Stalking Derek Walcott

"Conduct Somewhat Irregular"

A true story
by Keith Goffe

[*Derek Walcott was born in 1930 in Saint Lucia, one of the Windward Islands in the Lesser Antilles. He received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1992.]

It is the Christmas term 1956, and a brown boy in short khaki pants is standing before an imposing Victorian Gothic stone building fronted by a long low verandah in the shade of a giant Ficusberry tree. The sun is out, but a light rain is falling as if something dreadful is about to happen. A poet is standing at one end of the verandah where it makes the shape of an L, opposite the Chemistry lab. He is unmoved, his mind made up like a boarder's bed at the stroke of six. Feline eyes look away, prowling the St. Andrew hills, scanning the higher ridges, then following the lines of that green sonnet, sweeping down stanzas of cascading foothills, finally coming to look pitilessly at the boy. At least this is how I remember it. I was a child, therefore a victim. 'Mr. Johnson said you did. So I'm going to punish you. Meet me upstairs.'

I had come to stand before Derek Walcott because as housemaster of Murray House he was responsible for disciplining me. The poet was then 26. His canvas was already fully stretched and primed with the first fresh layers of success. It was long before the thick impasto of prizes, wives, honors and fame, though, and long before the poet posed beside a bust of himself in a square dedicated to him in St. Lucia.

I was a teacher's son, one that ruled by the cane at home and at school. Scoldings hissed from her teeth between strokes, warnings, admonishments, and the titration of shame, aiming her cane at artful angles, choosing my flesh carefully. There was pain, but there was passion, too.

It was immediately a shock to me, body and soul, and to what I thought Art and Poetry were all about. I had been caned before -- about eight times by six different masters -- but this one stood out, and not only because the poetasters of terror, inferior rhymers and dabblers in poetry, went on to obscurity while Walcott, who was my housemaster for a year when I was a student at Jamaica College in the 1950s, became more famous by the decade, salting my wounds.

The beating was unjust, the punishment exceeding the minor offence that I was charged with, but was innocent of. I recognized cruelty as a child does. I think it was then that I started not to believe in poetry and could not separate it from its purveyors and began to feel that words were vectors that carried lies and that poems were insincere paper things.




2.
As I learned more about the lives of certain English and American poets, their personal agony and the agony they caused others, I began to fear that I was a victim of poetry. I say of poetry, not Walcott.

I kept an eye out for a poem or an image in a poem from his earlier books that might give a clue to the poet's frame of mind at the time of my little trouble. But, I could no more find it than that elusive slab of light on Tiepolo's mutt. Worse yet was the dread that I was the casualty of a discarded poem, crumpled and thrown out in some 1956 wastebasket, and that there I had remained.

Like Shabine, like Walcott, I had a colonial education and caning was a part of it. Unremarkable, routine, an average terror repeated daily all over those subject islands. So ordinary, it was called discipline.




3.



But this was different. Wordless, without emotion, this was the institution of caning. The caning of schoolboys had history and tradition behind it. The cane should not be raised above the height of the master's shoulder. Three or four strokes for minor lapses. More than six strokes forbidden except for the most grave offences, and then to be applied only by the headmaster. Torture, when it is officially sanctioned, has rules.

Disgust or enthusiasm for his new task saw the poet scything the cane from above his shoulders, heavy on the downstroke, six of his best lines, and as he threshed me, a white dust of ibises took flight from the seat of my khakis, and for the first time I knew what it meant to suffer Walcott's accurate iambics. But what would make a tyro housemaster, a poet, apply this custom of Empire so liberally? A manual of the day gives a clue: 'It is good policy when a schoolboy is to be caned for the first time to lay it on well. He will greatly fear repetition.' Pre-emption then preventing the need for future punishment by sever action now. A subtle kindness, poetic or was it sadism, or duty?

Sometimes there were public canings for smoking. The bell rang. The lesson stopped. Classrooms emptied and the entire school of 300 boys assembled before an outdoor stage. The stage was moved into place by a groundsman named Brutus and another who had been a Bedwardite. I remember two boys of twelve or thirteen were led like calves by a master and sacrificed. None of us was baying, though. We knew torture and soul-murder when we saw it. I wonder what happened to those boys? Fifty years, a half a century ago, and I never forgot. Are you out there, did you survive?

