Literary Occasions_ Essays Part 3

It was wartime. The migration of my own family into the town had become part of a more general movement. People of all conditions were coming into Port of Spain to work at the two American bases. One of those bases had been built on recently reclaimed land just at the end of our street-eight houses down. Twice a day we heard the bugles; Americans, formal in their uniforms, with their khaki ties tucked into their s.h.i.+rts, were another part of the life of our street. The street was busy; the yards were crowded. Our yard was more crowded than most. No servant ever lodged in our servant room. Instead, the room sheltered a succession of favoured transients, on their way to better things. Before the big family rush, some of these transients had been outsiders; but now they were mostly relations or people close to the family, like Bogart.

The connection of Bogart with my mother's family was unusual. At the turn of the century Bogart's father and my mother's father had travelled out together from India as indentured immigrants. At some time during the long and frightening journey they had sworn a bond of brotherhood; that was the bond that was being honoured by their descendants.

Bogart's people were from the Punjab, and handsome. The two brothers we had got to know were ambitious men, rising in white-collar jobs. One was a teacher; the other (who had pa.s.sed through the servant room) was a weekend sportsman who, in the cricket season, regularly got his name in the paper. Bogart didn't have the education or the ambition of his brothers; it wasn't clear what he did for a living. He was placid, without any p.r.o.nounced character, detached, and in that crowded yard oddly solitary.

Once he went away. When he came back, some weeks or months later, it was said that he had been "working on a s.h.i.+p." Port of Spain was a colonial port, and we thought of sailors as very rough, the dregs. So this business of working on a s.h.i.+p-though it suggested money as well as luck, for the jobs were not easy to come by-also held suggestions of danger. It was something for the reckless and the bohemian. But it must have suited Bogart, because after a time he went away-disappeared-again.

There was a story this time that he had gone to Venezuela. He came back; but I had no memory of his return. His adventures-if he had had any-remained unknown to me. I believe I was told that the first time he had gone away, to work on the s.h.i.+p, he had worked as a cook. But that might have been a story I made up myself. All that I knew of Bogart while he lived in the servant room was what, as a child, I saw from a distance. He and his comings and goings were part of the confusion and haphazardness and crowd of that time.

I saw a little more of him four or five years later. The war was over. The American base at the end of the street was closed. The buildings were pulled down, and the local contractor, who knew someone in our family, gave us the run of the place for a few days, to pick up what timber we wanted. My mother's extended family was breaking up into its component parts; we were all leaving my grandmother's house. My father had bought a house of his own; I used timber from the old American base to make a new front gate. Soon I had got the Trinidad government scholars.h.i.+p that was to take me to Oxford.

Bogart was still reportedly a traveller. And in Trinidad now he was able to do what perhaps he had always wanted to do: to put as much distance as possible between himself and people close to him. He was living in Carenage, a seaside village five miles or so west of Port of Spain. Carenage was a negro-mulatto place, with a Spanish flavour ('pagnol, in the local French patois). There were few Indians in Carenage; that would have suited Bogart. in the local French patois). There were few Indians in Carenage; that would have suited Bogart.

With nothing to do, waiting to go away, I was restless, and I sometimes cycled out to Carenage. It was pleasant after the hot ride to splash about in the rocky sea, and pleasant after that to go and have a Coca-Cola at Bogart's. He lived in a side street, a wandering lane, with yards that were half bush, half built-up. He was a tailor now, apparently with customers; and he sat at his machine in his open shop, welcoming but undemonstrative, as placid, as without conversation, and as solitary as ever. But he was willing to play with me. He was happy to let me paint a sign-board for his shop. The idea was mine, and he took it seriously. He had a carpenter build a board of new wood; and on this, over some days, after priming and painting, I did the sign. He put it up over his shop door, and I thought it looked genuine, a real sign. I was amazed; it was the first sign-board I had ever done.

The time then came for me to go to England. I left Bogart in Carenage. And that was where he had continued to live in my memory, faintly, never a figure in the foreground: the man who had worked on a s.h.i.+p, then gone to Venezuela, sitting placidly ever after at his sewing machine, below my sign, in his little concrete house-and-shop.

That was Bogart's story, as I knew it. And-after all our migrations within Trinidad, after my own trip to England and my time at Oxford-that was all the story I had in mind when-after two failed attempts at novels-I sat at the typewriter in the freelances' room in the Langham Hotel, to try once more to be a writer. And luck was with me that afternoon. Every morning when he got up Hat would sit on the banister of his back verandah and shout across, "What happening there, Bogart?" Every morning when he got up Hat would sit on the banister of his back verandah and shout across, "What happening there, Bogart?" Luck was with me, because that first sentence was so direct, so uncluttered, so without complications, that it provoked the sentence that was to follow. Luck was with me, because that first sentence was so direct, so uncluttered, so without complications, that it provoked the sentence that was to follow. Bogart would turn in his bed and mumble softly, so that no one heard, "What happening there, Hat?" Bogart would turn in his bed and mumble softly, so that no one heard, "What happening there, Hat?"

The first sentence was true. The second was invention. But together-to me, the writer-they had done something extraordinary. Though they had left out everything-the setting, the historical time, the racial and social complexities of the people concerned-they had suggested it all; they had created the world of the street. And together, as sentences, words, they had set up a rhythm, a speed, which dictated all that was to follow.

The story developed a first-person narrator. And for the sake of speed, to avoid complications, to match the rhythm of what had gone before, this narrator could not be myself. My narrator lived alone with his mother in a house on the street. He had no father; he had no other family. So, very simply, all the crowd of my mother's extended family, as c.u.mbersome in real life as it would have been to a writer, was abolished; and, again out of my wish to simplify, I had a narrator more in tune with the life of the street than I had been.

