Eric Walrond: A Life in the Harlem Renaissance and the Transatlantic Caribbean

elieved to be self-sufficient again, Walrond thanked Nancy Cunard breathlessly for having introduced him to Erica Marx. “If you had not given her my name and address and if she had not got into touch with me, I would not be writing this letter now to thank you for having made it possible for me to make a clean break with the life I had known for so very long,” signing himself “Yours in eternal gratitude.”¹ Some of the gregariousness returned. Over lunch in Leicester Square, he discussed the proposed program with Marx and her Company of Nine partners.² Walrond’s task, undertaken at the British Museum, was to research “Negro poetry” in all its historical manifestations, including music. From his findings, he was to select a representative sample for performance by black actors. Walrond began the work while still living at Roundway, arriving at Paddington Station and visiting the reading room. He executed the task with his customary assiduity: “The programme should be up to date and none of the significant new voices should be overlooked.”³ After his discharge in September 1957, he took a room near the museum in the Alliance Club on Bedford Place, throwing himself into research. It was a shame the reading room now closed at 5 p.m., he told Marx, as he had been accustomed before the war to staying until 9.⁴

For his initial two-week research trip from Wiltshire he received £25 ($70), but he was not really in it for the money.⁵ Captivated by the idea of a spectacular performance, the first of its kind, he worked vigorously. He was thrilled to partner with Marx, eager that she know “how grateful I am for everything that you did to make my visit to London such a pleasant one.”⁶ The project rekindled his sense of involvement at the leading edge of a black cultural initiative, showcasing the race’s extraordinary inheritance. Marx suggested to Walrond’s delight that the proceedings should be published by Hand and Flower Press, an anthology to which he should contribute a scholarly introduction and bibliography.⁷ Would this project become his path back to literary work after all? Astutely, Walrond thought to leverage it into identifying a publisher for his Panama history. Marx was not in a position to publish it because Hand and Flower specialized in contemporary poetry, but she was well connected in London and offered to help him place The Second Battle. “Finish the work that you are already engaged upon,” she advised, “and in the meantime you should send me 13 chapters, which I will deal with and try to interest one or two publishers.”⁸

Having reviewed the manuscript, Marx was candid in her assessment, which was that although “the story becomes more and more interesting, I do feel it would do very well possibly to write the beginning of it in a slightly different way.” “It reads slightly like a statistical commentary,” she continued, “and it seems to me to need an atmospheric opening into which you can incorporate the manifold facts which you have weeded out more or less unobtrusively. In fact, it would only probably need the first 2 or 3 chapters going over again.”⁹ Walrond thanked her for “such useful criticism and advice” and acknowledged that the first chapters were too “closely knit, cramped and taut.” He agreed to “introduce a little air into them and enough of the story of M. de Lesseps’ first battle at Suez and how he came to be fighting a second one, in order not to leave the reader in a quandary about anything that has gone before.” He stated his purpose plainly: “I am passionately concerned to remove the cinders from the eyes of those more or less interested parties who continually assert and appear to like to believe for reasons of their own that the failure of M. de Lesseps in Panama was due to the decimation of his workers by yellow fever.” Walrond did not intend to minimize these casualties but to demonstrate the decisive impact of political factors. However, to “remove the cinders” from anyone’s eyes he would have to write accessibly. “If I do not succeed in giving the reader who knows nothing of the subject a clear and convincing account of what actually happened, without soft-pedaling any of the relevant facts, I will have failed signally in my task.”¹⁰

