Edgar Austin Mittelholzer’s Creative Genes(is) & the Geni(us) behind it.
“Let the Divine energy work through you, and express itself fully in your work.” [Ramacharaka, Y. Advanced Course in Yogi Philosophy and Oriental Occultism (1917) p. 23]
A J Seymour, in a 1952 pen portrait of Mittelholzer, stated the author
had declared his key themes were ‘sex and religion’. In my PhD thesis I go to some lengths
to demonstration how the two themes are intimately interlinked. But for the purposes of this paper and
because of time restrictions I
focus primarily on the theme of religion. I’ll provide an
overview of his religious influences and hope to show that an understanding of
his interest in Oriental Occultism is imperative to an understanding of the man. It also offers the tools through which
his novels can be analysed for deeper meaning. I ultimately aim however to explore his fascination with
notions of the ‘spirit-self’ (in its wide variety of forms) and how this led to
the creation of a private and esoteric narrative that runs sub-textually through
his novels; and how mythography shaped itself into a pattern that informed Mittelholzer’s
life and perhaps his death by self-immolation.
ACHIEVEMENTS
But first let’s consider his achievements. Mittelholzer born in 1909 of
Swiss-German, English, French and African ancestry became the first of the Caribbean literati to make a professional
career out of writing novels. Though his first novel, Corentyne Thunder, was applauded by the
Times Literary Supplement in 1941 for its gripping storyline, its “odd beauty”
and “haunting pathos”, the events of the 2nd world war prevented it
from achieving international recognition. Its publication was nevertheless highly significant as
an exemplar of what could be achieved.
The reality was that
while three West Indian novelists had preceded Mittelholzer’s success (in that
their novels had been published in the UK), none had achieved this, from within
the Caribbean region solely through their own efforts. As C L R James noted: “We couldn’t make
it at home. Mendes and I had work
published before we left, but that was because distinguished people came to the
island, we were introduced to them as “literary persons”, and they took our
work away and gave it to editors; that’s how I was first published.” It is similarly likely that De
Lisser’s entrance into the UK publishing industry was facilitated by one of the
many elite officials he fraternised with.
These included people such as Lord Sydney Olivier, the Governor of
Jamaica (1907-1913) to whom his first novel Jane’s
Career (1914) was dedicated. Claude McKay’s novels were notably
published in the USA long after he had left Jamaica (never to return) in 1912. Corentyne
Thunder thus became a symbol of hope for other would-be novelists and
certainly invited the admiration of fellow writers, like Mendes, who claimed it
and I quote “the best novel so far written about this part of the world.”
The significance of his second novel A Morning at the Office (1950) was
immediately recognised by Henry Swanzy, editor of the BBC’s Caribbean Voices
programme:
“I suppose that the [Caribbean Voices] programme may be indirectly
responsible for luring so many young adventurers here […]. Obviously, one does not altogether want
to discourage the more promising from chancing their arm… […] The
task is not made any easier by the success of Edgar Mittelholzer, whose novel
is really outstandingly good, much the best I have ever read about the West
Indies, and very high in contemporary English writing I should think. […] His novel, and the West Indian
cricketers, may give some openings to the writers in London…” [my italics]
Apart from the
successive publication of his own novels, Shadows
Move Among Them (1951), Children of
Kaywana (1952) and The Weather in
Middenshot (1952), novelists such as Selvon, Lamming and Mais received
their first major breaks with the respective novels: A Brighter Sun (1952), In the
Castle of My Skin (1953) and The
Hills were Joyful Together (1953). A Morning at the Office (republished by Penguin in 1964) had thus
paved the way for the vibrant literary movement of the 1950s.
The measure of his literary success can be deduced
by the translation of several of his 22 novels into at least six European
languages. Other published works include an
anti-capitalist novella, a travel journal, an autobiography, numerous articles,
short stories and poems. He was known at the height of his career,
according to A J Seymour, to millions of English-speaking people across the
world. His novels were indeed the
“hottest sellers in the paperback market” with his books selling an average of
8,000 copies. His prowess as a writer was recognised soon after the publication
of his third novel, Shadows Move Among
Them (1952), when he became the first Caribbean to be awarded the esteemed
Guggenheim Fellowship. The
aforementioned novel, dramatised by Moss Hart, as The Climate of Eden, became the first Caribbean play to be staged
on Broadway (at the Martin Beck Theatre, New York) in 1953. The play, according to Wagner,
secured a national television showing in the United States six years later. His novel, My Bones and My Flute was described by
the Daily Telegraph as equal to the
novels of Joseph Thomas Sheridan Le Fanu (1814-1873), the leading ghost story
writer of the 19th century. Later dramatised for radio, it is still remembered with awe and trepidation by many Guyanese
listeners.
At the time of his death, Mittelholzer was the
most important literary figure that British Guiana had produced. But this was not just in terms of
writing entertaining novels. In a
tribute to the author on 10th May 1965, the Guianese Prime Minister,
L S F Burnham referred to him as: “a great author who had done much to bring
our art to the eyes of the world. […] [B]y his work the author had put British
Guiana on the map.” This contention has been widely
acknowledged. Before the
publication of Mittelholzer’s Guiana-novels few Americans were aware of the
country’s existence let alone its history. A J Seymour’s interviewer, during a radio programme in
Minneapolis, admitted that the city’s knowledge of Guiana had been derived
primarily from the Kaywana
series. Mittelholzer’s aim – to
record the history of Guiana in the form of popular fiction, with the specific
aim of commanding a wide international audience – had worked.
