EGDAR MITTELHOLZER

Jun 07, 2009 Features / Columnists, The Arts Forum

By Ameena Gafoor

This is a version of some Preliminary remarks offered to THE ANNUAL CONFERENCE OF WEST INDIAN LITERATURE, National Gallery of Art, Castellani House, Georgetown, Guyana, 28th April, 2009.

Glancing through a Bibliography of Books and Documents pertaining to Guyana, starting with Ralegh’s Discoverie of Guiana, 1596 to the present time, one discovers that until Edgar Mittelholzer intervened with Corentyne Thunder in 1941 and brought the first work of imaginative prose into the public sphere, the intellectual infrastructure of Guiana comprised largely of Travel writings under such titles as: A Voyage to the Demerary; Wanderings in South America; Sailors’s verses; Twelve views of the interior of Guiana; Eight years in B.G., Twenty-five years in B.G.; Forty-two years in B.G.; Indian Tribes, their conditions and habits; Coolie Ships and Sailors; Dreams, Devils and Vampires; and political tracts, such as: “India: The Progress of her Peoples . . . “, and so on.

The travels of Robert Schomburgk, explorer/scientist, and his brother Richard, a botanist, stretch from 1835 to 1848 and occupy a significant place in the early historiography of Guiana. The two had commissioned a water-colourist, Edward Goodall, to produce impressions of the colony. Goodall’s Sketches of Amerindian Tribes, 1841-1843 (published by the British Museum, 1977) with notes and an Introduction by Prof Sr. Noel Menezies, remains invaluable, offering a wealth of anthropological and ethnological knowledge into the condition of existence of the Aboriginal peoples.

But Mittelholzer might have regarded Goodall’s sketches with skepticism, images of calm, composed Indians inhabiting tranquil, sanitized, pastoral clearings that belie the realism of a people who lived with a hardihood that defied logic and whose humanity was then scarcely taken into account by the western world for, in his Foreword to A Carib Eye (1958), Mittelholzer complains: “Northerners who have written books about the Caribbean colonies are people who have generally set out intentionally to “cover” the area. They have spent perhaps a week or two in, say, British Honduras, Cuba, Jamaica, Haiti, Antigua, Trinidad, Barbados and British Guiana, touching briefly at Grenada, St. Kitts, Dominica, the Virgin Islands and the Bahamas.

They made notes, and took photographs of palm-fringed beaches, calypsonians, smiling black girls and voodoo worshippers, then returned home and wrote “colourful” accounts of their travels. In almost every case, the resulting book has been one strongly influenced by the writer’s preconceived notions of tropical countries. The strange and the “exotic” have always been high-lighted, and rarely has a balanced, authentic picture of the region been presented”.
Perhaps for this very reason we should even now pause before accepting uncritically the views and pronouncements of 19th century missionaries, such as H.V.P. Bronkhurst, about the natives and immigrants of this colony.

Works of the creative imagination began to emerge in Guiana during the closing decades of the 19th century with, notably, Egbert Martin (c. 1861-1890). Martin, thought to be of mixed blood, perhaps of German and African ancestry, was the first major native Guyanese poet and the first black West Indian poet of substance. He initiated the idea of “writing the local landscape” from the point of view of the labourer’s life and his Poetical Works (1883) – written under the pseudonym Leo — represents the beginning of Guyanese literature, later reflected in the works of Edgar Mittelholzer, Wilson Harris and A.J. Seymour, no doubt.
Edward Jenkins, an English lawyer sent out to investigate the condition of East Indian indentured workers, produced a quasi-fictional work, Lutchmee and Dilloo (1877) that offers the very first glimpse into plantation life and East Indians in British Guiana.
At the very close of the century, James Rodway wrote a work of fiction, In Guyana Wilds: A Study of Two Women (1899) set in the interior.

