1. The term Windrush derives from the name of the ship, the SS Empire Windrush, that brought Caribbean immigrants to England in 1948.
2. West Indian, though based on Christopher Columbus's erroneous geography, is the term most often used in the postwar years to refer to people from the English-speaking Caribbean (and it still, in the University of the West Indies and the supranational cricket team, has contemporary relevance). The preferred term is now Anglophone Caribbean, used in order both to distance the islands from Columbus-era European presumption and to distinguish among the language groups in the region. This book will employ both West Indian and Anglophone Caribbean in a more or less interchangeable way, largely for reasons of style and to avoid repetition, rather than with regard to any distinct semantic or political intent. Caribbean will also be employed in circumstances where the Anglophone context is either already obvious or unimportant.
3. Eysteinsson acknowledges that this malleability and contention are characteristic of all literary concepts but suggests that, since the modern is still so closely allied to our sense of the present, discussions of modernism appear to take on a particular sense of urgency or importance.
4. The institutional authority with which Levin (and later Beebe) speaks attests to the clear shift in the balance of power (political, economic, and not coincidentally academic) from Britain to the United States after World War II.
5. In his chapter on literature and painting, Spender in fact cites Levin's essay, endorsing and employing his fellow critic's characterizations of Eliot and Pablo Picasso.
6. Notwithstanding Laura Riding and Robert Graves's 1928 A Survey of Modernist Poetry, the term modernism does not seem to have been employed with any consistency until well into the second half of the twentieth century. The Oxford English Dictionary’s tracing of the term with reference to literature shows that it was only rarely employed without quotation marks until the late 1960s.
7. Critics such as Alison Donnell, Evelyn O'Callaghan, Leah Rosenberg, and Faith Smith, among others, have persuasively argued against uncritical acceptance of a romanticized Windrush myth of origins, suggesting that this has worked against a more inclusive understanding of Anglophone Caribbean literature and its roots.
8. Both Lamming (1957) and Naipaul (1961) won the W. Somerset Maugham Award during this period, while Mittelholzer (1952), Lamming (1955), and Selvon (1955, 1968) received Guggenheim Fellowships. The figure for novels published in the United Kingdom during this period is taken from Ramchand's “Year by Year Bibliography” in The West Indian Novel and Its Background.
9. See Miller's Late Modernism and Esty's A Shrinking Island.
10. Mao and Walkowitz provide an excellent and wide-ranging bibliography of scholars engaged in this kind of work (“New Modernist Studies”). Numerous later works in the same vein but published after their article appeared could be cited, but those that include Caribbean-specific subject matter include Matthew Hart's Nations of Nothing But Poetry and Anita Patterson's Race, American Literature, and Transnational Modernisms.
11. Critics of postmodernist and postcolonial literatures, emerging into prominence at around the same time, also invested time distinguishing their critical practices from each other. See Kwame Anthony Appiah's “Is the Post- in Postmodernism the Post- in Postcolonial?” and Linda Hutcheon's “‘Circling the Downspout of Empire’: Post-Colonialism and Postmodernism” for influential examples of this debate.
12. Other prominent examples of this early antipathy can be found in Kumkum Sangari's “The Politics of the Possible” and in the entry for modernism in Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin's Post-Colonial Studies: The Key Concepts.
13. See also Howard J. Booth and Nigel Rigby's Modernism and Empire and Richard Begam and Michael Valdez Moses's Colonialism: British and Irish Literature, 1899–1939; both collections are explicitly aimed at counteracting the straightforward association of modernism with imperialism.
14. Neil Lazarus is another critic who has fruitfully examined the connections between modernist and postcolonial literature. See, e.g., “The Politics of Postcolonial Modernism.”
15. See Bourdieu's The Rules of Art: Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field for Bourdieu's most thorough accounting of this phenomenon in literature. David Swartz's Culture and Power: The Sociology of Pierre Bourdieu provides an astute, readable overview of Bourdieu's cultural theory, to which my own thinking is indebted.
16. See Joe Cleary's “The World Literary System: Atlas and Epitaph” and Christopher Prendergast's “The World Republic of Letters” for early, comprehensive, and insightful critical assessments of Casanova's book.
17. This point bears comparison with Edward Said's notion of the “contrapuntal.” Although from a quite different critical lineage, Said's concept is equally concerned with conveying “a more urgent sense of the interdependence between things” (Culture and Imperialism, 61).
18. Although not specifically discussed in this book, reviews from Caribbean sources tell an interesting parallel story: while culturally focused journals like BIM and Kyk-over-al were frequently amenable to Windrush experimentation, many of the more mainstream establishment organs, especially Jamaica's Daily Gleaner, conveyed suspicion of the works’ modernist overtones.
19. The elided words from this passage—“and modernity”—illuminate a critical disagreement. To be sure, Migrant Modernism embraces, and indeed takes its inspiration from, the basic premise of Gikandi's book. However, the book's occasional conflation of modernism with modernity overlooks the former's often agonistic relationship with the latter, implicitly eliminating the possibility that modernist practice might function as a productive critique of modernity. Susan Stanford Friedman has been an influential voice in arguing for modernism as defined primarily by its complex and ambiguous relation to modernity; see, e.g., her “Planetarity: Musing Modernist Studies.”
20. Michael G. Malouf's Transatlantic Solidarities: Irish Nationalism and Caribbean Poetics, while not interested in modernism per se, has a similar interest in making connections across disciplinary and cultural domains assumed to be separate.
21. Emery's delineation of how modernist aesthetics helps articulate a resistant subjectivity is illuminating (Modernism, the Visual). If the book's broad historical sweep—encompassing the early twentieth century to the present day—may give the appearance of monumentalizing both the oppositionality of Caribbean modernist aesthetics and the colonial oppression against which Emery sees it reacting, it nevertheless identifies a crucial ground of struggle—the visual—staked out in Anglophone Caribbean artistic practice.
22. Dash's book The Other America: Caribbean Literature in a New World Context undertakes an examination of modernism in a trans-Caribbean context, including Anglophone, Francophone, and Hispanophone literature within its purview. It makes a convincing demonstration of modernism as an important epistemological disposition across Caribbean literature, though such unifying breadth tends to underplay the widely divergent political and cultural histories in which modernism arose within the separate linguistic regions.
23. Caribbean Voices was certainly the most important institution enabling the establishment of the Windrush writers in London. It will be discussed in more detail in chapter 1.
24. The importance of fluid, mobile critique to Caribbean literature has been emphasized through critical terms other than modernism. For example, Glyne Griffith's Deconstruction, Imperialism and the West Indian Novel employs the notion of deconstruction (itself heavily indebted to modernism for many commentators) as a useful way of characterizing the nature of West Indian literature, while Antonio Benítez-Rojo uses postmodernism (also heavily indebted to modernism and perhaps not quite historically accurate in the case of Windrush) as his critical lens.
25. That these writers all came to prominence as novelists is not accidental. Although only Mittelholzer originally considered himself to be primarily a novelist, the exigencies of publishing in Britain at the time largely worked to reward Commonwealth novelists, rather than poets or even dramatists, the nature of whose work, of course, could be more easily sustained independent of the institutional literary resources concentrated in London. Interestingly, Henry Swanzy's letters reveal that in the late 1950s, even so manifest a poetic talent as Derek Walcott was composing a novel manuscript.
26. Some commentators include V. S. Reid's New Day, published in 1949, with these early Windrush novels; however, Reid's book was first published in New York, and though available a year later in Britain, it did not receive the same notice or have the magnitude of impact in the United Kingdom as the novels discussed here. Indeed, so magnetic was the pull of London literary possibilities that Reid published his second novel, The Leopard, in 1958 with Heinemann in Britain, as well as Viking in the United States.
27. See Edmondson, Making Men: Gender, Literary Authority, and Women's Writing in Caribbean Narrative. Michelle Ann Stephens's Black Empire: The Masculine Global Imaginary of Caribbean Intellectuals in the United States, 1914–1962 is another important examination of the gendered nature of Caribbean political thought during the era of decolonization.
28. Donnell's “Heard but Not Seen: Women's Short Stories and the BBC's Caribbean Voices Programme” explores the gendered dynamics of the era's literary production through the lens of genre.
29. Perhaps relatedly, their writing also fits, broadly speaking, into a mimetic realist paradigm. Jean Rhys is an obvious exception to this pattern, but her writing occurs either well before the Windrush writers’ emergence or well after. Moreover, Rhys was generally considered a British author until the late 1960s. Emery, in particular, perceptively established Rhys as a modernist Caribbean author in Jean Rhys at “World's End”: Novels of Colonial and Sexual Exile.
30. This book's principle of selection is based on the claim that it is the first authors to publish novels in the British marketplace who had the most prestige and profile during the 1950s. Such selection thus leaves to the side quite a few other (male) Windrush novelists who, while important, were neither as widely recognized nor as clearly experimental, including figures such as Jan Carew, John Hearne, Reid, and Andrew Salkey.
31. In significant ways, this formative stage of West Indian literature begins its life, from its very inception, as “global literature” in the sense employed by David Damrosch; i.e., its initial release already sees it having moved out of its “origin country” to be received and interpreted in a different cultural milieu. Similarly, Gail Low has observed how West Indian “literary history of the fifties and sixties is a history of transnational connections in a way that reminds us that our current generation's claims to cultural cosmopolitanism are not originary” (“Publishing Commonwealth,” 91).
32. In quite different ways, both Nicholas Brown's Utopian Generations: The Political Horizon of Twentieth-Century Literature and Marianne DeKoven's Rich and Strange: Gender, History, Modernism note utopian political energies as a fundamental characteristic of modernist literature and the geographical locations to which it arguably dispersed. John Marx's The Modernist Novel and the Decline of Empire advances a similarly expansive case with a somewhat different tonality, suggesting that modernism was a key imaginative component in the rise of a new, dispersed global network of administration with (various forms of) the English language as its common idiom.
