A Way in the World (13 page)

“There was a little gathering of Butler people one evening. Nothing to do with the strike this time. The opposite, in fact: this was to give people a chance to be together and drink a little rum and forget the trouble they were in.

“We were in a small Trinidad wood house in the country somewhere. Black old wood, corrugated iron, gaps in the plank floors. Oil lamps. In spite of everything, the atmosphere was good. I made notes. Then I simply enjoyed myself. I had got to like the local rum. It was light and nice. And then—it was as if time had jumped—I became aware that the half-white people and the brown people and the one or two Indians had gone away, and that everybody in the little room was black, except for me.

“Why did I feel that? Simple: they made me feel it. I knew a lot of those people very well. They knew where I stood, and once or twice in difficult situations with English officials I had been able to help them. But now the people around me were making racial jokes about me and they weren’t letting go of those jokes. This went on and on. They were like schoolboys. They were ganging up on me. I began to find it hard to keep on smiling. The room was full of big criss-crossing shadows from the oil lamps. The thought came to me that one of those black men might reach out and touch me in this new aggressive way, and then anything might happen. I might be the white Charlie King.

“One of the men was called Lebrun. He was a Trinidadian, but he had grown up in Panama. His family had gone there to work on the Canal, just as the Grenadians had come to Trinidad to work on the oilfields. Lebrun was a communist of a kind you got in the thirties. I actually thought he was the most dangerous man around Butler. He was a fluent Spanish speaker and his business was to travel round Central America and the West Indies and West Africa and talk révolution.
He knew how to talk to local people, and at the same time he was able to pitch everything he did and said at some very special people in Moscow or wherever who were his patrons. He was actually a very handsome man, very educated and polished.

“In this dark little house now Lebrun began to taunt me sexually. I wasn’t ready for that at all. I was white: women came easily to me: that was what he was banging away at. Can you imagine?”

After more than twenty years, the comment of Lebrun’s—the taunting, as Foster Morris saw it—still rankled, and when I looked at Foster Morris’s dim eyes, cobwebbed by the thin strands of dry hair falling over his forehead, the rather flat, wrinkled, pasty face, his air of withdrawal, I thought I could still see the emotional incompleteness that Lebrun had tried to play on.

“The taunting got worse and worse. I thought I would have to leave. Lebrun began to say that black men lived with sexual deprivation. That was a pretty original thing for a black man to say in 1937, though it was strange to hear it from Lebrun. He was very good-looking and I’m sure he did very well that way. A strange idea came to me, with the rum and the surprise and with all those men so close to me: it was that Lebrun was really a white man, imprisoned in this other body. As soon as I thought that, I found words for it. Almost as soon as I began to speak the words, I thought I was making a big mistake. The words would have been good in the Oxford Union ten years before, but they were going to be terrible here. I said, ‘I’m sorry, Lebrun. I can’t kiss you and make you a prince.’

“To my surprise, everybody laughed. It was a joke with a delayed charge, you might say, because the key word was missing. Some people caught on later than the others, and the laughter went on. The taunting stopped, people pulled away. I could breathe again, and it was all right. It was as
though nothing had happened, and we were as we had always been. But I knew that something had happened. I knew I had been close to something nasty. And I knew that Lebrun would never forgive me.

“That was something else you couldn’t write about. It may be that there are some things you can’t write about. I tried later to make a story of that episode. Once I set it in pre-war Berlin. It became too Isherwood. Then I set it in France, and Lehmann published it during the war. But the transposition was difficult. I was never happy with it. The thirties were a difficult time for a writer, and one of the big problems about going to a place like Trinidad was that black people were simply not a subject. No one was interested in the subtleties. I don’t think Graham managed it in his Liberian book—he didn’t know whether he was Somerset Maugham or Sanders of the River. Perhaps it’s easier now. Perhaps it will be easier in twenty years. I don’t know.

