Read Ebook {PDF EPUB} A Swarthy Boy by Edgar Mittelholzer A Swarthy Boy. A Childhood in British Guiana. Large octavo size [16x24cm approx]. Very Good condition in Good+ Dustjacket - DJ has a closed tear to top corner of front panel & now protected in our purpose-made plastic sleeve. B/w frontispiece. Previous owner's signature to front free endpaper. Robust, professional packaging and tracking provided for all parcels. 157 pages. Edgar Austin Mittelholzer was a Guyanese novelist, the earliest novelist from the West Indian region to establish himself in Europe and gain a significant European readership. He is considered the first professional novelist to come out of the English-speaking Caribbean. Seller Inventory # 311350. Bibliographic Details. Title: A Swarthy Boy. A Childhood in British Guiana Publisher: Putnam & Company Publication Date: 1963 Binding: Hardback Dust Jacket Condition: Dust Jacket Included Edition: 1st UK Edition. Remembering Edgar Mittelholzer: Part 1. The republication of four of the early novels of the late Guyanese author Edgar Mittelholzer (1909-1965), and the intended republication of six more, along with his autobiography, and a detailed evaluation of his work, as well as a full scale biography, is giving a fresh lease of life, and a whole new readership, to a near-forgotten author who died more than half a century ago. Jeremy Poynting, who heads up the Peepal Tree Press, based in Leeds, England, has been the catalyst for this renewal of interest in Mittelholzer, a pioneering Caribbean writer. In creating a series called “Caribbean Modern Classics,” which will put back into print many novels by West Indian writers who came into their own in the 1950s and 1960s, Peepal Tree Press is providing a new platform for Mittelholzer and fellow Guyanese novelists Jan Carew, Denis Williams and O.R. Dathorne, as well as Andrew Salkey, Roger Mais and Neville Dawes of Jamaica and George Lamming of Barbados, among others. Mittelholzer will have the lion’s share of the early part of this series, and Peepal Tree has already republished his 1941 gem Corentyne Thunder, and his novels A Morning at the Office (1950), Shadows Move Among Them (1951) and The Life and Death of Sylvia (1953). Next year will see the republication of Mittelholzer’s famed Kaywana Trilogy, another early novel, his autobiography and an anthology of Mittelholzer’s published and unpublished work by Juanita Cox titled In the Eye of the Storm: Edgar Mittelholzer 1909-2009 Critical Perspectives. Cox, the reigning Mittelholzer scholar, provided the Introduction for the Peepal Tree edition of Corentyne Thunder, which she called “a remarkably rich and sophisticated first novel,” and said it made “a bold commitment to the Caribbean reality and is an aesthetically rich work of fictive art.” She also did the Introduction for Peepal Tree’s The Life and Death of Sylvia. Mittelholzer’s first book — Creole Chips — was locally printed in British Guiana in 1937, and the author sold it himself in New Amsterdam and Georgetown. The following year he completed Corentyne Thunder, but spent two years looking for a British publisher. In mid-1941 it appeared under the prestigious imprint of Eyre & Spottiswoode in London, just before Mittelholzer left British Guiana for wartime service in the Trinidad Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve. Eyre & Spottiswoode 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 their 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 Salkey, Carew, Lamming, and several others. 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 sudden popularity of the book, which had a waiting list. I explained that most of the borrowers were members of a burgeoning group of young writers, like the book’s author, from the Caribbean. She sniffed, and said that if the Library’s copy was actually so rare she would put it in a glass case when it was not out on loan, and might even consider charging a deposit to borrowers. In 1948 Mittelholzer and his Trinidadian wife moved to London. In his luggage was the manuscript of a Trinidad-set novel called A Morning at the Office, which would be published by Hogarth Press two years later. Then came Shadows Move Among Them, followed by Children of Kaywana, the first of the Kaywana Trilogy, and another novel in 1952. When Mittelholzer was awarded a year-long Guggenheim Fellowship he decided to spend the time in Canada and he and his wife moved to Montreal, living there from August, 1952, to April, 1953. They did not like the weather or the city. Shortly after The Life and Death of Sylvia was published they moved