1. Lamming's knowledge of Amis certainly belies his later claims in an interview with David Scott in Small Axe that in the 1950s he was not paying attention to English writers and critics, though this does not undermine his claim that French writers (loathed by the Movement writers) were most influential on him at that time.
2. It is worth mentioning Sukhdev Sandhu's London Calling: How Black and Asian Writers Imagined a City as a work that suggests something of a reciprocal relationship between immigrant writers and the metropolitan space of London, albeit largely in the imaginative realm and with considerable emphasis, still, on the writers’ own creative agency.
3. Low's monograph Publishing the Postcolonial engages directly with the interactions between several Windrush writers and the British publishing world. Low conveys broad agreement with Kalliney's approach but deals primarily with 1960s-era publications. On the other hand, her emphasis on how the West Indian writers, unlike their fellow Commonwealth writers, published outside the educational arena lends support to claims here that Windrush writers were welcomed as “high” cultural producers.
4. It should be noted that the major figures of the Movement generally denied that they were part of any group. Although acquainted with each other, these writers maintained only a loose affiliation based on age and disposition rather than a consciously articulated aesthetic project. Later in the 1950s, inspired by the popularity of playwright John Osborne's Look Back in Anger, the label of choice used to describe this generation of writers became “Angry Young Men.” While each of the terms has both salience and shortcomings, the original name “Movement” will be employed here throughout, in deference to the term's less restrictive range and the (rightly challenged now, but at the time quite accepted) connotations of a fiercely avant-garde sensibility.
5. Francis Wyndham's article “New West Indian Writers” explicitly argues that writing by West Indian writers is the place to look in postwar British letters for a continuation of the prewar modernist tradition: “in England during the 1950s a handful of West Indian writers are producing fresh and interesting books, unusual both in content and in style” (188). The review by Amis that Lamming excoriates, “Fresh Winds from the West,” suggests a similar (if less celebratory) acceptance of this alignment.
6. See Bourdieu's Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste for a comprehensive account of this term, which is somewhat akin to Raymond Williams's “structure of feeling.”
7. Paul Gilroy's The Black Atlantic, although it pays little attention to the Caribbean proper, is another important voice in this regard, asserting that the diasporic culture named by the book's title is a constitutive feature of modernity. As noted in the introduction to this book, Gikandi's starting point in Writing in Limbo is also closely related to an understanding of the Caribbean as necessarily enmeshed in modernity.
8. Both Raymond Williams's The Politics of Modernism and Elleke Boehmer's Colonial and Postcolonial Literature note the striking conjunction between colonial immigration to the imperial metropolis and the development of modernist practice. The generative forces of cultural mixture and estrangement they attribute to metropolitan space seem in many ways equally appropriate as a description of the Caribbean since 1492.
9. Collymore, of course, was the editor of BIM and was influential in incubating the careers not only of Lamming, Brathwaite, and Austin Clarke but, through BIM, almost all of the Windrush generation. For accounts of Collymore's crucial role in the period's literature, see Philip Nanton's Remembering the Sea: An Introduction to Frank A. Collymore and Edward Baugh's Frank Collymore: A Biography.
10. Lamming has sometimes included Joyce as an important literary forebear as well (“Interview with Mr. George Lamming,” 100), while in terms of poetry, he names Thomas Hardy as a crucial figure due to his emphasis on sound and rhythm. In such discussions, Lamming also consistently returns to H. G. Wells's book The Outline of History as a catalyzing influence for exposing him to a much broader idea of history, beyond the narrowly British-centered version in which he was schooled.
11. The two letters to Collymore referred to here are dated Tuesday, Aug. 1949, and 5 Aug. 1949, respectively. They are in the Frank Collymore Collection at the Barbados Department of Archives (hereafter the Collymore Collection).
12. Selvon's article can be found in Foreday Morning: Selected Prose 1946–1986.
13. See Guari Viswanathan's Masks of Conquest: Literary Study and British Rule in India for an important critical account of the function of literature in colonial British education.
14. Both Gikandi and Edmonson, in quite different ways, have suggested the continuing influence of Victorian mores on the formation of Caribbean political and cultural subjectivity.
15. London, as envisioned here, is understood in ways similar to Brent Hayes Edwards's characterization of Paris in The Practice of Diaspora, as a site that both facilitates and is determined by transnational interchange and exchange. As Edwards observes, “to ask about the function of Paris is to ask a broader set of interrelated questions about the role of outernational sites” (4). Such a view, of course, has parallel implications when asking about the Caribbean.
16. Matthew Mead has convincingly demystified the (often verifiably false) elements that have gone into forming the conventional Windrush narrative, though he too insists on its continued importance to the British cultural imaginary.
17. The Caribbean region's average yearly emigration to Britain was indeed remarkable during this period, rising from less than 1,000 in the years before 1951 to 32,850 during the years from 1955 until the severely restrictive Commonwealth Immigration Act of 1962. Peter Fryer's Staying Power notes that there were around 55,000 Indians and Pakistanis in Britain by 1958, a considerable increase in their population, but nevertheless vastly smaller in number than the Caribbean community.
18. Useful historical accounts of Britain's geopolitical struggles in this period can be found in David Childs's Britain since 1945: A Political History, John Darwin's Britain and Decolonisation, and vol. 1 of Keith Middlemas's Power, Competition and the State.
19. Indeed, this class confusion provides much of the subject matter for many of the most prominent novels of the time, not least those of Amis, John Braine, Osborne, Alan Sillitoe, and Wain. Upper-class panegyrics on the ostensible eclipse of aristocratic England—such as Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited and Angela Thirkell's Peace Breaks Out—also literarily reflect (albeit from a much different social position) the sense of shifting class dynamics.
20. Accounting in an interesting way for these odd political overlaps, Kalliney's Cities of Affluence and Anger argues that postwar Britain ultimately viewed the cultural distinctiveness of the class system itself as an important part of British identity.
21. Both Kathleen Paul and Paul Gilroy have noted the compelling connections between the rise of a postwar British national identity and discourses of racial exclusivity, further suggesting the fraught sociocultural landscape in which the Windrush writers initially found themselves.
22. More recently, critics such as Bradbury, Gasiorek, Dominic Head, and MacKay and Stonebridge have convincingly problematized the simplified narrative of a resurgent postwar realism at the utter expense of modernism. Nevertheless, they still acknowledge the period's primary tendency away from modernist aesthetics.
23. See also Blake Morrison, Alan Sinfield, Randall Stevenson, and William Van O'Connor, who all generally assess the major literary trend of the era as being explicitly opposed to the formal experimentation of writers like Joyce, Woolf, and Lawrence.
24. Arnold Bennett, famously, was the focus of Woolf's attack on realist fiction in “Mr. Bennett and Mrs Brown,” and it is no accident that the subject of Wilson's article, a revival of Bennett's popularity, was helped in no small part by the advocacy of Wain, who also published an appreciation of Bennett in his Preliminary Essays.
25. Bloomsbury, the name commonly attached to the circle of friends associated with Woolf, was frequently used as a shorthand term for modernism at the time. In terms of literary criticism, Wyndham's view is not unrepresentative. Indeed, as early as 1952 the Times Literary Supplement (TLS) notes that contemporary writers “lack the zest for experiment that marked young men and women in the twenties” (Symons, “Uncommitted Talents,” iii). Anthony Quinton observes in his 1958 consideration of the state of the novel in London Magazine, as well, that “the techniques of current fiction are resolutely traditional” and that “there is no notable writer openly dedicated to the idea of literary experiment” (Quinton et al., “New Novelists,” 15).
26. Both Head and Gasiorek compellingly trouble the distinction between “realist” and “experimental,” thereby undermining the very terms by which the common appraisal of the decade's literature is made. While from a purely literary perspective, this argument is both important and convincing, it does not extend its efficacy into the historical or sociological realm: the authors and critics of the time emphatically positioned themselves on one side or the other of the realist-experimental debate, giving the terms legitimate purchase in an understanding of the literary production of the time.
27. Kalliney, though not specifically citing Ritchie, descries the same generational dynamics in the period, as discussed in more detail below.
28. In the literary struggles for critical supremacy in the 1950s, Lehmann quite clearly represented the older establishment to writers like Wain and Amis. An explicit rivalry emerged in 1953, when Wain's BBC radio program First Readings took over for Lehmann's New Soundings, positioning its editorial philosophy as diametrically opposed to that of its predecessor. Not coincidentally, Lehmann was also one of the earliest British champions of West Indian writing.
29. The program, begun by the Jamaican Una Marson, was broadcast to the Caribbean from 12 Mar. 1945 to 7 Sept. 1958. Swanzy took over as producer in 1946. V. S. Naipaul took over from Swanzy in the later years of the program, beginning in 1954. From 1956, various others also took on editing duties, often Mittelholzer. With the exception of Naipaul, who arrived on scholarship to Oxford, all of the major authors treated in this book had published pieces on the program before coming to England. In the case of Lamming, Mittelholzer, and Selvon, the primary reason for migrating evolved out of their success on the show.
30. All citations from Caribbean Voices are taken from the written transcripts at the BBC Written Archives Center (WAC), under the reference number R34/473/1. Throughout, they will be cited by CV, followed by the date of the program.
31. It is noteworthy that this month of experimentalism on Caribbean Voices occurs almost immediately after Lamming and Selvon begin to appear regularly as readers on the program.
32. A more cynical view of the show would note the paternalist implications of Swanzy's influence emanating from metropolitan London out to the benighted territories; in one critic's view, his influence was disturbingly strong at the time: “When Swanzy sneezed, the whole Caribbean caught a cold” (“What Does Mr. Swanzy Want?”). Swanzy was quite aware of this troublesome aspect of his position, frequently noting his outsider status, verbalizing his discomfort about sitting in judgment despite his lack of expertise, and reading aloud comments from listeners specifically criticizing the British assumptions inherent in the program.
