Just six years before, at the door of the vault of the Registrar-General’s Department in Port of Spain I had — with what pleasure, what a vision of the future — pretended in my spare time in the office to be a writer, filling paper, correcting, making a page look like a page of manuscript. Now it was a desperate matter.
This was my mood when in the Kilburn library I looked at The Shadowed Livery, the work of a published writer, and decided to turn to Foster Morris for help.
On the day of the recording I went to the studio and sat behind the glass with the studio manager and the producer.
Foster Morris was a stockyish, grey man with a broad face, dim-eyed, withdrawn. I suppose he would have been fifty. The dimness of the eye, the withdrawal, the man removed — that made an impression on me, as did the story he told when he was asked to speak some words to the microphone for the voice-level test.
He said, “I was lunching with Victor Gollancz the other day. He told me this joke. A farmer was had up for having sex with an under-age girl. The farmer told the judge he wasn’t to blame, because the village girls had been stealing his apples and he had warned them that he was going to screw any of them he caught stealing apples. The farmer got off. But then the judge said to him, ‘Mr. Roberts, you should be careful. Otherwise, you won’t get to see many of your apples.’ ”
It wasn’t much of a joke, but the name of the publisher was impressive. So Foster Morris was more than a man from the past; he was a man still in casual touch with great names.
In the shabby canteen, still with its rough-and-ready wartime feel, I said to him, “I’ve read The Shadowed Livery. And I looked at it the other day again.”
His dim eyes lightened. He seemed even abashed. A kind of old-fashioned courtesy came to him. He said, “Oh, is that still around?”
That was also impressive: dismissing a whole published book, a book that had required two two-week journeys by steamer and taken weeks of writing. And I remember thinking, “When my turn comes, this is how I must behave.”
I walked out with him to the Oxford Street lobby.
I said, “I’ve been writing a book for nearly a year. I don’t know how to go on. Will you have a look at it for me?”
He agreed. He wanted me to send it to him at a publisher’s where he said he looked in once or twice a week, but then he said I should send it to his house. As he was writing out his address, he said, “Whatever happened to that white-nigger fellow?”
I was stumped. I didn’t know who he was talking about, and I had never heard that combination of words in Trinidad. Probably the words came from another island; or probably Foster Morris had simply forgotten. But I understood — though he had been scrupulous in his book in the other direction, not appearing to notice a person’s race, and hardly mentioning it — he was making a heavy kind of local joke with me. I knew he would have been referring to some light-skinned mulatto — in Trinidad people like that were described as “red,” without insult — and then I understood he was talking about a well known radical who had taken part in the great Butler strike. Foster Morris had written in his admiring way about this man; and I felt I was caught a little off balance, not knowing about one of the important figures in The Shadowed Livery.
This was a bad moment, but I let it pass. I sent him my manuscript. He didn’t keep me waiting. Within days he had sent it back, with a long typed letter, a page and a half in single spacing. The first sentence of his letter was: I have read your book and my advice to you is to abandon it immediately.
He was right. I knew that. But I had been hoping — just a little — for some kind of magic. And I was full of anger and hurt. I remembered that bad moment with him in the lobby; I remembered the one-sidedness and subtle wrongness of The Shadowed Livery. I thought of his unimportance. But it didn’t help. I knew he was right.
All my life I had felt myself marked, destined for achievement. I had known doubts, long depressions; but I had been a student then, not a man in my own right. Now at last I was in the world, a doer: my moment should have come.
I spent a bad two or three weeks. I felt dreadfully abased. For some reason the moments on buses, going between Kilburn and the BBC on Oxford Street, were the worst. And yet at the same time I couldn’t help feeling relieved. I didn’t have to write that book. I didn’t have to face that manuscript.
I read Foster Morris’s letter many times. It was really quite packed, and even at the first reading I had seen that, after the brutality of his first line, he wanted to help. His letter was full of instruction, of a sort no one before had given me. He wanted me to read certain writers — Chekhov, Hemingway, and his beloved Graham Greene — and he wanted me to pay attention to the way they wrote. He wanted me to think more about writing. And he was right. I had read only in a gobbling, inconsequential way. As for writing, I had thought of it as something that would come naturally to me. I hadn’t thought of it as something I would have to learn about and try to understand. I hadn’t foreseen the problem I was having with my material and the uncertainty of my writing personality.
But I was at the age when every day is long. It is hard when days are so long to hold on to gloom. And it must have been just three or four weeks after receiving Foster Morris’s letter that, out of the misery of those bus rides up and down the Edgware Road, I decided to make a fresh start as a writer. I thought I would turn away from what I had done, and go back to the beginning: try to see whether I couldn’t make writing out of plain concrete statements, adding meaning to meaning in simple stages.
At about this time something else happened. At tea in the BBC canteen one day we were talking about George Lamming’s autobiography, In the Castle of My Skin. The producer who had introduced Foster Morris to the programme wanted to talk only about a small, comic episode in the book — about a boy climbing up a tree. I noticed the producer’s laughter, his admiration, and I learned as a new truth what I really had always known, and what so far in my writing (veering between farce and introversion) I had suppressed: that comedy, the preserver we in Trinidad had always known, was close to me, a double inheritance, from my story-telling Hindu family, and from the creole street life of Port of Spain.
Within days I had begun to write about Port of Spain street life, setting my narrator in a street such as the one where once (in my memory or fantasy) my aunt had fanned her coalpot and talked about Grenadians. And I set my narrator at the level of the street. I found an immense freedom in this touch of fiction. The material bubbled up; the stories bubbled up; the jokes made themselves, two or three to a page. Day by day my book grew; I felt myself becoming a writer, someone in control, someone more at ease. In six weeks, no more, my book was done. My life in London at last had purpose. And I blessed the name of Foster Morris, this unlikely figure from the past who had set me free.
IT WAS four years before that book was published. The publisher required something less unconventional in form first, something more recognizable by the trade as a novel. When the street book was published I sent a copy to Foster Morris, with a letter. I reintroduced myself; told him about his letter, the pain it had caused, the release it had given. The book, I said, was an offering to him. And there was this extra interest: the book embroidered on memories, my own, that began almost at the time of his visit to Trinidad for The Shadowed Livery. So, although he was nearly thirty years older, it could be said that as writers our paths had long ago crossed. He would have seen as an adult certain things — Port of Spain streets, houses, backyards — which I had seen with the freshness and wonder of a child, an Indian child moving from the country to the city.