Bogart's tailoring business, with the sign-board I had done for him, I transferred from the Carenage side street to the Port of Spain servant room, and with it there came some hint of the silent companionableness I had found in Bogart at that later period. The servant room and the street-the houses, the pavements, the open yards, the American base at the end of the street-became like a stage set. Anyone might walk down the street; anyone might turn up in the servant room. It was enough-given the rhythm of the narrative and its acc.u.mulating suggestions of street life-for the narrator to say so. So Bogart could come and go, without fuss. When, in the story, he left the servant room for the first time, it took little-just the dropping of a few names-to establish the idea of the street as a kind of club.

So that afternoon in the Langham Hotel Port of Spain memories, disregarded until then, were simplified and transformed. The speed of the narrative-that was the speed of the writer. And everything that was later to look like considered literary devices came only from the anxiety of the writer. I wanted above all to take the story to the end. I feared that if I stopped too long anywhere I might lose faith in what I was doing, give up once more and be left with nothing.

Speed dictated the solution of the mystery of Bogart. He wished to be free (of Hindu family conventions, but this wasn't stated in the story). He was without ambition, and had no skill; in spite of the sign-board, he was hardly a tailor. He was an unremarkable man, a man from the country, to whom mystery and the name of Bogart had been given by the street, which had its own city sense of drama. If Bogart spent whole afternoons in his servant room playing Patience, it was because he had no other way of pa.s.sing the time. If, until he fell into the character of the film Bogart, he had no conversation, it was because he had little to say. The street saw him as sensual, lazy, cool. He was in fact pa.s.sive. The emotional entanglements that called him away from the street were less than heroic. With women, Bogart-unlike most men of the street-had taken the easy way out. He was that flabby, emasculated thing, a bigamist. So, looking only for freedom, the Bogart of my story had ended up as a man on the run. It was only in the solitude of his servant room that he could be himself, at peace. It was only with the men and boys of the street that he could be a man.

The story was short, three thousand words, two foolscap sheets and a bit. I had-a conscious piece of magic that afternoon-set the typewriter at single s.p.a.ce, to get as much as possible on the first sheet and also to create the effect of the printed page.

People were in and out of the freelances' room while I typed. Some would have dropped by at the BBC that afternoon for the company and the chat, and the off-chance of a commission by a producer for some little script. Some would have had work to do.

I suppose Ernest Eytle would have come in, to sit at the other typewriter and to peck, with many pauses, at the "links" or even a "piece" for the magazine programme. And Ernest's beautifully spoken words, crackling over the short wave that evening, would suggest a busy, alert man, deep in the metropolitan excitements of London, sparing a few minutes for his radio talk. He was a mulatto from British Guiana. He was dark-suited, fat and slow; when, some years later, I heard he had died, I was able mentally to transfer him, without any change, and without any feeling of shock, to a coffin. As much as broadcasting, Ernest liked the pub life around Broadcasting House. This sitting at the typewriter in the gloomy freelances' room was like an imposition; and Ernest, whenever he paused to think, would rub a heavy hand down his forehead to his eyebrows, which he pushed back the wrong way; and then, like a man brus.h.i.+ng away cobwebs, he would appear to dust his cheek, his nose, his lips and chin.

Having done that with Ernest, I should say that my own typing posture in those days was unusual. My shoulders were thrown back as far as they could go; my spine was arched. My knees were drawn right up; my shoes rested on the topmost struts of the chair, left side and right side. So, with my legs wide apart, I sat at the typewriter with something like a monkey crouch.

THE FREELANCES' room was like a club: chat, movement, the separate anxieties of young or youngish men below the pa.s.sing fellows.h.i.+p of the room. That was the atmosphere I was writing in. That was the atmosphere I gave to Bogart's Port of Spain street. Partly for the sake of speed, and partly because my memory or imagination couldn't rise to it, I had given his servant room hardly any furniture: the Langham room itself was barely furnished. And I benefited from the fellows.h.i.+p of the room that afternoon. Without that fellows.h.i.+p, without the response of the three men who read the story, I might not have wanted to go on with what I had begun. room was like a club: chat, movement, the separate anxieties of young or youngish men below the pa.s.sing fellows.h.i.+p of the room. That was the atmosphere I was writing in. That was the atmosphere I gave to Bogart's Port of Spain street. Partly for the sake of speed, and partly because my memory or imagination couldn't rise to it, I had given his servant room hardly any furniture: the Langham room itself was barely furnished. And I benefited from the fellows.h.i.+p of the room that afternoon. Without that fellows.h.i.+p, without the response of the three men who read the story, I might not have wanted to go on with what I had begun.

I pa.s.sed the three typed sheets around.

John Stockbridge was English. He worked for many BBC programmes, domestic and overseas. Unlike the rest of us, he carried a briefcase; and that briefcase suggested method, steadiness, many commissions. At our first meeting in the freelances' room three or four months before, he hadn't been too friendly-he no doubt saw me as an Oxford man, untrained, stepping just like that into regular radio work, taking the bread out of the mouths of more experienced men. But then his att.i.tude towards me had become one of schoolmasterly concern. He wanted to rescue me from what, with his English eyes, he saw as my self-neglect. He wanted me to make a better job of myself, to present myself well, to wear better clothes, and especially to get rid of my dingy working-cla.s.s overcoat. (I knew nothing about clothes, but I had always thought the overcoat was wrong: it had been chosen for me, before I went up to Oxford, by the Maltese manageress of an Earl's Court boarding house.) Now, after he had read the story, John made a serious face and spoke a prodigious prophecy about my future as a writer. On such little evidence! But it was his way of finally accepting my ambition and my London life, and giving me a little blessing.

Andrew Salkey was a Jamaican. He worked in a nightclub, was also trying to get started as a writer, and had just begun to do broadcasts, talks and readings. He compared learning to write with trying to wrap a whip around a rail; he thought I had begun to make the whip "stick." He detected, and made me take out, one or two early sentences where I had begun to lose faith in the material and had begun to ridicule, not the characters, but the idea that what I was doing was a real story.