There evidently remains 60 years after Mittelholzer’s death many
supporters of his work. But it has
to be acknowledged that in spite of his pioneering status, he has yet to be
given the recognition he deserves by the wider Caribbean. This can be attributed to allegations of
Euro-centrism, race prejudice, fascism, of being out of step with the
mid-twentieth century nationalistic agenda of the Caribbean, of being morbidly
obsessed with the theme of death and of failing to reign in an obsession with sex. All of this, from my perspective,
lies in an unfortunate misinterpretation of the man and his work.
And so back to
the topic of religion…
CHRISTIAN UPBRINGING
As a young child he attended Sunday school at the New Amsterdam Lutheran
Church where Bible stories his grandmother had often relayed to him, were
repeated and reinforced in his consciousness. In 1922 he was confirmed into the
Anglican Church and soon after became an altar-server. The importance of this event is patent:
At home and at school,
one was made to feel that one was inadequate, even a little good-for-nothing
runt. But here was the Rector
singling one out as first-class
material, choosing one to be an altar-server! It was a revolution in values. I agreed with solemn enthusiasm to do my best.
Apart from representing
a space in Mittelholzer’s life where he could feel “really safe and
significant”, it was also a space imbibed with romance. Notions of being “washed of all sin” by
the Holy Spirit, through the Lord’s intermediary, the bishop; his “laying on of
hands” and the resultant transmission of the “divine spark”, all charged and
nurtured Mittelholzer’s creative imagination. Christianity
undoubtedly played a pivotal role in his early socialisation and certain
passages from the Bible seemingly helped Mittelholzer to overcome the negative
impact of his father’s extreme Negrophobia. Note for instance verses 12 and 13 in
the testament of John:
“12Yet
to all who received him, to those who believed in his name, he gave the right
to become children of God – 13children born not of natural descent
nor of human decision or a husband’s will, but born of God. [John1: 12-13 - New
International Version]”.
As the eldest of
four children, he had been “the Dark One at whom [his father, William Austin]
was always barking or frowning”;
he was the one whose birth, as a swarthy child, was considered a moment of monumental
disappointment.
While he rejects Orthodox Christianity by the time he is an adult, the
teachings of the apostle John (in particular John verses 1-14) aid our
understanding of his literary genesis. As someone with literary ambitions, one can appreciate the mystical
power of verses 1 and 14: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with
God, and the Word was God. // The
Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us.” [The Holy Bible: New International Version]. John and his brother, James are notably
described by Jesus as the Sons of Thunder: apostles whose quick tempers provoke
their desire to call “down fire from heaven” (Mark: 3:17 and Luke 9:51-56) when
Samaritan villagers fail to offer Jesus the welcome he deserves. These qualities would have
appealed to Mittelholzer’s rebellious nature.
Occult entities in Guianese Folklore
Mittelholzer’s formal Christian upbringing was not his only source of childhood
instruction on matters metaphysical. As he reveals in With A
Carib Eye his nurse - or Nana as he called her - entertained him with tales
from Guianese folklore: many involving occult entities
like the Water People, Jumbie, Baccoo and Kanaima. Mittelholzer’s love of myth and mystery, clearly born out of
the Guianese context, were to dominate his creative thinking. As he was to note in a non-fictional article about his
home in Coburg Street:
You
[could] feel the mystery of unknown tracts of land simply by staring east
towards the Canje Creek. There it
is all bush where once plantations flourished.
Like the poet,
Martin Carter, he felt that the interior was a “ghostly premise”. A sensibility for the supernatural finds exemplification in
Mittelholzer’s My Bones and My Flute
when Rayburn observes that the people living up river: “were always seeing some
jumbie or hearing a kanaima”: “an evil spirit of the jungle which sometimes
lodges itself in the body of a human being, turning the individual so possessed
into a homicidal fiend...”
But did Mittelholzer believe in the actual
existence of these supernatural or occult entities? The easy
answer is yes. In his
autobiography, he claims to have seen “many a robust ghost”
and talks in letters to friends, of “presences” from the “Other Side”. In 1941 he as tellingly observed: “It seems as though
some jinnee dwells on my shoulder – a jinnee of unrest”.
It should be noted
here that Mittelholzer was variously influenced by the tale of the “Fisherman
and the Jinnee” from the collection, One
Thousand and One Nights, (or Arabian
Nights as it is more commonly known).
This is of course the tale of the Jinnee who had been imprisoned in a
bottle for refusing to pledge obedience to his master and embrace his master’s
faith. After hundreds of years of enslavement,
he is eventually released by a fisherman - who on casting his net into the sea
in the hope of finding something, anything that would help to support his wife
and children - pulls out the bottle and breaks off the seal.
A Morning at the Office, and the
tale of The Jen that is embedded within it, are intertextually informed and
influenced by the Arabian Night’s
tale. The Jen, like the Jinnee
is viewed as a “dreadful monster” until confronted. While the little girl Mooney sleeps, the Jen howls a
ghost-like: “Whooo-ooo, Whooo-oom”, seemingly imploring her (and the wider
society) to give some thought to whom she is; to explore her real, or as
Frances Williams terms it, her ‘Genuine
Self’. But these questions
are difficult to address and her nanny, Beatrice implores: “don’t let’s talk
about it.” While the jinnee can be
thought of in terms of its European cognate – genie, i.e., a magical servant
that turns up when summoned and grants wishes, Mittelholzer was evidently more
attached to the Quran’s conception of a Jinn, (Djin or Jinnee). These are said to be good, evil,
genius, demonic or neutral spirits, that have the power to influence mankind
and are variously portrayed as living independently or as part of an
object. In the Qur’an, they are
said to be made of smokeless flames or ‘scorching fire’ but also importantly
referred to as Children of Fire.