In 1904, British naturalist W.H. Hudson, published Green Mansions, a haunting tale of a European’s ill-fated love for Rima, a lovely and mysterious girl of the jungle, and we have come to recognize the jungle interior as a place of tremendous aboriginal possibilities.
In 1917, A.R.F. Webber, a Trinidadian, published Those That Be in Bondage, a semi-fictional work written in semi-journalistic style, that recreates the encounter of indentured East Indians with the white ruling class in a setting that is recognizably early 20th century British Guiana.
In 1926, Guyanese Eric Waldrond published Tropic Death, an impressive collection of ten short stories set in Guyana, Barbados and Panama, which gained the distinction of being the first substantial volume of Caribbean short stories in English.

But it was Edgar Mittelholzer’s Corentyne Thunder (1941) that represents the seminal work of imaginative prose writing in the colony by a native. Michael Gilkes observes:
Although the attempt in the novel to assert a positive Caribbean way of life—a Caribbean identity and culture—began with earlier writers like Claude McKay, C.L.R. James and Alfred Mendes in the 1930’s, it was Edgar Mittelholzer [with Corentyne Thunder, 1941] who first raised the question of the role of heredity itself: the phenomenon of racial admixture and cultural disorientation which is beneath the Caribbean writer’s deep psychological need to define racial and cultural identity in an attempt to heal a division of consciousness [a peculiarly Caribbean theme].
The theme of “divided consciousness” was only one theme in a range of concerns. Save for one or two misguided stereotypes introduced in Corentyne Thunder, it remains a tour de force not only in its depiction of rural life and the living landscape of the savannahs – a landscape we at once recognize and identify with, one without daffodils and nightingales – but, crucially, because the work stands as a testimony to social differentiation and class prejudice in the plantation culture. It also pays attention to the condition of women long before feminist novelists emerged in the Caribbean.

In Corentyne Thunder, Mittelholzer offers the first peculiarly post-modern image of an independent woman, in the wake of indentureship, in this memorable and lyrical portrait of Kattree, almost like a pagan goddess of fertility:
Kattree was of lighter brown and her eyes were like the distant lowing of cows in the after-glow of sunset. She was not very pretty, but a dim mystery dwelt about her . . . This was her beauty (pp. 9, 10)
And still [she] would not break the mystery of her calm silence. Her thoughts seem rigid like dream-incidents in time past. Her soul seemed poised at the middle point between the past and the future and troubled by the dark thunder of neither. Walking with grace in her dirty clothes, she looked like a figure created by the magic of the savannah and the sunlight (p. 28).
In this work, Mittelholzer offers a progression of three images of the East Indian woman, ranging from the stereotypes of passive victim and temptress, to a prototype of the fully-realised, young woman prepared to be responsible for the child she is bearing.

At the same time, he throws light on the psychological dilemma of the person of mixed blood and his place in the society, revealing the tormented self, what one critic has termed the “mulatto angst”.
Mittelholzer was a more complex personality than generally recognized for in addition to his mixed blood was a fierce loyalty of the German bloodline. … “just one drop of German blood …..” he had overheard his father tell their neighbour.
In Shadows Move Among Them (1951) we see a curious recreation of a liberal life of European learning, music and art including unrestrained sexuality in a jungle space outside of Victorian morality, perhaps influenced by Rousseau’s libertarian ideas. This is something critics could explore. I also have deliberately left untouched a disturbing thread noticed in some of the works, towards a fascist tendency, i.e. the idea of the survival of the fittest or the strongest, perhaps used ironically— in, for instance, The Aloneness of Mrs. Chatham.

Corentyne Thunder was not Mittelholzer’s first attempt at writing. Since leaving school, he had been filling exercise books with short stories that he passed around to his friends and neighbours to read much to the dismay of his parents. He also wrote pithy and amusing anecdotes about the society, some of which were published in the Daily Chronicle, much like the short pieces that G.H.H.McLellan would write in the Chronicle under the pseudonym, “Pugagee Pungcuss”.

