Life Class: The Selected Memoirs Of Diana Athill (65 page)

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 subcontinent 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 community, 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’.

The book was admired in England and disliked in Trinidad, but it was not addressed to the white audience in order to please it. Its whole point was to show that Caribbean societies are a mess because they were callously created by white men for the white men’s own ends, only to be callously administered and finally callously abandoned. Vidia was trying to write from a point of view above that of white or brown or black; he was trying to look at the people now inhabiting the West Indies with a clear-sighted and impartial intelligence, and to describe what he saw honestly, even if honesty seemed brutal. This he felt, and said, had to be done because a damaged society shuffling along with the help of fantasies and excuses can only become more sick: what it has to do is learn to know itself, and only its writers can teach it that. Caribbean writers had so far, he claimed, failed to do more than plead their own causes. If he expected Trinidadians to welcome this high-minded message he was naive – but I don’t suppose he did. He was pursuing his own understanding of the place, and offering it, because that is what a serious writer can’t help doing. If anyone resented it, too bad.

Of course they did resent it – who doesn’t resent hearing disagreeable truths told in a manner verging on the arrogant? But I think the label ‘racist’ which they stuck on him was, so to speak, only a local one. I saw him as a man raised in, and frightened by, a somewhat disorderly, inefficient and self-deceiving society, who therefore longed for order, clarity and competence. Having concluded that the lack of these qualities in the place where he was born came from the people’s lack of roots, he over-valued a sense of history and respect for tradition, choosing to romanticize their results rather than to see the complex and far from admirable scenes with which they often co-exist. (His first visit to India, described in
An Area of Darkness
, left him in a state of distress because it showed him that an ancient civilization in which he had dared to hope that he would find the belonging he hungered for could be just as disorderly and inefficient as the place where he was born.) Although both England and the United States were each in its own way going to fall short of his ideal society, Europe as a whole came more close, more often, to offering a life in which he could feel comfortable. I remember driving, years ago, through a vine-growing region of France and coming on a delightful example of an ancient expertise taking pleasure in itself: a particularly well cultivated vineyard which had a pillar rose – a deep pink pillar rose – planted as an exquisite punctuation at the end of every row. Instantly – although it was weeks since I had seen or thought of him – he popped into my head: ‘How Vidia would like that!’

But although I cannot see Vidia as racist in the sense of wanting to be white or to propitiate whites, I do think it is impossible to spend the first eighteen years of your life in a given set of circumstances without being shaped by them: and Vidia spent the first eighteen years of his life as a Trinidadian Indian
*
. Passionate though his determination to escape the limitations imposed by this fate was, and near though it came to achieving the impossible, it could not wholly free him from his conditioning.

In Chapter One of
The Middle Passage
, when he has only just boarded the boat-train which will take him to Southampton, there begins the following description. Into the corridor, out of the compartment next to Vidia’s, had stepped ‘a very tall and ill-made Negro. The disproportionate length of his thighs was revealed by his baggy trousers. His shoulders were broad and so unnaturally square that they seemed hunched and gave him an appearance of fragility. His light grey jacket was as long and loose as a short topcoat; his yellow shirt was dirty and the frayed collar undone; his tie was slack and askew. He went to the window, opened the ventilation gap, pushed his face through, turned slightly to his left, and spat. His face was grotesque. It seemed to have been smashed in from one cheek. One eye had narrowed; the thick lips had bunched into a circular swollen protuberance; the enormous nose was twisted. When, slowly, he opened his mouth to spit, his face became even more distorted. He spat in slow, intermittent dribbles.’

Vidia makes a slight attempt to give this man a role in the story of his journey by saying that he began to imagine that the poor creature was aware of him in a malign way, that at one moment their eyes met, that in the buffet car there he was again … but in fact once he has been described the man has no part to play, he is  done with; in spite of which Vidia could not resist placing him right at the start of the book and
describing him in greater physical detail than anyone else in all its 232 pages
. I am not saying that this man was invented or that he may have been less dreadfully unattractive than we are told he was; but by choosing to pick him out and to
fix
on him, Vidia has given an indelible impression less of the man than of his own reaction: the dismayed recoil of a fastidious Trinidadian Indian from what he sees as an inferior kind of person. And I believe that if I were black I should from time to time, throughout his work, pick up other traces of this flinching presence hidden in the shadow behind one of the best English-language novelists we have. And even as part of the white audience I cannot help noticing the occasional touch of self-importance (increasing with the years) which I suspect to have its roots far back in the Trinidadian Indian’s nervous defiance of disrespect.

Vidia’s mother, handsome and benignly matronly, welcomed his publishers very kindly when they visited Trinidad, and gave the impression of being the beloved linchpin of her family. When I first met them, long before they had been stricken by the close-together deaths of one of the daughters and of Shiva, Vidia’s younger and only brother, they impressed me as a flourishing lot: good-looking, intelligent, charming, successful. A married daughter told me that Mrs Naipaul ‘divides her time between the Temple and the quarry’ – the latter being a business belonging to her side of the family, in which she was a partner. That she was not simply a comfortable mother-figure became apparent when she told me that she had just got home from attending a seminar on welding and was very glad that she hadn’t missed it because she had learnt enough at it to be able to cut the number of welders they employed at the quarry by half. Soon afterwards she threw more light on her own character by making a little speech to me, after noticing my surprise when she had appeared to be indifferent to some news about Vidia. She had been, she said, a well-brought-up Hindu girl of her generation, so she had been given no education and was expected to obey her parents in everything, and that was what she did. Then she was married (‘And there was no nonsense about falling in love in those days’), whereupon it was her husband she had to obey in everything, and that was what she did. Then she had her children, so of course it was her job to devote herself entirely to them and bring them up as well as possible, and that was what she did (‘and I think I can say I made a good job of it’). ‘But then I said to myself, when I am fifty – FINISH. I will begin to live for myself. And that is what I am doing now and they must get on with their own lives.’

It was an impressive little thumbnail autobiography, but it left questions in my mind. I had, after all, read
A House for Mr Biswas
, the novel Vidia had based on his father’s life, and had gained a vivid picture of how humiliated Mr Biswas had been after his marriage into the much richer and more influential Tulsi family – although I don’t think I knew at that stage that Seepersad Naipaul, Vidia’s father, had once had a mental breakdown and had vanished from his home for months. Clearly this attractive and – I was now beginning to think – slightly formidable woman was greatly oversimplifying her story, but I liked her; as I told Vidia when, soon after this, he asked me if I did. ‘Yes, very much,’ I said; to which he replied: ‘Everyone seems to. I hate her.’