And a similar feeling of being let down by what should have been mine by right came when I found and went into a bookshop. Great cities possessed bookshops-just as they had cinemas which showed French films. Colonial towns or settlements like my own didn"t have bookshops. In the old colonial main square in Port of Spain-antique roofs and awnings of corrugated iron, once painted red or in alternate stripes of white and red; old carpentry, fretted gables with finials, decorative Victorian ironwork; architecture that spoke to me of our remoteness from the ports where that timber and decorative ironwork and corrugated iron were shipped-in the old colonial square there were emporia that sold schoolbooks and perhaps children"s books and coloring books, and had perhaps as well a short shelf or two of Penguin books, a few copies of a few t.i.tles, and a few of the Collins Cla.s.sics (looking like Bibles): emporia as dull as the emporia of those days could be, suggesting warehouses for a colonial population, where absolutely necessary goods (with a few specialist lines, like mosquito nets and the Collins Cla.s.sics) were imported and stored in as unattractive and practical a way as possible.
And here, in the city of New York, was a bookshop. A place I should have entered as though I had journeyed to enter it. I loved books, I was a reader-it was my reputation at home. But the books I knew or knew about were few. There were the books in my father"s bookcase: cla.s.sics from the Everyman series, religious books, books about Hinduism and India. These last were bought from a trader in Indian goods in a petty commercial street in Port of Spain, and bought, most of them, as a gesture of Indian nationalism; few of them were read by my father, and none by me. There were the books I had studied at school; there were the books I saw in the Central Library. Really, though, I knew only the cla.s.sical or established names, the French, Spanish, and English books I had studied at school, and the very famous names my father had introduced me to.
To enter this New York bookshop was to find myself among unhallowed names. I was traveling to be a writer, but this world of modern writing and publishing I had walked into was not something I was in touch with. And among all these unfamiliar, unhallowed names, I looked for the familiar, the cla.s.sics, the uniform series, the very things I had looked at (with a feeling of deprivation and being far away) in the dark colonial emporia of Port of Spain, among the reams of paper and the stacks of exercise books, next to wholesalers of various kinds of imported goods (cloth and coal pots), all in a warm smell of spices and damp raw sugar and various cooking oils from the wholesale grocers of South Quay, where there were donkey carts and horse carts and pushcarts among the motor trucks.
This was an American shop, not one with English stock, the stock I was more familiar with. I settled then for the Modern Library series, and bought South Wind South Wind. This had been recommended to me by an English teacher who knew of my writing ambitions. I had despaired of finding this book in the emporia of Trinidad. Here, part of the great wealth of New York, was the book, immediately available. I paid one twenty-eight, and the a.s.sistant, who must have been eight or ten years older than me, called me sir.
South Wind! But it remained unread. My first attempt to read it was like all the attempts I made later: it showed me that-like the books of Aldous Huxley and D. H. Lawrence and certain other contemporary writers whose names had come to me through my father or through teachers at school-this book, with a young man called Denis and a bishop, and an island called Nepenthe, was alien, far from anything in my experience, and beyond my comprehension. But the alienness of a book, though it might keep me from reading it (I never read beyond the first chapter of But it remained unread. My first attempt to read it was like all the attempts I made later: it showed me that-like the books of Aldous Huxley and D. H. Lawrence and certain other contemporary writers whose names had come to me through my father or through teachers at school-this book, with a young man called Denis and a bishop, and an island called Nepenthe, was alien, far from anything in my experience, and beyond my comprehension. But the alienness of a book, though it might keep me from reading it (I never read beyond the first chapter of South Wind South Wind), did not prevent me from admiring it. The very alienness, the inaccessibility, was like a promise of romance-a reward, some way in the future, for making myself a writer.
So much of my education had been abstract that I could live like this and think and feel like this. I had, for instance, studied cla.s.sical French drama without having any idea of the country or the court that had produced this drama; without having the capacity to grasp the historical reality of France, and in fact quietly (in my own mind) rejecting as a fairy story all that I was told in introductions or textbooks about kings and ministers and mistresses and religious wars. These things were too removed from my experience and I could not grasp them; I knew only my island and my community and the ways of our colony. I had prepared essays on French and Soviet cinema simply by reading books and articles. I had learnt the great names of art and architecture in the same way.
So, though now in New York I was a free man, and this was the first book I was buying in a great city, and the occasion was therefore important, historical for me, romantic, I took to it the abstract att.i.tudes of my school education: the bright boy, the scholarship boy, not acting now for his teachers or family, but acting only for himself.
Yet, with the humiliations of my first twenty-four hours of travel, my first twenty-four hours in the great world, with my increasing sense of my solitude in this world, I was aware (not having a home audience now, not having any audience at all) that I felt no joy. The young man in the shop called me sir and that was unexpected and nice. But I felt a fraud; I felt pushed down into a part of myself where I had never been.
Less than twenty-four hours had pa.s.sed since the magical vision of landscape, sugarcane fields and forested hills and valleys; and the crawling sea; and the clouds lit from above by the sun. But already I could feel the two sides of myself separating one from the other, the man from the writer. Already I felt a twinge of doubt about myself: perhaps the writer was only a man with an abstract education, a capacity for concentration, and a capacity for learning things by heart. And I had worked so hard for this day and this adventure! With the new silence of my solitude, this solitude something I had never antic.i.p.ated as part of the great adventure, I watched the two sides of myself separate and dwindle even on this first day.
And that afternoon in New York, from a pier whose number I carried for many years in my head, but which I have now forgotten, a number not a.s.sociated with romance but with humiliation and uncertainty, there began a journey on a ship of some days. Port of Spain to Puerto Rico to New York, by air. New York to Southampton, by ship.
THAT JOURNEY by ship was for a long time-many weeks, many months: a long time to a boy of eighteen-my most precious piece of writer"s material. Or so I saw it. And for a long time, in a boardinghouse in Earl"s Court in London, in the dreariness of my college room in Oxford, and in the greater dreariness of a bed-sitting-room in the holidays, using my indelible pencil or my Waterman pen or the very old typewriter I had bought in London for ten pounds, more than a week"s allowance for me (expensive, but new typewriters at that time, the war not being long over, were still not easily available), I wrote and cherished a piece I called "Gala Night." by ship was for a long time-many weeks, many months: a long time to a boy of eighteen-my most precious piece of writer"s material. Or so I saw it. And for a long time, in a boardinghouse in Earl"s Court in London, in the dreariness of my college room in Oxford, and in the greater dreariness of a bed-sitting-room in the holidays, using my indelible pencil or my Waterman pen or the very old typewriter I had bought in London for ten pounds, more than a week"s allowance for me (expensive, but new typewriters at that time, the war not being long over, were still not easily available), I wrote and cherished a piece I called "Gala Night."