33. It should be stressed that the type of ecumenical, transcultural tradition generally advocated by Caribbean Voices under Swanzy did not preclude a strong emphasis on formulating an alternative and distinct “national-regional” identity in opposition to dominant notions of Englishness: the goal of the program was overtly geared toward Caribbean self-realization. Indeed, Swanzy was notorious for insisting on “local color” in the submissions as part of a consistent effort to avoid the formation of a West Indian literature submissively subordinate to British or European canons of taste and suitability.
34. While it is tempting to see this eager metropolitan embrace of West Indian writers as yet another devious method of cooptation whereby the colonizing culture ensures its dominance, Kalliney argues that such a view is too simple, noting that “we cannot assume that success in London's literary world implies political complicity any more than we can assert that hostility to modernist aesthetics guarantees a form of militancy” (“Metropolitan Modernism,” 97).
35. Many other critics, including Lodge, Morrison, and Taylor, share such a view of Amis's antimodernist bent, which is particularly evident in his prolific journalism of the time.
36. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the Movement's emphasis on Englishness employs an almost exclusively masculine, heterosexual frame of reference. Foreignness, the wrong kind of femininity, and homosexuality are all lumped together as undesirable or improperly English.
37. Bradbury's “No, Not Bloomsbury” identifies the novel's vernacular voicing of protest against pretension, complexity, and the distractions of the far away as its most salient contribution to the ethos of postwar literary production.
38. As Lodge notes in his article “The Modern, the Contemporary, and the Importance of Being Amis,” Amis traveled to Portugal and wrote the novel after winning the Somerset Maugham Award, an award designed to encourage writers to travel as a progressive gesture toward international understanding and cultural connection. The novel thus can be read as a private joke mocking the ideas behind the award.
39. Lodge finds a similar championing of everyday expression in Lucky Jim, connecting it with the “ordinary language” philosophy influential during Amis's time at Oxford as a student.
40. Lord Elton's anti-immigrant tract, The Unarmed Invasion, is one of the more egregious titular expressions of this attitude, while even Sheila Patterson's largely sympathetic study of West Indian migration, Dark Strangers, characterizes the status of its subjects as one of racialized unbelonging.
41. Embarrassingly falling prey to popular misconceptions, Spender mistakes Lamming's nationality as Jamaican.
42. Spender thus also perpetuates a trope, identified by Low as widespread, of the fresh, new, vital (primitive) literature able to infuse some energy and life into the tired, old English literary scene.
43. Although it was published anonymously, Arthur Calder Marshall is the author of this piece, “Caribbean Voices,” and it appears under his name in the bibliography.
44. A prime indicator of these attitudes taken up by Morrison and other critics is the almost magical absorption into the upper class of the heroes of Lucky Jim and Wain's Hurry on Down despite most of the novels’ energy being devoted to encouraging the reader to frown upon this very class of people.
45. Contemporary critics noted this tendency too; Angus Wilson describes the “neo-philistine, neo-realistic” attitude of these writers as characterized mainly by “self-interest ennobled by the violence of its expression or modified by sentimental clowning” (“Mood of the Month—III,” 41), while Frank Hilton, a bit more glibly, describes this new class as “an army of rag-tag and bobtail new men who are fed up with you, fed up with war, fed up with politics, fed up with rationing, and feel it is time that the good things in life came their way” (“Britain's New Class,” 60). V. S. Pritchett likewise dismisses the political earnestness of the Movement, flatly stating that “it rejects committal. Its rancors are private” (“These Writers,” 1).
46. In his Feb. 1957 foreword to London Magazine, a special issue on South African writing, Lehmann expresses similar optimistic support for Commonwealth writing, singling out the British West Indies as an especially fruitful literary region; in his Nov. 1958 foreword, Lehmann reinforces this view, distinguishing between “the novel in England” and “the novel written in English,” with only the latter providing hope for lasting literary greatness (9).
47. The Suez crisis seems an uncannily appropriate emblem of political concern for the period, imbued as it is with its (unsuccessfully consummated) notions of reasserting British imperial power in the Middle East.
48. See Rushdie's “Outside the Whale.”
49. Lessing's observations here find support in Rich's and Patterson's accounts of the period, which note a startling lack of knowledge on the part of UK citizens regarding their country's imperial holdings.
50. This is not to imply that the subject was not taken up in literature, as writers like Colin MacInnes and Alan Sillitoe deal relatively sympathetically, if problematically, with black immigrant characters in their novels. However, the Movement writers, along with their masculinist tendencies, generally included race only via a kind of casual racism in their works, such as Osborne's evocation of “some dirty old Arab, sticking his fingers into some mess of lamb fat and gristle” (Look Back in Anger, 19), Wain's description of his hungover character's mouth “like an Arab's armpit” (Hurry on Down, 233), or Amis's consistent mockery of foreigners in novels like I Like It Here.
51. Race was, not surprisingly, a particular topic on which the West Indian authors wished to be heard. Coupled with the steady stream of overt racism Caribbean migrants faced at this time was the complacent British self-conception of being unprejudiced and wholly fair-minded. As Walvin wryly observes, in midcentury Britain, “it was widely assumed by many prominent spokesmen and politicians in the host society [the United Kingdom] that whereas discrimination existed in other parts of the world (in the U.S.A., and South Africa, for instance), Britain was unusually free of this scourge” (Passage to Britain, 124).
52. Naipaul provides an important exception here, as he fits in quite readily with the Movement emphasis on apolitical, sparely literalist, “humane,” and satirically comic prose. He rose to prominence just after the writers on which this book focuses, and his subsequently decisive influence on the end (and subsequent reception) of Windrush writing will be discussed in the book's concluding pages.
1. At the time of writing, Peepal Tree Press had just reissued several of Mittelholzer's novels, with plans for more, as well as for a biography and a collection of critical essays.
2. Geoffrey Wagner's “Edgar Mittelholzer: Symptoms and Shadows” makes the case for Mittelholzer's fascism most directly, but Victor Chang's biographical treatment, A. J. Seymour's survey of Mittelholzer's novels, and Russell McDougall's analysis of My Bones and My Flute all suggest similar judgments.
3. The literature on the relationship between British modernism and its intersections with either a reactionary worldview or fascist politics is voluminous. A sampling of key texts might include Robert Casillo's The Genealogy of Demons: Anti-Semitism, Fascism, and the Myths of Ezra Pound; Elizabeth Cullingford's Yeats, Ireland and Fascism; Charles Ferrall's Modernist Writing and Reactionary Politics; John R. Harrison's The Reactionaries; Fredric Jameson's Fables of Aggression: Wyndham Lewis, the Modernist as Fascist; Peter Nicholls's Ezra Pound: Politics, Economics, and Writing; Michael North's The Political Aesthetic of Yeats, Eliot, and Pound; and Vincent Sherry's Ezra Pound, Wyndham Lewis, and Radical Modernism.
4. Mittelholzer was famously productive, composing, on average, well more than one novel a year for most of his writing life, despite the protestations of his publishers.
5. Mittelholzer's somewhat ghoulishly spectacular suicide—via self-immolation—has likewise contributed unfavorably to his critical reputation, allowing his work to be framed as the product of an irrational, unbalanced mind.
6. The valorized figures throughout Mittelholzer's work share this drive to singularity, including Harpo's fierce individualism in The Aloneness of Mrs. Chatham and Paul's stubborn iconoclasm in Uncle Paul, among numerous others. The relation of Mittelholzer's characters to the world—characterized by constant, strenuous struggle to locate a space of autonomy uncorrupted by the dictates of social expectation—can be likened in some sense to Mittelholzer's restive forays into multiple literary styles.
7. Mittelholzer's first novel, Corentyne Thunder, was published in London by Eyre & Spottiswoode in 1941 but, in some part due to the urgent distractions of World War II, never received much critical attention or notice.
8. Mittelholzer's letter to Frank Collymore of 19 June 1949 (Collymore Collection) reveals his proud sense that the novel had successfully appealed to the experimental, high-art tastes of the Woolfs’ publishing house: “The treatment is very unusual (difficult to explain here), and I daresay it is what must have appealed to the Hogarth Press more than anything else, for, as you probably know, they publish very few novels, and those few are generally of an original or novel treatment or technique.”
9. The orthographic levity of “The Sibilant and the Lost” prefigures the playful aspects of the experimental Oulipo tradition, particularly as practiced by Georges Perec. The story was reviewed on air by Arthur Calder Marshall, who dismisses it as a stunt and explains that Mittelholzer is having fun with the fact that the BBC typically frowns on too many s sounds because of the difficulty in pronouncing them audibly into a microphone.
10. Jacqueline Mittelholzer notes as well that “A Morning at the Office has been likened to Woolf's The Waves,” though, keeping true to her husband's instincts, she does not agree with the parallel (“Idyll and the Warrior,” 64).
11. Marshall's later, 1955 commentary on Mittelholzer in TLS also focuses on his technique, though, as discussed in the first chapter, he advances a rather more patronizing interpretation of it.
12. This review has no author named. It can be found in the bibliography, listed as “Review of Latticed Echoes.”
13. Ironically, the introduction in the first case is also for a Selvon short story, which Mittelholzer takes as evidence that his fellow author has no technical mastery.
14. West Indian literary reviews, on the whole, were somewhat more sympathetic to Mittelholzer's experimentation, even concerning the more labored leitmotiv technique. See, e.g., the reviews of Latticed Echoes by A. J. Seymour (in Kyk-over-al) and by Harold Marshall (in BIM). Joyce and Woolf were also frequently mentioned as stylistic precursors in the West Indian reviews of Mittelholzer throughout his career.
15. Mittelholzer often seems to advance the Movement view of modernist technique as dubious intellectual chicanery, despite engaging overtly in the same strategies himself. Ironically, the critiques contained in his satirical take on the literature of futurity (which is represented as being interested solely in sound rather than semantic sense) in A Twinkling in the Twilight and his dismissive presentation of Susan's novel-writing strategy of piling “sentence upon sentence so as to achieve the highest degree of unreadability” (194) in The Aloneness of Mrs. Chatham sound startlingly similar to critiques reviewers leveled at Latticed Echoes and Thunder Returning.
