On the Importance of Mittelholzer by Jeremy Poynting

• Posted by peepaltreepress on July 16, 2010 at 5:46am
• on http://caribbeanliterarysalon.ning.com/profiles/blogs/on-the-importance-of

No important West Indian writer’s reputation has suffered as much as that of Edgar Mittelholzer. In the 1960s, many of his novels were issued as mass market paperbacks in lurid and wildly misleading covers that quite probably sold in quantities that would make Caribbean writers of our day hugely jealous. His A Morning at the Office appeared in Penguin. Then, as tends to happen when a writer dies, when Edgar Mittelholzer committed suicide by fire in 1965, his novels began to disappear, to be represented in the 1970s and 80s only by Heinemann’s revival of Corentyne Thunder and A Morning at the Office. Longman reissued My Bones and My Flute. In the later 60s and early 1970s some critical assessments appeared, most notably A.J. Seymour’s still immensely important Edgar Mittelholzer: the man and his work, which in 1967 inaugurated the Edgar Mittelholzer memorial lectures in Guyana. But even Seymour’s critique, though often just and properly generous, is broad brush and is not always very accurate in its readings. Thereafter there was important work done by Michael Gilkes, though in it Mittelholzer sometimes seems fated to be seen as an interesting and less successful precursor to Wilson Harris. For the past thirty years Mittelholzer disappeared totally, his books obtainable only second hand, and his reputation solidified as at best being that of a literary ancestor, a pot-boiling writer obsessed with sex and race-mixing and given to right-wing, authoritarian views. His later novels do, indeed, suffer from the provocative preachiness of a mind at the end of its tether, but it is clear that many of the earlier evaluations read Mittelholzer through the distorting overlay of his later, British-based work, rather than reading the earlier, Caribbean-based work in its own right.

Our reissue of Mittelholzer’s earlier books, the careful critical introductions to them and the ongoing work ofJuanita Cox, will we hope lead to a proper revaluation of Mittelholzer’s work, not just as an ancestor – though he warrants respect as the first Caribbean author to fully earn his living by writing – but as a writer of immense literary ambition and imagination, not a preacher but a provocateur of ideas. There is his fascination with musical form as analogous to the form of the novel and his idiosyncratic take on a number of the devices of modernist fiction. There is his perception that the confrontations manifest in early nineteenth century writing (between the optimism of the rationalist project, the gothic sensibility of darkness and disorder and the romantic discovery of truth to inner feeling) were pertinent to Caribbean societies in the process of making themselves after the sleep of colonialism. And with this seriousness went a compulsive urgency to tell stories. These are all aspects of Mittelholzer’s depth as a writer that we hope contemporary readers will discover for themselves.

The Edgar Mittelholzer Memorial Lectures (1983) by Roy Heath

Taken from: http://www.stabroeknews.com/2010/guyana-review/04/29/the-edgar-mittleholzer-memorial-lectures-1983/

Republished in the Stabroek News on 29 April 2010

The sources of fiction

One of Guyana’s most prolific and best-loved novelists, the late Roy Heath possessed a consumate understanding of the rich sources from which Guyanese and Caribbean writers derived the themes for their works. Heath himself drew on his experiences of urban Guyana to produce a vein of storytelling that remains a highly valued part of the Guyanese literary culture.
The eight in a distinguished lineup of Guyanese literary personages to deliver the Edgar Mittelholzer Memorial Lectures, the first of Heath’s trilogy focuses on the sources of Guyanese and Caribbean fiction. In this issue The Guyana Review reprints the full text of that lecture.

Storytelling, like painting and music, dates back to pre-Neolithic times, this is to say, the earliest period of man’s history. Perhaps the most striking aspect of storytelling throughout the ages is its shifting centre of interest. Among the aboriginal Indians of South America storytelling attributes an importance to animals that matches man’s, in fact the jaguar is almost invariably man’s superior. Man steals fire from him, marries his daughters to him and in general treats him with a reverence reserved for the latter-day gods. The jaguar emerges from these stories with the dignity of a hero belonging to Japanese fiction.

It is during this early planting period – as exemplified by the way of life most aboriginal Indians North of the Amazon- that certain universal themes began to preoccupy the story makers: incest, disloyalty and rape characterize some of the most striking tales – striking to us, no doubt because they are the stuff of contemporary obsessions. But the most common themes are the origin of the stars, of fish poison, of fire, and so on, providing, as it were, a summary of the technology on which their way of life depends.

Most of these stories, then, appear to be functional, and do not depend for their effect on the identification of the individual listener with the characters involved. Yet, it is precisely this kind of judgement that must attract suspicion, for such tales may evoke an emotional response in the Indians as profound as our reaction to a classic novel. Nevertheless, they do not exploit an interest in individual behaviour, nor are they divorced from the destiny of the social group for whom they were composed.

Edgar Mittelholzer

This undifferentiated view of man as part of the animal world later lost ground to stories centering around the hero, who was to become the chief preoccupation of the story-maker, a remarkable development that took place late in early Neolithic times. In Guyana we have the opportunity to witness these two contrasting mentalities, the undifferentiated and the individualistic. The self seeking of the town dweller is alien to the psychology of aboriginal Indians who, as late as the early part of this century, could not even be persuaded to work for others.

This new culture-hero, while he represents an emerging individual psychology, is very different from the hero of later times. Far from being an ideal male, a model to be emulated, he is a trickster figure, unreliable and devious, often with an unbridled sexual appetite, who sounds a warning against the unhibited individual ego. In his most primitive form he appears in the Winnebago trickster cycle of the Iroquois Indians of North America, while in Guyana he is a Macunaima, the culture hero of the Arecuna tribe, who once used his magical powers to hoist the communal hut high into the air simple because he was angry with his brother.

Kwaku Anansi, hero of Akan folk tales, emphasizes one aspect of the trickster figure, namely his ability to survive, thus presenting the Winnebago and Arecuna hero in an attenuated form, divested of many anarchical traits. It is worth mentioning at this point that, despite numerous developments in story-telling, the trickster figure has not disappeared: he lives on in the villain of fiction and drama, a figure of endless fascination who acts as a foil to our hero.

With the appearance of a culture hero came a parallel development in the length of the story, which now told as part of a series. If the hero provided the connecting link to the parts of his misadventures conformed to a pattern, so giving the often lengthy series of tales a unity to which the old stories of animals and humans did not inspire. The problems of unity and length are important since they anticipate the latest flowering of story-telling, the novel or long story in prose.

