Life Class: The Selected Memoirs Of Diana Athill (64 page)

I suppose it was his New York agent who sent me a copy of
The
Foot
, his last novel, which has never been published. There was wonderful stuff in it, particularly about his childhood and losing his hair – when the wig was first put on his head, he wrote, it was as though his skull had been split with an axe … But much of the book had gone over the edge into the time of the voices. After reading
The Foot
I saw why
The Exquisite Corpse
is so extraordinarily vivid: more than anyone had realized at the time, its strange events had been as real to Alfred ‘as a bus going down the street’. He was already entering the dislocated reality of madness, but was still able to keep his hold on style: instead of leaving the reader, flustered, on the edge of that reality, he could carry us into it. When he came to write
The Foot
his style had started to slither out of his grasp. By that time the sickness which found such nourishment in the ‘liberation and gentleness’ of Morocco, with its abundance of delicious kif, had won.

Without knowing it, Alfred left me a delightful legacy: his oldest and truest friend, the poet Edward Field. Some years ago Edward’s tireless campaign to revive Alfred’s reputation in the United States caused him to get in touch with me, and almost instantly he and his friend, the novelist Neil Derrick, took their place among my most treasured friends. It is Edward who told me about Alfred’s last, sad years.

Back in Morocco, his behaviour became so eccentric that he lost all his friends and alarmed the authorities. He was thrown out, and moved with his dogs – new ones, not Columbine and Skoura – to Israel, where he survived by becoming almost a hermit, still tormented by the voices and trying frantically to drown them with drink and drugs. I was shown by Edward what was probably the last thing he ever wrote: a piece intended to be published in a periodical as ‘A Letter from Israel’. It was heartbreaking. Gone was the sparkle, gone the vitality, humour and imagination. All it contained was baffled misery at his own loneliness and hopelessness. The madness, having won, had turned his writing – a bitter paradox – far more
ordinary
than it had ever been before. The world he was describing was no longer magical (magical in horror as well as in beauty), but was drab, cruel, boring – ‘mad’ only in that the mundane and tedious persecutions to which he constantly believed himself subject were, to other people, obviously of his own making. When he died – probably from heart failure brought on by drugs and alcohol – he was alone in a rented house which he hated. It is true that his death cannot be regretted, but feeling like that about the death of dear, amazing Alfred is horribly sad. However, other people are now joining Edward in keeping his writing alive in the United States: it is still a small movement, but it is a real one. May it thrive!

G
OOD PUBLISHERS ARE
supposed to ‘discover’ writers, and perhaps they do. To me, however, they just happened to come. V. S. Naipaul came through Andrew Salkey who was working with him at the BBC, and Andrew I met through Mordecai Richler when he took me for a drink in a Soho club. When Andrew heard that I was Mordecai’s editor he asked me if he could send me a young friend of his who had just written something very good, and a few days later Vidia came to a coffee bar near our office and handed me
Miguel Street
.

I was delighted by it, but worried: it was stories (though linked stories), and a publishing dogma to which André Deutsch strongly adhered was that stories didn’t sell unless they were by Names. So before talking to him about it I gave it to Francis Wyndham who was with us as part-time ‘Literary Adviser’, and Francis loved it at once and warmly. This probably tipped the balance with André, whose instinct was to distrust as ‘do-gooding’ my enthusiasm for a little book by a West Indian about a place which interested no one and where the people spoke an unfamiliar dialect. I think he welcomed its being stories because it gave him a reason for saying ‘no’: but Francis’s opinion joined to mine made him bid me find out if the author had a novel on the stocks and tell him that if he had, then that should come first and the stories could follow all in good time. Luckily Vidia was in the process of writing
The Mystic
Masseur
.

In fact we could well have launched him with
Miguel Street
, which has outlasted his first two novels in critical esteem, because in the fifties it was easier to get reviews for a writer seen by the British as black than it was for a young white writer, and reviews influenced readers a good deal more then than they do now. Publishers and reviewers were aware that new voices were speaking up in the newly independent colonies, and partly out of genuine interest, partly out of an optimistic if ill-advised sense that a vast market for books lay out there, ripe for development, they felt it to be the thing to encourage those voices. This trend did not last long, but it served to establish a number of good writers.

