Literary Occasions Read Online Free Page B

knowing much about new reputations, I tried plain English novels from the public library, too many questions got in the way—about the reality of the people, the artificiality of the narrative method, the purpose of the whole set-up thing, the end reward for me.
    My private anthology, and my father’s teaching, had given me a high idea of writing. And though I had started from a quite different corner, and was years away from understanding why I felt as I did, my attitude (as I was to discover) was like that of Joseph Conrad, himself at the time a just-published author, when he was sent the novel of a friend. The novel was clearly one of much plot; Conrad saw it not as a revelation of human hearts but as a fabrication of “events which properly speaking are
accidents
only.” “All the charm, all the truth,” he wrote to the friend, “are thrown away by the … mechanism (so to speak) of the story which makes it appear false.”
    For Conrad as for the narrator of
Under Western Eyes,
the discovery of every tale was a moral one. It was for me, too, without my knowing it. It was where the
Ramayana
and Aesop and Andersen and my private anthology (even the Maupassantand the O. Henry) had led me. When Conrad met H. G. Wells, who thought him too wordy, not giving the story straight, Conrad said, “My dear Wells, what is this
Love and Mr. Lewisham
about? What is all this about Jane Austin? What is it all
about
?”
    That was how I had felt in my secondary school, and for many years afterwards as well; but it had not occurred to me to say so. I wouldn’t have felt I had the right. I didn’t feel competent as a reader until I was twenty-five. I had by that time spent seven years in England, four of them at Oxford, and I had a little of the social knowledge that was necessary for an understanding of English and European fiction. I had also made myself a writer, and was able, therefore, to see writing from the other side. Until then I had read blindly, without judgement, not really knowing how made-up stories were to be assessed.
    Certain undeniable things, though, had been added to my anthology during my time at the secondary school. The closest to me were my father’s stories about the life of our community. I loved them as writing, as well as for the labour I had seen going into their making. They also anchored me in the world; without them I would have known nothing of our ancestry. And, through the enthusiasm of one teacher, there were three literary experiences in the sixth form:
Tartuffe,
which was like a frightening fairytale,
Cyrano de Bergerac,
which could call up the profoundest kind of emotion, and
Lazarillo de Tormes,
the mid-sixteenth-century Spanish picaresque story, the first of its kind, brisk and ironical, which took me into a world like the one I knew.
    That was all. That was the stock of my reading at the end of my island education. I couldn’t truly call myself a reader. I had never had the capacity to lose myself in a book; like my father, I could read only in little bits. My school essays weren’t exceptional; they were only crammer’s work. In spite of my father’s example with his stories I hadn’t begun to think in any concrete way about what I might write. Yet I continued to think of myself as a writer.
    It was now less a true ambition than a form of self-esteem, a dream of release, an idea of nobility. My life, and the life of our section of our extended family, had always been unsettled. My father, though not an orphan, had been a kind of waif since his childhood; and we had always been half dependent. As a journalist my father was poorly paid, and for some years we had been quite wretched, with no proper place to live. At school I was a bright boy; on the street, where we still held ourselves apart, I felt ashamed at our condition. Even after that bad time had passed, and we had moved, I was eaten up with anxiety. It was the emotion I felt I had always known.
4
    THE COLONIAL government gave