Parallel to the development of the short story into a series of tales, there arose a new form designed to meet the need for a historical record of traumatic events. In Guyana both the Arawaks and Warraus recount epic tales of their wars with the Caribs, late intruders into South America from the islands to the North. These stories are necessarily long and like all so-called historical records show their tellers, the Warrau and Arawaks, in a heroic light. This period was the heroic age when the Caribs, unable to stabilize their growing population, penetrated South American North of the Amazon by the way of the Orinoco, the Waini and other large rivers. Such long epic tales are characteristics of a certain historical time, and if my evidence is taken from story-telling among the aboriginal Indians it is not for want of examples elsewhere. The Ramayana epic in India, the Mandingo epics of Mali and the Homeric epics of Greece all serve a similar purpose and belong to a similar historical time. Interestingly enough the epic follows, broadly, the same line of development with regard to the hero as did the shorter tales. More diffused in their centre of interest in their earliest form, they sought to concentrate on the deeds of a few characters in their latest manifestations. What the Warrau did to the Caribs in the Warrau-Carib wars, as told by the Warrau, becomes, the later heroic age, the successes of the Greeks through leaders like Agamenon and Ulysses.

We see, therefore, a parallel development in the obsession with the hero-idea in both forms of story-telling. The ego is well on its way to establishing itself as one of the pivotal preoccupations of fiction as fiction or fiction as history. Fiction as history is in fact still the main form of history taught in schools and universities throughout the world. Just as story-telling is unable to resist the fascination of the trickster figure is the guise of the villain, in the same way historical investigations is trapped by the demands of propaganda.

It must be obvious to many that nothing has been said about women and children in the history of the art of story-telling. The stories that have been collect among Neolithic peoples all tell of an art manipulated by male storytellers. The heroes are almost invariable male until the late epics, and where a female protagonist appears she is a temptress – leading men to their doom in the forest or the at the bottom of the sea – a bringer of disaster who, against all warnings, opens a box out of which fly all the woes of the this world, or a faithful wife, ideal of man’s wish-fulfilment. Children fare even worst, for it is only recently that fiction has ceased maltreating or murdering them, thus disclosing the unconscious hand behind the apparently conscious art of invention. Just as the release of the age in an important aspect on the history of story-telling, so the role of women will provide a later impulse to the moulding of a new fiction, a matter to be discussed later.

Wilson Harris

Up to this point the direction taken by the story-maker’s art appears to have followed a determinist course: a certain historical time gives rise to a certain type of story. Propaganda itself yields to the demand of the period. But if the role of propaganda is subtle in pre-literate times, its purpose becomes clean when the art of printing allows the dissemination of stories in a permanent form. The German oral stories collected by the brothers Grimm were brutal in the extreme. When the prince came upon Sleeping Beauty he did not wake her up with a kiss as the written version would have it: he raped her. The pressures operating at the time, overt and otherwise, obliged the Grimm brothers to modify these folk tales, in order to make them acceptable to the church and the new merchant class. It was all very well for the common people to regale themselves with stories of an unbridled imaginations, but the wives and children of the middle class had to be protected. Stories were made to match the art of that period, a fey, prettified version of the bourgeois world, in which violence was banished and a longed-for order reigned. Organized religion became the master censor, which prescribed theatrical productions that were not put on at the Court or in the Church porch.

The reality in West Africa was quite different. Villagers were able to pursue their art, free from the interference of an umbrella-like religious organization. The Gelede secret society among the Yoruba of Nigeria, formed to protect men from the power of women, have their poetry, songs, stories and dances. The vigour of public story-telling at the door-mouth was equalled by the vigour of private story-telling among the secret societies.

The theory of economic activity as the source of change, like every system of investigation, has its limitations. Old Chinese paintings in which humans are dwarfed by the landscape contrast sharply with African art whose subjects demand attention by their very posture. The cultural experience also has a formative influence. One would expect, therefore, the content of stories of one culture to have a recognizable stamp beyond the exigencies of historical time. In West African stories the characters meet people without limbs on the road; an old woman begs a ride from a generous young man, who is unable to get her off his back. These are stories in which their character inhabit a nightmare world of terror and dismay. Other cultures at a similar historical time-stage are characterized by a gender vision of fate. But it is a matte of interest that uncensored African and European art, which provide humans with a violent image of themselves in the world- even in the plastic arts the image is aggressive- should share such an oppressive world view.

It would be easy to get lost in the multiplicity of genres that emerge as the merchant class grows more powerful. Didactic stories, religious, fairy tales and others vie with one another for public attention, reflecting in their division of interest the division of labour that seeks to satisfy a growing demand for goods. But it is precisely in this period that a story-telling form emerges which gathers together all the threads of the art into a single genre, the novel, that is to say, a long story in prose. It is difficult and perhaps futile to attempt to discover the country that can claim the honour to the first novel. Modern research ascribes the earliest acknowledged examples to eleventh century Japan where the novel flourished under the leadership of women authors, while Europe and China produced outstanding examples in the 16th and 17th centuries. Characterization in depth and a sustained story line were salient features of the new form. A middle-class art from, the novel chartered the course of middleclass aspiration and achievement, disappointment and disgust: in Europe it became more potent as cultural anaemia became more apparent. It was not the novel that discovered depth psychology, but rather the psychologists who took their cue from the new surgeons of the mind, following in the wake of practitioners like Gogol and Dostoyevsky, just as egrets forage for a meal in the footsteps of cattle. But the individual had no sooner come into his own then he went into swift decline. He was examined, anlysed, dismantled, reconstituted, rejected, rehabilitated, reviled and even dehumanised.

The trickster figure, once dressed in the garb of respectability to play the hero, now survives as villain and anti-hero, and social anguish has been translated into ‘fictional’ revulsion.

In West Africa the novel has gone its own way; unaffected by the profound pessimism of Europe and the United States it has been able to produce remarkable works like Buchi Emecheta’s Bride Price, a masterpiece that draws it vigour from a powerful culture source. Gabriel Marques has written the first genuinely South American novel, 100 years of Solitude and followed it with Autumn of the Patriarch, a novel of such magical evocations that it confirms fiction as an understanding art form.

The novel, then, has become a comprehensive form into which a variety of inventions can be poured. From Robbe-Grillet (French) and Wilson Harris (Guyanese), two of the leaders of the experimental school of fiction, to the detailed chronicles of some American writers, it covers a vast terrain. Any literate culture may borrow the novel and make it what it will. On the one hand it has re-absorbed poetry and drama, history and myth, and on the other it has been fractionalized into numerous genres.

A development in fiction which might well prove to be one the most significant, is its growing interest in woman, who often no longer appear as appendages of men. Much of art can be described as reflecting male wish-fulfilment and anxiety. Not only are the majority of its practitioners men, but its subject matter too often betrays a male concern, so that adultery, violence and murder are its staples. In at least one country, where more than half of the novelists are women, the reader is male to confront the condition of a female psyche far removed from the illusions of male fiction. If Flaubert and Tolstoy warn against the tragedy adultery brings in its train Emecheta the Nigeria novelist ignores the subject. For her it is the very existence of men as the great manipulators that fuel her obsessive vision. Even the titles of her books, Bride Price, the ironic Joys of Motherhood, are disturbing to the male illusion.

