The Enigma of Arrival Part 4

So at last, just as the house was cleansed of Jack's life and death, so the ground he had tended finally disappeared. But surely below all that concrete over his garden some seed, some root, would survive; and one day perhaps, when the concrete was taken up (as surely one day it would be taken up, since few dwelling places are eternal), one day perhaps some memory of Jack, preserved in some shrub or flower or vine, would come to life again.

With that building of a big house where once, perhaps for centuries, had stood the cottages or dwellings of farm or country laborers, a cycle had been completed.

Once there would have been many hamlets, settlements of farm workers and shepherds, near the fording places along the river. These hamlets had dwindled; they had dwindled fast with the coming of machinery. Fewer hands had been needed; and then, when sheep stopped being kept, even shepherds were not needed.

The garden of the manor, the forested orchard, lay partly on the site of one vanished hamlet. Such building-over would have occurred many times before. The duplicate name of the hamlet or village, Waldenshaw-the same word (for forest or wood) in two tribal languages, both long since absorbed into other languages-the very name spoke of invaders from across the sea and of ancient wars and dispossessions here, along the picturesque river and the wet meadows.

This history had repeated, had radiated outwards, as it were: much of the wealth for the Victorian-Edwardian manor, its gardens and ancillary buildings, had come from the empire, ventures abroad. Once the manor estate had covered many of the acres of my afternoon walks. But its glory had lasted one generation. The family had moved elsewhere; the estate had become the manor and grounds alone; it had shed its farms and land. Others had taken over those acres, built new big houses in villages or on the sites of hamlets once full of working people. And now the last of the peasant or farm cottages along the droveway had been taken over. What had once been judged a situation suitable only for agricultural cottages-next to a farm, far from roads and services-had become desirable. The farm had gone; the very distance from the public road was a blessing. And so, the quality or attributes of the site changing, the past had been abolished.

I had lived, very soon after coming to the valley, with the idea of change, of the imminent dissolution of the perfection I had found. It had given a poignancy to the beauty I had experienced, the pa.s.sing of the seasons. I had promised myself again and again, every spring, every autumn, to get a camera (or at least to relearn how to use the one I owned) to record the droveway and the ruined house below the sycamores and the gypsy caravan and the farm buildings and Jack's cottage and garden and goose ground. But I had never once taken a camera on my walks; and perhaps because I had no physical record of these things, they had an added poignancy, since they very soon began to exist only in my head.

I had thought that because of my insecure past-peasant India, colonial Trinidad, my own family circ.u.mstances, the colonial smallness that didn't consort with the grandeur of my ambition, my uprooting of myself for a writing career, my coming to England with so little, and the very little I still had to fall back on-I had thought that because of this I had been given an especially tender or raw sense of an unaccommodating world.

I had seen Jack as solid, rooted in his earth. But I had also seen him as something from the past, a remnant, something that would be swept away before my camera would get the pictures. My ideas about Jack were wrong. He was not exactly a remnant; he had created his own life, his own world, almost his own continent. But the world about him, which he so enjoyed and used, was too precious not to be used by others. And it was only when he had gone, when the town workers who had replaced him had gone, it was only then that I saw how tenuous, really, the hold of all of these people had been on the land they worked or lived in.

Jack himself had disregarded the tenuousness of his hold on the land, just as, not seeing what others saw, he had created a garden on the edge of a swamp and a ruined farmyard; had responded to and found glory in the seasons. All around him was ruin; and all around, in a deeper way, was change, and a reminder of the brevity of the cycles of growth and creation. But he had sensed that life and man were the true mysteries; and he had a.s.serted the primacy of these with something like religion. The bravest and most religious thing about his life was his way of dying: the way he had a.s.serted, at the very end, the primacy not of what was beyond life, but life itself.

MY TIME was over in the valley, that particular, rhythmical time of manor cottage and grounds and the special signs there of the seasons, and walks on the downs and the riverbank. And I felt like that-that the second life I had been granted had ended-though I did not move far. The cottages I had been renovating were on the same bus route, the bus that made fewer trips, with fewer pa.s.sengers, for more and more money. was over in the valley, that particular, rhythmical time of manor cottage and grounds and the special signs there of the seasons, and walks on the downs and the riverbank. And I felt like that-that the second life I had been granted had ended-though I did not move far. The cottages I had been renovating were on the same bus route, the bus that made fewer trips, with fewer pa.s.sengers, for more and more money.

One day a middle-aged woman spoke to me. Some of the people on the bus spoke to me; some, even after twelve years, never did. I did not recognize the woman who spoke to me.

She said, "Jack. Jack's wife."

And then I remembered her face and the cadaverous, wicked-eyed face of her father.

She spoke of Jack, always, in this distant way, as though speaking of another person altogether, someone she had known rather than lived with.

She said, "It's the hair you didn't recognize."

She fingered her hair. It was short.

She said, "Jack liked it long. He liked me to wear it in a bun."

This was something new about Jack. From a distance, his own beard, and his upright posture, had made him look like a romantic, something like an early socialist (in my fantasy); and perhaps he had copied the beard from an older person. Perhaps he had, after all, self-consciously lived out a certain kind of life. Perhaps in his own way he had been a tyrant, imposing, in addition to the long hair and the bun, a style and way of life that had been irksome to his wife.

She lived now in a small settlement of council houses in a small town in another valley. She liked the area, her house, her neighbors. She found it strange-no more than that-that a big house should have been put up where she had lived for all those years. She said, "Isn't it funny what they do?"