16. The second set of ellipsis points in the quotation is per the original.
17. Equally typical of Mittelholzer, the implied subject of reform would have to be, more than any other character, Horace, the lowest-ranking member on the office's social scale. While the moral guidelines would apply to all, in the novel, Horace is the only real casualty of the tendency toward paranoid interpretation condemned in the novel.
18. Michael Gilkes interprets the Jen as representing “the repressed, creative self” (“Spirit in the Bottle,” 243). Though complementary to the above reading, Gilkes's view narrows the story's social application down to the aesthetic sphere only. Howard's reading of the Jen as a frustrated longing can also be seen as complementary, though his interpretation emphasizes the sexual urge and suggests a deterministic view of the Jen as unavoidable.
19. Many of Mittelholzer's characters express similar, explicitly valorized views in favor of tolerance, such as in Uncle Paul, Eltonsbrody, The Wounded and the Worried, and Shadows Move Among Them, among other novels. However, the stricture is oddly unidirectional, somehow allowing for social eccentricity and subversion in Mittelholzer-approved ways while not applying to certain crimes, sexual behaviors, political views, and even cultural dispositions of which Mittelholzer viscerally disapproved.
20. As in many other things, Mittelholzer had a strangely ambivalent attitude toward homosexuality. While he seems to have been wary or even dismissive of feminine traits in men—particularly evident in his autobiography, A Swarthy Boy (28, 64, 84, 113, 128)—he gives gay characters (always overly effeminate men) quite positive roles in many of his novels, such as Graham and Uncle Raphael in the Kaywana trilogy and Archie in The Aloneness of Mrs. Chatham. In “Malicious Morality,” a column for the Barbados Advocate, Mittelholzer suggests tolerance of gay behavior to be a virtue of ancient societies. In another such column, “Sexual Inverts,” though he opines that tolerating too many open homosexuals would be “a menace to society,” he nevertheless approvingly notes that “homosexuals have figured, and still figure, among the cream of the world's culture.” Moreover, Mittelholzer takes the trouble to write a letter to the editor of the TLS, asserting that its review of The Piling of the Clouds is mistaken in detecting any animus toward “homosexuals” in the novel. He takes pains to note that, though the book does condemn many types of people (“unilateralists, pacifists, neutralists, and various kinds of pseudo-liberals,” as well as violent criminals), homosexuals are emphatically not included.
21. The ellipsis points in the quotation are per the original.
22. This formulation arises in his response to the question “Is there a West Indian way of life?” which appeared in Kyk-over-al in 1955, discussed below. The employment of “primitive” as a characterization of African-derived folk tales is also revealing: Mittelholzer famously disputed the use of such terms (especially “native”) to describe people from the Caribbean but did not hesitate to use them to describe inhabitants of other areas of the world, notably Africa.
23. Perhaps the most concrete manifestation of this urge is the Kaywana trilogy, which, with its historical sweep and geographical focus, seems intended to serve as an imaginative national epic for Guyana.
24. Many of these formulations occur in his columns discussing religious thought—Mittelholzer seems to have been taken aback by the overt, deeply conservative religiosity he witnessed in Barbados—but the general outlines of his iconoclasm enter fluidly into other spheres, especially the cultural and social ones: consensus in these areas was also considered stultifying and potentially dangerous. One of Mittelholzer's favorite targets in the social sphere was the unthinking duplication of European sartorial styles in a West Indian climate completely unsuitable for them.
25. Other of Menand's descriptions of Eliot also seem appropriate to Mittelholzer, such as the notion that “Eliot was an avant-gardist, but he was also a critic of avant-garde aspirations” and the sense that Eliot and others “engaged in a good deal of shouting against the nineteenth century and…at the same time did their best in various ways to live up to the nineteenth century's cultural standards” (Discovering Modernism, 4).
26. In the Caribbean context, of course, the Eliotic concept of tradition has proven widely influential. Wilson Harris's essays in Tradition, the Writer and Society draw explicitly on Eliot's work, and both Walcott and Brathwaite also look to Eliot as a critical lodestar. For an in-depth examination of the Eliotic influences on these latter two, see Charles Pollard's New World Modernisms.
27. In The Piling of the Clouds Peter articulates a version of this gradualist view, telling Charles, “You can't reform people overnight. The outlooks of people can only be changed by a cataclysm or by evolution” (82).
28. It seems fair to say that Mittelholzer willfully ignored the symbolic political implications of a more Afrocentric cultural outlook in his advocacy of a predominantly European cultural tradition. It is also the case, however, that his arguments pay more attention to the historical weight and prevalence of European norms, rather than their “naturalness” or innate, universal applicability. Nevertheless, the racial underside of Mittelholzer's assertion of a West Indian identity frequently emerges as a distinction between the “civilized” nature of West Indian society and the “primitive,” African way of life that still persisted (to Mittelholzer's mind) in twentieth-century Africa.
29. Such a view has compelling similarities with Lamming's notion of a “backward glance,” although for Lamming the greater emphasis is on innovation and newness rather than the encumbrance of history.
30. Mittelholzer cites no particular review, and its bibliographical details remain unrecovered at this time.
31. Interestingly, in 1954, Mittelholzer wrote a review of Woolf's posthumous A Writer's Diary, in which he lauds her, and the Bloomsbury circle in general, as representative of a more wholesome time in which “civilized people could genuinely be interested in the finer things of living for the sake of these finer things—and not for the sake of commercial involvements” (“Dying Integrity”). Thus, despite his discomfort with technical comparisons with Woolf, Mittelholzer comes down clearly on the side (in this case, anyway) of the aesthetic bête noir of the Movement and its acolytes.
32. Mittelholzer had something of an obsession about his family's Swiss-German heritage and the forceful prestige of German culture, so it is no accident that Richard, the hero, also identifies himself as having German ancestry. In many ways, Germany stood as a convenient affiliation for Mittelholzer, appropriately distant from both Guyanese and British connection and likewise far enough removed to avoid dominance in his own upbringing. Emily's analysis of her father's obsession with Germanness in this episode (127–28) explicitly echoes such a reading of compensatory reaction-formation, though, as is typical in Mittelholzer, this analysis is ultimately discounted as too inattentive to genetic inheritance to be viable.
33. It is certainly imaginable that the third novel could have ended similarly to A Tale of Three Places, in which the protagonist calmly and decisively chooses to leave his passionate, soul-mate paramour and return to the regularizing routine of familial responsibility.
34. This ridiculing of the pompous self-certainty of characters espousing what are commonly thought of as Mittelholzer's own views—Paul even admits to his priggish tendency to spew “junk” out at his interlocutors in Uncle Paul—adds a surprisingly consistent, if understated self-conscious critique of such views. This critique perhaps finds its apogee in Mittelholzer's last two novels, The Aloneness of Mrs. Chatham and The Jilkington Drama, in which multiple characters have both conflicting and overlapping traits typically valorized by Mittelholzer, such that a simple, straightforward understanding of what is most valued in the novels is not realistically obtainable. More sweepingly, Gilkes, one of Mittelholzer's most perceptive and persuasive readers, has asserted, “it is never safe in reading his work to accept a superficial estimate (even if it appears to be Mittelholzer's own) of events or characters” (“Edgar Mittelholzer,” 134).
35. The “Guide to Leitmotivs” provided at the end of Thunder Returning lists Richard's compound leitmotiv as: “Perpetually…distant artillery…bass buzzing…giant bees trapped…basement…core…detached…fight…march…Create…image…feather-bed tilting…dark…waves…daze…actuality…fancy…dipping…rocking…illusion…insecurity…circumference” (237, original ellipses).
36. The bull frogs and their distinctive “quark” sound are explicitly named as part of the British Guiana leitmotiv in the appendix of Thunder Returning (237). Perhaps revealingly, Mittelholzer does not formally name any images specific to Richard and Lindy's lovemaking in the appendix.
37. The passage clearly suggests the procreative potential as well, since Lindy observes that the day is an ideal one for her in terms of fertility, and of course, it later emerges that she and Richard did conceive a child that day.
38. Birbalsingh, in assessing the importantly experimental nature of Mittelholzer's literary accomplishments, predicts success in almost precisely these terms, opining that “Mittelholzer will gradually come to be regarded as the true innovator of a literature that is finally free from parochialism” (“Edgar Mittelholzer,” 103).
1. Lamming originally intended to be a poet, and though he ultimately became known as a novelist, his prose still bears palpable traces of this early lyrical ambition. The critic Ian Munro sees less value in Lamming's early poetry than Swanzy does, dismissing it as “experimental and often overly imitative” (“Early Work of George Lamming,” 327).
2. While one might take issue with the cultural and historical homogeneity implied by his book's general assumption that “all modern readers subscribed to the same hierarchy of value” (Difficulties of Modernism, 63), Diepeveen convincingly documents a consistent tension between advocates of stylistic complexity or simplicity in twentieth-century literature.
3. On the other hand, his status as “new” (i.e., ethnically other) could be argued as an advantage in the British publishing competition: Lamming was frequently reviewed together with African American authors such as James Baldwin and Africans such as Amos Tutuola, and the market for books written by people of African descent—targeted mainly toward the guilty liberal British conscience—was certainly expanding.
4. Esty's A Shrinking Island adeptly illustrates British authors’ struggle to adapt modernism to nativism in a strain of late modernism. Esty includes readings of Selvon and Lamming as participants in the anthropological turn he identifies taking shape in the middle of the century. While his readings of these two West Indian authors convincingly illustrate how their novels work to displace Englishness as a universal category, they do not strongly register the cultural politics of Lamming's and Selvon's formal choices (and in some ways suggest that the authors’ primary interest lies in portraying British people and customs).
5. Lamming recounts this episode in The Pleasures of Exile as well (56–57).
6. In a BBC radio interview about a British antiracism bill, Lamming suggests an empirical model for this double sense of “engagement,” asserting that he sometimes encourages racist expression to facilitate an argument, after which, at least, some lines of communication can be said to have been formed (“This Time of Day”). In later writings, Lamming has also emphasized the need to recognize the importance of conflict as a creative process that is “accepted as a norm and not a distortion” (Sovereignty of the Imagination, 58).