Old people and children rarely achieve prominence in fiction, a fact as deplorable as the neglect of the female psyche. If children are no longer regularly brutalized or murdered with a ritual fervor they do not frequently appear, and where the demands of realism oblige authors to put them on stage they are treated with cursory attention. Our interest in the condition of the very old and very young is no less sketchy than is our understanding of the human mind. This observation alone serves as a reminder that story-telling, despite its remarkable age still has much ground to cover.

Modern psychology would have us believe that the source of fiction lies in the individual experience. Edgar Mittleholzer’s recurrent themes can be traced to his childhood. Nikolai Gogol’s mania for describing people’s noses is attributed to a castration fear, and so on. Yet, the recurrent themes in Mittelholzer’s books are the obsessions of the Guyanese Creole in the pre-1960 Guyana, just as Gogol’s preoccupation with sneezing, nose wiping and the disappearance of noses can be traced to Ukranian 18th and 19th century stories. What appears at first to be an individual mania draws, in fact, on a pool of cultural experience. Yet, it is through individual experience that the author is able to empathize with a culture or with humanity at large. It is, therefore, useful to identify experiences which might serve as a starting point for a story capable of achieving resonance among a large group of listeners or readers.

It is axiomatic that first novels are frequently autobiographical; furthermore, they might possess a numinous quality subsequent books can never recapture. If the source of fiction is the individual experience its vividness often belongs to the power of recollection of childhood events. Childhood memories undoubtedly furnish much material for the subject matter of fiction. Some authors openly proclaim their intention of writing an autobiography, while others are convinced that their fiction is a made-up story. But neither autobiography nor fiction is what is seems, for the first is all too often an apologia festooned with inventions, and the second invention anchored to a solid raft of truth. The author’s unconscious intention invariably become clear after the third or fourth book: a one-sided treatment of a recurring theme, consistently weak male characters, a preoccupation with death, self-hatred and much else, which tumble out like the words of a patient under the influence of a truth drug.

But fiction as recollection is not all obsessive. The observant writer will look outward and note the behaviour of others, the outline shape of a tree, the way a child cocks its head speech patterns and a host of little things. For they all go to make up the kaleidoscopic background against which is to be played out the action that justifies the descriptive term ‘story’. This detail is the hallmark of much contemporary fiction. Novelists from North and South America, the Caribbean, Africa, Europe and Asia all feel obliged to work this pattern. At first sight a novel, the most evolved story-telling form, is synonymous with detail. Yet the Bible story of Joseph the Dreamer who was sold into slavery by his brother conforms to the definition of the novel while lacking great detail: a long story in prose, it has a protagonist whose character is convincingly portrayed. Besides it boasts qualities that most contemporary fiction might well emulate. This magnificent tale refutes the contentions that the novel is a modern literary form and that it requires a detailed evocation of the environment in which the story takes place. Significant detail does contribute to its appeal: Joseph’s megalomania, his rejection of Potiphar’s wife, the symbolic importance of the number 7 in his dreams, all help to cast the story’s spell. Extravagant detail on the other hand is a convention of the contemporary novel, just as guns are a convention of the American cinema. The convention persuades us that it is indispensable.

In the foregoing I have indicated that the sources of fiction reside mainly in the socioeconomic condition and that the individual experience, while capable of imbuing a work with numinous quality, takes its direction and broader vision from the socio-economic condition. In my view any forecast regarding the direction of fiction will have to take the above into account. Does experimental fiction give us a clue to the new directions or will the bias be in favour of the fiction of Gabriel Marques’ magical realism? I have no idea, for if the sources of art are identifiable its future is elusive.

Destruction of the Caribbean Landscape Through Colonization in Edgar Mittelholzer's Corentyne Thunder, Jean Rhys' Wide Sargasso Sea (etc)

See http://thescholarship.ecu.edu/handle/10342/2834 for link to thesis by Sandra Williams

Full Title:

Destruction of the Caribbean Landscape Through Colonization in Edgar Mittelholzer's Corentyne Thunder, Jean Rhys' Wide Sargasso Sea, and Wilson Harris' Palace Of The Peacock

Photo of Mittelholzer

Photo taken in 1952 (from the Marquette University Archives)

http://www.flickr.com/photos/27772396@N07/4886431836/

Colin Rickard's Article 'Remembering Edgar Mittelholzer: Part Two'

Original Posting: http://www.stabroeknews.com/2010/features/in-the-diaspora/11/29/remembering-edgar-mittelholzer-part-ii/

The 24 novels and two works of non-fiction by the late Guyanese writer Edgar Mittelholzer (1909-65) — the majority of them published in a 15-year period — was a remarkable achievement. With the exception of 1964, he had a new book out every year from 1950 to 1965, sometimes more than one. There were two in 1952, 1954, 1960, 1963 and 1965 and three each in 1958 and 1961.

He enjoyed the music of Wagner, and was fascinated by the weather — being especially fond of the sea and of casuarina trees — which not infrequently featured in his novels, and while he has gone, he has not been forgotten, and much of his work now seems poised to make a comeback.

After the author’s tragic death in 1965 I wrote a tribute piece in Frank Collymore’s Barbados-based literary magazine Bim, which was published the following year, and Mittelholzer’s second wife, Jacqueline Pointer (now Ward), also wrote about her late husband in Bim.

Guyanese literary icon A.J. Seymour, wrote meaningfully about Mittelholzer in his magazine Kyk-over-Al in 1968, and the pioneering Caribbean author’s life and work has been explored by Michael Gilkes, and by Guyana-born Dr. Frank Birbalsingh, Senior Scholar and Professor Emeritus of York University’s Department of English, who has written several scholarly articles about aspects of Mittelholzer’s writing, and has interviewed various of his colleagues and members of his family over a period of years.

The Mittelholzer “renaissance” has come about through the agency of Peepal Tree Press in England, which, in a new series of books called “Caribbean Modern Classics,” has republished four of his early novels and has plans to republish another six, a book of literary criticism and, ultimately, a biography.

As part of the Caribbean Tourism Organization-sponsored “Caribbean Week” in Toronto, late last month, the University of Toronto’s Centre for Caribbean Studies and the community bookshop A Different Bookstore staged an evening event remembering Mittelholzer.

Speakers included Dr. Birbalsingh, Trinidadian author Raymond Ramcharitar, who provided the Introduction for Peepal Tree’s edition of A Morning at the Office – originally published in 1950 –and myself. Dr. Alissa Trotz, the Guyanese scholar who directs the Centre for Caribbean Studies, was the Moderator, and readings from Mittelholzer’s 1941 classic Corentyne Thunder and The Life and Death of Sylvia, published in 1953, were given by Nancy Rickford and Christopher Pinheiro, respectively a Guyanese and a Trinidadian.

Mittelholzer is arguably best known for his ambitious Guyana-set Kaywana Trilogy, published in 1952, 1954 and 1958. It tells the story of the fictional Van Groenwegel family from the 17^th Century to the eve of Guianese self-government — and is an astonishing piece of work, described by Dr. Birbalsingh as the author’s “supreme achievement.”