For her, Jack's wife, the move away from the cottage had been good. She saw her life as a small success story. Father a forester, a gamekeeper of sorts; Jack the farm worker, the gardener; and now she half a townswoman.

One cycle for me, in my cottage, in the grounds of the manor; another cycle on the farm, among the farm buildings; another cycle in the life of Jack's wife.

THE JOURNEY.

TO WRITE about Jack and his cottage and his garden it was necessary for me to have lived a second life in the valley and to have had a second awakening to the natural world there. But a version of that story-a version-came to me just days after I came to the valley, to the cottage in the manor grounds. about Jack and his cottage and his garden it was necessary for me to have lived a second life in the valley and to have had a second awakening to the natural world there. But a version of that story-a version-came to me just days after I came to the valley, to the cottage in the manor grounds.

The cottage at that time still had the books and some of the furniture of the people who had been there before. Among the books was one that was very small, a paperback booklet, smaller in format than the average small paperback and with only a few pages. The booklet, from a series called the Little Library of Art, was about the early paintings of Giorgio de Chirico. There were about a dozen reproductions of his early surrealist paintings. Technically, in these very small reproductions, the paintings did not seem interesting; they seemed flat, facile. And their content was not profound either: arbitrary a.s.semblages, in semi-cla.s.sical, semi-modern settings, of unrelated motifs-aqueducts, trains, arcades, gloves, fruit, statues-with an occasional applied touch of easy mystery: in one painting, for instance, an over-large shadow of a hidden figure approaching from round a corner.

But among these paintings there was one which, perhaps because of its t.i.tle, caught my attention: The Enigma of Arrival The Enigma of Arrival. I felt that in an indirect, poetical way the t.i.tle referred to something in my own experience; and later I was to learn that the t.i.tles of these surrealist paintings of Chirico's hadn't been given by the painter, but by the poet Apollinaire, who died young in 1918, from influenza following a war wound, to the great grief of Pica.s.so and others.

What was interesting about the painting itself, The Enigma of Arrival The Enigma of Arrival, was that-again perhaps because of the t.i.tle-it changed in my memory. The original (or the reproduction in the Little Library of Art booklet) was always a surprise. A cla.s.sical scene, Mediterranean, ancient-Roman-or so I saw it. A wharf; in the background, beyond walls and gateways (like cutouts), there is the top of the mast of an antique vessel; on an otherwise deserted street in the foreground there are two figures, both m.u.f.fled, one perhaps the person who has arrived, the other perhaps a native of the port. The scene is of desolation and mystery: it speaks of the mystery of arrival. It spoke to me of that, as it had spoken to Apollinaire.

And in the winter gray of the manor grounds in Wilts.h.i.+re, in those first four days of mist and rain, when so little was clear to me, an idea-floating lightly above the book I was working on-came to me of a story I might one day write about that scene in the Chirico picture.

My story was to be set in cla.s.sical times, in the Mediterranean. My narrator would write plainly, without any attempt at period style or historical explanation of his period. He would arrive-for a reason I had yet to work out-at that cla.s.sical port with the walls and gateways like cutouts. He would walk past that m.u.f.fled figure on the quayside. He would move from that silence and desolation, that blankness, to a gateway or door. He would enter there and be swallowed by the life and noise of a crowded city (I imagined something like an Indian bazaar scene). The mission he had come on-family business, study, religious initiation-would give him encounters and adventures. He would enter interiors, of houses and temples. Gradually there would come to him a feeling that he was getting nowhere; he would lose his sense of mission; he would begin to know only that he was lost. His feeling of adventure would give way to panic. He would want to escape, to get back to the quayside and his s.h.i.+p. But he wouldn't know how. I imagined some religious ritual in which, led on by kindly people, he would unwittingly take part and find himself the intended victim. At the moment of crisis he would come upon a door, open it, and find himself back on the quayside of arrival. He has been saved; the world is as he remembered it. Only one thing is missing now. Above the cutout walls and buildings there is no mast, no sail. The antique s.h.i.+p has gone. The traveler has lived out his life.

I didn't think of this as an historical story, but more as a free ride of the imagination. There was to be no research. I would take pointers from Virgil perhaps for the sea and travel and the seasons, from the Gospels and the Acts of the Apostles for the feel of the munic.i.p.al or provincial organization of the Roman Empire; I would get moods and the idea of ancient religion from Apuleius; Horace and Martial and Petronius would give me hints for social settings.

The idea of living in my imagination in that cla.s.sical Roman world was attractive to me. A beautiful, clear, dangerous world, far removed from the setting in which I had found myself; the story, more a mood than a story, so different from the book on which I was working. A taxing book: it had been occupying me for eight or nine months and I still hadn't completed a draft.

At the center of the book I was writing was a story set in an African country, once a colony, with white and Asian settlers, and now independent. It was the story of a day-long journey made in a car by two white people at a time of tribal war, suddenly coming, suddenly overwhelming colonial order and simplicity. Africa had given both those white people a chance, made them bigger, brought out their potential; now, when they were no longer so young, it was consuming them. It was a violent book-not violent in its incidents, but in its emotions.

It was a book about fear. All the jokes were silenced by this fear. And the mist that hung over the valley where I was writing; the darkness that came early; the absence of knowledge of where I was-all this uncertainty emanating from the valley I transferred to my Africa. And it did not occur to me that the story of The Enigma of Arrival The Enigma of Arrival-a sunlit sea journey ending in a dangerous cla.s.sical city-which had come to me as a kind of release from the creative rigors and the darkness of my own African story, it did not occur to me that that Mediterranean story was really no more than a version of the story I was already writing.

