with the simplest idea of society or human association: outside the family, the sugar estates, the oilfields, the government buildings. Politics at one time meant a bearded Grenadian called Tubal Uriah Buzz Butler, a Bible-crazed Negro with ideas of the racial apocalypse. He had brought about a big strike on the oilfields in 1937 (during which a black policeman had been burned alive), and he really had no idea what to do next. Politics might also mean Albert Gomes, the Portuguese fat man in Port of Spain, with his Stalin moustache, dreaming of being the leader of the three hundred thousand blacks of Trinidad.
To read, in this setting, about the court of Louis XIV (inthe âTeach Yourself Historyâ series in order to get background for Molière and the others), or the French Revolution, or the baffling political changes of the nineteenth century in France, was to read about a fairyland. No one seemed real. What was a court? What were courtiers? What was an aristocrat? I had to make them up in my mind, though for the most part I left them as words. In this way I picked up many facts, insubstantial, hard to get a grip on, but I lived in a cloud of not-knowing, and the world around me, in my grandmotherâs house during its religious occasions, and in my school books, was a blur. I lived easily with this; it had come to me, strangely, with my education, my little learning; and I thought only that was how it was.
This was the lack of vision I took with me to England with my bright boyâs scholarship. I had first to understand the lack and had then to read and write myself out of it.
But I feel that the writers I couldnât read were also partly to blame. If in 1955 I didnât know what
The Quiet American
was about, and had to leave the book two-thirds of the way, it was because Graham Greene hadnât made his subject clear. He had assumed that his world was the only one that mattered. He was like Flaubert in
Sentimental Education
, assuming that the complicated, clotted history of mid-nineteenth-century France was all-important and known. Not all metropolitan writers were like Flaubert and Greene, though. Maupassant in his stories, with little room to manoeuvre, but with his details of time and place always concrete, giving even minor figures a name and a family history (he always deals with a whole life), made his far-off world complete and accessible, even universal. Youdidnât need to know the history of nineteenth-century France to understand the awfulness of his peasants or the wounds of the Franco-Prussian War. The Russians (with the exception of Turgenev) were always clear. Mark Twain from far-away Missouri was always clear. And it seemed, in a strange way, that at the end, when the dust settled, the people who wrote as though they were at the centre of things might be revealed as the provincials.
In 1955, the year of
The Quiet American
, Evelyn Waugh published
Officers and Gentlemen
, the second volume of his war trilogy. This gave me trouble too. I felt, in spite of the usual disclaimer, that it was too close to fact. It required some knowledge of the course of the war and of a small campaign in a small place; and it was written in a mannered, flippant way. There were many lines of unattributed dialogue: you had to work back to find out who the speaker was. The mode might have been meant to be a form of understatement, but it was also a lazy carry-over from the pre-war comedies, suited to idle chatter, and not suited to the early stages of a terrible war. Above all, this book was laden with a strange vanity, not a national vanity, which would have been understandable in a book about war, but a social vanity within that, as of a man, melancholy before the war, who then in the middle of the war had found higher values: comradeship among people he recognised as his superiors. This was strangely like Kipling, and it made the work very private.
It was a relief, in a way, to understand from
To read, in this setting, about the court of Louis XIV (inthe âTeach Yourself Historyâ series in order to get background for Molière and the others), or the French Revolution, or the baffling political changes of the nineteenth century in France, was to read about a fairyland. No one seemed real. What was a court? What were courtiers? What was an aristocrat? I had to make them up in my mind, though for the most part I left them as words. In this way I picked up many facts, insubstantial, hard to get a grip on, but I lived in a cloud of not-knowing, and the world around me, in my grandmotherâs house during its religious occasions, and in my school books, was a blur. I lived easily with this; it had come to me, strangely, with my education, my little learning; and I thought only that was how it was.
This was the lack of vision I took with me to England with my bright boyâs scholarship. I had first to understand the lack and had then to read and write myself out of it.
But I feel that the writers I couldnât read were also partly to blame. If in 1955 I didnât know what
The Quiet American
was about, and had to leave the book two-thirds of the way, it was because Graham Greene hadnât made his subject clear. He had assumed that his world was the only one that mattered. He was like Flaubert in
Sentimental Education
, assuming that the complicated, clotted history of mid-nineteenth-century France was all-important and known. Not all metropolitan writers were like Flaubert and Greene, though. Maupassant in his stories, with little room to manoeuvre, but with his details of time and place always concrete, giving even minor figures a name and a family history (he always deals with a whole life), made his far-off world complete and accessible, even universal. Youdidnât need to know the history of nineteenth-century France to understand the awfulness of his peasants or the wounds of the Franco-Prussian War. The Russians (with the exception of Turgenev) were always clear. Mark Twain from far-away Missouri was always clear. And it seemed, in a strange way, that at the end, when the dust settled, the people who wrote as though they were at the centre of things might be revealed as the provincials.
In 1955, the year of
The Quiet American
, Evelyn Waugh published
Officers and Gentlemen
, the second volume of his war trilogy. This gave me trouble too. I felt, in spite of the usual disclaimer, that it was too close to fact. It required some knowledge of the course of the war and of a small campaign in a small place; and it was written in a mannered, flippant way. There were many lines of unattributed dialogue: you had to work back to find out who the speaker was. The mode might have been meant to be a form of understatement, but it was also a lazy carry-over from the pre-war comedies, suited to idle chatter, and not suited to the early stages of a terrible war. Above all, this book was laden with a strange vanity, not a national vanity, which would have been understandable in a book about war, but a social vanity within that, as of a man, melancholy before the war, who then in the middle of the war had found higher values: comradeship among people he recognised as his superiors. This was strangely like Kipling, and it made the work very private.
It was a relief, in a way, to understand from
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