“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.
5. On the Run
I
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.