Literary Occasions (15 page)

My father had written to MacGowan; and MacGowan, who had been to India and was interested in Indian matters, thought that my father should be encouraged. My father’s iconoclastic views, and their journalistic possibilities, must have appealed to him. He became my father’s teacher—beginning no doubt with English which, it must be remembered, was for my father an acquired language—and my father never lost his admiration and affection for the man who, as he often said, had taught him how to write. More than twenty years later, in 1951, my father wrote me: “And as to a writer being hated or liked—I think it’s the other way to what you think: a man is doing his work well when people begin
liking
him. I have never forgotten what Gault MacGowan told me years ago: ‘Write sympathetically’;
and this, I suppose, in no way prevents us from writing truthfully, even brightly.”

My father began on the
Guardian
as the freelance contributor of a “controversial” weekly column. The column—in which I think MacGowan’s improving hand can often be detected—was, provocatively, signed “The Pundit”; and my father remembered the Pundit’s words well enough to give blocks of them, years later, to Mr. Sohun, the Presbyterian Indian schoolmaster, in the latter part of
Gurudeva. Gurudeva
has other echoes of my father’s early journalism: Gurudeva’s beating up of the drunken old stick-fighter must, I feel, have its origin in the news story my father, now a regular country correspondent for the
Guardian,
wrote in 1930: “Fight Challenge Accepted—Jerningham Junction ‘Bully’ Badly Injured—Six Men Arrested.” A country brawl dramatized, the personalities brought close to the reader, made more than names in a court report: this was MacGowan’s style, and it became my father’s.

It was through his journalism on MacGowan’s
Guardian
that my father arrived at that vision of the countryside and its people which he later transferred to his stories. And the stories have something of the integrity of the journalism: they are written from within a community and seem to be addressed to that community: a Hindu community essentially, which, because the writer sees it as whole, he can at times make romantic and at other times satirize. There is reformist passion; but even when there is shock there is nothing of the protest—common in early colonial writing—that implies an outside audience; the barbs are all turned inwards. This is part of the distinctiveness of the stories. I stress it because this way of looking, from being my father’s, became mine: my father’s early stories created my background for me.

But it was a partial vision. A story called “Panchayat,” about a family quarrel, reads like a pastoral romance: the people in that story exist completely within a Hindu culture and recognize no other. The wronged wife does not take her husband to the
alien law courts; she calls a panchayat against him. The respected village elders assemble; the wife and the husband state their cases without rancour; everyone is wise and dignified and acknowledges
dharma,
the Hindu right way, the way of piety, the old way. But Trinidad, and not India, is in the background. These people have been transported; old ways and old allegiances are being eroded fast. The setting, which is not described because it is taken for granted, is one of big estates, workers’ barracks, huts. It is like the setting of “In the Village”; but that vision of material and cultural dereliction comes later, and it is some time before it can be accommodated in the stories.

Romance simplified; but it was a way of looking. And it was more than a seeking out of the picturesque; it was also, as I have since grown to understand, a way of concealing personal pain. My father once wrote me: “I have hardly written a story in which the principal characters have not been members of my own family.” And the wronged wife of “Panchayat”—as I understood only the other day—was really my father’s sister; the details in that story are all true. Her marriage to a Punjabi brahmin (a learned man, who could read Persian, as she told me with pride on her deathbed) was a disaster. My father suffered for her. In the story ritual blurs the pain and, fittingly, all ends well; in life the disaster continued. My father hated his father for his cruelty and meanness; yet when, in his autobiographical sketch, he came to write about his father, he wrote a tale of pure romance, in which again old ritual, lovingly described, can only lead to reconciliation. And my father, in spite of my encouragement, could never take that story any further.

