THE IDYLL AND THE WARRIOR (Recollections of Edgar Mittelholzer) By Jacqueline Mittelholzer 1 By Jacqueline Mittelholzer THE IDYLL AND THE WARRIOR (Recollections of Edgar Mittelholzer) © Jacqueline Mittelholzer 2014 Cover design by Peepal Tree Press Cover photograph: Courtesy of Jacqueline Mittelholzer All rights reserved No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form without permission. Published by the Caribbean Press. ISBN 978-1-907493-69-0 2 Contents INTRODUCTION ................................................................... 3 CHAPTER ONE: FIRST IMPRESSIONS ........................... 19 CHAPTER TWO: OUR LIFE TOGETHER ........................ 25 CHAPTER THREE: EDGAR AND THE ESOTERIC – A TINKLING IN THE TWILIGHT, THE WOUNDED AND THE WORRIED, THE ALONENESS OF MRS. CHATHAM.............................................................. 37 CHAPTER FOUR: THE BIRD IN THE ROOF – THE PILING OF CLOUDS.............................................. 51 CHAPTER FIVE: OTHER NOVELS .................................. 59 CHAPTER SIX: EDGAR’S CHILDHOOD: A SWARTHY BOY ............................................................ 77 CHAPTER SEVEN: WHY DID EDGAR KILL HIMSELF? ........................................................................ 91 POEM ‘Death in Prospect’ ............................................... 101 FAMILY PHOTOGRAPHS ................................................ 103 ‘FATE AND THE WARRIOR’ (A play based on recollections of Edgar Mittelholzer) ........................... 109 3 4 THE IDYLL AND THE WARRIOR (Recollections of Edgar Mittelholzer) By Jacqueline Mittelholzer 5 6 “Two elements have always lived within me, side by side and in restless harmony, something, no doubt, after the fashion of uranium atoms. Any positive disturbance, and the precarious symbiosis dissolved into roaring chaos. The Idyll element dreamed of a peaceful, sylvan situation (‘a Book of Verse – and Thou beside me”) and life proceeding with oiled precision, secure under cosy, twilit rafters, with rain, thunder and lightning, sunshine and the rustling of trees providing a simple, satisfying variety in the flow of the days and the weeks and months, even the years. The Warrior Element listened always to the sound of Conflict, was perpetually alert to the raw actuality of Life, perpetually ready to resist, to repulse, to do battle to the death with any foe that might appear, Greensleeves weaving through the Sword motif from The Ring. Edgar Mittelholzer, A Swarthy Boy “God. A Supreme Being … Yes … I believe – have always believed – in myself.” Edgar Mittelholzer, last lines of The Harrowing of Hubertus 1 2 INTRODUCTION I first met Edgar on a coach, going to the annual Writers’ Summer School in Derbyshire. “Is this seat taken?” he asked, and I replied: “No.” Our first conversation included graveyards and old churches; reincarnation – in which we both believed; and writing. He told me how he liked to make the characters in his novels “a little nutty”, for he felt this would excuse any extraordinary incidents he invented. In The Weather in Middenshot1, for example, there is an old man who believes – or pretends to believe – that his very living and present wife is dead. Whenever he needs to communicate with her, he stages a spiritualistic séance. And in A Tinkling in the Twilight (which Edgar had just published, in 1959, when I met him) many ideas, about which the author was really quite serious, are put across in a mocking fashion – yoga, reincarnation, and views on crime and punishment. Was it the down-to-earth side of him, or was it an inconsistent lack of sureness, that made a person who usually wrote and spoke with such conviction, use this mocking cover? In either case, he cannot have been content to let his beliefs rest with the light-hearted tone of the two novels just mentioned; for later came the outspoken The Piling of Clouds, The Wounded and the Worried and The Aloneness of Mrs. Chatham. I remember being impressed by the way Edgar (who, in that year when we met, had fourteen published novels and one non-fiction work, With a Carib Eye, to his credit) behaved at the school with all the modesty of a beginner. Born in Guyana (then British Guiana) in 1909, he was living in London, Maida Vale – when I met him. He had been married previously, and had four children, but was divorced. His first wife was a Trinidadian. At the end of the 1939-45 war, when, following some dispute, he was discharged from the Trinidad Naval Reserve, he lived for six years in Trinidad. In 1948 he managed to come to England, and worked with 3 the British Council, helping in a “typing pool”, until he began to live entirely by his writing. In 1952, following a literary award, he moved with his family to Montreal for a while, to work on The Harrowing of Hubertus, the second of the Kaywana trilogy. Then, due to the