“In Port of Spain, when they were talking down south about shooting niggers, there was a Potogee trade-union feller who had a moustache and smoked a pipe and tried to look like Stalin. You could do that in farce. But then you can’t recover and do something serious. You just become sentimental. Like Evelyn. In
The Shadowed Livery
I had to tone it down. I had to make the Stalin man more serious.”

I HAD GONE
to the lunch out of a sense of duty, out of a sentimental regard for the man who had appeared at such a bad moment in my life and set me right. I had expected a stiffish occasion with a much older man. But he had made it reasonably enjoyable. I was overwhelmed by his fluency and knowledge, the subtlety of some of the things he had said; and, unexpectedly, by the beauty and measure of his old-fashioned voice.

But when I “played the newsreel back”—a metaphor I
used in those days for the memory drill I instinctively practised (and had done since childhood) after every meeting: trying to remember words, gestures and expressions in correct sequence, to arrive at an understanding of the people I had been with and the true meaning of what had been said—when I played the newsreel back a few times, I began to feel that he had not spoken as spontaneously as I had thought.

He had come prepared to defend the incompleteness (or the simplicity) of his Trinidad book, which at our first meeting he had appeared—so grandly, in my eyes—to dismiss. Perhaps that also contained a defence of his other work in the thirties and forties, which I didn’t know about.

Later, still playing back the newsreel, I saw that, almost as an aspect of this defence of the things he had chosen not to do, there was with Foster Morris a final disapproval even of those writers—like Graham Greene—whom he appeared to admire.

And then—how could I have missed it at the time?—I saw that though in his letter he had said that he had loved my book, and though no one could have been more courteous as a host, there had run right through our lunch a constant indirect criticism of what I had written.

The book itself he had mentioned only as we were leaving the club. He said, “You have written a very funny book. What I like about it is that I can look through its surface and see some of the things I saw all those years ago. You know, the way you can train yourself to see through the surface of a trout stream, the sky, the clouds, the reflections.”

A writer’s simile: perhaps he had prepared it, perhaps he had used it before. It struck a false note. But at the moment I thought it was his way of taking up something I had written in my letter. It was only some days later that I saw that, when it was added to the other things he had said, about farce and sentimentality, and the need to be serious about what was
serious and wretched in the world, he was really putting me in my place.

AND I DIDN’T
actually mind. After four years I had come to the end of the way of writing I had arrived at as a result of the letter from Foster Morris: the language discipline (increasingly a constriction), the comedy. Together they had given me confidence; but they had also given me a writing character I had begun to grow out of. With confidence I had begun to see that the comedy that had become my writing tone, the ability to make two or three jokes to the page, the jokeyness that was my double inheritance from my Trinidad background, however good, however illuminating, was also a way of making peace with a hard world; was on the other side of hysteria. This was true of the colonial society I was writing about; it was also true of my own position in London, which was full of uncertainty.

Unwilled, this anxiety or hysteria, the deeper root of comedy, had become my subject. Both my language and writing personality had changed as a result. This had happened in the actual writing of a book I had been working on for about a year (the time of six-week books had gone) when I went to have lunch with Foster Morris.

I was absolutely secure in this new book, and for the first time, since I had begun truly to write, felt the need for no one’s approval. I was weeks away from the end of the first draft, and was full of what I was carrying. I often wanted to say, as Foster Morris was talking (as I thought) about the problems of tone and tact in writing, “Yes, yes, I know exactly what you mean.” Once or twice I nearly told him about the new book I was close to finishing—so different from the street book I had sent him, and much closer to the kind of book of which he seemed to approve. I was held back only by the superstition that came to me just then that
to talk about unfinished work was to run the risk of never finishing it.

It was a good instinct. A little over two years later—after the book had been revised and handed in, and I had travelled abroad, and was deep in a new work about those travels—I sent him an early copy of the book I had been full of at our lunch. I reminded him in a letter of what he had said about farce and sentimentality and seriousness. And just as I had made an offering to him of the street book, so now I made an offering to him of this larger work.