It was my first piece of writing based on metropolitan material. It was wise; it suggested experience and the traveler. "Gala Night"-it might have been written by a man who had seen many gala nights. Knowing what it was doing, knowing the value of names, it played easily with great names-New York, the Atlantic, the S.S. Columbia Columbia, United States Lines, Southampton (especially beautiful, as a name, this last).
The gala night that provided the material for this piece of descriptive writing-it was not a story-took place on shipboard on our last full day on the Atlantic. In the morning we were to call at Cobh in Ireland; then we were to dock at Southampton in the afternoon. Most of the pa.s.sengers were to get off at Southampton; the others would get off the next morning at Le Havre. The gala night was a dance after dinner in one of the lounges of the tourist cla.s.s. And it was disturbing to me to see-as from a distance, and as though I were studying a kind of animal life, since no shipboard romance had come to me-how the s.e.xual impulse, like drink, clouded and distorted people I knew, men and women. To me, a lover of women but quite virginal at that time, the distortion in the women I had got to know was especially unsettling.
There was a dainty girl who had spoken to me of poetry. How strange to see her now in the company of a man of no particular education or quality, and to see her moist-eyed, as though worked upon by forces outside her control. There was no recognition of me now in her eyes. And how distant, earnest, and preoccupied hitherto friendly men became, how impatient of conversation with me, conversation they had at other times welcomed. There was a man from San Francisco, an Armenian; he had fought in Europe during the war, and we had talked of the war and the soldier"s life. He had told me that the only true war film he had seen was A Walk in the Sun A Walk in the Sun. His thoughts were now elsewhere.
Part of the trouble was that the gala night was also an occasion of drinking; and I at that time didn"t drink at all. To win my scholarship, I had punished myself with study; and because I wished things to go well for me, I was full of ascetic self-castigations.
In what I wrote I was recording my ignorance and innocence, my deprivations (of which the asceticism was a disingenuous sign) and frustration. But "Gala Night," in the intention of the eighteen-year-old boy who was doing the writing, was knowing and unillusioned. So that in the writing, as well as in the man, there was a fracture. To a truly knowing person the piece would have given itself away in more than one place.
I concentrated towards the end of the piece on the figure of the ship"s night watchman. He was standing outside the lounge where the dancing was taking place, and he had begun to address the disconsolate and unlucky men standing outside with him, men to whom, even on this wanton occasion, when dainty girls went dreamy and wild, no shipboard romance had come. He was as divided as I was, and perhaps the other men who were listening to him. There was a sourness in their silence. He, the night watchman, was lively; he spoke as a man who had seen it all. He was a heavily built man in his forties; in the lecturing posture he had settled into, his hands, stretched out on either side of him, grasped the handrail against which he was leaning. He paused between sentences, to allow the wickedness he was describing to sink in; looking at no one in particular, he pressed his lips together; and then, as if talking to himself, he started again.
People changed after three days on a ship, he said. Faithful wives and girl friends became faithless. Always, after three days. Men became violent and were ready to fight over women, even men with young and loving wives to whom they had just said good-bye. He said (or in many versions of "Gala Night" I made him say): "I have seen a captain make to kill a guy in this here place."
"Make to," "kill," "guy," "this here place"-in addition to what he was saying, his lack of illusion about men and women (comforting in one way, that lack of illusion and the fierce judgment it implied, but also very painful, this account of a near-universal wantonness that was nevertheless denied us), the night watchman talked like someone in a film. And that was why, as material, he was so precious to me. That was why the hard indelible pencil traced again and again, in those faint letters (which would brighten and turn purple when dampened), the words he spoke.
In "Gala Night" I looked for metropolitan material; I stuck to people who seemed to me to have this quality. There was a man, originally from the Middle East but now in spite of his Muslim name entirely American, who said he was an entertainer. He spoke familiarly of famous stars, stars whose films I had seen; and it never occurred to me to wonder why this entertainer was traveling tourist. He read me some of his material, after the usual three days. "Material"-that was what he called it, and the short and simple jokes were typed. That was impressive and strange and "American" to me: that such trivial "material" should be typed, should be given that formality. As impressive as that was his way of talking of his time in animated cartoons. They made many cartoons at the same time, he said. "We make them and we can them." "Can"-I was entranced by the word, so knowing, so casual, so professional. Just as his "material" became part of mine, so his language became part of my material as well. So that I was having it both ways with him: making use as a writer of his metropolitan knowingness, appropriating it, yet keeping myself at a distance from him (not on the ship, only in "Gala Night"), as though he, being only an entertainer (traveling tourist) and dubiously American, was a kind of buffoon (the kind of buffoon such a person should be, in writing of the sort I was aiming at) and as though I-now adrift, supported only by the abstractions of my colonial education-stood on firmer ground than he.
Two Salvation Army girls were also among my material. They were traveling to a conference somewhere in Europe; but they were ready to flirt. This flirtatiousness in religious girls struck me as strange; with my deprivations, I saw oddity where there was none. And there was a young man from the South. He shared the entertainer"s cabin. He was heavy and pockmarked and he wore gla.s.ses. In "Gala Night" he appeared-and the scene was written so often by me that in my imagination he remains forever-in undershirt and underpants, sitting on the upper bunk, in the dim top light, peeling and eating an orange, and talking about girls, perhaps the Salvation Army girls.
He said, looking down at his orange, "I"m a plodder. I know what I want and I go get it-see?"
That was material for me: I could show the world-writing like that, observing things like that-that I knew the world. I could say in effect: "I, too, have seen this. And I, too, can write about it."
But there was another memory, disconnected from the first. In some versions of "Gala Night" I used it. In other versions I left it out.
The young Southerner was talking about "colored people." He said, "Nowadays they want to get in your bed and sleep with you."