There are, of course, only three books — which makes it a trilogy — but I have met people who are convinced that there were actually seven Kaywana books. The problem is that U.S. hardcover and paperback publishers tended to change the British publishers’ titles to suit their audiences. There were some changes (one of them with Mittelholzer’s approval) in England, too. So, for the record, I set out what I have found on the true publishing history.

Children of Kaywana was initially published by Peter Nevill in London in 1952 and was not re-titled in its U.S. hardcover edition. However, when it was published there in paperback it became Savage Destiny, though much later a different paperback publisher reverted to the original title.

Mittelholzer changed his British publishers after Children of Kaywana, and subsequent editions came out under the imprint of Secker & Warburg, with whom he would have a decade long relationship. His title for the sequel, The Harrowing of Hubertus, published in 1954, failed to make a specific link to the earlier book, while the title of the third volume, Kaywana Blood, published four years later, was unequivocal, so Secker & Warburg changed the title of later editions of Hubertus, re-naming it Kaywana Stock.

The U.S. publisher retained Kaywana Stock for their edition, but another publisher changed the name of Kaywana Blood to The Old Blood, and a paperback publisher followed suit. Another U.S. paperback publisher, some 20 years later, used Kaywana Blood, and, at about the same time, a British paperback house, in republishing Hubertus — a.k.a. Stock — called it Kaywana Heritage, hence all the confusion.

Dr. Birbalsingh recalls first encountering Mittelholzer’s writing through the novel My Bones and My Flute, first published in 1955. It involves the passengers on a ship going up the Berbice River and Birbalsingh began reading it while ascending the same river to visit his brother.

“I can’t describe my excitement when I realized that I was making the journey of the characters in the book,” he said. “I was reading about something which actually involved me.”

Fellow panelist Ramcharitar recalled that he bought a secondhand copy of My Bones and My Flute in a Port of Spain bookshop, thinking that he might be able to use it in teaching a class, and was also excited to discover a book with West Indian characters, “a book which really meant something to me.”

Several audience members also remarked that after growing up on a steady diet of English Classics, they, too, had been thrilled to find in Mittelholzer an author who wrote about things which had relevance in their lives. Reader Pinheiro spoke of the impact Mittelholzer’s writing — particularly Corentyne Thunder, which is currently being made into a major film by Guyanese actor Marc Gomes — has had on him.

Next year, Peepal Tree Press — which will celebrate its 25^th Anniversary — will republish the three volumes of the Kaywana Trilogy, with their original titles, as well as My Bones and My Flute, Mittelholzer’s autobiographical A Swarthy Boy, first published in 1963, and In the Eye of the Storm: Edgar Mittelholzer 1909-2009 Critical Perspectives by Juanita Cox.

London-based, and of Guyanese descent, Cox is an Associate Fellow of the Caribbean Studies Centre at London Metropolitan University, and is working on a doctoral thesis called “Edgar Mittelholzer and the Shaping of his Novels” at the University of Birmingham. She has run down people who knew the author, has unearthed collections of his letters, and successfully undertaken really quite extraordinary research for a forthcoming biography.

Peepal Tree Press tells me that they have secured the rights to republish Mittelholzer’s first book, Creole Chips, and also the rare The Adding Machine, initially published in Jamaica in a very small edition in 1954.

Guyanese scholar Rupert Roopnaraine, opens his Introduction for Peepal Tree’s edition of Shadows Move Among Them, by saying: “While it may be too early to speak of a Mittelholzer revival, there are encouraging signs of a reawakening of not only academic but wider general interest in the work of this prodigious pioneer of the Guyanese and Caribbean novel.”

He is perfectly correct — and the Mittelholzer smorgasbord has begun.

Colin Rickard's Article 'Remembering Edgar Mittelholzer: Part 1

Originally post http://www.stabroeknews.com/2010/features/11/15/remembering-edgar-mittelholzer-part-1/

The republication of four of the early novels of the late Guyanese author Edgar Mittelholzer (1909-1965), and the intended republication of six more, along with his autobiography, and a detailed evaluation of his work, as well as a full scale biography, is giving a fresh lease of life, and a whole new readership, to a near-forgotten author who died more than half a century ago.

Jeremy Poynting, who heads up the Peepal Tree Press, based in Leeds, England, has been the catalyst for this renewal of interest in Mittelholzer, a pioneering Caribbean writer.

In creating a series called “Caribbean Modern Classics,” which will put back into print many novels by West Indian writers who came into their own in the 1950s and 1960s, Peepal Tree Press is providing a new platform for Mittelholzer and fellow Guyanese novelists Jan Carew, Denis Williams and O.R. Dathorne, as well as Andrew Salkey, Roger Mais and Neville Dawes of Jamaica and George Lamming of Barbados, among others.

Edgar Mittelholzer

Mittelholzer will have the lion’s share of the early part of this series, and Peepal Tree has already republished his 1941 gem Corentyne Thunder, and his novels A Morning at the Office (1950), Shadows Move Among Them (1951) and The Life and Death of Sylvia (1953).

Next year will see the republication of Mittelholzer’s famed Kaywana Trilogy, another early novel, his autobiography and an anthology of Mittelholzer’s published and unpublished work by Juanita Cox titled In the Eye of the Storm: Edgar Mittelholzer 1909-2009 Critical Perspectives.

Cox, the reigning Mittelholzer scholar, provided the Introduction for the Peepal Tree edition of Corentyne Thunder, which she called “a remarkably rich and sophisticated first novel,” and said it made “a bold commitment to the Caribbean reality and is an aesthetically rich work of fictive art.” She also did the Introduction for Peepal Tree’s The Life and Death of Sylvia.

Mittelholzer’s first book — Creole Chips — was locally printed in British Guiana in 1937, and the author sold it himself in New Amsterdam and Georgetown. The following year he completed Corentyne Thunder, but spent two years looking for a British publisher. In mid-1941 it appeared under the prestigious imprint of Eyre & Spottiswoode in London, just before Mittelholzer left British Guiana for wartime service in the Trinidad Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve.

Eyre & Spottiswoode sent out a number of Review Copies to British newspapers and magazines, and shipped a few copies to bookshops, but before their normal distribution was complete a German bomber, on one of Hitler’s raids on London, scored a direct hit on their warehouse.

Back in the early 1960s the only copy of Corentyne Thunder known to me was in the Golders Green Public Library in London. I borrowed it several times, as did such up-and-coming Caribbean-born authors as Salkey, Carew, Lamming, and several others.

Golders Green was a predominantly Jewish area, and the sight of non-White library borrowers there was so unusual that the Librarian once asked me about the sudden popularity of the book, which had a waiting list.

I explained that most of the borrowers were members of a burgeoning group of young writers, like the book’s author, from the Caribbean. She sniffed, and said that if the Library’s copy was actually so rare she would put it in a glass case when it was not out on loan, and might even consider charging a deposit to borrowers.