7. Interestingly, in contemplating the British government's initial 1944 discussion of the establishment of tertiary education in their Caribbean colonies, Lamming uses markedly similar terminology to Woolf's: “It is at this critical juncture when new definitions will have to be found to clarify the meaning of the word ‘civilization’ that the meetings to consider the creation of the University of the West Indies took place” (Sovereignty of the Imagination, 23).
8. Marshall makes exactly the same comparison in his Caribbean Voices review of the novel (CV, 22 Mar. 1953).
9. Pritchett's choice of possessive pronoun reveals much: although Britain encouraged its colonized population to consider themselves British, the reality in the home country was quite removed from this ideal of national solidarity. In literary reviews of the time, there is a symptomatic oscillation between differentiating and claiming the writing of the Commonwealth.
10. The reviewer is not named, so the review appears in the bibliography under its title, “New Fiction.”
11. Edward Said's Orientalism is a fundamental and originary postcolonial text in pointing out precisely how organized (and thus easily internalized) the effect of colonial discourse can be.
12. In such a context, it is also useful to note Diepeveen's assessment that antidifficulty arguments almost always employ a language of normativity in which “difficulty is typically presented as an abnormal state of affairs” (Difficulties of Modernism, 74)—an appealing trait if one is seeking distinction of some kind.
13. See pages 33–34.
14. Of course, for many commentators, including Lamming himself, this blending of the narration between first and third person, between a singular subject and a more plural village-oriented one, articulates via formal qualities precisely the hesitation and struggle between individual and community on which the book's content focuses.
15. This discourse of development, here couched within the terms of the literary, has obvious overlaps with the era's familiar political claims that British colonies were not yet ready or mature enough for independence.
16. This London Times review is also unattributed. It is alphabetized in the bibliography under its title.
17. Nadi Edwards has likewise asserted that Lamming's advocacy of a newfound linguistic agency should be seen as a central aim of “the complex experimental narratives that constitute his fiction,” though Edwards ultimately reads this agency as resolutely vernacular and anti-Western (“George Lamming's Literary Nationalism,” 61).
18. Indeed, although it is largely a matter of emphasis, it could be argued that the concentrated focus on English identity that Esty identifies both presupposes and consolidates an even firmer conception of what is considered “not-English.” Both Ian Baucom and Gikandi, as Esty notes, provide compelling witness to the necessary re-imaginings of Englishness accompanying the migration of former colonial subjects to metropolitan England.
19. The first item in the series, oddly, is The Waste Land, which the author apparently likewise sees as an object of mainly anthropological interest and, like the others, a dire expression of the breakdown of the rules of language. The sense in the review is of West Indian writing as degenerate, just like the writings of the modernists, and indeed, both Mittelholzer and Lamming are specifically rebuked by the author for the pretension of their experimental aims.
20. C. L. R. James wrote a letter to the editor that appears in the 28 Sept. 1962 TLS, asserting that West Indian novels provide far more than simply insights into Caribbean life and placing the article's (then anonymous) author in the nefarious tradition of James Anthony Froude.
21. John Plotz has argued in a similar vein about Lamming's authorial attempt to “re-possess” what the Empire perceives as objects, though his emphasis on the far-reaching potency of creative imagination may seem undue given Lamming's clear-eyed view of the material restraints imposed by imperial history.
22. Mimi Sheller's Consuming the Caribbean, in its longue durée analysis of the products and images traveling between England and the Caribbean since Columbus, makes provocative use of the metaphor of consumption and its very literal, material effects on the bodies, psyches, and landscapes of the Caribbean people.
23. Emery provides an illuminating reading of this scene, noting that Lamming employs “modernist devices” to portray how the incident, for Dickson, “has altered his deepest sense of himself as a person in time and space” (Modernism, the Visual, 162). In her reading, Emery emphasizes how emigrant men are feminized by the colonial gaze in the novel, usefully connecting this phenomenon with earlier historical instances of imperial interest in observing exhibits of exotic, eroticized women.
24. Many critics, including Nair, M. Morris, and Paquet, have viewed the “Author's Note” in a negative light, considering it unwieldy, unnecessary, or even, in Nair's case, in direct opposition to the overarching message of the novel. The reading here suggests that the passage's emphasis on self-critical humility in the face of difference is in direct agreement with the novel's ethos.
25. Imre Szeman is among the most recent critics to assert that, for Lamming, the novel genre was attractive because of its capacity for use as a pedagogic technology (Zones of Instability, 76). Forbes, Gikandi, Joyce Jonas, and Avis G. McDonald have also all drawn attention to the investment Lamming's work makes in underscoring the relationship of reader to text.
26. As Curdella Forbes has noted in “…And the Dumb Speak,” Lamming's fiction often operates as theory, enacting theoretical principles rather than simply describing or presenting them. Forbes connects the opacity of Lamming's texts to the indecipherability of the human (specifically Caribbean) body in The Emigrants, arguing that this hermeneutical resistance creates space for a liberating self-fashioning.
27. This manuscript can be found in the Sam Selvon Collection, University of the West Indies (UWI), St. Augustine, item 88, p. 8 (hereafter the Selvon Collection).
28. The parallel is interesting in that the Movement writers also considered themselves heirs to the same eighteenth-century novelists, the difference surely being that Lamming is comparing sociocultural function, while Amis and company were trying to simulate actual writing style. Lamming's point is also about new cultural beginnings, while the overriding tendency of the Movement was to return to “real Englishness.”
29. This is not to say that Lamming did not have readers in the Caribbean. He clearly received, on the whole, a serious and often enthusiastic reception among the reviewers of regional journals and newspapers. Moreover, browsing the archive of Barbados's Sunday Advocate reveals that both major booksellers of the island—Advocate Stationery and the book department of C. F. Harrison & Co.—advertised Lamming's novels for sale. Indeed, Advocate Stationery not only initially devoted a rare, single advertisement wholly to In the Castle of My Skin but also put out a second one a month later to announce the receipt of a second shipment of the novel, indicating a certain level of (largely middle-class) popularity for the book.
30. Lamming's 1956 speech “The Negro Writer and His World,” discussed below, is an eloquent testament to his carefully calibrated universalism. Without sacrificing an anticolonial, antiracist politics, Lamming nevertheless strongly insists that black writers cannot lose sight of how their plight can be rendered, and hence comprehended, as a universal condition.
31. In his introduction to the University of Michigan Press's paperback edition of In the Castle of My Skin, Lamming explicitly parallels what he characterizes as the authoritarian leanings of contemporary pan-Africanists in Barbados with the old colonial ideology, emphasizing, in keeping with Fanon, that the imperialist mindset is not merely the monopoly of the original colonizing power. Shephard and Singh, from Of Age and Innocence, are particular examples of such behavior in Lamming's fiction.
32. Lamming generally includes all who read the English language within the rubric of “English reading,” asserting that English is also and emphatically a West Indian language. Caryl Phillips notes the utopian nature of Lamming's ideas of altering the nature of reading, cautioning that it would be unwise to “underestimate the impervious nature of British society” (New World Order, 236). Nevertheless, Phillips lists himself as someone profoundly affected by reading both Lamming's and Selvon's writing.
33. McDonald analyzes a complementary passage on reading in Natives of My Person, in which the Commandant, reading over his old diary entries, appears to recognize the self-serving contradictions in his writing.
34. A comment about Mark's private artistry accidentally falling into its readership's hands rather than being consciously communicated could also be read into this scene. Lamming sees Mark's inability to communicate meaningfully, even with those who are closest to him, as his greatest flaw (“Sovereignty of the Imagination,” 145). For Lamming this is an explicit failure for a writer, who is obliged by his function as writer to be a public figure, of however limited a kind.
35. James Proctor's Dwelling Places, in its analysis of spatial representations in Black British literature, has an extended discussion of the barbershops and hair salons in Lamming's novels as places of succor and community. Paquet, on the other hand, reads these spaces as negative embodiments of British social prejudice.
36. It is perhaps not coincidental that Attridge here acknowledges a debt to Sartre's What Is Literature?, as this book is one that Lamming has identified as formative in his understanding of the role of a writer. Both Janet Butler (“Existentialism of George Lamming”) and Emery (Modernism, the Visual) have discussed the Sartrean influence on Lamming's thought.
37. Lamming takes this phrase from a speech by the Guyanese poet Martin Carter. Emery's examination of the important ways in which Fola both sees and acknowledges being seen in Season of Adventure outlines a similar sense—in the register of the visual—of Lamming's affirmation of creative, self-reflexive reciprocity (Modernism, the Visual, 165).
38. In the anxiety it evinces with regard to the communal cohesion of even the smallest scale of local inhabitation, In the Castle of My Skin bears some striking resemblances to Woolf's Between the Acts, which catalogs the conflicting consciousnesses of English villagers on the cusp of World War II.
39. Critics who, to varying degrees, view Trumper as the novel's predominant affirmative character include Butler, Eugenia Collier, Munro, Mbatau Kaburu Wa Ngai, Paquet, and Ngugi wa Thiong'o. Lamming's 1983 introduction to the novel makes an indirect critique of Trumper's advocacy of purely racial solidarity, dismissing the reactive response of a “rhapsodic and uncritical embrace of Africa as a mother once stolen and now miraculously restored” (xlv). Lamming cites the voice of the ancestral spirit who speaks, significantly, through Pa, warning against such Garveyite romanticism, as a powerful rebuttal of precisely this viewpoint in his novel.
40. Trumper, in his lack of interest in what G. is trying to say, parallels the narrator's unnamed friend in The Emigrants, discussed above. Lamming's latest views are in concord with such a suspicion of Trumper's disavowal of further questioning, as he equates simply being as a process of continual enquiry (Sovereignty of the Imagination, 35). As Patrick Taylor likewise observes, Trumper, in not remaining open to new knowledge, “is in danger of becoming a ‘corpse’” (Narrative of Liberation, 222).