In recognition of Mittelholzer’s love of word play, of word association,
I ought to point out that Jen or Jenny (originally pronounced Jinny) was a
common hypocorism of names like Johanna, Jane, Jean, Joan and Janet: all of
which are feminine forms of the male name, John. So that it is generally possible through ‘name’ association
to work out which characters in his books he privately associates with a ‘fire
spirit’, e.g., Jannee of Corentyne
Thunder, Jacques Van Groenwegel of Children
of Kaywana and Jack Sampson of The
Life and Death of Sylvia. The
latter, described in the novel, as a “spirited”, young black man who is
anti-British, anti-monarchy, anti-capitalist, communist and shouts: “Rule
Britannia me backside!” while pointing out some difficult truths:
“Look,
Sylvie, you know why we in dis colony can’t develop all de jungle-country we
got? You know why over eighty thousand square miles of dis land lying fallow
and untouched? It’s because we
mesmerized. It’s because we
walking about in a dream. And
dat’s why we’ll always be kicked around and exploited by dose imperious sons of
bitches in de Colonial Office in London.”
Before I return to
Mittelholzer’s literary use of the John-Jinnee-Jumbie-Jen matrix – and these
for him are all connected through sound and by their inherent characteristics –
I need next to talk about his belief in Oriental Occultism.
Oriental Occultism
Mittelholzer adopted
Yoga and Oriental Occultism at the age of 19, following an introduction to a
Yogi whom he describes as: “Outwardly…no impressive specimen – he was careless
in dress and habits – he nevertheless, was highly intelligent and intensely
sincere. To listen to him
logically and earnestly rending to bits orthodox beliefs and conventions was,
to me, a feat to marvel at.” Though he never explains what the term
Oriental Occultism means, we know from an unpublished article At Forty-Three: A Personal View of the World
- that his yogic practices involved dieting, rhythmical breathing,
contemplation, physical posturing, and abstinence from smoking, alcohol and
“fleshy pleasures”; the objective of which was to conquer “the Flesh so that
the Spirit might finally be released from mortal rebirth, from mortal pain and
suffering”. Other articles in the Barbados Advocate (circa 1953-1956)
meantime reveal that he believed, or was interested, in concepts of
reincarnation, karma, astral projection, telepathy and nirvana.
So what made a previously devote Christian convert to Oriental
Occultism? Perhaps key to Mittelholzer’s rejection
of orthodox Christianity was, as implied by the aforementioned quote, a deep
sense of suffering. His
autobiography reveals a far from happy childhood: his mother frequently
punished him with a whip she called “Tickle Toby” while his father, physically
affectionate to his siblings, tended to ignore him. As an adult ambitiously aiming to become a writer, in what
many have termed a philistine society, the problems in his life merely intensified. Writing in 1941 he disclosed:
Life
has given my heart a pretty rough time […]. If disappointments used to leave tangible physical scars on
one’s heart, my heart would be found to be nothing but one great blurred tough
mass of calloused flesh.
Christian prayer
had presumably done little to change the painful circumstances of his
upbringing or his frequent bouts of melancholy. Writing in 1954
for the Barbados Advocate on a
similar theme, Mittelholzer stated:
Isn’t
it inevitable that as the child develops and discovers for itself what life is
really like, bitterness and disillusion must result? How soon doesn’t the poor creature realise that “Gentle
Jesus” doesn’t protect him from starvation or the stalking sex-maniac in the
park!
Perhaps too, he
had never felt particularly loyal to a single tradition. Whilst his paternal grandfather had
been a Lutheran Pastor, his Uncle John became a Roman Catholic and his father,
an Anglican. His maternal
grandmother with whom his family lived was a Congregationalist. Within this family set-up, no
monolithic interpretation of the Bible was agreed upon. An article in
the Barbados Advocate, entitled “God on Earth” offers this supposition some
credibility but also indicates why Oriental Occultism was appealing: “How
chaotic and childish western people appear when contrasted with the calm and
detachment of the truly noble men of the East. How much more credible and satisfying – and peaceful – is
the Nirvana of Buddhism than the vulgar “heavens” of the Occident – and I make
it plural, for, so far as I can see, no two Christians have coincided in their
definitions of heaven.”
While Oriental Occultism was to remain a life-long source of inspiration
and constant study for Mittelholzer, he felt unable to continue living like a
Yogi because of the unwelcome pillorying he received from the coloured middle
class community of New Amsterdam – they thought him mad. He had also discovered (note his honesty):
“…that the pleasures of the world were not so bad as [he] aesthetically wanted
to think”. It is important to highlight that
Mittelholzer was also familiar at this stage of his life with the Mahabharata
and was presumably struck – given the Christian and Islamic themes of ‘fire’ - by descriptions of the Pandu prince, Arjuna,
as a “swarthy young man, a burning cinder hidden by ash”; and by that of Draupadi;
the beautiful dark-skinned young woman who together with her brother had
emerged from a smokeless sacrificial fire. These religious texts led Mittelholzer to believe that
issues of race, colour and class – material notions of who we are – were to be
transcended by the search for our ‘Real’ spiritual selves.