In 1948 Mittelholzer and his Trinidadian wife moved to London. In his luggage was the manuscript of a Trinidad-set novel called A Morning at the Office, which would be published by Hogarth Press two years later. Then came Shadows Move Among Them, followed by Children of Kaywana, the first of the Kaywana Trilogy, and another novel in 1952.

When Mittelholzer was awarded a year-long Guggenheim Fellowship he decided to spend the time in Canada and he and his wife moved to Montreal, living there from August, 1952, to April, 1953. They did not like the weather or the city. Shortly after The Life and Death of Sylvia was published they moved to Barbados, remaining until May, 1956, then returning to England.

Mittelholzer enjoyed inserting himself into his books and appears as two different characters in A Morning at the Office — the U.S. edition was called A Morning in Trinidad — and as one in The Life and Death of Sylvia. Among his major interests was religion, usually of the unorthodox kind. Oriental occultism, which he first discovered when he was 19, was another of his preoccupations, and suicide was a frequent theme in his books.

I first met Mittelholzer shortly after he returned to England. By then he had published nine books in England, including the first two volumes of his Kaywana Trilogy and his ghost story My Bones and My Flute, had established a strong link with publisher Secker & Warburg and was working with BBC Caribbean Service’s programme “Caribbean Voices.” I then went into the Royal Air Force to do my compulsory National Service, and our paths did not cross again until late 1958.

By that time he had published four more books, including the third in the Kaywana Trilogy and his first non-fiction work, a travel book called With a Carib Eye. He had also severed his links with “Caribbean Voices,” but retained connections with the Caribbean Service, and travelled up to London from his home in the country fairly often. Salkey, who was well dug in with the Caribbean Service and the BBC World Service, was a special friend of Mittelholzer and the three of us liked to lunch in Fleet Street.

Mittelholzer’s venture into Guyana’s history was his boldest stroke, requiring much research and imagination, and the ambitious Kaywana historical trilogy eminently displayed his literary powers.

“I can’t think of any other West Indian writer who has such narrative fluency,” says Guyana-born Dr. Frank Birbalsingh, Senior Scholar and Professor Emeritus of York University’s Department of English. “He was an amazing talent.”

Mittelholzer and his wife divorced in 1959 and the following year he married again. In 1961 he had three books published, by three different publishers, one of them — The Mad MacMullochs — under the nom-de-plume of H. Austin Woodsley. He fell out with publisher Secker & Warburg over a novel they considered pornographic, and also grew more and more reactionary in his thinking. His writing reflected this, and, as the content of his novels made them ever harder to place, he cast his net widely for outlets.

Few of his last books, issued by several different publishers, can have been financially successful, or have really helped him to meet his commitments to his first wife and their three children, or the need to support his second wife and their small child.

On May 5, 1965, then living deep in the British countryside west of London, Mittelholzer took a can of gasoline and a box of matches into a field near his home, doused himself with the fluid and set himself alight. I drove Salkey, Lamming and Carew down to Farnham, some 40 miles outside London, on a wet and chilly English day for the funeral. When Mittelholzer’s final book, The Jilkington Drama, was published a few months after his death, we were all astounded to find that self-immolation was the fate of the novel’s central figure.

Article by Francesca Scalinci - 'A Matter of Colour: Edgar Mittelholzer's A Swarthy Boy

See http://www.publifarum.farum.it/ezine_articles.php?art_id=92

The name of Edgar Mittelholzer (1909-1965) is still quite unknown outside the area of Anglo-Caribbean literary studies. Many, however, recognise his pioneering role in Caribbean literature as he was one of the first of his generation to emigrate to England in order to have his work published. His novels, moreover, anticipate the main themes and concerns typical of post-1950 West Indian literature: the question of identity, the problem of ethnic and cultural admixture, the sense of rootlessness. In spite of this, much of his rich production has frequently been interpreted as «the work of a novelist manqué» (GILKES 1979: 95) for its insistence on sensational and morbid aspects. The peculiarity of Mittelholzer’s literary work lies, above all, in its particular closeness to biography. As a matter of fact, the author’s personal obsessions, his multifarious interests and his unconventional ideas on life overbearingly emerge throughout the whole of his literary production. For this reason, Mittelholzer's autobiography, A Swarthy Boy, published in 1963, has seldom been the object of separate study but has often been used as a reference in the criticism of his fiction. As I will point out in my paper, A Swarthy Boy is nevertheless a very interesting work: by focusing on the issue of skin colour, the work not only provides a precious insight into the life of a very troubled author but also, as it were, a picture of British Guyana at the beginning of the 20th century, that is of a country divided between colonial heritage and future independence, and afflicted by more or less overt social and ethnic conflicts.

Although geographically set on the mainland of South America, Guyana (British Guyana, up to a few years ago) is considered a Caribbean country, especially because of the many similarities it holds with West Indian islands such as Trinidad & Tobago and Jamaica. Whereas it was originally inhabited by Amerindian tribes (Arawaks and Caribs), the first colonies were founded in 1615 by the Dutch who established sugar-cane plantations exploiting the work of hundreds of slaves eradicated from the African continent. The English arrived in the late 18th century and, after having created big sugar and tobacco plantations west of Surinam river, officially acquired power in 1796. The abolition of slavery in 1834 compelled plantation owners to turn to indentured labourers coming above all from India, China and Portugal. This definitely altered the demographical balance of the country creating basic conditions for subsequent social and ethnic hostilities. Guyana achieved independence in 1966 and is nowadays a Co-operative Republic within the Commonwealth. Its extremely ethnically heterogeneous population encloses the offspring of people who arrived as slaves or indentured labourers. The largest ethnic groups are those of East Indian and African descent who, in the last fifty years, have constantly been fighting to obtain the political control of the country.

Mittelholzer's personal history is strictly connected to that of his country. Born as the first child of a middle-class family of Swiss, English and partly African descent, Mittelholzer grew up as an ordinary West Indian middle-class boy among stamp-collecting, silent movies, and tales of adventure and suspense read on Imperial youth periodicals like Union Jack. Reading and writing, in particular, became true passions for young Edgar who, from the beginning of the 1920s, spent a good part of his spare time keeping a diary and writing short stories on school note-books. It was in 1928 that Mittelholzer seriously started sending his stories and novels to English publishers and magazines. Being the political and cultural centre of the Empire, London was the natural objective of Caribbean writers who could not rely on significant local publishing houses and on a meaningful West Indian reading public. Eventually, some of Mittelholzer's works were issued on magazines and periodicals, but in the following twelve years the author received an incredible number of rebukes. His first novel,Corentyne Thunder was accepted and issued by an English publisher in 1941. This was also the year the novelist left Guyana to join the Trinidad Royal Naval Reserve and, succeedingly, the local government at the Harbour Engineer’s Office. Nevertheless, a certain restlessness, together with an undeniable psychological instability and an endless search for inspiration, pushed the writer to frequent moves: after a short period in Barbados, in 1948 he went to England. In London, he became clerk in the Books Department of the British Council, a job which in all likelihood gave him the opportunity to read a lot. During all these years, Mittelholzer went on writing strenuously: he composed novels, started collaborating on important Caribbean literary magazines such as Bim and began working with BBC Caribbean Voices. In the 1950s, anyhow, the writer relocated in Canada, Barbados again and England once more, where he committed suicide – burning himself alive— in 1965. On the whole, Edgar Mittelholzer has left twenty-two novels, an autobiography, a travelogue, a fable, and various poems and short-stories. Among his major works we find: Shadows Move Among Them(1951), The Kaywana Trilogy (1952-1958), The Life and Death of Sylvia (1953), My Bones and My Flute (1955). From 1962, his novels are set in England and have English characters: among them we have The Aloneness of Mrs Chatham (1963) and The Jilkington Drama (1965).

