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famed Kaywana Trilogy, another early novel, his autobiography and an anthology of Mittelholzer’s published and unpublished work by Juanita Cox titled In the Eye of the Storm: Edgar Mittelholzer 1909-2009 Critical Perspectives.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.
M. GILKES, The West Indian Novel, Boston, Twayne Publishers, 1981.
W. J. HOWARDS, «Edgar Mittelholzer’s Tragic Vision», Caribbean Quarterly, n. 16, 4, December 1970, p. 19-28.
B. KING, West Indian Literature, London & Basingstoke, Macmillan, 1979.
J. KRISTEVA, Pouvoirs de l’horreur. Essai sur l’abjection, Paris, Seuil, 1980.
E. MITTELHOLZER, A Swarthy Boy: A Childhood in British Guyana, London, Putnam, 1963.
J. OLNEY (ed.), Autobiography: Essays Theoretical and Critical, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1980.
K. RAMCHAND, An Introduction to the Study of West Indian Literature, Kingston, Nelson Caribbean, 1976.
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

Edgar Austin Mittelholzer: A Caribbean Voice (part two)

By Juanita Cox

With his novels becoming the subject of critical attention and scrutiny, Mittelholzer played an inadvertent but key role in the evolution of West Indian literature in a number of important ways. By way of exemplification, it would be useful to consider the review of Mittelholzer’s My Bones and My Flute, which was broadcast in November 1955. Whilst not disputing Mittelholzer’s undeniable skills as a novelist; his representations of local colour or dialect, V S Naipaul noted that he could not “find much West-Indianess in Mittelholzer’s work” by which he meant “Mittelholzer’s characters [could] fit in anywhere”. This for Naipaul contrasted with the characters in novels such as In the Castle of my Skin and A Brighter Sun, which “could belong to nowhere but the West Indies”. Naipaul, with his usual insightfulness, went on to remark:

…I don’t think it is hard to see why…the professional West Indian novelist tends to loose his West-Indian-ness. The books he has read are the books of England and American and European writers… His imagination is naturally conditioned by the films he sees and the books he reads. So with the professional West Indian writer we have the danger of art following art, not art following life.i

As a key protagonist at a pivotal stage in West Indian literary history, Mittelholzer’s novels sometimes became the prototype of what not to write; in this particular case helping to inform the growing consensus that West Indian writers should endeavour to produce material that was uniquely West Indian in character.

The value of these reviews can be deduced from an observation that V S Naipaul made in a later programme:
One can learn a lot from all writing – perhaps more from bad writing than from good – and I learned a lot from Caribbean Voices. / …I became very careful and very worried about everything I wrote. I learned to avoid certain themes.ii

Indeed it is puzzling to note, as Tobias Döring has highlighted in Caribbean-English Passages (2002)iii, that no-one has for example considered the influence of Mittelholzer’s With A Carib Eye (1958) – particularly its critical reception – on Naipaul’s The Middle Passage (1962). The short interludes between the publication of both travel journals, their discursive similarities and the related cultural positions of both authors, must surely raise some interesting insights into Mittelholzer’s influential role as a literary figure in the Caribbean. That aside it can surely be argued the reviews of Mittelholzer’s novels, whether good or bad helped, in the absence of an already established literary tradition to shape the material his counterparts later produced.

Less than five months after leaving Barbados to resume residency in the UK, Mittelholzer once again (October 1956) became directly involved in the BBC’s Caribbean Voices; this time taking over the role of programme editor/presenter, from V S Naipaul. These programmes which span October 1956 to June 1958 took on a variety of forms. However, in the majority of cases the programmes were divided into two halves; the first presenting one or two short stories (dependent on their length) followed by a selection of verse and read by Caribbeans who were based in the UK: e.g., Andrew Salkey, Gordon Woolford, Ulric Cross, Ellsworth Keane, Karl Hudson Phillips, V S Naipaul and Pauline Henriques. Oftentimes Mittelholzer would intersperse these readings, with a critical discussion based on the perceived merits of the works in question. It is worth pausing here to take note of Mittelholzer’s approach to editing the programmes:

Choosing the stories for “Caribbean Voices” can sometimes prove an extremely difficult task. Should a badly written story be broadcast? And note I say written, for many a story that reaches us here is excellent in content-matter, but fails in literary technique and grammatical composition. Such stories are hard to reject, for it is in content-matter that a writer truly reveals his talent. Literary technique, and even grammatical composition, may be brushed up in the process of time, but if a writer lacks imagination to infuse into his work, the solid qualities of a good tale – meaning narrative, characterisation and atmosphere above all – then the most polished literary style…will not raise his work out of the rut of the drab and uninspired.iv

In bestowing greater importance on creative imagination than grammatical composition or literary technique, Mittelholzer’s programmes notably included material which other forums of literary expression might otherwise have rejected. Whilst he occasionally addressed the ‘failings’ of some these works, it is significant that in the main, Mittelholzer was careful to offer words of encouragement.

Having observed that his own novels were often the subject of varied and contradictory reviews, Mittelholzer tended to end his critiques by noting that the listeners of Caribbean Voices needed to come to their own conclusions about the merits of any particular reading. These critiques are worthy of mention since some provide illuminating insights into issues that unsettled him. While, for example, Mittelholzer offers a positive review of Samuel Selvon’s Ways of Sunlight, he went on to state in a programme transmitted in February 1958:

…it is a sad thing to relate that the public in this country is being schooled into expecting [West Indian’s to write stories] that treat only of crude, loud-mouthed, uninhibited characters all of whom are dubbed West Indians (though many people are inclined to call West Indians Jamaicans, as though they all originated in Jamaica). This attitude is encouraged by the newspapers and magazine publishers as well as by television people, and it is fast becoming the popular thing to depict West Indians as loose, pleasure-loving individuals, absolutely feckless, as the Irish and Welsh are supposed to be. And, of course, it must be amply shown how fond they are of calypsos and steel-bands and of cutting ridiculous figures wherever they venture, whether in a bus or in Hyde Park or in Oxford Street. The writer who tries to depict his West Indians as a normal, decent, well-be-haved [sic] person will eventually starve, for editors won’t be interested in his creations.v

Whilst Mittelholzer saw nothing inherently wrong with writing about certain aspects of West Indian society, he nevertheless felt deeply uncomfortable within the context of 1950s Britain, about literary material or cultural practices which appeared to nurture or intensify white racial prejudice and notions of West Indian primitivism. Having been subject to regular bouts of humiliating maltreatment by his Negrophobe father on account of his swarthy complexion,vi Mittelholzer was acutely sensitive to the pernicious presence of race ideologies not just in the Caribbean (the legacies of which he explores in novels such as The Life and Death of Sylvia and A Morning at the Office) but also across the globe. This awareness was reflected in his determination never to set foot in places like the southern states of America or South Africa: for as he once remarked in his characteristically blunt (and in today’s terms, ‘politically incorrect’) manner: “I should not relish being insulted by barbarian inferiors with pink skin.”vii

Mittelholzer’s attitude and personal thematic rejection of folk/peasant culture (and towards the end of his career, Caribbean settings/characters) can perhaps be better understood if we consider some of the reviews of his early novels. In The Observer, Mittelholzer’s first published novel, Corentyne Thunder (1941) is for example described as a “brilliant and relentless study of primitives” whilst the Manchester Guardian describes it as a “direct portraiture of…rather primitive yet appealing…people”.viii Since Mittelholzer had apparently hoped to highlight the universality of the human condition as well as draw parallels between British Guianese and European society by making explicit references to extraneous texts such as Moliere’s L’Avare (The Miser), the play upon which Corentyne Thunder is partially inspired, he undoubtedly felt aggrieved when the critics labelled his characters, “primitive”. Mittelholzer’s sensitivity to Western racial prejudice clearly provides some indication as to why he felt driven to write a novel about coloured middle society (i.e., The Life and Death of Sylvia):