long, cold Canadian winter, they moved to Barbados and were in the West Indies for three years, until they returned to England in 1956. In Georgetown, Guyana, he had once worked as a meteorologist. He was fascinated by weather, and at home we had a number of charts, thermometers, barometers and hygrometers. One sees his interest in weather in many of the novels. The Weather in Middenshot and The Weather Family are obvious examples. The sections in The Weather in Middenshot are divided by the weather, and in The Aloneness of Mrs. Chatham by the seasons. Edgar had always had a chequered career with his writing. He felt he was fated to be unlucky. His first published novel, Corentyne Thunder (1941) was produced only after a lot of “ups and downs”, and there was an interval of nine years before the appearance of the next one – A Morning at the Office. In A Swarthy Boy (the autobiography of his early years), Edgar describes his first struggles to publish: how he sent manuscripts to publishers in England, and always had the next script half completed by the time the preceding one returned. Also, he describes this, and the adventures of such novels as were in the end published, in his article, A Pleasant Career (published in the Barbadian journal, BIM, June 1983). Although he became known as a leading “West Indian novelist”, Edgar never liked the label. In fact, he used to point out that Guyana is not, strictly speaking, part of the West Indies. All his later novels were set in England, though the early ones were, naturally, of the Caribbean. He always liked to write about settings with which he was familiar. As it happens, one of his own favourites among his novels has a Guyanese setting, Shadows Move Among Them. At the time when I met him, he was publishing two novels a year. He could write his works very fast, straight off the typewriter, seldom making a rough draft before the final copy (“fair copy” as he always called it). 4 In his last two years, he had written two books very important to him, as if they must be written before too late: A Swarthy Boy – and The Aloneness of Mrs. Chatham. The latter contains much of his thoughts and feelings – from his political ideas, to his belief in yoga and in the occult. He had composed several versions of this novel before the published one; but it is the last version, the known one, which we shall have to consider – if only because I cannot track down the other versions! Published in 1965, this last one concerns what are still ongoing social problems. I shall return to it in a later chapter. Throughout his later novels – The Piling of Clouds, The Wounded and the Worried, Uncle Paul, The Aloneness of Mrs. Chatham, The Jilkington Drama – Edgar was experimenting with a style of writing in which he avoided “stream of consciousness” and where, in fact, what the characters were thinking would not be mentioned at all. “She seemed to be thinking” would be used instead of “she thought”. The effect is of the story unfolding objectively as it would through the eyes of a perceptive observer. Sometimes the character talks aloud to herself, and I thought this contrived, until I noticed how much one actually does this. Most of the characters’ reactions have to be seen through the dialogue, as in a play. My husband had (without finding a market for them) written a number of plays, and at one time belonged to a play-writing circle in London. Edgar’s great musical hero was Wagner, and in connection with this, there was another kind of experimental writing that he evolved in his last few years. It was to make use of the Wagnerian Leitmotiv system in writing. I shall give examples of this, too, in another chapter. Here again, understanding the story depends upon the dialogue. The Leitmotivs are all in the descriptive passages. The two books in which the technique is used are Latticed Echoes and Thunder Returning (the latter contains an explanatory foreword). The author hoped to make them part of a trilogy, but this did not happen. I encouraged him to write the experimental Latticed Echoes, and he dedicated it to me. The only other book he was to dedicate to any people was the final version of The Aloneness of Mrs. Chatham with its strongly expressed, reactionary views – to the fourteen publishers who turned it down. 5 Edgar had always felt he would be more at home in England than in his native country. He loved England; had been educated to think of her as the mother country and therefore, in a sense, the homeland; and he preferred the British climate to the tropical one. Yet, after a while in England, he seemed almost as though he would have been more at home in Germany. He claimed that it was through the Germanic part of him that there came the great admiration he had for discipline in any form. Perhaps his romantic streak could have been partly from the same source.