cultural heterogeneity as a value in the creative imaginations of writers as different as Ralph Ellison, Jean Rhys, and Patrick White.
Three other Guyanese novelists of note are Edgar Mittelholzer, Jan Carew, and Denis Williams. Edgar Mittelholzer was the first of his generation to immigrate to the United Kingdom with the intention of earning his living as a writer. He wanted to become 'rich and famous -597- by writing books for the people of Britain to read.' He was a prolific novelist and published twenty-two novels altogether. Mittelholzer recognized no particular responsibility to a collective West Indian community, which he felt was doomed by virtue of its heterogeneity. His novels are obsessed with sex and violence as facets of miscegenation. His racially mixed characters suffer from recurring, destructive crises of identity that have their root in a split sensibility. Like those of Harris and Carew, Mittelholzer's vast and primitive landscapes are richly evoked as a source of wonder and terror in his Guyanese settings. Mittelholzer's better novels are the early works set in Guyana, Corentyne Thunder (1941), Shadows Move Among Them (1951), and his Kaywana trilogy — Children of Kaywana (1952), The Harrowing of Hubertus (1954), and Kaywana Blood (1958). The books in the Kaywana trilogy are sensationally written historical novels about Guyana's brutal history of slavery and colonial settlement to the mid-twentieth century. Mittelholzer makes it seem inevitable that these narratives become mired in sex, violence, and death. A Morning at the Office (1950) is an interesting contrast to Mittelholzer's rural settings in Guyana. Set in Port of Spain, Trinidad, this is a well-made novel about the tedium and stasis of colonial society with its elaborate hierarchies of race, color, and ethnicity.
Jan Carew and Denis Williams bring a different sensibility to the Guyanese novel. Jan Carew published two novels of adventure, Black Midas (1958) and The Wild Coast (1959). Carew's novels are highly conventional adventure stories of frontier life in Guyana. The impact of the vast continental landscape dominates these novels as does the varied racial and ethnic composition of Guyanese society. Carew's undoing, if it can be so described, lies in an uncritical and often indulgent use of racial stereotypes. Denis Williams is a painter and archaeologist as well as a novelist. His Other Leopards (1963) is set in the Sudan where Williams lived for five years. This novel is usefully compared with Vic Reid's The Leopard (1958), about the Mau Mau rebellion in Kenya. Both novels are essential to any study of the impact of Africa on the modern Caribbean sensibility.
The Jamaican novelists Vic Reid, Roger Mais, John Hearne, Andrew Salkey, and Orlando Patterson bring a distinct sense of their island's geographical, social, and cultural particularity to the Jamaican novel. Vic Reid's best- known work is New Day (1949), a his-598- torical novel celebrating Jamaica's new constitution in 1944. National and historical consciousness is embodied in the history of one family's participation in resistance against colonial oppression beginning with the 1865 Morant Bay rebellion. The novel is written in a modified dialect and represents an early attempt to shape the language of narration in the novel to the rhythms of a rich oral storytelling tradition.
Roger Mais wrote a different kind of fiction altogether. In The Hills Were Joyful Together (1953), he transforms the social realism of the barrack-yard novel of James and Mendes into an unqualified denunciation of 'the dreadful conditions of the working classes' in 'the real Jamaica.' With great effect, he conceptualizes the occupants of the Kingston yard collectively as the center of consciousness in this novel. In his second yard novel, Brother Man (1954), Mais takes a sympathetic look at Rastafarianism as a transformative value in the lives of the poor and oppressed. Mais's novels are full of energy and passion in part because he is willing, like Lamming and Harris and Reid and Selvon, to experiment freely with literary forms and language. His third novel, Black Lightning (1955), is a moving portrait of the relationship between the artist as blacksmith and sculptor and his community.
Orlando Patterson's The Children of Sisyphus (1964) is usefully compared with the yard novels of Mais. Patterson builds his representation of the dreadful conditions of Kingston's poor around the Dungle, a community of misery formed on the site of the city's garbage dump. This is a bleak novel that records the failure of the island community to nurture and sustain its own. Patterson wrote two other novels, An Absence of Ruins (1967) and Die the Long Day (1972), a well-researched historical novel about slave culture in Jamaica in the late eighteenth century.