Despite their talents, neither Walrond nor Marx was an ideal producer of a “Negro poetry programme.” Marx did not live in London and, despite her extensive contacts, had no experience with “Negro” poetry. Walrond had not lived in London in years, so his sphere of activity was limited. They relied on each other, Marx drawing on Walrond’s knowledge, he on her experience staging readings. It took more than a year to realize the plan. “Black and Unknown Bards” was performed at the Royal Court Theatre in Sloane Square on October 5, 1958.¹¹ They could not have anticipated it, but the performance occurred during one of the most acrimonious periods in British race relations. White-on-black violence and intimidation increased throughout 1958, fueled by Fascists exploiting white working class resentment and culminating on a bank holiday weekend in August, when a massive gang of “teddy boys” terrorized Notting Hill. Five black men were left unconscious in the streets, and the community attempted to defend itself. An atmosphere of hostility and mutual suspicion reigned. Claudia Jones—born in Trinidad, raised in New York, and deported to London during the McCarthy trials—responded to the violence with a cultural weapon, organizing the now legendary Carnival festival. Similarly, it was through culture that “Black and Unknown Bards” sought to foster black pride and understanding across Britain’s fraught lines of race. When they conceived it, however, Marx and Walrond did not anticipate this dramatic escalation of tensions.

Poring over the British Museum holdings, Walrond was fascinated with eccentric instances of “Negro verse”: a seventeenth-century Dutch chimney sweep composing in Latin; a protégé of the Duke of Montagu who studied at the University of Cambridge; “a simple milk-maid of Bristol” whose poetic gift captured the attention of Hannah More, the eighteenth-century playwright.¹² Walrond knew the value of such exercises from his Harlem days and, at this pivotal moment in British race relations, he hoped that the documentation and performance of superb talent would help erode racial prejudice, which was widespread despite the fact that half of white Britons “had never met a black person—and among those who had the acquaintance had mostly been casual.” Many whites were averse to “contact or communication with black people [and] objected vehemently to mixed marriages.”¹³ A Jamaican adolescent said, “The English are kind of funny. They think if they’re polite and pretend something isn’t there it’ll go away and they won’t have to notice it.”¹⁴ But it was no longer possible to ignore the people of color arriving in increasing number, nor were they going away.

On a Wednesday in August 1957, Walrond left Roundway Hospital to catch the 10 a.m. train from Devizes and present a draft of the “Negro poetry programme” to the Company of Nine executive committee, hoping fervently for a positive reception. His discharge hinged on the outcome; if the project got a green light, he would submit his request. The committee received Walrond enthusiastically, and it was agreed that the Arts Council of Great Britain should be brought in, and the Trinidadian actor Errol John should be invited to perform and recruit actors. Marx and Walrond planned the companion anthology. There was talk of a promising West African poet, J. David Rubadiri, from whom contributions might be solicited. In short, the meeting was a smashing success and spirits soared. Marx wrote Walrond that she “was extremely pleased how the evening went, on an increasing, rising scale, as far as the appreciation was concerned. […] It was very nice seeing you, and I am glad that the reactions of our friends were as they were.” Walrond replied, “Personally, I enjoyed every moment of the time I spent with you. […] I am glad that you felt after the meeting […] that we had ‘broken the back’ of the task before us.” The rest of the week found him in the British Museum, his step lightened by a £100 advance. The day before he moved to London, Marx sent a note: “I shall be very interested to hear how your life goes, and where you are going to live, and I am glad you feel you are starting off something worth while.”¹⁵ But tough sledding lay ahead.