Nor did it occur to me that it was also an attempt to find a story for, to give coherence to, a dream or nightmare which for a year or so had been unsettling me. In this dream there occurred always, at a critical moment in the dream narrative, what I can only describe as an explosion in my head. It was how every dream ended, with this explosion that threw me flat on my back, in the presence of people, in a street, a crowded room, or wherever, threw me into this degraded posture in the midst of standing people, threw me into the posture of sleep in which I found myself when I awakened. The explosion was so loud, so reverberating and slow in my head that I felt, with the part of my brain that miraculously could still think and draw conclusions, that I couldn't possibly survive, that I was in fact dying, that the explosion this time, in this dream, regardless of the other dreams that had revealed themselves at the end as dreams, would kill, that I was consciously living through, or witnessing, my own death. And when I awoke my head felt queer, shaken up, exhausted; as though some discharge in my brain had in fact occurred.

This dream or nightmare or internal dramatization-perhaps a momentary turbulence in my brain had created the split-second tableau of the street, the cafe, the party, the bus, where I collapsed in the presence of people-had been with me for a year or more. It was a dream that had been brought on by intellectual fatigue and something like grief.

I had written a lot, done work of much difficulty; had worked under pressure more or less since my schooldays. Before the writing, there had been the learning; writing had come to me slowly. Before that, there had been Oxford; and before that, the school in Trinidad where I had worked for the Oxford scholars.h.i.+p. There had been a long preparation for the writing career! And then I discovered that to be a writer was not (as I had imagined) a state-of competence, or achievement, or fame, or content-at which one arrived and where one stayed. There was a special anguish attached to the career: whatever the labor of any piece of writing, whatever its creative challenges and satisfactions, time had always taken me away from it. And, with time pa.s.sing, I felt mocked by what I had already done; it seemed to belong to a time of vigor, now past for good. Emptiness, restlessness built up again; and it was necessary once more, out of my internal resources alone, to start on another book, to commit myself to that consuming process again.

I had finally been undermined. My spirit had broken; and that breaking of the spirit had occurred not long before I had come to the valley. For two years I had worked on an historical book about the region where I had been born. The book had grown; and since (beyond a certain length) a big book is harder to write, more exhausting, than a shorter one, I had resisted its growth. But then I had become excited by the story it told. The historian seeks to abstract principles from human events. My approach was the other; for the two years that I lived among the doc.u.ments I sought to reconstruct the human story as best I could.

It was a labor. Ten or twelve doc.u.ments-called up from memory, almost like personal memories-might provide the details for a fairly short and simple paragraph of narrative. But I was supported by my story, the themes it touched on: discovery, the New World, the dispeopling of the discovered islands; slavery, the creation of the plantation colony; the coming of the idea of revolution; the chaos after revolutions in societies so created.

A great packed education those two years had been. And I had such faith in what I was writing, such faith in the grandeur of my story, that I thought it would find the readers that my books of the previous twelve years had not found. And I behaved foolishly. Without waiting for that response, I dismantled the little life I had created for myself in England and prepared to leave, to be a free man.

For years, in that far-off island whose human history I had been discovering and writing about, I had dreamed of coming to England. But my life in England had been savorless, and much of it mean. I had taken to England all the rawness of my colonial's nerves, and those nerves had more or less remained, nerves which in the beginning were in a good part also the nerves of youth and inexperience, physical and s.e.xual inadequacy, and of undeveloped talent. And just as once at home I had dreamed of being in England, so for years in England I had dreamed of leaving England. Now, eighteen years after my first arrival, it seemed to me that the time had come. I dismantled the life I had bit by bit established, and prepared to go. The house I had bought and renovated in stages I sold; and my furniture and books and papers went to the warehouse.

The calamity occurred four months later. The book in which I had placed such faith, the book which had exhausted me so much, could not please the publisher who had commissioned it. We had misunderstood one another. He knew only my name; he did not know the nature of my work. And I had misunderstood his interest in me. He had approached me as a serious writer, but he had wanted only a book for tourists, something much simpler than the book I had written; something at once more romantic and less romantic; at once more human and less human. So I found myself up in the air. And I had to return to England.

That journey back-from the island and continent I had gone to see with my new vision, the corner of the New World I had just written about, from there to the United States and Canada, and then to England-that journey back to England so mimicked and parodied the journey of nineteen years before, the journey of the young man, the boy almost, who had journeyed to England to be a writer, in a country where the calling had some meaning, that I couldn't but be aware of all the cruel ironies.

It was out of this grief, too deep for tears or rage-grief that began partly to be expressed in the dream of the exploding head-that I began to write my African story, which had come to me as a wisp of an idea in Africa three or four years before.

The African fear with which as a writer I was living day after day; the unknown Wilts.h.i.+re; the cruelty of this return to England, the dread of a second failure; the mental fatigue. All of this, rolled into one, was what lay on the spirit of the man who went on the walks down to Jack's cottage and past it. Not an observer merely, a man removed; but a man played on, worked on, by many things.

And it was out of that burden of emotion that there had come to the writer, as release, as an idyll, the s.h.i.+p story, the antique quayside story, suggested by The Enigma of Arrival The Enigma of Arrival; an idea that came innocently, without the writer's suspecting how much of his life, how many aspects of his life, that remote story (still just an idea for a story) carried. But that is why certain stories or incidents suggest themselves to writers, or make an impression on them; that is why writers can appear to have obsessions.

