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Edgar+Mittelholzer.Pdf [Word Count: 980] EDGAR AUSTIN MITTELHÖLZER Edgar Austin Mittelhölzer (1909-1965) was a Guyanese writer, widely recognized as the first professional novelist to emerge from the Anglophone Caribbean. Mittelhölzer was born on December 9, 1909 in New Amsterdam, Berbice in present-day Guyana—then British Guiana—to William Austin Mittelhölzer and Rosamond Leblanc Mittelhölzer. His father, whom he would later describe as a “confirmed Negrophobe” in his memoir A Swarthy Boy (1963), claimed Swiss-German ancestry. Mittelhölzer was raised among the urban middle class, attending Berbice High School and resolving to become a professional writer in his teenage years. He began submitting short stories to numerous British periodicals in the 1920s, almost completely without success. The Daily Chronicle, a local paper, published his first story in 1928; his second story was published in the Connoisseur a year later. Unable to find a publisher for his first novel Creole Ships (1937), Mittelhölzer printed and peddled the work himself—an inauspicious start to a three-decade career that would result in 22 novels, a memoir, and the travelogue With a Carib Eye (1958). In 1941, Mittelhölzer’s second novel Corentyne Thunder was published by Eyre and Spottiswoode in London. That year, the author moved to Trinidad, where he joined the Trinidad Royal Volunteer Naval Reserve. After receiving a medical discharge in 1942, he married Roma Halfhide. Along with their young daughter, in 1948 the couple immigrated to England, where Mittelhölzer initially worked as a typist for the British Council. Upon achieving critical acclaim for a string of novels—including A Morning at the Office (1950), Shadows Move Among Them (1951), and the first work in his “Kaywana” trilogy Children of Kaywana (1952)—he left his day-job to pursue writing full-time. Between 1952 and 1961, London firm Secker and Warburg published thirteen works by Mittelhölzer. The author received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1952, taking him to Montreal in May of that year. Displeased with the harsh Canadian climate, Mittelhölzer and his family relocated soon thereafter to Barbados, where they stayed until returning to England in 1956. Barbados would ultimately provide the setting for three of his novels: Of Trees and the Sea (1956), The Mad MacMullocks (1959), and Eltonsbrody (1960). Mittelholzer reached the pinnacle of his career around this period: A Morning at the Office, a social-realist portrait of Trinidadian society, was a commercial success and cemented Mittelhölzer’s reputation as a major writer; the “Kaywana” trilogy—a family saga chronicling the history of Guyana from its earliest Dutch colonization in the early seventeenth century to the establishment of universal adult suffrage in the middle of the twentieth—earned him popularity and a substantial transatlantic readership. After the publication of the “Kaywana” saga—comprising Children of Kaywana (1952), The Harrowing of Hubertus (1954), later reissued as Kaywana Stock in 1959, and Kaywana Blood (1958)—Mittelholzer’s career and personal life began to decline. He divorced his wife in 1959, marrying Jacqueline Pointer the next year. Riddled by the financial pressures of maintaining two separate families, Mittelhölzer attempted suicide for the second time in 1960. (His first attempt occurred on May 14, 1939.) The author also encountered considerable difficulty finding publishers for his increasingly eccentric work. He officially broke with Secker and Warburg in 1961, the company having deemed his Piling of Clouds pornographic. That novel was ultimately rejected by five publishers before appearing in 1963. His following work, The Aloneness of Mrs. Chatham (1965), was rejected by fourteen publishers. On May 5, 1965, Mittelhölzer committed suicide by immolation in a field near Farnham, Surrey. His final novel The Jilkington Drama was posthumously published later that year. Due to his incredible rate of production, Mittelhölzer covered a staggering variety of themes and genres in his fictional output—among them, treatments of race and ethnicity in the English-speaking Caribbean, the history of Guyana, social reform, erotica and sexual deviance, abnormal psychology, and black magic, the supernatural, and the occult. A Morning at the Office—which chronicles goings-on at the offices of Essential Products, Ltd. from precisely to 6:56am to noon—provides a cross-section of Trinidad’s multi-ethnic makeup, including characters of African, Indian, Chinese, and European descent. Its predecessor, Corentyne Thunder, broke new ground in its portrayal of Guyana’s Indian Hindu community. Shadows Move Among Them, set in an imaginary Guyanese jungle, portrays a utopian commune largely inhabited by Amerindians and presided over by an authoritarian reverend. The leader’s strict regulation of romantic liaisons initiates a recurring interest in sexual taboo throughout Mittelhölzer’s oeuvre. The “Kaywana” novels include instances of not only fornication and adultery, but also rape, incest, flagellation, castration, and sadomasochism. The troublesome Piling of Clouds depicts murderous pedophilia, and necrophilia appears in Eltonsbrody—a novel that also reflects the author’s longstanding treatment of supernatural or occultist themes. Mittelhölzer’s predilection for bizarre scenarios and eccentric behavior runs through his mature output, including: Of Trees and the Sea, where strange events occur in the Barbadian village of St. Stephen; My Bones and My Flute (1955), subtitled “A Ghost Story in the Old- Fashioned Manner,” where an eighteenth-century Dutch manuscript places a curse upon its discoverer, a young artist who must find the bones of the manuscript’s creator and give them a proper Christian burial; and A Tinkling in the Twilight (1959), whose clairvoyant protagonist practices levitation and nearly goes insane during an extended period of self-imposed sexual abstinence. Despite occupying a central position in the history of Anglophone Caribbean literature, Mittelhölzer has been largely neglected by scholars and critics who deem his writing sub-literary, suspecting that his most fantastical or sexually explicit work was written primarily for the purposes of entertainment and commercial gain. To date, no book-length study of Mittelhölzer has been published, although a collection of critical essays on his life and work, in addition to several unpublished dissertations, has recently appeared—perhaps vindicating one critic’s prediction that the author “will gradually be regarded as the true innovator of a literature that is finally free from parochialism.” Bibliography Birbalsingh, Frank. “Edgar Mittelholzer: Moralist or Pornographer?” Passion and Exile: Essays in Caribbean Literature, Hansib, 1988, pp. 23-37. ---. “Edgar Mittelholzer.” Dictionary of Literary Biography, Vol 117: Twentieth-Century Caribbean and Black African Writers, Gale Research Co., 1992, pp. 236-46. Cox, Juanita, ed., In The Eye of the Storm: Edgar Mittelholzer 1909-2009: Critical Perspectives, Peepal Tree Press, 2009. Gilkes, Michael. “Edgar Mittelholzer.” West Indian Literature, Macmillan, 1979, pp. 95-110. Seymour, Arthur James. “Edgar Mittelholzer.” Kyk-Over-Al, vol. 5, no. 15, 1952, pp. 16-18. Nicholas T Rinehart .
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