to Barbados, remaining until May, 1956, then returning to England. Mittelholzer enjoyed inserting himself into his books and appears as two different characters in A Morning at the Office — the U.S. edition was called A Morning in Trinidad — and as one in The Life and Death of Sylvia. Among his major interests was religion, usually of the unorthodox kind. Oriental occultism, which he first discovered when he was 19, was another of his preoccupations, and suicide was a frequent theme in his books. I first met Mittelholzer shortly after he returned to England. By then he had published nine books in England, including the first two volumes of his Kaywana Trilogy and his ghost story My Bones and My Flute, had established a strong link with publisher Secker & Warburg and was working with BBC Caribbean Service’s programme “Caribbean Voices.” I then went into the Royal Air Force to do my compulsory National Service, and our paths did not cross again until late 1958. By that time he had published four more books, including the third in the Kaywana Trilogy and his first non-fiction work, a travel book called With a Carib Eye. He had also severed his links with “Caribbean Voices,” but retained connections with the Caribbean Service, and travelled up to London from his home in the country fairly often. Salkey, who was well dug in with the Caribbean Service and the BBC World Service, was a special friend of Mittelholzer and the three of us liked to lunch in Fleet Street. Mittelholzer’s venture into Guyana’s history was his boldest stroke, requiring much research and imagination, and the ambitious Kaywana historical trilogy eminently displayed his literary powers. “I can’t think of any other West Indian writer who has such narrative fluency,” says Guyana-born Dr. Frank Birbalsingh, Senior Scholar and Professor Emeritus of York University’s Department of English. “He was an amazing talent.” Mittelholzer and his wife divorced in 1959 and the following year he married again. In 1961 he had three books published, by three different publishers, one of them — The Mad MacMullochs — under the nom-de-plume of H. Austin Woodsley. He fell out with publisher Secker & Warburg over a novel they considered pornographic, and also grew more and more reactionary in his thinking. His writing reflected this, and, as the content of his novels made them ever harder to place, he cast his net widely for outlets. Few of his last books, issued by several different publishers, can have been financially successful, or have really helped him to meet his commitments to his first wife and their three children, or the need to support his second wife and their small child. On May 5, 1965, then living deep in the British countryside west of London, Mittelholzer took a can of gasoline 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, some 40 miles outside London, on a wet and chilly English day for the funeral. When Mittelholzer’s final book, The Jilkington Drama, was published a few months after his death, we were all astounded to find that self-immolation was the fate of the novel’s central figure. The dark ones. Some of my favourite memories are of magical moon-lit nights with no electricity, when the white rocky orb would slowly rise in the east, above the multiple rows of triangular rooflines silhouetted against the shaded sky. Light breezes caressed our hair, flirted with our faces and sighed in our ears. We would stop and listen for a moment, before heeding the siren song of the wind, by racing off to seek out the street’s supreme teller of supernatural tales. The older of my two marvellous mothers, both since sadly deceased, Ms. Nora or Aunty Nora excelled in the oral tradition of what we euphemistically term all over the Caribbean, “jumbie stories.” Born in 1918, she had started life as an only child in a far too bushy and remote area of the mighty Abary-Mahaica Rivers, later moving to the neat little farming village of Cane Grove, so called for the sweet stalks cultivated there. With no television around, and none in sight, for decades, even remotely, in the south Georgetown pot-holed backstreets I and my varied pals tarried, and the batteries forever low on the radio, she would tease us, “Allyuh sure?” adding, “Nobody gun pee their bed tonight?” Assuring her in the negative, as a far too loud, nervous chorus, we would play along, until tired of the opening entreaties, my mother would gather us into a motley, multi-coloured heap on the small upper wooden landing and its many steps, or out under the smiling stars in the open cold, concreted yard. Come wet, rainy nights, Ms. Nora