The year 1962 can be seen as something of a watershed for the West Indian presence, both literary and actual, in Britain. Most important, the passage of the Commonwealth Immigrants Act of 1962 decisively restricted the entry of new migrants from the entire ex-empire. Though the flow of immigrants did not dry up immediately—mainly due to the continued ability of spouses and children to join migrants already resident in Britain—the act marks a crucial change in both the perception and the legal status of the West Indian population in Britain. Moreover, the year also marked the dissolution of the West Indies Federation and the subsequent achievement of independence by its two largest (and mutually quarrelsome) members: Jamaica and Trinidad and Tobago. Although these landmark events of official history do not necessarily have immediate ramifications in the cultural world, they do serve as useful indicators of the different directions in which West Indian literature could be said to move after the initial postwar years. Both events suggest an epochal shift in British-Caribbean relations, establishing a much firmer border between the former colonies and their erstwhile colonizer. While far from completely removed from considerations of British policymakers, the islands, serially emerging as independent nation-states, become responsible for their own fates, no longer a legitimate subject of domestic British legislation. This shift also bears significantly on the nature of the Windrush migrants resident in Britain: it effectively allows them to become British by dint of having arrived before the Commonwealth Immigrants Act took effect.1 Thus, after an initial period of flux, uncertainty, and mixture following World War II, 1962 marks a moment in which the West Indian diasporic community begins officially consolidating into distinct formations, loosely contained under the headings of Caribbean—actually resident in and citizen of an island nation in the region—or Black British—part of a visible minority population situated within Britain itself.
Certain parallels to this drawing apart can be seen in the fortunes of West Indian literature, too, as the period of intense, agonistic interconnection described in the pages of this book draws to a close, and Caribbean literary energies get channeled into distinct, quite different paths. At the center of these changes in the literary scene—perhaps standing athwart them in some sense—is the now towering figure of V. S. Naipaul. From a contemporary perspective, Naipaul, among all the novelists of the Windrush generation, has achieved the most prominence, a status attested to most concretely by the 1990 knighthood bestowed upon him by Queen Elizabeth II and his 2001 Nobel Prize in Literature. During the earlier postwar years, however, Naipaul had a much lower profile as a novelist vis-à-vis his Windrush peers. His initial publication, The Mystic Masseur, in 1957, comes well after Lamming, Mais, Mittelholzer, and Selvon had established the early parameters of the postwar West Indian novel, and his immediately subsequent books—The Suffrage of Elvira (1958) and Miguel Street (1959)—continue in the same comedic, lightly satirical vein as his debut novel, not unnoticed by critics, but likewise not registering with the same serious, high literary force as his predecessors. It is arguably in 1961, with the publication of A House for Mr. Biswas (and his being awarded the Somerset Maugham Award), that Naipaul begins to establish himself lastingly in the British world of letters.2 Although Naipaul should by no means be considered the sole representative of shifts in the Britain-based West Indian literary field, his rise to cultural prominence occurs at a suggestively pivotal moment in both political and cultural terms and, perhaps counterintuitively, helps shed light on the emergent aesthetic formations of both Black British and Anglophone Caribbean literature, as well as, much later, its uneasy consolidation into what is now thought of as postcolonial literature.
