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.
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