Mittelholzer gathered his pieces and published them as Creole Chips in 1937 and hawked this publication from door to door at four cents per copy. Since Pungcuss’s pieces began to appear in the Chronicle from 1937, it would suggest that it was Mittelholzer who first introduced these satirical pieces that had been regular features in newspapers throughout the Caribbean. He contributed short stories regularly to the Caribbean Voices programme—all this while gathering historical material for the Trilogy. He was later a reader on the BBC programme and later, still, programme editor/presenter up to 1958, while contributing to BIM and other regional literary magazines and to Kyk-over-Al.

Mittelholzer was transformed by the rejection, and the psychological and physical brutalization he received from his disappointed parents at a tender age into a sensitive and determined young adult who seemingly harboured a death wish. After his death, his wife is reported to have said “”but he always had a death wish . . . Edgar was fascinated by death” and this tendency is reflected in some of his fictional creations, perhaps the most poignant being Sylvia, an evocation of grief and despair. Geoffrey Weldon, whose romantic rebellion with Kattree forms the emotional centre of Corentyne Thunder, informs her: “One day, I’m going to commit suicide and people will wonder why” (p. 189) and, of course, in 1965, Mittelholzer re-enacted the suicide of the protagonist of his final work, The Jilkington Drama.

By the time of his tragic demise, Mittelholzer had published 23 novels in 24 years, one of which is set in Trinidad, some are set in Barbados where he had a short sojourn (1953 – 1956) and others in England where he retreated again from the late fifties, including the remarkably feminist work, The Aloneness of Mrs. Chatham (1965). It would take another critical discourse to explore why Mittelholzer abandoned Guyanese themes in favour of English ones.
But it is the Guyana novels that we find not merely intriguing but essential works of our culture and civilization here and in the West Indies, among which is a gothic tale, My Bones and My Flute, a haunting and elemental work.

Of the Kaywana Trilogy, A.J. Seymour remarks:
I take the view that in a very special sense, the preparation and composition of these three novels completed Edgar. He was able to allow his own love of the Mittelholzer ancestry to run coincidental with the history of Guyana and, in this manner, he was able to successfully project the image of his nation … this series puts him fully in the national tradition.
The Kaywana Trilogy is, on one level, an important chronicle of the sojourn of several generations of a Dutch planter family, the van Groenwegels, and their courage in the face of successive slave uprisings in Guiana, including the historic 1763 rebellion in the upper reaches of the Berbice River. On another level, it is an affirmation of the superiority of European blood with which Mittelholzer’s identity and creative energy are bound up. It seems that this saga served to memorialize the pioneering Dutch endeavours as much as to civilize the English.

While it is hardly a surprise to discover that the Guyana novel sprung from among the middle class, it is fascinating to note that three novelists, Mittelholzer, Jan Carew and Wilson Harris are all coloured middle –class men with roots in New Amsterdam. New Amsterdam was known to be “very segmented, very conservative, with very narrow vision” an enclave in which twelve prominent coloured families (by the turn of the 20th century) constituted a kingdom and upheld a morality of supreme snobbery and contempt based on colour, race and class.

This snobbery was gratuitously extended to Edgar who writes in his auto-biography, A Swarthy Boy:
I always felt tense in my grandfather’s presence. And this tension was probably increased by the presence of my father whom I feared. Even at this green age, I could sense a certain resentment in his attitude towards me. Then, naturally, I was ignorant of what was behind it. All I knew was that something made him perpetually impatient with me. Something made it necessary for him to snap and bark at me.

We are left to speculate how much the nature/nurture dichotomy impacted on this writer. Rejected from birth, Mittelholzer, in turn, rejected the family’s embrace of conventional Christianity and adopted instead Yoga and Oriental Occultism; he rejected the social conventions of the day and created alternative worlds in his novels; then he rejected the sane world and took refuge in a world of madness, insulated from society’s rules and prejudices, until he rejected life itself to become a haunting memory.

We will let A.J. Seymour have the last word: “He was a pioneer without caring to know he was one. He was just a man whose ambition was to write.”
And, might we add, he has contributed immeasurably to the collective process of self-discovery and self-knowledge in the society and to the evolution and development of the Guyanese novel.

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