A Way in the World (14 page)

The third writer was Foster Morris. Just after the war he had published a novel that Greene thought was much better than his own
England Made Me,
published a few years before the war. The Foster Morris book was there on the shelves in Greene’s flat, part of his great collection.

He took the book down and read without talking for a minute or two, with the expression of a man who was finding that memory had played him false. He said, as though addressing Foster Morris rather than me, “You see, you see.” And he read out a sentence from the Morris book: “The Easter drizzle persisted like remorse.”

“Actually,” he said later, “he was a prodigy. At Oxford we thought him among the best. He was at Oxford when he was writing
Seedtime.”

The famous book was on the shelves. Greene took it down and showed it to me. Its yellow cloth binding had faded now to a very pale primrose.

“The title seems tame now, but I loved it. It was full of meaning, full of ironies. It was from the Wordsworth line in
The Prelude,
‘Fair seed-time had my soul.’

“It was a running-away book. I cannot tell you how original and good it felt to us at the time. Foster ran away from his school for almost a whole term when he was sixteen. He used all his school money and survived quite well. He ran away as a protest against the school and his family. His family ran a small engineering firm in the Midlands.
Seedtime
was about that running away, the people he met, the poverty he saw, his sexual awakening.

“Foster made the notes during the two months, but he didn’t write the book until he was at Oxford. He was an adult when he wrote, but still very young, and I suppose that gave the book some of its quality. It was precocious and knowing, and technically quite skilled, yet you have to say that it was also innocent. It was full of echoes that Foster didn’t know about. It felt very original, but of course running away is one of the great themes of literature. Huckleberry Finn, David Copperfield running away to Betsey Trotwood, Smike running away from Squeers, De Quincey. Foster said the only name that came to him, half-way through, was W. H. Davies, the super-tramp man. In some ways his book anticipated Orwell and that American book,
Catcher in the Rye.

“It sold eight thousand copies, a prodigious number in those days. It was famous for ten years—Connolly’s limit, you know. They keep on trying to revive it, but it doesn’t work now. The sexual awakening bit is silly, and the protest parts are very old-fashioned, a little bit like
The Way of All Flesh.
That’s the trouble with precocious things. They really belong to the earlier generation.

“You might say Foster never recovered from that success. He floundered. If he hadn’t had that family firm to fall back on, he might have had to take a job, like the rest of us. But he had that little income. It wasn’t a great deal, but it was there. So he kept on at the writing. He was always looking for another piece of luck, that happy landing on a subject. He tried his hand at many other things. He did the Forster personal relationships, though no one knows what that means; he did the Marxist thing; he tried to do the Catholic thing. He tried to do the Auden and Isherwood travel book, but I always thought that Trinidad book was a lazy piece of work. Then he wrote that novel after the war, and I thought he had found his feet. I was wrong.”

HE WAS
precocious, as Greene had said. A precocious writer doesn’t have much experience to work on; his talent isn’t challenged. The quickness of such a writer lies in assuming the manner and sensibility of his elders. Foster Morris’s runaway adolescent experience and his “rebellious” style as an undergraduate had disguised his essential mimicry, and later made it hard for him to find himself. The contemporaries who admired him soon began to outpace him. For the rest of his writing life he was a man always saying goodbye to people. It couldn’t have been easy for him.

It was strange that a man so much in search of his own voice should have been the one to help me find mine. But perhaps it wasn’t strange. He would have seen at once, when he looked at my manuscript, where my difficulty lay, how I
had chopped and changed between various modes. In that first, long letter he would have been like a man half talking to himself.

More than twenty years after that strange literary dinner, when he was very old, he appeared to make some amends. A book of mine had been published when I was out of England, travelling. When I came back some months later I found that the publisher was using a favourable quotation from a Foster Morris review.

