The idea behind the book, the narrative line, was to attach the island, the little place in the mouth of the Orinoco River, to great names and great events: Columbus; the search for El Dorado; Sir Walter Raleigh. Two hundred years after that, the growth of the slave plantations. And then the revolutions: the American Revolution; the French Revolution and its Caribbean byproduct, the black Haitian revolution; the South American revolution, and the great names of that revolution, Francisco Miranda, Bolívar. From the undiscovered continent to the fraudulence and chaos of revolution; from the discovery and Columbus and those lush aboriginal Indian “gardens” he had seen in 1498 in the south of the island (along beaches I knew, wide beaches down which freshwater streams flowing from woodland cut little channels to the sea, where yellow Orinoco floods mingled with the Atlantic), from the discovery by Columbus, a man of medieval Europe, to the disappearance of the Spanish Empire in the nineteenth century — this was the historical span of my story. At the end of the period of my story, Trinidad, detached from South America and Venezuela and the Spanish Empire, was a full British West Indian colony, an island of sugar and slaves (the aboriginal population extinct, forgotten). And then, within years, slavery was to be abolished; sugar was to cease to be of value; and this little corner of the New World, all ideas of its promise now abandoned, was to sink into its long nineteenth-century colonial torpor. While revolutionary Venezuela, no longer part of the Spanish Empire, was beginning its century of chaos.
I could see, in the documents of this later period, the lineaments of the world I had grown up in. Asian-Indian immigrants had come in the period of nineteenth-century torpor. As a schoolboy I had assumed that torpor to be a constant, something connected with the geographical location of the island, the climate, the quality of the light. It had never occurred to me that the drabness I knew had been man-made, that it had causes, that there had been other visions and indeed other landscapes there.
Reading the transcript (miraculously preserved) of the trial of a Negro slave for the murder of another slave in Port of Spain in the Spanish time, and picking up inconsequential details about the houses, the street life, the backyard or slave-yard love affairs and jealousies, I found I could easily think myself back into that Port of Spain street of two hundred years before. I could see the people, hear the speech and accents. In that street I could see the origin of the Port of Spain street I had spent part of my childhood in — the street whose life and people had been the subject of my first book.
That my Port of Spain street, which as a child I had studied with such intentness, could be material had come to me as an illumination in 1955, fully five years after I had come to England, five years after “Gala Night” and “Life in London” and “Angela” and other attempts at “metropolitan” writing. That illumination was still to some extent with me. I was still working out, in my writing, all the implications of that discovery. But it was astonishing to me to discover that the street life I had written about had such a past, that the street life I had witnessed as a child, or something like it, had existed in Port of Spain in 1790. While Trinidad was still part of the great and old Spanish Empire; while slavery still existed, and was forty-four years away from being abolished; when the French Revolution was still new, and the black Haitian revolution was still a year away.
These references — to the Spanish Empire and the Haitian revolution — would not have occurred to me when I had lived on the street. Even when at school I had got to know (as part of school learning) the historical facts about the region, they did not have any imaginative force for me. The squalor and pettiness and dinginess — the fowl coops and backyards and servant rooms and the many little houses on one small plot and the cesspits — seemed too new; everything in Port of Spain seemed to have been recently put together; nothing suggested antiquity, a past. To this there had to be added the child’s ignorance; and the special incompleteness of the Indian child, grandson of immigrants, whose past suddenly broke off, suddenly fell away into the chasm between the Antilles and India.
So, just as at the moment of takeoff in 1950 in the Pan American World Airways plane, I had been amazed by the brown-and-green pattern of fields which gave my island the appearance of other places photographed from the air, so now I was amazed, reading the documents of my island in London, by the antiquity of the place to which I belonged. Such simple things! Seeing the island as part of the globe, seeing it sharing in the antiquity of the earth! Yet these simple things came to me as revelations, so used had I been, in Trinidad, to roadside views, to seeing the agricultural colony at ground level, as it were, at the end of the great depression and the century-long colonial torpor. The landscape in my mind’s eye during the writing of this book became quite different in its feel and associations from the landscape of the earlier books.
The labor which at the beginning I had thought of as the labor of six months stretched to two years. Ever since I had begun to identify my subjects I had hoped to arrive, in a book, at a synthesis of the worlds and cultures that had made me. The other way of writing, the separation of one world from the other, was easier, but I felt it false to the nature of my experience. I felt in this history I had made such a synthesis. But it tired me.
And many months before finishing this book I thought I would put an end to my time in England; shed weariness, not only the weariness of the writing, but also the weariness of being in England, the rawness of my nerves as a foreigner, the weariness of my insecurity, social, racial, financial; put an end to the distortion of my personality that had begun on the very day I had left home; put an end to that journey which — in spite of the returns and other journeys in the interim — had remained the fracturing one that had begun that day when the Pan American plane, taking me up a few thousand feet above the island where I had lived all my life, had shown me a pattern of fields and colors I had never seen before.
I sold my house. A few weeks’ writing remained; and in the house to which I moved I began to feel very tired. I used to have two baths a day. The first bath was after breakfast, to wash away the effects of the sleeping pill that had kept my mind quiet during the night, had stopped me dealing in words, solving the problems of various parts of my book, had stopped me seeing all these problems come together into one unsolvable and alarming threat (in daylight I knew that writing problems were solved one by one). The second bath I had at the end of the day’s work. So morning and evening for ten or fifteen minutes at a time I soaked in warm water. One morning the idea came to me that I was like a corpse at the bottom of a river or stream, tossing in the current. I gave up the morning soak. But the idea of the corpse was hard to get rid of. It came back to me every time I had a bath.
At last the book was handed in, and I could leave England. I had no long-term plans. I could think ahead only to the freedom, the freedom of not having a book to write any more, the freedom to spend each day as I chose, the freedom to move from place to place, to say good-bye. I intended to be a roamer for a while, to live the hotel life. I intended also — at last — to spend a little time in the United States. Before that, there was some journalism to do: pieces on the Caribbean islands of St. Kitts and Anguilla, then in the news; and a piece on Belize, British Honduras, my first piece on Central America.
I went first of all to my own island, Trinidad. I wanted to see the island where I had been living in a new way in my imagination for the last two years, the island I had restored, as it were, to the globe and for which now I felt a deep romance.