought-connections—as with Ruskin—were not always clear; but you assumed they were there. As with the poetry of Blake (or, within a smaller compass, Auden), you held on, believing there was a worked-out argument.

  It was rhetoric, of course. And, of course, it was loaded in his favour. He couldn’t be interrupted; like royalty, he raised all the topics; and he would have been a master of the topics he raised. But even with that I don’t think that I am pitching the comparisons too high. I thought him a prodigy. I was moved by the fact that such a man came from something like my own background. I began to understand his great reputation among middle-class black people. How, considering when he was born, had he become the man he was? How had he preserved his soul through all the discouragements of the colonial time?

  He had a sense of his audience. He appeared to understand the questions in my mind, and no doubt in the minds of others. Late in the evening he began to talk about himself.

  He said, “My mother had an uncle who was a coachman for an English family in Barbados. I’m going back a long way now. I’m going back a hundred years. The thing about being a black man in this Caribbean-Central American region is that you have quite an ancestry here, if you want to claim it. At some stage the English family went to London. I don’t know whether they went for good or whether they went for a short time. They took their black coachman with them.

  “In London this coachman became friendly with a black man who worked as a servant in the Tichborne house. A famous family, connected with a famous law case. An uneducated Australian appeared one day and said he was the Tich borne heir. Lady Tichborne, for some strange reason of her own, said the man, who could hardly read or write, was her long lost son. A great Victorian scandal. The best account of the affair is by Lord Maugham, who used to be Lord Chancellor, arid on the evidence of this Tichborne book was a much better writer than his novelist brother.

  “The black man who worked for the Tichbornes was married to one of the servant women of the house. This had a powerful effect on my mother’s uncle. He used to be in and out of the house. You must imagine him going down the steps to the basement. He said whenever he went the servants gave him tea and cake. The women petted him. He pined for that when he came back to Barbados. When he was very old he was still talking about the black man in the big house in London who had married the white woman and nobody minded, and he was still talking about the white servants who always made him welcome and gave him tea and cake. He would say of the servants, ‘They always much me up.’ Meaning they had made much of him.

  “I heard such a lot about this when I was a child that I developed a fantasy about a big house in England, and white people giving me tea and cake too. The house in my fantasy was like a big estate house. It wasn’t like your big house in Belgravia or South Kensington. And years later that fantasy house came back and got in the way when I began reading the English novelists. It still does, a little bit.

  “My mother’s uncle, the old coachman, and a very proud man, used to say, ‘It had no trouble in those days. Black people and white people was one.’ And that was what I grew up believing too, that in the old days things were better. When I was old enough to understand what the old coachman had taught me, I was ashamed. I tried to forget. From various things I deduce that the old man was born in 1840. This was six years after the abolition of slavery. This means that his mother had been a slave, and all the older people around him. It also means something else. The slave trade was abolished in 1807. So when my mother’s uncle was ten or twelve there would have been people of sixty-five or seventy in Barbados who had been brought over from Africa. And still the old man thought that things were better in the old days, and had got me to believe it.

  “I was tormented by this memory, until I arrived at my own political resolution, and saw it for what it was.”

  “Political resolution”—it was his indirect way of referring to his Marxism; it was as though to speak the word itself would have been too crude.

  “But even after I had arrived at my political resolution I couldn’t bring myself to talk of this memory. And then I did so in Trinidad, during the Butler strike. I was at a public meeting, before the big march on Port of Spain that so terrified the colonial government. I was saying something quite simple. Something like: the time had come for black people to take their destiny into their own hands. Just then the memory of the old coachman came to me, and I began to tell the crowd about the white servants and the tea and cake. I could feel them listening in a new way. They had never heard anything like that before from a black man on a public platform. But the biggest effect was on me. As soon as I began to talk about what my mother’s uncle had got me to believe as a child, that in the old days white people and black people were one, as soon as I did that—in five seconds the shame I had carried for twenty years dropped from me.”

  He paused. There was a silence. As though everyone was being given time to exa
mine himself.

  Then Lebrun said, “And every black man has a memory like that. Every educated black man is eaten away quietly by a memory like that.”