In this light, it is surely provocative that the two books Naipaul published subsequent to A House for Mr. Biswas—after a well-known artistic and emotional crisis—display rather overt signs of their author's tendentious and controversial disaffiliation with the Caribbean as the grounds of his public and artistic identity.3 His 1962 nonfiction account of a return trip to the Caribbean, The Middle Passage, paints an almost wholly denigrating picture of the region, poignantly portraying Naipaul's own paranoia about becoming trapped back in his home island of Trinidad and presenting its entire narrative in the tradition of English travel writing (most notably and notoriously that established by James Anthony Froude).4 The book's opening sentence betrays Naipaul's supercilious self-positioning as thoroughly distinct from his fellow Caribbean travelers: “there was such a crowd of immigrant-type West Indians on the boat-train platform at Waterloo that I was glad I was travelling first class to the West Indies” (2). This book, of course, is also where one of Naipaul's most controversial statements appears. Echoing the book's epigraph from Froude that asserts the absence of meaningful human existence in the region, Naipaul proclaims, “history is built around achievement and creation; and nothing was created in the West Indies” (20). In a related gesture of natal disavowal, Naipaul's next novel, Mr. Stone and the Knights Companion, published in 1963, represents Naipaul's first attempt to write a novel set entirely in England with English characters. The novel's basic plot structure—of an aging British man discovering some measure of creativity late in life—can be construed in the manner of an allegory of bittersweet creative rebirth pointing to Naipaul's own and certainly suggests the author's reorientation, however hesitant or unfulfilling, toward things English. Naipaul's notorious (and anguished) antipathy toward the Caribbean is by now well known and much discussed, and these two texts seem useful in tracing the beginnings of a pronounced shift in Naipaul's artistic vision and positioning. However, it is from an earlier moment that one can begin to descry the tectonic shifts in West Indian literature in Britain that Naipaul's influence inaugurated—most particularly, when he took over from Henry Swanzy as the editor of Caribbean Voices in 1954.
As discussed in the first chapter, this program had an outsized role as the primary arbiter of literary taste for Anglophone Caribbean writing of the era: to return to Gail Low's emphatic assessment, the importance of the show in establishing a unity of taste and practices for writers of the time “cannot be overestimated” (“Publishing Commonwealth,” 80–81). The internal BBC politics are intriguing to consider, if largely undocumented, but it seems there was a sense that by 1954 it was “time” for the West Indians to run their own literary show. Swanzy has suggested in an interview that his liberal leanings (at a moment when Britain was having great difficulty maintaining control over its far-flung empire) were a factor in the BBC's gently pointed encouragement that he find other projects to work on, and his letters to friends informing them of his departure from the show betray an understated sense that he was not doing so entirely willingly.5 Whatever the forces effecting this change in editorship, its results appear in a much clearer light: if Swanzy's tastes tended toward an embrace of the ostensibly liberal aims of prewar literary experimentation, Naipaul's most certainly did not.
Unsurprisingly, perhaps, Naipaul's editorial preferences on Caribbean Voices mirror his own writing practices, insisting on a spare, exactingly descriptive prose style, with some allowances for satire (so long as it was not overtly political). His dismissive depiction of the BBC-led literary culture for Commonwealth emigrants in London in the 1950s in his 2001 novel Half a Life offers one indication of his disdain for both writers and editors engaged in supposedly highbrow literary pursuits at that time. Naipaul's satirical portrayal of Willie as a writer who thoughtlessly imitates Hemingway and produces largely nonsensical, film-inspired prose stories finds precise parallel in Naipaul's own literary criticism on Caribbean Voices, in which he persistently censures writers (especially Garth St. Omer and John Hearne) for trying to sound like Hemingway and suggests that certain writers are too inspired by film and should concentrate more on structure and cohesion. Indeed, Naipaul's on-air commentary aggressively advances an aesthetic project that sounds like an uncanny double of Amis's. Deeply impatient with literary experimentation, Naipaul argues instead for more commonsense language, straightforward stories, and a down-to-earth, lightly humorous writing style. For Naipaul, like his Movement contemporaries, good writing appears on the page “with a vigour and pungency entirely free from affectation” (CV, 20 Mar. 1955).