The most wholehearted acceptance came from Gordon Woolford. He was from British Guiana. He came from a distinguished colonial family. He said he had some African ancestry, but it didn't show. Some deep trouble with his father had kept Gordon away from his family and committed him, after a privileged pre-war upbringing in Belgium and England, to a hard bohemian life in London. He was an unusually handsome man, in his mid-thirties. He had married a French girl, whom he had met when she was an a.s.sistant in one of the big London stores. That marriage had just broken up. Gordon was writing a novel about it, On the Rocks; On the Rocks; it wasn't something he was going to finish. He changed jobs often; he loved writing; his favourite book-at least it was always with him during his drinking bouts-was it wasn't something he was going to finish. He changed jobs often; he loved writing; his favourite book-at least it was always with him during his drinking bouts-was Scoop. Scoop.

Something in the Bogart story touched Gordon. When he finished reading the story he folded the sheets carefully; with a gesture as of acceptance he put the sheets in his inner jacket pocket; and then he led me out to the BBC club-he was not on the wagon that day. He read the story over again, and he made me read it with him, line by line, a.s.sessing the words and the tone: we might have been rehearsing a broadcast. The ma.n.u.script still has his foldmarks and his wine stains.

During the writing of the Bogart story some memory-very vague, as if from a forgotten film-had come to me of the man who in 1938 or 1939, five years before Bogart, had lived in his servant room. He was a negro carpenter; the small sheltered s.p.a.ce between the servant room and the back fence was at once his kitchen and workshop. I asked him one day what he was making. He said-wonderfully to the six-year-old child who had asked the question-that he was making "the thing without a name."

It was the carpenter's story that I settled down to write the next day in the freelances' room. I had little to go on. But I had a street, already peopled; I had an atmosphere; and I had a narrator. I stuck to the magic of the previous day: the non-rustle BBC paper, the typewriter set at single s.p.a.ce. And I was conscious, with Gordon Woolford's help, of certain things I had stumbled on the previous day: never to let the words get too much in the way, to be fast, to add one concrete detail to another, and above all to keep the tone right.

I mentally set the servant room in another yard. The only thing that Popo, who called himself a carpenter, ever built was the little galvanized-iron workshop under the mango tree at the back of his yard. The only thing that Popo, who called himself a carpenter, ever built was the little galvanized-iron workshop under the mango tree at the back of his yard. And then scattered memories, my narrator, the life of the street, and my own childhood sense (as a six-year-old coming suddenly to Port of Spain from the Hindu rigours of my grandmother's house in the country) of the intensity of the pleasures of people on the street, gave the carpenter a story. He was an idler, a happy man, a relisher of life; but then his wife left him. And then scattered memories, my narrator, the life of the street, and my own childhood sense (as a six-year-old coming suddenly to Port of Spain from the Hindu rigours of my grandmother's house in the country) of the intensity of the pleasures of people on the street, gave the carpenter a story. He was an idler, a happy man, a relisher of life; but then his wife left him.

Over the next few days the street grew. Its complexities didn't need to be pointed; they simply became apparent. People who had only been names in one story got dialogue in the next, then became personalities; and old personalities became more familiar. Memory provided the material; city folklore as well, and city songs. An item from a London evening paper (about a postman throwing away his letters) was used. My narrator consumed material, and he seemed to be able to process every kind of material.

Even Gordon was written into the street. We were on the top of a bus one evening, going back from the BBC to Kilburn, the Irish working-cla.s.s area where I lived in two rooms in the house of a BBC commissionaire. Gordon was talking of some early period of his life, some period of luxury and promise. Then he broke off, said, "But that was a long time ago," and looked down through the reflections of gla.s.s into the street. That went to my heart. Within a few days I was to run it into the memory of a negro ballad-maker, disturbed but very gentle, who had called at my grandmother's house in Port of Spain one day to sell copies of his poems, single printed sheets, and had told me a little of his life.

The stories became longer. They could no longer be written in a day. They were not always written in the freelances' room. The technique became more conscious; it was not always possible to write fast. Beginnings, and the rhythms they established, didn't always come naturally; they had to be worked for. And then the material, which at one time had seemed inexhaustible, dried up. I had come to the end of what I could do with the street, in that particular way. My mother said, "You getting too wild in this place. I think is high time you leave." My mother said, "You getting too wild in this place. I think is high time you leave." My narrator left the street, as I had left Trinidad five years before. And the excitement I had lived with for five or six weeks was over. My narrator left the street, as I had left Trinidad five years before. And the excitement I had lived with for five or six weeks was over.

I had written a book, and I felt it to be real. That had been my ambition for years, and an urgent ambition for the past year. And I suppose that if the book had had some response outside the freelances' room I might have been a little more secure in my talent, and my later approach to writing would have been calmer; it is just possible.

But I knew only anxiety. The publisher that Andrew Salkey took the book to sent no reply for three months (the book remained unpublished for four years). And-by now one long year out of Oxford-I was trying to write another, and discovering that to have written a book was not to be a writer. Looking for a new book, a new narrative, episodes, I found myself as uncertain, and as pretending to be a writer, as I had been before I had written the story of Bogart.

To be a writer, I thought, was to have the conviction that one could go on. I didn't have that conviction. And even when the new book had been written I didn't think of myself as a writer. I thought I should wait until I had written three. And when, a year after writing the second, I had written the third, I thought I should wait until I had written six. On official forms I described myself as a "broadcaster," thinking the word nondescript, suitable to someone from the freelances' room; until a BBC man, "staff," told me it was boastful.

So I became "writer." Though to myself an una.s.suageable anxiety still attached to the word, and I was still, for its sake, practising magic. I never bought paper to write on. I preferred to use "borrowed," non-rustle BBC paper; it seemed more casual, less likely to attract failure. I never numbered my pages, for fear of not getting to the end. (This drew the only comment Ernest Eytle made about my writing. Sitting idly at his typewriter one day in the freelances' room, he read some of my pages, apparently with goodwill. Then, weightily, he said, "I'll tell you what you should do with this." I waited. He said, "You should number the pages. In case they get mixed up.") And on the finished ma.n.u.scripts of my first four books-half a million words-I never with my own hand typed or wrote my name. I always asked someone else to do that for me. Such anxiety; such ambition.