41. The gendered language in Lamming's address reveals the assumptions and expectations with regard to “the Negro Writer” at the time of the conference, as well as the general status of what was then called Negro writing as an almost exclusively male artistic preserve.
42. Jonas similarly notes that Lamming's (and Wilson Harris's) work demands “the reader's active participation in a deconstructive rewriting of texts” (Anancy in the Great House, 2).
43. Richard Clarke has noted the emphasis Lamming puts on Marxist notions of agency, with their insistence on recognizing both the restraints of one's social and historical situatedness and the creative power of human endeavor. Although possibly too sanguine about the efficacy of Lamming's texts in the social realm, Patrick Taylor takes a similar view of Lamming's aims, using his novels as examples of liberating narratives that “transform the socio-political totality so that lived history becomes open possibility” (Narrative of Liberation, 189).
44. The utopian nature of this project is palpable, and Lamming's long literary silence suggests something of his ultimate evaluation of its viability. Rafael Dalleo has suggested an explanation for Lamming's turn away from novel writing, arguing that the anticolonial content of his novels had increasingly little purchase in a world becoming dominated by the imperatives of the United States. The contours of this argument are compelling, though the contents of Lamming's novels, beginning as early as Of Age and Innocence, extend well beyond the merely anticolonial into a critique of independence and postindependence Caribbean possibilities. It would seem, as well, that Lamming is most concerned with the form of media in which he works, variably expressing interest in drama, radio, television, film, and political speeches later in life.
1. Selvon himself encouraged such an image in some cases, indeed once referring to himself in an interview with Reed Dasenbrock and Feroza Jussawalla as “what one would perhaps call a primitive writer” (118). At other times, of course, he capably discusses technique and form in interviews while maintaining an insistence on the relatively autodidactic origin of his achievements.
2. The resilience of such views can be seen in Margaret Paul Joseph's assessment of Selvon, which provides an overarching characterization of Selvon's work that echoes Birbalsingh quite closely. Joseph lays emphasis at the outset of her discussion of Selvon on his “gentle comedy, his compassionate realism, and his subtle pathos” (Caliban in Exile, 84).
3. Barratt's article initially appeared in 1981 in English Studies in Canada and will be quoted throughout in its original form.
4. Gordon Rohlehr's article “Literature and the Folk,” although not concerned with issues of European influence, is an important meditation on how the term folk cannot properly capture the complexity of geography, class, and race in the Caribbean. Rohlehr uses the multiplicity of “folk” subjects found in Selvon's writing as a prominent example of this complexity.
5. It was only in the 1990s that Joyce's anticolonial politics become generally recognized by literary scholars. Cheng's “Of Canons, Colonies, and Critics: The Ethics and Politics of Postcolonial Joyce Studies” provides a useful overview of the rise of this critical urge to question the canonical assumptions of Joyce as primarily an apolitical stylist.
6. In interviews, Selvon often emphasizes the egalitarian, universalist aims of A Brighter Sun, such as when he tells Ramchand “it still amazes me that when some people talk about that novel they mention the Tiger-Joe relationship as a racial statement. To me I was just portraying the relationship that existed between two human beings and that was all” (“Sam Selvon Talking,” 97).
7. Conversely, one of Selvon's most common complaints about the British was in fact their woeful ignorance of the very existence of Trinidad. He presented much of his writing as a means of closing this gap in knowledge.
8. This item, dated 31 Mar. 1952, appears in Selvon's personal papers in the Selvon Collection, item 267.
9. Selvon's papers held in the Selvon Collection indicate that the American response to A Brighter Sun followed in much the same vein as the British one, focusing especially on the perceived simplicity of the author and his work. Especially in the case of his early novels, Selvon seems to have kept himself well informed about what reviewers said about his books on both sides of the Atlantic via a news-clipping service. Intriguingly, given Selvon's famed optimism, the complimentary words or phrases in the clippings are all underlined (though whether this was done by Selvon or by the clipping service is unclear).
10. The TLS database does not identify the author of this piece. It is listed in the bibliography by its title.
11. A handful of American reviews did register the book's broader message of a shared humanity, including reviews in the Tuscon Citizen (Selvon Collection, item 270), the Hartford Courant (item 368), and the Louisville Courier-Journal (item 396).
12. In conversation with Peter Nazareth, Selvon suggests that this message of human universality characterized all of his writings: “I think that in my work this is one of the things that I tried to explain—that human beings from any part of the world think and experience the whole range of human emotion and experience” (81).
13. Roydon Salick's The Novels of Samuel Selvon notes that the original conception Selvon had for the title of his first novel was an even more “peasant-oriented” one—Soul and Soil (16).
14. The focus of this novel has led commentators such as Susheila Nasta to characterize it, along with I Hear Thunder, as a middle-class novel. The other categories Nasta employs are peasant novels (including the Tiger novels, The Plains of Caroni, and Those Who Eat the Cascadura) and immigrant novels (encompassing the Moses trilogy and The Housing Lark). Salick employs these categories in structuring his monograph on Selvon's novels.
15. Ramchand goes a step further, asserting that Tiger, Foster, and Moses, the central figure of The Lonely Londoners, represent the “quintessential Selvon hero” in their collective tendency toward reflective engagement with philosophical issues of “Time, Death, Friendship, and the Meaning of Life” (“Celebrating Sam Selvon,” 49).
16. Somewhat ironically, given the metropolitan conflation of Tiger and Selvon, it is Foster's background that more closely resembles Selvon's own. Indeed, though this is often overlooked, Selvon claimed that his “middle-class” novels (An Island is a World and I Hear Thunder) best reflected his own personal experiences and thoughts (“Oldtalk,” 120), while insisting that A Brighter Sun was very far removed from his actual life in Trinidad. As he tells Daryl Cumber Dance, “when A Brighter Sun was published, everyone thought that, well, there must be a great deal of biographical material in this book, and strictly speaking, there is absolutely none at all” (“Conversation with Samuel Selvon,” 249).
17. Selvon's intricate negotiation of the particular and the collective resonates with Natalie Melas's compelling concept of “dissimilation,” articulated in All the Difference in the World: Postcoloniality and the Ends of Comparison and associated by her with both modernist and postcolonial Caribbean literary forms.
18. This letter does actually begin with a note of its location—London—all the way on the right margin of the page, so there is some chance that this might alert a careful reader that the letter is from Foster, whom the reader already knows to be in London. However, the fact that the place name is on the right margin makes it easy to miss, and there is certainly no reason that Rena herself could not be in London. Most compellingly, of course, the previous sentence contains a strong implication that any letter that follows would be the one under discussion.
19. The insistent, unceasing blurring of the lines between “characters” found in Finnegans Wake is likewise a technique that seeks to enunciate the same sense of simultaneous unity and difference.
20. In interviews, this view closely tracks Selvon's preference for open-minded cultural assimilation. He tells Nazareth that he thinks West Indians have a particular capacity for such assimilation (“Interview with Sam Selvon,” 432), and the ideal definition of “Caribbean man” he provides to Dance has a similar emphasis: “you're not Indian, you're not Black, you're not even white; you assimilate all these cultures and you turn out to be a different man who is the Caribbean man” (“Conversation with Samuel Selvon,” 253). In both instances, there is a simultaneous emphasis on cross-cultural openness anchored in local (Caribbean) roots.
21. Similarly, although critics like Birbalsingh and Ramchand have assailed his nationalist credentials, Selvon in fact embraced his own national identification throughout his career, describing himself in conversation with Nazareth as a “real born Trinidadian, you can't get away from it” (“Interview with Sam Selvon,” 83).
22. In A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Joyce suggests a similar connection between personal and cosmic in what Stephen has written on the flyleaf of his geography book, which names “himself, his name and where he was” in ascending order from his school, town, county, country, and continent on to “The World” and “The Universe” (15).
23. Rebecca Walkowitz employs a similar sense of cosmopolitanism, suggesting that modernist narrative styles are especially well suited to communicating such a disruptive epistemological intervention (see Cosmopolitan Style).
24. Interestingly, Salick, a Caribbean critic, also censures the overly European nature of the novel, opining that Selvon's attempt to craft a localized version of “more famous European existentialist heroes presents serious problems of credibility” (Novels of Samuel Selvon, 83). Both critics thus suggest that existentialism has no authentic place in Caribbean fiction.
25. This review is discussed in more detail in chapter 1 (33–34).
26. This article is titled “Two Novels by Selvon” and is item 261 in the Selvon Collection.
27. Selvon critics have yet to settle on a name for the language used in his “dialect novels,” characterizing it variously as Trinidadian, modified West Indian Standard, creole, and many other loosely defined terms. The most commonly approved term today is probably creole. Matthew Hart's Nations of Nothing But Poetry places Selvon's language into the evocative category of the “synthetic vernacular,” which Hart considers emblematic of modernist poetics.
28. Although Selvon is often credited with writing the first (modern) West Indian novel entirely in dialect form, Ramchand and other critics have pointed out that Vic Reid's New Day, narrated in a Jamaican dialect, preceded Selvon's novel by seven years. However, Ramchand insists on a crucial distinction between the two novels: while Reid's book is told in the first person, with the narrator implied to be a relatively uneducated, oral teller, Selvon's novel is the first to use dialect for a third-person narrative voice that is not refracted through any characters but takes on all the authority and objectivity implied by third-person narration (West Indian Novel, 101–2).
29. The segment on The Lonely Londoners in David Dabydeen and Nana Wilson-Tagoe's A Reader's Guide to West Indian and Black British Literature is an early, important (though perhaps overemphatic) delineation of the novel's distress over British racism.
30. Page A of a screenplay Selvon wrote for The Lonely Londoners (Selvon Collection, item 151) provides a particularly clear insight into Selvon's thinking regarding the novel, describing the purpose of the film in unequivocal terms as that of evenhanded education and transethnic identification: “its purpose is to show that [immigrant West Indians] behave as anybody else in certain given situations, and the audience should identify themselves and not be dished out with the popular concepts of the tribulations and hardships of black people. On the other hand, neither should it be a propaganda piece exhibiting the nobilities and durabilities of the negro.”