It left me cold. I never thought to look for the review itself; and it is only now that I wonder whether I shouldn’t have taken notice of the old man’s gesture. I think, though, that my instinct was correct. To meet Foster Morris again would have been to repeat the lunch I had had with him, to expose myself to his courtesy and beautiful old-fashioned voice (not unlike Greene’s), and to find, below that, even in old age, I am sure, the intellectual uncertainty of the unfulfilled writer, with his disapproval of all the people he had said goodbye to.

IN THE
late thirties (when my memories of them begin) the cruise ships, from Europe and the United States (and the United States cruise ships continued for some time after the war), would dock in Port of Spain in the morning. My father, or some other journalist from the
Trinidad Guardian
, would go aboard with a photographer to do something about the more famous passengers. Sometimes they could be very famous: Lily Pons, Oliver Hardy, Annabella, the wife of Tyrone Power. The photographs and the stories would come out in the next day’s paper. By that time the ship would have left, so the visit of these great people from the great world would have been like something one had missed, a blessing in the night.

I never thought then that we were at a great turn in
history, and that one day I would be able to look from the other side, as it were, at these visits. I never thought I would be able one day to understand what Foster Morris had come out of, and to follow him in all his uncertainties as a writer out to Trinidad.

His book was incomplete but not bad. In its direct presentation of subject people as whole, belonging to themselves, it was even original, and it can be fitted into the great chain of changing outside vision of that part of the world. That chain might begin in 1564 with John Hawkins’s precise and fresh accounts of aboriginal life (down to the taste of the potato: somewhere between a parsnip and a carrot); might go on to Sir Walter Raleigh in 1595 miraculously rescuing, and naming, the tortured and half-dead Amerindian chiefs of Cumucurapo who had been dispossessed by the Spaniards; might then lead through the high spirits and cruelties of the early nineteenth-century naval novels of Captain Marryat; to the Victorians, Trollope, Kingsley, Froude.
The Shadowed Livery
has a definite place between the decadent imperial cruise books and the books of post-colonial writers like James Pope-Hennessy and Patrick Leigh Fermor. Over four centuries the vision constantly changes; it is a fair record of one side of a civilization.

AT OUR
lunch in his South Kensington club in 1959 Foster Morris had spoken of Lebrun, the Trinidadian-Panamanian communist of the 1930s, as one of the most dangerous men around Butler, the oil strike leader.

That was news to me. Lebrun wasn’t one of the names I had heard about. But then I didn’t know much about the strike. I was five when it happened; it was some years before I could begin to understand about it.

Leb run’s name I got to know only in 1947, when I was in the sixth form at Queen’s Royal College, a full ten years after the strike. And then it was a name connected with a book he had written. A name—like Owen Rutter and Foster Morris—with a local connection, and with the glamour of print.

This book of Lebrun’s was on a bottom shelf of our sixth-form library: two or three rows of glass-cased shelves above a cupboard. The shelves to the left held the school’s small lending stock: popular books (Sabatini, Sapper, John Buchan, the William books) expensively re-bound and gilt-stamped (in England, we were told: that was where the dies were)
with the college arms and motto: unyielding, shiny leather spines providing an elegant front for cheap paper furred and worn with handling, with the print itself a quarter rubbed off.

Lebrun’s book was on a shelf next to that, below textbooks and dictionaries. The purple-brown binding had grown so dark that the name on the spine was almost illegible.

The book was about Spanish-American revolutionaries before Bolívar. I never read it, and knew no one who had. Thirty years later people were to write about it in radical journals as one of the first books of the Caribbean revolution; but people doing research in university libraries, where everything is accessible, sometimes see progressions that didn’t exist at the time. There would have been very few copies of Lebrun’s book in Trinidad. There were none in the shops or the Central Library. The only copy I knew about was on the library shelf at school, and it was just there, unread, hardly known, its dark spine illegible.

Still, it was a book, published in London. It gave an aura to the man. It suggested a life of unusual texture. I asked a boy a year ahead of me—he had won a scholarship and was going to Cambridge—about Lebrun.