Among many themes and subjects, the concern with the genetic, psychological and social implications of skin colour and miscegenation is at the heart of much of Mittelholzer's work. The Guyanese novelist’s attitude towards race (and racism) emerges in most of his novels and is usually shaped by a contrast between strong and weak individuals. In the Kaywana Trilogy, a set of three historical novels1 following the vicissitudes of a family of Dutch plantation owners over three centuries of Guyanese history, characters of Dutch-German descent are made to appear as extremely strong, determined and self-willed persons while others show signs of weakness and effeminacy. Mixed-bloods are particularly doomed to a fate of indecision, failure and moral decline. This is particularly evident in The Life and Death of Sylvia (1953): Sylvia, the daughter of an English middle-class man and of a Guyanese low-class woman of African and Amerindian descent, loses her battle against a corrupt and lascivious society and finally dies poor and sick. However, the novel clearly points out that Sylvia’s real tragedy lies in the taint which is the result of her racial admixture. In another novel, A Morning at the Office (1950), ethnic conflicts are made explicit through the depiction of working relationships in a Port-of-Spain (Trinidad) office. As a matter of fact, Mittelholzer's novels seem to bear witness to the novelist's fierce despise for the non-European part of his genetic and cultural heritage. It is as if, as it were, the writer transposed his self-abjection above all in black and mixed-blood characters. Seeing his slightly dark complexion as a mark of ignominy and débauche, Mittelholzer felt divided and inherently disharmonic; with time, this conflict between different ‘bloods’ progressively took the shape of a continuous battle between intellect and emotion, spirituality and sensuality, the ‘Apollonian’ and the ‘Dionysian.' This sense of interior splitting, strictly connected to the problem of race and profoundly influenced by the parents' attitude, was probably among the causes determining the writer's tragic vision of life.

The autobiography describes only a period of nineteen years, from 1909, the year of Mittelholzer's birth, to 1928, when one of the young novelist's short stories was accepted by a review. The work focuses therefore on Mittelholzer's childhood and youth with a particular attention to family life and relationships. In it we find – besides the descriptions of the daily routine of a young middle class Guyanese boy – the author's repeated attempt to explain his fixation for ethnic matters as well as his rebuke of his black heritage. The title, A Swarthy Boy, sets a direct connection with the problem of race, whereas the subtitle, A Childhood in British Guyana, immediately establishes the nexus between Mittelholzer's personal experience and the background of Guyana at the beginning of the 20th century, thus sanctioning the representative value of the author's life. In rebuilding his own «mythic tale» (GUSDORF 1980: 45), Edgar Mittelholzer describes his individual attempts to come to terms with the taboos and conventions of his family and of his society as well as with the problem of class divisions and prejudices. However, in dealing with the Guyanese novelist's autobiography it is important to highlight how in every transposition of personal experience «the process of selfdiscovery is […] inseparable from the art of self-invention» (EAKIN 1985: 55). If, on the one hand, the narration provides a fundamental reading key of the author's work and ideas, on the other hand Mittelholzer's statements about his individual and social life should be taken cum grano salis and partly considered as functional to the creation of his 'character'.

It is quite interesting that, in a book bearing clear references to the protagonist's dark complexion, the first chapter, entitled “Background”, should contain a long digression on Mittelholzer's Swiss origin:

The manager of Plantation de Vreede was a Swiss-German, Herr C. Mittelholzer, the first Mittelholzer, so far as anyone knows, to come to this part of the world. He came from the canton of Geneva, but was probably born in Appenzell which is the original home of the family. There are two districts in Appenzell where the family was firmly established as far back as the early seventeenth century-Rämsen and Mittelholz. (MITTELHOLZER 1963: 10).2

Mittelholzer goes on narrating his own visit to Appenzell, where a relative, Dr. Johann Mittelholzer, shows him a «large ledger-like book» (p. 10) anonymously sent to his father in 1886 by someone in South America and containing the record of life on a plantation. As the book is hardly readable and is only accompanied by a silver spoon, the writer's Germanic past and family history appear from the outset as surrounded by a thick mystery worthy of a romance. The retrieval of a lost manuscript, not by coincidence, is a typical device of romances and ghost stories. The narrator, furthermore, refers to these objects as 'relics', as sacred artefacts recalling a sort of distant golden age. Besides the book and the spoon, another item acquires relevance, that is a sabre found in the home of Edgar's Uncle John in Georgetown:

The story is that our ancestor used this sabre to defend himself against the negro slaves when he was a fugitive in the jungle during the savage and bloody slave insurrection of 1763. He is reputed to have hacked off the hand of at least one of his attackers and laid out a number of others before eventually winning his way to safety. (p. 11)

In Mittelholzer's eyes, the sabre is a reminder of the ancestor's courage in fighting the savagely evil slaves. By assuming the Swiss ancestor's point of view, however, this chronicle totally cancels the humanity of the African slaves and says nothing about the true reasons hiding behind the revolt. For that matter, the Berbice Slave Rebellion had broken out as a consequence of the cruelty and ruthlessness which the Dutch plantation owners had used in treating their slaves.

In spite of his heroism, it is this ancestor, Jan Vincent, who, according to Mittelholzer, «dropped the pebble that started the ripple of black blood in the family» (p. 11). Dark skin, probably introduced into the family through sexual intercourse between the ancestor and one of his African slaves (an event to which Mittelholzer only implicitly alludes) is depicted as a «ripple», that is a wrinkle, a flaw in the genealogy of this once purely Germanic dynasty. It is undoubtedly true that in most cases white plantation owners had black mistresses, but in his anthropological study of kinship in the West Indies Raymond T. Smith has also identified «the archetypical union of a slave woman and a white master» (SMITH 1990: 88) as a sort of myth of origins for the Caribbean middle class. Mittelholzer, anyhow, sees this original racial admixture as a veritable corruption of his pedigree. The idea of miscegenation as contamination is of course not new as it accompanied Europeans, and the British in particular, in the conquest and colonisation of – to Westerners- unknown territories. In explaining the ideological origin of South African apartheid, for example, Coetzee highlights how the idea of a disease, of a dangerous infection brought about by 'inferior races', was common in the pseudo-scientific, ethnographic and genetic texts supporting ethnic separation (cf. COETZEE 1999: 12-35).