The ways of my fantasy, the process of creation, remained mysterious to me. For everything that was false or didn't work and had to be discarded, I felt that I alone was responsible. For everything that seemed right I felt I had only been a vessel. There was the recurring element of luck, or so it seemed to me. True, and saving, knowledge of my subject-beginning with Bogart's street-always seemed to come during the writing.

This element of luck isn't so mysterious to me now. As diarists and letter-writers repeatedly prove, any attempt at narrative can give value to an experience which might otherwise evaporate away. When I began to write about Bogart's street I began to sink into a tract of experience I hadn't before contemplated as a writer. This blindness might seem extraordinary in someone who wanted so much to be a writer. Half a writer's work, though, is the discovery of his subject. And a problem for me was that my life had been varied, full of upheavals and moves: from my grandmother's Hindu house in the country, still close to the rituals and social ways of village India; to Port of Spain, the negro and G.I. life of its streets, the other, ordered life of my colonial English school, which was called Queen's Royal College; and then Oxford, London and the freelances' room at the BBC. Trying to make a beginning as a writer, I didn't know where to focus.

In England I was also a colonial. Out of the stresses of that, and out of my wors.h.i.+p of the name of writer, I had without knowing it fallen into the error of thinking of writing as a kind of display. My very particularity-which was the subject sitting on my shoulder-had been enc.u.mbering me.

The English or French writer of my age had grown up in a world that was more or less explained. He wrote against a background of knowledge. I couldn't be a writer in the same way, because to be a colonial, as I was, was to be spared knowledge. It was to live in an intellectually restricted world; it was to accept those restrictions. And the restrictions could become attractive.

Every morning when he got up Hat would sit on the banister of his back verandah and shout across, "What happening there, Bogart?" That was a good place to begin. But I couldn't stay there. My anxiety constantly to prove myself as a writer, the need to write another book and then another, led me away. That was a good place to begin. But I couldn't stay there. My anxiety constantly to prove myself as a writer, the need to write another book and then another, led me away.

There was much in that call of "Bogart!" that had to be examined. It was spoken by a Port of Spain Indian, a descendant of nineteenth-century indentured immigrants from South India; and Bogart was linked in a special Hindu way with my mother's family. So there was a migration from India to be considered, a migration within the British empire. There was my Hindu family, with its fading memories of India; there was India itself. And there was Trinidad, with its past of slavery, its mixed population, its racial antagonisms and its changing political life; once part of Venezuela and the Spanish empire, now English-speaking, with the American base and an open-air cinema at the end of Bogart's street. And just across the Gulf of Paria was Venezuela, the sixteenth-century land of El Dorado, now a country of dictators, but drawing Bogart out of his servant room with its promise of Spanish s.e.xual adventure and the promise of a job in its oil fields.

And there was my own presence in England, writing: the career wasn't possible in Trinidad, a small, mainly agricultural colony: my vision of the world couldn't exclude that important fact.

So step by step, book by book, though seeking each time only to write another book, I eased myself into knowledge. To write was to learn. Beginning a book, I always felt I was in possession of all the facts about myself; at the end I was always surprised. The book before always turned out to have been written by a man with incomplete knowledge. And the very first, the one begun in the freelances' room, seemed to have been written by an innocent, a man at the beginning of knowledge about both himself and the writing career that had been his ambition from childhood.

2.

THE AMBITION to be a writer was given me by my father. He was a journalist for much of his working life. This was an unusual occupation for a Trinidad Indian of his generation. My father was born in 1906. At that time the Indians of Trinidad were a separate community, mainly rural and Hindi-speaking, attached to the sugar estates of central and southern Trinidad. Many of the Indians of 1906 had been born in India and had come out to Trinidad as indentured labourers on five-year contracts. This form of Indian contract labour within the British empire ended, as a result of nationalist agitation in India, only in 1917. to be a writer was given me by my father. He was a journalist for much of his working life. This was an unusual occupation for a Trinidad Indian of his generation. My father was born in 1906. At that time the Indians of Trinidad were a separate community, mainly rural and Hindi-speaking, attached to the sugar estates of central and southern Trinidad. Many of the Indians of 1906 had been born in India and had come out to Trinidad as indentured labourers on five-year contracts. This form of Indian contract labour within the British empire ended, as a result of nationalist agitation in India, only in 1917.

In 1929 my father began contributing occasional articles on Indian topics to the Trinidad Guardian. Trinidad Guardian. In 1932, when I was born, he had become the In 1932, when I was born, he had become the Guardian Guardian staff correspondent in the little market town of Chaguanas. Chaguanas was in the heart of the sugar area and the Indian area of Trinidad. It was where my mother's family was established. Contract labour was far behind them; they were big landowners. staff correspondent in the little market town of Chaguanas. Chaguanas was in the heart of the sugar area and the Indian area of Trinidad. It was where my mother's family was established. Contract labour was far behind them; they were big landowners.

Two years or so after I was born my father left the Guardian, Guardian, for reasons that were never clear to me. For some years he did odd jobs here and there, now attached to my mother's family, now going back to the protection of an uncle by marriage, a rich man, founder and part owner of the biggest bus company on the island. Poor himself, with close relations who were still agricultural labourers, my father dangled all his life in a half-dependence and half-esteem between these two powerful families. for reasons that were never clear to me. For some years he did odd jobs here and there, now attached to my mother's family, now going back to the protection of an uncle by marriage, a rich man, founder and part owner of the biggest bus company on the island. Poor himself, with close relations who were still agricultural labourers, my father dangled all his life in a half-dependence and half-esteem between these two powerful families.

In 1938 my father was taken on by the Guardian Guardian again, this time as a city reporter. And we-my father, my mother and their five children, our own little nucleus within my mother's extended family-moved to Port of Spain, to the house owned by my mother's mother. That was when I was introduced to the life of the street (and the mystery of the negro carpenter in the servant room, making "the thing without a name"). That was also when I got to know my father. again, this time as a city reporter. And we-my father, my mother and their five children, our own little nucleus within my mother's extended family-moved to Port of Spain, to the house owned by my mother's mother. That was when I was introduced to the life of the street (and the mystery of the negro carpenter in the servant room, making "the thing without a name"). That was also when I got to know my father.

