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piece of news. Edgar, who lived in a southern suburb of London, had one day soaked himself with petrol and set himself alight, like a Buddhist monk in Vietnam. I never got to know what had driven him to this, or how he had got the courage and resource. There was a story that he had become a Buddhist, which I would have thought the most difficult thing for an outsider to be; but I don’t know how true that was and what it meant, or how it could have converted into the final horror. In this horror there was yet so much awful method: going through hispapers, putting them in order (or perhaps wishing only to destroy them), going to the trouble of sending me the green booklet, and then remembering waspishly to ask for it back.
    A writer lives principally for his writing. Edgar, whatever might be said about his work, was a dedicated writer. And I wonder whether an idea at the back of his mind during those last days of pain and resolve wasn’t that he had got as far as he could with his writing.
    Samuel Selvon was a Trinidad Indian. He was born in 1923. He didn’t come (like my own family, say) from the more rooted rural Indian community, where an India of sorts could be said to survive. Selvon’s Indians were semi-urban people shaken loose from the rural community, and losing their traditions fast. After various wartime jobs Selvon joined the
Trinidad Guardian
and for a time did columns for the evening paper under the name of Michael Wentworth, very suave, very smooth, more like a disguise than a pen-name. In 1950 (four or five months before me) he went to England. In 1951 he published his first novel,
A Brighter Sun
, a simple reconstruction of wartime Trinidad life for a semi-urban Indian. It is hard to be the first with any kind of writing, and Selvon in this book burnt up his simple material.
    Trinidad was the subject best suited to Selvon’s talent. In far-off London it faded, or he lost touch with it. He had trouble with his second book,
An Island Is a World
. When at last it came it was wordy and absurd, full of poor man’s philosophizing about the beauty of the simple life in a simple setting (Selvon denying in this way the purpose of his own migration to England in 1950). He continued in much the same vein inthe
Caribbean Voices
studio, where we had asked him to record an interview. The prosiness and piety and self-regard were intolerable. I was young, not yet twenty-three. I heard myself saying, like a pompous Oxford don, “Most laudable.” That was the don, and it would have passed. Then, however, I went on with something of my very own: “But getting back to your wretched book—” The words had slipped out. Apology was useless (in spite of Sam’s forgiving sweet smile). We were recording on disc, and editing was not easy. The interview had to be scrapped. Forty years later I saw the offending book in an outside stand of the Gloucester Road Bookshop. It was being offered for five pence. I bought it, in a modest act of expiation, and put it on my shelves.
    Selvon would have fallen silent if he hadn’t alighted on the subject of the black West Indian immigrant in London. He was good with the popular black language; he could make it sing; and in his attractive natural way he did picaresque tales (The
Lonely Londoners
, 1956) which seemed drawn from life but were in fact formal, with their own rules, like Damon Runyon’s New York stories or like W. W. Jacob’s night-watchman stories from London’s old dockland. There was real comedy; the inventive things Selvon did with the Caribbean English language (he did not merely record it) should at least have earned him a place in the anthologies. But this new material, like the old Trinidad material, was limited. There were the same black characters, it seemed, and variations on the same joke (black people knocking hopelessly on white doors in London); and then characters and jokes were overtaken by social change in the