Derek Walcott's is one of those lives which richly deserve a biography, even while its subject is still productive and active. While on this side of the Atlantic, and perhaps in the prosperous West generally, the heroic, multi-layered literary life tends to be a thing of the past, here we have a life story from the Caribbean to match that of Yeats or Lawrence.
Walcott was born in St Lucia in 1930, along with his twin brother Roderick (who went on to become a dramatist in his own right). Walcott's father Warwick - "Nature's Gentleman" - was of Bajan extraction from a racially mixed union; after his early death in 1931, it was Derek's mother Alix who took over the reins of the family. She was of Dutch and "brown" extraction from a neighbouring island and was headmistress at the local Methodist infant school. Derek was therefore brought up within a tiny, and influential, Protestant minority on a predominantly Catholic island. His family spoke English, the language of the local elite, while French Creole remained the vernacular of the majority. Reviewing his identity in a later poem, he wrote:
I'm just a red nigger who love the sea,
I had a sound colonial education,
I have Dutch, nigger, and English in me,
and either I'm nobody, or I'm a nation.
When it came to his secondary education, Derek's path led to a Catholic college, St Mary's, in the island's capital, Castries. Already recognised as an aspiring poet among local artists and writers, he fell foul of one of the college priests, a Father Jesse, who accused the young Methodist of heresy in an early poem, "1944". The public rebuke from this zealous priest stung Walcott and his family (and it was not to be his only run-in with the Catholic Church on the island); however, the relationship with Catholicism was renewed in 1946, when St Mary's was taken over by Christian Brothers.
The poet took to these new recruits from Cork, who came with different accents and an un-British variety of English and introduced him to the work of the Irish literary renaissance. A little later, Walcott discovered James Joyce, who has remained a key reference for him, and whose influence is discernible in his masterpiece, Omeros (1990).
In his formative years in St Lucia, Walcott was almost as attracted by painting as he was by poetry and drama. An influential early friendship was with Dunstan St Omer, with whom he attended drawing classes, and who is now celebrated as the island's greatest painter. Derek knew that he "lived a different gift" and gave his main energies to forging a new literature for his corner of the Caribbean. Bruce King's narrative manages to convey the excitement of those early years, when a committed group of artists was giving voice to their separate identity: the Caribbean was a crucible of imperial history, but Walcott points out that he had "nothing against which /to notch the growth of my work /but the horizon".
Even before he left St Lucia to go to university in Jamaica, Walcott's life had already assumed its hectic, varied pattern. Theatre projects, poetry, painting, self-promotion and the turbulence of personal relationships all crowd into the life and make the biographer's task a daunting one. An early sequence of teaching engagements in the 1950s gave way to an 18-year commitment to the Trinidad Theatre Workshop in Port of Spain, as the West Indies were moving from empire to independence.
Just as Yeats could characterise his work with Gregory at the Abbey as coming "to nothing", so too did Walcott feel great personal disillusionment when, in the 1970s, with his second marriage ending, he resigned from the Trinidad theatre and determined to seek his fortune in the States. Although notionally "famous", with a growing American reputation as a poet, after many years of dedication he could still complain that the theatre in Port of Spain "lacked seating, was roach-infested, had no security, the roof leaked, it had never been cleaned under the stage, the floor boards splintered, etc."
From the 1960s onwards, America had become a vital constituency for Walcott's poetry and plays. His appointment to a teaching position at Boston University in 1982 was the culmination of a long involvement with American publishing and academia. Bruce King goes into exhaustive detail about Walcott's travelling, his theatre arrangements, the fees he was paid for readings and workshops, his negotiations with publishers, and so on. His friendships with Brodsky and Heaney were among the strongest he made in America. (Without Walcott's insistence that Heaney write plays, we would not have The Cure at Troy.) Even with well-paid lecturing stints, however, he was perpetually short of money, the turbulence of his personal life defying his best attempts at financial security.
Bruce King has already published a scholarly account of Walcott's involvement with the Trinidad theatre; his expertise is strengthened by personal acquaintance with his subject, and by having access to a hitherto unpublished prose autobiography. There is an intimacy in the approach which makes some parts read like a memoir of a personal friend: King stands by Walcott throughout the attacks on him from black activists who believe he has not been forthright enough in espousing what the French-language writers call negritude, and he is also sceptical about the validity of the sexual harrassment charges which have been made against Walcott at Harvard and at BU.
There is not a lot of space here for an assessment of the poetry, although King does shed light on the early influences, with the figure of Auden looming surprisingly large. Later chapters give us fascinating glimpses of Walcott's provocative, demanding and original teaching style, particularly at BU, where he still teaches poetry and dramaturgy. There is, increasingly in his later teaching, a classical insistence on form, a trend observable in his own poetry from the loose styles of the early autobiographical Another Life (1972), to the hexameters of Omeros.
This is a good book about a great life. Anyone who values the range, energy and ambitions of Walcott's poetry will be gratified, and daunted, by the discovery that the work is indeed sourced in a life of similar proportions.