Errol John was in Port of Spain, declining inquiries, and their producer’s office was always “crowded out with visitors” whenever Walrond sought a meeting, “the queue extending halfway down the stairs.”¹⁶ Marx excised much of the material Walrond submitted for the program, and although he feigned indifference he later complained that so little of his research made its way into the final product.¹⁷ When Errol John returned to London, Marx found him boorish and demanding: “As far as bigheads are concerned—he is one. I have never been so tired in my life as I was when I left him at 3 p.m., having, as I thought, achieved a little something in the end. Anyhow, the long and short of it is that his mind has changed, and he no longer wishes to do the programme, for which I must say I am deeply and profoundly grateful.”¹⁸ As they scrambled to identify a new lead actor, producer, and location, Walrond fended off despair and rallied Marx with the old saw, “The show must go on!”¹⁹ Fortunate developments ensured that it would. Marx interested the Arts Council, a major national organization, meaning “We have blessings in high places.”²⁰ From Harold Jackman, word arrived of an anthology of “Negro” poetry compiled by the Amsterdam publisher Paul Breman, who “kindly offered to share with me the information which he has about the younger Negro poets in the U.S.A.”²¹ Marx contacted the African American actor Gordon Heath, who had performed on London, Paris, and New York stages and in film, written for Theatre Arts magazine, and owned a Paris club where he had performed folk music since 1953. Walrond felt confident: “I think he will enter readily into the spirit of the thing and will doubtless regard the programme not merely as an opportunity to ‘shine’ personally but as an opportunity to render a service to the minority group in the theatre to which he belongs.”²² Heath recruited two accomplished performers: a young black Briton, Cleo Laine, and the African American actor Earle Hyman, a veteran of the American Shakespeare Festival. Soon poems arrived from Rubadiri of Nyasaland. “I think they will add considerably to the interest of the [project],” Walrond enthused, “His vision of Africa is so different from that of his congeners in the U.S.A. and the West Indies.”²³

The most intriguing development was the interest in the companion anthology plan shown by the Arts Council director, William Emrys Williams. A passionate champion of arts education, Williams headed Penguin Books UK, and like Horace Liveright, was accustomed to controversy. He met Walrond in November 1957 to discuss publishing Black and Unknown Bards. Working furiously to finalize the anthology, Walrond needed to find full-time employment but worried that it would disrupt his research.

He was staying at a Bloomsbury student hotel and could not find work. It had been some time since he had looked for a job, and even longer since he had written a ten-thousand-word essay, his Penguin assignment. Between the false starts on the poetry program, unemployment, the writing task, and bills coming due with a frequency he had been spared the last five years, his resolve seems to have faltered. He may have relapsed into depression. In the new year, 1958, he and Marx ceased correspondence. It is unclear when Walrond completed his research or whether it was to her satisfaction, nor did they discuss The Second Battle after her initial offer of assistance; but they went eight months without contact, and all indications are that Walrond was impoverished. Having transcribed by hand twelve exercise books “full of stuff” for the anthology, he could not afford a typewriter.²⁵ Spring came and went. He wrote Jackman that the anthology was “in the hands of a publisher” but negotiations were “very complicated.” He moved from Bloomsbury to Hornsey, a northern suburb, where Jackman mailed him copies of Jet magazine, which made him “feel sort of homesick!”²⁶

When he wrote Marx again it was to ask for money. She responded with a check, and he thanked her “for coming to my rescue in the nick of time.”

As regards looking for other work, I assure you I have been looking. […] Only a few days ago I had a long interview with one of the senior officials at the Labour Exchange where I am registered. (I was out weeks ago to the exchange on Farringdon Road, off Fleet Street, and tried in vain to get on their register.) In the meantime I am pressing on with my writing. I have sent out two stories so far, and it is obvious from the reactions I have had that what I am up against is a “marketing problem.”²⁷

He enclosed rejection letters to illustrate the “marketing problem,” perhaps also to confirm that his pen was not dormant. Labour Exchanges were intended to rationalize job searches, matching employees with open positions, but West Indians found them susceptible in the 1950s to the same discrimination that plagued the open job market.²⁸ There was good news from Marx, however. The English Stage Company was interested in “Black and Unknown Bards,” looking to stage it at the Royal Court Theatre in London’s West End. But Walrond was clearly on the project’s periphery by this point, Marx having brought in another coordinator that spring.