would bundle us inside the tiny kitchen, so that the stifling smoke from the seething kerosene oil lamps would spit, twist and curl, into bizarre, disquieting figures, dancing on the ceilings and walls, burning my nostrils and searing into my brain. The late Guyanese linguist and lexicographer, Dr Richard Allsopp theorised that the word “jumbie” is of Bantu origin referring to its use in at least 11 related tonal languages and dialects from the Congo and Angola, in Africa with “nsambi/insambi” meaning God and “nsumbi/ndsumbi” Devil. In his magnus opus, “The Dictionary of Caribbean English Usage,” Dr Allsopp observed that the linking of good and evil with the same cosmic power is also reflected in some of the original practices with which the term is associated. His book of over 20, 000 words launched by Oxford University Press in 1996, was the said to be the first serious attempt for some four centuries to provide an authentic record of current English from the West Indian archipelago, encompassing Guyana in South America, and Belize on the northern end of the geographical arc, in Central America. As an example of the Bantu word, Dr Allsopp cited this sentence by the great but troubled Guianese novelist, Edgar Mittelholzer famous for his “Kaywana” Trilogy, “Toolwa lived in a lonely wooden cottage three miles away, and the wind, and the rain, and perhaps the jumbies were tearing it down shingle by shingle.” Born in New Amsterdam, in December 1909, to race-conscious near-white middle-class parents, their scorned dark-skinned son attended Berbice High School. Edgar’s mother Rosamond Mabel, nee Leblanc with a painfully symbolic surname, hailed from Martinique, and his stern, proud father, William Austin Mittelholzer, who was of Swiss-German background found the boy’s colour “a momentous disappointment.” “I was the Dark One at whom he was always frowning and barking” the son later recalled, hence his 1963 autobiography, “A Swarthy Boy.” Yet, by 1938, battling neurosis, Edgar Mittelholzer had already completed “Corentyne Thunder,” a powerful, absorbing narrative which signalled the birth of the novel in British Guiana. He would go on to write more than 20 others, before his fiery suicide in a Surrey field in 1965, a horrible and sad end to a brilliant man, predicted in several of his works. Recently, the BBC promoted Netflix’s “The Haunting of Bly Manor,” the latest adaptation of Henry James’s Victorian tale about a troubled governess in “The Turn of the Screw,” which bestselling American author, Stephen King called one of “the only two great novels of the supernatural in the last hundred years.” However, my published ghost story of choice remains Mr Mittelholzer’s “My Bones and My Flute” which came out in 1955. A few years ago, I managed to find a sun-burnt, worn paperback copy and re-reading the eerie story on a sunny day, and again during the continuing Covid-19 lockdown, gave me, a fellow dark one, renewed delight and real chills. I can hear still, during the heyday of local radio, the acclaimed Guyanese broadcaster James Sydney in his distinctive, deep voice, crisply delivering the stunning script adaptation and its echoing introduction “My bones-sss, and my flute,” as the haunting strains of the instrument floated to the ceiling, and my siblings and I hardly dared to breathe, move much less venture outside in the dark. Mr Mittelholzer subtitled his classic novel of finely-tuned horror “A Ghost Story in the Old-fashioned Manner.” It is set in the 1930s-British Guiana but against a background of a cursed manuscript, slavery and revenge, Only when he is on board the steamer halfway to a remote destination up the Berbice River, does the artist Milton Woodsley realise that there is something sinister afoot in this excursion. Milton thinks he will just create some paintings for Henry Nevinson, a rich businessman. But when the Nevinsons mention a flute player that no one else can hear, Woodsley begins to glean that there is more to their stay at the inland jungle home, Peepal Press (PP) said in a 2015 reissue. “Told in Woodsley’s sceptical, self-mocking and good-humoured voice, the tension rises as the cottagers’ sanity and lives are threatened by psychic manifestations whose source they must discover before it overwhelms them,” Peepal wrote. “Amongst the barks of baboons, rustles of hidden creatures in the remote Berbice forests, Mittelholzer creates a brilliantly atmospheric setting for his characters and their terrified discovery that this is not a place where they can be at home,” it noted. My mother would admonish us, “Dis time nah