Naipaul's review of Lamming's The Emigrants, for example, complains that the novel's “technique is difficult” and its prose “over-dramatic,” offering the suggestion that “the book needed some documentary writing” (CV, 2 Jan. 1955). Elsewhere, Naipaul decries the “brittle unloveliness of the moderns,” which, he says, results in “a coldness, an intellectualizing which does not belong to the poetic temperament” (CV, 30 Oct. 1955). On yet another show, he articulates the typical 1950s critique of modernism as too self-concerned and expresses his fear “that this intensity will lead to a niggling hypersensitiveness and eventually to sterility; and, in the end, will isolate the writer from his society more than ever” (CV, 8 Apr. 1956). In a 1956 review of the previous nine months of Caribbean literature, Naipaul praises Mittelholzer as “the only one who really can tell a story” and then rebukes the “university writers,” including Stuart Hall and Brathwaite, bemoaning that “it is all mind and manner with these young men” and complaining that their work is flat—“not all the pretentiousness of borrowed technique could leaven it”—as well as “unusually open to infection from foreign ‘isms’ which it would be folly to apply to the West Indies” (CV, 16 Sept. 1956). The note of aesthetic isolationism in this last reproof—with its implications of Caribbean cultural nationalism—is perhaps surprising coming from Naipaul, but it is in fact of a piece with the Movement's critiques of experimental writing: both are invested in a somehow natural, unmarked style taken to represent the “normal” state of a national culture, however defined. Moreover, the foreignness that Naipaul abhors does not seem to be British, but European, since, at bottom, he expresses a sense at this time that properly West Indian literature is British. In an early discussion of Caribbean literature on the show, Naipaul notes the extinction of the native population of Caribs and Arawaks, pointedly concluding that “there is therefore no binding national tradition; such traditions as exist come from Britain” (CV, 12 Dec. 1954). In contrast with Mittelholzer, however, Naipaul displays a quite static understanding of tradition, what Paul Gilroy has strongly critiqued as “the idea of tradition as invariant repetition rather than a stimulus toward innovation and change” (Black Atlantic, x). At Caribbean Voices, Naipaul seems to have aimed at aligning West Indian writing as closely as possible to an ostensibly stable, unchanging tradition of realism then being noisily revived by Amis's generation in English literature itself.
If Naipaul thus shared the Movement's politics of form, the commonality reverberates in his view of the place of politics in literature as well. From the outset, Naipaul was adamantly in favor of effacing political concerns from the radio show's literary offerings. As he opines early in his tenure: “too often, I feel, a Caribbean Voice has been one of social protest” (CV, 26 Dec. 1954). Another transcript finds him commending one poet because “there is only one hint of the nationalism so conspicuous in early Jamaican poetry. Things seem to have changed now. The writer is an individual who no longer needs to be buoyed up by his nationalism” (CV, 18 Sept. 1955). On a different show, expressing impatience with stories about the poor, Naipaul pointedly notes that he “would welcome a story about the middle class” (CV, 30 Jan. 1955). Race, of course, is also eschewed, perhaps most explicitly when Naipaul complains about “the handy old subject of the burden of being black. Writers are so boring when they are only being black” (CV, 16 Sept. 1956). Taken together, these editorial views have some import for Caribbean writers’ strategic positioning vis-à-vis the British literary field: that is, Naipaul's taste in style and content exhorts West Indian authors to produce writing that is closer to the so-called universal qualities then assumed to comprise the essence of great English literature, while also erasing the difference, exoticized or otherwise, often stressed about the subjects of the region's writing at the time.6 Thus, in the context of the British literary marketplace, Caribbean Voices under Naipaul in fact encouraged its writers to efface the distinctions Swanzy's policies had invited Caribbean writers to maintain, pointing them toward becoming less and less distinguishable—in terms of strongly marked West Indian content, but also formally—from their British counterparts.
A useful marker of this change is the Trinidadian author Michael Anthony, who might be considered the most successful authorial “product” of Naipaul's tenure at Caribbean Voices.7 Anthony's work appeared with remarkable frequency at this time, and Naipaul's encouragement and critique of the work almost precisely shadow the Movement-inflected responses to West Indian novels delineated in the preceding pages of this book. The first work of Anthony's to appear on the show, “The Strange Flower,” occurs at the end of 1955, well into Naipaul's tenure, and his stories appear with some frequency thereafter. By March of the following year, a program holds up Anthony as the most successful example of the show's critical guidance. Anthony's work is praised for being “neater and tighter…with an almost professional directness,” and he is favorably contrasted to writers who have succumbed to what is figured as literary and intellectual decadence: in his writing there is “no padding, no showing off, no asides to the reader” (CV, 4 Mar. 1956). In May he is again lauded for his directness, and in June for not writing about the color problem. By September, however, Naipaul sees a problem with the work. Commenting on Anthony's story “The Tree,” Naipaul expresses worry that Anthony's writing is suffering because he has come to London and fallen into “bad literary company,” such that his stories now reveal a “growing affectation, a growing ‘prettiness’” (CV, 2 Sept. 1956). Two weeks later, in his cumulative review of the past nine months (and apparently oblivious to the ironies of his own position of exile), Naipaul reiterates these anxieties, describing Anthony as “a new writer from Trinidad, now alas! in England, and slowly losing the feel of his island” (CV, 16 Sept. 1956).
