The Worlds of Lawrence Scott
By Stewart Brown


Trinidadian Lawrence Scott's journey of self-discovery has taken him back and forth across the Atlantic and inspired him to write searching novels of love and belonging, including his prize-winning Aelred's Sin with its story of gay love. James Ferguson explains
Lawrence Scott could be excused if he felt a twinge of apprehension as he flew to
Trinidad in October 1998. He was on his way to launch a new novel in his home island, with a public presentation at the Port of Spain Heritage Library and a series of media interviews. After all, any author might reasonably be anxious about the critical reception awaiting a new novel, especially in a place like Trinidad where people aren't slow to criticise if they don't like what they read.
And this was no ordinary novel. Aelred's Sin, which had appeared several weeks earlier in London, is a powerful and at times unsettling look at homosexual love as experienced by a Benedictine novice, Aelred, whose passion for an older monk in an English monastery encompasses religious, as well as physical, rapture. A complex story of the "dangerous chastity" lived by religious orders, the novel explores one young man's multifaceted encounter with love, sacred and profane. At times it is explicit in its sexual scenes, but that isn't the whole story. It is also lyrical, moving and life-affirming.
The novel has, to say the least, potential for controversy. And in Trinidad, where any mention of gay love is liable to cause a stir, controversy seemed inevitable. All the more so as the Equal Opportunities Bill, with its implications for gay people, was currently being debated amid some uproar from opponents of equal rights (for women as well). A publisher's dream in terms of publicity, but perhaps slightly more worrying for the author.
Had Scott known that the Trinidad and Tobago Independent would liken to him to a local version of Salman Rushdie, he might have felt a little more nervous about his own fatwa. "All the important communities will line up to lynch him," predicted the newspaper cheerfully.
Scott smiles with a touch of relief when he recalls that, far from being lynched, he received a positive critical reception and a good deal of genuine interest. "I was really surprised and heartened by the reaction the book got," he says. "Far from being treated as an 'issue book', it had reviews in the Express and Guardian that talked about its real themes - love, compassion, rootlessness, the time in a young person's life when you don't know yourself." The launch reception passed smoothly without homophobic incident, and Scott was pleased that his old friend, Professor Ken Ramchand, was able to chair the event. "I was also pleased to have the launch in a downtown location rather than in some swanky hotel," he says.
Even better was to come. Some months later, Scott returned home from work one Friday night to find a message from the marketing person at Allison & Busby, his publishers, on the answerphone. It said he had won a Commonwealth Writer's Prize. "I said to Jenny [his wife] there must be some sort of mistake. I tried to get hold of the publishers over the weekend, but had to wait until Monday, when they said it was true, I'd won the prize for Aelred's Sin."
The money involved wasn't huge - £1,000 - but Scott had to travel to New Zealand to collect the award and take part in readings and a conference for Commonwealth writers. "I found there were surprising parallels with Trinidad there," he says. "It's the British Victorian legacy that seems to crop up around the world. There were at least five cocktail parties. At one of them, I was introduced to the Governor-General as a Trinidadian writer and he said, 'Oh, Trinidad. Isn't that where Vidia Naipaul comes from?'" The thought of Naipaul's reaction to this innocent question makes him laugh.
We are sitting in a prime example of Victoriana, the bar of the Russell Hotel in
Bloomsbury, London, complete with leather armchairs, marble pillars and an open fire. It's one of those places where you can sit and talk for hours without anyone making you think you've overstayed your welcome. Scott reminds me that we've only met once before, at the launch of a book by a mutual friend, but somehow I feel I know him better than that, even though we've just spoken on the phone a few times. Perhaps, I venture, it's because the three books so far published - Aelred's Sin (1998), Ballad for the New World (1994) and Witchbroom (1992) - are largely autobiographical. It's a question he's clearly got used to fielding, especially as it is common knowledge that he came to England to be a Benedictine monk before leaving to study and teach.
"Aelred's Sin draws a lot on the fact that I grew up a Catholic and was very involved in religion from an early age. I went to Mount St Benedict school at 11 and at 14 joined the junior seminary there. It was a much nicer world than the boarding school. For a start you got your own room. But I also met boys from all over the Caribbean islands, and many of them were black, which made the seminary different from the college in the 1950s, when most students were white."
