A Way in the World (15 page)

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 felt 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.

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.