In the penultimate program of Caribbean Voices, Naipaul names Anthony and Leslie Roberts as the “only two new writers of any worth” discovered during his time on the show (CV, 31 Aug. 1958). He expresses regret that a last story by Anthony cannot be read on the show, but his description of Anthony's counterpart Roberts (whose story is read on the show) provides a lucid portrait of the aesthetic priorities of Naipaul's editorial reign.8 Initially, Roberts is praised as “an earthy writer with no literary pretensions,” whose stories “are always honest.” Naipaul then goes on to praise the verisimilitude of his characters—“you can never doubt that he is writing about real people”—and, more important, the fact that “he also never uses them, as so many West Indian writers do, as material for facile social protest.” The subsequent description of Roberts's writing is connotatively rich, suggesting a transcendence of the physical (and, implicitly, the racial) into the rarefied realm of hard-earned literary universality: “There is toil and endeavour in these stories; rather than blood and tears and sweat” (CV, 31 Aug. 1958). The broader tension in the script between a salutary groundedness and the contamination of the physical remains unremarked (and arguably structures Naipaul's writing to this day), but the overarching message to write carefully mimetic, commonsense prose is plain enough. In this way, Naipaul's predilections favor a literary style that is aesthetically assimilated into the regnant British mode of writing advocated by Amis and other Movement figures.
This is not to say that West Indian fiction was channeled completely into the mold advocated by Naipaul: there was of course still considerable diversity and quantity of production by West Indian authors in Britain stretching well into the 1960s. Yet Naipaul had unquestionably become a central figure as the decade turned. Naipaul's biographer Patrick French, for example, asserts regarding his subject that “only in 1960 did his star begin to rise” (World Is, 180), while in 1963, none other than Kamau Brathwaite (then writing as Edward) claims Naipaul as an avatar of West Indian novelistic revolt in his essay “Roots.” Brathwaite makes what would now seem uncharacteristic claims about Naipaul in a characteristically strong manner, naming Naipaul as almost the only exception to the sterility suffered by contemporary Caribbean novelists as a result of exile: “The novels of Vidia Naipaul, then, come at a significant stage in the development of our (British) Caribbean literary tradition. Very little of what has so far been said applies to him and his remarkable series of books…[which] have come, almost overnight, to topple the whole hierarchy of our literary values and set up new critical standards of form and order in the West Indian novel” (Roots, 39).9 Importantly, of course, Brathwaite's knowledge of Naipaul's novels in this essay stops with A House for Mr. Biswas, but the language of epochal change he employs in describing Naipaul is unmistakable. Oddly, for a figure so readily associated with oppositional formal experiment in his own poetics, Brathwaite's subsequent enumeration of Naipaul's authorial traits reiterates almost precisely the conventional terms Naipaul himself employed so frequently in the previous decade. As Brathwaite maintains, in Naipaul's work “we find a sense of narrative, an ease, a lightness of touch, an absence of tension, a feeling for proportion, an ear, a power of characterization” (Roots, 39).10 At the end of the essay Brathwaite explicitly acknowledges that Naipaul's success as a novelist reveals that “to write really well about a living society…one has simply to be an «old fashioned» writer like Hardy, Dickens, George Eliot, or Jane Austen. This is what Naipaul is” (53). The discordance between this critical endorsement of Victorian literary style and Brathwaite's later aesthetic investments—prominently visible in his first published collection of poetry, Rites of Passage, in 1967—is