We’ve been looked upon too long as “natives” and for once and all, I want to have the truth out, I want the English and Americans to realise that there are coloured “natives” out here who can be just as educated and refined as they can be… [; at the same time] all our failings and foibles will be pictured without bias.ix

Ironically despite again drawing a clear link between Georgetown’s middle-class cliques with the dysfunctional middle-class characters of John Galsworthy’s Swan Song, the reviews remained similarly blinkered:

[The novel, The Life and Death of Sylvia,] shows what happens when the laws of the jungle are replaced by the codes of the suburbs, and it portrays with grimness the lives of coloured people whose worship of ancestral ju-jus has changed into keeping up with the Jones.x

Mittelholzer was indeed so obviously angered at the injustice of the Western perceptions, that he includes the above quote in With A Carib Eye (1958), and goes on to make the assertion that the critic of Time Magazine clearly knew nothing about the Caribbean since they – “negroes and coloured” alike – had been civilised for at least as long as Americans.

Mittelholzer’s desire for Caribbeans to be accepted as a ‘civilised’ equals was rooted not only in the self-proclaimed belief that “human character [was] basically … the same everywhere in the world”xi but also in the conviction that since the “strongest cultural influences [in the region had] been European”, it was ignorant of the West to perceive them as being ‘primitive’. What this latter assertion also points to however is that as a member of New Amsterdam’s coloured middle-class society, he had broadly accepted the Western world’s definition of ‘civilisation’ and had in turn internalised notions of their cultural supremacy.

Thus whilst he attempted to subvert notions of Caribbean primitivism, he paradoxically became increasingly unable to envisage the validity of developing folk cultural practices and in particular those which were African-derived.xii In an article which appeared in the Trinidad Guardian in 1945 he, for instance, argued that; if matters were left up to him calypsos would continue to be regarded “as in years past, as calypsos, and just calypsos – not as masterpieces of music equal in grandeur, to the Eroica or Gotterdammerung”xiii.

Despite these views it is interesting to note that a short journalistic piece that he published in 1947, A Carnival Close-Up, represents one of the earliest depictions of carnival to be broadcast via Caribbean Voices.

This suggests that Mittelholzer, particularly when we taken into consideration novels like Corentyne Thunder, A Morning at the Office, Sylvia and the Kaywana Trilogy, had recognised the importance of providing for the region documented records of the regions socio-cultural past and present. However, whilst A Carnival Close-up, does for example attempt to offer an objective/detached portrayal of the Trinidad carnival and observes that “Everybody is in a bubbly, light-hearted mood”, the narrator’s use of particular words are nevertheless reflective, through connotation, of the views which Mittelholzer had earlier expressed in the Trinidad Guardian. Apparently lacking by implication any sophistication, the steel bands “clatter”, “clang”, “clash” and “thump” while Old Masque revellers (who are a “straggly group”) “pranced and tramped and hopped”.xiv Irrespective of his personal standpoint, it is within the context of this article perhaps more important to appreciate that in terms of his relationship with Caribbean Voices, and Caribbean literature in general, Mittelholzer believed very strongly in the rights of each individual to express their own personal concerns and preoccupations. As he once observed:

…it is the complex nature of [Caribbean] social origins, and the conflicting loyalties involved in the scheme of…race, class and economic status, which dictate that each must tread his own lone-wolf path of literary expression.xv

This awareness seems to have allowed Mittelholzer to put aside his personal ambivalence surrounding the evolution and development of folk culture, calypso and Anancy stories specifically with respect to the material that was selected for transmission. As the transcripts reveal he not only invited key figures like the playwright Errol John to share his personal views on the importance of calypso to the region, but also regularly featured stories of the aforementioned type as a matter of course, never failing to pour praise on those, like Andrew Salkey’s Anancy and The Ghost Wrestler’s, or Stanley Brown’s Pocomania, which he felt were well written, entertaining and/or insightful.

