Sunrise with Seamonsters (15 page)

Sit in a room in Singapore and try to write. Every sound is an interruption, and your mind blurs each time a motorcycle or a plane or a funeral passes. If you live near a main road, as I do, there will be three funerals a day (Chinese funerals are truckloads of gong-orchestras and brass bands playing familiar songs like "It's A Long Way To Tipperary"). The day the Bengali gardener mows the grass is a day wasted. Hawkers cycle or drive by and each stops; you learn their individual yells, the bean-curd man with his transistor and sidecar, the fish-ball man on his bike, the ice-cream seller with his town crier's bell (a mid-afternoon interruption), the breadman in his Austin van, leaning on the horn; the elderly Chinese lady crouching in her
sam foo
and crying "
Yeggs!
" through the door, the Tamil newsboy, a toddy alcoholic, muttering "Baybah, baybah". Before the British forces left there was a fish-and-chip van; it didn't beep, but there were yells. The Singaporean doesn't stir from his house. He waits in the coolness of his parlor for the deliverers to arrive. The yells and gongs, at first far off, then closer, console him. It is four-thirty, and here comes the coconut-seller ringing his bicycle bell. He has a monkey, a macaque the size of a four-year-old, on the crossbar. The coconut-seller is crazy; the buyers make him linger and they laugh at him. A crowd gathers to jeer him; he chases some children and then goes away. After dark the grocery truck parks in front of your house; the grocer has a basket of fish, a slaughtered pig, and the whole range of Ma-Ling canned goods ("Tripe in Duck Grease", "Chicken Feet," "Lychees in Syrup") and for an hour you will hear the yelp and gargle of bartering. You have written nothing.

The heat and light; you asked for those in coming so far, but it is hotter, though less bright than you imagined—Singapore is usually cloudy, averaging only six hours of sunshine a day. That persistent banging and screeching is an annoyance that makes you hotter still. You are squinting at the pen which is slipping out of your slick fingers and wondering why you bothered to come.

Slowly, it happens, a phrase, a sentence, a paragraph. Nothing comes out right the first time, and you are not so much writing as learning a language, inching along in what seems at times like another tongue. A characteristic of writing in the tropics is this recopying, rewriting, beginning again, and understanding that it will take a long time, whatever you write: it has taken me a week to get this far with this little essay. It is not impossible to finish, just hard, because many things have to be in your
favor: it can't be too hot, it must be quiet, two or three hours have to be totally free of interruption; your health must be good and your mood fairly bright—a late night, an argument or a hangover means a lost day.

But the fact of being in a foreign place has made you small. You are not a public figure (public figures who are habitually vocal are deported), simply an English teacher. The bookstores do not stock your novels, or anyone's. No one is going to ask you to lecture at the National Library on "The Future of the Novel"; the worst that can happen, if it is known you are a writer, is that you'll be asked to edit the church newsletter. You are unaware of any sense of celebrity or reputation. That happened last year, in another country, when your novel appeared; and there hasn't been a murmur since. Everything has to be proven anew, and if you need humility, look at the bookshelf behind you where your novels, even last year's, have become mildewed and discolored in the humidity: they could be the books of a dead man. No one where you live has the slightest idea of what you are doing. To write you have withdrawn, like any conscientious hobbyist; and ceasing to live in the place you may be lonelier: your world is your house, your family, your desk; abroad is a bar.

It is a form of eccentricity, but in the tropics the eccentric is common, and far from being held in contempt, he is regarded as rather special and left alone. At Makerere University in Uganda, one head of department was never seen. He didn't teach his classes; he was never sober; he was said to be a great character. He had many defenders. There was a professor of philosophy in Singapore who used to saunter down the street in his pajamas, reading difficult books. This was his uniqueness. He was watched but never pestered. Expatriates by the very fact of their having come to the tropics are considered by the locals to be somewhat crazed, and the expatriate who fails to be a person in any subtle sense can still, with a little effort, succeed as "a character". This requires a specific obsession, a singular tic of personality. Your distinguishing mark might be your continual absence ("Oh,
him—
he's
never
around"), and if not doing your job is your affectation, then you may proceed with other things. What does it matter if anyone sees this as dereliction? You are an expatriate on contract, not an exile; you intend to go home eventually. Gain a modest reputation for being unreliable and you will never be asked to do a thing. The students will become used to receiving their essays late.