Mittelholzer’s religious
beliefs did filter through into the themes of his early work but only in esoteric
form. His novel Sylvia has death as one of its central
themes but few would appreciate that it is in many respects a ‘Buddhist’
meditation on death. The only real
hint in the novel that Oriental Occultism may be a key influence appears in the
abstruse words proffered by Grantley Russell:
This
business of living can be a barren affair. Pleasure, Goo-Goo, without an oriented outlook, affords no satisfaction. That
may be above your head, but never mind. I like saying profound things to you. [my italics]
The first of Mittelholzer’s
novels to deal explicitly with the theme of Oriental Occultism was his tenth
novel, A Tinkling in the Twilight (1959). Mittelholzer explains in a letter to A
J Seymour :
It
is the first time that I’ve cared to bring so clearly into the open my strong
attachment to Oriental occultism and Yoga. I’ve held these beliefs since I was 19, but in my writings
have never liked to reveal them because I know perfectly well I can prove
nothing I say on the basis of plain logic (and unfortunately, the Western World
can only be convinced by “rational” arguments). Belief in the teachings of the Orientals, I realise, must
come from within.
So like the key protagonist of
his ghost story My Bones and My Flute,
Mittelholzer was reluctant to put occultist/psychic experiences into print
because of modern day attitudes to phenomena that could not be scientifically
measured.
But like Esmeralda of The Weather Family
and the Oriental Occultist and ex-Church of England priest, Tom Dellow, in The Wounded and The Worried the author’s
desire to share his beliefs became overwhelming:
I won’t be completely
happy until I get you all to believe in what I believe. If I could even get you to a point
where you won’t sneer, you won’t be sceptical, won’t tell me I’m mad, I’d be
content. [...] The sneers, the
sceptical smirks, of people who are supposed to be intelligent,
enlightened. It gives me a
terrible feeling of despair – an exasperation and frustration beyond all
endurance – when I’m sneered at for what I know to be the truth.
The fear of being scoffed at
lead him to portray his characters as “a little nutty”. Their nuttiness, he believed, would
enable readers to excuse any views they might otherwise consider implausible.
The author’s fears were not unwarranted for many of the reviews of A Tinkling in the Twilight were
disparaging with one notably wishing that “Mr. Mittelholzer would come off his
astral plane”.
A Tinkling in the Twilight
importantly provides the first comprehensive list of Oriental Occultist texts that
Mittelholzer had, like his character, Margaret Beaver, undoubtedly read and
absorbed: namely, “Fourteen Lessons in
Yogi Philosophy and Oriental Occultism. . . Hatha Yoga. . . The Bhagavad-Gita .
. . Advanced Course in Yogi Philosophy and Oriental Occultism. . . Science of
Breath.” What becomes apparent is that while
Mittelholzer did not believe in the orthodox Christian conception of God, he
did believe in the existence of an all-pervading spiritual power: variously
described by Ramacharaka as ‘The Absolute’, Nature, God, the Divine, and by
Buddhists as the Supreme Buddha.
Though the notion of the Arabic Jinn with its multitude of
personalities/projections (evil, good, demonic) remained with him it should be
noted that the Islamic conception of the ‘children of fire’ became more closely
associated with Mittelholzer’s ‘Jen’; notion of the ‘divine spark’ within; and the
‘Real Self’.
THE GENI(US) IN CHILDREN OF KAYWANA
It is an
understanding of Ramacharaka’s texts and Mittelholzer’s creation of the
esoteric John-Jinnee-Jumbie-Jen matrix that - when used in conjunction with
knowledge of the author’s socio-religious upbringing, and non-fictional
writings - can help critics to anchor meaning in Mittelholzer’s novels. While
time prevents me from going into detail here I would like to expand on what I
mean, by exploring aspects of Mittelholzer’s novels with particularly attention
being given to Children of Kaywana.
In the Arabian Night’s story of the Fisherman
and the Jinnee, the fisherman asks of the jinnee: “But what is your
history, pray, and how came you to be imprisoned in this bottle?” Is this the question that prompted
Mittelholzer to consider his own identity in terms of the physical as well as
the spiritual Karmic world: to later on write a trilogy about the turbulent
history of British Guiana, beginning with Children
of Kaywana? Perhaps. What I can say is that the trilogy
which commences in 1611 and traces the social, political and economic history
of the Van Groenwegel family, contains sub-textual traces of the story of “The Fisherman
and the Jinnee”, while also attempting to answer the call of the spirit Jen,
“Whoooo, Whoooom”.
Given Mittelholzer’s known love of word play, the Children of Kaywana can be read as the history of the ‘Children of
Fire’ for whilst Kaywana is said to mean “Old Water”, other characters
frequently allude to her ‘Fire Blood’.
Indeed the first chapter of the novel, “A Jet of Fire” [my italics] points paradigmatically to the symbolic
connection between Kaywana and Mittelholzer’s idea of the Jen/Jinnee and this, reinforced
in the words of August Vyfuis who passionately loves her:
Yes, you have spirit. From
the first day I saw you I knew you were an unusual person. A jet of fire.
As a “half-breed” of mixed English and
Amerindian ancestry she represents for Mittelholzer the starting point of modern
Guianese history. August
Vyfuis her first lover importantly points out that she is different from other
Amerindian girls (on account it would seem of her mixed blood); she is clever,
“everything better and different”. As his first name suggests, he is
like Kaywana, an awe-inspiring character, impressive and someone to be respected. August dies in battle, and leaves
Kaywana pregnant with a son that she names after him. August junior - who later adopts the surname of
Kaywana’s second partner, Adriansen van Groenwegel - becomes the father of the mulatto
slaves, Hannah and Katrina. Using
the standard notion of genetics, Kaywana’s fire-blood (or jinnee-spirit) appears
to be passed on to later generations. The point I want to make here is that while
Mittelholzer sticks to the standard historical portrayal of slavery, many of
the so-called ‘inferior’ characters (e.g., Janny, the illegitimate mulatto
grandson of Henrickje) are privately and on an esoteric level viewed as
heroes. In other words, all
the negative stereotypes that are associated with their mulatto heritage are transcended,
in Mittelholzer’s mind, by actions that are in keeping with their ‘Real
Selves’, their fire-spirits.