instructive, suggesting not only Naipaul's widespread influence by the beginning of the decade but also the disparate, multifarious tendencies it ultimately created in the field of West Indian literature. Brathwaite's championing of Naipaul, surely, did not last long (indeed, he would shortly turn to Mais as a much more appropriate representative of Caribbean novelistic production in “Jazz and the West Indian Novel”). However, Brathwaite's own important projects for West Indian literature, notably the formation of the Caribbean Artists Movement, display the traces of an aesthetic reaction to Naipaul that helped determine the diffuse directions in which Anglophone Caribbean writing would flow through the 1960s and beyond.11
The germ of Brathwaite's organizational plan for Caribbean culture can be discerned in the same 1963 essay in which he praises Naipaul. Noting the return of many exiled writers to their regional roots, Brathwaite observes that “all now that is needed to make the story complete is for us to arrange a Conference of Caribbean Writers and begin the publication of our version of something on the scale of Presence Africaine” (Roots, 29), the Paris-based pan-African journal that began publication in 1947. Ultimately, with the establishment of the Caribbean Artists Movement (CAM) in 1966 and its related journal, Savacou, in 1970, Brathwaite succeeded, however fleetingly or intermittently, in realizing this aspiration. Within a periodization of Anglophone Caribbean literature, CAM would seem to represent the next major cultural assemblage to appear after the Windrush generation treated in the preceding pages.12 In fact, CAM was originally envisioned as an antidote to the perceived decline in West Indian cultural visibility in Britain since the postwar literary boom. Andrew Salkey, one of the founding members of the group, remembers this lack of public attention as central to the group's beginning, as revealed by his recollection of an early conversation with Brathwaite: “‘It doesn't seem to me,’ he [Brathwaite] said, ‘that West Indian writers are being noticed any more. The ’50s, yes, they were then noticed. We don't hear from them, they are not in the bookshops, I don't see anybody giving talks in London, and so on. How about it, Andrew?’” (quoted in Walmsley, Caribbean Artists Movement, 46). Brathwaite reinforces the sense of frustrated belatedness remembered by Salkey in a footnote to the version of “Jazz and the West Indian Novel” that appears in Roots. Noting how, even in the 1980s, Caribbean authors were dependent on metropolitan publishers, he expresses a belief that British publishing firms continue to display a “waning of interest” in “«new», «experimental», «too parochial», «too specialized», «for too narrow a market», «unknown» Caribbean writing.” Brathwaite dates this lack of interest specifically to the 1960s, observing that “some say since; Lamming's The Pleasures of Exile (1960),” and then protests that almost no “new Caribbean writers have appeared on London publishers’ lists since the 60s” (82). The strong association Brathwaite makes here between Caribbean literature and experimentalism is striking, especially when set alongside his earlier praise for Naipaul's Victorian conventionality. CAM itself, as Anne Walmsley records in her authoritative account of the movement, was characterized from its founding moments by similar fissures and divergences, manifested in both its internal and public debates. Although Naipaul simply refused to be involved in CAM, the tensions that animated—and eventually sundered—the organization centered precisely on the axes of style and politics that most exercised him. It is thus in the finally splintered nature of CAM that the antithetical reaction to Naipaul's aesthetic stance becomes most visible, revealing not only the divergent paths taken by Anglophone Caribbean writing in the 1960s but also the different ways in which the Windrush legacy of modernist experiment manifested itself after its 1950s apogee.