I had lived before then (at least in my own memory) in my mother's family house in Chaguanas. I knew I had a father, but I also knew and accepted that-like the fathers of others of my cousins-he was not present. There was a gift one year of a very small book of English poetry; there was a gift another time of a toy set of carpenter's tools. But the man himself remained vague.

He must have been in the house, though; because in the subsidiary two-storey wooden house at the back of the main building there were-on the inner wall of the upstairs verandah-jumbled ghostly impressions of banners or posters he had painted for someone in my mother's family who had fought a local election. The cotton banners had been stretched on the verandah wall; the beautiful oil paint, mainly red, had soaked through, disfiguring (or simply adding to) the flowered designs my mother's father (now dead) had had painted on the lower part of the verandah wall. The glory, of the election and my father's banners, belonged to the past; I accepted that.

My mother's family house in Chaguanas was a well-known local "big house." It was built in the North Indian style. It had bal.u.s.traded roof terraces, and the main terrace was decorated at either end with a statue of a rampant lion. I didn't like or dislike living there; it was all I knew. But I liked the move to Port of Spain, to the emptier house, and the pleasures and sights of the city: the squares, the gardens, the children's playground, the streetlights, the s.h.i.+ps in the harbour.

There was no American base at the end of the street. The land, still hardly with a name, known only as Docksite, had just been reclaimed, and the grey mud dredged up from the harbour was still drying out, making wonderful patterns as it crusted and cracked. After the shut-in compound life of the house in Chaguanas, I liked living on a city street. I liked looking at other people, other families. I liked the way things looked. In the morning the shadows of houses and trees fell on the pavement opposite; in the afternoon our pavement was in shadow. And I liked the munic.i.p.al order of each day: the early-morning cleaning of the streets, with the hydrants turned on to flood the green-slimed gutters with fresh water; the later collection of refuse; the pa.s.sing in mid-morning of the ice-cart.

Our house stood on high concrete pillars. The newspaper man threw the Guardian Guardian as high as he could up the concrete front steps. This delivery of a paper was one of the novelties of my Port of Spain life. And I also knew that, because my father worked for the as high as he could up the concrete front steps. This delivery of a paper was one of the novelties of my Port of Spain life. And I also knew that, because my father worked for the Guardian, Guardian, the paper was delivered free. So I had a feeling of privilege, a double sense of drama. And just as I had inherited or been given a feeling for lettering, so now I began to be given ambitions connected with the printed word. But these ambitions were twisted. They were not connected with the simple reporting that my father was doing for the the paper was delivered free. So I had a feeling of privilege, a double sense of drama. And just as I had inherited or been given a feeling for lettering, so now I began to be given ambitions connected with the printed word. But these ambitions were twisted. They were not connected with the simple reporting that my father was doing for the Guardian Guardian at that time-he didn't like what he was doing. The ambitions were connected with what my father had done for the at that time-he didn't like what he was doing. The ambitions were connected with what my father had done for the Guardian Guardian long before, in that past out of which he had so suddenly appeared to me. long before, in that past out of which he had so suddenly appeared to me.

My father had a bookcase-and-desk. It was a bulky piece of furniture, stained dark red and varnished, with gla.s.s doors to the three bookshelves, and a lipped, sloping, hinged lid to the desk. It was made from pine and packing crates (the raw, unstained side panel of one drawer was stencilled Stow away from boilers Stow away from boilers). It was part of the furniture my father had brought from where he had been living in the country. I was introduced to this furniture in Port of Spain, recognized it as my father's and therefore mine, and got to like each piece; in my grandmother's house in Chaguanas nothing had belonged to me.

Below the sloping lid of the desk, and in the square, long drawers, were my father's records: old papers, where silver fish squirmed and mice sometimes nested, with their pink young-to be thrown out into the yard for chickens to peck at. My father liked to keep doc.u.ments. There were letters from a London writing school, letters from the Guardian. Guardian. I read them all, many times, and always with pleasure, relis.h.i.+ng them as things from the past; though the raised letter-heads meant more to me than the letters. There was a pa.s.sport with my father's picture-a British pa.s.sport, for someone from the colony of Trinidad and Tobago; this pa.s.sport had never been used. And there was a big ledger in which my father had pasted his early writings for the I read them all, many times, and always with pleasure, relis.h.i.+ng them as things from the past; though the raised letter-heads meant more to me than the letters. There was a pa.s.sport with my father's picture-a British pa.s.sport, for someone from the colony of Trinidad and Tobago; this pa.s.sport had never been used. And there was a big ledger in which my father had pasted his early writings for the Guardian. Guardian. It was an estate wages ledger; the newspaper cuttings had been pasted over the names of the labourers and the wages they had been paid week by week. It was an estate wages ledger; the newspaper cuttings had been pasted over the names of the labourers and the wages they had been paid week by week.

This ledger became one of the books of my childhood. It was there, in the old-fas.h.i.+oned Guardian Guardian type and lay-out-and not in the paper that fell on the front steps every morning, sometimes while it was still dark-that I got to love the idea of newspapers and the idea of print. type and lay-out-and not in the paper that fell on the front steps every morning, sometimes while it was still dark-that I got to love the idea of newspapers and the idea of print.

I saw my father's name in print, in the two spellings, Naipal and Naipaul. I saw the pen-names that in those glorious days he had sometimes also used: Paul Nye, Paul Prye. He had written a lot, and I had no trouble understanding that the Guardian Guardian had been a better paper then. The Chaguanas that my father had written about was more full of excitement and stories than the Chaguanas I had known. The place seemed to have degenerated, with the paper. had been a better paper then. The Chaguanas that my father had written about was more full of excitement and stories than the Chaguanas I had known. The place seemed to have degenerated, with the paper.

