The mimic men - V. S. Naipaul [95]
He talked better than he wrote. He was always intense but always, oddly, negative. He analysed situations acutely and with relish. But he gave equal weight to everything. He was content with a feverish analysis of each succeeding episode. He was saved by his ambivalent attitude towards the subject he most exploited: the distress of his race. He had written a venomous little pamphlet, anti-everybody, about the Negro skull, working out in this way some of the anger he had felt about an article in an American journal. Yet one of his favourite bar stories – he liked doing the upper-class English accent – was of the bewildered but honest English cricket captain who had cabled back to London in the 1880s: Beaten by local team whereof six were black. And it was Browne again who, while campaigning for the employment of Negroes in the firm of Cable and Wireless, supported their exclusion from the banks. He used to say: ‘If I thought black people were handling my few cents I wouldn’t sleep too well.’
On the subject of distress he was serious, without a doubt. But he was bitter only in his writings. He did not give the impression, which many others gave, of regarding a secreted and growing bitterness as a source of strength to come. Perhaps in his conversation he was trying unconsciously to flatter his hearers; for Browne, more noticeably now than at school, preferred the company of other races. It might be that he required alien witness to prove his own reality and make valid the distress he anatomized. Or perhaps it was that he feared to be alone with his distress, and could exercise his wit only with others. His frenzy seemed such a private thing. It was what we expected of our poets and, it might be, our clowns. It was attractive. There were always people to support his most outrageous enterprises. I myself had taken the back cover of his pamphlet on the Negro skull for an understating advertisement: Crippleville is a suburb.
When he came to the Roman house to urge me to proclaim my father’s name he had grown a small beard and was editing a paper called The Socialist. The beard went well with his thin face and slender body. It hid the wart on his chin and made him look less of a comedian. That was its sole motive. It had nothing to do with the paper which, after the first issue in which the policy was stated at length, contained little of socialism. Browne always stated the policy of each of his papers at length. He was a pamphleteer. Having stated the policy of his paper, he became bored with the paper; and most of his energies seemed to go in getting advertisements. What he wrote became increasingly bitty, gossipy and even disheartened; the reader got the impression that the editor was having trouble not only in getting advertisements but in getting things to put between them.
The Socialist was at this stage when Browne came to see me. He said he had a plan and an idea. The plan was that I should put money in the paper, or in some other paper we might start together. The idea was that The Socialist should celebrate the anniversary of the dockworkers’ exodus from the city, and that I myself should write the main article about my father.
Certain ideas overwhelm us by their simplicity. It was the proclaiming of the name first of all that appealed to me; then the idea of the magazine. My excitement astonished, then excited, him. He made those gestures I knew so well – the washing of the hands, the whipping of the right index finger, the great swivel in the chair as he