The interactions of CAM, its founders, and other West Indian writers certainly seem to map neatly into various emergent divisions discernible in West Indian literature at that time. If Naipaul can be read, as suggested above, as the most prominent example of a conscientiously Anglicizing West Indian author, his protégé Michael Anthony's experience with CAM suggests that he, too, did not fit into the explicitly political, assertively Afro-Caribbean contours assumed by the organization. Describing Anthony's presentation at the first CAM symposium in 1967, Walmsley observes that the author's three published novels “were apparently written in the mainstream European tradition—good stories, with clearly defined and well-developed characters” (Caribbean Artists Movement, 65). In his own summation of the presentation, Anthony notes that “my contention was simply that the primary function of the writer was to write, and in our intellectualism we must be careful not to lose sight of the wood for the trees” (quoted in Walmsley, Caribbean Artists Movement, 65) and turns to E. M. Forster as his primary authority. In such statements, Anthony clearly resembles his mentor Naipaul, emphasizing simplicity and craft over either intellectual or political concerns, and what Walmsley calls his “expressedly neutral, innocent approach to depicting society” appears to have provoked his fellow panelist Orlando Patterson to a rousing riposte in favor of political commitment (66). Later that year, Anthony caused some unrest at the CAM conference in Kent by avowing, “The novel of protest is not my sort of novel…I want to tell a story and tell it well” (Walmsley, Caribbean Artists Movement, 104). Although defended by C. L. R. James on the basis of authorial autonomy on this occasion, Anthony seems to have remained on the periphery of the group ever after, never officially presenting at any more of its public events. Anthony's work was still discussed frequently—often admiringly—but his apolitical disposition and “uncommitted” aesthetic sensibility put him well outside the main concerns that CAM developed, and his participation in the movement tapered and then ceased altogether with his move to Brazil in 1968. However causally related, Anthony did not publish another novel until 1973.13
At the same time, the founding figures of CAM—Brathwaite, John La Rose, and Salkey—were articulating an emphatically pronounced political viewpoint, under the growing influence of Black Power. In the first public session of CAM, for example, La Rose advocated “the rehabilitation of the African experience” (Walmsley, Caribbean Artists Movement, 67) and in a later session reiterated the need to explore more African-centered creative options: “If we do not break our tête-à-tête with Europe, and this self-abasement to a certain kind of form which we have inherited through the language, we cannot explore all these possibilities” (Walmsley, Caribbean Artists Movement, 172). Most indicative of this political strain, perhaps, is the August 1969 CAM symposium in which all three founding members presented papers: Brathwaite's “Africa in the Caribbean,” Salkey's “The Negritude Movement and Black Awareness,” and La Rose's “The Development of Black Experience and the Nature of Black Society in Britain” (Walmsley, Caribbean Artists Movement, 241).14 The titles alone make clear that the major concern of the symposium centers on matters of Africa and the iterations of its diaspora, and indeed, only Brathwaite's title gestures specifically to the Caribbean itself. This discrepancy, in fact, can also be seen as significant, as Brathwaite's appearance at the conference occurred after his having spent a year away from London, in Jamaica. Indeed, Brathwaite's departure to Jamaica to take up a position at the University of the West Indies, Mona, in the fall of 1968 marked the institutional bifurcation of CAM, in which Salkey and La Rose officially took over for Brathwaite in London, while the latter began efforts to establish a new branch in the Caribbean. This bifurcation, in turn, neatly summarizes the two directions in which CAM was splitting—to a politicized concern with race relations in Britain (as well as a broadly international politics of race) and to a focus on establishing a strong cultural and political presence at home in the Caribbean. In many ways, this split can be read as the founding moment of a particularly Black British literary orientation separating itself from the priorities of specifically West Indian writing, especially when one considers La Rose's role (along with his partner, Sarah White) as the founder of New Beacon Books in 1966, which became the first press dedicated to Black British publication in Britain (to be followed, shortly thereafter, by Bogle-L'Oeverture Publications and, much more recently, by Peepal Tree Press). Both of these complementary facets of CAM were highly politicized. However, as Salkey and La Rose became more and more enmeshed in addressing the situation of minorities in Britain, Brathwaite's turn to the Caribbean is more legible as an archetypal postcolonial concern with fashioning a meaningful, independent culture not beholden to the metropole. Although it would be impossible to separate Black British and West Indian literature into two wholly distinct categories even today, their different tendencies with regard to the politicization of culture emerge in this foundational split within CAM.
