Derek Walcott, The Journeyman Years, Volume 1: Culture, Society, Literature, and Art: Occasional Prose 1957-1974 (Cross/Cultures - Readings in the Post/Colonial Literatures in English, 171)

607 Pages·3.341 MB·English

by  Gordon Collier (editor)

Derek Walcott
The Journeyman Years
Volume 1: Culture, Society, Literature, and Art
CROSS
Readings in Post/Colonial
ULTURES Literatures and Cultures in English

171

SERIES EDITORS
Gordon Collier Bénédicte Ledent Geoffrey Davis
(Giessen) (Liège) (Aachen)
CO-FOUNDING EDITOR
Hena Maes–Jelinek
Derek Walcott
The Journeyman Years
Occasional Prose 1957-1974
Volume 1: Culture, Society, Literature, and Art
Edited by
Gordon Collier
Amsterdam - New York, NY 2013
Cover Image
Gordon Collier
The paper on which this book is printed meets the requirements of “ISO
9706:1994, Information and documentation - Paper for
documents - Requirements for permanence”.
Volume I ISBN: 978-90-420-3756-4
Volume I + II ISBN: 978-90-420-3755-7
E-Book ISBN: 978-94-012-1006-5
© Editions Rodopi B.V., Amsterdam – New York, NY 2013
Printed in The Netherlands
Table of Contents
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Acknowledgements and Technical Notes vii
Introduction:
Derek Walcott’s Guardian Aesthetic xi
1 Caribbean Society 1
2 The Arts in Anglophone Caribbean Society 29
3 Literature and Society 123
4 Anglophone Caribbean Periodicals 161
5 Anglophone Caribbean Poetry 183
General / 183
Individual Poets / 196
6 Anglophone Caribbean Prose Fiction 235
General / 235
Individual Fiction Writers / 247
Wilson Harris / 285
V.S. Naipaul / 301
7 Anglophone Caribbean Non-Fiction 323
8 The African Connection 335
9 Other Lands 347
10 Visual Arts 385
Group Exhibitions and General Reflections / 385
Individual Caribbean Artists / 433
Beyond the Caribbean / 492
11 Jeux d’Esprit 507
Index 535
Acknowledgements and Technical Notes
——————————————————————————— (cid:97)
O
UR WORK ON THE PRESENT SELECTION of Derek Walcott’s
occasional journalism received collegial support at certain critical
junctures from Bruce King and Robert D. Hamner, to whom much
thanks. Thanks, too, to the many people involved in Caribbean studies, both
in Europe and in the Caribbean itself, who urged us passionately to cease our
foot-dragging and to get the damn’ ting out. The archival staff at the British
Newspaper Library at Colindale, the University of Florida, and the Institute of
Jamaica were invariably and courteously helpful. A debt of gratitude is owed
to our students and assistants at Justus Liebig University, Giessen, for helping
with the transcription from often indifferent photocopies, and at the Ludwig
Maximilian University, Munich, for work on double-checking, ordering, and
preliminary indexing of the material on the performance arts in Volume 2.
On two discrete occasions (in Munich and in Milan), Derek Walcott gave us
his express permission to edit and publish, without limitation, contributions by
him to the Trinidad Guardian and Public Opinion. Every effort was made, at
various stages in the editing process, to secure the consent of the managers of
the periodicals concerned.
(cid:97)
Textual editing was carried out on conservative principles: i.e. there was no
high-handed alteration of grammar, lexis, idiom or style. Only in cases of self-
evident or contextually apparent typos, slips in punctuation, misquotation, or
misreadings on the part of typesetters or sub-editors were alterations or cor-
rections made. In other cases, one reading out of more than one spelling was
decided on for the sake of consistency. Minor features of orthography and
punctuation have been adjusted to accord with Cross/Cultures house-style.
Some features of newspaper-based formatting and layout were changed – for
example, titles of plays, novels and the like in running newspaper text were
usually rendered as plain text, and italics have been introduced in such cases.
Capitalization of article titles has been normalized and standardized to suit
present-day house-style (a wide range of styles was adopted by the news-
viii THE JOURNEYMAN YEARS, VOLUME 1 (cid:97)
papers; these can be viewed by consulting the chronological listing in Volume
2). The only arguably radical departure from the original presentation was the
approach taken to paragraph layout within the articles, particularly with regard
to the Guardian. As a typical modern newspaper, the Guardian was latterly
concerned to make units of information salient and easily absorbed, so that
Walcott’s prose was often presented in individual paragraphs consisting of
one or two sentences each. The articles by Walcott (and others) from the
Guardian as reprinted in Hamner’s Critical Perspectives on Derek Walcott
observe ‘diplomatic’ procedure, with the original layout preserved, which is a
quite proper approach that provides an ‘historical’ perspective, albeit distorted
by the fact that the multi-columned original newspaper layout was replaced by
a page-wide spread. In two large volumes, however, this was not an option, on
technical grounds alone: preserving layout in columns would have produced
an even bigger monster of over two thousand pages, and preserving the short
paragraphs in a page-linear layout would have looked abnormally bitsy. The in-
ternal logic of Walcott’s prose (never unclear) permitted the editing-together,
by deduction and inference, of contiguous paragraphs to produce an overall
text that looked like, and was readable as, the articles as surely originally en-
visaged by the author.
The grouping of material under various heads in both volumes is clearly
thematic, and is designed to permit the reader direct access to these individual
themes. Within the sections, sequencing has generally been topical, not chrono-
logical (save for the reviews of group art exhibitions, and – if anything, to