Far from viewing the world in terms of binary opposites – in this
instance – spirit and flesh – Mittelholzer’s aim was to explore his themes
holistically. Gilkes has
argued that Mittelholzer’s novels are preoccupied with “two-ness”:
black versus white, hereditary versus environment, strong versus weak and so
forth. On one level Gilkes’
assertions are correct. However,
it is important to recognise that Mittelholzer’s themes, rooted in the
teachings of the Bhagavad Gita are
about the need to transcend these conceptual limitations. As Krishna tells Arjuna most
people fail to seek unity, nurturing instead their ‘otherness’:
Blinded by the pair of opposites, O Prince
their eyes filled with the smoke of illusion – seeking instead of Unity, the
opposing forms of like and dislike; men walk in the field of the Universe,
deluded, all. Nay, not all – for
there be a few who have freed themselves from the pair of opposites – who have
discarded attachment – who have cleared their eyes of the smoke of illusion;
such as these, O Prince, know Me to be the One – the All – and hold to me,
steadfast and constant, in their love and devotion. [my italics]
There are those
who may criticise Mittelholzer for giving especial attention to the fate of the
mixed race characters (which for him perhaps represents the holistic blending
of ‘binary opposites’ – black/other with white) in this novel. His reposte would be that he considered
himself a member of the “world’s human community”
but that “[It] is the complex nature of […] social
origins, and the conflicting loyalties involved in the scheme of […] race,
class and economic status, which dictate that each [novelist] must tread his
own lone-wolf path of literary expression.”
Mittelholzer importantly rejected pseudo scientific
theories of race; the notion that race biologically determined such things as
intelligence or strength. The
contention, according to Sparer, that he had internalised Western ideologies of
race, is patently false. While issues of race dominate his
Caribbean-set novels, it is an attempt at social realism, not an attempt (conscious or sub-conscious) at
perpetuating negative stereotypes.
It is an attempt, having
born the brunt of his father’s misguided Negrophobia, to force his
contemporaries to question their attitudes toward each other. It was also sometimes an attempt
to provoke anger, reflection and change as suggested by his poem, “Pitch-Walk
Mood”. While looking at the curved
belly of a pregnant girl, the poet ponders on the purpose of life and wonders
if the unborn child will grow up to be a fool or “with pen or voice contumely
hurl / upon his fellows […] and slash
awake a thousand fears to quicken the leaven of his native land? –“[my
italics]. And it is of course sometimes the
result of irritation at being bound, restricted in the material world, by the
dross of race.
Talking in Oriental Occultist terms in the Barbados
Advocate he notably attributes Churchill’s greatness not to genes but to the
accumulated experience of previous lives:
What manner of man could this be upon
whom the Fates decided so haphazardly to bestow so many virtues of
character? Could it merely be the result
[…] of a change arrangement of chromosomes? Or could the Orientals be right in that he is a being who
lived before and who has merely returned, bringing all the attributes of his
past selves, to carry on where he left off?
Without wanting
to labour the point, it should be noted that in the Children of Kaywana the narrator attempts to demonstrate that white
blood is not automatically an index of strength of character. Griselda van Groenwegel, wife of
Willem, is ‘pure’ German and described as soft, as weak. Their similarly weak son Reinald
marries a Flemish woman, Juliana and they in turn have their son,
Ignatius. The fiery
protagonist Hendrickje, who has inherited black blood from her mother, Katrina,
chooses to marry her cousin, Ignatius, falsely believing it will help to retain
the family’s ‘fire-blood’.
Ignatius, a mix of Carib and European, turns out to be as weak in
character as his father and grandmother before him. Ignatius’s ineffectual personality provokes the wrath
of Hendrickje who feeling the need to hurt “all soft and weak things” crushes
his will to live. So while
Mittelholzer’s novels address the issue of heredity, at a subtextual level it
is not about the genetic traits pseudo scientists associate with race but
rather those associated with Karma, or Jen(etic)
heritage.
I turn now to Mittelholzer’s theme of strength (and
linked notions of the brutality of life), which has at times been interpreted
as ‘right wing’. In Corentyne Thunder, Stymphy’s romantic
conceptualisation of nature prevents him from recognising the real hardships of
country living until he is exposed to the frowsy smell of Ramgolall’s hut. In Sylvia,
the eponymous heroine is forced to change her idyllic view of working-class
society when her own economic downfall becomes a struggle for survival. In Children
of Kaywana Jacques van Groenwegel was instinctively drawn like Mittelholzer
to think of nature in romantic terms - “If only…life could be just a soft, cool
breeze at night-time and the fragrance of dry-weather plants”. He soon, however, comes to “the
depressing truth that it takes strength to make a secure world”
and eventually learns to cultivate the ‘warrior’ side of his personality. This, though the uninitiated reader
will not know it, is in keeping with the Oriental Occultist teachings of Yogi
Ramacharaka that state: ““Look for the warrior, and let him fight in
thee.” Look for him; believe in
him; trust him; recognise him – and let him fight the battle for you.”
