Evelyn Waugh and Pauline Melville in Guyana Robert Ness
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“Not his sort of story”: Evelyn Waugh and Pauline Melville in Guyana Robert Ness On December 12, 1932, Evelyn Waugh set sail from England for what was then the colony of British Guiana.1 Recently divorced, and suffer- ing the mortification of the cuckold, he had left London with a “heart of lead” (Diaries 354), driven away by the craving to put substantial distance between himself and home. South America seemed suitably “far flung… [with its] impenetrable Guiana forests” (Hastings 266). e resulting narrative, Ninety-Two Days (1934), suggests by its title less an excursion to lands appealingly far-flung than a tribulation or peni- tential act to be gotten through. ough Waugh claims in Ninety-Two Days to be interested in “distant and barbarous places, and particularly in the borderlands of conflicting cultures and states of development” (11), he did not pay much attention to his surroundings in Guiana. Indeed, one of his biographers, Selina Hastings, sums up his attitude as follows: “[T]here can have been few travel writers… who show less curiosity about their surroundings. Although prepared to note the ar- chitecture, go to Mass, and drink with members of the expatriate pop- ulation, Evelyn rarely displays more than a superficial inquisitiveness about the country or its indigenous inhabitants” (269).2 His first sight of Georgetown harbor was not encouraging: “hope dried up in one at the sight of it” (Ninety-Two Days 12). Waugh’s re- corded his general impression of Georgetown in his Diaries: “I don’t care how soon I leave it” (360). He traveled by canoe and horse through the forests and savannahs of Guiana and Brazil, suffering considerably from heat, hunger, thirst, sleeplessness, vampire bats, and especially insects. e rivers he thought “unendurably monotonous” and the Amerindians he dismissed as “unattractive, squat and dingy, with none of the grace one expects in savages” (122). ough Waugh acknowledged that the Indians could on occasion be cheerful and well-disposed, and were 51 Robert Ness chiefly fond of hunting, pets, and strong drink (which Waugh fancies as an English resemblance), he found them mostly elusive and obscure, solitary, suspicious, lazy, and without ambition, drifting by on their “un- explained and pointless errands, moving invisibly like the tides” (78). In his Diaries, he noted that the “negroes” on the other hand were more cheerful and “comic,” though ramshackle and “hobbledehoy” (359). In Georgetown, he spent most of his time drinking rum swizzles at the local expatriate club; on the savannahs he sought out relative meas- ures of comfort with ranchers and priests (Waugh was a recent Catholic convert), where he could dine on food more palatable than the unvary- ing “farine” (cassava) and “tasso” (dried meat) he was served up along the route. Along the way he encountered a number of eccentrics, includ- ing the descendants of the “highly romantic… Mr. Melville” (Diaries 24), which I will go on to address further. Upon his return from the bush Waugh summed up Guiana as a “civilization in its retreat…a place returning to solitude and desolation frivolously disturbed…a destruc- tive and predatory civilization” (161–62). Back in England, he confid- ed to a friend that he had just returned from “a journey of the greatest misery…. Am getting rid of some of the horrors of life in the forest” (Hastings 281). Pauline Melville, author of e Ventriloquist’s Tale (1997), was born in Guyana and is part British. Her mother’s family were “a tribe of Anglo- Saxons if there ever was one, blonde and blue-eyed,” and she is also part Guyanese and describes her father’s family as “a genetic bouquet of African, Amerindian and European features, a family gazing out from dark, watchful eyes” (“Beyond the Pale” 739–40).3 Melville descends from the “highly romantic Mr. Melville” of whom Waugh wrote in 1933, and thus she has made an autobiographical investment in her own fic- tion by introducing both her forebears and Waugh as characters in e Ventriloquist’s Tale. In fact, she has laid Waugh’s travel book and diary under requisition to help provide several characters and events in her novel. Such intertextualities are at first glance unexpected and puzzling especially since Waugh’s travel narrative shows so much unremitting dis- like for his chosen destination. More puzzling, perhaps, given Waugh’s lunatic conviction that human worth can be measured by race and ge- 52 Evelyn Waugh and Pauline Melville in Guyana nealogy is frequently on display, especially in his Diaries.4 It is amusing to speculate that Melville’s agenda may be in part personal. “All stories,” the narrator of e Ventriloquist’s Tale informs us, “are told for revenge or tribute. Take your