Rosey E. Pool, a Jewish scholar of Dutch descent who lived in London, dedicated her career to studying and promoting African American literature. It is unclear whether Pool came aboard to replace Walrond or was invited with his blessing, but he met with her and Marx in May for lunch at the Theatre Arts Club, and she won his trust and affection. A genuine radical, she advocated tirelessly for African American literature, publishing in several languages. She was a friend and avid correspondent of Hughes, Cullen, Bontemps, and Cunard, and a Holocaust survivor who linked the experience of African Americans to the oppression of Jews under Nazism. She knew Walrond’s writing and had saved newspaper reviews of Tropic Death. Having worked with Paul Breman in Amsterdam and George Lamming and Henry Swanzy on BBC radio, she was a tremendous asset. “She could have been a professor of black studies in the 1940s,” said Gordon Heath, “long before America decided it should know more about black history and achievement.”²⁹ It may have been Pool’s involvement that propelled “Black and Unknown Bards” out of limbo. She and Walrond received equal credit for selecting the material, but Heath’s memoir omits any reference to Walrond, suggesting that Walrond was unable to execute his duties after the difficult winter of 1958.³⁰

Staging a prominent “Negro poetry” performance in the wake of the Notting Hill riots was a dicey proposition, but the Royal Court Theatre was no stranger to controversy. Its artistic director invited work challenging comfortable pieties, including John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger, which delivered the post-war “angry young man” to the English stage in 1956, and Samuel Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape, which opened three weeks after “Black and Unknown Bards.” The theater press announced “Black and Unknown Bards” with anticipation. “Something of a novelty,” the Guardian called it, while the Sunday Times hoped for “an interesting evening. I cannot recall ever having come across a collection of Negro Poetry on the stage—or for that matter in book form.”³¹ In interviews, Marx situated the performance in the context of England’s deteriorating race relations: “I practically despaired of it ever coming off, on account of the number of difficulties that have been experienced. But maybe there is a useful side to all this, in that the programme will bring itself to the attention of the public at a very psychological moment, with the troubles that appear to be happening here and there.”³² The performance had not been conceived as a response to local circumstances, but intervening events ensured it would be received in this context.

An evasion of England’s “troubles” was built into the program. Despite Walrond’s extensive research on African and Caribbean poetry, “Black and Unknown Bards” contained only African American material. As Heath announced, it reflected “the continuity of Negro life in America: through slavery, plantation life, civil war, emancipation, education, urbanisation and the promise of full integration at all levels of American life.”³³ From the spirituals and work songs to modern verse, the performers held the audience spellbound. The exclusive U.S. focus may have been expedient given time constraints and the abundance of African American material. However, when one considers the vexing matters of British race relations and the decline of the empire, the decision to delimit the scope may have been deliberate. Ghana had just declared independence, Britain’s first African colony to do so, and independence movements stirred much of that continent and the Caribbean. Tensions from the race riots simmered, and the Fascists and “teddy boys” struck again, brutally murdering Antiguan immigrant Kelso Cochrane. A performance of African American poetry addressed present conditions, but obliquely.

The audience in the Royal Court Theatre made the link. The News Chronicle observed, “At a time when we should all feel disquiet at the racial riots of Notting Hill and elsewhere, it was fitting to hear the voices of three Negro artists expressing their longing, their bitterness, and hopes through the words of the American Negro poets, greater and lesser.”³⁴ The Daily Worker said, “At a time when it is particularly necessary to draw attention to the talent, dignity, sufferings and aspirations of the coloured peoples, we have this excellent programme which does just that.”³⁵ Whether “short and witty,” “nostalgic,” or “bitter,” the “magnificent” poems represented “the Negro who has been ill-treated for centuries,” resonating beyond U.S. borders.³⁶ Even those who were critical of the performance drew the parallel. In one reviewer’s opinion, the performance “underlined the truism that humanity seldom sees the whole answer the whole way; we can only do our best, and that goes for white as well as coloured nationals.” The implication was that the performance afforded only a partial view, and whites were “doing their best” under the circumstances. This reviewer preferred “a glancing ray of sunny humour” to “self-pity.”³⁷ But the consensus was that the performance deserved wider circulation. It “should be repeated on TV for a nation-wide audience,” wrote the News Chronicle, while The Daily Worker thought it far “too good for a single performance before the exotic sophisticates of the Royal Court. […] It really should be given the widest presentation.”^38,39 The performance would not be repeated, but among the reactions it inspired, none missed its relevance to conditions in Britain and her waning empire. From the “Black and Unknown Bards” performance came a companion anthology of the same title, published by Hand and Flower Press. Featuring an Africanist woodcut on the cover, it contained the work of twenty poets and the lyrics of a “slave song,” a “chain gang song,” and two “traditionals.”⁴⁰ It was Walrond’s final publication.