I was taken aback by that, and then amazed: that he, so full of racial feeling, could talk to me like that, as though he didn"t see me racially. But that topic of race-though it was good, familiar material, and could prove my knowledge of the world-formed no part of "Gala Night." It was too close to my disturbance, my vulnerability, the separation of my two selves. That was not the kind of personality the writer wished to a.s.sume; that was not the material he dealt in.
So that, though traveling to write, concentrating on my experience, eager for experience, I was shutting myself off from it, editing it out of my memory. Editing out the airport taxi driver who had overcharged me-the humiliation had been too great; editing out the Negro at the hotel.
Nor, as a writer, could I acknowledge the other, hideous anxiety of my day in New York. The journey in a liner across the Atlantic should have been pure romance; the going aboard the ship that afternoon in New York should have been pure romance. But romance was in only one part of my mind; there was something else in another part of my mind. I was nervous about sharing a cabin. For months I had worried about that aspect of my journey across the Atlantic. I feared being put with aggressive or disagreeable or s.e.xually unbalanced people. I was small and felt my physical weakness. I feared being a.s.saulted; I feared attracting someone"s malevolence.
That had been a great anxiety for me. But when I went aboard the ship it had been miraculously resolved. Yet I could not, in "Gala Night," wishing to be the kind of writer I wanted to be, write about that.
The British vice-consul in New York had booked a pa.s.sage for someone who, when he went aboard the ship at the pier in New York, was clearly seen not to be English and was a puzzle to the purser. I remember it only now-so successful was "Gala Night" in cutting out the memory. Only now, laying aside the material of "Gala Night," I remember having to stand about for some hours while they decided where to put me. I would have been unplaced, would have been standing about, worried about my few pieces of luggage, even while the ship was leaving the pier. My sight of the New York harbor and the famous skyline would have been tainted by that standing about. And then someone took a decision, and the issue was wonderfully resolved.
I was given a cabin absolutely to myself in a higher cla.s.s. And I was given a key to open the door that separated that cla.s.s from the tourist cla.s.s, where I was to continue to live and eat during the day. This was a wonderful piece of luck. Immediately, much of my anxiety left me. I thought it a very good omen for the future. I thought (still with the fear of sharing cabins, compartments, and hotel bathrooms) that I would be blessed with what I thought of then as "traveler"s luck."
But that night, when I was asleep, there was a commotion that awakened me. The top light of the cabin was put on. There were voices. I knew then, I knew, what was about to happen. Someone was going to be put with me. Someone else from "tourist" was going to be given a key to the door-which for some hours that evening I had thought of as a very private possession, almost a secret-that separated the cla.s.ses. And the top light, put on just like that, and the raised voices, were so inconsiderate. I closed my eyes. Like a child. Like someone practicing magic. If I pretended to be asleep, if I pretended to know nothing, then nothing might happen; and the people who had come in might all just go away.
But there was trouble. The man who had been brought in was making trouble. He was rejecting the cabin. His voice was rising. He said, "It"s because I"m colored you"re putting me here with him."
Colored! So he was a Negro. So this was a little ghetto privilege I had been given. But I didn"t want the Negro or anybody else to be with me. Especially I didn"t want the Negro to be with me, for the very reasons the Negro had given.
And he wasn"t to be with me. The top light went out; the cabin door closed; the people who had come in went out. And the Negro was no doubt taken back past the barrier door to tourist cla.s.s and fitted into some crowded three- or four-berth cabin, but with white people. Satisfactory to him, the black man; but at what price, at what cost in strain and tension for the days of the journey across the great Atlantic. Frightening, that glimpse of another man"s deprivation and drive. Yet I was also ashamed that they had brought the Negro to my cabin. I was ashamed that, with all my aspirations, and all that I had put into this adventure, this was all that people saw in me-so far from the way I thought of myself, so far from what I wanted for myself. And it was shame, too, that made me keep my eyes closed while they were in the cabin.
He, the black man, sought me out the next morning in the lounge of the tourist cla.s.s, to apologize. He was tall, slender, well dressed, with a suggestion of boniness and sharpness below his fine, thin summer suiting: bony knees, sharp shins. He was well spoken, quieter with me than he had been in the cabin. He had thought that the people from the purser"s office were genuinely offering him a better and less crowded cabin when they led him beyond the tourist door. But when he saw me he changed his mind. He knew that I had become the nucleus of a little ghetto; he knew the Americans, he said. What else did he tell me? What else was there to him apart from his racial pa.s.sion? Was he so restricted? I remember nothing else. I remember no other meeting with him.
A woman-young, but older than my eighteen-told me more about him one day on deck: he clearly had made an impression on some of the pa.s.sengers. He was fatigued by American prejudice, the woman said; and she spoke of him with understanding and also a kind of admiration. He was going to live in Germany, she said. His wife was German; they had met when he was serving with the army in Germany; he had grown to like the German people. Strange pilgrimage!
In Puerto Rico there had been the Trinidad Negro in a tight jacket on his way to Harlem. Here was a man from Harlem or black America on his way to Germany. In each there were aspects of myself. But, with my Asiatic background, I resisted the comparison; and I was traveling to be a writer. It was too frightening to accept the other thing, to face the other thing; it was to be diminished as man and writer. Racial diminution formed no part of the material of the kind of writer I was setting out to be. Thinking of myself as a writer, I was hiding my experience from myself; hiding myself from my experience. And even when I became a writer I was without the means, for many years, to cope with that disturbance.
I wrote on with my indelible pencil. I noted dialogue. My "I" was aloof, a man who took notes, and knew.
Night and day a man stood in the bow of the ship, scanning the gray sea ahead. And when finally I landed at Southampton I had for a short while the pleasing sensation that the ground moved below my feet the way the ship had moved for five days.
I had arrived in England. I had made the journey by ship. The pa.s.senger terminal was new. Southampton, of the pretty name, had been much bombed during the war. The new terminal looked to the future; but pa.s.senger liners were soon to be things of the past.
AFTER THE gray of the Atlantic, there was color. Bright color seen from the train that went to London. Late afternoon light. An extended dusk: new, enchanting to someone used to the more or less equal division of day and night in the tropics. Light, dusk, at an hour which would have been night at home. gray of the Atlantic, there was color. Bright color seen from the train that went to London. Late afternoon light. An extended dusk: new, enchanting to someone used to the more or less equal division of day and night in the tropics. Light, dusk, at an hour which would have been night at home.
