The Lonely Londoners Read online

  SAM SELVON

  The Lonely Londoners

  With an Introduction by Susheila Nasta

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  THE LONELY LONDONERS

  SAM SELVON was born in Trinidad in 1923. From 1945–50, he worked as a journalist for the Trinidad Guardian and was literary editor of the Guardian Weekly. During this period he published a number of short stories and poems under pseudonyms before departing for London in 1950. Soon after his arrival in the metropolis his first full-length novel, A Brighter Sun (1952) appeared; it received much international acclaim and established Selvon as a major voice in contemporary literature. It was followed by a number of other influential works set both in London and in Trinidad. These include the collection of short stories Ways of Sunlight (1957); his London fictions – The Lonely Londoners (1956), The Housing Lark (1965), Moses Ascending (1975) and Moses Migrating (1983) – as well as his Trinidad novels – An Island Is a World (1955), Turn Again Tiger (1958), I Hear Thunder (1963), The Plains of Caroni (1970) and Those Who Eat the Cascadura (1972). Selvon remained in London until 1978 when he left the UK for Calgary in Canada. By the time of his departure from London he had earned the title of the ‘father of black writing’ in Britain. Sam Selvon died in 1994 on a brief trip home to Trinidad.

  SUSHEILA NASTA is a critic, teacher, editor and broadcaster. Currently a Reader in literature at the Open University, she has also taught at the universities of London and Cambridge. She has published and lectured widely in the field of contemporary twentieth-century literatures: particularly on Caribbean literature, women’s writing and the fictions of the black and South Asian diasporas. As Founding Editor of the distinguished international literary journal Wasafiri she has produced over forty-eight issues of the magazine since 1984. She has acted as literary judge for a number of literary awards and is currently a member of the advisory committee for the Commonwealth Writer’s prize. Her most recent monograph Home Truths: Fictions of the South Asian Diaspora in Britain was published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2002; her edited collection of over thirty interviews with international writers, Writing Across Worlds: Contemporary Writers Talk was published by Routledge in 2004. Her study of Jamaica Kincaid, Writing a Life, is due to appear in 2007. She was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts in 2006.

  Introduction

  ‘One grim winter evening’, Moses Aloetta jumps on ‘a number 46 bus at the corner of Chepstow Road and Westbourne Grove to go to Waterloo to meet a fellar who was coming from Trinidad on the boat-train’. As we accompany Moses, veteran black Londoner on his routine journey to welcome yet another newcomer into the fold, we are swiftly transported into the tragi-comic urban theatre of Selvon’s London. It is a labyrinthine city that his cast of rootless, unlettered characters soon learn to survive in and reinvent. As an iconic chronicle of post-war West Indian immigration to Britain, The Lonely Londoners encapsulates the romance and disenchantment of an imagined city that was both magnet and nightmare for its new colonial citizens, a promised land that despite its lure turns out to be an illusion. Without doubt Selvon’s ironic reversal of the El Dorado myth – his colonization of England in reverse – has important sociopolitical implications. First and foremost however it remains a powerful imaginative work, timeless in its bittersweet love affair with the city and groundbreaking in its creation of an inclusive narrative voice that creates a new means of describing it.

  In The Lonely Londoners, Selvon faced the challenge of both exploring London as a black city and creating a suitable literary frame to inscribe it. In using a creolized voice for the language of the narration and the dialogue, a voice which transports the calypsonian ‘ballads’ of his errant island ‘boys’ to the diamond pavements of Caribbean London, Selvon not only envisioned a new way of reading and writing the city but also exploded some of the narrow and hyphenated categories by which black working-class voices had hitherto been defined. Closing the difficult gap between the teller of the tale and the tale itself, Selvon thus finds a means to not only reinvent London but to reshape its spaces, giving his previously voiceless characters a place to live in it. During the first six months of the novel’s composition, Selvon in fact tried to write the book in Standard English, but it ‘just would not work’. The language was not sufficiently pliable and could not convey the feelings, the moods and the – as yet – ‘unarticulated’ desires of his characters. At the same time there were certain ‘physical and emotional scenes’ where the oral vernacular simply ‘couldn’t carry the essence of what I wanted to say’. Once Selvon switched to the ‘idiom’ of the people and shifted his register to fuse Standard English with the full range of a broad and hybrid linguistic continuum, he was able to bring new life and rhythms to the book. As Caryl Phillips once commented:

  If I were to point to a writer who captures the tone … and texture of London when the austere ’50s were about to give way to the swinging sixties, I would not cite the plays of John Osborne or Arnold Wesker, or the prose of David Storey or John Braine. For acuity of vision, intellectual rigour and sheer beauty … it would have to be the works of Sam Selvon which would figure pre-eminently. He did not only know the Caribbean but the pages of London’s A to Z, and was able to capture these with a haunting lyricism which remains … imprinted on the imagination.

  Often heralded today as an ingenious alchemist of style or ‘father of black writing’ in Britain, Selvon’s work has influenced succeeding generations of writers. Interestingly Phillips, now a major contemporary writer himself, locates Selvon not only in terms of a tradition of black writing – a precursor of contemporary figures such as David Dabydeen, Zadie Smith or Andrea Levy – but more significantly as a key figure in the literary reimaging of Britain during the post-war years. Selvon’s improvisations in this his first London novel forged a shift in perspective which would not only change the way the city was seen, but ‘Englishness’ itself. It was akin, as he once put it, to experimenting with ‘music … I sat like a passenger in a bus and let the language do the writing’.

  Early on in the novel the atmosphere of Selvon’s city is described: ‘it had a kind of unrealness about London, with a fog sleeping restlessly over the city and the lights showing in a blur as if is not London at all but some strange place on another planet’. Mimicking the oral rhythms of a modified Caribbean vernacular, Selvon immediately takes us inside the world of his immigrant characters, creating an intimacy between storyteller and reader and distancing us from the bleak landscape of the alien city outside. Although earlier inscriptions of the city reverberate (we feel the shrouding fog in Dickens’s Bleak House and hear the morbid echoes of T. S. Eliot’s ‘unreal city’ in ‘The Waste Land’), the narrator’s voice distinguishes itself from such earlier models carrying with it the weight of a differently formed historical and cultural experience.

  ‘When Moses sit down and pay his fare he take out a handkerchief and blow his nose. The handkerchief turn black …’ The fear of racist contamination objectified in the black handkerchief which stares Moses in the face is not improved at the unemployment office: ‘a kind of place where hate and disgust and avarice and malice and sympathy and sorrow and pity all mix up. Is a place where everyone your enemy and your friend’ (p.27). Moreover the heart of this metropolis is elusive; its romance one of pathos and misery. It is a place divided up into ‘little worlds, and you stay in the world you belong to and you don’t know anything about what happening in the other ones’. It is an unforgiving world where ‘men know what it is to hustle a pound to pay the rent when Friday come’, a threatening, fractured landscape which Cap, the Nigerian (soon to be black Londoner), describes as ‘hell’ (p.35). For Selvon’s characters inhabit a hidden world of derelict spaces that other ‘people … don’t really k
now’; they exist in a twilight subterranean enclave of cramped-up rooms situated somewhere between Notting Hill and the Harrow Road. When Henry Oliver (rechristened ‘Sir Galahad’) first ventures out in the city, his flamboyant small world exuberance is fast deflated by the vastness and the alien elements: ‘The sun shining, but Galahad never see the sun look like how it looking now. No heat from it, it just there in the sky like a force-ripe orange’. Most strikingly, perhaps, the psychologically disorientating effects are created by the collision of the two worlds – of Trinidad and London – in Galahad’s mind, as the surrealistic image of the dream-like orange becomes an object of the extremity of Galahad’s dislocation and fear.