I WENT WENT for my walks every afternoon. I finished my book. The panic of its composition didn't repeat in the revision. I was beginning to heal. And more than heal. For me, a miracle had occurred in this valley and in the grounds of the manor where my cottage was. In that unlikely setting, in the ancient heart of England, a place where I was truly an alien, I found I was given a second chance, a new life, richer and fuller than any I had had anywhere else. And in that place, where at the beginning I had looked only for remoteness and a place to hide, I did some of my best work. I traveled; I wrote. I ventured out, brought back experiences to my cottage; and wrote. The years pa.s.sed. I healed. The life around me changed. I changed. for my walks every afternoon. I finished my book. The panic of its composition didn't repeat in the revision. I was beginning to heal. And more than heal. For me, a miracle had occurred in this valley and in the grounds of the manor where my cottage was. In that unlikely setting, in the ancient heart of England, a place where I was truly an alien, I found I was given a second chance, a new life, richer and fuller than any I had had anywhere else. And in that place, where at the beginning I had looked only for remoteness and a place to hide, I did some of my best work. I traveled; I wrote. I ventured out, brought back experiences to my cottage; and wrote. The years pa.s.sed. I healed. The life around me changed. I changed.

And then one afternoon came that choking fit as I was walking past Jack's old cottage-Jack himself long dead. A few hours later came the serious illness which that choking fit had presaged. And when after some months I recovered, I found myself a middle-aged man. Work became harder for me. I discovered in myself an unwillingness to undertake new labor; I wished to be free of labor.

And whereas when I came to the valley my dream was the dream provoked by fatigue and unhappiness-the dream of the exploding head, the certainty of death-now it was the idea of death itself that came to me in my sleep. Death not as a tableau or a story, as in the earlier dream; but death, the end of things, as a gloom that got at a man, sought out his heart, when he was at his weakest, while he slept. This idea of death, death the nullifier of human life and endeavor, to which morning after morning I awakened, so enervated me that it sometimes took me all day, all the hours of daylight, to see the world as real again, to become a man again, a doer.

The dream of exhaustion once; now the debilitation brought on by involuntary thoughts of the final emptiness. This too was something that happened to the man who went walking, witness of people and events in the valley.

It was as though the calling, the writer's vocation, was one that could never offer me anything but momentary fulfillment. So that again, years after I had seen the Chirico picture and the idea for the story had come to me, again, in my own life, was another version of the story of The Enigma of Arrival The Enigma of Arrival.

AND INDEED there had been a journey long before-the journey that had seeded all the others, and had indirectly fed that fantasy of the cla.s.sical world. There had been a journey; and a s.h.i.+p. there had been a journey long before-the journey that had seeded all the others, and had indirectly fed that fantasy of the cla.s.sical world. There had been a journey; and a s.h.i.+p.

This journey began some days before my eighteenth birthday. It was the journey which-for a year-I feared I would never be allowed to make. So that even before the journey I lived with anxiety about it. It was the journey that took me from my island, Trinidad, off the northern coast of Venezuela, to England.

There had, first, been an airplane, a small one of the period, narrow, with a narrow aisle, and flying low. This had given me my first revelation: the landscape of my childhood seen from the air, and from not too high up. At ground level so poor to me, so messy, so full of huts and gutters and bare front yards and straggly hibiscus hedges and shabby backyards: views from the roadside. From the air, though, a landscape of logic and larger pattern; the straight lines and regularity and woven, carpetlike texture of sugarcane fields, so extensive from up there, leaving so little room for people, except at the very edges; the large, unknown area of swampland, curiously still, the clumps of mangrove and brilliant-green swamp trees casting black shadows on the milky-green water; the forested peaks and dips and valleys of the mountain range; a landscape of clear pattern and contours, absorbing all the roadside messiness, a pattern of dark green and dark brown, like camouflage, like a landscape in a book, like the landscape of a real country. So that at the moment of takeoff almost, the moment of departure, the landscape of my childhood was like something which I had missed, something I had never seen.

Minutes later, the sea. It was wrinkled, as in the fragment of the poem by Tennyson. It glinted in the sun; it was gray and silver rather than blue; and, again as in the fragment by Tennyson, it did crawl. So that again the world in which I had lived all my life so far was a world I had never seen.

And then the little airplane rose just above the clouds and flew like that, just above the clouds, until we reached Puerto Rico. I had heard about the beauty of the clouds seen from the top from someone who had traveled to Jamaica, perhaps in an even smaller airplane, five years before. So this was a beauty and an experience which I was ready for, and was overwhelmed by. Always, above the cloud, the sun! So solid the cloud, so pure. I could only look and look; truly to possess that beauty, to feel that one had come to the end of that particular experience, was impossible. To see what so few men had seen! Always there, the thing seen, the world above the clouds, even when unperceived; up there (as, down below, sometimes at sunset) one's mind could travel back-and forward-aeons.

We droned on to Puerto Rico. It was late afternoon. Another country, already, after only a few hours. Travel! Another language; people of mixed race, mulattoes, but subtly different from the mixed people of my own place.

There was a Negro in the hangar. (Or so the place seemed to me; there was no airport terminal to speak of; air travel, though a luxury, still had in those days a rough-and-ready side.) The Negro was from the little airplane. I asked him whether he was from Trinidad. Of course he was. I knew that. I had seen him in the plane. But I asked him. Why? Friends.h.i.+p? I didn't need that. I noted the falsity in my behavior. In the hangar or shed there was a man from another plane, or waiting for another plane, who was reading that day's edition of The New York Times The New York Times. This large world had always existed outside my little island-like the sun above the clouds, always there, even when unperceived. And this large world was now within reach!