31. Interestingly, Galahad, perhaps the most important character aside from Moses, is remembered appearing with Harris in the park, “both of them dress like Englishmen, with bowler hat and umbrella, and the Times sticking out of the jacket pocket so the name would show” (140). Moreover, Selvon attaches this characterization to the character George in “Come Back to Grenada” (Foreday Morning, 177), an early iteration of The Lonely Londoners, in which George embodies the experiences of both Moses and Galahad, further suggesting the breadth of acceptable “West Indianness” in Selvon's London novel.
32. In being the social unifier, Harris bears comparison to Clarissa Dalloway in Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway.
33. Jennifer Rahim pays particular attention to this scene in “(Not) Knowing the Difference: Calypso Overseas and the Sound of Belonging in Selected Narratives of Migration.” She, too, notes that Moses registers some disapproval of the “excessiveness and potentially counterproductive behavioral modes of the ‘boys’” (par. 9) and argues that it would be reductive to read Harris as a wholly negative sign of “one-sided accommodation” (par. 10). However, Rahim ultimately reads Harris's Englishness as a subversive “excessive identity performance” (par. 12), akin to his fellow West Indians’ more direct refusals of British social norms, rather than as a potentially authentic gesture of cultural rapprochement.
34. An early essay by Selvon, “Thoughts…Here and There” (Selvon Collection, item 548), also explicitly remarks the need for West Indians to shed acquaintances and ways of thinking maintained merely out of comfortable habit, particularly decrying the stolid determinism evoked by the phrase “what is to is must is,” a phrase that has been singled out and cited by some critics as an approving expression of West Indian resilience, rather than the narrow defeatism that Selvon suggests in this essay.
35. As Nick Bentley observes regarding Selvon's third novel: “for an addressee belonging to dominant white culture the text re-activates the very stereotypes it claims to challenge” (“Black London,” 43). Bentley also asserts the more positive, yet still firmly separatizing, implications for a black audience, to whom the text can “represent an empowering framework of cultural differentiation and celebration” (43).
36. This quotation is taken from a clipping of an advertisement for a series of six stories by Selvon to appear, in a series called “London Calypso,” on the front page of the paper's edition of 30 Mar. 1957 (Selvon Collection, item 281).
37. Some reviewers, it is true, note the dialect narration as obtrusive or artificial. For example, Quigly describes it as “a literary trick rather than the author's authentic voice,” while the London Times notes the novel's “effective if self-conscious use of dialect.” Thus, it seems clear, if it was perceived as consciously crafted, the dialect was suspicious for not being “natural.”
38. The review, which appeared on 12 Jan. 1957, is item 321 in the Selvon Collection.
39. To be fair, while Betjeman seems to discount Selvon's conscious artistry and ability, his review does register that the novel should not be read as a purely comic production. On the other hand, Betjeman makes the frustratingly familiar error of grouping all West Indian immigrants under the category of “Jamaican.” His review, which appeared on 21 Dec. 1956, is item 365 in the Selvon Collection.
40. The American reviews similarly reinforce this familiar separation. See, e.g., John Hicks in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch (Selvon Collection, item 402) and Evelyn Levy in the Baltimore Sunday Sun (item 420).
41. Much of the material in Selvon's papers at the Harry Ransom Center reinforces this emphasis on tolerance and mixture, such as a TV/film script titled “Milk in the Coffee” that concludes with a scene of the protagonists, a mixed-race couple, dancing together at a club. Selvon's treatment is emphatically egalitarian: “CUT TO DISCOTHEQUE WITH LOUD ‘SOUL’ MUSIC/SINGING…LOTS OF YOUNG PEOPLE, BOTH BLACK AND WHITE, DANCING, INCLUDING ANDREW AND BRENDA, BUT WITH NO SPECIAL FOCUS ON THEM…BRING UP CREDIT TITLES ON THIS SCENE—TO END” (manuscript notebook containing holograph drafts of radio and television plays, the opening lines of Moses Ascending, unfinished story, and various notes, dated 1973).
42. Ironically, the converse of this criticism could be leveled at The Lonely Londoners, as it does not present any real depictions of a white, English point of view. In a 1959 letter to Selvon held at the Harry Ransom Center, John Figueroa tactfully suggests, in response to the controversial scene in which Tiger essentially rapes the estate owner's wife, that the novel could have been improved by considering the woman's point of view.
43. In this context, it is useful to note that, as Selvon discussed with Dance (“Conversation with Samuel Selvon,” 254), he was obliged by his publisher, Allen Wingate, to leave out an aggressive and sharply political interracial sex episode set in Britain in An Island Is a World (similar, it would seem, to the scene in Turn Again, Tiger, which Selvon brought out with a different publisher). A very stern 1954 letter from Charles Fry suggests that Selvon initially resisted the changes to his manuscript but, under threat of breach of contract, ultimately acquiesced. Although Paola Loreto's “The Male Mind and the Female Heart” attempts to redeem Selvon's sexual politics by arguing that his two “Tiger novels” evoke a gentle philosophy of gender complementariness, the consistent appearance of male sexual domination (especially across racial lines) suggests gender as a relative blind spot in Selvon's articulations of cosmopolitan equality. Critics who engage more skeptically with the gender dimensions of Selvon's work include Ashley Dawson, Curdella Forbes, and Lewis MacLeod.
44. Ernesto Laclau's “Universalism, Particularism, and the Question of Identity” provides a useful theoretical model for this way of thinking. In it, Laclau suggests the notion of the universal as consistently open and unstable, constructed only by being temporarily inhabited by various particularisms at any given time. Critics such as Bruce Robbins and Satya P. Mohanty have made similar arguments for the importance of universality in a more postcolonial vein.
45. Ronald Sutherland describes Selvon's vision of national identity in terms of an “umbrella consciousness of being Trinidadian” that transcends the islands’ ethnic groupings (“Sam Selvon,” 45). John Rothfork similarly argues for Selvon's fiction as an extended effort “to achieve a delicate balance to preserve ethnic traditions…while, on the other hand, not permitting ethnic and communal identity to annul commitment to the larger society” (“Race and Community,” 10). These flexible models of belonging, however, both stop at the level of the national, rather than engaging with the international possibilities of this type of model that Selvon's novels also suggest.
1. Gladys Lindo's letters to Swanzy betray a consistent tone of unease regarding Mais, while Swanzy's letters (to Lindo, as well as to Calder Marshall and Collymore) reveal his pronounced dislike of Mais's first novel, as well as Mais's forward, aggressively confident personality. These letters can be found in the Henry Swanzy Papers, held in the University of Birmingham's library.
2. During his brief stint in Europe, Mais also exhibited paintings in both London and Paris, and the Times obituary refers to him as both novelist and painter.
3. For convenience, the page numbers for this collection of Mais's novels will be used in the following discussion. Manley's introduction comprises a separate entry in the bibliography.
4. “Jazz and the West Indian Novel” appears in the essay collection Roots. For a further example of Brathwaite's politicized treatment of Mais, see the overtly nativist take Brathwaite provides in his article “Roger Mais” in the Dictionary of Literary Biography.
5. Sylvia Wynter's two-part “We Must Learn to Sit Down Together and Talk about a Little Culture” takes explicit aim at what she sees as Carr's “acquiescent” aestheticizing take on Mais. Kwame Dawes, too, has taken issue with Carr's readings in “Disarming the Threat of Rasta Revolution in Mais's Brother Man.”
6. Hawthorne is surely correct in descrying Romantic and individualist strains within Mais's writing; however, the clear-cut dichotomy she sets up between these traits and a nationalist outlook seems to rely on a largely unexamined conception of nationalism as a static, monolithic political orientation.
7. This quotation is cited from a typescript of extracts from reviews of The Hills Were Joyful Together in the Roger Mais Collection, UWI, Mona (hereafter the Mais Collection). It is identified as a review appearing somewhere on the BBC under the title “Books to Read,” on 8 June 1953.
8. This, too, comes from the Mais Collection.
9. This quotation may also be found in the Mais Collection. No author is identified.
10. The author is anonymous; the review appears as “Review of The Hills Were Joyful Together” in the bibliography.
11. The drawings referred to by the reviewer were Mais's own, which appeared in the original edition (and were also included in Sangster's three-volume reissue). Much of Mais's art, too, appears to be influenced by European modernist trends, perhaps especially Fauvism and Cubism.
12. Carr notes in 1967 that “apart from a sensitive reading of [Black Lightning] by Mr. Kenneth Ramchand (Public Opinion June 10, 1966) the novel has received virtually no attention” (“Roger Mais,” 25). Jeannette B. Allis's normally exhaustive West Indian Literature: An Index to the Criticism provides only the Ramchand piece to which Carr refers under its listing of reviews of Black Lightning. Certainly none of the major London publications appears to have reviewed the novel, even if they had reviewed one or both of Mais's previous works.
13. D'Costa's introduction to the Heinemann edition of Black Lightning expresses her ambivalent attitude toward the novel, which she characterizes as a “flawed experiment” (7).
14. A number of critics have identified this Lawrentian element in Mais's work, including Carr (“Roger Mais”), Creary (“Prophet Armed”), and Gilkes (West Indian Novel), and even Brathwaite's reference to the “belly-centred” tradition within which he places Mais evokes Lawrence's investment in vital, instinctual language (Roots, 74).
15. In addition to Burack's work, see Michael Bell's D. H. Lawrence: Language and Being and Robert E. Montgomery's The Visionary D. H. Lawrence: Beyond Philosophy and Art for assessments of Lawrence's pronounced interest in uniting mind and body, language and feeling.
16. Daphne Morris suggests that Mais served four months of his six-month sentence and was not badly treated in prison. In the words of one contemporary observer, Basil McFarlane, Mais's penning of the article was regarded “as the most critical of his entire career” and the act “by which his name became a household word throughout Jamaica” (“Roger Mais”).