Vidia did not yet have the confidence to walk away from our shilly-shallying, and fortunately it did him no real harm. Neither he nor we made any money to speak of from his first three books,
The
Mystic Masseur, The Suffrage of Elvira
and
Miguel Street
, but there was never any doubt about the making of his name, which began at once with the reviews and was given substance by his own work as a reviewer, of which he got plenty as soon as he became known as a novelist. He was a very good reviewer, clearly as widely read as any literary critic of the day, and it was this rather than his first books which revealed that here was a writer who was going to reject the adjective ‘regional’, and with good reason.

We began to meet fairly often, and I enjoyed his company because he talked well about writing and people, and was often funny. At quite an early meeting he said gravely that when he was up at Oxford – which he had not liked – he once did a thing so terrible that he would never be able to tell anyone what it was. I said it was unforgivable to reveal that much without revealing more, especially to someone like me who didn’t consider even murder literally unspeakable, but I couldn’t shift him and never learnt what the horror was – though someone told me later that when he was at Oxford Vidia did have some kind of nervous breakdown. It distressed me that he had been unhappy at a place which I loved. Having such a feeling for scholarship, high standards and tradition he ought to have liked it … but no, he would not budge. Never for a minute did it occur to me that he might have felt at a loss when he got to Oxford because of how different it was from his background, still less because of any form of racial insult: he appeared to me far too impressive a person to be subject to such discomforts.

The image Vidia was projecting at that time, in his need to protect his pride, was so convincing that even when I read
A House
for Mr Biswas
four years later, and was struck by the authority of his account of Mr Biswas’s nervous collapse, I failed to connect its painful vividness with his own reported ‘nervous breakdown’. Between me and the truth of his Oxford experience stood the man he wanted people to see.

At that stage I did not know how or why he had rejected Trinidad, and if I had known it, would still have been unable to understand what it is like to be unable to accept the country in which you were born. Vidia’s books (not least
A Way in the World
, not written until thirty-seven years later) were to do much to educate me; but then I had no conception of how someone who feels he doesn’t belong to his ‘home’ and cannot belong anywhere else is forced to exist only in himself; nor of how exhausting and precarious such a condition (blithely seen by the young and ignorant as desirable) can be. Vidia’s self – his very being – was his writing: a great gift, but all he had. He was to report that ten years later in his career, when he had earned what seemed to others an obvious security, he was still tormented by anxiety about finding the matter for his next book, and for the one after that … an anxiety not merely about earning his living, but about
existing as the person he
wanted to be
. No wonder that while he was still finding his way into his writing he was in danger; and how extraordinary that he could nevertheless strike an outsider as a solidly impressive man
*
.

This does not mean that I failed to see the obvious delicacy of his nervous system. Because of it I was often worried by his lack of  money, and was appalled on his behalf when I once saw him risk losing a commission by defying the
Times Literary Supplement
. They had offered their usual fee of
£
25 (or was it guineas?) for a review, and he had replied haughtily that he wrote nothing for less than fifty. ‘Oh silly Vidia,’ I thought, ‘now they’ll never offer him anything again.’ But lo! they paid him his fifty and I was filled with admiration. Of course he was right: authors ought to know their own value and refuse the insult of derisory fees.

I was right to admire that self-respect, at that time, but it was going to develop into a quality difficult to like. In all moral qualities the line between the desirable and the deplorable is imprecise – between tolerance and lack of discrimination, prudence and cowardice, generosity and extravagance – so it is not easy to see where a man’s proper sense of his own worth turns into a more or less pompous self-importance. In retrospect it seems to me that it took eight or nine years for this process to begin to show itself in Vidia, and I think it possible that his audience was at least partly to blame for it.