lang time!” Coming from a strange, shadowy realm replete with , ol’ higues, churailes, baccoos, fairmaids and sundry ghosts, Auntie Nora loved to entertain us with anecdotes all personally verified, employing highly effective onomatopoeic sound effects. There was the Moongazer, tall, misty giant, staring enraptured at the earth’s natural satellite, disturb him to your peril. “Sssssh!” she would fiercely frown, and the fidgeting and tittering would cease, as we froze, then became fused with the petrified passengers, racing their car through the wide open legs of the monster straddling the lonely airport road. One uncle was an infamous mad professor, a purveyor of the paranormal and the occult, who frequently materialised in the Cane Grove cemetery, the corner shop or the closet. Decades later, while clearing out, I would stumble across an innocuous bag, left by his daughter, with a distressing daguerreotype of Dr. Danger. Piercing eyes, handlebars moustache, a sneering satyr, and some of his blackened books of diagrams with badly burnt edges, an incantation of spells to summon a legion of devils. I took one look at the lot, turned a lighter shade of pale, and with trembling hands tossed the Obeah Orator and his entire package into the black-covered outdoor bin. ID recalls her mom’s “Whoosh! The Fire Rass suddenly went up in de night sky,” and the advice to leave asafoetida or “hing” and no less than 99 grains of rice scattered around babies’ cots and outside of doorways. A Swarthy Boy. Download A Swarthy Boy book PDF, Read Online A Swarthy Boy Book PDF. Ebook available in PDF, tuebl, mobi, ePub formar. Click Download book and find your favorite books in the online databases. Register to access unlimited books for 30 day trial, fast download and ads free! Find A Swarthy Boy book is in the library. READ as many books as you like (Personal use). A Swarthy Boy. A Swarthy Boy. SWARTHY BOY. Fifty Caribbean Writers. "Caribbean literature, though distinguished, is only now being discovered, and this handy reference will assist readers in its discovery. . . . Both . Telling Stories. The present volume is a highly comprehensive assessment of the postcolonial short story since the thirty-six contributions cover most geographical . Encyclopedia of Post Colonial Literatures in English. Post-Colonial Literatures in English, together with English Literature and American Literature, form one of the three major groupings of literature . A Swarthy Boy by Edgar Mittelholzer. LIKE many people, “My Bones and My Flute” was the first work I read by the celebrated Guyanese writer, Edgar Mittelholzer. Mittelholzer’s legacy as a Guyanese writer is unmatched, particularly with regard to his development from a young man growing up in Berbice in the early 1900s into one of the first professional writers of Caribbean descent, who was able to establish himself as a successful writer in Europe due to his talent, his determination, and the urgency with which he created his oeuvre of celebrated literary works, including over 20 novels. He had his first book published by Hogarth Press, founded by Virginia Woolf and Leonard Woolf, won a Guggenheim Fellowship, wrote several seminal works and then, tragically, in 1965, he committed suicide. Mittelholzer’s life, goals, and talents live on in his written work. Along with Sir Wilson Harris, Martin Carter, and A.J. Seymour, he is undoubtedly one of the most respected and most-read Guyanese novelists. Even today, reference to him is often made by the younger and upcoming batch of academics and readers who engage with “A Swarthy Boy,” “Corentyne Thunder,” “Shadows Move Among Them,” “Children of Kaywana,” or one of Mittelholzer’s other works and often need to recommend or highlight this author who was born over 100 years ago. There exists, also, in the fact that he lived and wrote so many years ago, the idea, the truth, that he literally created the Guyanese novel, an act so alien to modern comprehension that it only serves to cement his place in a time away from the modern, so far removed from the 21st Century that it is impossible for any of us to really know or study Mittelholzer in the way that we might know and study Carter or Harris, or Agard, Nichols, Melville, Dabydeen and Carew. This unknowability is unfortunate and yet, ultimately, in the long run, it is a part of what leads more people to Mittelholzer’s works, as his literature is one of the only authentic ways in which any reader can really get to know this particular writer. Most people often gravitate to “My Bones and My Flute” because the concept of the text has always