Race relations in England would get worse before they got better. Incremental gains came from initiatives such as the Notting Hill Carnival; the West Indian Gazette, which Claudia Jones published with Amy Ashwood Garvey; and community-based programs emerging from the violence of the late 1950s. They contributed to a nascent culture of postcoloniality in which both white and “coloured” residents participated.⁴¹ But the atmosphere remained rancorous because many social ills were attributed to immigrants, by which was meant the “coloured.” The Conservative Party, having previously endorsed a relaxed immigration policy, now pursued restriction aggressively, leading to the Commonwealth Immigrants Act. This was a devastating blow not only to those seeking to immigrate but also to black Britons, who were stigmatized and subject to deportation if convicted of an offense within five years of arrival. Immigrants flocked to Britain to beat the impending restrictions, nearly one hundred thousand arriving from the West Indies alone in the fifteen months before the law took effect.⁴² Jamaican poet Louise Bennett gave the migration the clever designation “Colonization in Reverse.” The newcomers would transform English race relations in ways that were unimaginable at the time. Among them were Stuart Hall, Edward Kamau Brathwaite, John La Rose, Jan Carew, Ivan Van Sertima, Orlando Patterson, and Wilson Harris. They collaborated with Windrush generation writers to launch the Caribbean Artists Movement (CAM), a concerted expression of black British sensibility. Walrond was not involved in CAM, but its founders were aware of his work. One of them, Kenneth Ramchand, devoted a section of his dissertation at the University of Edinburgh to Tropic Death, and his presentation at CAM’s first conference led to the publication of The West Indian Novel and its Background, the first such study by a Caribbean scholar.⁴³

Walrond drifted from public view after Black and Unknown Bards. He spent his last several years working for an import-export firm near St. Paul’s Cathedral and living modestly in north London. George Lamming saw him at the bar of a Jamaican nightclub where he was a regular. “He had very special hours; he’d go in and have a drink.” Walrond told Lamming he had been a war correspondent after leaving the United States. “He was something of a picaresque character, moving about without a fixed boat, as it were. He had a very interesting ear for picking up the language of the people of Panama. He was a very strong writer. It’s a pity that something happened.”⁴⁴ Despite the stirrings of a robust black British culture that he took part in cultivating before the war, Walrond seems to have been quite alone in the diaspora.

Walrond had not succeeded at writing his way into literary London, as he hoped. He tried putting the Black and Unknown Bards anthology in the hands of those who might recognize its merits. Nancy Cunard requested seven copies of the book, and when Walrond learned that Arthur Spingarn of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) was in London on a holiday, he stopped by his Russell Square hotel with a copy.⁴⁵ He mailed some to Jackman, requesting the addresses of Gwendolyn Bennett and Francis Parkes, a Ghanaian poet in London. He groused that the anthology “does not quite reflect the immense amount of labour” he put into it. Jackman felt it should be made available to New York booksellers.⁴⁶ Cunard was effusive (“I love ‘Black and Unknown Bards’”) and brimming with affection (“How good to see your acute, dear, astute self again!”). She was also receptive to a business proposition Walrond made, a collaboration. “I would, yes, like us to do ‘a job of work’ together, let me think a bit—on a stage, yes; something like enacted poems—a kind of Masque perhaps, not quite All-Spade, but nearly. Oh, it could be gorgeous—people (and poems) of America.” Although she found the prospect tantalizing, it may have been merely a diversion. “I have been so down lately,” she confided, “not a laugh in a year, not a smile.”⁴⁷ Nothing materialized.