The students demand less than American ones; the system, Oxbridge in equatorial decline, forces them to work alone. They are as insular as their parents and subservient to the government; their civic-mindedness takes the form of fashion shows for charity. They are intelligent, nervous, inexperienced and poorly read. Many would like to emigrate to Australia (Singaporeans talk reverently about Australia, the way people from
Massachusetts used to talk about California: "Plenty of opportunities there, and a really nice climate"). Like students in developing countries everywhere their speech is a mixture of the bookish and the political ("whilst we go from strength to strength", "timorous Claudio is part and parcel..."). Some in essays sound like Jacobeans. One discovers Irving Ribner and tears him to shreds; another who has never heard of the First World War writes about Wilfred Owen. There is no American literature. "Richard Cory" is said to be an old English ballad, and Herman Woo and Heidi Chin think the eponymous hero's name "ridiculous and comic". Except for the archaic phrases the students write clearly, in mission school copperplate; they speak less well, and in a tutorial sometimes spell out the word they want to say. Lady Macbeth is "roofless" or "rootless", and Dickens is very good at "crating a crackter". It is easy to laugh at such lapses, until one reminds oneself of the emigré scientists in the States—brilliant men in their fields—pronouncing their original sentences all wrong. Chinese students are plagued by glottal stops and certain consonants, and they always speak very fast. In a tutorial a girl holding a leatherbound book reads aloud to prove a point she has just made:

Must dow esplain da ting I hate most on erf,
Da treason, da shame, da assident of my berf!

In a lecture on
Tamburlaine
I repeat the line, "Holla, ye pampered jades of Asia!" They smile earnestly in recognition. What will become of them? It is a foreigner's question. Their parents have saluted four different flags, some more; in twenty-five years, when these students are middle-aged, what flag will be flying over the Singapore City Hall? It is futile to speculate, but not less worrying for the person who has spent three years among them, who knows many as friends and who has come to understand that the student who says, "Must dow esplain ..." is no fool.

I never traveled much in the United States, but I remember my two older brothers making a train journey from Boston to Ohio when I was seven or eight—in the late 'forties. Somehow we had the idea that people in Ohio suffered from a lack of iodine because of the scarcity of fish. The Ohioans were afflicted by goiters, and people walked around Cleveland with bulbous growths on their necks. I was too young to go to Ohio, but I remember my brothers' stories: about their meal on the train, how the waiter brought their change back on a plate (a
plate!
), the flatness of Ohio, and they
had
seen some people with goiters, and one elderly lady called my brothers "Yankees". They had their rolls of film developed; the
results were blurred and banal, every one was a disappointment: Ohio, which sounded so foreign, looked like Massachusetts.

Growing up, I mistrusted anyone who had not traveled. I thought of becoming a White Father, not out of any piety but from a desire to be sent to Africa. I thought of becoming a doctor: then I could have a useful occupation overseas. When I was nineteen or twenty I applied for a job in a Lebanese university, and having fabricated much of the application, was called for an interview in a Boston hotel. The interviewer was kind, asked me my age, then smiled and said I wouldn't do: Beirut was a rough city, and "there is always some kind of trouble in the Arab quarter". I finally left in the spring of 1963, and I have not been back in the States for more than a few weeks at a time, a total of about four months in nine years. Now I want to go back for good, not because it is too difficult to live abroad—only writing is hard in the tropics—but perhaps because it is too easy. Africa, for all its mystery and strangeness, unquote, is really a very simple place to live. Africans are candid and hospitable, and make it easy for you to live among them. The Chinese in Singapore appear not to see you; the students do not greet you or each other. Anonymity is simple.