For eight hours-or was it thirteen?-we drove on in a dark sky to New York. Hours away from the life of my island, where nothing had savor, and even the light had a life-killing quality (as I thought), I lived-like any peasant coming for the first time to a capital city-in a world of marvels. I had always known that this world existed; but to find it available to me only for the price of a fare was nonetheless staggering. With the marvels, however, there went, as in a fairy story, a feeling of menace. As the little plane droned and droned through the night the idea of New York became frightening. Not the city so much as the moment of arrival: I couldn't visualize that moment. It was the first traveler's panic I had experienced.

The pa.s.senger beside me was an Englishwoman. She had a child with her. I saw them only in that way: an Englishwoman and a child. I had no means of placing them.

I wrote my diary. I had bought, for that purpose, a cheap little lined pad with a front cover that held envelopes in a pocket. I also had an "indelible" mauve pencil, of the sort that serious people-especially officials, in Trinidad-used in those days. When you licked the pencil the color became bright; dry, the color was dull. I had bought the pad and the pencil because I was traveling to become a writer, and I had to start.

I asked the stewardess to sharpen my pencil. I did so partly to taste the luxuriousness of air travel. The plane was small, but it offered many little services, or so the airline advertis.e.m.e.nts said. This request to the stewardess was in the nature of a challenge; and to my amazement the stewardess, white and American and to me radiant and beautiful and adult, took my request seriously, brought the pencil back beautifully sharpened, and called me, two weeks away from being eighteen, sir.

So I wrote my diary. But it left out many of the things that were worth noting down, many of the things which, some years later, I would have thought much more important than the things I did note down. The diary I wrote in the airplane left out the great family farewell at the airport in Trinidad, the airport building like a little timber house with a little garden at the edge of the asphalt runway.

That family farewell was the last of the big Hindu or Asiatic occasions in which I took part-those farewells (from another era, another continent, another kind of travel, when a traveler might indeed never return, as many of us, or our grandfathers, had never returned to India) for which people left their work, gave up a day's earnings, and traveled long distances to say good-bye. And not really to say good-bye, more to show themselves, to be present at a big clan occasion, to a.s.sert their members.h.i.+p of the clan; in spite of the fact (or because of the fact) that there were now such differences between various branches of the extended family, and conversation was already touched with condescension or social nervousness on one side or the other.

I did not note down that occasion in my writer's diary with the indelible pencil sharpened by the elegant Pan American World Airways stewardess in the little airplane. And one reason was that the occasion was too separate from the setting in which I wrote, the setting of magic and wonder. Another was that the occasion, that ceremonial farewell with stiff little groups of people hanging about the wooden building at the edge of the runway, did not fit into my idea of a writer's diary or the writer's experience I was preparing myself for.

Nor did I write about-something I would certainly have written about, not many years later, when I had begun to work towards some understanding of the nature of my experience-the cousin and his advice at the airport.

This cousin was a half-witted or certainly dim-witted fellow who had developed a little paunch at the age of fifteen or so, had kept it ever since, and had in some bizarre way-without any knowledge of grammar or feeling for the English language or any other language-made himself a journalist. He had no goodwill towards me. Perhaps he even had ill will; perhaps he would have easily-not out of any positive malice, but halfheartedly, as befitted his character, and out of a simple principle of family hate-done the equivalent of sticking pins in my effigy.

But he was moved by the occasion, or felt he had to act up to it. And at that crowded farewell at the airport, where a few people (some of whom I didn't know) were even managing to cry, this cousin came up to me and, as though pa.s.sing on a secret handed to him, a journalist, from the highest quarters, from the airport manager, from the director of Pan American World Airways, or from G.o.d himself, whispered: "Sit at the back of the airplane. It's safer there." (Travel was still an adventure, by sea or by air. And it may be that what my cousin said about sitting at the back of the airplane was right. Perhaps, though-and more likely-his advice was based on the child's comic-strip idea of the airplane crash, the plane diving down, cras.h.i.+ng on its nose.) I didn't write about this cousin and his advice in my airplane diary, because-like the family send-off, the remnant of peasant Asia in my life-the frivolous advice did not seem to me suitable to the work, which was about a more epic vision of the world and about a more epic kind of personal adventure. Perhaps it never even occurred to me to write about the farewell or the cousin's advice; there was no question of rejecting the themes.

But though personal adventure was my theme, I was in no position to write about something more important, the change in my personality that travel and solitude had already begun to bring about. The intimations of this alteration were very slight. In five years I was to see very clearly that the family farewell and my cousin's advice were "material." But it was to be many years after that before the alterations in my personality, or the slight intimations I was beginning to have about those alterations, intimations that were minute fractions of that first day's adventure, were to acquire their proper proportions.

There had been the Negro in the hangar or airport shed in Puerto Rico where, after many hours, and in the late afternoon, our little airplane had made its first halt. Already the light had changed; the world had changed. The world had ceased to be colonial, for me; people had already altered their value, even this Negro. He was bound for Harlem. At home, among his fellows, just a few hours before, he was a man to be envied, his journey indescribably glamorous; now he was a Negro, in a straw-colored jacket obviously not his own, too tight across his weight lifter's shoulder (weight lifting was a craze among us). Now, in that jacket (at home, the badge of the traveler to the temperate north), he was bluffing it out, insisting on his respectability, on not being an American Negro, on not being fazed by the airplane and by the white people.