Jacques’s
grandmother, Hendrickje, is in her ruthless adherence to the family tradition
the ultimate paragon of fighter blood:
“No van Groenwegel must ever run from an enemy. We stay and fight.” It is through her actions that the
author’s theme of strength is pushed to an extreme:
No
one who thinks and observes what goes on around us can believe in such a myth
as God or the teachings of the Church.
Life is brutal, Adrian. The stronger survive, and the weaker get
crushed. It isn’t pleasant to
think of it, but it’s the truth, and one must not avoid the truth. [my italics]
The ‘strong
versus the weak’ theme that Gilkes et al identify as Nietzschean is more
importantly a concept that is central to the teachings of the Bhagavad Gita.
In the Bhagavad-Gita Arjuna and
Krishna, (the Supreme Spirit) are overlooking a battle that takes place between
family members. Overcome with grief, Arjuna
expresses the desire to die rather than defend himself against one of his
kinsmen. Krishna responds by telling him his
“utterances” contain the seeds of outer wisdom but reveal a lack of knowledge
about the inner doctrines of the wise.
As a member of the
warrior caste it is his duty to put aside “childish grief”, pursue victory and
“fight well”:
If
thou chance to be slain in the battle, the warrior’s heaven wilt be thy reward;
if victorious thou emergeth from the fray, the joys of earth await thee. Therefore, O Prince of Pandu, arise and
fight! being willing to take whatever betideth thee – be it pain or pleasure;
loss or gain; victory or defeat;
thine only concern being whether thou has done thy best […]. That is your plain Duty! [my italics]
I’d like to
highlight here that Krishna’s battle cry Victory or Defeat, seemingly
influenced Mittelholzer’s adoption of the German military refrain Sieg Oder Tod
(meaning Victory or Death).
LAWS OF NATURE
If this all seems harsh, to Mittelholzer’s mind it merely represented the
universal laws of nature. As the
character, Tom Dellow explains to Gwen Wellings in the Wounded and the Worried (1962):
“The
law that controls human destiny is a neutral law. It leaves us free to use it either for good or for evil.”
“But
what about God? Isn’t God love?
For Oriental Occultists it is Nature (in which
the Absolute is manifest) that provides the principles or laws upon which human
lives should be based:
Hatha
Yoga is first, nature; second, nature,
and last NATURE. When confronted
with a choice of methods, plans, theories, etc., apply to them the touchstone:
“Which is the natural way?” and always choose that which seems to conform the
nearest to nature.
Modern civilized
races, Ramacharaka asserts had forgotten the existence of nature in their “rush
towards externals” and were by implication on the wrong path.
In other words, human practices that did not “square with nature” needed to be
discarded.
This in many ways explains Mittelholzer’s carefully rendered descriptions
of environment, descriptions for which he is famed and which on the one hand
describe the beauty of nature, but on the other hand illustrate it’s
destructiveness as in Hurricane Janet of The
Weather Family and it’s indifference to human life as depicted in Corentyne Thunder:
Ramgolall
was dead. […] A frog squeaked somewhere behind the mudhouse. […] No, nothing had changed at all. Surely the savannah must know that Ramgolall was dead and
that there were pebbles and pieces of dried mud lying scattered on the floor of
the mud-house. It looked so
untroubled, the same as they had been yesterday and all the days before: the
sky blue, the wind cool, the sun red because it was low in the west. // Ramgolall was dead, but the whole
Corentyne remained just the same.
Psychic Projections
In The Jilkington Drama the key
protagonist, Garvin expresses a mystical affinity with all weather, which
Mittelholzer as an Oriental occultist and amateur meteorologist shared:
‘Do you sometimes feel yourself a projection of the weather?’ said Garvin. ‘As if you might be an
emanation of rain falling, or sunshine in the trees? Or fog? Or even
thunder and lightning? … / … that’s how I feel sometimes. … Perhaps it’s
something mystical in my make-up.’
[…] And God is in the weather – as in everything else. Well, it’s the weather that acts as my
link with God. I feel I have a
kinship with every kind of weather.’ [my italics]
The
notion of psychic and or astral projections takes various forms in the
Mittelholzer canon and were again influenced by Ramacharaka’s Fourteen Lessons in Yogi Philosophy and Oriental
Occultism: the topics of which include “Human Aura”, “Thought Dynamics”,
“Telepathy, Clairvoyance”, “Human Magnetism”, “Psychic Influence” and “The
Astral World”.
But
notions of psychic projection may also have been influenced by the
doctrines of The Tibetan Book of the Dead,
which according to Mittelholzer’s eldest daughter was a book he often read,
perhaps seriously, perhaps for literary inspiration. The Tibetan text asserts that when an individual
enters “bardo” (the time period between death and reincarnation or
enlightenment) they will be faced with terrifying self-projections: how they
respond is critical to their final destiny. This interval, if enlightenment is not attained,
determines which of the six realms they will be reborn into and in what form. Those hoping to attain liberation from
rebirth need to explore the contents of their “unconscious” minds:
the contention being that individuals who learn to face and overcome their fear
of psychic projections will be prepared for the moment of bardo. One of the mantras that is to be recited
in the moment following death appears to have captured Mittelholzer’s
imagination:
Now
when the bardo of dharmata dawns upon me,
I
will abandon all thoughts of fear and terror,
I
will recognise whatever appears as my projection
and
know it to be a vision of the bardo;
now
that I have reached this crucial point
I
will not fear the peaceful and wrathful
ones,
my own projections.
