A Writer's People Read Online Free PDF Page A

certain cultures, have to be written about in a certain way. These ways are not interchangeable; you cannot write about Nigerian tribal life as you would write about the English Midlands. Shakespeare when he borrowed was exchanging like against like. It is the better and truer part of the labour of a writer froma new place to work out what his material is, to wring substance from the unwritten-about and unregarded local scene.
    Walcott was lucky in his early audience. They were middle-class people mainly of mixed race who had begun to have some idea of the spiritual emptiness in which they lived. They would not have been able to define that emptiness. Yet it was there, all around them. The beaches of which they were proud, almost as of a personal possession, might have given them an idea of the beginning of the emptiness. If they could have looked at those beaches in another way they might have seen the past in a simple picture: New World islands scraped clean of the aborigines Columbus and his successors saw. This was history, though, far off, not to be looked at too closely, not to be felt in the bones. The unhappy middle-class people would have thought mainly of the later colonial set-up and their place within it, the secure but petty civil-service jobs, the small pay, the general absence of grandeur, the need always to look outside for anything—a film, a book, the life of a great man—that might lift a man out of himself.
    The competing empires of Europe had beaten fiercely on these islands, repeopled after the aborigines had gone, turned into sugar islands, places of the lash, where fortunes could be made, sugar the new gold. And at the end, after slavery and sugar, Europe had left behind nothing that could be called a civilisation, no great architecture, no idea of local beauty, no memory of style and splendour (the splendour created by the sugar wealth would have occurred elsewhere, in Europe), only the smallest small change of civility. Everything that remainedwas touched with the pain of slavery: the brutalities of the popular language, and the prejudices of race: nothing a man would wish to call his own. And when in the 1940s middle-class people with no home but the islands began to understand the emptiness they were inheriting (before black people claimed it all) they longed for a local culture, something of their very own, to give them a place in the world.
    Walcott in 1949 more than met their need. He sang the praises of the emptiness; he gave it a kind of intellectual substance. He gave their unhappiness a racial twist which made it more manageable.
    Then he went stale on them. He exhausted the first flush of his talent; nothing more seemed to be coming; and he became ordinary, a man in need of a job.
    In time he began to work on the Trinidad
Sunday Guardian
, doing a weekly cultural article. He was too good for the job; and in 1960, when I was in Trinidad on a visit, he told me that someone had said to him, “Walcott, you’ve been promising for too damn long, you know.” He told it as a joke, but it wouldn’t have been a joke for him. From this situation he was rescued by the American universities; and his reputation there, paradoxically, then and later, was not that of a man whose talent had been all but strangled by his colonial setting. He became the man who had stayed behind and found beauty in the emptiness from which other writers had fled: a kind of model, in the eyes of people far away.
    â€¢Â Â Â â€¢Â Â Â â€¢
    O THER WRITERS FROM THE REGION were not so lucky. I will mention three: Edgar Mittelholzer, Samuel Selvon, and my own father.
    Edgar Mittelholzer, born more than twenty years before Walcott, in 1909 in Guyana, had a hard, wandering early life. His well-received novel,
A Morning at the Office
, now vanished, was published in London by the Hogarth Press in 1950, the year after Walcott’s
25 Poems
was privately published in Barbados. Like Walcott,