FROM THE ASHES OF EARLY CRISIS

EARL LOVELACE HAS RISEN TO HEIGHTS OF LITERARY GLORY

The biographical note, which had come up in previous interviews, came up again as I sat in the breezy living room of novelist Earl Lovelace's home on a hill in Cascade.

It was the recounting of a disappointment early in the writer's life.

Born of labouring parents, long before the introduction of Common entrance, he looked to winning an exhibition for free secondary schooling.

"I was supposed to be bright," he said from behind the smoke from one of his ten daily cigarettes. "I was expected to win an exhibition. When I was 11, I felt I could rule this country.

"But I failed the exhibition - twice. The whole world fell in. That supposed failure closed off that option, that particular route to training or education."

That personal crisis early in his life, and the continuing crisis among a people caused by the experience of slavery and degradation, have been driving forces in the work that has made Lovelace a major figure in Caribbean literature.

The latest of his five novels, Salt, won him the 1997 Commonwealth Writers Prize. He now finds himself driven to go beyond writing, and to campaign personally for reparation to be made to the descendants of slaves.

To Lovelace, the demand for reparation is more urgent than the jostling for space and power between Africans and Indians in Trinidad today. The groups should have sympathy with each other's pain, he said, but the experiences of the two are different.

"We are talking about human dignity, about how (people in) a community can deal with each other, about how a society can free itself from its past.

"Reparation is not just for the victim - it's also for the person who inflicted the would, and for the bystanders. We must deal with the indignities of the past if we are to go forward."

After the unhappy college exhibition effort, his parents arranged for him to attend a fee-paying secondary school, where he dreamt of overturning the sentence of failure which the early exams had passed on him. "I had a sense of becoming somebody. What, I didn't know. I had no sense of what at any point."

Lovelace was born in Toco in 1935 to a housewife and a labouring man who planted the land he owned. The fourth of seven children, he was sent at an early age to Tobago, where he grew up with his cousins in his grandparents' home.

'A lot of things grew out of that experience and one of them was an understanding of the black family. When mothers had children, it was a family affair and one would look after the other's children You had a wider sense of family."

Even so, the experience brought with it a sense of alienation and distance.

"I was never withdrawing from people. I was part of the people. But there was both a distance and an involvement with people. I felt that while people would be responding to the general propaganda of things, there was a difference in my perception of things."

At 11, Lovelace rejoined his family in Trinidad, where they moved to Belmont and, later, to Morvant. His eldest brother, Lewis, was a painter.

"He was the first artist that I knew, the first one of our family, of my world, to address something beyond the labouring for material survival. For that reason, he was, from early, very special to me - an inspiration - a point of reference," Lovelace once recalled in an address.

Lovelace was a voracious reader from early. "I read everything - detective stories, mysteries, westerns, the Bible. By age ten I had already read about black people, about Booker T and Harriet Tubman."

After school he became a proofreader at the Guardian. He didn't pursue becoming a reporter, because he had "a vague sense that it belonged to a certain class".

After he was fired by the Guardian for not following instructions, Lovelace responded to a notice about an opening as a forest ranger "because there was a job". It turned out to be the experience that would propel him into his career as a novelist.

He moved to Valencia and lived alone in a small room. Part of his duties was to accompany and supervise the labourers who ventured into the forest to fell trees and burn them to make charcoal, and who gathered stalks to make baskets.

"You got an appreciation of these people. The truck would come early in the morning to go to the forest and you travelled in the same truck with them, laughed with them, shared their conversation. They would cook and share their food with you.

"It was a very useful experience. In addition to getting to know the landscape, you got a sense of ordinary people. You got a sense that they were special, tremendous people."

He spent much of his off-duty time playing sports and gambling with the labourers. But still, there were many vacant hours in that isolated village and he eagerly looked out for the visits of the library van.

"I started writing at that time. You were alone then. I decided I would read and write every day. A lot of those early stories have emerged as other stories."

Lovelace joined a literary discussion group with two other young men who had minor publishing success, and again became aware of his difference in perception.

"People were talking importantly about writing. They elevated writers like Hemingway and Maupassant to the status of gods. I was not as reverent before them."

He eventually left Valencia to become an agricultural officer ("It was thought a step above forestry") and was posted to the even more remote village of Rio Claro.

"The whole culture of rural Trinidad unfolded. There I could get more deeply into the culture. I could, for example, see stickfighting and I would go and sing with the drummers for the stickfights."

In Rio Claro he got married to Jean. He was 27 and felt he should have been getting on in life.

"I thought I couldn't do nothing.I thought the most important thing to do - the only thing I could do - was to write."

He sent his first novel to foreign publishers, who rejected it but gave "great encouragement".

He turned to writing poetry. "I don't remember why." Occasionally, he would journey to Port of Spain and stand in the shadows as the Trinidad Theatre Workshop rehearsed Derek Walcott's plays.

Hoping for helpful comment, he gave Walcott a few of his poems, but Walcott lost them.

The diversion into poetry was another "useful" experience, Lovelace said. "Writing poetry enabled me to enter into ideas more deeply. It gave me a greater appreciation of language, of rhythm."

With the arrival of Independence in 1962, he got his first break. British Petroleum sponsored an Independence literary award offering the then princely sum of TT $5,000.

Learning of the competition late, Lovelace dusted off the manuscript the publishers had rejected and reworked it. "I finished it on the last day for submission." The result, While Gods are Falling, won the BP award and became his first published work.

After that came The Schoolmaster; The Dragon Can't Dance, and The Wine of Astonishment, all of which chronicle the struggles of ordinary people. Lovelace has also published a collection of plays; Jestina's Calypso, and short stories, A Brief Conversion and Other Stories.

Upon his return from London where he received the Commonwealth prize, a reception in honour of Lovelace was held at President's House.

UWI professor Ken Ramchand spoke in tribute: "Lovelace's work seeks to digest enslavement, indenture, colonialism, and the oppressions of new forms of economic and cultural imperialism, recasting them in the form of two major quests: firstly, the search for selfhood, the real self beneath and behind the role selves imposed upon us by others and put on in bad faith by ourselves; and secondly, striving for recognition, respect and reparation for what has been abused, trying to make communal wholeness out of a history of fragmentation."

Lovelace is proud of having made his mark on world literature from a home base. Yet he is painfully aware of the difficulties writers and artists who chose to remain at home have had to endure.

After leaving his job as an agricultural officer he became a writer and sub-editor at the Express, but found the work stymied his creative writing.

His later job at the UWI was on terms that left him frustrated and financially insecure. "One can't write and work at many other things," he noted.

"Just as society needs to produce engineers and priests and so on, it should feel the need to produce artists and writers. A society that is serious should see that the writers and artists are there to see the development of the place, someone to give them back themselves.

"In the Caribbean it has been very shameful, really. The society has not felt itself responsible to have people living here and writing. We've grown up seeing our writers being taken care of elsewhere."

Lovelace, who, for a decade, was a UWI lecturer in English, is today a visiting lecturer at Wellesley College in Boston. He now spends his time between Boston and Cascade, where he lives with his sons, Walt, a television producer, and Che, a painter.

His daughter Lulu, the last of his three children with wife Jean, from whom he is estranged, is at Rutgers. He has two daughters, Maya, six, and Tiy, three, with Robyn Cross, director of the successful Shades of I - She production.

Longman is about to publish a children's story on the adventures of "Crawfie the Crapaud" which Lovelace wrote for his first three children.

In addition to a novel that explores life in the imagined village of Cascadu, which appeared in Salt, he is working on plays and a book of essays on the Caribbean. He says he has as yet "plenty writing to cover".

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