His reply was swift. It began: “I have looked at your new book. You have passed a stool. It is far prettier than Alan Sillitoe’s and those of recent young eminences …”

I stopped reading, though his letter, typewritten, was long, as long as the one he had written six years before. I stopped reading, unwilling to allow any further word to fix itself on my consciousness, just as I might have stopped reading a poison-pen letter, one of those that came in small brown envelopes and were written on lined paper in a narrow’ cramped hand.

I felt a fool to have sent the book to him. That was all. I felt no disappointment, no doubt, no rage; only something like relief, relief that I could set this disciple-guru relationship aside.

But his letter had to be acknowledged. I wrote to his suburban address, saying that I was sorry he felt as he did, but that the book was still new enough for him to sell to Gaston. Gaston was a bookseller in Chancery Lane. He dealt mainly with libraries, and was a kind of patron of book reviewers. The basis of this reputation in the late fifties was that from known reviewers he bought any new book, regardless of its subject, publisher or saleability, for half the published price.

It seemed a light enough reply, what I wrote about Gaston, but Foster Morris didn’t like it. Like Lebrun in Trinidad
in 1937, I had touched a nerve. He wrote to say that he was getting by; he didn’t need Gaston. That, I thought, was the end of it. But two weeks later he wrote again. He had bought a ticket for a big dinner of some literary association. Now he found he couldn’t go, and he didn’t like the idea of wasting the ticket. Would I like it? If I did, I should telephone him at a particular number at a certain time.

I telephoned. I said I would like to go to the dinner. I did so to let him know that I was indifferent to his abuse. On the telephone we talked only of the literary group. He said, in his beautiful, old-fashioned voice, that it was going to be very dull, full of suburban lion-hunters, but it might amuse me. It was as though his letter had been an aberration; that we were as we had been at the lunch. Then right at the end, before he put the phone down, he said, “I don’t like the idea of you being out of pocket.”

The dinner card came, creased, smudged, as though it had been for some time in the fluff of a jacket pocket.

Three or four days before the dinner I recognized the hand of Foster Morris in an anonymous review of my book. He had gone out of his way to make signals to me, to show his own knowledge of the background, his own attitude to the background. The review was full of abuse of the people I wrote about. To attempt comedy or profundity or universality about such people was absurd, the reviewer said; they were people of the estate barracks, living off the smell of an oil rag, sunk in superstition, without an intellectual life, without nobility or potential. This was the abuse of colonial days, the opposite of the attitude (and originality) of
The Shadowed Livery.
It took me back to the bad moment in the BBC lobby when he had asked me about the white-nigger man.

I treated this review as I had treated his earlier letter. I didn’t read it to the end. But I went to the dinner. I went because I had said I would go; also, a little, for the experience.
But I went mainly because I didn’t want him to think I was cast down by what he said about my book.

So I went with his card and sat in the place marked with his name. The occasion was as dull as he had said it would be. I sat next to a middle-aged woman who was there because she had written a textbook of some sort. She was disappointed in me, too. This woman was obsessed with her family; that was where her mind and heart were, rather than at the dinner. We didn’t make much connected conversation. When I stood up to go I saw that I had sat all evening with my trouser zip undone.

That was how my brush with Foster Morris ended. Then I realized that I hadn’t needed to go to the dinner at all.

AN ANTHOLOGY
(aimed at schools and universities) of contemporary criticism of the great nineteenth-century European novels, a Patrick Hamilton-like novel about Gerard’s Cross that didn’t get into paperback and sank, a scattering of small reviews—this was all that I noted about Foster Morris over the next five or six years. He was in his sixties now; there were fewer reminders of him. He became part of the past for me.

At the end of 1967 I went to Antibes to interview Graham Greene for a London paper. The meetings with the writer were spread over two days. At one stage Greene talked of writers he had followed but who had then stopped writing or faded away. There were three such writers. Two were young; I had reviewed their work; they had tried to write Graham Greene novels.