Literary Occasions (13 page)

He had been brought out from England to Trinidad, on the recommendation of
The Times,
to modernize the
Trinidad Guardian.
The
Port of Spain Gazette,
founded in 1832, and representing French creole planter and business interests, was the established local paper. The
Guardian,
started in 1917, and representing other business interests, was floundering a long way behind. Its make-up was antiquated: on the front page a rectangle of closely printed news cables was set in a big frame of shop advertisements.

MacGowan changed the front page. He gave the
Guardian
a London look. He had a London feeling for international news (“Daily at Dawn—Last Night’s News in London”). And to the affairs of multi-racial Trinidad he brought what, in local journalism, was absolutely new: a tourist’s eye. Everything was worth looking at; there was a story in almost everything. And there were real excitements: French fugitives from Devil’s Island, voodoo in negro backyards, Indian obeah, Venezuelan vampire bats (at one time the
Guardian
saw them flying about in daylight everywhere, and this concern with bats was to get both
MacGowan and my father into trouble). Every community interested MacGowan. The Indians of the countryside were cut off by language, religion and culture from the rest of the colonial population. MacGowan became interested in them—as material, and also as potential readers.

It was as an Indian voice, a reforming, “controversial” Indian voice (“Trinidad Indians Are Not Sincere”), that my father began to appear in MacGowan’s
Guardian,
doing an occasional column signed “The Pundit.” My feeling now is that these columns must have been rewritten by MacGowan, or (though my mother says no) that some of the material was plagiarized by my father from the reformist Hindu literature he had begun to read.

But a relationship was established between the two men. And my father—at a starting salary of four dollars a week—began to do reporting. There the voice was his own, the knowledge of Trinidad Indian life was his own; and the zest—for news, for the drama of everyday life, for human oddity—the zest for looking with which MacGowan infected him became real. He developed fast.

Even when there was no news, there could be news. “Chaguanas Man Writes Lindbergh—‘I Know Where Your Baby Is.’” “Indians Pray for Gandhi—Despair in Chaguanas.”

It must have been MacGowan who suggested to my father that everybody had a story. Was that really so? Not far from my mother’s family house in Chaguanas was the railway crossing. Twice or four times a day an old one-armed negro closed and opened the gates. Did that man have a story? The man himself didn’t seem to think so. He lived in absolute harmony with the long vacancies of his calling, and the brightest thing about my father’s piece was MacGowan’s headline: “Thirty-six Years of Watching a Trinidad Railway Gate.”

More rewarding was the Indian shopkeeper a couple of houses down on the other side of the road. He was a man of the merchant caste who had come out to Trinidad as an indentured
labourer. Field labour, and especially “heading” manure, carrying baskets of manure on his head, like untouchables in India, had been a humiliation and a torment to him. In the beginning he had cried at night; and sometimes his day’s “task” so wore him out that he couldn’t cook his evening meal. Once he had eaten a piece of sugar-cane in the field, and he had been fined a dollar, almost a week’s wage. But he had served out his five-year indenture, and his caste instincts had reasserted themselves. He had made money as a merchant and was soon to build one of the earliest cinemas in the countryside. It was a good story; in Trinidad at that time, only my father could have done it.

MacGowan increased the circulation of the
Guardian.
But the directors of the paper had other local business interests as well, and they felt that MacGowan was damaging these interests. MacGowan, fresh from the depression in England, wanted to run a “Buy British” campaign; the chairman of the
Guardian
directors owned a trading company which dealt in American goods. The chairman had land at Macqueripe Bay; MacGowan campaigned for a road to Maracas Bay, where the chairman had no land. Some of the directors had invested in tourist ventures; MacGowan was running stories in the
Guardian
about “mad bats” that flew about in daylight, and his cables to
The Times
and
New York Times
about vampire bats and a special Trinidad form of rabies were said to be frightening away cruise ships.

Paralytic rabies was, in fact, killing cattle in Trinidad at this time. And for all the playfulness of his “mad bat” campaign (“Join the Daylight Bat Hunt—Be First”), MacGowan was acting on good advice. A local French creole doctor had recently established the link between bats and paralytic rabies, and was experimenting with a vaccine; the work of this doctor, Pawan, was soon to be acknowledged in text books of tropical medicine. But the
Guardian
chairman, who said later he had never heard of anyone in Trinidad dying from a bat bite, decided that MacGowan had to go.

MacGowan couldn’t be sacked; he had his contract. He
could, however, be attacked; and the editor of the
Port of Spain Gazette,
whom MacGowan had often satirized, was only too willing to help. “Scaremongering MacGowan Libels Trinidad in Two Continents”: this was a headline in the
Gazette
one day. MacGowan sued and won. Journalistically, the case was also a triumph: the
Guardian
and its editor had become serious news in both papers. It was even better journalism when MacGowan sued the
Guardian
chairman for slander. For three weeks, in a realization of a Fleet Street ideal, the
Guardian
became its own big news, with the chairman, the editor and the editor’s journalistic style getting full-page treatment day after day. But MacGowan lost the case. And all Trinidad knew what until then had been known only to a few: that at the end of his contract MacGowan would be leaving.

MacGowan left. My father stayed behind. He became disturbed, fell ill, lost his job, and was idle and dependent for four years. In 1938, in the house of my mother’s mother in Port of Spain, he came fully into my life for the first time. And in his clippings book, an old estate wages ledger, I came upon his relics of his heroic and hopeful time with MacGowan.