My father had written about village feuds, family vendettas, murders, bitter election battles. (And how satisfying to see, in print, the names of those relations of my mother's whose ghostly election banners, from a subsequent election, I had seen on the verandah wall of my mother's family house!) My father had written about strange characters. Like the negro "hermit": once rich and pleasure-seeking, now penniless and living alone with a dog in a hut in the swamp-lands. The Guardian Guardian called my father's hermit Robinson Crusoe. Then, true to his new name, this Crusoe decided to go to Tobago, Crusoe's island; he intended to walk there; and, fittingly, there was no more about him. There was the negro woman of 112 who said she remembered the days of slavery when "negroes were lashed to poles and flogged." That didn't mean much; but the words (which made one of the headlines) stuck, because I didn't know that particular use of "lash." called my father's hermit Robinson Crusoe. Then, true to his new name, this Crusoe decided to go to Tobago, Crusoe's island; he intended to walk there; and, fittingly, there was no more about him. There was the negro woman of 112 who said she remembered the days of slavery when "negroes were lashed to poles and flogged." That didn't mean much; but the words (which made one of the headlines) stuck, because I didn't know that particular use of "lash."

My father had his own adventures. Once, on a rainy night, and far from home, his motorcycle skidded off the road and for some reason he had to spend the night up a tree. Was that true? I don't remember what my father said, but I understood that the story was exaggerated.

It didn't matter. I read the stories as stories; they were written by my father; I went back to them as to memorials of a heroic time I had missed. There was something about the ledger I noticed but never asked about, accepting it as a fact about the ledger: the clippings stopped quite suddenly; at least a third of the book remained unused.

In the Guardian Guardian that came to the house every day my father's name didn't appear. The style of the paper had changed; the reporting was all anonymous. The paper was part of the drama of the early morning, but I was interested in it only as a printed object. I didn't think to look for what my father had written. that came to the house every day my father's name didn't appear. The style of the paper had changed; the reporting was all anonymous. The paper was part of the drama of the early morning, but I was interested in it only as a printed object. I didn't think to look for what my father had written.

The fact was I was too young for newspapers. I was old enough only for stories. The ledger in the desk was like a personal story. In it the ideas of "once upon a time" and my father's writing life in old Chaguanas came together and penetrated my imagination, together with Charles Kingsley's story of Perseus (a baby cast out to sea, a mother enslaved), which was the first story my father read to me; the early chapters of Oliver Twist; Oliver Twist; Mr. Murdstone from Mr. Murdstone from David Copperfield; David Copperfield; Mr. Squeers. All this my father introduced me to. All this was added to my discovery of Port of Spain and the life of our street. It was the richest and most serene time of my childhood. Mr. Squeers. All this my father introduced me to. All this was added to my discovery of Port of Spain and the life of our street. It was the richest and most serene time of my childhood.

It didn't last long. It lasted perhaps for two years. My mother's mother decided to leave Chaguanas. She bought a cocoa estate of 350 acres in the hills to the north-west of Port of Spain, and it was decided-by the people in the family who decided on such matters-that the whole family, or all its dependent branches, should move there. My mother was willing enough to be with her family again. The rest of us were not so willing. But we had to go. We had to leave the house in Port of Spain. After the quiet and order of our two years as a separate unit we were returned to the hubbub of the extended family and our scattered nonent.i.ty within it.

The intention was good, even romantic. It was that the family should together work the rich and beautiful estate. It was more the idea of the commune than a continuation of the extended family life of Chaguanas, where most people had their own land and houses and used the family house as a centre. Here we all lived in the estate house. It was a big house, but it wasn't big enough; and the idea of communal labour turned out to be little more than the exaction of labour from the helpless.

In Chaguanas the family had been at the centre of a whole network of Hindu reverences. People were always coming to the Chaguanas house to pay their respects, to issue invitations or to bring gifts of food. Here we were alone. Unsupported by that Chaguanas world, with no one outside to instruct us in our obligations, even to ourselves, our own internal reverences began to go; our Hindu system began to fail.

There were desperate quarrels. Animosities and alliances s.h.i.+fted all the time; people had constantly to be looked at in new ways. Nothing was stable. Food was short; transport to Port of Spain difficult. I didn't see my father for days. His nerves deteriorated. He had been given one of the servant rooms (we children slept anywhere). In that room one Sunday evening, in a great rage, he threw a gla.s.s of hot milk. It cut me above my right eye; my eyebrow still shows the scar.

After two years we moved back to the house in Port of Spain, but only to some rooms in it. There was a period of calm, especially after my father got a job with the government and left the Guardian. Guardian. But we were under pressure. More and more people from my mother's family were coming to Port of Spain, and we were squeezed into less and less s.p.a.ce. The street itself had changed. On the reclaimed area of Docksite there was the American base; and at least one of the houses or yards had become a kind of brothel ground. But we were under pressure. More and more people from my mother's family were coming to Port of Spain, and we were squeezed into less and less s.p.a.ce. The street itself had changed. On the reclaimed area of Docksite there was the American base; and at least one of the houses or yards had become a kind of brothel ground.

Disorder within, disorder without. Only my school life was ordered; anything that had happened there I could date at once. But my family life-my life at home or my life in the house, in the street-was jumbled, without sequence. The sequence I have given it here has come to me only with the writing of this piece. And that is why I am not sure whether it was before the upheaval of our move or after our return to Port of Spain that I became aware of my father writing stories.

In one of the drawers of the desk there was a typescript-on Guardian Guardian "copy" paper-of a story called "White Man's Way." It was an old story and it didn't mean much to me. A white overseer on a horse, a girl in a cane-field: I cannot remember what happened. I was at sea with this kind of story. For all my reputation in the house as a reader of books-and my interest in books and magazines as printed objects was genuine-there was an element of pretence, a carry-over from the schoolroom, in much of the reading I did on my own. It was easier for me to take an interest in what my father read to me. And my father never read this story aloud to me. "copy" paper-of a story called "White Man's Way." It was an old story and it didn't mean much to me. A white overseer on a horse, a girl in a cane-field: I cannot remember what happened. I was at sea with this kind of story. For all my reputation in the house as a reader of books-and my interest in books and magazines as printed objects was genuine-there was an element of pretence, a carry-over from the schoolroom, in much of the reading I did on my own. It was easier for me to take an interest in what my father read to me. And my father never read this story aloud to me.