17. These sections can indeed be hard to decipher, and critics, though rarely actively interpreting the passages themselves, describe them with a variety of terms. Karina Williamson presents them as “a kind of prose-poetry charged with symbolism” (“Roger Mais,” 145); Barrie Davies characterizes them as “broken poetry” with traces of surrealism (“Novels of Roger Mais,” 141); and Ramchand refers to them as “authorial choruses” (West Indian Novel, 180). The notion of a chorus is now most prominent, though this seems to arise from the much more consistent (and actually choric) appearance of similar chapter beginnings in Brother Man, as well as Mais's use of the chorus device in the Jamaican production of his play, Atalanta at Calydon, in 1950.
18. Critics who single out the scene for such discussion include Carr, D'Costa, Hawthorne, Ramchand, and Williamson. In her monograph, D'Costa perceptively observes that the more troubling fissures within the group are also present underneath the social delight at the fish fry, asserting that “all later action, all later developments, derive from this scene” (20).
19. Naipaul (in a Caribbean Voices review of The Hills Were Joyful Together) and subsequently Brathwaite (“Unborn Body”) have noted the often ungainly mixture of Jamaican and American vernacular language in Mais's novels. This song, while plainly meant to evoke Jamaican folk culture, seems, in orthographic terms, much closer to a southern US African American spiritual.
20. The chronology of events is not always clearly marked in the novel, but the succeeding two chapters portray many of the other characters in the yard going to bed after the fish fry, such that it is hard to make sense of the intervening chapter on Surjue as anything other than contemporaneous with those that follow it.
21. Singh suggests that a dominant theme of entrapment pervades The Hills Were Joyful Together, extending from the literal imprisonment of Surjue out to the less obvious but no less serious restraint imposed upon the rest of the yard by societal systems of oppression and control. This observation is a useful one, and it suggests in some ways that Surjue can be read as an archetype for the rest of the characters in the novel or, in terms of D'Costa's notion of “group-as-hero,” as the most extreme (and visible) limit-case of the group's activity.
22. It emerges in the following sentences that Surjue actually, rather than metaphorically, sees something—the nearby church on fire—but the heavy symbolism of this sight, with its suggestion that Jamaica's inhumane penal policy destroys the charity and forgiveness embodied in the church and its teachings, only reinforces the sense that Surjue has now been enlightened about the world.
23. Others who emphasize the emotional aspect of Mais's aesthetic include D'Costa, Grandison, and Wynter.
24. Hawthorne notes something similar in another short story, “The Wine Is More Precious than the Skin,” observing the protagonist's narratorially approved attempts to gain understanding beyond the mundane, everyday meanings of the material and social world.
25. The novel is rightly lauded by critics as the first Caribbean novel to represent a Rastafarian character in a sympathetic light. In “Disarming the Threat of Rasta Revolution in Mais's Brother Man,” Dawes convincingly lays out the ideological significance of Mais's representation of Brother Man, arguing that many of the character's views (including on the use of marijuana, as well as sexual propriety) function as limitations on social critique, reflecting an interest in making the book's views more palatable to middle-class sensibilities. Brathwaite's “Brother Mais” (in Roots) also notes the extremes to which the novel goes to romanticize the moral purity of Rastafarianism.
26. Interestingly, a riddle (thought to be a product of Papacita's teaching) is also told in this chorus, and there is superstitious gossip about the ghost of Old Mag blessing Brother Man in the street. The less savory aspects of the chorus, however, appear to be eclipsed at the end of the chorus by the hymn singing.
27. It is rather remarkable that this jeering mob is explicitly made up of mostly women and children. For a comprehensive examination of the troubling gender implications in the novel, see Dawes's “Violence and Patriarchy: Male Domination in Roger Mais's Brother Man.”
28. The contrast between mechanical and human often appears in Mais's work in the form of eating, whereby approved characters like Brother Man eat with evident natural enjoyment, whereas Girlie eats mechanically (20). Not surprisingly, Girlie's reading habits, too, are contrasted with Minette's epiphanic reading experience: when the novel introduces Girlie, she is “idly turning the pages of a magazine” (9).
29. Brathwaite's citations match the edition used here, and his orthographic choices have been preserved.
30. The prologue takes the form of a conversation between the narrator and God and, though complicated in its implications, ultimately asserts that God is comprised, most of all, of man (specifically the common, working man) and that the task of awakening humans to their own dignity is a holy task.
31. Another important scene of Amos playing alone occurs on p. 73, before Jake's accident and Amos's increasing importance to him; in this scene, too, the music inspires visions only in Amos.
32. This point of Mais's is also noted by Carr (“Roger Mais”), as part of the same passage cited in the discussion above.
33. Indeed, thought of in these terms, his novels get less “political” at the same time as they get less “experimental”: that is, his most overtly political novel, The Hills Were Joyful Together, is also his most obviously experimental.
34. Before his death, Mais had been working on a novel, In the Sight of This Sun, based on the biblical story of David and Bathsheba. The manuscript—fragmentary and unfinished—is preserved in the Mais Collection. The typescripts for two other earlier, unpublished novels—Another Ghost in Arcady and Blood on the Moon—are also held, along with much other material, in the same collection.
35. Mais's growing distrust of the political efficacy of aesthetic form might also be taken to reflect the inevitable contradictions of writing anticolonial literature in the seat of imperial power.
1. The legal categories of British citizenship became quite convoluted in the aftermath of this legislation, emerging into clarity only in 1981, when Margaret Thatcher's government passed the British Nationality Act. See Randall Hansen's Citizenship and Immigration in Post-war Britain for an exhaustive, technical, (and gruffly polemical) account of this history.
2. This award, it should be noted, was officially for Miguel Street. A look at the list of awardees from its inauguration in 1947 through the 1960s suggests the continuing struggle for institutional legitimation between the Amis-supported aesthetics of natural mimeticism and the more consciously experimental works of writers such as B. S. Johnson (winner in 1967) and Angela Carter (winner in 1969).
3. See Patrick French's richly detailed biography of Naipaul for a revealing account of this critical episode in Naipaul's life, in which he, interestingly, feels geographically disoriented in a provincial English railway station.
4. In an evocative echo of Amis's use of the Maugham prize money to write a novel satirizing the express purpose of the prize, Naipaul's own trip was financed by Eric Williams, then the chief minister of Trinidad and Tobago. French provides a good account of the ironies of the trip and its eventual published product (World Is, 201–3).
5. The interview was excerpted in “What Does Mr. Swanzy Want?,” a program aired on BBC Radio Four, 27 Nov. 1998. Swanzy's rather tight-lipped and forcibly optimistic letters to Gladys Lindo and Frank Collymore, at the time he was certain of his new posting (in the Gold Coast) in late July and August, likewise suggest both his sadness and his relative unwillingness to give up editing the show.
6. Gail Low remarks a similar strain in the general publishing atmosphere of the time, in which the wishes of editors often concentrated on a folk or sociological aspect of the “traditional” Caribbean while artistic strivings toward modernism had less commercial appeal in Britain and were correspondingly played down in promoting the books (“Publishing Commonwealth,” 86).
7. Naipaul's relationship with the show seems to have tapered off some time in the autumn of 1956, when he made his first trip back to the Caribbean after coming to Britain for university. At this time, Mittelholzer was the most regular editor on the show, along with various others. Characteristically, the aesthetic attitude of the shows on which Mittelholzer appears varies wildly, sometimes lauding experiments in dialect or form, other times decrying the influence of Joyce and Dylan Thomas on Caribbean writers. French's biography suggests that Naipaul continued to have solid ties to the BBC at least until Caribbean Voices wound down in 1958.
8. As French's biography relates, the script was written by Naipaul but read by someone else, due to the fact that Naipaul arrived late to the recording session (World Is, 179–80).
9. This essay originally appeared in BIM in 1963. It is cited here in the collection of Brathwaite's critical writing Roots, published in 1993.
10. For accounts of Brathwaite's modernist-inflected experimentation, see esp. Hart, Nations of Nothing But Poetry, and Pollard, New World Modernisms.
11. If Brathwaite's attitude toward Naipaul changed, the reverse was also certainly the case. In an interview with French, Naipaul dismissively observed with regard to Brathwaite: “He's become very black; when I met him he wasn't so black” (French, World Is, 141). However crudely put, the trajectory Naipaul observes regarding his fellow Oxbridge author bears some truth. Brathwaite's initial poetry appearing in Caribbean Voices is all based on classical mythological sources (“Prometheus,” “Persephone,” and “Prometheus Unbound”), while his next set of poems to appear focuses on portraying European scenes, with an additional poem in memory of Dylan Thomas. Such topics are quite far removed from Brathwaite's later poetic output, influenced by his time in Ghana from 1955 to 1962.
12. This is not to say that the movements are entirely distinct or distinguishable: many authors plausibly falling into the category of the Windrush generation, notably Andrew Salkey, participated in CAM. However, both the political and the cultural contexts out of which these two important groupings emerged, as argued above, would seem to be appreciably different.
13. Anthony left England, spending two years in Brazil before returning to Trinidad in 1970. After publishing three novels—one each in 1963, 1965, and 1967—he did not produce another novel until 1973. Oddly, in that interval, his 1965 novel The Year in San Fernando was reissued in 1970 as the inaugural book of the Heinemann Caribbean Writers series, perhaps a testament to Naipaul's continuing prominence in British literary circles. Anthony's current critical reputation is not nearly as high as it was during the 1960s, and his work surely, if even only on the grounds of history, deserves more scrutiny.
14. Walmsley notes that Merle Hodge was credited as a copresenter with Salkey, but no record of her participation exists.
15. One of Harris's most comprehensive critics, for example, is Hena Maes-Jelinek, who was a central figure in the institutionalization of Commonwealth Literary Studies. Indeed, her edited collection of that group's 1974 conference, Commonwealth Literature and the Modern World, contains a lecture that Harris himself delivered there, as well as three other papers given on his work.