This was, very roughly, what I knew when, two years after I had written about Bogart and the life of the street, I thought of reconstructing the life of someone like my father. I had changed flats in London; and my mind went back to 1938, to my discovery of the few pieces of furniture which my father had brought with him to Port of Spain, the first furniture I had thought of as mine. I wanted to tell the story of the life as the story of the acquiring of those simple, precious pieces. The book took three years to write. It changed; and the writing changed me. I was writing about things I didn’t know; and the book that came out was very much my father’s book. It was written out of his journalism and stories, out of his knowledge, knowledge he had got from the way of looking MacGowan had trained him in. It was written out of his writing.

The book was read some years later—in Moscow—by a
New
York Times
writer, Israel Shenker. In 1970, in London, he interviewed me for his paper; he was doing a series on writers. Some weeks later he sent me a copy of a clipping from the
New York Herald Tribune
of 24 June 1933, and asked for my comments.

I was staggered. I had no memory of this incident. I had read nothing about it in my father’s ledger. I had heard nothing about it from my father or mother or anybody else. All that I remembered was that my father had a special horror of the Kali cult; and that he had told me once, with one of his rages about the family, that my mother’s mother had been a devotee of Kali.

I wrote to Shenker that the story was probably one of MacGowan’s joke stories, with my father trying to make himself his own news. That was what I believed, and the matter went to the back of my mind.

Two years later, when I was in Trinidad, I went to look at the
Guardian
file in the Port of Spain newspaper library. To me,
until then, in spite of education, writing and travel, everything connected with my family past had seemed irrecoverable, existing only in fading memory. (All my father’s documents, even his ledger, had been lost.)

Here were printed records. Here, in the sequence in which they had fallen in the mornings on the front steps of the Port of Spain house, were the
Guardian
s of 1938 and 1939, once looked at without being understood: the photographs of scholarship winners (such lucky men), the sports pages (with the same, often-used photographs of great cricketers), the cinema advertisements that had awakened such longing (Bobby Breen in
Rainbow on the River
).

And then, going back, I rediscovered parts of my father’s ledger. I found that the ledger I had grown up with was not complete. My father had left out some things. The clipping Shenker had sent me told a true story. It was a bigger story than I had imagined, and it was not comic at all. It was the story of a great humiliation. It had occurred just when my father was winning through to a kind of independence, and had got started in his vocation. The independence was to go within months. The vocation—in a colonial Trinidad, without MacGowan—was to become meaningless; the vacancy was to be with my father for the rest of his life.

I had known about my father’s long nervous illness. I hadn’t know about its origins. My own ambitions had been seeded in something less than half knowledge of my father’s early writing life.

MY FATHER,
when I got to know him, was full of rages against my mother’s family. But his early writings for the
Guardian
show that shortly after his marriage he was glamoured by the family.

They were a large brahmin family of landowners and pundits. Nearly all the sons-in-law were the sons of pundits, men with big names in our own private world, our island India. Caste had won my father admittance to the family, and for some time he seemed quite ready, in his
Guardian
reports, to act as a kind of family herald. “Popular Hindu Engagement—Chaguanas Link with Arouca”: MacGowan couldn’t have known, but this item of “Indian” news was really a family circular, court news: it was about the engagement of my grandmother’s eldest granddaughter.

With the departure of my mother’s father for India, and his subsequent death, the direction of the family had passed to the two eldest sons-in-law. They were brothers. They were ambitious and energetic men. They were concerned with the establishing of the local Hindu-Muslim school; with the affairs of the Local Road Board; and—in those days of the property franchise—with the higher politics connected with the island Legislative Council. They were also, as brahmins of the Tiwari clan, defenders of the orthodox Hindu faith—against Presbyterianism, then making converts among Hindus; and also against those reforming Hindu movements that had sent out missionaries from India. The brothers sought to be leaders; and they liked a fight. They were engaged in constant power games, which sometimes took a violent turn, with other families who also presumed to lead.

To belong to the family was to be in touch with much that was important in Indian life; or so my father made it. And in MacGowan’s
Guardian
Indian news became mainly Chaguanas news, and Chaguanas news was often family news. “600 at Mass Meeting to Protest the Attitude of Cipriani.” That was news, but it was also a family occasion: the meeting had been convened by the two senior sons-in-law. And when three days later the Chaguanas correspondent reported that feeling against Cipriani (a local politician) was still so strong that an eleven-year-old boy had been moved to speak “pathetically” at another
public gathering, MacGowan couldn’t have known that the boy in question was my mother’s younger brother. (He became a Reader in mathematics at London University; and thirty years after his “pathetic” speech he also became the first leader of the opposition in independent Trinidad.)

My father might begin a political item like this: “At a surprise meeting last night …” And the chances were that the meeting had taken place in the “hall,” the big downstairs room in the wooden house at the back of the main family house in Chaguanas.

But this closeness to the news-makers of Chaguanas had its strains. The family was a totalitarian organization. Decisions—about politics, about religious matters and, most importantly, about other families—were taken by a closed circle at the top—my grandmother and her two eldest sons-in-law. Everyone in the family was expected to fall into line; and most people did. There was something like a family propaganda machine constantly at work. It strengthened approved attitudes; it could also turn inwards, to discredit and humiliate dissidents. There was no plan; it simply happened like that, from the nature of our family organization. (When the two senior sons-in-law were eventually expelled from the family, the machine was easily turned against them.) And even today, when I meet descendants of families who were once “blacked” by my mother’s family, I can feel I am in the presence of the enemy. To grow up in a family or clan like ours was to accept the ethos of the feud.