But it was night when we arrived at Waterloo station. I liked the size, the many platforms, the big, high roof. I liked the lights. Used at home to public places-or those I knew, schools, stores, offices-working only in natural light, I liked this excitement of a railway station busy at night, and brightly lit up. I saw the station people, working in electric light, and the travelers as dramatic figures. The station lights gave a suggestion (such as the New York streets had already given me) of a canopied world, a vast home interior.
After five days on the liner, I wanted to go out. I wanted especially to go to a cinema. I had heard that in London the cinemas ran continuously; at home I was used to shows at fixed times. The idea of the continuous show-as the metropolitan way of doing things, with all that it implied of a great busy populace-was very attractive. But even for London, even for the metropolitan populace of London, it was too late. I went directly to the boardinghouse in Earl"s Court, where a room had been reserved for me for the two months or so before I went to Oxford.
It was a small room, long and narrow, made dark by dark bulky furniture; and bare otherwise, with nothing on the walls. As bare as my cabin on the Columbia Columbia; barer than the room I had had in the Hotel Wellington for that night in New York. My heart contracted. But there was one part of me that rejoiced at the view from the window, some floors up, of the bright orange street lights and the effect of the lights on the trees.
After the warm, rubbery smell of the ship, the smell of the air conditioning in enclosed cabins and corridors, there were new smells in the morning. A cloying smell of milk-fresh milk was rare to me: we used Klim powdered milk and condensed milk. That thick, sweet smell of milk was mixed with the smell of soot; and that smell was overlaid with the airless c.o.c.kroachy smell of old dirt. Those were the morning smells.
The garden or yard or plot of ground at the back of the house ran to a high wall. Behind that high wall was the underground railway station. Romance! The sound of trains there all the time, and from very early in the morning! Speaking directly to me now of what the Negro in the New York hotel had spoken: the city that never slept.
The bathrooms and lavatories were at the end of the landing on each floor. Or perhaps on every other floor-because, as I was going down, there came up a young man of Asia, small and small-boned, with a pale-yellow complexion, with gla.s.ses, and an elaborate Asiatic dressing gown that was too big for him in the arms; the wide embroidered cuffs hid his hands. He gave out a tinkling "Goo-ood morning!" and hurried past me. Was he Siamese, Burmese, Chinese? He looked forlorn, far from home-as yet, still full of my London wonder, my own success in having arrived in the city, I did not make the same judgment about myself.
I was going down to the dining room, in the bas.e.m.e.nt. The boardinghouse offered bed and breakfast, and I was going down to the breakfast. The dining room, at the front of the house, sheltered from the noise of the underground trains, subject only to the vibration, had two or three people. It had many straight-backed brown chairs; the walls were as blank as the walls of my room. The milk-and-soot smell was strong here. It was morning, light outside, but a weak electric bulb was on; the wall was yellowish, shiny. Wall, light, smell-they were all parts of the wonderful London morning. As was my sight of the steep narrow steps going up to the street, the rails, the pavement. I had never been in a bas.e.m.e.nt before. It was not a style of building we had at home; but I had read of bas.e.m.e.nts in books; and this room with an electric light burning on a bright sunny day seemed to me romantic. I was like a man entering the world of a novel, a book; entering the real world.
I went and looked around the upper floor afterwards, or that part of it that was open to guests. The front room was full of chairs, straight-backed chairs and fat low upholstered chairs, and the walls were as bare as the walls everywhere else. This was the lounge (I had been told that downstairs); but the air was so still, such a sooty old smell came off the dark carpet and the tall old curtains, that I felt the room wasn"t used. I felt the house was no longer being used as the builder or first owner had intended. I felt that at one time, perhaps before the war, it had been a private house; and (though knowing nothing about London houses) I felt it had come down in the world. Such was my tenderness towards London, or my idea of London. And I felt, as I saw more and more of my fellow lodgers-Europeans from the Continent and North Africa, Asiatics, some English people from the provinces, simple people in cheap lodgings-that we were all in a way campers in the big house.
And coming back night after night-after my tourist excursions through London-to this bare house, I was infected by its mood. I took this mood to what I saw. I had no eye for architecture; there had been nothing at home to train my eye. In London I saw pavements, shops, shop blinds (almost every other one stenciled at the bottom J. Dean, Maker, Putney J. Dean, Maker, Putney), shop signs, undifferentiated buildings. On my tourist excursions I went looking for size. It was one of the things I had traveled to find, coming from my small island. I found size, power, in the area around Holborn Viaduct, the Embankment, Trafalgar Square. And after this grandeur there was the boardinghouse in Earl"s Court. So I grew to feel that the grandeur belonged to the past; that I had come to England at the wrong time; that I had come too late to find the England, the heart of empire, which (like a provincial, from a far corner of the empire) I had created in my fantasy.
Such a big judgment about a city I had just arrived in! But that way of feeling was something I carried within myself. The older people in our Asian-Indian community in Trinidad-especially the poor ones, who could never manage English or get used to the strange races-looked back to an India that became more and more golden in their memory. They were living in Trinidad and were going to die there; but for them it was the wrong place. Something of that feeling was pa.s.sed down to me. I didn"t look back to India, couldn"t do so; my ambition caused me to look ahead and outwards, to England; but it led to a similar feeling of wrongness. In Trinidad, feeling myself far away, I had held myself back, as it were, for life at the center of things. And there were aspects of the physical setting of my childhood which positively encouraged that mood of waiting and withdrawal.
We lived, in Trinidad, among advertis.e.m.e.nts for things that were no longer made or, because of the war and the difficulties of transport, had ceased to be available. (The advertis.e.m.e.nts in American magazines, for Chris Craft and Statler Hotels and things like that, belonged to another, impossibly remote world.) Many of the advertis.e.m.e.nts in Trinidad were for old-fashioned remedies and "tonics." They were on tin, these advertis.e.m.e.nts, and enameled. They were used as decorations in shops and, having no relation to the goods offered for sale, they grew to be regarded as emblems of the shopkeeper"s trade. Later, during the war, when the shanty settlement began to grow in the swampland to the east of Port of Spain, these enameled tin advertis.e.m.e.nts were used sometimes as building material.