In Mittelholzer's case, however, the refusal of 'blackness' – and the sense of interior division even the shadow of it brings – is undeniably tied to family relations, in particular to the father described as a «confirmed negrophobe» (p. 17). Chapter 2 bears a meaningful title, “A Swarthy Baby”, and tells the story of Edgar's father's reaction to his olive-skinned first-born:

[...] I was born at 2 a.m. on the sixteenth of December, 1909. For my father, it was an occasion of momentous disappointment. I turned out a swarthy baby! Himself fair-complexioned with hair of European texture, [...] and his wife also fair-complexioned and European in appearance, he had, naturally, assumed that chances were heavy in favour of a fair-complexioned baby. [...] However, there it was. His first-born – a swarthy boy! (p. 17)

In spite of this early rejection, Mittelholzer shows empathy for his father: «It requires a minimum of effort for me to put myself in his place. In a community like that, at that time, he would have had to be a superhuman not to be disappointed» (p. 17). The writer then goes on explaining the parent's attempt to demonstrate his «compensatory side» (p. 21): «I can almost hear him thinking behind scowls: “Oh, well, he may be dark-skinned, but he does seem to have some intelligence”. These demonstrations would take the form of quizzes. He would ask me questions before my grandfather and aunts in order to hear me give the correct answers» (p. 21). The author tells us how, in one of these occasions, he had not been able to answer one question. The father had then got so angry as to violently scold and humiliate him in front of the whole family. In his mother, Mittelholzer sees a similar, though different, offsetting attitude. The mother is depicted as a sentimental, anxious and sometimes oppressive woman. She afflicts her children, Edgar in particular, with her maniacal attentions and sense of protection: in spite of his son's protests and humiliation in front of friends, she insists, for example, on little Edgar going to school with an umbrella for fear that the strong Caribbean sun might damage his health. In the Guyanese matriarchal family organisation, she represents, together with her own mother and sisters (Edgar's grandmother and aunts), «the Authorities» (p. 56), that is those who univocally decide every single aspect of the children's life. Yet, also Mittelholzer's mother's authoritative and protective behaviour is read by the author through the lenses of racial discrimination:

In these days I did not feel like a boy, and it was because my mother treated me with a sentimentality peculiarly her own. First of all, she felt she had to protect me against my father's impatience; I was the Dark One at whom he was always frowning and barking. Secondly, she was very feminine and just could not help being fonder of me than of my sister [...]. Thirdly, like my father himself, she was enough of a negrophobe to treasure my dead-straight European texture hair. The result was the she let my hair grow long right to my waist like a girl's [...] (p. 28).

In the biography, the writer tells of his deep-seated resentment towards his mother for the feminisation of his childhood, with all its racial implications. This notwithstanding, by defining himself as the Dark One and by attempting to justify the father's behaviour Mittelholzer proves to have internalised negative stereotypes about his African origins. At the same time, as we have seen, the writer seems to linger on a compensating attitude which comes close to that of his parents: he continually takes pride in his Germanic «innate sense of orderliness» (p. 90) and «discipline» (p. 45), and tells the reader of his endeavour to re-establish a connection with his Swiss origins.

[...] I discovered among a roomful of old books [...] a number of German grammars, and instantly I resolved to begin learning German. The German text did not dismay me. I soon mastered it [...]. In no time I had discovered that the plural of Holz was Hölzer [...]. The pastor must have been careless! Or he must have wanted to make a concession to his British nationality – hence the non-appearance of the Umlaut in our name. Very well, I would put the matter right. I would restore the Umlaut. I began to spell our name Mittelhölzer.3 (p. 137-138)

So, the Umlaut, which is the visual indicator of Mittelholzer's predilection for his Swiss ancestry, represents for young Edgar a sort of escape from – if not a denial of – his 'other' heritage and, consequently, of his swarthiness. The writer's attitude towards his black origins is in the book constructed around the ambivalence attraction / repulsion, as the following episode suggests:

Another very clear and vivid memory [...] is of my nurse, a shapely negro girl, seated on a large travelling trunk in the corridor outside the big bedroom, with me in her lap, casually fumbling out a full breast and letting me fondle it. I'm sure this happened more than once, and I'm equally sure that on one occasion my father passed us [...] but pretended not to notice. [...] It must have been my earliest erotic experience which probably explains why I remember it so distinctly. (p. 18)

If the nurse with her comforting, but also strongly erotic, demeanour is a reassuring figure and represents the stereotypically warm femininity of the black mother, Elvira, the cook, depicted as «a terror» (p. 22), represents the menacing, mysterious and revolting side of blackness:

She was the cook – a negress with cross eyes. She would appear suddenly just before I was taken upstairs to see my grandfather [...] and she would say something to me, her eyes rolling fantastically. I would recoil and whimper, shuddering and wriggling in fright. [...] I can remember, even at home, my nurse threatening, when I was naughty, to take me to Elvira if I did not behave myself. Ever since those days, the name Elvira has lurked in my imagination, a symbol of evil. (p. 22)

Indeed, the young boy's fear is enhanced by the transfiguration of the nurse as well who, when necessary, proves to be a secret ally of the evil cook. As we have also seen in the description of the 1763 slave rebellion, by identifying blackness with savagery, backwardness, darkness and evilness, Mittelholzer is necessarily speaking against his own black part. This sense of repugnance turns thus into self-abjection, a feeling that, not by coincidence, in Mittelholzer's novels identifies mixed blood characters in particular. For Kristeva, the abject precisely embodies all that is in-between, ambiguous, composite (KRISTEVA 1980: 114) and that prevents the psyche, or a culture, from recognising a coherent identity. Mittelholzer's sense of unease in front of blackness, however, does not only stem from his inability to find a stable identity, but also from his fear of regressing to a beastly and primitive state, which is, in his view, the possible implication of his swarthiness. In his Peau noire, masques blancs, Franz Fanon has well described this feeling: «D'abord il y a la négresse et la mulâtresse. La première n'a qu'une possibilité et un souci: blanchir. La deuxième non seulement veut blanchir, mais éviter de régresser» (FANON 1952: 64). As a matter of fact, Mittelholzer explains in his autobiography that racism has above all to be imputed to people of his own class: middle-class people of «coloured admixture but of fair olive complexion» (p. 155). It is especially in coloureds, those that are the result of the Caribbean melting pot, that we find the painful rejection of blackness and the burning desire to whiten. As Mittelholzer also describes in his novel A Morning at the Office4, in Guyana as in Trinidad, coloureds can be divided into infinite classes according to skin pigmentation and hair texture. Of course, people with light olive skin and straight hair find themselves in an upper position of the social ladder. No wonder that, as narrated in Chapter Two, the father's consolation lies in the fact that little Edgar's hair shows no sign of «negroid kinks» (p. 18) but is «dead straight» (p. 18). In the first appendix to the book, just like in the second chapter, the writer again as it were justifies the parents' attitude by inscribing it in the social and ethnic situation of Guyana at the beginning of the 20th century: «Had I been an adult in 1909, the year of my birth, it is just possible that I might have felt the disadvantage of my swarthy complexion, for at that time complexion was sometimes a barrier to advancement» (p. 155). There are, of course, exceptions: for example Mr. Cummings, the headmaster of Edgar's general school, portrayed as a «pure-blooded negro» (p. 61) but also as a «well-bred man» (p. 61) who has achieved a certain status and has unproblematically been accepted into the coloured middle class. Mittelholzer's himself admits that «it was not until [he] got much older that [he] thought of him as being a negro» (p. 162). Still, it is through marriage that Mr. Cummings has achieved the right to rise socially, as he has married a woman «much lighter than himself in complexion» (p. 161). Nonetheless, in Mittelholzer's words, racism in Guyana is not simply a matter of white vs. black but it involves all ethnic and social groups and, paradoxically, is not only about skin colour. Discrimination, instead, often refers to the role these groups have held in colonial history and to their order of arrival:

