Caribbean People with Colin Rickards

New lease of life for Edgar Mittelholzer

By Colin Rickards

Guyanese author Edgar Mittelholzer’s first major novel, Corentyne Thunder, was published in England in mid-1941, just before he left British Guiana to serve in the Trinidad Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve. It was republished 29 years later, went out of print, and has now been republished again, 68 years after its initial appearance and 39 after its short-lived second manifestation.

British-based Peepal Tree Press is launching a new series of books called “Caribbean Modern Classics,” which will put back into print many novels by the Caribbean writers who came into their own in the 1950s and 1960s.

Edgar Mittelholzer was born in British Guiana, on December 16, 1909. He spent time in Trinidad, Barbados and St. Lucia, and sojourned briefly in Canada, but the most productive years of his life were spent in Britain.

Louis James wrote an Introduction to the 1970 republication of Corentyne Thunder, in the Heinemann Caribbean Writers Series, but secondhand copies of this edition are much sought after, and extremely expensive when found.

The new Peepal Tree edition has an Introduction by Juanita Cox, a PhD student writing her thesis -- “Edgar Mittelholzer and the Shaping of his Novels” -- at the University of Birmingham. An Associate Fellow of the Caribbean Studies Centre at London Metropolitan University, she is working on a critical anthology of published and unpublished work, tentatively titled “In the Eye of the Storm -- Edgar Mittelholzer (1909-1965).”

Cox also has plans for a Mittelholzer biography, which is much needed.

Guyanese literary icon A.J. Seymour, wrote meaningfully about Mittelholzer in his literary magazine Kyk-over-Al in 1952 and again in 1968. After the author’s tragic death in 1965 I wrote a tribute piece in Frank Collymore’s Barbados-based literary magazine Bim, and his second wife, Jacqueline Pointer (now Ward), also wrote about her late husband in Bim.

Mittelholzer has also been explored by Michael Gilkes, and by Frank Birbalsingh, who has done a good deal of work on both the author and his books. All these writers have tended to look at their subject biographically, or his writing generally -- and in the case of Birbalsingh specifically, as in “Indians in the Novels of Edgar Mittelholzer.”

Cox takes a much more “literary” approach in her Introduction, attempting to pinpoint some of the authors and playwrights who influenced Mittelholzer when he was writing Corentyne Thunder. She concludes that the book is “a remarkably rich and sophisticated first novel,” making “a bold commitment to the Caribbean reality and is an aesthetically rich work of fictive art.”

In tracing the fortunes of Corentyne Thunder, from being written in British Guiana in 1938, to being published in England three years later, and apparently receiving only one book review, Cox writes: “Sadly for Mittelholzer, only a small number of copies were printed and perhaps because of wartime conditions, interest in the book was short-lived.”

Actually, the facts are more complex.

Eyre and Spottiswoode had sent out a number of Review Copies to British newspapers and magazines, and shipped a few copies to bookshops, but before their normal distribution was complete a German bomber, on one of Hitler’s raids on London, scored a direct hit on the publisher’s warehouse.

Back in the early 1960s the only copy of Corentyne Thunder known to me was in the Golders Green Public Library in London. I borrowed it several times, as did such up-and-coming Caribbean-born authors as Andrew Salkey from Jamaica, Samuel Selvon from Trinidad, George Lamming from Barbados, Mittelholzer’s countryman Jan Carew, and several others, too.

Golders Green was a predominantly Jewish area, and the sight of non-White library borrowers there was so unusual that the Librarian once asked me about the popularity of the book -- which had a waiting list at the time -- and why it seemed to suddenly be in such demand.

I explained that most of them were members of the burgeoning group of young writers, like the book’s author, from the Caribbean.

Mittelholzer wrote 26 books, the first -- Creole Chips -- locally printed in British Guiana in 1937. In the 17 years that he made Britain his home he wrote 23 novels, including his famed Kaywana trilogy, and two works of Non-Fiction: With a Carib Eye (1958) was a travel book and A Swarthy Boy (1963) the first -- and only -- volume of a proposed autobiographical trilogy.

From 1960, Mittelholzer began to dabble in Oriental Occult and Mysticism and grew more and more Right-wing in his thinking. Increasingly, his writing reflected this, and his long connection with publishers Secker & Warburg was severed. His novels’ content made them harder and harder to place, and he had to cast his net widely to publish his output. In 1961 he resorted to the nom-de-plume of H. Austin Woodsley to publish his novel The Mad MacMullochs. Few of his last books, issued by several different publishers, can have been financially successful.

On May 5, 1965, Mittelholzer, then living deep in the British countryside west of London, took a can of petrol and a box of matches into a field near his home, doused himself with the fluid and set himself alight. I drove Salkey, Lamming and Carew down to Farnham on a wet and chilly day for the funeral, but that’s another story, which I may tell some time.

When Mittelholzer’s final book, The Jilkington Drama, was published some months after his death, we are all astounded to find that self-immolation was the fate of the novel’s central figure.

Along with Corentyne Thunder, Peepal Tree will republish three other early Mittelholzer novels this year: A Morning at the Office, Shadows Move Among Them and The Life and Death of Sylvia. Next year, they will do five more, including the Kaywana trilogy, the autobiography and the ghost story My Bones and My Flute, which is probably my favourite Mittelholzer novel.

They are to be congratulated.

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This article originally appeared in The Caribbean Camera: Canada’s #1 Caribbean Newspaper