show possible paths of development – where more than one article is devoted
to a particular artist or author). Readers interested in acquiring a ‘genetic’ or
developmental perspective on Walcott’s approach to a given theme are invited
to consult the chronological listing in Volume 2. Contributions to the Guar-
dian that consisted of a ‘macaroni’ of very brief notations by Walcott on
events etc. of the day or week have generally been disregarded, but more ex-
tensive sub-sections within articles covering heterogeneous topics (e.g., theatre
or film reviews along with book reviews) have been split up and consigned to
the appropriate chapter. In such cases, the original article title is rendered in
[square brackets] and the location of a given segment of an article is indicated
at the end (e.g., ‘item 2’). Text that is not by Walcott (whether written by him
or transcribed from interviews) is clearly differentiated by typography (as in
sub-editorial introductory matter at the newspaper, or in italics if the words of
an interviewer); to avoid oppressive optical display, long paraphrases of talks
by Walcott have been treated as though verbatim.
After some experimentation with concocting explanatory notes for the
many cultural features that Walcott refers to, it was eventually decided to dis-
pense with footnote annotations, save in a very few instances. These latter
(cid:97) Acknowledgements and Technical Notes ix
occasional clarifications are marked ‘[Ed.].’; any that are not so marked offer
bibliographical information (inconsistently) and were in the original news-
paper article; some very brief data on books being reviewed or persons dis-
cussed are inserted in square brackets in the running text or in footnotes.
(Note: as all of the footnotes in Volume 2 are editorial, ‘[Ed.]’ has been un-
necessary there.) Here I have relied largely on my personal library, which
couldn’t hope to cover everything. Aside from this necessary minimum of
bibliographical information, it is clear that there are too many Caribbean
initiates and Walcott aficionados in the world for an exhaustive approach to
annotation not to appear irritatingly superfluous, and students as well as inter-
ested readers among the more general public can today easily look up any-
thing unfamiliar via the internet (not an option at the inception of our project).
We have likewise chosen not to over-analyse the content of Walcott’s articles,
and have accordingly restricted ourselves to providing an index for each of
the two volumes that is onomastic only. By this means, readers can locate all
occurrences of a proper name or title, but are left to their own devices as far as
concepts are concerned. An exception is made in Volume 2, which is less
heterogeneous, and where some central concept headwords are provided.
Responsibility for the compilation of the indexes and editorial footnotes in
both volumes, as well as for the annotated Walcott bibliography, lies with
Gordon Collier. It should also be pointed out that Volume 1 has been set in
closer spacing than Volume 2, in order to balance out the volumes physically.
(cid:97)
Grateful acknowledgement is made to Guardian Media Limited (Port-of-
Spain) for permission to reprint copyright material from the Trinidad Guar-
dian and Sunday Guardian.
Every effort has been made to clarify copyright in other material by or related
to Derek Walcott in periodicals other than the Guardian, these latter being:
Caribbean Contact (Port-of-Spain, Trinidad, 1973).
The Gleaner (Kingston, Jamaica, 1954,1957).
Public Opinion (Kingston, Jamaica, 1952,1956,1957,1958).
Tapia (Tunapuna, Trinidad, 1976; now Trinidad & Tobago Review, Lloyd
Best Institute of the West Indies).
The Voice of St. Lucia (Castries, St Lucia, 1950,1955).
(cid:97)
Introduction
Derek Walcott’s Guardian Aesthetic1
——————————————————————————— (cid:97)
I
’LL BE REPORTING FURTHER ALONG BELOW on a sliver of a facet of a
phase in West Indian literary history, the 1960s, which can by hindsight
be called formative, if one aligns literary production with genre and with
subsequent canonicity. One or two of the points I shall be making much later
might just lay a modest claim to novelty, but they depend for their effect on a
perhaps inordinate amount of scene-setting (Part I below) in terms of the
cultural-historical background to newspaper journalism and Walcott’s in-
volvement in it. Editing his journalism prompted investigation of some of his
aesthetic preoccupations as these reveal themselves in the texture of his re-
views and articles, and invited me to offer illustration (in Part II) of how the
material gathered here might be employed to explore a particular thesis and
genre.
— I —
Let me endeavour to hasten to my conclusion by rehearsing the familiar. In
poetry, the 1960s produced Derek Walcott’s three collections In a Green
Night (1962),The Castaway (1965), and The Gulf (1969) and the three inter-
linked collections-cum-long narratives, published between 1967 and 1969,
that make up Kamau Brathwaite’s Arrivants trilogy. It was during the 1960s
that the Trinidad Theatre Workshop arose out of the Little Carib Theatre
Workshop, providing the West Indies with their first moderately sustainable
testing-ground and model for dramatic productions. Here, too, Walcott was
not only wearing one of his several creative caps, that of playwright, but was
also bullying and cajoling into tangible existence the objects of this burning
first love: the plays of other Caribbean playwrights, such as Errol John’s
Moon on a Rainbow Shawl (first broadcast on the BBC in 1958), and his own
– pre-eminently Ti-Jean and His Brothers (written and first staged in 1957)
and Dream on Monkey Mountain (premiered in 1967). One should also