  The food was brought out into the dim sitting room. Our hosts were Lebanese, but the food was West Indian, in honour of the occasion. Not the Asian-Mediterranean or French creole style of a cosmopolitan place like Trinidad; but the rough African food of the smaller islands. The central dish was an oily yellowish mound of what looked like boiled and pounded green bananas.

  Lebrun made a big show of being excited by this dish.

  “Ah,” he said. “Coo-coo. It is the last thing one expected in London. We must give it our full attention.”

  Somebody else said, “At home we call it foo-foo.”

  Lebrun said, “Coo-coo or foo-foo, it is the serious business of the evening.”

  A heavy glistening mound was placed on my own plate. I probed it: boiled yams and green bananas and possibly other tubers mashed together with peppers, the whole mixture slimy from the yams and—the Lebanese touch:—olive oil. Below the pepper it had almost no taste, except one of a tart rawness (from the green bananas), and I thought it awful, the texture, the slipperiness. I didn’t think I would be able to keep it down. I let it be on my plate. No one noticed.

  While Lebrun ate, and his dutiful woman friend ate, and the smell of meat and oil became high in the squashed sitting room with the old upholstered chairs, and people asked the Lebanese where they had got the yams and green bananas from, I (feeling that I was betraying them all, and separating myself from the good mood of the evening) remembered my aunt twenty years before, fanning her coalpot on the concrete back steps of our house in Port of Spain, and talking about Grenadians boiling their “pitch-oil tin” of ground provisions once a week.

  Soon, through his mouthfuls of the coo-coo or the foo-foo, Lebrun began to talk again.

  He said, “Perhaps the most extraordinary discussion of the century was the one between Lenin and the Indian delegate, Roy, at the Second Congress of the Comintern in 1920.”

  I felt that this was an offering to me.

  “A re-interpretation of Marx, with special reference to the struggles of non-European peoples in the twentieth century. There is a certain racial view of Marx that we all know about. It was encouraged by the journalism he did about the Indian Mutiny for the American papers. Pieces done to order, unconsidered in parts, clearly not the whole truth. A re-interpretation was necessary, and the work was done all of forty years ago. Some people can forget that. When Gandhi and Nehru and Mountbatten and the others have become footnotes in the history of Asia, people will look back and see that meeting between Lenin and Roy, just three years after the revolution, as one of the crucial events of the century.”

  THERE WAS no moment of break with Lebrun, as there had been with Foster Morris. For me the illumination of his article in the Russian magazine remained; but we both soon got to recognize—what I feel sure we always knew—that the relationship between us was forced. We shared a background and in all kinds of unspoken ways we could understand one another; but we were on different tracks.

  A great embarrassment occurred just a few weeks after our dinner.

  Lebrun’s woman friend—intelligent, easy of manner, accepting, curiously calm—lived in New York. I hardly knew the city and had met very few Americans. I couldn’t set the woman in a background, couldn’t separate what might have been background and background manner from the person. I liked what I saw, though. I liked her especially—she was ten or twelve years older than I—for her calm; that gave her a kind of attractiveness.

  It happened that I had to go to New York. I had a commission of sorts: to provide a story idea, for a possible film (really an impossible film): the kind of futility and self-betrayal a young man can be easily lured into. Near the end of the Maida Vale dinner, when things were more informal, I mentioned this trip to Lebrun and his friend. They were interested. They mentioned names to one another. Then Lebrun said he would send me a list of people I should meet in New York.

  He did what he said (I always found him punctilious in that way). And so a few weeks later, on a Sunday afternoon, having been let out as on parole from the expensive hotel where my film work was like a torment, I found myself being driven around Manhattan, having the famous sights pointed out to me, by a couple who were overwhelming me with their friendship, and more than friendship: involving me with something like love as Lebrun’s fellow countryman and London friend.

  After the sightseeing there was to be a dinner. They had invited some people to meet me; Lebrun, they said, had written to various people about me. The dinner was going to be very nice, the lady said. They had prepared some special dishes; they had prepared gefilte fish.

  She asked, turning around to me from the front seat of the car, “Have you had gefilte fish?” (A memory here, connected with this movement, that she was wearing a fur coat.)

  She looked happy to hear that I hadn’t.