He was not an educated man, not someone I would have sought out at home. Yet already I had sought him out and even claimed kins.h.i.+p with him. Why? I felt the gestures of friends.h.i.+p to be false even as I made them. In his tight, respectable jacket, he was cool with me; and I was half glad he was, because friends.h.i.+p, chat, with him wasn't what I wanted. But I had made the gestures. If I had been asked whether I was feeling solitary, vulnerable, I would have said that the opposite was true, that I was in a state of great excitement, that I was loving everything; that everything I had seen so far in the second half of that great day was new and wonderful.

He was cool, the Trinidad man, b.u.t.toned up, his eyes quiet, no s.h.i.+ne to his color, which had rather a mat or dead quality that spoke of tension. I let him be. I stayed by myself. The light yellowed, darkened. Then we were airborne again.

The little airplane droned on and on. The repet.i.tiveness of this form of travel was an unexpected revelation. So that though the journey was the fastest I had ever made, and though I knew that compared with a s.h.i.+p's journey it was extraordinarily short, yet it was neither exaggerated nor pretentious to feel that it was "boring."

There were the woman and her child beside me. The woman was English, as I have said. I had never met an Englishwoman of her age before-had indeed met only one Englishwoman-and had no means of reading her character or intelligence or education. I was not interested in children; was not interested in women with children. Yet towards this woman-much taken up with her child-I found myself making overtures of friends.h.i.+p.

I was carrying some bananas to New York. They were in a paper bag, perhaps on the floor. Some remnant of old peasant travel, with food for the journey; some genuine Hindu distrust of the food that might be offered by the airplane and then by the hotel in New York. The bananas were smelling now; in the warm plane they were ripening by the hour. I offered the woman a banana. Did she take it for her child? I cannot remember. The fact was, I made the offer. Though, really, I didn't want this woman's friends.h.i.+p or conversation, and was not interested in the child.

Was there some fear of travel, in spite of my longing for the day, and in spite of my genuine excitement? Was this reaching out to people a response to solitude-since for the first time in my life I was solitary? Was it the fear of New York? Certainly. The city, my behavior there at the moment of arrival, my inability to visualize the physical details of arrival, how and where I was going to spend the night-these were developing anxieties as we flew on and on.

I witnessed this change in my personality; but, not even aware of it as a theme, wrote nothing of it in my diary. So that between the man writing the diary and the traveler there was already a gap, already a gap between the man and the writer.

Man and writer were the same person. But that is a writer's greatest discovery. It took time-and how much writing!-to arrive at that synthesis.

On that day, the first of adventure and freedom and travel and discovery, man and writer were united in their eagerness for experience. But the nature of the experiences of the day encouraged a separation of the two elements in my personality. The writer, or the boy traveling to be a writer, was educated; he had had a formal school education; he had a high idea of the n.o.bility of the calling to which he was traveling to dedicate himself. But the man, of whom the writer was just a part (if a major, impelling part), the man was in the profoundest way-as a social being-untutored.

He was close to the village ways of his Asian-Indian community. He had an instinctive understanding of and sympathy for its rituals, like the farewell at the airport that morning. He was close to the ways of that community, which was separated from peasant India only by two or three generations in a plantation colony of the New World. Yet there was another side to the man: he did not really partic.i.p.ate in the life or rituals of that community. It wasn't only that he was educated in the formal way of a school education; he was also skeptical. Unhappy in his extended family, he was distrustful of larger, communal groupings.

But that half-Indian world, that world removed in time and s.p.a.ce from India, and mysterious to the man, its language not even half understood, its religion and religious rites not grasped, that half-Indian world was the social world the man knew. It was all that he had outside school and the life of the imagination fed by books and the cinema. That village world had given him its prejudices and pa.s.sions; he was interested in, had been pa.s.sionate about, the politics of India before and after independence. Yet he knew little about his community in Trinidad; he thought that because he belonged to it he understood it; he thought that the life of the community was like an extension of the life of his family. And he knew nothing of other communities. He had only the prejudices of his time, in that colonial, racially mixed setting. He was profoundly ignorant. He hadn't been to a restaurant, hated the idea of eating food from foreign hands. Yet at the same time he had dreamed of fulfillment in a foreign country.

He looked for adventure. On this first day he found it. But he also came face to face with his ignorance. This ignorance undermined, mocked the writer, or the ambition of the writer, made nonsense of the personality the writer wished to a.s.sume-elegant, knowing, unsurprised. (Like Somerset Maugham. Or-a truer comparison-like the Trinidad Negro with the tight borrowed jacket in the hangar or shed at Puerto Rico, on his way to Harlem and quite another idea of glamour.) So my memories of my arrival late at night in New York are vague. I think back hard now, and certain details become clearer: a very bright building, dazzling lights, a little crowd in a small s.p.a.ce, a woman official with a very sharp "American" accent calling out the names of certain pa.s.sengers.

There was a letter for me. A man from the British Consulate should have met me. But the plane had been so delayed he had gone home, leaving this letter, which gave me only the name of the hotel he had booked me into. He should have protected me. He left me at the mercy of the taxi driver who took me into the city. The driver cheated me, charged too much; and then, seeing how easily I acquiesced, he stripped me of the few remaining dollars I had on me (I had a few more, very few, hidden in my suitcase) by claiming them as a tip. I felt this humiliation so keenly that memory blurred it soon; and then eradicated it for many years.

I preferred to remember the taxi driver as being talkative, because that was the way taxi drivers were. I worked hard at remembering what he had said. ("We sold the j.a.ps all our sc.r.a.p metal and they shot it right back at us.") And I remembered the Negro (he must have occurred in the hotel) who talked like a Negro in a book or film ("Dis city never sleeps" or "Dis city sho don' sleep, man") and whom I couldn't tip because I had no money on me.

