This was the view of the region he had offered. This was the currency — this news of the coming revolution, his place within that revolution — with which, as it were, he had paid his way among revolutionaries abroad.
When I had heard him talk in the square in 1956—not absolutely knowing about his Russian sympathies, knowing about him only vaguely as a far-off black revolutionary of the region — I had been as puzzled as anyone by his stress on the industrial nature of slavery in the Caribbean. Later I thought of it as ideology for ideology’s sake, a man on the periphery over-staking his claim.
Now, in the New York house, catching fragments of his views and rhetoric and even his voice in what was being said to me, I saw this stress as part of the “political resolution” he had talked about at the Maida Vale dinner. He had said that that resolution had enabled him to lay aside the shame he had grown to feel because of his mother’s uncle, the old coachman, who looked back to a time nearer slavery as the good time, when white people and black people were one.
The confession had been impressive: every black man, he had said, had some tormenting secret like that. Yet the words, “political resolution,” had appeared to conceal something. And now I felt — with shame, grief, sympathy, admiration, recognizing something of myself in his struggle — that, as much as the uneducated old coachman of ninety years before, and the middle-aged black man in bowler and pin-stripe suit stepping out of the bus queue in Regent Street in 1950 to show me photographs of his house and English wife, Lebrun had always needed to find some way of dealing with the past. With his fine mind, and his love of knowledge, his need might even have been greater.
The ideology he had found (and his interpretation of it) enabled him to do more than most. There was a type of revolutionary (or merely protest) writing which found it easier to move imaginatively in the time of slavery, with its fixed structures, its clear enemy, its clear morality. This kind of writing saw the period of slavery as a time of almost continuous guerrilla war; it relished that drama, but was unable to deal with the period after the abolition of slavery, which by comparison was flat, directionless, without moral issues. Lebrun’s political resolution was very far from this sensationalism. It enabled him, not to embrace the period of slavery, but to acknowledge it without pain, and, presenting it in his own way, to make a claim for its universality, and even its precedence.
“THE MAN want to take you over,” the chief minister had said, over the stained tablecloth in Government House. And I began to feel something of that in the house in New York. I was using Lebrun’s introductions and I suppose it was to be expected that they should think I was a revolutionary too. But after a while I couldn’t help noticing that I was being regarded as part of Lebrun’s revolution. They all knew about the article in the Russian magazine. And somehow my work ceased to be strictly mine; it was as it were contained in Lebrun’s vision of the region. I began to feel that in their vision I was incidental to my own work: I was an expression of Lebrun’s will. I didn’t like the assumption but didn’t know how to speak against it. I had allowed them to talk and never spoken up; I had allowed them to go too far.
I could see that they were willing to make room for me, as once no doubt they had made room for Lebrun. No words about this were spoken, but I could sense that I was being invited to shed my racial or cultural burdens and to be part of their brotherhood. And they were so nice and attractive, and the house was so pleasant, and the thought of the film work in the hotel was so disagreeable, it would have been marvellous, it would have been less trouble, if I could have pretended to be a convert. And I had a sense that years before, in much harder times, Lebrun might have made such a deal, would have shed one smarting skin and felt himself reborn in another.
Few of us are without the feeling that we are incomplete. But my feelings of incompleteness were not like Lebrun’s. In the things I felt myself incomplete Lebrun was — as I thought — abundantly served: physical attractiveness, love, sexual fulfilment. But there were other yearnings that no shedding of skin could have assuaged: my own earned security, a wish for my writing gift to last and grow, a dream of working at yet unknown books, accumulations of fruitful days, achievement. These yearnings could be assuaged only in the self I knew.
No other group would ever again make me an invitation so wholehearted or so seductive. But to yield was to cease to be myself, to trust to the unknown. And like the chief minister, I became very frightened.
We went to a smaller room for the dinner. The walls were of plain brick, rose-coloured, pale, seemingly dusted over, very attractive. Eventually the gefilte fish, which had been promised since the afternoon, came. I didn’t like the way it looked, and have no memory of it. The idea of something pounded to paste, then spiced or oiled, worked on by fingers, brought to mind thoughts of hand lotions and other things. I became fearful of smelling it. I couldn’t eat it. With the coo-coo or the foo-foo in the Maida Vale flat I had been able to hide what I did to the things on my plate. That couldn’t be done here: everyone knew that the gefilte fish had been specially prepared for Lebrun’s friend from London.
Manners never frayed. Conversation revived. But the embarrassment that began in the dining room lasted until I was taken back to the Manhattan hotel.
• • •
THE ART collectors we know about and envy are the successful ones, like those who a hundred years ago bought Van Gogh and early Cézanne for very little. The people we don’t know about from that period are the people who — perhaps with equal passion — collected works by contemporaries who have faded. I once asked a London dealer about such collectors. Did they get to know at a certain moment that they had been wrong? The dealer was unexpectedly vehement. Bad collectors, he said, were a type: they believed in themselves more than in the art they paid for.
I wonder whether that was also true of Lebrun’s New York patrons, or whether they had to find other ways over the next few years of acknowledging that the news he had been giving them was wrong, that the special revolution he had promised in the islands wasn’t going to happen.
The politics of the islands never really changed. The leaders who had come to power at the end of the colonial time — like the chief minister who had ordered Lebrun off his little island — remained in power. It didn’t matter that many of them were bored and didn’t do much. They were all in their different ways racial leaders, and the first successful ones. They were very local, and for that reason special, each man embodying in his territory the idea of black redemption. In the almost mystical relationship between these very local men and their followers there was no room for Lebrun.
He was now old and very poor, a revolutionary without a revolution, occasionally flourishing (as his enemies reported) on the bounty of women admirers from the past, but at other times living a hard bohemian life, lodging in other people’s houses or apartments in the Caribbean and Central America, in England and Europe, and always moving on. I grew to feel that at some stage he had given up, lost faith in his cause — though nothing was said, and though, earning his keep, he continued to write communist-slanted articles in small-circulation left-wing magazines.
Lebrun and I never met after that evening in the Maida Vale flat; but I saw him a few times on television when he was very old, and because of that I have the feeling I witnessed his ageing and physical decay. We kept up the courtesies after the New York embarrassment. We exchanged letters; sometimes he sent me magazines containing articles he had written in which he referred to my work. Those references became fewer; finally they stopped.