He often spoke of doing an autobiographical novel. Sometimes he said it would be easy; but once he wrote that parts of it would be difficult; he would have trouble selecting the incidents. When in 1952 he sent me “My Uncle Dalloo”—which he described in another letter, apologetically, as a sketch—he wrote: “I’d like you to read it carefully, and if you think it good enough, send it to Mr Swanzy, with a note that it’s from me; and
that it is part of a chapter of a novel I’m doing. Indeed, this is what I aim to do with it. As soon as you can, get working on a novel. Write of things as they are happening now, be realistic, humorous when this comes in pat, but don’t make it deliberately so. If you are at a loss for a theme, take me for it. Begin: ‘He sat before the little table writing down the animal counterparts of all his wife’s family. He was very analytical about it. He wanted to be correct; went to work like a scientist. He wrote, “The She-Fox,” then “The Scorpion”; at the end of five minutes he produced a list which read as follows: …’ All this is just a jest, but you can really do it.”

But for him it wasn’t a jest. Once romance and its simplifications had been left behind, these little impulses of caricature (no more than impulses, and sometimes written out in letters to me), the opposite of MacGowan’s “Write sympathetically,” were all he could manage when he came to consider himself and the course of his life. He wrote up the animal-counterparts episode himself (I am sure he was writing it when he wrote that letter to me) and made it part of
Gurudeva,
which had become his fictional hold-all. But even there the episode is sudden and out of character. There is something unresolved about it; the passion is raw and comes out, damagingly, as a piece of gratuitous cruelty on the part of the writer. My father was unhappy about the episode; but he could do no more with it. And this was in the last year of his life, when as a writer—but only looking away from himself—he could acknowledge some of the pain about his family he had once tried to hide, and was able to blend romance and the later vision of dereliction into a purer kind of comedy.

It is my father’s sister—once the wronged wife of “Panchayat,” a figure of sorrow in a classical Hindu tableau—who ten years afterwards appears as a road-mender’s wife in another story and acts as a kind of comic chorus: the road-mender was the man of lesser caste with whom she went to live after she had separated from her first husband, the Punjabi brahmin. Ramdas of “Ramdas and the Cow”—the Hindu tormented by the possession
of a sixty-dollar cow which turns out to be barren—is my father’s elder brother in middle age.

The comedy was for others. My father remained unwilling to look at his own life. All that material, which might have committed him to longer work and a longer view, remained locked up and unused. Certain things can never become material. My father never in his life reached that point of rest from which he could look back at his past. His last years, when he found his voice as a writer, were years of especial distress and anxiety; he was part of the dereliction he wrote about.

My father’s elder brother, at the end of his life, was enraged, as I have said. This sturdy old man, whose life might have been judged a success, was broken by memories of his childhood; self-knowledge had come to him late. My father’s own crisis had come at an earlier age; it had been hastened by his journalism. One day in 1934, when he was twenty-eight, five years after he had been writing for the
Guardian,
and some months after Gault MacGowan had left the paper and Trinidad, my father looked in the mirror and thought he couldn’t see himself. It was the beginning of a long mental illness that caused him for a time to be unemployed, and as dependent as he had been in his childhood. It was after his recovery that he began writing stories and set himself the goal of the book.

SHORTLY BEFORE
he died, in 1953, my father assembled all the stories he wanted to keep and sent them to me. He wanted me to get them published as a book. Publication for him, the real book, meant publication in London. But I did not think the stories publishable outside Trinidad, and I did nothing about them.

The stories, especially the early ones, in which I felt I had participated, never ceased to be important to me. But as the
years passed—and although I cannibalized his autobiographical sketch for the beginning of one of my own books—my attachment to the stories became sentimental. I valued them less for what they were (or the memory of what they were) than for what, long before, they had given me: a way of looking, an example of labour, a knowledge of the literary process, a sense of the order and special reality (at once simpler and sharper than life) that written words could be seen to create. I thought of them, as I thought of my father’s letters, as a private possession.