been thrilling. The novel is a ghost story, and although Guyana has a wealth of supernatural tales and folklore, not enough literary work has been done in bringing forth these aspects of our culture into the mainstream. “My Bones and My Flute” might be one rare exception to this norm. Mittelholzer’s tale is of a young man named Milton who goes into the interior of the Guyanese jungle, along with an upper-class couple, Mr. and Mrs. Nevinson, and their daughter, Jessie, in search of answers regarding an old and mysterious document that causes anyone who touches it to hear otherworldly and ominous sounds of a flute. As the characters settle on a cottage overlooking a river in the sweltering forest, the stakes escalate and the music begins to lure Mr. Nevinson away from the safety of the house as Mrs. Nevinson is plagued by nightmares where she is called into the forest, and Jessie becomes a vessel for horrific possession. Milton, confronted by the terror of the forest, the attacks on the Nevinsons, and the ghost of a colonial, plantation owner, among other sinister supernatural happenings, must figure out a way to save them all before it is too late. The novel is eerie and there are moments of true horror and tension. For example, there is a scene in the text where one of the characters sees the ghost. From Milton’s perspective, we get a description of the character’s face and odd behaviour as they stare at the entity that cannot be described by Milton because we get the novel from Milton’s perspective and he -himself, at this point, is unable to see the ghost that this other character sees. However, the scene is extremely terrifying and is one which underscores Mittlelholzer’s ability to inculcate true horror in his writing. Moments of levity also appear amid the terror, so that the novel borders on entering territory that might be regarded as almost-absurdist, which, in its own way only serves to heighten, rather than detract from, the tension within the text. The banter between Jessie and Milton, and the quips from Mrs. Nevinson, in particular, while highlighting Mittelholzer’s keen ear for voice and dialogue, also add to the sense of comedy at the centre of the horror within “My Bones and My Flute.” One thing that I found interesting in the story was how Mittelholzer presents the supernatural. Despite being set in the Guyanese interior, the novel’s antagonist, in essence, seems to be a creature of horror that is reminiscent of something by Lovecraft or Poe, rather than something more rooted in the folklore of Guyana. I am analysing Mittelholzer’s choices from a modern perspective, where the pyramid of Guyanese horror ascends by each entity’s relation to folklore from the villages. For example, any Guyanese will tell you that a kanaima is more terrifying than a mere ghost, and an ‘ole higue’ is more horrific than a vampire. Perhaps Mittelholzer’s spectres, though rooted in Guyanese history, is indicative of what he read and was inspired by, or what the people of his time fed their fears on and what was in vogue in the literature of his day, or perhaps I am misguided and Mittelholzer’s ghosts might actually have much more in common with the Guyanese jumbie or Dutchman spirits than I can establish right now. Whatever the case, there is no doubt that this novel can aid in an exploration of the concept of Guyanese horror, should anyone choose to research this area someday. Apart from being a good horror novel, “My Bones and My Flute” also offers Guyanese the chance to look back at a particular time in Guyanese history. The novel was published in 1955 and in the text, there are some gems to be found regarding the time in which the novel was published and the time in which it was set, in comparison to modern Guyana. For example, there is a reference to a specific song that the protagonist listens to, which a modern reader can now simply find online with a few clicks, and there is the fact that Ovaltine before bedtime seems to have been a Guyanese tradition for a very, very long time, and there is also how Mittelholzer’s beautiful descriptions of the mood in the interior remains as accurate and beguiling as it is today in real life, or even in the way language has changed over the years and certain words that were used for common items decades ago are no longer in use now. In writing “My Bones and My Flute,” Mittelholzer not only created a compelling ghost story, but he also created a narrative that helped to preserve a time in Guyana that is long gone and difficult to reclaim, and that is a part of the author’s legacy that is also worth noting.