A Way in the World Read Online Free PDF

demeanour, and went into local politics. He judged the moment well. He shot up, and then, in a decolonizing world, he rose and rose. He was to have an international career. Nearly twenty years later we were to meet in an independent East African country. He had gone there to work for the local government on a short-term contract. He would have been especially pleased by this assignment in independent Africa; but it was there, not long after we had met again, that he was to die, murdered by the agents of some wild men in the government who felt threatened by him. For two days Blair’s big, mangled body lay undiscovered in a banana plantation, partly covered by dead banana leaves. A career is a career; and death is inescapable. I do not know whether the ironies of his death made a mockery of that career or undid the virtue of it. But that matter will be raised in this book in its place.
    Remember him now, in the office at the Red House: at that mid-point in his career, when with his extraordinary gifts he could have gone one way or the other. Remember him (like me) trailing all the strands of his own complicated past, animated by that past, feeling the current running with him (as the lawyer Evander did), and feeling (again like me)as he studied after work that he was at the most hopeful time of his life.
    WHEN I HAD free time—usually an hour or two a day—I did my writing, the way Blair did his studying. But I had nothing to write about: I was just preparing to be a writer. I kept a kind of notebook and in turquoise ink wrote comments about books I had read and thoughts about life. What I wrote was pretentious and false; I thought of it like that even when I was doing it, and wouldn’t have wanted anyone to see it, though with a small part of my mind I was hoping it was profound. Sometimes I wrote descriptions of landscapes: the Petit Valley woods, remnants of old cocoa estates in the hills to the north-west of the city, after afternoon rain. Sometimes I did Port of Spain scenes: the Western Main Road in St. James at night, after rain (more rain), the red neon Coca-Cola sign on the Rialto cinema flicking on and off, the shiny uneven asphalt reflecting the lights of cars and open shops, the naked light bulbs in the parlours, the flies sleeping on the hanging electric cord, rough with their droppings, the bald head of the Chinese parlour-keeper, the smeared glasscase with stale, floury cakes and soft coconut turnovers. I liked doing those tableaux. I liked even more correcting them, for the sake of the appearance of the corrected page. Artificial, but everything I worked on in this way stayed with me, and years later those descriptions were to be a key to events and moods I had thought beyond recall.
    I went one Saturday or Sunday to a black beauty contest at the Rialto. I went for the material; I hadn’t gone to any beauty contest before that. It was a shabby occasion, shabby to everyone except perhaps one or two of the girls. It wasn’t really funny; I hadn’t found it so; but I tried to write a funny piece about it. There had been no twist, but I tried to give it one: I made the queen cry because of the hoots of the crowd.The writing took two or three weeks, too much time for the simple or flat things I had to say. I wrote with pen and then on an office typewriter, correcting and correcting, deliberately lengthening out the writing time. The correcting didn’t help; it made the essay more and more of a school-magazine piece, with the humour depending more on words than on observation or true feeling.
    I concentrated in what I wrote on the master of ceremonies: his formal clothes, his ungrammatical speech, his vanity. I showed the finished article to a black woman typist in the office whom I had got to know. She held the sheets against her high standard typewriter and read them through. I thought she smiled once or twice, but at the end she said, “If it was an Indian man, you wouldn’t have written like that.”
    It