Half a Life

The story, as he thought of it, became almost all dialogue. Everything was to be contained in the dialogue. The setting and the people weren't to be explained. That undid a lot of the difficulty He had only to begin; the story rewrote itself; and though in one way it was now very far from Willie, it was also more full of his feelings. He changed the title to “Sacrifice.”

Roger had mentioned the movie of “The Killers.” Willie hadn't seen it. He wondered what they had done with the story. He tried idly to work it out. And, with his mind working in this way, it occurred to him over the next few days that there were scenes or even moments in Hollywood movies he might redo in the manner of “Sacrifice,” and with the vague “Sacrifice” setting. He thought especially of the Cagney gangster movies and High Sierra with Humphrey Bogart. One of his first original compositions at the mission school had been something like that. He had written of a man (of no stated country or community) waiting for no stated reason in an undefined place for someone, smoking while he waited (there was a lot about cigarettes and matches), listening for motorcars and doors and footsteps. In the end (the composition was only a page long) the person had arrived, and the man waiting had become full of anger. He had ended it like that because he didn't have a story. He didn't know what had gone before or what was to come. But now, with the moments from the Cagney and Bogart movies, there wasn't this difficulty.

The stories came quickly to him. He wrote six in a week. High Sierra gave him three stories and he saw three or four more in it. He changed the movie character from story to story, so that the original Cagney or Bogart character became two or three different people. The stories were all in the same vague setting, the setting of “Sacrifice.” And as he wrote, the vague setting began to define itself, began to have markers: a palace with domes and turrets, a secretariat with lines of blank windows on three floors, a mysterious army cantonment with white-edged roads where nothing seemed to happen, a university with a yard and shops, two ancient temples where dressed-up crowds came on certain days, a market, housing colonies with graded dwellings, a hermitage with an unreliable holy man, an image-maker, and, outside the town, the high-smelling tanneries with their segregated population. To Willie's surprise, it was easier, with these borrowed stories far outside his own experience, and with these characters far outside himself, to be truer to his feelings than it had been with his cautious, half-hidden parables at school. He began to understand—and this was something they had had to write essays about at the college—how Shakespeare had done it, with his borrowed settings and borrowed stories, never with direct tales from his own life or the life around him.

The six stories came to no more than forty pages. And now that the first impulse had gone he wanted encouragement, and he thought of Roger. He wrote a letter, and Roger replied right away, asking Willie to lunch at Chez Victor in lower Wardour Street. Willie was early, and so was Roger. Roger said, “You saw the sign on the window? Le patron mange ici. ‘The owner eats here.' Literary people come here.” Roger dropped his voice. “The man across the way is V. S. Pritchett.” Willie didn't know the name. The sturdy middle-aged man was benign, with a well-modelled, humorous face and a humorous, absent-minded air. Roger said, “He writes the main reviews for the New Statesman.” Willie had seen the magazine in the college library, and he knew that there were college students who competed for it every Friday morning. But Willie had not yet developed the need to read magazines like that. The New Statesman was to him a mystery, full of English issues and references he didn't understand.

Roger said, “My girlfriend is coming. Her name is Perdita. She may even be my fiancee.”

The strange phrasing told Willie there was some trouble. She was tall and slender, not beautiful, unremarkable, with a slight awkwardness of posture. She was made up in a different way from June, and something she had used had given a shine to her pale skin. She took off her striped white gloves and slapped them down together on the small Chez Victor table with a sequence of gestures in which Willie saw such style that he began to reconsider her face. And Willie soon got to understand—such language of the eyes from Perdita, such looking down and away by Roger—that, with all their courtesies to each other and to him, the two people at his table were not on good terms, and that he had been asked to the lunch to act as a buffer.

The talk was mainly of the food. Some of it was about Willie. Roger's courtesy never failed, but in Perdita's company he looked extinguished, his eyes dull, his colour changed, his openness gone, the beginnings of a vertical worry-line showing above the bridge of his nose.

He and Willie left Chez Victor together. Roger said, “I am tired of her. And I will be tired of the one after her and the one after that. There's so little in a woman. And there's this myth about their beauty. It's their burden.”

Willie said, “What does she want?”

“She wants me to go through with the business. Marry her, marry her, marry her. Whenever I look at her I feel I can hear the words.”

Willie said, “I've been doing some writing. I've taken your advice. Would you like to read it?”

“Can we risk it?”

“I would like you to read it.”

He had the stories in the breast pocket of his jacket. He gave them to Roger. Three days later there was a friendly letter from Roger, and when they met Roger said, “They are quite original. They are not like Hemingway at all. They are more like Kleist. One story on its own might not have an impact, but taken together they do. The whole sinister thing builds up. I like the background. It's India and not India. You should carry on. If you can do another hundred pages we might have to think of peddling it around.”

The stories didn't come so easily now, but they came, one a week, two a week. And whenever Willie felt he was running out of material, running out of cinematic moments, he went to see old movies or foreign movies. He went to the Everyman in Hampstead and the Academy in Oxford Street. He saw The Childhood of Maxim Gorky three times in one week at the Academy. He cried, fitting what he saw on the screen to his own childhood, and he wrote some stories.

*

ROGER SAID ONE DAY, “My editor is coming to London soon. You know I do him a weekly letter about books and plays. I also drop the odd word about cultural personalities. He pays me ten pounds a week. I suppose he's coming to check on me. He says he wants to meet my friends. I've promised him an intellectual London dinner party, and you must come, Willie. It will be the first party in the Marble Arch house. I'll present you as a literary star to be. In Proust there's a social figure called Swann. He likes sometimes for his own pleasure to bring together dissimilar people, to create a social nosegay, as he says. I am hoping to do something like that for the editor. There'll be a Negro I met in West Africa when I did my National Service. He is the son of a West Indian who went to live in West Africa as part of the Back to Africa movement. His name is Marcus, after the black crook who founded the movement. You'll like him. He's very charming, very urbane. He is dedicated to inter-racial sex and is quite insatiable. When we first met in West Africa his talk was almost all about sex. To keep my end up I said that African women were attractive. He said, ‘If you like the animal thing.' He is now training to be a diplomat for when his country becomes independent, and to him London is paradise. He has two ambitions. The first is to have a grandchild who will be pure white in appearance. He is half-way there. He has five mulatto children, by five white women, and he feels that all he has to do now is to keep an eye on the children and make sure they don't let him