There can be no doubt furthermore that he shared with his editorial predecessors a sincere desire to nurture, help and inspire other aspiring writers. By drawing on his own experiences as a professional writer, Mittelholzer was able to contribute to Caribbean Voices in unique way. Like other aspiring writers and listeners of the programme, he knew what it felt like to believe very strongly in the quality of the work he produced and in turn how it felt to be rejected by prospective publishers. In remarking that he had often regretted there hadn’t been amongst his acquaintances a “brutally honest critic” to tell him what was “wrong” with his work and why it was unlikely to be considered by a publisher, it is possible to surmise that his views (whether negative or positive) were aimed not at deflating aspiring writers but rather at helping them to achieve their hopes of becoming published authors. Mittelholzer invited, for instance, David Farrer, the Director of Secker & Warburg and Innes Rose, head of John Farquharson’s literary agency to offer advice to “those young men and women in the West Indies dreaming of literary fame”xvi, particularly on the subject of how to get published, the benefits of employing a literary agent as a medium and on the type of stories that were currently in vogue. In a bid to provide variety and maintain the interest of listeners Mittelholzer also importantly invited the Grenadian writer/researcher, Edward Scobie to share with listeners insights into the lives of Caribbean figures such as Ignatius Sancho: an ex-slave who, born in British Guiana waters in 1729, later became the owner of a bookstore in London and a man of letters. Other programmes recalled the contribution of writers such as Alfred Mendes, H G De Lisser, Eric Waldron and C L R James; focusing not just in the case of the latter on his literary efforts but also on his non-fictional work, The Black Jacobins.

Apart from the historical interest these programmes must have generated, they arguably demonstrated that if early pioneers had succeeded in pursuing their literary ambitions despite a less favourable socio-political climate, there was little excuse for modern-day Caribbeans to be discouraged by the relatively fewer obstacles that faced them.

In the interests of employing literature as a tool of integration, Mittelholzer was additionally careful to ensure, not only that he selected material from a broad range of writers across the region but also that all ‘racial’ groups and ‘classes’ were, where possible, represented. In the case of stories which treated of minority groups such as Claude Thompson’s Mr Wu Contemplates Peace and Edward Scobie’s The Return of the Carib, Mittelholzer offered listeners a potted history which located them firmly within the Caribbean.

This was clearly for the benefit of those territories whose listeners were less aware of the extent of racial diversity in places such Trinidad and Guyana. The content of his programmes arguably represented Mittelholzer’s hope, as a person of mixed ancestry, that the literary culture of the West Indies would develop along inclusive lines, taking into account the rich and full racial/class diversity of the region. Conscious additionally of the problems of producing, publishing and distributing literary journals within the region, Mittelholzer also importantly used Caribbean Voices as a forum through which to promote Frank Collymore’s BIM, noting in one particular programme that:

BIM is the one magazine in the Caribbean area which has rigidly upheld the policy of publishing only what measures up to the best, by universal standards, in creative literature. BIM’s attitude has never been; for the West Indies, this is good enough.xvii

Interestingly Mittelholzer never makes any other direct references to other literary journals. Whether this was a reflection of the dearth of literary journals and that fact that some like Focus were not consistently in production, it is arguably the case that as a close friend and admirer of Collymore, Mittelholzer may have been more biased towards promoting BIM.xviii In the use of the term “universal standards”, it is also possible to deduce that Mittelholzer did not give much credence to the efforts of other key protagonists in the region. Whatever the case, credit must surely be given to Mittelholzer, for helping to raise a greater awareness amongst listeners across the region of BIM and perhaps for encouraging other writers to make contributions to it.