A final aspect of CAM's fragmented history—its relationship to Wilson Harris—has particular pertinence for an understanding of Caribbean literature's modernist inheritance. Harris is unquestionably the most direct literary descendant of novelists such as Lamming, Mais, Mittelholzer, and Selvon. Harris's dense, mythopoetic novels are overtly experimental in nature, and his essays at the time advocate a pronounced opposition to conventional realist narrative representation. Harris's first novel, The Palace of the Peacock, appeared in 1960 and received consideration in a good number of the major journalistic outlets in Britain. After this first book, however, Harris's steady and prolific novelistic output (seven more novels before the decade came to an end) garnered British notice, if at all, only in the Times Literary Supplement. Considering that CAM discussions frequently held Harris up as one of the most important examples of contemporary Caribbean artistry, it seems plausible that his lack of visibility in Britain played a key role in catalyzing the movement's foundation. Harris was, according to La Rose's account, felt to “be an important person to be part of” CAM when it was being initiated (Walmsley, Caribbean Artists Movement, 43), and at the second CAM conference, both Swanzy and Ivan Van Sertima held up Harris “as the exemplary Caribbean writer” of the time (Walmsley, Caribbean Artists Movement, 172). He presented (along with Anthony) at CAM's first symposium, articulating his own vision of a “radical new art of fiction” (Walmsley, Caribbean Artists Movement, 64), and he also participated widely in CAM's Kent conference. However, the disagreement voiced there—in which CAM artists were criticized for not allying themselves more directly and publicly with black immigrants in Britain—put Harris in the position of defending the autonomy of the artist. Walmsley bluntly summarizes the effect of this conference's heated exchanges on Harris: “CAM artists were challenged directly to relate to and identify with the immigrant community in Ladbroke Grove and Brixton; as a result key artists withdrew from CAM, notably Wilson Harris” (305). Presaging the later geographical separation within CAM, Harris's devotion to a high-art aesthetic of challenging, opaque, and philosophical prose here splits ways with the group's evolution into an organization with more immediate political ends.
While these internecine divisions may seem far removed from Naipaul's direct influence, one can see emblematized in CAM's fragmentation the eruption of disagreements in precisely the areas in which his aesthetic proclamations fastidiously sought to foreclose discussion. Politics—persistently dismissed by Naipaul as a pertinent concern for literature—plays the most visible role in CAM's disagreements, but discussions of aesthetic style also reverberate loudly. Certainly, as the politicized Black British side of CAM emerged into dominance, the organization's earlier openness to aesthetic variegation contracted accordingly, and it seems far from accidental that the era's two most prominent practitioners of Caribbean experimental writing split off, albeit in vastly different directions, from the group in Britain. Brathwaite's poetics, upon his return to the Caribbean, take on an oppositional mode characteristic of modernism, but they are almost always rhetorically positioned as embodying a Caribbean (largely Afro-Caribbean) form. Brathwaite's famed revolt against the constraints of iambic pentameter is illustrative. As he argues in “History of the Voice,” this meter has dominated English verse and imposed a way of thinking on poetry in English: “the pentameter remained, and it carries with it a certain kind of experience, which is not the experience of the hurricane. The hurricane does not roar in pentameter” (Roots, 265). Although this formal critique of convention could come straight out of a modernist manifesto, it is here clothed in explicitly folk form. In “Jazz and the West Indian Novel,” Brathwaite addresses these consonances more explicitly, as he explains: “I'm trying to outline an alternative to the English Romantic/Victorian cultural tradition which still operates among and on us, despite the «colonial» breakthrough already achieved by Eliot, Pound and Joyce; and despite the presence among us of a folk tradition which in itself, it seems to me, is the basis of an alternative” (Roots, 72–73). While he does here acknowledge some similarity between his project and Euro-American modernism, Brathwaite nevertheless insists on the ultimate difference of his proposed cultural solution, and the essay pointedly presents itself to its Caribbean audience as “the delineation of a possible alternative to the European cultural tradition which has been imposed upon us and which we have more or less accepted or absorbed, for obvious reasons, as the only way of going about our business” (Roots, 72). Taking jazz as its model for anticolonial cultural resistance, the essay argues for a Caribbean aesthetic that finds its material basis in a specific history of African diasporic practice. In this influential essay (and with increasing explicitness over the course of his career) Brathwaite's modernism is thus rhetorically denuded of its European inheritance, rearticulated in a version of countercultural autonomy that resonates with the decolonizing emphasis of many of the more recent incarnations of postcolonial literary criticism.
