Morris Cargill

DEAR Wayne Brown:

WHEN I wrote about the 'competence' of West Indian and American writers, I was not referring to writers like Naipaul, Walcott, and very many other fine writers both in the West Indies and the USA. I was referring to the ordinary run of columnists.

That I did not make this clear was due to sloppy writing on my part so that in one way, if not in another, I deserved your very gentle ticking off.

I am sorry that you seem to have first heard about me from the UWI Marxists. Very many years ago when I was very young, I briefly joined the English Communist Party. In those days of terrible unemployment in England the streets of London werelined with men begging or churning hired barrel organs, with little monkeys on top of them, trained to collect thrown pennies. I thought that there must be some better way of running a country. I also had a trivial reason, perhaps, for joining the Communist Party, which was that I didn't want to be left out of the fun of throwing rocks at Sir Oswald Mosely and his black-shirt followers when they went to the East End to beat up Jews.

Eminently bedable

I left the Communist Party when it became obvious to all except to leftist intellectuals, (who never see anything they don't want to see) that communist Russia was a totalitarian tyranny. Years later I shifted over to the Fabians, who were much the same, but gentler, and I spent a lot of time going about giving Fabian lectures. During this time I attended two lectures given by the great George Bernard Shaw. At the end of one lecture, I summoned enough courage to go up, very nervously, to the great man and asked him why he had become a socialist. He said: "Young man, I dislike the lower classes, and socialism is the only way to abolish them".

At the end of that same lecture during which he had been belabouring the capitalist classes he said to the audience: "Ladies and gentlemen, when you leave this hall you will see outside a chauffeur-driven Rolls Royce. Do not damage it; it is mine". George Bernard Shaw had the extraordinary and delightfully mischievous capacity of demonstrating at least two conflicting points of view simultaneously. A good example of this is his play 'The Apple Cart'.

I eventually took my leave of the Fabians because, when the Labour Party came to power after World War Two, most of their Ministers including Nye Bevan were obviously scamps, but also because of the trivial reason that Fabian women though eminently bedable (they believed in free love) were very earnest and nothing spoils fun more than ideological intensity. I must confess that I do most things for rather trivial reasons, for trivial reasons are always less harmful and saner than serious ones.

I hope I am not boring you, but you were good enough to tell me much about yourself, and I am being self indulgent enough to tell you something about me and my wayward ways.

Local socialists

During the 1970s in Jamaica I spent a lot of time kicking the butts of our local socialists, for it takes one to know one, and I knew what they were up to. I am not surprised therefore that they gave me a bad press, but I have also spent a bit of time kicking the butts of the plantocracy. Being one of their scions I knew what they were up to too.

Some years before all this, back in Jamaica as a young lawyer, it was one of my jobs to collect the debts owing to the money lending business Bustamante was running. It took some ingenuity to conceal from the courts that some of the debts were attracting interest of up to 1000 per cent. When, however, Bustamante gave his energies to kicking up a fearful fuss about the low wages to workers, I made common clause with him because I thought that his agitation was just what Jamaica needed. He was a shrewd man. Unlike the Manley clique who were all "sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought", he believed in practical rather than ideological solutions. He would never, of his own accord, have put us into Independence without some link with a metropolitan country; without capital and without even a gold watch for three centuries of service to England.

You and I, Wayne Brown, who are columnists and supposed to be pundits know that the whole truth, being many-faceted, can never be fully encompassed, but can only be dealt with in little bits at a time. There are many sources of truth, one of which is an ice-cold dry Vodka Martini.

At 85 and with unreliable legs I cannot visit you, but I would be extremely happy if you could visit me and share with me a glass or two of the truth. Phone me if you can.

Incidentally, V.S. Naipaul is extraordinarily good company as well as being a delightfully good writer. I have not seen him for years, but when I last saw him he told me that he had turned his back on the West Indies.

If he meant Jamaica I could hardly blame him. But I wonder whether he can now justly be called a West Indian writer.