pick” (9). Melville may not have been pleased by Waugh’s perfunctory and unkind observations about her ancestors. e reader might additionally presuppose the following set-up: Melville in- troduces Waugh as an archetypal instance of the Tory-colonial Colonel Blimp at his most rank and unweeded, racist, misogynistic, full of rum swizzles, insect-piqued irritability and harrumphing snobbery. Waugh is in short an easy target for Melville’s (and the reader’s) post-colonial deri- sion. In other words, Waugh’s presence in the novel offers the thematic possibility of a simple binary with a predictable outcome: against the dull ceremony of the English tea-table Melville will serve up the brisk peppery callaloo of her multifaceted Creole identity. As Melville states in “Beyond the Pale,” “I am a champion of mixtures and hybrids…. I enjoy Carnival because … it is a masquerade where disguise is the only truth…. Death comes in the guise of uniformity, mono-cultural purity, the externals of the state as opposed to the riot of the imagina- tion” (742–43). But as I hope to show, a strictly post-colonial reading of e Ventriloquist’s Tale and Waugh’s deployment as a character in it is inadequate. Melville engages Waugh’s Ninety-Two Days and his diary in an intertextual dialogue with an Amerindian Guyanese world, and the juxtaposition of its magic, mythic lore and very non-Western realities produces interesting and unexpected results. Her object is not to praise one culture at the expense of another, nor to oppose the magical world of the Wapisiana against the rationalist world of the Europeans—that would be too easy. Rather, she dwells on the mutual incomprehension that makes relations between cultures both necessary and extremely dif- ficult, if not impossible. First, let me offer a structural outline of Melville’s complex novel. e novel contains three separate narratives, nested like Chinese boxes. It is framed with a short prologue and epilogue spoken by the ventriloquist narrator of the book’s title, a mischievous, elusive trickster who refuses to give his name: “Ah, secrecy, camouflage and treachery. What blessings to us all. Where I come from, disguise is the only truth and desire the 53 Robert Ness only true measure of time” (7). e first narrative is the contemporary story of the adulterous love affair between Chofy McKinnon and Rosa Mendelson. e second, which constitutes two-thirds of the novel, takes place sixty or so years earlier (during Waugh’s visit) and tells of the inces- tuous love affair between Danny and Beatrice McKinnon. e trickster narrator is associated with Sonny, who is Danny and Beatrice’s autistic son, as well as with Macunaíma, one of the brothers in Macusi myth who loosed a flood on the world by cutting down the tree of life. Waugh’s travel book is chronologically linear and conventional. He describes the isolated cattle savannas and the sparse eccentric ranchers who inhabit it. Among the ranchers Waugh encountered were Teddy Melville and his sister, Amy (Melville) Hart. Mr. Melville was “a govern- ment officer with a pretty Brazilian wife, [who] gave me beer” (Diaries 367–68). Mrs. Hart, who lived on a nearby ranch, looked after her six children and “a dotty bastard nephew [Melville’s Sonny], son of John Melville [Teddy and Amy’s brother] by his three-quarter sister” (Diaries 367). At the time of Waugh’s visit, “Melville’s family still h[e]ld com- plete predominance in the [Rapununi] district, all the key positions being held by his sons and son-in-law” (25). Waugh wrote that Mr. Melville and Mrs. Hart were the half-Indian children of a highly romantic character named Mr. Melville. is gen- tleman, who died a few years back, was a parson’s son from Jamaica. His story, as told me by one of his daughters, was that after various unsuccessful attempts at gold washing he was found by some Wapishiana Indians dying of fever in the upper Essequibo. He expressed a desire to die in open country and they accordingly carried him to the Rupununi savannah where he made an immediate recovery…. He won the Indians’ con- fidence, married among them, and presently began keeping cattle on an increasing scale until by 1915 he was living in pa- triarchal authority at a large ranch named Dadanawa. (24) In e Ventriloquist’s Tale, the Melville family is rechristened McKinnon, whose biography follows. e resemblance between Waugh’s Melville and Melville’s McKinnon is clear: 54 Evelyn Waugh and Pauline Melville in Guyana Alexander McKinnon was a lean energetic Scotsman in his thirties who prided himself on being a free-thinker. He had arrived in the colony via Jamaica where his father was an arch- deacon…. Rejecting the church and determined to get as far away from civilization as possible, he struck off into the in- terior of Guiana with a group of nomadic Atorad Indians….