The essence of
this mantra, present in Arthur Lamby’s allegorical story of “The Jen” in A Morning at the Office, is more fully
explored in My Bones and My Flute. In the latter novel, the adventure that
takes Milton Woodsley and the Nevinson Family beyond Goed de Vries into a
jungle interior can be construed as a metaphorical journey into the unconscious
or a story about the supernatural.
The manifestations (good and bad) that the characters face are
projections of the Dutchman, Jan Pieter Voorman; his restless spirit seeking
release from a life of purgatory.
The diary entry of the dead Dutchman explains:
It
is I myself who plague myself in several forms projected and created by my
errant will. These presences bear
the essence of me Jan Pieter Voorman.
When they call it is I would severally call. The evil I have created calls at the good in me. There are no demons but the demons our
own wills evoke. […] Holy candles
and clean flames they shudder and shrink from, shriek and writhe before, and
thunder tumultuously, they of the Dark, who are me and who attempt to conquer
the good me.
The story of Jan Pieter Voorman alludes, like the
story of “The Jen”, to the inner demons that we all have to face and also to the
Oriental Occultist belief that:
…
those who pursue the descending path [i.e., practice black magic] meet with a
terrible punishment by reason of their own acts, and are often compelled to
labour for ages before [finding] their way back to the Path upon which the sun
of the Spirit shines brightly.
As a musical
inventor, Jan Pieter Voorman had called “to those of the Dark”
in a bid to add three more keys to his flute and suffered the Karmic
consequences.
The notion of bad Karma, of astral beings inhabiting other planes of
existence is similarly alluded to in Shadows
Move Among Them. Believing
in psychic phenomenon, Mr Harmston tells Gregory about the legacy of the 1763
Berbice Slave Rebellion:
Berbice
was a flourishing colony. But the
Dutch were cruel masters. […] Two
or three thousand slaves took charge of affairs practically overnight and the
few hundred whites were slaughtered… […]
Later on when the Government gained control again, the rebel leaders
were burnt at the stake and broken on the wheel. Berkelhoost teams with
passionate, cruel spirits. The
whole neighbourhood bristles with the
residual effluvia of past violence. [my italics]
The author
presents a different but related scenario in Morning at the Office.
Sitting at her
desk fantasising about a paramour, Miss Henery suddenly feels rough, calloused
hands rubbing her thighs: hands of the dead carpenter who made her desk
and this was “no daydream”. As Gilkes recognised this
scenario reflected: “Mittelholzer’s […] belief in the interpenetration of …
material and spiritual worlds”. It did not however, given
Mittelholzer’s esoteric beliefs serve “to illustrate the unpredictable
terrifying aspect of the suppressed, libidinal self”. This analysis is substantiated in My Bones and My Flute (1955). When Mrs Nevinson insists her
nightmare felt real, Milton Woodsley counters that Freud only explained dreams
“as being symbolic of the functionings of the subconscious mind; he never tried
to suggest that [it] might be connected with a supernatural event.”
Milton is crucially rebuffed by Mr
Nevinson who asks why they “should not be justified in entertaining the belief
that [her nightmare] might actually be connected in some way with the events of
actuality”
simply because it was scientifically inexplicable. Mittelholzer’s belief in Karma and the
reality of a non-material psychic world explains his well-established contempt
for psychology and his
belief that Jenetics (the spiritual
kind) plays a greater role than social environment in the formation of an
individual’s character.
Death
So finally what
about death? Another of Mittelholzer’s key themes – death is not only
meditated up but also portrayed as nothing to be afraid of. In Sylvia,
the drunk protagonist Bertie Dowden reflects on the “thousands – hundreds of
thousands – of people all over the world who […] are unhappy” and wishes he
could tell them there is no need to despair for there is death. “Death. A pale blue plumbago in the shade of the guava tree.” Mittelholzer’s attitude to death was undoubtedly drawn from
the Bhagavad-Gita:
“How can a man who knoweth the truth – that the Real Man is
eternal, indestructible, superior to time, change and accident, commit the
folly of thinking that he can either kill; cause to be killed; or be killed
himself? […] “Or if, perchance, thou believeth not these things and liveth in
the illusion of belief in birth and death as realities – even so, asketh thee,
why should thou lament and grieve?
For, if this last be true, then as certain as it is that all men have
been born, so it is certain that all men must die; therefore why grieve and
fret thyself over the inevitable and unavoidable?
It is perhaps
this that informs the author’s attitude toward criminals in his later
English-set novels: i.e., his vehement support for capital punishment.
CONCLUSION
To conclude, Mittelhozler’s work reflected a complex range of
hidden objectives: fearing censorship, his style was deliberately
abstruse. When Grantley Russell in The Life and Death of Sylvia, for
example, proclaims -
- it would have
been easy to conclude, as many did, that he was Anglo-centric; that he was in
support of European notions, precisely because they were European. And as any reader of Mittelholzer’s
work will have noted, the author references, or quotes from, a wide range of
texts and authors, who are largely European (e.g., Clive Bell, T S Eliot, Omar
Khayyam, Baruch Spinoza, Arthur Schopenhauer, William Shakespeare, Sigmund
Freud, Charles Dickens and Richard Wagner). But this has nothing to do with being so-called Anglo-centric.