For example, after a year or so of meetings in the pubs or restaurants where I usually lunched, I began to notice that Vidia was sometimes miffed at being taken to a cheap restaurant or being offered a cheap bottle of wine – and the only consequence of my seeing this (apart from my secretly finding it funny) was that I became careful to let him choose both restaurant and wine. And this carefulness not to offend him, which was, I think, shared by all, or almost all, his English friends, came from an assumption that the reason why he was so anxious to command respect was fear that it was, or might be, denied him because of his race; which led to a squeamish dismay in oneself at the idea of being seen as racist. The shape of an attitude which someone detests, and has worked at extirpating, can often be discerned from its absence, and during the first years of Vidia’s career in England he was often coddled for precisely the reason the coddler was determined to disregard.

Later, of course, the situation changed. His friends became too used to him to see him as anything but himself, and those who didn’t know him saw him simply as a famous writer – on top of which he could frighten people. Then it was the weight and edge of his personality which made people defer to him, rather than consideration for his sensitivity. Which makes it easy to underestimate the pain and strain endured by that sensitivity when he had first pulled himself up out of the thin, sour soil in which he was reared, and was striving to find a purchase in England where, however warmly he was welcomed, he could never feel that he wholly belonged.

During the sixties I visited the newly independent islands of Trinidad & Tobago twice, with intense pleasure: the loveliness of tropical forests and seas, the jolt of excitement which comes from
difference
, the kindness of people, the amazing beauty of Carnival (unlike Vidia, I like steel bands: oh the sound of them coming in from the fringes of Port of Spain through the four-o’clock-in-the-morning darkness of the opening day!). On my last morning in Port of Spain I felt a sharp pang as I listened to the keskidee (a bird which really does seem to say ‘
Qu’est-
ce qu’il dit?
’) and knew how unlikely it was that I should ever hear it again. But at no time was it difficult to remember that mine was a visitor’s Trinidad & Tobago; so three other memories, one from high on the country’s social scale, the others from lower although by no means from the bottom, are just as clear as the ones I love.

One
. Vidia’s history of the country,
The Loss of El Dorado
, which is rarely mentioned nowadays but which I think is the best of his non-fiction books, had just come out. Everyone I had met, including the Prime Minister Eric Williams and the poet Derek Walcott, had talked about it in a disparaging way and had betrayed as they did so that they had not read it. At last, at a party given by the leader of the opposition, I met someone who had: an elderly Englishman just retiring from running the Coast Guard. We were both delighted to be able to share our pleasure in it and had a long talk about it. As we parted I asked him: ‘Can you really be the only person in this country who has read it?’ and he answered sadly: ‘Oh, easily.’

Two
. In Tobago I stayed in a delightful little hotel where on most evenings the village elders dropped in for a drink. On one of them a younger man – a customs officer in his mid-thirties seconded to Tobago’s chief town Scarborough, from Port of Spain – invited me to go out on the town with him. We were joined by another customs officer and a nurse from the hospital. First we went up to Scarborough’s fort – its Historic Sight – to look at the view. Then, when conversation fizzled out, it was suggested that we should have a drink at the Arts Centre. It looked in the darkness little more than a shed, and it was shut, but a man was hunted up who produced the key, some Coca-Cola and half a bottle of rum… and there we stood, under a forty-watt lamp in a room of utter dinginess which contained nothing at all but a dusty ping-pong table with a very old copy of the
Reader’s Digest
lying in the middle of it. We sipped our drinks in an atmosphere of embarrassment – almost shame – so heavy that it silenced us. After a few minutes we gave up and went to my host’s barely furnished but tidy little flat – I remember it as cold, which it can’t have been – where we listened to a record of ‘Yellow Bird’ and drank another rum. Then I was driven back to the hotel. The evening’s emptiness – the really frightening feeling of nothing to do, nothing to say – had made me feel quite ill. I knew too little about the people I had been with to guess what they were like when at ease: all I could discern was that my host was bored to distraction at having to work in the sticks; that he had been driven by his boredom to make his sociable gesture and had then become nervous to the extent of summoning friends to his aid; and that all three had quickly seen that the whole thing was a mistake and had been overtaken by embarrassed gloom. And no wonder. When I remember the Arts Centre I see why, when Vidia first revisited the West Indies, what he felt was fear.