only the classical or established names, the French, Spanish, and English books I had studied at school, and the very famous names my father had introduced me to.
To enter this New York bookshop was to find myself among unhallowed names. I was traveling to be a writer, but this world of modern writing and publishing I had walked into was not something I was in touch with. And among all these unfamiliar, unhallowed names, I looked for the familiar, the classics, the uniform series, the very things I had looked at (with a feeling of deprivation and being far away) in the dark colonial emporia of Port of Spain, among the reams of paper and the stacks of exercise books, next to wholesalers of various kinds of imported goods (cloth and coal pots), all in a warm smell of spices and damp raw sugar and various cooking oils from the wholesale grocers of South Quay, where there were donkey carts and horse carts and pushcarts among the motor trucks.
This was an American shop, not one with English stock, the stock I was more familiar with. I settled then for the Modern Library series, and bought South Wind. This had been recommended to me by an English teacher who knew of my writing ambitions. I had despaired of finding this book in the emporia of Trinidad. Here, part of the great wealth of New York, was the book, immediately available. I paid one twenty-eight, and the assistant, who must have been eight or ten years older than me, called me sir.
South Wind! But it remained unread. My first attempt to read it was like all the attempts I made later: it showed me that—like the books of Aldous Huxley and D. H. Lawrence and certain other contemporary writers whose names had come to me through my father or through teachers at school—this book, with a young man called Denis and a bishop, and an island called Nepenthe, was alien, far from anything in my experience, and beyond my comprehension. But the alienness of a book, though it might keep me from reading it (I never read beyond the first chapter of South Wind), did not prevent me from admiring it. The very alienness, the inaccessibility, was like a promise of romance—a reward, some way in the future, for making myself a writer.
So much of my education had been abstract that I could live like this and think and feel like this. I had, for instance, studied classical French drama without having any idea of the country or the court that had produced this drama; without having the capacity to grasp the historical reality of France, and in fact quietly (in my own mind) rejecting as a fairy story all that I was told in introductions or textbooks about kings and ministers and mistresses and religious wars. These things were too removed from my experience and I could not grasp them; I knew only my island and my community and the ways of our colony. I had prepared essays on French and Soviet cinema simply by reading books and articles. I had learnt the great names of art and architecture in the same way.
So, though now in New York I was a free man, and this was the first book I was buying in a great city, and the occasion was therefore important, historical for me, romantic, I took to it the abstract attitudes of my school education: the bright boy, the scholarship boy, not acting now for his teachers or family, but acting only for himself.
Yet, with the humiliations of my first twenty-four hours of travel, my first twenty-four hours in the great world, with my increasing sense of my solitude in this world, I was aware (not having a home audience now, not having any audience at all) that I felt no joy. The young man in the shop called me sir and that was unexpected and nice. But I felt a fraud; I felt pushed down into a part of myself where I had never been.
Less than twenty-four hours had passed since the magical vision of landscape, sugarcane fields and forested hills and valleys; and the crawling sea; and the clouds lit from above by the sun. But already I could feel the two sides of myself separating one from the other, the man from the writer. Already I felt a twinge of doubt about myself: perhaps the writer was only a man with an abstract education, a capacity