He wasn’t. His method was original. He ignored the comedy, over which I had taken so much trouble — such care in the mounting of so many scenes, such judgement in the matter of language and tone. He looked through all of that to the material itself — the people, the background — and he considered that with complete seriousness. He said I was writing about people impoverished in every way, people on whom history had played a cruel trick. My characters thought they were free men, in charge of their own destinies; they weren’t; the colonial setting mocked the delusions of the characters, their ambitions, their belief in perfectibility, their jealousies. The books, light as they were, were subversive, the article said, and remarkable for that reason.
It was a version of what Foster Morris had said, in elaborate metaphor, about my first book, as we were leaving his South Kensington club. As with a trout stream, he had said, you had to train yourself to look through the surface reflections to what lay below.
I had said nothing to that, though I had thought the comment misplaced, and of no value to me, because it was denying me — who relished it so much — the gift of comedy (the discovery of which was still linked in my mind with getting started as a writer).
Lebrun’s article, on the other hand, though different only in angle and emphasis from Foster Morris’s comment, was like a revelation to me. I knew immediately what he meant about the helplessness of my characters; I realized I had always known it; I had grown up with that knowledge in my bones.
It was as though, from moving at ground level, where so much was obscured, I had been taken up some way, not only to be shown the petty pattern of fields and roads and small settlements, but also, as an aspect of that high view, had been granted a vision of history speeded up, had seen, as I might have seen the opening and dying of a flower, the destruction and shifting about of peoples, had seen all the strands that had gone into the creation of the agricultural colony, and had understood what simple purposes — after such activity — that colony served.
The article seemed to me a miraculous piece of writing. It stuck closely to what I had actually written, but was about so much more. Reading the article, I thought I understood why as a child I felt that history had been burnt away in the place where I was born. I found myself constantly thinking, “Yes, yes. That’s true. It was like that.”
The revelation of Lebrun’s article became a lasting part of my way of looking. I suppose I was affected as I was, not only because it was the first article about my work, but also because I had never read that kind of political literary criticism before. I was glad that I hadn’t. Because if I had, I mightn’t have been able to write what I had written. Like Foster Morris and others, I would have known too much before I had begun to write, and there would have been less to discover with the actual writing. The problems of voice and tone and naturalness would have been that much harder; it would have been harder for me to get started.
I wrote to Lebrun to acknowledge his marvellous article, and a short time later there came an invitation to dinner, to meet Lebrun, from a common West Indian acquaintance.
The acquaintance worked in a large insurance company. He was in his early thirties, a few years older than me. He did occasional scripts for the magazine programmes of the BBC Caribbean Service; that was how we had met. He came from one of the smaller islands, and I would have said he was a mulatto. He said he was Lebanese. His wife was like him, but with an accent more of the islands.
They lived in a squashed mansion block flat in Maida Vale. It must have been rented furnished. There was a lot of fat upholstered furniture of the 1930s, a feeling of old dirt, of smells and dust ready to rise. The dim ceiling light in the sitting room was made dimmer by a frosted-glass saucer-shaped shade that hung on little chains and was full of dead moths and other insects.
I thought when I arrived that the come-down-in-the-world atmosphere suited the occasion. Lebrun had lost his access to other chief ministers, and was generally out of things in the Caribbean; there were many little towns where he couldn’t walk the streets. And I thought that this was going to be a melancholy little dinner in London for sentimental people who wanted to show solidarity with the old man.
In fact, if I had thought about it, I would have seen that Lebrun, old and displaced as he was, was now at the start of the finest phase of his reputation, the one that would grow and grow until the end. People in most of the territories had lost faith in the first wave of populist politicians. The corruption of these men didn’t matter too much; what power had done was to show up their ignorance and unexpected idleness. Lebrun had been rejected by those men. He remained pure and principled, and educated; he could still speak the language of revolution and liberation. This was what many people — like the people who had come to the Maida Vale flat — still wanted to hear. So it was an air of conspiracy, rather than melancholy, that hung over our dinner.
Black liberation was the principal theme. But we were a mixed group; that was part of the civility of the occasion. And Lebrun, when he came, was with a white American woman, of Czech or Polish origin, a good twenty years younger than he. That reputation, as a womanizer, or as a man successful with women, had always been Lebrun’s.
Lebrun was now past sixty. He was slender and fine-featured; he took care of himself. Close to, he was delicate, smooth-skinned, with a touch of copper in his dark complexion that spoke of some unusual — perhaps Amerindian — ancestry.
It was understood that we had come to hear him talk. And everything that occurred between his arrival and his settling down to talk — the general greetings, the brisk and colloquial exchanges with his Lebanese hosts to establish how well he knew them, his “don’t-mention-it” attitude to my acknowledgement of his article in the Russian magazine — everything was like an orchestra tuning up, to background chatter, for the evening’s big event.
Soon enough — while our hosts went to their little kitchen and cooking smells came out to cling to the old curtains and the fat upholstered furniture — Lebrun was launched.
He was born to talk. It was as though everything he saw and thought and read was automatically processed into talk material. And it was all immensely intelligent and gripping. He talked about music and the influence on composers of the instruments of their time. He talked about military matters.
I had met no one like that from our region, no one who had given so much time to reading and thought, no one who had organized so much information in this appetizing way. I thought his political reputation simplified the man. And his language was extraordinary. What I had noticed in Woodford Square was still there: his spoken sentences, however in volved, were complete: they could have been taken down and sent to the printers. I thought his spoken language was like Ruskin’s on the printed page, in its fluency and elaborateness, the words wonderfully chosen, often unexpected, bubbling up from some ever-running spring of sensibility. The thought-connections — as with Ruskin — were not always clear; but you assumed they were there. As with the poetry of Blake (or, within a smaller compass, Auden), you held on, believing there was a worked-out argument.
It was rhetoric, of course. And, of course, it was loaded in his favour. He couldn’t be interrupted; like royalty, he raised all the topics; and he would have been a master of the topics he raised. But even with that I don’t think that I am pitching the comparisons too high. I thought him a prodigy. I was moved by the fact that such a man came from something like my own background. I began to understand his great reputation among middle-class black people. How, considering when he was born, had he become the man he was? How had he preserved his soul through all the discouragements of the colonial time?