Scott is himself a white Trinidadian, described as a "Caribbean Creole" in Witchbroom's author blurb. His father's side came from Germany in the 1830s and were called Schoener. His mother's family, the Lange dynasty, were French-descended and part of an established white Creole community. His father worked as manager of the Petit Morne sugar estate, not far from the southern town of San Fernando. "It was a childhood of canefields, estate houses and big families. In fact, the estate houses were often not much more than big bungalows, but it was a privileged existence." Later the family moved to a spot now known as Lange Park, which has become a housing development near Chaguanas, in central Trinidad. "It used to be an old house looking up to the mountains. It inspired a story I wrote called The Fitful Muse about a little bungalow gradually being swallowed up by Port of Spain's housing boom."
With his O Levels completed, Scott set off for Britain in January 1963. It was the harshest winter in many years, and the young Trinidadian gazed in amazement at the snow-covered fields and hedges as his train took him from London to Stroud. From there he went to Prinknash Abbey, a 17th-century monastery near Gloucester, where he had an introduction from another monk from Trinidad. "At that stage I had a really romantic, medieval view of monastic life. I wanted a very austere, devotional life, perhaps working on the monastery farm. I think I would have liked to be a Trappist, with all the self-denial and vows of silence." But Scott also wanted to read, to learn, to find out about the world outside. "I remember the library and how I read the classic English novels - Austen, Eliot, Hardy. I realised that I was also attracted to an intellectual life. I was a very young 19-year-old at the time, so I don't think I really knew what I wanted."
The tug-of-war between the religious and the wider world went on for four years or so. "Eventually, but also very gradually, I decided to leave the Abbey. There was no overnight drama. The Abbot asked me whether I wanted to renew my commitment and perhaps study in Rome and I decided not to."
By that time, Scott was already writing and was very interested in the radical brand of Catholicism in vogue during the late 1960s and early 1970s. "We wanted to turn Prinknash into a communal farm. I'm not sure what the Tory farmers all around would have made of that." And so Scott left the monastery, thinking now that he was interested above all in literature and teaching. Over the following years, he says, his Catholicism slowly faded. "I'm still in touch with people from that period in my life, but I don't count myself as a Catholic."
Wanting to do a degree, Scott first had to pass A Levels and then read for an external London degree at a private college in Oxford for which he received a grant. This was an intellectually stimulating time, as university dons taught his course and he became active in the theatre, working at the Oxford Playhouse as a stage manager and developing ambitions to direct. From there he moved to Manchester, where he qualified as a teacher in 1973.
A job came up to teach English at a comprehensive school in Peckham, South London, and Scott took it. Suddenly he was in a tough, inner-city classroom environment and he loved it. "There was a large Caribbean community in that part of London and I read Sam Selvon and other West Indian writers with the kids. I'd never really felt comfortable with my new English identity, and I'd also left Trinidad behind by then. But when I heard my Caribbean voice in the classroom and saw how the kids reacted, it raised issues about myself and where I was from. The experience at Peckham focussed all that."
By 1977 Scott was ready to return to Trinidad. He had married Jenny Green, also a teacher, and both were keen to live and work in the Caribbean. He had been back briefly in 1969, but this was the first real return since the time when he had left the island as an aspiring monk. "I'd gone away to be a priest and came back as a left-wing teacher. I suppose people thought I'd changed a little bit."
He taught for a year at Presentation College, San Fernando, then Aranguez Junior Secondary. "The kids were wonderful," he says, "they actually stood up when you came into the classroom!" But there were few resources, large
groups had to share a single book, the school was run-down. "I was really into teaching at the time and very active in union work. I was involved in setting up a new teachers' union and we were all interested in politics. Cuba seemed like a fascinating alternative and we followed what was happening in Grenada."
I wondered whether Scott encountered any hostility on account of being white. "No, quite the opposite. Trinidad society is incredibly tolerant and inclusive when it comes to race and colour. Some of the 'big politics' rhetoric is about race, but there's room for white individuals in whatever they want to do. I think some people imagined I was English anyway, but I never felt any animosity."