But the memory of my father’s 1943 booklet,
Gurudeva and Other Indian Tales,
has never altogether died in Trinidad. Twelve years after his death, my father’s stories were remembered by Henry Swanzy in a
New Statesman
issue on Commonwealth writing. In Trinidad itself the attitude to local writing has changed. And my own view has grown longer. I no longer look in the stories for what isn’t there; and I see them now as a valuable part of the literature of the region.

They are a unique record of the life of the Indian or Hindu community in Trinidad in the first fifty years of the century. They move from a comprehension of the old India in which the community is at first embedded to an understanding of the colonial Trinidad which defines itself as their background, into which they then emerge. To write about a community which has not been written about is not easy. To write about this community was especially difficult; it required unusual knowledge and an unusual breadth of sympathy.

And the writer himself was part of the process of change. This wasn’t always clear to me. But I find it remarkable now that a writer, beginning in the old Hindu world, one isolated segment of it, where all the answers had been given and the rituals perfected, and where, apart from religious texts, the only writings known were the old epics of the
Ramayana
and the
Mahabharat;
leaving that to enter a new world and a new language; using simple, easily detectable models—Pearl Buck, O. Henry; I find it remarkable that such a writer, working always in isolation,
should have gone so far. I don’t think my father read Gogol; but these stories, at their best, have something of the quality of the Ukrainian stories Gogol wrote when he was a very young man. There is the same eye that lingers lovingly over what might at first seem nondescript. Landscape, dwellings, people: there is the same assembling of sharp detail. The drama lies in that; when what has been relished is recorded and fixed, the story is over.

Gogol at the beginning of his writing life, my father at the end of his: even if the comparison is just, it can mislead. After his young man’s comedy and satire, after the discovery and exercise of his talent, Gogol had Russia to fall back on and claim. It was the other way with my father. From a vision of a whole Hindu society he moved, through reformist passion, which was an expression of his brahmin confidence, to a vision of disorder and destitution, of which he discovered himself to be part. At the end he had nothing to claim; it was out of this that he created comedy.

The process is illustrated by
Gurudeva.
This story isn’t satisfactory, especially in some of its later sections; and my father knew it. Part of the trouble is that the story was written in two stages. The early sections, which were written in 1941–2, tell of the beginnings of a village strongman. The character (based, remotely, on someone who had married into my mother’s family but had then been expelled from it, the mention of his name forbidden) is not as negligible as he might appear now. He belongs to the early 1930s and, in those days of restricted franchise, he might have developed (as the original threatened to develop) into a district politician. Although in the story he is simplified, and his idea of manhood ridiculed as thuggery and a perversion of the caste instinct, Gurudeva is felt to be a figure. And in its selection of strong, brief incidents, its gradual peopling of an apparently self-contained Indian countryside (other communities are far away), this part of the story is like the beginning of a rural epic.

Ten years later, when my father returned to the story (and brought Gurudeva back from jail, where in 1942 he had sent him), the epic tone couldn’t be sustained. Gurudeva’s Indian world was not as stable as Gurudeva, or the writer, thought. The society had been undermined; its values had to compete with other values; the world outside the village could no longer be denied. As seen in 1950–2, Gurudeva, the caste bully of the 1930s, becomes an easy target. Too easy: the irony and awe with which he had been handled in the first part of the story turn to broad satire, and the satire defeats itself.

Mr. Sohun the schoolmaster, the Presbyterian convert, holds himself up, and is held up by the writer, as a rational man, freed from Hindu prejudice and obscurantism. But Mr. Sohun, whose words in the 1930s might have seemed wise, is himself now seen more clearly. It is hinted—he hints himself: my father makes him talk too much—that he is of low caste. His Presbyterianism is more than an escape from this: it is, as Gurudeva says with sly compassion, Mr. Sohun’s bread and butter, a condition of his employment as a teacher in the Canadian Mission school. Mr. Sohun’s son has the un-Indian name of Ellway. But the boy so defiantly named doesn’t seem to have done much or to have much to do. When Gurudeva calls, Ellway is at home, noisily knocking up fowl-coops: the detail sticks out.