He said, “Oh, he’s a revolutionary. He’s on the run somewhere in the United States.”

That was dramatic, the exotic black man, Trinidadian-Panamanian, on the run. But I didn’t believe it. I could understand, from the films, how a John Garfield character could be on the run. But I didn’t understand it about Lebrun. I suppose—I was fifteen—I didn’t believe in his character as a revolutionary; didn’t believe such a character was possible for a black man from Trinidad and Panama; and didn’t see how such a man could be thought dangerous enough to be hunted down.

Eight years later I saw him for the first time. He was among the speakers on the bandstand in Woodford Square,
outside the Red House, part of the new politics that had come to the island while I had been in England. Almost twenty years had passed since the Butler strike, and Lebrun was now in his fifties, slender, fine-featured. Words poured fluently out of him. He spoke in complete sentences.

The working people of the West Indies, he said, had been engaged for centuries in the mass production of sugar. This meant that they were among the earliest industrial workers in the world: the fact of slavery shouldn’t be allowed to conceal this truth. So the people of the West Indies were readier than most for revolution. He had waited for twenty-five years for this moment. He had never lost hope that the moment would come, that the people could be marshalled for political action.

He talked—I heard him more than once during the few weeks I spent in Trinidad at that time—as though the whole movement was an expression of his will and his ideas, as though he had brought it into being.

Yet he was not one of the people trying to get into the new politics. He had no local base. He was not one of the men to whom power came. After the elections he disappeared, as he had disappeared after the Butler oilfield strike.

That was all that I knew of Lebrun when Foster Morris talked of him three years later. For both of us he was a man from the past. What we didn’t know was that Lebrun—the sexual taunter in the oil-lamp shadows of the little Trinidad country house in 1937, as yet unknown as writer or agitator, the man to whom Foster Morris as a London writer might have shown patronage—was going to be another person to whom Foster Morris was going to say goodbye.

In extreme old age Lebrun fetched up in England, and in a world greatly changed, where black men were an important subject, he was “discovered” as one of the prophets of black revolution, a man whose name didn’t appear in the history books, but who for years had worked patiently, had been
behind the liberation movements of Africa and the Caribbean. So a kind of fulfilment came to him. It was very much the idea of himself he had had, and had promoted, for much of his life. It had anchored him, had been a kind of livelihood, that idea. But it had also got him into trouble, with the very people whose cause he thought he served.

ONCE HE
was declared to be an undesirable immigrant by the chief minister of one of the smaller West Indian islands. In the long run this didn’t do Lebrun’s reputation any harm, but at the time—this was at the start of decolonization, and this chief minister was one of the lesser men of the region—it was a humiliation: the old black revolutionary barred from the revolution he claimed as his own.

Not long after, I went to this island. I sent in my name to the chief minister’s office—as a courtesy, and an insurance against trouble. To my surprise, the chief minister asked me to have lunch with him at Government House. He wanted to talk about Lebrun.

He said, “Let him come here and try to walk the streets.”

Street-corner talk in Government House. Lebrun wasn’t at all a street-corner man, but as a revolutionary—even in the Butler days—he had always thought that the strength and roughness of the crowd were things he might call on. Now they were being used against him.

The new politics had thrown up people like the chief minister in almost every territory. Most had started as trade-union organizers; and many of them, like Butler in Trinidad, had a religious side.

This man now lived in Government House. It was a modest house, but it was the best in the small island. The uniformed sentry, the local abstract paintings, the heavy locally made furniture—it was all there, the inherited pomp, as in other territories. But the chief minister was already bored.
He had already got to the limit of what he could do with power. Power had already begun to press him down into himself, and he now lived very simply, as though it was a needless strain to do otherwise. He didn’t make many speeches now. He seldom went out.

The person closest to him was a middle-aged black woman called Miss Dith, a woman of the people, someone you wouldn’t notice on the street. She was said to be his spiritual adviser, his housekeeper, his cook, his protection against poison.