The talkative taxi driver, the quaintly spoken Negro-I cherished them because I felt I knew them, because I felt they were confirming so much of what I had read, were confirming so much of my advance information. They rea.s.sured me that I was indeed traveling, and was already in New York. And in their familiar aspect they were material, suitable for the writer. But the humiliation connected with each (the driver's theft, my inability to tip the Negro, who was expecting me to play a character role too and give him a tip) got in the way; and they were edited out of my memory for twenty years. They were certainly edited out of the diary which I wrote with indelible pencil (already a little blunt) that evening in the hotel (on the hotel paper, for the extra drama).

A family farewell in the morning, thousands of miles away: a farewell to my past, my colonial past and peasant-Asiatic past. Immediately, then, the exaltation: the glimpse of the fields and the mountains which I had never seen; the rippled or wrinkled sea crawling; then the clouds from above; and thoughts of the beginning of the world, thoughts of time without beginning or end; the intense experience of beauty. A faint panic, then; even an acted panic; then a dwindling of the sense of the self. A suppressed, half true, but also half intensely true, diary being written in a small dark room of the Hotel Wellington in New York. And already a feeling of being lost, of truth not fully faced, of a world whose great size I had seized being made at night very small for me again.

I had come to New York with some bananas. I had eaten some on the plane and left the others behind, guiltily but correctly (they would almost certainly have been taken from me by the authorities). I had also been given a roasted chicken or half a roasted chicken: my family's peasant, Indian, Hindu fear about my food, about pollution, and this was an attempt to stay it, if only for that day. But I had no knife, no fork, no plate, and didn't know that these things might have been got from the hotel; wouldn't have known how to set about asking, especially at that very late hour.

I ate over the wastepaper basket, aware as I did so of the smell, the oil, the excess at the end of a long day. In my diary I had written of the biggest things, the things that befitted a writer. But the writer of the diary was ending his day like a peasant, like a man reverting to his origins, eating secretively in a dark room, and then wondering how to hide the high-smelling evidence of his meal. I dumped it all in the wastepaper basket. After this I needed a bath or a shower.

The shower was in my own room: a luxury. I had dreaded having to use a communal one. One tap was marked HOT HOT. Such a refinement I had never seen before. In Trinidad, in our great heat, we had always bathed or showered in water of normal temperature, the water of the tap. A hot shower! I was expecting something tepid, like the warm bathwater (in buckets) that my mother prepared for me (mixed with aromatic and medicinal neem leaves) on certain important days. The hot water of the Hotel Wellington shower wasn't like that. Hot was hot. Barely avoiding a scalding, I ducked out of the shower cubicle.

So the great day ended. And then-it was my special gift, and remained so for nearly twenty years, helping me through many crises-I fell asleep as soon as I got into bed and didn't wake up again until I had slept out all my sleep.

My memory retains nothing of the hotel room in daylight, nothing of the room in which I awakened. Perhaps, then, some embarra.s.sment obliterated the memory. Less than twenty-four hours out of my own place, the humiliations had begun to bank up: to my own developed sense of the self was now added another sense of the self, a rawness of nerves and sensibility against which from now on for many years all my impressions, even the most exalted, were to be set. As were the impressions of the morning, the ones that remained with me, impressions that (after the humiliations of the previous evening, the humiliations of arrival) resumed the romance.

The newsstand downstairs, in the lobby of the Wellington, was part of this romance: a little shop, in the building where one lived: it was quite new to me, quite enchanting. I bought a packet of cigarettes from the man who was selling, a tall, gray-haired man, as well dressed and formal and educated, I thought, as a teacher. (Not like the Indian shopkeepers of our country villages, men who kept themselves deliberately dirty and ragged, the dirtier the better, to avoid hubris, to deter jealousy and the evil eye. Not like the Chinese in their "parlors," who wore sleeveless vests and khaki shorts and wooden clogs, stayed indoors all the time, and in spite of their wizened, famine-stricken, opium-den appearance, fathered child after child on happy black concubines or blank-faced, flat-chested Chinese wives.) From the tall gray-haired man I bought a packet of Old Golds. I had no palate in tobacco, couldn't tell the difference between brands, and went mainly by things like names. In Trinidad only locally made or English cigarettes were sold in the shops; American cigarettes were available, informally and in quant.i.ty, because of the American bases, but they were never sold in the shops; and this ability to buy a packet of American cigarettes, from the whole range of American names, was wonderful. As was the price, fifteen cents, and the book of matches that came with it. Largesse!

The sensuousness of those soft American cigarette packets! The cellophane, the name of the brand, the paper of the packet outlining the shapes of the cigarettes: the thin red paper ribbon at the top of the packet which enabled you to undo the cellophane: the delicious smell. Cigarettes had always been for me an aesthetic experience. The flavor of burning tobacco I had never cared for; so the smoking addiction, when it came, had been severe. And if I had stopped smoking many times already at home, it was because I had for many months during the past worrying year been denying myself things, at one stage even (secretly) denying myself food, out of a wish not to lose my scholars.h.i.+p, the scholars.h.i.+p that was to take me to England and Oxford, which was not a wish so much to go to Oxford as a wish to get out of Trinidad and see the great world and make myself a writer. Such pa.s.sion, such longing had gone into this journey, which was less than a day old!