So I was used to living in a world where the signs were without meaning, or without the meaning intended by their makers. It was of a piece with the abstract, arbitrary nature of my education, like my ability to "study" French or Russian cinema without seeing a film, an ability which was, as I have said, like a man trying to get to know a city from its street map alone.
What was true of Trinidad seemed to be true of other places as well. In the book sections of some of the colonial emporia of Port of Spain there would be a shelf or two of the cheap wartime Penguin paperbacks (narrow margins, crudely stapled, with the staples rusting quickly in our damp climate, but with a wonderful color, texture, and smell to the paper). It never struck me as odd that at the back of those wartime Penguins there should sometimes be advertis.e.m.e.nts for certain British things-chocolates, shoes, shaving cream-that had never been available in Trinidad and were now (because of the war, as the advertis.e.m.e.nts said) no longer being made; such advertis.e.m.e.nts being put in by the former manufacturers only to keep their brand names alive during the war, and in the hope that the war would turn out well. These advertis.e.m.e.nts-for things doubly and trebly removed from possibility-never struck me as odd; they came to me as an aspect of the romance of the world I was working towards, a promise within the promise, and intensely romantic.
So I was ready to imagine that the world in which I found myself in London was something less than the perfect world I had striven towards. As a child in Trinidad I had put this world at a far distance, in London perhaps. In London now I was able to put this perfect world at another time, an earlier time. The mental or emotional processes were the same.
In the underground stations there were still old-fashioned, heavy vending machines with raised metal letters. No sweets, no chocolates came from them now. But for ten years or so no one had bothered to take them away; they were like things in a house that had broken down or been superseded, but remained unthrown away. Two doors away from my boardinghouse in Earl"s Court there was a bomb site, a gap in the road, with neat rubble where the bas.e.m.e.nt should have been, the dining room of a house like the one in which I lived. Such sites were all over the city. I saw them in the beginning; then I stopped seeing them. Paternoster Row, at the side of St. Paul"s Cathedral, hardly existed; but the name still appeared on the t.i.tle page of books as the London address of many publishers.
My tramps about London were ignorant and joyless. I had expected the great city to leap out at me and possess me; I had longed so much to be in it. And soon, within a week or less, I was very lonely. If I had been less lonely, if I had had the equivalent of my shipboard life, I might have felt differently about London and the boarding-house. But I was solitary, and didn"t have the means of finding the kind of society I had had for the five days of the Atlantic crossing.
There was the British Council. They ran a meeting place for foreign students like me. But there one evening, the first time I went, I found myself, in conversation with a bored girl, turning to the subject of physical pain, a fearful obsession of mine, made more fearful with the war (and one further explanation of the austerities I practiced at various times). I began to talk of torture, and persevered, though knowing it to be wrong to do so; and was so alarmed by this further distortion of myself (more distorted than my behavior during the flight to New York, first with the Negro in Puerto Rico, then with the Englishwoman in the seat beside me) that I never went to that British Council place again, for shame.
I had only the boardinghouse and that curious, mixed, silent company of English people, Europeans in limbo, and a few Asiatic students to whom English was difficult. And perhaps that boardinghouse life might have meant more to me if I were better read in contemporary English books, if, for example, I had read Hangover Square Hangover Square, which was set in the very area just eleven years or so before. A book like that would have peopled the area and made it romantic and given me, always needing these proofs from books, some sharper sense of myself.
But in spite of my education, I was under-read. What did I know of London? There was an essay by Charles Lamb-in a schoolbook-about going to the theater. There were two or three lovely sentences-in another schoolbook-about the Embankment, from "Lord Arthur Savile"s Crime." But Sherlock Holmes"s Baker Street was just its name; and the London references in Somerset Maugham and Waugh and others didn"t create pictures in the mind, because they a.s.sumed too much knowledge in the reader. The London I knew or imaginatively possessed was the London I had got from d.i.c.kens. It was d.i.c.kens-and his ill.u.s.trators-who gave me the illusion of knowing the city. I was therefore, without knowing it, like the Russians I was to hear about (and marvel at) who still believed in the reality of d.i.c.kens"s London.
Years later, looking at d.i.c.kens during a time when I was writing hard myself, I felt I understood a little more about d.i.c.kens"s unique power as a describer of London, and his difference from all other writers about London. I felt that when as a child far away I read the early d.i.c.kens and was able with him to enter the dark city of London, it was partly because I was taking my own simplicity to his, fitting my own fantasies to his. The city of one hundred and thirty years before must have been almost as strange to him as it was to me; and it was his genius to describe it, when he was an adult, as a child might have described it. Not displaying architectural knowledge or taste; not using technical words; using only simple words like "old-fashioned" to describe whole streets; using no words that might disturb or unsettle an unskilled or unknowledgeable reader. Using no words to unsettle a child far away, in the tropics, where the roofs were of corrugated iron and the gables were done in fretwork, and there were jalousied windows hinged at the top to keep out the rain while letting in light and air. Using, d.i.c.kens, only simple words, simple concepts, to create simple volumes and surfaces and lights and shadows: creating thereby a city or fantasy which everyone could reconstruct out of his own materials, using the things he knew to recreate the described things he didn"t know.
To d.i.c.kens, this enriching of one"s own surroundings by fantasy was one of the good things about fiction. And it was apt that d.i.c.kens"s childlike vision should have given me, with my own child"s ideas, my abstract education and my very simple idea of my vocation, an illusion of complete knowledge of the city where I expected this vocation to flower. (Leaving room at the same time, fantasies being what they are, for other, late-nineteenth-century ideas of size and imperial grandeur, which neither Buckingham Palace nor Westminister nor Whitehall gave me, but which I got from Paddington and Waterloo stations and from Holborn Viaduct and the Embankment, great Victorian engineering works.) I had come to London as to a place I knew very well. I found a city that was strange and unknown-in its style of houses, and even in the names of its districts; as strange as my boardinghouse, which was quite unexpected; a city as strange and unread-about as the Englishness of South Wind South Wind, which I had bought in New York for the sake of its culture. The disturbance in me, faced with this strangeness, was very great, many times more diminishing than the disturbance I had felt in New York when I had entered, as though entering something that was mine by right, the bookshop which had turned out to have very little for me after all.