  First published in 1956, The Lonely Londoners fictionalizes some of Selvon’s early experiences with a group of black ‘immigrants … among whom I lived for a few years when I first arrived in London’. Commonly referred to as the period of the ‘Windrush generation’, it was an era (poignantly satirized in Tolroy’s surprise reunion with virtually his entire family at Waterloo) when West Indian migrants, all christened ‘Jamaican’ by the neologisms of the British media, were oft reported to be ‘flooding’ London’s streets, streets which they soon discover are not ‘paved with gold’. Basing his character, Moses, on a real ‘live’ man from the Caribbean with whom he ‘limed’ in the early days, Selvon’s initial aim was to give voice to this early immigrant experience, distilling the ordinary language of the people and making it accessible to a wide readership. For Waterloo (rather like Ellis Island in New York) comes to symbolize more than a place of ‘arrivals’ and ‘departures’; it is a migrant gateway to the city, a rite of passage, which homesick fellars like Moses, who has already been in Britain for ten long years, ‘can’t get away from the habit of going to’.

  Like many other writers of his generation Selvon migrated to London in the 1950s to escape the parochialism of the West Indian middle-classes and to establish an international audience for his work. As an East Indian Trinidadian with a half-Scottish mother, Selvon grew up, like his contemporary V. S. Naipaul, in a multicultural world that carried the sediments of a mixed colonial history situated at the dynamic crossroads of different and sometimes jangling cultural traditions. Well versed in the racy mock-heroic satire of the Port of Spain streets as well as the traditional forms of the colonial English canon, Selvon began writing whilst working as a wartime wireless operator for the Royal Naval Reserve. Travelling by chance on the same boat as the Barbadian novelist George Lamming (and bickering with him over the shared usage of an old Imperial typewriter as they crossed the Atlantic), Selvon completed the draft of his first novel, A Brighter Sun, on board ship. It was published soon after his arrival, to much acclaim. As Selvon frequently commented it was an exciting period; London had become a kind of ‘literary headquarters’ and many soon-to-be major writers from the different islands were meeting for the first time. A recognizable tradition emerged as a specifically Caribbean consciousness was created and a literary movement was born.

  Many fictional and non-fictional accounts have documented this period of British and West Indian cultural history, a period which witnessed the making of a series of different ‘Englands of the mind’ (Seamus Heaney). Selvon’s long sojourn in London, from 1950 to 1978, when he left for Canada, was to act as a crucial catalyst in the development of his art. Through his encounter with London, it became possible to move towards a more fully realized picture of the world back home whilst defining a Caribbean consciousness within a British context. It was only in ‘London’ that ‘my life found its purpose’. Whilst many works of West Indian ‘exile’ sought to define this early phase of migration (such as The Emigrants by George Lamming or The Mimic Men by V. S. Naipaul), The Lonely Londoners has been the most enduring and emblematic. Selvon not only fashioned an innovative way of writing his unlettered characters into fiction - creating at the same time an ironically nuanced black colony within the heart of the city - but also translated the humorous dynamics of the Caribbean street talk that they brought with them into an international context. In style and content therefore it represented a major step forward in the process of linguistic and cultural decolonization.

  In a memorial tribute delivered after Selvon’s death in 1994, George Lamming reconstructed the atmosphere of the early days they shared in Britain struggling to earn a living in the city: ‘Can you imagine … waking up one morning and discovering a stranger asleep on the sofa of your living room?’ This was the situation many English encountered when ‘they awoke’ to find these people (once comrades on Second World War battlefields), now ‘metaphorically’ in their houses: ‘on the one hand the sleeper on the sofa was … sure through imperial tutelage … he was at home, on the other, the native Englishman was completely mystified by this unknown interloper’. The contradictions of this predicament were heightened by the ‘open door’ policy of the 1948 Nationality Act which welcomed migrants into Britain. Although the majority of colonial citizens held British passports and equal rights of residence, by 1958 racial disturbances had begun to erupt. And with the passing of a further Immigration Act in 1962, an explicitly exclusionist government policy emerged, designed to keep ‘coloured’ citizens out. Selvon frequently draws our attention to this volatile atmosphere, as the room-based existence which his characters lead becomes a powerful metaphor for their in-between existence both inside and outside English culture. Never hectoring the reader, but nevertheless making us fully aware of the absurdity and potential seriousness of the situation, Selvon is keen to point both to the excitement the city offers – the hope inspired by the grandeur of its monuments – as well as its grim realities: ‘… you know the most hurtful part of it’, Moses warns Galahad, who is still hopeful he will find a job, ‘The Pole who have that restaurant, he ain’t have no more right in this country than we. In fact we is British subjects, and he is a foreigner … is we who bleed to make this country prosperous’.