I remember that in the story there was a phrase about the girl's b.r.e.a.s.t.s below her bodice; and I suppose that my father had grafted his s.e.xual yearnings on to an English or American magazine-style tropical story. In the desk, h.o.a.rded with his other papers, there was a stack of these magazines, often looked at by me, never really read. My father had done or partly done a correspondence course with a London writing school before the war-some of the letters were in the desk. The school had recommended a study of the "market." These magazines were the market.

But "White Man's Way" was in the past. The stories my father now began to write were aimed at no market. He wrote in fits and starts. He wrote in bed, with a pencil. He wrote slowly, with great patience: he could write the same paragraph over and over again. Liable to stomach pains, and just as liable to depressions (his calls then for "the Epictetus" or "the Marcus Aurelius," books of comfort, were like calls for his stomach medicine), my father became calm before and during his writing moods.

He didn't write a great deal. He wrote one long story and four or five shorter stories. In the shorter pieces my father, moving far from my mother's family and the family of his uncle by marriage, re-created his own background. The people he wrote about were poor, but that wasn't the point. These stories celebrated Indian village life, and the Hindu rituals that gave grace and completeness to that life. They also celebrated elemental things, the order of the working day, the labour of the rice-fields, the lighting of the cooking fire in the half-walled gallery of a thatched hut, the preparation and eating of food. There was very little "story" in these stories. But to me they gave a beauty (which in a corner of my mind still endures, like a fantasy of home) to the Indian village life I had never known. And when we went to the country to visit my father's own relations, who were the characters in these stories, it was like a fairytale came to life.

The long story was quite different. It was comic; yet it dealt with cruelty. It was the story of an Indian village thug. He is taken out of school at fourteen in order to be married: a boy of high caste, as the protagonist is, should be married before his whiskers grow. In the alien, Presbyterian school the boy is momentarily abashed by the idea of his early marriage; at home he is proud of the manhood this marriage confers. He terrorizes and beats his wife: strong men should beat their wives. Secure in his own eyes as a brahmin and the son of a landowner, he disdains work and seeks glory. He uses his father's money and authority to establish and lead a village stick-fighting group, though he himself has no skill in that exacting and elegant martial art. None of this is done for gain; it is all done for glory, a caste idea of manhood, a wish for battle, a wish to be a leader. The quality of the ambition is high; the village setting is petty. The would-be caste chieftain ends in the alien police courts as an uneducated country criminal, speaking broken English.

I was involved in the slow making of this story from the beginning to the end. Every new bit was read out to me, every little variation; and I read every new typescript my father made as the story grew. It was the greatest imaginative experience of my childhood. I knew the story by heart, yet always loved to read it or hear it, feeling a thrill at every familiar turn, ready for all the varied emotions. Growing up within my extended family, knowing nothing else, or looking at everything else from the outside, I had no social sense, no sense of other societies; and as a result, reading (mainly English books) was difficult for me. I couldn't enter worlds that were not like mine. I could get on only with the broadest kind of story, the fairytale. The world of this story of my father's was something I knew. To the pastoral beauty of his other stories it added cruelty, and comedy that made the cruelty just bearable. It was my private epic.

With the encouragement, and possibly the help, of my mother's elder brother, my father printed the stories. That was another excitement. And then somehow, without any discussion that I remember, it seemed to be settled, in my mind as well as my father's, that I was to be a writer.

On the American base at the end of the street the flag was raised every morning and lowered every evening; the bugle sounded twice a day. The street was full of Americans, very neat in their s.h.i.+ny starched uniforms. At night the soundtrack of the open-air American cinema thundered away. The man in the yard next door slaughtered a goat in his back gallery every Sunday morning and hung the red carcase up, selling pieces. This slaughtering of the goat was a boisterous business; the man next door, to attract customers, made it appear like a celebration of the holiday. And every morning he called out to the man in the servant room in our yard: "Bogart!" Fantasy calling to fantasy on our street. And in the two rooms to which we had been reduced, our fantasy was dizzier. I was eleven; I had given no sign of talent; but I was to be a writer.

On the window frame beside his bed, where he did his writing, my father had hung a framed picture of O. Henry, cut out from the jacket of the Hodder and Stoughton uniform edition. "O. Henry, the greatest short story writer the world has ever known." All that I know of this writer to this day are the three stories my father read to me. One was "The Gift of the Magi," a story of two poor lovers who, to buy gifts for each other, make sacrifices that render the gifts useless. The second story (as I remember it) was about a tramp who decides in a dream to reform and then wakes up to find a policeman about to arrest him. The third story-about a condemned man waiting to be electrocuted-was unfinished; O. Henry died while writing it. That unfinished story made an impression on me, as did the story of O. Henry's own death. He had asked for the light to be kept on and had spoken a line from a popular song: "I don't want to go home in the dark."

Poverty, cheated hopes and death: those were the a.s.sociations of the framed picture beside my father's bed. From the earliest stories and bits of stories my father had read to me, before the upheaval of the move, I had arrived at the conviction-the conviction that is at the root of so much human anguish and pa.s.sion, and corrupts so many lives-that there was justice in the world. The wish to be a writer was a development of that. To be a writer as O. Henry was, to die in mid-sentence, was to triumph over darkness. And like a wild religious faith that hardens in adversity, this wish to be a writer, this refusal to be extinguished, this wish to seek at some future time for justice, strengthened as our conditions grew worse in the house on the street.

Our last two years in that house-our last two years in the extended family-were very bad indeed. At the end of 1946, when I was fourteen, my father managed to buy his own house. By that time my childhood was over; I was fully made.