And something else occurred in those very early days, the first days of arrival. I lost a faculty that had been part of me and precious to me for years. I lost the gift of fantasy, the dream of the future, the far-off place where I was going. At home I had lived most intensely in the cinema, where, before the fixed-hour shows, the cinema boys, to shut out daylight or electric street light, closed the double doors all around and untied the long cords that kept the high wooden windows open. In those dark halls I had dreamt of a life elsewhere. Now, in the place that for all those years had been the "elsewhere," no further dream was possible. And while on my very first night in London I had wanted to go to the cinema for the sake of those continuous shows I had heard about, to me the very essence of metropolitan busyness, very soon now the idea of the cinema, the idea of entering a dark hall to watch a moving film became oppressive to me.
I had thought of the cinema pleasure as a foretaste of my adult life. Now, with all kinds of shame in many recesses of my mind, I felt it to be fantasy. I hadn"t read Hangover Square Hangover Square, didn"t even know of it as a book; but I had seen the film. Its Hollywood London had merged in my mind (perhaps because of the a.s.sociations of the t.i.tles) into the London of The Lodger The Lodger. Now I knew that London to be fantasy, worthless to me. And the cinema pleasure, that had gone so deep into me and had in the barren years of abstract study given me such support, that cinema pleasure was now cut away as with a knife. And when, ten or twelve years later, I did return to the cinema, the Hollywood I had known was dead, the extraordinary circ.u.mstances in which it had flourished no longer existing; American films had become as self-regardingly local as the French or English; and there was as much distance between a film and me as between a book or a painting and me. Fantasy was no longer possible. I went to the cinema not as a dreamer or a fantast but as a critic.
I had little to record. My trampings about London didn"t produce adventures, didn"t sharpen my eye for buildings or people. My life was restricted to the Earl"s Court boardinghouse. There was a special kind of life there. But I failed to see it. Because, ironically, though feeling myself already drying up, I continued to think of myself as a writer and, as a writer, was still looking for suitable metropolitan material.
Metropolitan-what did I mean by that? I had only a vague idea. I meant material which would enable me to compete with or match certain writers. And I also meant material that would enable me to display a particular kind of writing personality: J. R. Ackerley of Hindoo Holiday Hindoo Holiday, perhaps, making notes under a dinner table in India; Somerset Maugham, aloof everywhere, unsurprised, immensely knowing; Aldous Huxley, so full of all kinds of knowledge and also so s.e.xually knowing; Evelyn Waugh, so elegant so naturally. Wishing to be that kind of writer, I didn"t see material in the campers in the big Earl"s Court house.
ONE SUNDAY, not long after I had come to London, I was invited to lunch by the Hardings. Mr. Harding was the manager of the boardinghouse, but I had seen almost nothing of him or his wife. I had seen more of Angela, whose last name I seldom used and in the end forgot. Angela was Italian, from the south of the country. She was in her mid or late twenties, but I couldn"t really tell: she was older than me, ten years at least, and I saw her as very mature. She had spent all the war in Italy and had somehow fetched up-like many of her friends-in London.
Angela had a room in the house and some kind of position, but I wasn"t sure what the position was. She sometimes was in the dining room in the bas.e.m.e.nt, serving the breakfasts; and sometimes she was there in the evening. She also worked on some evenings as a waitress in the Italian restaurant, the Venezia or some such name, not far from Earl"s Court station; she served the two-and-six or three-and-six dinners. I had the dinner there a few times. It gave me an indescribable pleasure to be in a restaurant where I knew the waitress, even though I didn"t understand the menu and didn"t particularly like the food.
Angela was the first woman outside my family I had got to know. There was an easiness about her from the start. I found her very attractive and-still a virgin myself-was half in love with her. This acquaintance with Angela gave me, fleetingly, a little metropolitan excitement, told me I was far from home and in a great city in Europe. The boardinghouse; the underground railway at the back of the house, and the entrance to the many-platformed station just around the corner; the Italian restaurant, the waitress one knew. I liked the setting and the props; they were part of the drama; they gave me a sense of myself as a metropolitan man just for a minute or so.
Angela gave me a certain amount of encouragement. She told me she liked me; she told me my color was like the color of some people in her country. But there was a man in her life, an Englishman she had met in Italy during the war. He was a rough, common man, liable to become violent. I never saw him; it was Angela herself who described her lover in that way-half asking you to condemn the man, half asking for sympathy for herself, speaking of the relationship as though it was something unavoidable.
She said that one night, during a quarrel, he had become so violent that she had run out of the room or flat naked except for a coat which she had grabbed as she ran. She had decided after that to live by herself. That was when she had moved to the Earl"s Court house. Her lover was absent; at least I never saw him. Was he in a foreign country? I gathered from things that other people said that he might have been in jail. But I didn"t raise the question with Angela, and she didn"t say. I should have asked her, but because of my feelings for her I didn"t want to. She was loyal to this man nonetheless. And the encouragement she gave me was oddly chaste. Her room was open to me; but it was only when she had other visitors that she encouraged me to be playful-as though witnesses made my playfulness all right. She was more distant and careful when there were no other visitors.
It was because of Angela-in fact, as Angela"s friend-that I went to the Sunday lunch given by the manager, Mr. Harding, and his wife. Mr. Harding I had hardly seen. And even after this lunch-which became part of my "metropolitan" material, something I obsessively wrote about for many months, not only in London in the summer, but also later in Oxford in the autumn, altering the reality to make it fit my idea of what was good material, suitable for someone like myself to write about-even after all that writing I have no impression of what the man and his wife looked like.
The lunch was in a large room on the ground floor at the back of the house. The room at the front, choked with brown furniture and seldom used, was the "lounge." The room at the back was not so full of furniture; but the walls were as stripped as the walls of the other rooms in the house, as though the war itself had visited some disaster, some looting, on the house. I gathered that this back room was part of the quarters or rooms that the Hardings enjoyed as managers of the boardinghouse.
The tall windows looked out onto the garden-or, more properly, untended ground-that ran to the high brick wall of the underground railway station. There was a tree; there was a view of trees in neighboring plots. The ground was bare in the shadow of the brick wall of the underground station. It was not unpleasant to me; I liked the colors; I liked the feel of a s.p.a.ce enclosed and shaded but cool.