Immediately after the new year, 1959, Walrond moved again, evidently under duress. It was just a few blocks’ distance, but Cunard wrote, “I trust you are much better now and that things will go well.” “How awful for you to have to move. I know only too well the detestable nuisance all that can be.”⁴⁸ He planned to attend the inaugural Caribbean Carnival that Claudia Jones had organized and invited Cunard to join him. A prior commitment prevented her, but she pledged to look up Marx and get them all together. It was not until April, however, that she wrote again, and then just a telegram.⁴⁹ This was the last time they were in touch, and although a more extensive relationship cannot be ruled out, it did not yield any projects. Cunard’s health was deteriorating, and she suffered from the strain of several relocations and a tempestuous affair with a photographer half her age, fraying her fragile nerves.⁵⁰ Walrond was grasping at straws in an attempt to revive his career. He was reduced to the literary equivalent of odd jobs. An Italian scholar at work on an African art book hired Walrond to select photographs, consisting chiefly of images of sculpture in the British Museum and the Wallace Collection. He was excited and wrote admiringly of the Nigerian sculptors Lucky Wadiri and Ben Enwonwu. He felt that if he performed his task creditably more work might follow, and he implored Jackman to contact their mutual acquaintances: “Whatever help you can give, either personally or by passing the word on to Richard Barthe (or anyone else: Elizabeth Prophet, Augusta Savage, Meta Warwick Fuller … ?) would be greatly appreciated. Only, I am afraid, time is of the essence!”⁵¹ An unmistakable sense of urgency, even desperation, had set in.

George Padmore died that September, and Walrond attended his funeral, where he met Richard Wright. Wright was friendly and solicitous, asking Walrond about his Panama history. When W. E. B. Du Bois visited London later that year, Rosey Pool graciously arranged a meeting with Walrond, and Du Bois also inquired about The Big Ditch. These conversations provoked a conflicted response. Their kindness gratified him, but he was ashamed of his performance. Upon receiving the Guggenheim Foundation’s annual report, he unburdened himself to Henry Allen Moe. He was “greatly in need of help,” suffering under a “crushing moral obligation.”

Walrond took a job at E. Hornsby & Sons, an “export packing” firm located near the ancient walls of the City of London. St. Paul’s Cathedral stood a few blocks to the north, the Thames and the Tower Bridge just to the south. It is unclear in what capacity he worked for the firm, but he likely found the position through the Farringdon Road Labour Exchange he mentioned to Marx.⁵³ His sparse address book included a few London literary contacts: Rosey Pool, Claudia Jones, and Paul Breman.⁵⁴ It has been said that Walrond wrote a preface to Amy Ashwood Garvey’s Liberia: Land of Promise, but that text is scarce enough to make corroboration difficult.⁵⁵

Walrond developed health problems and in the summer of 1965 suffered the first of several heart attacks. Confronting his mortality, he renewed contact with his daughters—two in Jamaica, one in Connecticut—and he sent Lucille and Jean a copy of Tropic Death marked with editorial changes should the book ever be reissued. Little did he know that was precisely what Arthur Pell had been contemplating in the Liveright office in Manhattan. Pell had received inquiries about the book and its author and sought a publisher to whom he could sell the reprint rights. The civil rights movement had revived the curiosity of scholars and general readers alike in African American literature, leading to reconsiderations of the Harlem Renaissance, and officers at Liveright contemplated bundling Cane and Tropic Death. The problem was, no one knew where to find Walrond. Pell was resourceful, reaching out to Arna Bontemps, now director of university relations at Fisk, who told him that the novelist Jack Conroy, a friend and collaborator, was in London and would look into Walrond’s whereabouts.⁵⁶ Somehow Conroy located him and “took a great liking to him immediately.”⁵⁷ Three days later, Walrond wrote Bontemps to say he “had long wanted to cut, trim and re-work certain passages” in the book and was eager for the opportunity.