It was my class who looked down upon the East Indian sugar plantation labourers (“coolies” we called them, whether they were labourers or eventually became doctors or barristers or Civil Servants). It was my class who considered the Portuguese social inferiors because of their background of door-to-door peddling, rum-shops [...] and their low standards of living. We, too, treated the Chinese sweet-sellers and shopkeepers with condescension because of their poor immigrant status. (p. 155)

Nonetheless, as Mittelholzer points out in the appendix, in the colonial Guyana of his childhood, racial discrimination, though pervasive, is not overtly manifested. The writer ascribes this sort of discretion to the influence of British culture: «The colony was too British in spirit by then (a century of continuous British rule had already elapsed), and the polite hypocrisy of the British forbade any public display of prejudice» (p. 155). In Mittelholzer's autobiography this is particularly evident in the relationships the family entertains with the neighbours: the Luckhoos, a middle-class family of East Indian origin, and the Eggs, of clear British ancestry. If, on the surface, the three families share time and friendship, all of them secretly nurture a sense of superiority towards those who could be considered, from an ethnic and social perspective, their inferiors. The writer well describes this convolute net of social relations:

The East Indian family to the west of us had been accepted into middle-class circles, for Mr. Edward Luckhoo was a solicitor – a legal man [...]. But those were the days when only a very few East Indians had “emerged” from the plantation swarm of coolies – a people looked down upon socially by the whites and middle-class admixtures. So even though we were friendly with the Luckhoos [...] there persisted among my aunts and my mother a continual whispering snobbism... My sister and I were made to feel that we could go over and play with the children, but that it must not be overdone... “After all, they're really not our sort”. [...] With the Eggs relations were freer and more relaxed. Old Mother Egg and my grandmother, both blue-eyed and Caucasian, were unquestionably social equals. And Mr Tyer Egg, though of mixed blood, was fair-complexioned like my own parents. (p. 33-34)

Despite the snobbism of Edgar's mother, the Luckhoos are quite well off and, unlike the Mittleholzers, they own a car. The relationship with the Eggs is at the same time easier, as both families stand on the same level, both socially and racially, and more difficult, since the visibility of a streak of blackness, the discernibility of mixed-bloodedness in a member of one of the two families, as well as the suspicion of racism, can perturb and deteriorate this atmosphere of good neighbourhood. One day, for example, Old Mother Egg quarrels with little Edgar's grandmother about a remark the child has made while visiting her home.

Mother Egg said that when she had tried to take me into her lap I had said: “No. I mustn't sit on your lap.” And when she had asked me why not, I had replied: “Mother says I mustn't because you don't like me. Only Lucille you like [...] Mother says I'm too dark, and you don't like me to come over here”. (p. 34)

Mother Eggs decisively refuses these accusations but as readers we are left uncertain about the truth. We do not understand whether it is Mother Egg who has shown a marked preference for Edgar's sister because of her fair complexion, or if it is Edgar's mother – or the boy himself – who has projected her own prejudices in the neighbour. All the same, these episodes emphasize how, in this Caribbean colonial context, human relationships are constantly threatened by questions of colour and class.

To conclude, Edgar Mittelholzer's autobiography can certainly be seen as a mirror of the author's idiosyncrasies, and of his personal preoccupations with the problems stemming from ethnic admixture. Yet, the work also provides a faithful picture of Guyana in the early decades of 1900. The image is that of an unstable – colonial – society where balances are precarious and limits blurred, a situation which, as Mittelholzer's own history has demonstrated, pushes the individual towards a perpetual condition of anxiety, frustration and loneliness.

Bibliography

F. BIRBALSINGH, «Indians in the Novels of Edgar Mittelholzer», Caribbean Quarterly, n. 32, 1&2, March-June 1986, p. 16-23.
E. BOEHMER, Colonial & Postcolonial Literature, Oxford & New York, Oxford University Press, 1995.
F. A. COLLYMORE, «Edgar Mittelholzer: A Biographical Sketch», Bim, n. 10, 41, June-Dec 1965, p. 23-26.
P. J. EAKIN, Fictions in Autobiography: Studies in the Art of Self-Invention, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1985.
F. FANON, Peau noire, masques blancs, Paris, Seuil, 1952.
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W. J. HOWARDS, «Edgar Mittelholzer’s Tragic Vision», Caribbean Quarterly, n. 16, 4, December 1970, p. 19-28.
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C. RICKARDS, «A Tribute to Edgar Mittelholzer», Bim, n. 11, 42, Jan-June 1966, p. 98-105.
A. J. SEYMOUR, Edgar Mittelholzer: The Man and His Work (being the text of the 1967 Edgar Mittelholzer Memorial lecture), Georgetown (Guyana), The National History and History and Arts Council, Ministry of Education, 1968.
A. J. SEYMOUR, «The Novels of Edgar Mittelholzer», Kyk-Over-Al, n. 8, 24, December 1958, p. 60-74.
A. J. SEYMOUR, «West Indian Pen Portrait: Edgar Mittelholzer», Kyk-Over-Al, n. 5, 15, Year-End 1952, p. 15-17.
R. T. SMITH, Kinship and Class in the West Indies: A Genealogical Study of Jamaica and Guyana, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1990.
G. WAGNER, «Edgar Mittelholzer: Symptoms and Shadows», Bim, n. 9, 33, July-Dec 1961, p. 29-34.

Citation:

Francesca SCALINCI, A matter of colour: Edgar Mittelholzer’s A Swarthy Boy, Les Caraïbes: convergences et affinités, Publifarum, n. 10, pubblicato il 2009, consultato il 22/02/2011, url: http://publifarum.farum.it/ezine_articles.php?id=92