THE WISH to be a writer didn't go with a wish or a need actually to write. It went only with the idea I had been given of the writer, a fantasy of n.o.bility. It was something that lay ahead, and outside the life I knew-far from family and clan, city, colony, to be a writer didn't go with a wish or a need actually to write. It went only with the idea I had been given of the writer, a fantasy of n.o.bility. It was something that lay ahead, and outside the life I knew-far from family and clan, city, colony, Trinidad Guardian, Trinidad Guardian, negroes. negroes.

In 1948 I won a Trinidad government scholars.h.i.+p. These scholars.h.i.+ps were meant to give a man a profession and they could last for seven years. I decided to use mine to do English at Oxford. I didn't want a degree; I wanted only to get away; and I thought that in my three or four scholars.h.i.+p years at Oxford my talent would somehow be revealed, and the books would start writing themselves.

My father had written little. I was aware now of the trouble he had finding things to write about. He had read little, was only a dipper-I never knew him to read a book through. His idea of the writer-as a person triumphant and detached-was a private composite of O. Henry, Warwick Deeping, Marie Corelli (of the Sorrows of Satan Sorrows of Satan), Charles d.i.c.kens, Somerset Maugham, and J. R. Ackerley (of Hindoo Holiday Hindoo Holiday). My own reading was not much better. My inability to understand other societies made nonsense of the Huxley and the D. H. Lawrence and the Evelyn Waugh I tried to read, and even of the Stendhal I had read at school. And I had written scarcely at all. If the O. Henry trick ending stood in the way of my father's writing, Huxley and Lawrence and Waugh made me feel I had no material. But it had been settled that I was to be a writer. That was the career I was travelling to.

I left Trinidad in 1950. It was five years later, in the BBC freelances' room, that I thought to write of the shout of "Bogart!" That shout came from a tormented time. But that was not how I remembered it. My family circ.u.mstances had been too confused; I preferred not to focus on them; in my mind they had no sequence. My narrator, recording the life of his street, was as serene as I had been when we had first moved to Port of Spain with my father.

At the end of the book my narrator left his street. I left them all and walked briskly towards the aeroplane, not looking back, looking only at my shadow before me, a dancing dwarf on the tarmac. I left them all and walked briskly towards the aeroplane, not looking back, looking only at my shadow before me, a dancing dwarf on the tarmac. That line, the last in the book, wrote itself. It held memories of the twelve years, no more, I had spent with my father. The movement of the shadows of trees and houses across the street-more dramatic to me than the amorphous shadows of Chaguanas-was one of the first things I had noticed in Port of Spain. And it was with that sudden churlishness, a sudden access of my own hysteria, that I had left my father in 1950, not looking back. I wish I had. I might have taken away, and might still possess, some picture of him on that day. He died miserably-back at the tormenting That line, the last in the book, wrote itself. It held memories of the twelve years, no more, I had spent with my father. The movement of the shadows of trees and houses across the street-more dramatic to me than the amorphous shadows of Chaguanas-was one of the first things I had noticed in Port of Spain. And it was with that sudden churlishness, a sudden access of my own hysteria, that I had left my father in 1950, not looking back. I wish I had. I might have taken away, and might still possess, some picture of him on that day. He died miserably-back at the tormenting Guardian Guardian-three years later.

To become a writer, that n.o.ble thing, I had thought it necessary to leave. Actually to write, it was necessary to go back. It was the beginning of self-knowledge.

3.

IN 1977, after twenty-seven years, I saw Bogart again. He hadn't been important in our family; he had always liked to hide; and for more than twenty years I had had no news of him. I had grown to think of him as a vanished person, one of the many I had left behind for good when I left Trinidad. after twenty-seven years, I saw Bogart again. He hadn't been important in our family; he had always liked to hide; and for more than twenty years I had had no news of him. I had grown to think of him as a vanished person, one of the many I had left behind for good when I left Trinidad.

Then I discovered that he too had left Trinidad, and not long after I had left, not long after I had done the sign for his tailoring shop in Carenage. He had gone to Venezuela. There he had been for all this time. As a child, considering his disappearances and returns, I had divined his dreams (because they were also partly mine) of sensual fulfillment in another land and another language. And then, in the story I had devised for him in one afternoon, I had cruelly made him a bigamist. He had been part of my luck as a writer. My ignorance of his true story had been part of that luck. I had been free to simplify and work fast.

I was going now, in 1977, to spend some weeks in Venezuela. And when I pa.s.sed through Trinidad I tried to get Bogart's address. That wasn't easy. He still apparently caused embarra.s.sment to his close relations. And then there was some confusion about the address itself. The first address I was given was in the oil town of Maracaibo, in the west. The second was on the former pearl island of Margarita, three or four hundred miles to the east, on the Caribbean coast. That was like the old Bogart: a man on the move. He seemed, from this second address, to be in business in Margarita, as "international traders" or an "international trading corporation" or an "import-export corporation."

Venezuela was rich, with its oil. Trinidad was now also rich, with the oil that had been discovered off-sh.o.r.e. But when I was a child Trinidad was poor, even with the American bases; and Venezuela was a place to which people like Bogart tried to go.

Many went illegally. In a fis.h.i.+ng boat it was a pa.s.sage of a few hours, no more than a drift with the strong current, across the southern mouth of the Gulf of Paria. In the mixed population of the villages in the Orinoco delta, far from authority, Trinidadians who were protected could pa.s.s. Some acquired Venezuelan birth certificates; so it happened that men whose grandfathers had come from India sank into the personalities, randomly issued by the migration brokers, of Spanish mulattoes named Morales or Garcia or Ybarra.

These men didn't go only for the money. They went for the adventure. Venezuela was the Spanish language, South America: a continent. Trinidad was small, an island, a British colony. The maps in our geography books, concentrating on British islands in the Caribbean, seemed to stress our smallness and isolation. In the map of Trinidad, the map which I grew to carry in my head, Venezuela was an unexplained little peninsula in the top left-hand corner.