The substance of John Hearne's novels is the Jamaican middle class, their ethics and values and their relationship to the vast majority of Jamaicans who are poor, uneducated, and black. The most impressive of these is Voices under the Window (1955), which examines the efforts of a middle-class Jamaican politician to provide leadership to a society in the throes of violent social upheaval. Hearne has published five other novels: Stranger at the Gate (1956), The Faces of Love (1957), Autumn Equinox (1959), Land of the-599- Living (1961), and The Sure Salvation (1981). In all of these Hearne examines the personal choices available to a middle class that is finally unable or unwilling to restructure its relationship to the needs of the society as a whole.
Andrew Salkey also writes about the Jamaican middle class but his best novel is not about this class at all. A Quality of Violence (1959) is set in a rural parish in Jamaica during a devastating drought that leaves the community weak and vulnerable to hysteria. Salkey sets peasants who believe in Pocomania, an African-Christian religious cult, against a brown, Bible-fearing minority of small landowners. This is a well-made novel about Jamaica in a state of physical and spiritual crisis. The novel is usefully compared with McKay's Banana Bottom and Mais's Brother Man.
Trinidadian writers like Sam Selvon, V. S. Naipaul and Shiva Naipaul, Michael Anthony, Earl Lovelace, and Ismith Khan widened the scope of the Caribbean novel even further. Sam Selvon was the first of these to publish. He left Trinidad for the United Kingdom with George Lamming in 1950, and has lived abroad ever since, first in the United Kingdom and then in Canada. Selvon's accomplishments are many; he writes both about an indigenous reality specific to Trinidad and about the West Indian immigrant experience in the United Kingdom. Selvon's Trinidad novels add a new dimension to the Caribbean novel with his sympathetic depiction of a transplanted Indian peasantry in the process of creolization. A Brighter Sun (1952) and its sequel Turn Again Tiger (1958) are peasant novels that employ different modes of looking at roughly the same world of the Indian peasant emerging from the feudal structure of the sugar-cane estate or plantation. A Brighter Sun is a novel of emergence, or Bildungsroman, in which a newly married, young Indian couple painfully adjust to the possibilities of life in the creolized space of a suburban village beyond the conservative ethnicity and humiliations of Indian life in a sugar estate village. Selvon represents creolization as a necessary prelude to individual growth and fulfillment in multiracial, multiethnic Trinidad. Turn Again Tiger replaces this compositional design with a version of McKay's agricultural idyll. Tiger and his family return to the sugar estate for a year, from planting to harvest time, and, in the process, cyclic time is reestablished as a stable, restorative framework for growth and fulfillment. -600- Selvon's London novels reveal the same imaginative approach to fictional composition. His Moses trilogy — The Lonely Londoners, Moses Ascending, and Moses Migrating — displays innovative approaches to the representation of immigrant life in the United Kingdom. The most accomplished of the trio are The Lonely Londoners and Moses Ascending, where West Indian otherness is savored and emphasized in linguistic experiments and comic representations of the West Indian immigrant as misfit, clown, fool, and clever rogue in an alien landscape.
V. S. Naipaul's relationship to his Indian ancestry and creolization is very different from Selvon's. Selvon continues to affirm the syncretic character of Caribbean life and culture. Living in the Caribbean, he explains, 'You become Creolized, you not Indian, you not Black, you not even White, you assimilate all these cultures and you turn out to be a different man who is the Caribbean Man.' On the face of it, V. S. Naipaul finds nothing in the prospect of Caribbean Man to celebrate: 'History is built around achievement and creation; and nothing was created in the West Indies.' This much-quoted statement in The Middle Passage (1962) has generated a discourse of its own within the Caribbean on history, on culture and mimicry, and on 'nothing,' in the works of writers as accomplished as Walcott, Brathwaite, Rhys, and Lamming. However, Naipaul's extravagant success as a novelist and travel writer with British and North American audiences is independent of controversy within the Caribbean, and his contribution to the Caribbean novel stands regardless of the controversy that surrounds his pronouncements about the bankruptcy of Caribbean society. He has published nine novels to date and seven of