  I knew almost nothing of New York, and couldn’t place these people, couldn’t assess the suburb and the house to which we drove when our sightseeing in Manhattan was over. I couldn’t assess the people who began to arrive, quite early, as I thought, for the dinner and the special dish the lady had gone straight to her kitchen to see about.

  They remain vague, but I know they were nice people, intelligent, friendly people. Some were near neighbours. Others had come from some distance for this Sunday dinner. They were all anxious to show friendship to me; but I knew they were showing friendship to Lebrun.

  I had accepted Lebrun’s introductions, but I had never really believed in the value of his international contacts. Even with the regard I had grown to have for him, I thought of him as a talker more than anything else. I saw him as a gifted black man compelled by the circumstances of his time, from fairly early on, to live on his wits. His Russian connection, the article in the Russian magazine, his appearance at the Maida Vale dinner with the attractive Polish or Czech woman—all of that, though real enough, I saw as attributes of the now old black man living as by second nature on his wits.

  He belonged to the first generation of educated black men in the region. For a number of them—men as old as the century—there was no honourable place at home in their colony or in the big countries. They were in-between people, too early, without status; they tried to make their way. They came and went; they talked big in one place—the United States, England, the West Indies, Panama, Belize—about the things they were doing somewhere else. Some of them became eccentric or unbalanced; some attached themselves to the Back-to-Africa movement (though Africa was itself at that time colonized); some became fraudsters.

  When I came to England in 1950 there were still extravagant black figures from that generation about on the streets of London: men in pin-stripe suits and bowlers, with absurd accents. Sometimes they greeted me; they were prompted to do so by solitude, but they also wished to find someone to boast to. One wet winter evening one of these men, met in a Regent Street bus queue, straight away took out his wallet and began to show me photographs of his house and his English wife. They were shipwrecked men. They had lost touch with themselves and now, near the end, were seeing the fantasies they had lived on washed away by the arrival of new immigrants from Jamaica and the other islands, working men in Harlem-style zoot suits and broad-brimmed felt hats.

  Lebrun, with all his gifts, I saw as part of that older generation. He too came and went, and was spoken of (like many others) as a man of mystery. But my feeling always was (considering my own arrangements) that the hidden, foreign segments of Lebrun’s life would have been quite tame and full of small financial alarms. In that way I thought he would have been a little like Butler, the 1937 strike leader, who, after the war and internment, went to live, very quietly, in London, cutting himself off from the demands (though not the subsidy) of his followers and his political party, the British Empire Workers and Citizens Home Rule Party. I thought that Lebrun’s time abroad wou
ld have had that element of quietness and rest.

  So, just as I had been overwhelmed by Lebrun’s article in the Russian magazine, never expecting such penetration from him, now in this New York suburban house I was thrown into some confusion by this evidence of Lebrun’s international life, which was far more elegant than anything I had expected. It was far more elegant than anything I had known.

  They knew a lot about the politics and the personalities of the islands; and they knew about this from Lebrun’s side, as it were. They satirized the local politicians who were Lebrun’s enemies; they described one as a gangster, another as a witchdoctor.

  One woman had travelled in the islands, visiting places I didn’t know. It was impossible, she said, to be in those islands without having an idea of their history, and some sense of their future. What had she seen? She couldn’t really tell me. She refused to speak as a tourist; that refusal was like part of her self-esteem. And I felt that, just as (considering the island she had spoken of, the one with the witchdoctor) all the forests that had been there at the discovery had been scraped away for the sugar-cane fields, so she had stripped the people she had seen of all their too easily seen attributes, to get down to some ideal structure that existed in her head.

  I remembered the effect on me of Lebrun’s article in the Russian magazine: it had appeared to take me above road-level and show me the pattern of things from above. I felt that Lebrun had done the same for this group, that everything in that woman’s way of looking would have come from her own interpretation of what Lebrun had said.

  I remembered how out of tune Lebrun had been in Woodford Square in Port of Spain during the great emotional assemblies of 1956. The meetings were billed as educational; the square was described as a university. People hadn’t of course gone to learn anything; they had gone to take part in a kind of racial sacrament. Lebrun had appeared to be participating in that when he talked about having waited all the years of the century for this great occasion, and never having doubts that the moment would come. But then he had gone off on a track of his own. He had begun to talk about history and the production of sugar.