The late 1970s was also a vibrant literary and cultural period for Scott. "I'd never really been aware of the boom in Caribbean writing until then, but I soon discovered a whole lot of writers like Alejo Carpentier and Aimé Césaire. I was reading voraciously, rediscovering the literature, the landscapes, the people I'd never really known." He became friendly with Earl Lovelace and Ken Ramchand, spent a memorable Christmas at the beach with C.L.R. James, pursued his interest in the theatre by working with Derek Walcott on Remembrance at the Trinidad Theatre Workshop. "I was incredibly active," he recalls, "we'd intended to travel around the world, but instead we stayed in Trinidad for three years. All that time I was thinking about writing, but always procrastinating. Eventually I started writing regularly in the mornings, but it was terrible. I felt quite scared."
A return to England in 1980 proved unsuccessful, and Scott admits he went through a sort of crisis with a job he didn't like and a bad case of writer's block. By 1982 he was back in Trinidad, on his own, living and writing in his mother's home in Lange Park. It was a lonely time, but also a productive one. Several stories were completed, he says, and they were even quite good. "Jenny read them and said to a friend, 'I think Lawrence can actually write.'"
Returning once more to London, he found a part-time teaching job and carried on writing. The creative block had disappeared and a literary agent took him on. "I then embarked on a reckless venture by writing Witchbroom. My books take a while to happen, you know." In fact, the novel took four years to write, during which time he won the 1986 Tom-Gallon prize for a story called The House of Funerals. This was an important breakthrough, for it brought Scott to the attention of Peter Day, an editor at Allison & Busby. "He said that I'd have to make changes to Witchbroom, cut back on the digressions, rearrange the structure. It was a much bigger book to start with, but it turned out a better book in the end, even if it lost something.'
The novel wasn't a best-seller, but it was chosen by the BBC for its Book at Bedtime series. A Trinidadian producer, Marina Salandy-Brown, was instrumental in making that happen, and Margaret Busby abridged the book for the radio. "When I first started recording the reading, Marina stopped me and said 'you can't read like that'. She suggested I should pretend I was in a crowded, noisy pub, talking into one person's ear. That was the way to give the illusion of an intimate relationship with the listener at home."
Like Aelred's Sin, Witchbroom is a novel of powerfully evoked, emotional landscapes. It tells of the Monagas family, a white Creole dynasty, and their history in the turbulent, cosmopolitan, sensual island of Trinidad. With an imaginative approach to history not unlike Gabriel García Márquez's, Scott mixes fantasy and narrative inventiveness with real events to produce a novel that Wilson Harris perceptively called "strange and intriguing fiction with its layers of incurable pathos."
Scott talks passionately about landscapes, about the two places - Trinidad and England - that make up his life and literary world. "I would find it hard to choose one of the two. I want both. I love both landscapes and can't really write about anything else. Strangely, when I'm in Trinidad I find myself dreaming of the English countryside and vice versa." What is important, he says, is that even in fast-changing Trinidad, landscapes endure. I ask him whether he has favourites. "Yes, Rampanalgas on Trinidad's north-east coast and Shropshire. They're both wild landscapes and Jenny is from Shropshire."
I put it to Scott that his view of Trinidad is very different from Naipaul's, that he never sees the island as small or constricting. "I think my experience is very different. I couldn't go back to that very narrow Creole society of my childhood, but that isn't really Trinidad. When I came back in the late seventies, I realised I'd never been an adult there, that there was so much to discover. OK, you can stand at Mount St Benedict and look down and it all looks very small. But it contains amazing diversity and energy. Quite unlike the negative things that Naipaul has written."
As we sit there in the gentlemen's club ambience of the Russell Hotel, it strikes me that Lawrence Scott has found an enviable balance, one that eludes many people who inhabit two worlds. He writes, he teaches part time, he is happy in London, but equally so in Port of Spain. Another novel is being written, which he won't tell me about. He thinks he'd like to write full-time but isn't sure when that could happen. It has been a gradual process, but now the two sides of his life seem to have come together. "I could never not be part of Trinidad," he says. And if the experience of Aelred's Sin is anything to go by, Trinidad is happy to welcome him home any time as one of its most original and imaginative writers.