Before the year was out, Pell wrote with a proposal for the sale of the reprint rights to a paperback press, an advance of $150, and 50 percent of world reprint royalties. He assured Walrond that Toomer had the same arrangement. “I do not know if you remember me,” Pell added, “but I was with Horace Liveright at the time we published Tropic Death.”⁵⁸ Pell’s letter went astray, and it took some initiative on Walrond’s part to discover his plans for Tropic Death. Walrond wrote in March 1966, asking “if there is any substance in what has been conveyed to me” about “a new edition,” and if so “perhaps you would be good enough to let me know whether a decision has been reached in the matter.” He confessed that he had sent his copy to his daughter, “who has a job with the University of the West Indies” (Lucille Mair was by then a dean at Mary Seacole Hall and a pioneer in the field of women’s studies in the Caribbean), but did not think “she would very much mind letting me have it back.”⁵⁹ He restrained himself from observing the irony, which must have struck him forcefully, that the firm that dumped him during the Depression was approaching him again as the market for “Negro” literature expanded.

Pell reiterated the proposal and welcomed Walrond’s editorial emendations, indicating that he would ask Bontemps to write an introduction.⁶⁰ Walrond immediately signed the agreement, pledged to “send word to Jamaica to have the ‘worked over’ copy of the book sent direct to you,” and expressed enthusiasm about Bontemps, “as he is about the most competent person to undertake such a task that I know.” Should Pell be interested, he had three stories that could be added to Tropic Death, one of which The Spectator published, and one he was about to complete. Under separate cover, he included a handwritten note, revealing in its penmanship the toll of old age but in its composition his charm and powers of recall.

The prospect of reissuing Tropic Death was a thrilling surprise for Walrond, who had been down on his luck for years and at age 67 suffered from declining physical and mental health. What cheered him most was something Pell mentioned in a March letter—that he hoped to sell the reprint rights to a firm with an established market “in the schools.” Within a week of signing the agreement, Walrond deposited his $150 check and sent Pell the stories he wanted to add to the book, including “Consulate” and “Poor Great.” He found the prospect of placing Tropic Death in schools “exceedingly interesting” and reflected on the serendipitous developments.

That was something Walrond did not have much of. On a Monday in early August, four months before his sixty-eighth birthday, a heart attack felled him in the street. He was pronounced dead on arrival at St. Bartholomew’s Hospital in Southfield, not far from his workplace, and buried without ceremony in the sprawling Abney Park Cemetery in Stoke Newington, North London.⁶⁵ He did not live long enough to learn of the sale of Tropic Death’s reprint rights to Collier Books two years later.⁶⁶ But one cannot help but think that the prospect of its reissue was a kind of vindication. The summer before Walrond died, Bontemps visited London, and he and Conroy called on Walrond. “We found Eric suffering from a heart ailment,” Conroy recalled. “But during a lively talk session in Soho pubs, we heard him tell of his esteem for Arna and his gratitude for Arna’s rediscovering him.” So great was Walrond’s enthusiasm that he insisted on showing them around Paris to “tour his old haunts.”⁶⁷ Clearly, renewing acquaintance with his New York contacts had inspired him.

When Langston Hughes learned that Bontemps had located Walrond, he sent a Christmas greeting and a gift of one of his recent books. As Walrond recognized, it was a lovely gesture from someone with whom he had fallen out of touch, one of the few from that time whose fame had not diminished. Walrond replied with a card bearing the image of the Tower Bridge: “Dear Langston, What a pleasant surprise, hearing from you! Ever since Arna Bontemps wrote that you were getting out an anthology of Negro short stories I’ve had you very much in my thoughts. Many thanks for sending ‘Simple,’ its treasured inscription, and the Christmas card.”⁶⁸ On learning of Walrond’s death, Bontemps wrote Hughes, “Have you heard that Eric Walrond died in England a couple of weeks ago? It was a heart attack (about his 5th) on a street in London. […] So ‘let the choir sing a stormy song.’”⁶⁹