Mittelholzer presented his last Caribbean Voices programme on 1st June 1958. Since the programme was brought to an end just three months later, on 7th September 1958, one might wonder why he didn’t see Caribbean Voices through to its ultimate end. Some explanation for this can perhaps be found in what follows. On 4th May of that year, Mittelholzer took the extraordinary step of inviting Arthur Calder Marshall to offer a review of his travel journal, With a Carib Eye, which as the transcripts reveal, contained acid remarks about an “English novelist – well known rather than distinguished” who had written a book on Trinidad following a short stay in the islandxix. In allegedly being based on the drunken ramblings of the novelist’s host and the “slum districts…of Port of Spain”, the book, according to Mittelholzer had been destined to receive critical acclaim. Mittelholzer’s decision to invite Calder Marshall to share his views of the travel journal with Caribbean Voices listeners was unusual. Firstly, it is striking that no other reviews of his work were broadcast during the 21-month period of his editorship, despite for instance the publication of A Tale of Three Place (1957). The situation appears even more remarkable when we consider that the ‘well-known’ English novelist Mittelholzer had anonymously been referring to was in fact, Calder Marshall. It is possible to surmise from this that Mittelholzer had intended to confront Calder Marshall over the western tradition of portraying West Indians as: “distinctly primitive, backward and exotic.”xx This objective however apparently backfired in Calder Marshall’s favour. Apart from noting that Mittelholzer had got many of his facts wrong, (the book, Glory Dead (1938) had for instance “received extremely antagonistic reviews”) Calder Marshall went on to argue that Mittelholzer had created a false picture about the geology of Barbados, down played the importance of the cultural changes taking place in the West Indies and was deluded in his “thesis that West Indians are just like Europeans”. As a novelist who placed great importance on notions of truth and integrity and had written With a Carib Eye with, in his view, the authority of an insider, these comments must have been publicly humiliating.

Whilst Mittelholzer went on to host the programmes consecutively aired on the 11th and 18th of May, he was notably absent on the 25th of May, when Calder Marshall was this time invited by W. R. A. Pilgrim, the programme’s producer, to offer a review of V. S. Naipaul’s The Suffrage of Elvira. His opening comments indicate that the Caribbean Voices team favoured his perspective of the West Indies over that of Mittelholzer’s:

Some weeks ago on this programme Marghanita Laski, Edgar Mittelholzer and I were arguing as to whether West Indians were just the same as Europeans; and I was maintaining that just as British, French, Germans and Yugoslavs, for example, are very different from one another; so West Indians are very different from Europeans – and I’d go farther and say that the people differ from island to island.

It seems to me that Vidia Naipaul’s new book bears out my contention most brilliantly; it is not merely an essentially West Indian book, but a specifically Trinidadian or Tricky-dadian book.xxi

It is possible to speculate that as his last programme was aired on 1st June, four weeks after his clash with Calder Marshall, that Mittelholzer had either given notice of his resignation or been asked to step down from his post as programme editor. These events arguably triggered off a major turning point in the novelist’s life. With his ideas so badly out of joint with the times, Mittelholzer must have felt deeply alienated and unable to continue writing about the Caribbean from the perspective of an ‘insider’ since his understanding of the region had been so critically attacked. Without the anchoring influence of his Trinidadian wife, his greatest critic (from whom he had been estranged since 1957 and later divorced in May 1959) Mittelholzer turned his back on those whom he felt had rejected him. This could speculatively help to explain why all of the novels he conceived from 1958 onwards were set in the UK. Perhaps it was his attempt to turn the tables on the Western world by writing about them; attacking in many instances the faults that he perceived to exist in British society? It should be recalled that novels such Eltonsbrody (1960), The Mad MacMullochs (1959), Latticed Echoes (1960) and Thunder Returning (1961) all belong in terms of their conception to the pre-1958 period. The two latter highly experimental novels which were admittedly developed in the post-1958 period were only done so, with the encouragement of his second wife, Jacqueline to whom Latticed Echoes is dedicated. Since the semi-autobiographical protagonist, Richard Lehrer, in both Latticed Echoes and Thunder Returning is presented as a West Indian ‘outsider’, the novels arguably reflect the impact of Mittelholzer’s clash with Calder-Marshall on his state of mind.