From the teacherlike gray-haired man at the newsstand I also bought a copy of The New York Times The New York Times, the previous day's issue of which I had seen the previous day at Puerto Rico. I was interested in newspapers and knew this paper to be one of the foremost in the world. But to read a newspaper for the first time is like coming into a film that has been on for an hour. Newspapers are like serials. To understand them you have to take knowledge to them; the knowledge that serves best is the knowledge provided by the newspaper itself. It made me feel a stranger, that paper. But on the front page, at the bottom, there was a story to which I could respond, because it dealt with an experience I was sharing. The story was about the weather. Apparently it was unseasonably cool and gray for the end of July, so unseasonable that it was worth a story.

Without the paper I would not have known that the weather was unseasonable. But I did not need the paper to make me see the enchantment of the light. The light indoors in the hotel was like the light outdoors. The outdoor light was magical. I thought it was created by the tall buildings, which, with some shame, I stopped to look up at, to get their size. Light indoors flowed into light outdoors: the light here was one. In Trinidad, from seven or eight in the morning to five in the afternoon, the heat was great; to be out of doors was to be stung, to feel the heat and discomfort. This gray sky and gray light, light without glare, suggested a canopied, protected world: no need, going outside, to brace oneself for heat and dazzle. And the city of protected-feeling streets and tall buildings was curiously softly colored. I hadn't expected that, hadn't seen that in photographs or read about it. The colors of the New York streets would have appeared to me, in Trinidad, as "dead" colors, the colors of dead things, dried gra.s.s, dead vegetation, earth, sand, a dead world-hardly colors at all.

I went walking. In my memory there is only one walk. But I believe now that there would have been two, with a taxi ride in between (to check up on the sailing time for the s.h.i.+p that was to take me away that afternoon). Without the money in the suitcase I would have been penniless; so at least that precaution had served.

I saw a cinema advertising Marius Marius with Raimu. The advertis.e.m.e.nt was in movable letters. I had never seen a French film in my life. But I knew much about French cinema. I had read about it, and I had even in some way studied it, in case a question came up in a French cultural "general" paper. So much of my education had been like that, abstract, a test of memory: like a man, denied the chance of visiting famous cities, learning their street maps instead. So much of my education had been like that: monkish, medieval, learning quite separate from everyday things. with Raimu. The advertis.e.m.e.nt was in movable letters. I had never seen a French film in my life. But I knew much about French cinema. I had read about it, and I had even in some way studied it, in case a question came up in a French cultural "general" paper. So much of my education had been like that, abstract, a test of memory: like a man, denied the chance of visiting famous cities, learning their street maps instead. So much of my education had been like that: monkish, medieval, learning quite separate from everyday things.

Marius, Raimu. One name was like an anagram of the other, bar the s s (my monkish way of observing, studying, committing to memory). And if it had been afternoon, and if I didn't have a s.h.i.+p to take, I would have gone, for at home that was where, imaginatively, I lived most profoundly: in the cinema. Really-over and above that quirk of literary ambition-there was a great simplicity to my character. I knew very little about the agricultural colony in the New World where I was born. And of my Asiatic-Hindu community, a transplanted peasant community, I knew only my extended family. All my life, from the moment I had become self-aware, had been devoted to study, study of the abstract sort I have tried to give some idea of. And then this idea of abstract study had been converted into an idea of a literary life in another country. That had committed me to further, more desperate, more consuming study; had committed me to further withdrawal. My real life, my literary life, was to be elsewhere. In the meantime, at home, I lived imaginatively in the cinema, a foretaste of that life abroad. On Sat.u.r.day afternoons, after the special holiday shows which began at one thirty (and which we simply called "one thirty" rather in the way other people might speak of matinees), it was painful, after the dark cinema and the remote realms where one had been living for three hours or so, to come out into the very bright colors of one's own world. (my monkish way of observing, studying, committing to memory). And if it had been afternoon, and if I didn't have a s.h.i.+p to take, I would have gone, for at home that was where, imaginatively, I lived most profoundly: in the cinema. Really-over and above that quirk of literary ambition-there was a great simplicity to my character. I knew very little about the agricultural colony in the New World where I was born. And of my Asiatic-Hindu community, a transplanted peasant community, I knew only my extended family. All my life, from the moment I had become self-aware, had been devoted to study, study of the abstract sort I have tried to give some idea of. And then this idea of abstract study had been converted into an idea of a literary life in another country. That had committed me to further, more desperate, more consuming study; had committed me to further withdrawal. My real life, my literary life, was to be elsewhere. In the meantime, at home, I lived imaginatively in the cinema, a foretaste of that life abroad. On Sat.u.r.day afternoons, after the special holiday shows which began at one thirty (and which we simply called "one thirty" rather in the way other people might speak of matinees), it was painful, after the dark cinema and the remote realms where one had been living for three hours or so, to come out into the very bright colors of one's own world.

But I had not seen any French films. They had never been shown in Trinidad. And perhaps, like British films, if they had been shown they would have found no audience, being of a particular country, local, not universal like the Hollywood pictures, which could quicken the imaginations of remote people. I knew French films from books, especially Roger Manvell's Film Film. I knew all the still photographs in that book. His reverential text, and the enthusiasm that had been given me at school for France as the country of civilization, made me see extraordinary virtue in those strongly lighted, poorly reproduced small photographs.

And now, less than a day into my great adventure, seeing the name Marius Marius and its near anagram Raimu on the cinema board, I felt I was close to something that was mine by right (by education, vocation, training, yearning, sacrifice)-like and its near anagram Raimu on the cinema board, I felt I was close to something that was mine by right (by education, vocation, training, yearning, sacrifice)-like The New York Times The New York Times itself, which yet (when bought by me) didn't hold me, being like a crossword puzzle I could only partly fill in. itself, which yet (when bought by me) didn't hold me, being like a crossword puzzle I could only partly fill in.