There were other friends of the Hardings". Mr. Harding was the star of the lunch. I believe he was drunk. He wasn"t incapacitated; but he had been drinking. Mrs. Harding-again, I have no picture of her-and Angela looked after the serving of the lunch. Mr. Harding talked. He was not only the star, but also the comic turn; he had a strong idea of who he was, and he talked with the confidence of a man among people whom he knew, people who would laugh at his jokes and be impressed by his manner.
Had he been drinking at home, in a room somewhere, or had he gone to the pub? I didn"t have the social knowledge of London drinking to ask or to guess. I knew nothing about pubs. I didn"t like the idea of pubs; I didn"t like the idea of a place where people went only to drink. I a.s.sociated it with the rumshop drunkenness I had seen at home, and was amazed that to ordinary people on the London streets a drunk man was comic, and not hateful. Just as I was slightly amazed now that Mr. Harding, drunk at the lunch table, should not be treated with contempt by his guests but with tolerance and even respect. He was listened to. I cannot tell what sort of accent he had. It sounded good to me, like something from a film.
The most memorable moment of the lunch came during the telling of a story by Mr. Harding. I have a memory of Angela chuckling while Mr. Harding spoke; and a memory of Mrs. Harding doing a kind of straight-woman act.
What Mr. Harding"s story was about I do not remember. But there came a moment when he said, slowly, his deliberate drunken accents filling the room, "One of my wives-Audrey, yes Audrey." And then he spoke directly to Mrs. Harding: "Do you remember Audrey?" And Mrs. Harding, not laughing, not smiling, not looking directly at Mr. Harding, doing her straight-woman act, Mrs. Harding said, "I loved Audrey. She was such a sweet kid."
I was dazzled by that pa.s.sage of dialogue. It seemed to me sophisticated, big-city, like something in a film or play or a book-just the kind of thing I had traveled to London to find, just the kind of material that would help to define me as a writer. And in many of the pieces of writing I attempted, in London at the boardinghouse, and later in Oxford during the terms and then the holidays, I brought that pa.s.sage in. Though I had no social knowledge to set it off; though-to put it at its simplest-I had no idea what Mr. Harding had been doing that morning, where he had come from, and where he would be going that afternoon; though I could hardly see the man or judge his speech; though I never even thought to ask whether he had fought in the war or had spent his time in Earl"s Court drinking.
Writing about Mr. Harding and that pa.s.sage of dialogue, I had a setting. Sunday lunch in a big London house. In some of the writing I attempted I improved the condition of everybody. I improved my own condition as well (without overt boasting), because to have heard and recorded that pa.s.sage made me as "knowing" as I thought a writer should be when he moved among people. So to me, as a writer, that pa.s.sage gave as much pleasure as it had given to both Mr. Harding and Mrs. Harding.
But what of Mr. Harding? What other clue do I have to a more complete person? Has he really vanished from my memory? Can I not recall more than an impression of middle-aged, baldish whiteness, and a lazy, deliberate way of speaking? Did he know that the eighteen-year-old among the guests at his lunch was a writer who would cherish those words of his and go up to his room and write them down? He couldn"t have known. The sophistication, then, the play, was for the people at the table; it was a thing Mr. Harding could waste. And that little deduction, in retrospect, makes him more interesting than what I noted down about him at the time. My pa.s.sion to gather metropolitan experience and material, to give myself stature as a writer, this overreadiness to find material that I half-knew from other writers already, my very dedication, got in the way of my noting the truth, which would have been a little clearer to me if my mind had been less cluttered, if I had been a little less well educated.
As I wrote that pa.s.sage of dialogue between the Hardings, I often improved everybody"s circ.u.mstances, as I have said. But now, with my experience of Mr. and Mrs. Phillips at the manor house, and my knowledge of Bray, the car-hire man, I see that lunch in the Earl"s Court boardinghouse as slightly less than it seemed to me even at the time. I see the partic.i.p.ants as servants, in a degraded setting, the gentlefolk whom the servants were meant to serve being gone, with the war, and leaving a looted house, full of foreigners now. So possibly the deliberation of Mr. Harding"s speech was not only the deliberation of the habitual drinker after drinking, but also the genteel precision of the servant, whose vowels might have betrayed him to people in the know. But at that lunch Mr. Harding was safe. To his English friends his sophistication and wit would have been part of a familiar and loved act; and his Englishness worked-wonderfully-for the foreigners present, for both Angela and me.
If Mr. Harding was less than I made him in my writing at the time, then he was also more. To make him grand in my writing, equivalent to his wit, I suppressed the boardinghouse background. But in suppressing aspects of the truth, I did more: I managed to suppress memory. And it was only when I began to concentrate on the lunch that Sunday for this chapter that I remembered that the lunch was special. For this reason, which I never mentioned in my writing: it was the Hardings" last lunch in the house; they had been sacked. They were to be replaced by-Angela. So about the drinking and the wit and the byplay about "one of my wives," and Mrs. Harding"s "I loved Audrey," there was an element of great and admirable bravado. But that was not the material I was looking for; it was not the material I noted.
About Angela, I concentrated, in my writing, on her running away at night from the flat or room of her violent lover, wearing only a fur coat over her nakedness. I knew the fur coat. Its quality I couldn"t (and still can"t) a.s.sess; but it developed for me an alluring s.e.xual quality (as no doubt it had for Angela herself, telling the story of her near-naked night flight). The s.e.xual detail suggested a s.e.xual knowingness; it concealed the innocence of the writer. But I could do little with the material. Unwilling as a writer ever to fabricate, to invent where I had no starting point of knowledge, thinking of it as a kind of trespa.s.s, I came to the end of my Angela material very quickly.
As with Mr. Harding, I didn"t know where Angela had come from. Her past in London, her life away from the Earl"s Court boardinghouse, was mysterious to me. New to London, I couldn"t even begin to imagine the furnishings of her lover"s room or flat, his family background, his geographical background, far less his conversation. And as mysterious was Angela"s time in Italy. There was a story there-if it had occurred to me that there was. And there was a means of finding the story out. I could have asked her. But I never thought of asking her. I hadn"t arrived at that stage.