There is a clarity that comes with distance from events and landscapes. The painter knows there are things which are obscure, even invisible close up, which are seen quite clearly at a distance. So the artist butters a little paint on the dry bread of his canvas, steps back, appraises. Moving backward the memoirist overlooks the terrain of his life from afar as if it were another life.

For instance, the ficusberry tree. The ficus tree cast its wide shadow over my mind long after I left school. I remembered its huge centurion holding up the sky, and when I was a boarder and could not sleep I would hear in its highest perches the howling of battlefield spirits: old boys lost overseas in the First World War. These restless souls returning from unimaginable trenches found roost in its highest branches, chorusing with booting patoos and the awful baritone of croaking lizards, the coloratura of screeching bats and whistling toads, owl spirits, croakers all part of a dread nocturnal requiem.




4.





Returning to the campus decades later, I could hardly believe my eyes. Could this be the tree? Hardly a towering giant; not more than a big tree, really. Maybe it had died and another grown up in its place. Old boys told me the Ficus had suffered damage in a hurricane, its top blown off. But, in contrast, I had not remembered how high the master's verandah was. I looked down from this height to the ground where I had stood five trembling decades before. Was it for the brown boy or for the brooding adult looking down at him that I felt fresh sadness for the poet, for myself and for the once sheltering Ficus. Growing up and going abroad shrank the campus, shrank the Ficus, "shrank the archipelago to stepping stones, oceans to puddles."

I walked through the drizzle around to the front of Simms House, past the shielded lions and the gryphons, up the front steps and into the high lobby with the boards of distinguished old boys hanging on the walls: brown men of the middle class who became the leaders of the country. I walked past the dining halls with their long, low wooden tables and benches, polished for years by the khaki backsides of boarders and dayboys, monitors and prefects, smallboys, bigboys, and headboys, summoned by the heavy mounted brass bell which ordered every period of our days.

At the head of each long table sat a prefect, a sort of consul in this figment of empire. Masters sat at the head table with local and expatriate teachers: British men blown to the West Indies by the wind of change ruffling the tawny pelt of Africa, pukkha sahibs recycling after tours in India, ex-corporals who'd been policemen in Nigeria, the shell shocked of the Second War run to a sunny madness of cheap rum and Buccaneer tobacco, all those sad wounded exiles hiding their shame among lesser peoples.

But again these were seen through the sfumato of memory. These things are larger in the imagination, which alone can encompass the infinity of past events, so that there is nothing epic about a minor childhood story, a buttnote to 20th century literature, 'Caned by the mulatto of style.'




5.





I have recently retrieved from my parents, papers my Jamaica College Termly Report from Christmas term 1956. 'He does not try hard enough.' 40% Mr. Spicer, Latin. 'Moderate. Can do better.' 36% Mathematics, Mr. Johnson. 'Quite good.' Physics, 30% Mr. Sparks. 'Abominable effort.' Geography, Mr. Horsman. But I didn't care after he called my Chinese friend, 'puddingface.' The Headmaster: 'General standard not good enough for a scholar'; the Housemaster: 'conduct somewhat irregular, D.W.'

I encountered Walcott in Philadelphia several years later at a poetry event and met him again this past November at a reading in New York. [Many of you know that Keith was obsessed with Walcott, his poetry and his past and made a point of turning up at his readings whenever he could] In Philadelphia I walked toward the book signing table and approached the poet abruptly from the right flank, clutching my Jamaica College Termly Report. Interrupting his slow parade midstep, I said, "Are these your initials?" He paused to peer at the paper, acknowledged that they were and as if confirming his forecast of me made a lifetime before, straightened his back and continued on his walk...a great poet, like a great poem...

I realized, with a smile, that Walcott's prescient appraisal of me in 1956, 'conduct somewhat irregular.' was still true, and that his caning had failed to curb my conduct. I was the same, only 44 years older, and he was the same. But I pressed on, though fearing reinjury. I joined the line and got to the signing table with a few of Walcott's books from my collection. As he signed Omeros I reminded him that he had caned me in 1956 for something I hadn't done but he hardly looked up to say "O." Signing The Fortunate Traveler he asked had I survived it. "Hardly," I said. Then signing Midsummer he asked me what I did in Philadelphia and I told him I was a psychiatrist while he scribbled, 'To Keith, best Derek.' And, that was that.

-end-

copyright, Keith Goffe, 2009
*Derek Walcott was born in 1930 in Saint Lucia, one of the Windward Islands in the Lesser Antilles. He received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1992.

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