On closer inspection many like
Nietzsche, expressed ideas that corresponded at least to some extent, with
those of Oriental Occultism. It
should be explained that Mittelholzer believed like Ramacharaka that ‘Truths’
(albeit partial or inadequately explicated) appeared in the works of some
writers – Western or otherwise, even “the writer [who] may not fully understand
what he has written”, courtesy of “Divine Inspiration”. Ramacharaka observed that
internationally recognised Western thinkers could be cited as a means of
helping the more spiritually conscious or advanced reader absorb Oriental
thought and this (as a close analysis of his novels reveals) was Mittelholzer’s
modus operandi.
James, C. L. R.
“Discovering Literature in Trinidad: The 1930s” in Spheres of Existence (Allison and Busby: London, 1980) p. 239.
Letter to Frank Collymore
dated 17th May 1950 in Henry Swanzy (Caribbean Voices) Collection
(Ref: Box 1: MS42 1945-1952) held at the University of Birmingham.
See footnote no. 2 in Wagner,
G. “Edgar Mittelholzer: Symptoms and Shadows” in BIM (Vol. 9, No. 33; July-Dec. 1961) p. 29.
Cited in Mittelholzer, E.
“Our Readers Say: My Bones and My Flute” in Sunday
Advocate (Barbados: 6 December 1955) p. 4.
Mittelholzer had recognised
the need for a history of Guiana but realised that he would be unable to
convince any publishers to take on the risk of a non-fictional text about a
so-called colonial backwater.
See Hogarth Press Archives (Ref: MS2750/284, 1949-54) – 18 unpublished
letters between Mittelholzer and his publishers held at Reading University.
Mittelholzer had been sent
to the Lutheran Sunday School, as the Anglican Sunday School run by ‘Negro’
teachers, was considered unsuitable. See Mittelholzer, E. A Swarthy Boy: A Childhood in British Guiana
(Putnam: London, 1963) p. 47.
Mittelholzer, E. My Bones and My Flute (New English Library: London, 1974 [1955]) p.
98.
Op. cit., Mittelholzer, E. A Swarthy Boy p. 20.
Op. cit., Ruth Wilkinson
Collection - Letter dated 29 May 1941.
Mittelholzer, E. “The Cure for Corruption” in Sunday Advocate (Barbados: 4 April 1954)
p. 8.
Mittelholzer, E. “God on
Earth” in Sunday Advocate (Barbados:
8 August 1954) p. 8.
Mittelholzer, E. At Forty-Three – A Personal View of the World (Typed manuscript,
ref: 108, held in Beinecke Rare Books & Manuscript Library at Yale
University) p. 2.
Mittelholzer, E. The Life and Death of Sylvia (Secker and
Warburg: London, 1953) p. 55.
See letter addressed to A J
Seymour dated 20th January 1959 in A J Seymour Collection – unpublished letters between Seymour and
Mittelholzer held at the University of Guyana.
See Mittelholzer, E. My Bones and My Flute (New English Library: London, 1974 [1955]) p.
148.
Dawood, N. J. (trans.) “The Fisherman and the
Jinnee” in Tales from the Thousand and
One Nights (Penguin Books: London, 1973) p. 80.
See Gilkes, M.A. The Caribbean Syzygy: A Study of
the novels of Edgar Mittelholzer and Wilson Harris (1973-74 A8j Ph.D.,
Kent, 24-332).
Op. cit., Ramacharaka, Y. The Bhagavad Gita p. 86.
Mittelholzer, E.
“Pitch-Walk Mood” in BIM Vol.2, No. 7
(1946) pp. 52-53.
Op. cit., Mittelholzer, E. Children of Kaywana p.
70.
Ramacharaka, Y. The Bhagavad Gita or The Message of the Master (The Yogi Publication
Society: Chicago, 1911) p. 26.
Ramacharaka, Y. Hatha Yoga (L N
Fowler: London, no date [c. 1960]) p. 10.
Hatha
Yoga is a branch of Oriental Occultism that addresses the physical wellbeing of
adherents.
Mittelholzer,
E. Corentyne Thunder (Heinemann:
London, 1970 [1941]) p. 229.
Mittelholzer, E. The Jilkington Drama (Corgi Books: London, 1966) p. 30.
Rinponche, G. The Tibetan Book of the Dead (Shambhala: Boston & London, 1992)
p. 77.
Mittelholzer, E. My Bones and My Flute (New English Library: London, 1974 [1955]) p.
174.
Mittelholzer, E. Shadows Move Among Them (Peter Nevill: London, 1951) p. 67.
The psychic vision or
sensation that is opened up by contact between a material object and living
person is termed ‘psychometry’. Ramacharaka, Y. Fourteen Lessons in Yogi Philosophy and Oriental Occultism (The
Yoga Publication Society: Chicago, 1903) p. 110.
Gilkes, M. “The Spirit in the Bottle: A Reading
of Mittelholzer’s A Morning At The Office” in Caribbean Quarterly (Vol. 21: No. 4, 1975) p. 9.
Mittelholzer, E. My Bones and My Flute (New English Library: London, 1974 [1955]) p.
92.
See Ramacharaka, Y. Fourteen Lessons in Yogi Philosophy and Oriental Occultism (The
Yoga Publication Society: Chicago, 1903) p. 18 for his similar view of the
inadequacy of Western intellectual studies.
Op. cit., Ramacharaka, Y. The Bhagavad Gita pp. 30-31.
Seymour, A.
“Edgar Mittelholzer: The Man and His Works” in The 1967 Edgar Mittelholzer Memorial Lectures – First Series
(Georgetown, National History and Arts Council, 1968) p. 17.
Ramacharaka, Y. Advanced Course in Yogi Philosophy and Oriental Occultism (L N Fowler:
Ludgate Circus, 1917) p. 78.