How had she met her lover? What had life been like in Italy during the war? What had happened to other people in her family? And the various Italians and Maltese and Spaniards and Moroccans of European origin who came to her room and were her friends-what were their stories? How had these people found themselves in England and in that Earl"s Court area?
The flotsam of Europe not long after the end of the terrible war, in a London house that was now too big for the people it sheltered-that was the true material of the boardinghouse. But I didn"t see it. Perhaps I felt that as a writer I should not ask questions; perhaps I felt that as a writer, a sensitive and knowing person, it was enough or should have been enough for me to observe. But there was a subject there that could have been my own; something that would have exercised my indelible pencil to good purpose.
Because in 1950 in London I was at the beginning of that great movement of peoples that was to take place in the second half of the twentieth century-a movement and a cultural mixing greater than the peopling of the United States, which was essentially a movement of Europeans to the New World. This was a movement between all the continents. Within ten years Earl"s Court was to lose its prewar or early-war Hangover Square Hangover Square a.s.sociations. It was to become an Australian and South African, a white-colonial, enclave in London, presaging a greater mingling of peoples. Cities like London were to change. They were to cease being more or less national cities; they were to become cities of the world, modern-day Romes, establishing the pattern of what great cities should be, in the eyes of islanders like myself and people even more remote in language and culture. They were to be cities visited for learning and elegant goods and manners and freedom by all the barbarian peoples of the globe, people of forest and desert, Arabs, Africans, Malays. a.s.sociations. It was to become an Australian and South African, a white-colonial, enclave in London, presaging a greater mingling of peoples. Cities like London were to change. They were to cease being more or less national cities; they were to become cities of the world, modern-day Romes, establishing the pattern of what great cities should be, in the eyes of islanders like myself and people even more remote in language and culture. They were to be cities visited for learning and elegant goods and manners and freedom by all the barbarian peoples of the globe, people of forest and desert, Arabs, Africans, Malays.
Two weeks away from home, when I had thought there was little for me to record as a writer, and just eighteen, I had found, if only I had had the eyes to see, a great subject. Great subjects are illuminated best by small dramas; and in the Earl"s Court boardinghouse, as fellow guests or as friends of Angela"s, there were at least ten or twelve drifters from many countries of Europe and North Africa, who were offering themselves for my inspection, men and women, some of whom had seen terrible things during the war and were now becalmed and quiet in London, solitary, foreign, sometimes idle, sometimes half-criminal. These people"s princ.i.p.al possessions were their stories, and their stories spilled easily out of them. But I noted nothing down. I asked no questions. I took them all for granted, looked beyond them; and their faces, clothes, names, accents have vanished and cannot now be recalled.
If I had had a more direct, less unprejudiced way of looking; if I had noted down simply what I had seen; if in those days I had had the security which later came to me (from the practice of writing), and out of which I was able to take a great interest always in the men and women who were immediately before me and was to learn how to talk to them; if with a fraction of that security I had written down what pa.s.sed before me, frankly or simply, what material would I not have had! For soon the time would come when I would look, professionally, for material for a London book about the time of my arrival, and then I would find very little.
What remained in my memory was what I had written about obsessively in those early days, and much of that was about Angela"s s.e.xuality: the feel of her b.r.e.a.s.t.s when, sitting or reclining on the bed beside me in her room, our backs against the wall, and the room full of her strange friends, she had allowed me to press my hand against her breast; the shape of her mouth; the brilliant wartime red of her lips; and the feel of her fur coat; and the sight, thrilling and unexpected, of her ap.r.o.n in the restaurant.
Of Angela"s past and time in Italy I noted down nothing, never thinking to ask. I noted down only her railing against the Italian priests of the south, who became fat during the war, she said, when everybody else went hungry. I noted that down, I remember it now, because it was "anticlerical." "Anticlericalism"-that was one of the abstract issues of European history that I had got to know about, from teachers" notes and recommended textbooks, at Queen"s Royal College in Trinidad. History as abstract a study for me as the French or Russian cinema, about which I could write essays, just as I could write essays on French history without understanding, without having any idea about, kings and courtiers and religious sects, any idea of the government or social organization of an old and great country.
And how could my knowledge of the world not be abstract, when all the world I knew at the age of eighteen was the small colonial world of my little island in the mouth of the Orinoco, and within that island the world of my family, within our little Asian-Indian community: small world within small world. I hardly knew our own community; of other communities I knew even less. I had no idea of history-it was hard to attach something as grand as history to our island. I had no idea of government. I knew only about a colonial governor and a legislative council and an executive council and a police force. So that almost everything I read about history and other societies had an abstract quality. I could relate it only to what I knew: every kind of reading committed me to fantasy.
I was, in 1950, like the earliest Spanish travelers to the New World, medieval men with high faith: traveling to see wonders, parts of G.o.d"s world, but then very quickly taking the wonders for granted, saving inquiry (and true vision) only for what they knew they would find even before they had left Spain: gold. True curiosity comes at a later stage of development. In England I was at that earlier, medieval-Spanish stage-my education and literary ambition and my academic struggles the equivalent of the Spanish adventurer"s faith and traveler"s endurance. And, like the Spaniard, having arrived after so much effort, I saw very little. And like the Spaniard who had made a long, perilous journey down the Orinoco or Amazon, I had very little to record.
So, out of all the things I might have noted down about Angela"s Italian past, I noted down only her anticlericalism. It was a confirmation of what had up till then been abstract; it thrilled me because I had expected to find it.
The flotsam of Europe after the war-that was one theme I missed. There was another, linked to that.
Shortly after she had taken over from the Hardings, Angela took me up to a room one Sat.u.r.day afternoon to show me "something," as she said. She behaved as though this "something" was something she had just discovered, something the deposed Hardings might have been responsible for. Though this couldn"t have been true: Angela had been connected with the house for some time.
She took me to a room on the second or third floor. It was a big and dark room, much bigger than mine. The curtains were closed. The room smelled of old dirt and urine, old unwashed clothes, old unwashed bodies. It was as though the smell hung on the darkness of the room; as though the darkness was an expression of the smell. There was an old man on the bed; he was the source of the smell. A stick was leaning on the bed. Angela said to the figure on the bed, "I"ve brought someone to see you."