Though Mittelholzer’s involvement in Caribbean Voices apparently ended on a sour note, his contribution to the programmes and Caribbean literature in general was not forgotten. In a programme aired on 10th August 1958, and dedicated to the pioneers of Caribbean literature, Lamming acknowledged the regions indebtedness to three specific novelists: Edgar Mittelholzer, Vic Reid and Roger Mais. As he was to remark:

[West Indians] have had to live with a large and self-delighted middle class, who have never understood their function. One cannot accuse an illiterate man of avoiding books, but one wonders what is to be done with people who regard education as something to have, but not use. […] The absence of that [reading] public, the refusal of a whole class to respond to that activity which was not honoured by money; it was that dense and grinning atmosphere that […] Mittelholzer survived […] by fleeing the land…

Reid, Mittelholzer and Mais carried on their private war for more than twenty years. And different as they are in texture and theme [we offer] recognition of our debt to their work.xxii

In going on to transmit an excerpt from his short story, Forest Scene, Lamming argues that Mittelholzer’s literary talent was most apparent is his handling of atmosphere. This gift and life-long sensitivity to landscape, environment and climate remained an integral part of Mittelholzer’s novels irrespective of location; whether the Corentyne Thunder of British Guiana, The Weather in Middenshot or the Barbados-set Of Trees and The Sea. Since much of it is arguably depicted as having both a spiritually immanent and transcendental quality, perhaps this once again, indicates that critics need to devote greater attention to the impact of Mittelholzer’s religious beliefs on the shaping of his novels? This basic supposition certainly seems to be supported by the remarks of Garvin, (a key semi-autobiographical character in The Jilkington Drama):

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.xxiii

…and reinforces the hypothesis that Mittelholzer’s key preoccupations – religion and environment – are intimately interlinked.
This exploration into the Caribbean Voices transcripts and other related archival material has arguably demonstrated that much remains to be understood about Mittelholzer’s life, his world-view and thematic preoccupations. Based on findings thus far, it is evident he was a controversial and complex author: one whose life and literary career had been significantly influenced by an internalisation of western notions of cultural supremacy and a desire to refute/subvert western ideologies of Caribbean ‘primitivism’ by highlighting the universal commonalities of mankind. His status as an ‘inside-outsider’ of coloured middle class society arguably enabled him to rebel against the conservatism of New Amsterdam society; make the radical decision in 1928 to become a writer; and challenge the false notion that as a Caribbean man of colour, he was somehow less gifted or inferior to his European counterparts. His embattled state of mind, paradoxically, gave him the necessary impetus to remain focused, disciplined and determined to break through into the world of publishing and literary fame. It is clear however from his involvement in Caribbean Voices that his was not a self-centred ambition. He had wanted, as his writing Of Casuarinas and the Cliffs reveals, to demonstrate that the Caribbean was as valid an environment to write about as any other. In his role of programme editor he had clearly sought to engender not only an interest in literature within the region, but also to offer practical advice, help and support to writers who similarly aspired to become published poets and/or novelists. In selecting a broad range of material across the region, and which reflected the rich cultural, racial and social milieu, Mittelholzer also helped towards the breakdown of barriers which had previously isolated the multitude of islands and mainland territories from an awareness and understanding of each other. As a trailblazer, prolifically producing creative material which recorded socio-cultural and historical aspects of Caribbean society from his associative, principally middle-class perspective, his novels importantly became the source of close critical scrutiny. By providing a platform, within the context of Caribbean Voices, upon which key regional protagonists and programme listeners could discuss, debate, shape and consolidate their visions of a future more inward looking Caribbean, Mittelholzer helped (albeit at times in unintended ways) to influence the content and thematic trend of Caribbean literature.