Living among strangers in a foreign place I am like an unexpected guest waiting in a tropical parlor. My mind is especially alert to differences of smell and sound, the shape of objects, and I am apprehensive about what is going to happen next. I sit with my knees together in the heat, observing the surfaces of things. At the same time, the place is so different I can indulge myself in long unbroken reflections, for the moments of observation are still enough to allow the mind to travel in two directions: recording mentally the highly-colored things one sees is simple; the mind then wanders. The reflection may be a reminiscence of early youth, a piecing-together of an episode out of the distant past; it is not contradicted or interrupted by anything near. In a foreign country I can live in two zones of time, the immediate and apprehensible, and in that vaguer zone I thought I had forgotten. Since I do not write autobiographically, I am able to see the past more clearly; I haven't altered it in fiction. That detail of the goiters in Ohio, the forsythia bush behind our Medford house, our large family; slowly, in a foreign place, the memory whirrs and gives back the past. It is momentarily a reassurance, the delay of any daydream, but juxtaposed with the vivid present it is an acute reminder of my estrangement.

And it may be wasteful and near senility, this reaching back that living abroad allows. Certainly trivial details can be strongly visualized: twenty-five years ago I pulled myself up the side of my grandfather's rainbarrel and looked in and saw mosquito larvae twitching near the surface like tiny seahorses. I had not thought of it until yesterday, in a suburb of Singapore. I wonder at its importance.

Most of a writer's life is spent in pure idleness, not writing a thing. Up to now I have used this idleness to poke in places with bewitching names, Sicily, the Congo, Malaya, Burma, Singapore, Java; this distraction could be a form of indulgence, but I can't think what else I should have done. I know it is a mistake to stay away from home too long, and it is foolish if one calls oneself a writer to go on teaching. The professions are separate; I admire the people who can write love-scenes after work. I can't, and it is unprofitable to pose as if I can. I told a colleague I was leaving. She was concerned. She believes my subjects are little countries. She said, "But if you live in Europe or America, what will you write about?" We'll see.

I had been in Africa for a little over three years, writing every day; I was full of ideas, full of books and plans. This was in Uganda. I was a lecturer in the Department of Extra-Mural Studies at Makerere University. We ran weekend courses for adults in upcountry towns (now, most of those adults are dead and their towns burned to the ground). One day in 1966, a man on the English Department said, "V. S. Naipaul is coming next week. He's joining the department. He'll be with us for about six months."

He never gave a lecture; I don't think he set foot in the department, and towards the end of his term he moved into a hotel in western Kenya. He hated the house he had been given. "Everybody gets those houses," a woman told him. He said, "I'm not everybody." He refused to put a nameboard on his house; and then he had an idea: "I'll have a sign saying 'Teas' and as you go up the road past the houses you'll see 'Smith,' 'Jones,' 'Brown,' 'Teas!'" He was asked to judge a literary competition. None of the entries was good enough for first or second prize: the single winner got third prize. He had some writing students; he invited them to his house and, one by one, urged them not to write. He gave the university's name a Scottish pronunciation, something like
MacArayray.
He said African names baffled him. "Mah-boya" he said for Mboya, "Nah-googy" for Ngugi, and an Englishman named Cook he called "Mah-Cook," because the man wore an African shirt and was full of enthusiasm for bad African poems. Naipaul bought a floppy military hat and a walking stick. He walked around Kampala, frowning. "See how they make paths everywhere—every park is crisscrossed with paths!" he said. "They do exactly as they please, that's why they're so happy," he said of the Africans. "But the English here are shameless. They're inferior, you know. Most of the men are buggers. That's why they're here." He liked referring to Ghana as "The Gold Coast" and Tanzania as "Tanganyika" and towards the end of his stay in East Africa, when Indians were being persecuted in Kenya and Uganda, he advised the Indian High Commissioner to cable his government urging a punitive mission. "Anchor a few battleships off Mombasa. Shell the coast. Mah-boya will change his tune."

I had never met anyone like him. We were introduced at one of Mah-Cook's poetry sessions. Afterwards, Naipaul asked me casually what I had thought of it. "Awful," I said, and from that moment we were friends. I told him how much I enjoyed his books. This pleased him, and if I gave him a line I liked he could give me the next one. He knew his books by heart, having copied them out in longhand two or three times—that was his writing method. He was impressed that I had read so many of his books—no one else in Kampala had. "No one reads here," he said. "They're all inferior. Obote puts a bronze plaque of his face over the Parliament Building and everyone thinks it's wonderful. He's a dictator! This country is slowly turning back into bush!"