Towards the end of 1994, I occasionally visited Wayne Brown on Gasparee, where he lived then. It was a long trip, and expensive; taxis from Chaguanas, then to Carenage, then the boat ferry. Those days were rare. I was not someone he regarded as much more than precocious in those days. And things were not going that well for me and I looked forward to the visits. We talked mostly, sitting in his blackened wood verandah on two Morris chairs, looking out over a sheer drop into deep green water, with some grotesque obtrusions of gray rocks sprouting trees, vines and moss. There was always a mongrel about-a doberman called Monty, whom he talked to like a child. We talked about books, writers he liked, and the way things were going in the country. Back then, as now, things looked pretty grim.
The days always ended with him taking out his boat, a small yacht called The Lisa, I believe. It was not an experience I enjoyed particularly, but for him, it meant something primal and life-affirming, like bullfighting for Hemingway, acid for Tim Leary, or cricket for James. It was the closest he got to nature; the boat became an instrument in his hands, the wind and rain either allies or combatants in a struggle with the elemental sea. Or something like that.
On the last of those visits, the day had been miserable. We’d met because I was leaving, on a fellowship he’d gotten for me, and I didn’t intend to be back for a long time. We’d talked a bit, but he was restless, not really interested in chatting that day. He wanted to get on the water, and I dutifully went along. The sea was choppy, and the yacht was moored along a concrete jetty. The pilot of the small tug that was supposed to take us out misjudged the roughness of the water, and somehow, the line snapped, leaving the yacht parallel to the jetty, with the sea becoming choppier and tossing the boat dangerously.
After a few minutes, it became clear that in a few minutes more the boat was going to be tossed against the jetty and smashed. Another tug came out, but the sea just became angrier, and not only the lines, but the rigging post on one of the boats snapped. Neither tug pilot wanted to risk attaching the line to their boats, and one said, quite nonchalantly: ’Tha’s it. Boat gone.’
Wayne put me on the boat, and showed me, in about two minutes, how to work the tiller. Then he went onto one of the tugs, and wrapped the line around his body and made the pilot ease the yacht round. It was a stupendously foolish thing to do, thinking back on it. Had the line pulled past a safety point, it could have killed him. And as it was, looking at him along the length of The Lisa as he strained, his face turning ashy from the effort, it was a close thing.
We talked about it for hours after that, sitting on the jetty, drinking, then at the house, when his partner, The Dark Lady, came home. It’s not exactly a moment where lives became intertwined, but it’s the closest we got. We never got a chance to be quite that close again, and I suppose I was glad I could be there to do something for him that meant something to him.
It’s a feature of these relationships-of the apprentice-teacher kind-that you find yourself wanting to repay according to the value of what you feel you’ve been given. And if Wayne had done only two things for me-introduce me to Wallace Stevens, and mark up the first short story I’d ever written, in 1992-my debt to him would still be enormous. But he did much more than that.
I met Wayne when I began at the Guardian in 1991. He had re-joined the Guardian circa 1992 as a columnist, after a long break from the newspapers, which had been preceded by a long and very successful stint at the Express as a columnist. I remember him as a saturnine figure; grave, intimidating. One of the subs told me he had said something I wrote showed promise, and it stuck.
A few months later, when I showed him my first short story, expecting, I don’t know, praise, he sized it up in a few minutes, and said to me, curtly: ’This could be something. It needs a lot of work, but there’s something here.’ And he took it with him. He handed me the story back a week or so later, almost unrecognisable because of the many red-ink marks and margin notes. He said: ’That’s what you could do with it.’
I have to admit, I was more impressed by his attitude rather than his technical suggestions. I was intrigued by the confidence, the intellect, and the coolness-fascinated that the place that produced me could produce that. And, I would realise later, there was a large, latent generosity. I wouldn’t call him a role model, exactly; not in the old-fashioned sense of a mentor, but certainly in the postmodern sense, where the figure of the role model is an assemblage of personalities and traits, cadged from many people, and not all of them real.
In the early 1990s, he was just beginning to teach again, and he offered me a scholarship to his prose workshop, which he taught at the Trinidad Theatre Workshop, which was then still at the Old Fire Station-whose Gothic shape remains, surreally, attached to the unconvincing modernity of the National Library. Several other people were there, some really talented ones, who just never did anything with their talent.
Wayne recommended me to Yaddo, the writer’s colony in 1994, and I was awarded a long fellowship there in 1995. I stayed away for a while, and when I came back in 1997, he was one of the first people I saw. He had continued teaching, and I rejoined his class, which contained another talented group of people, all women. One of them, Amanda Smyth, has recently published a very successful novel, Black Rock, which mentioned him in its acknowledgements.
By the time I returned to Trinidad, the class had tired of prose and turned their attention to poetry. The first poem we read in class was Wallace Stevens’ ’The Idea of Order at Key West ’. Its opening line -she sang beyond the genius of the sea-was the most fascinating line of language I had heard till then. What could those words, strangely resonant, playful, but just eluding ordinary meaning, possibly mean?