  When it first appeared, The Lonely Londoners was frequently seen as an amusing social documentary of West Indian manners. Whilst Selvon’s linguistic versatility was applauded, the complexities of the novel were often stereotyped and ‘exoticised’. Early reviews frequently misinterpreted Selvon’s self-consciously manipulated ‘naturalism’, the artifice of his technique, and mistakenly read the iconoclastic voices of his black characters as simply the expression of a dogged narrative of virtuous social realism. To read the book in this way is not only to seriously miss the potential of its poetry, its vision and its subversive humour, but also to fail to see that Selvon had no intention as an artist of fitting into the neat role (often patronizingly assigned to him) of being a representative black voice.

  Selvon loves his roguish innocents but they are nevertheless fictional inventions. His ‘boys’ originate from a world of words, an imaginary world ‘through which they grope’ as one critic has noted ‘for clarity’. Their London is primarily a present-oriented world buoyed up on insecure foundations and driven by the tales used to carve spaces in it. We meet few white characters, love relationships can not develop and topographical description is scarce. The language that the ‘boys’ bring with them – far more than the cardboard suitcases or tropical suits they arrive with at Waterloo – is a vital survival kit, a means to successfully accommodate them in the city. Not only are the viable boundaries of this colony secured and domesticated by the ritualistic repetition of names – in the west by ‘the Gate’ (Notting Hill), in the east by the ‘Arch’ (Marble) and in the north by the Water (Bayswater) – but also by the recitation of the ‘boys” racy ‘ballads’, whose inflated significance reinforce the fragile identity of the group’s own constructed mythology. There is Bart (who’s ‘neither here nor there’), Big City, apparent master of the tall story but who cannot even ‘full’ up the football pools, Five past Twelve (who ‘blacker’ than midnight) and Harris, the pseudo-English gentleman (carrying an ‘umbrella’ with a Times always sticking out of his trouser pocket). At times, the ‘boys’ shrink the two
-dimensionality of this world further; the walls of Paddington slums ‘cracking like the last days of Pompeii’. At others, the grandiose quality of ‘epic’ is subverted, as when Selvon, invoking Dante’s Purgatorio, portrays Bart (short for Arthur) scouring the interstices of the city for his lost love, Beatrice. It is comedy again which masks the seriousness of the situation when Sir Galahad, dressed ‘cool as a lord’ meets Daisy, a ‘nice piece of skin’ but confronts, instead, the ‘colour’ problem. Never seriously undermined, Galahad is left talking to the colour black as if it is a person, telling it that ‘is not he who causing botheration in the place, but Black, who is a worthless thing’.

  As suggested earlier, the narrative pace of the novel is partially driven by the influence of Trinidadian calypso, well-known for its wit, melodrama, licentiousness and sharp political satire. In fact, London’s West End nightclubs were increasingly swinging in the period when Selvon was writing the novel, to songs of the likes of ‘Lord Kitchener’ and ‘Lord Beginner’. Legend tells us that these two musicians were passengers on the iconic SS Windrush and notoriously transformed the atmosphere of ‘English’ cricket forever at Lords in June 1950 when Lord Beginner’s song, ‘Cricket, Lovely Cricket’, was composed on the spot to celebrate the West Indian victory. As in the barbed lyrics of many calypsos, Selvon’s Londoners inhabit a world replete with double entendre. It is both gold and grey, a comic universe that hovers on the edge of tragedy; a place when for a time the rules of the norm can be suspended, where figures of authority can be ridiculed and judged and those without power given voice. In shifting this upbeat trickster mode into a more polarized racial context, Selvon brings forth an optimistic voice which ingeniously sets his characters free but also entraps them. For his ‘boys’ (the name itself suggesting their almost amoral innocence) are the figures of a double appropriation: first as the representatives of a Western modernity which can only read them as the flat and stereotypical black subjects of Empire; and secondly, as characters who are the natural agents of an alternative modern vision. This not only contests but transforms the white gaze, enabling the genesis of a new dialogue with the city to develop which can open out the reductive postures previously available to them in history.