On the other hand, Harris, who has lived in Britain for more or less his entire career, is much less hesitant to represent his aesthetic philosophy as arising out of both European and Caribbean sources. A contrast with Brathwaite can be made even at the titular level: if Brathwaite's well-known essay collection, Roots, emphasizes a subterranean African presence, Harris's Tradition, the Writer and Society pays explicit homage to Eliot's “Tradition and the Individual Talent.” In the collection's central essay, “Tradition and the West Indian Novel,” Harris, in archetypal modernist fashion, makes strenuous claims against the appropriateness of “the framework of the nineteenth-century novel” (29) for West Indian literature. Harris faults Naipaul specifically for submitting to this framework, maintaining that it is responsible for the sad fact that the latter's fiction “never erupts into a revolutionary or alien question of spirit, but serves ultimately to consolidate one's preconception of humanity” (40). At the close of the essay, Harris observes the formal conformism of most West Indian novelists, asserting: “they may conceive of themselves in the most radical political light but their approach to art and literature is one which consolidates the most conventional and documentary techniques in the novel” (45). Against what he sees as the narrow constraints of such artistic practices, Harris finds surprising cynosures in “many of the great Victorians—Ruskin, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Dickens in Bleak House” (45), as well as grounding figures of European modernism, “Pound and Eliot, Joyce and Wyndham Lewis,” all of whom, to Harris's mind, “remain ‘explosive’ while many a fashionable rebel grows to be superficial and opportunistic” (46). The staggering range of European cultural touchstones employed by Harris in the book—encompassing, among others, Beckett, Dante, Dostoyevsky, Giotto, Kafka, Henry Moore, and Petrarch—illustrates the cultural inclusiveness at the base of Harris's understanding of something he nevertheless names West Indian tradition. Harris's fiction, too, in keeping with the apparent circumstances of his break with CAM, rejects the “national and political and social simplifications of experience in the world” (30) that he associates with the mainstream novel tradition. His writing generally carries its politics in a much less overt fashion, relying on subtle mediations between art and consciousness as the only possible location of its political purchase. Consequently, Harris's work has often seemed amenable to critics working in the strain of postcolonial literary studies emerging out of the Commonwealth literature paradigm, with its deemphasizing of politics in favor of a more unifying, allegedly universal approach to literature.15
Thus, two broad, antithetical options emerge in the lineage of what could be thought of as Caribbean modernism after Windrush: either the strongly marked cultural separatism of Braithwaite's aesthetics, denying the taint of the European in an effort to preserve its political integrity, or the more ecumenical experimental posture of Harris, vulnerable to critiques of pandering to metropolitan expectations and potentially guilty of evaporating its politics into a transcendent mist of high artistic style. As this book has tried to illustrate, such a view of Anglophone Caribbean literature's possible engagements with modernism is far too schematic and binaristic, offering an analytically sterile false choice between metropolitan and Caribbean. It is unable to capture the Windrush writers’ sophisticated involvement with the lingering remainders of the British modernist tradition, an involvement that embraced the unruly energy and utopian critique characteristic of its European forebears while remaining deeply anticolonial in its political message. A return to the scene of early Windrush production also gives the lie to any romantic tales of lonely postcolonial literary heroism at the crucial moment of decolonization, showing instead that from its very beginnings, Anglophone Caribbean literature was in fact constituted by its paradoxical positioning both in and against metropolitan European high culture. Far from shying away from this engagement, writers like Lamming, Mais, Mittelholzer, and Selvon—and, in a different way, Naipaul—all eagerly embraced the challenge of constructing a cultural movement with the erstwhile tools of imperial oppression. The fact that this generation of writers established an effective position in the field of postwar British writing as the inheritors of the modernist tradition should not be taken to mean that the roots of Anglophone Caribbean literature are utterly, inalterably British, any more than one could make the case that these writers wrested modernism wholly away from its European bases and transformed it into a straightforwardly postcolonial practice. The heuristic utility and historical importance of these distinct literary categories cannot be gainsaid. However, this need not foreclose an understanding of the more broadly global, relational dynamics whereby the very categories themselves have come into being. To state that at its foundational moments, West Indian literature was already densely and unavoidably transnational may risk stating the obvious, but such obviousness can easily be overlooked in favor of more self-ratifying, self-protective claims. Thus, however obvious, such a statement might also be taken as a reminder—echoed in the very practices of the Windrush writers examined here—of the intellectual need to unsettle one's own comfortable critical position and engage anew with the familiar other against which that position is typically constructed.