But it wasn’t just the words, or just the poets. This was when ’we’ in Trinidad were just beginning (apparently not for the first time) the lunatic worship of our own excrement as ’culture’, which meant throwing out great poets, writers, musicians, and artists for ’we ting’. Wayne was as astounded and enraged at this as I was, and his teaching was an overt form of activism against it. Though, I have to say, he did not deride the local in its entirety (as I do). He was an ardent admirer of David Ruddder’s hymns, and Peter Minshall’s pageants, and Boogsie Sharpe’s mesmerising arrangements and compositions, and wrote many admiring columns about them.
The columns, in the end, came to dominate his output, but his other work was unjustifiably pushed out of notice. His collection of essays, Child of the Sea, and his collections of poems, Voyages and On the Coast, were stark and almost shocking digressions from everything I had known about Trinidad, and the way I could look at Trinidad, and myself, till that moment. My own poetry and fiction are indebted to them in uncountable ways, and I recommend that vantage to anyone who is lucky enough to be able to get copies of Wayne’s books. (I understand Peepal Tree Press is going to publish a new collection of essays and re-publish the poems soon.)
Other than being a gifted writer, he was the best teacher I’ve ever been taught by, because he loved and believed in what he taught. It’s a lesson I’ve taken with me, along with the gifts of being introduced to Pound, Eliot, Donne, Walcott, Ted Hughes and many more when I was able to appreciate them. To this day, when students tell me reading is a chore, my initial reaction is always astonishment. I suppose had I relied upon UWI for these introductions to the great poets, I would almost certainly have been disappointed, or been taught them by people who knew nothing about them or what they represented or achieved, and probably ended up like many UWI Ph Ds who cannot scan a poem, much less understand poetry, or, indeed, know what art is for and what it does. (’The classics console’, as Walcott put it despairingly, ’but not enough’.)
For showing me that road, and taking me along the first few steps of that journey, I could never repay Wayne. And I could end here, but of course, this is not the end. Any summing up could not be complete without mentioning the price for that mask of magisterial aloofness-its antinomy of volatility, which surfaced, it seemed, randomly, dangerously.
The larger battles were plentiful and as close to epic-which is to say quixotic-as intellectuals could hope for here. There was the famous one against the very notion of the UNC in the 1990s, fought in the pages of the Independent, in which I was an enemy combatant. Before that, there was the battle with the NAR, in the late 1980s. Then there were the myriad smaller ones with people-who can tell their own stories.
Gordon Rohlehr launches an essay ’The Carrion Time’ from the 1970s (in his collection, My Strangled City) criticising Wayne’s denunciatory poem marking the death by suicide of Trinidad’s great poet, Eric Roach (who, fittingly, was from Tobago). Apparently, Wayne had attacked Rohlehr as ’naïve’ in the matter of assessing West Indian poetry. Rohlehr returned that Wayne thought a poet was ’a man who descends into the fish-pond of his own private silence and emerges sounding like Derek Walcott’.
The perspective Wayne proposed came from Walcott’s essay, ’What the Twilight Says: An Overture’, but it wasn’t Walcott who, as Pound put it, was Wayne’s Penelope-it was Nabokov. The trope of the febrile, aristocratic genius in exile appealed to him, and his prose was a living tribute to, and extension of, Nabokov’s intricate, effortless style and Olympian amoralism in recounting the tragic, ultimately farcical affairs of flawed humanity. Wayne’s essays, produced with such grace, and to a deadline, were sparklingly eloquent and finely observed, if not always profound-but how could they be?
The essays flowed freely, and two collections, the superb Child of the Sea, and the later Landscape with Heron, emerged in the 80s and 90s. But there was little else: no novel, of which rumours were heard from time to time; no historical work, which was abandoned in 1990s, when he decamped for Jamaica, ostensibly to produce a second volume of his celebrated Manley biography. What he did in Jamaica was teach, produce an arts supplement for the Observer, and by all accounts, train an impressive stable of talent.
So it is appropriate that he should be remembered for the work, but also as a Mauberly figure who,
out of key with his time,
He strove to resuscitate the dead art
Of poetry; to maintain ’the sublime’
In the old sense
But as generous and urbane as he was in his dealings with those he thought worth it, frequently, invariably, he fought with those he helped. He was a Romantic but in a tragic, occasionally farcical Nabokovian sense. He was as magnanimous, but could be astonishingly petty. He was eloquent and cerebral but could be shallow and callow. Death, however, dissolves these surface human entanglements, leaving only the primal and the enduring-Love. Gratitude. Progeny.
I had not spoken to Wayne in several years, and we probably would not have spoken had he remained alive for considerably longer. But I mentioned him in the acknowledgements of both the books of fiction and poetry I’ve published so far, and I will resist re-publishing here the elegy I wrote for him about ten years ago. I will publish instead something from Stevens, which he would have liked, and which describes, in style and substance, what I will treasure most about his time here:
The man bent over his guitar,
A shearsman of sorts. The day was green.
They said, ’You have a blue guitar,
You do not play things as they are.’
The man replied, ’Things as they are
Are changed upon the blue guitar.’
And they said then, ’But play, you must,
A tune beyond us, yet ourselves,
A tune upon the blue guitar
Of things exactly as they are.’
