Edgar Mittelholzer
ELTONSBRODY
with a new introduction by
JOHN THIEME
VALANCOURT BOOKS
INTRODUCTION
Edgar Mittelholzer was born in New Amsterdam, Guyana (then British Guiana) in 1909 into a mixed-race family of German-Swiss, French, English and African descent. In his autobiography of his early years, A Swarthy Boy (1963), he writes about being torn between two opposing impulses, the ‘Idyll Element’ and the ‘Warrior Element’, and themes of psychic division run throughout his work. He espoused the Germanic side of his heritage and had a lifelong love of Nietzsche’s philosophy and Wagner’s music.1 Apparently untroubled by their association with fascism in the 1930s, he associated these German influences with strength of character, and a struggle between envisioned strong and weak facets of personality is a recurrent theme in his fiction, achieving its fullest expression in his epic Kaywana trilogy (1952-58),2 which spans more than three centuries of Guyanese history.
As the ‘swarthy’ son of a mixed-race family, Mittelholzer was acutely conscious of being a disappointment to his ‘negrophobe’ father and throughout his life his wrestling with what he saw as a dual identity provided the driving force for much of his writing, including Gothic works such as Eltonsbrody (1960). Several of his novels, beginning with his first to be published, Corentyne Thunder (1941), include characters who contemplate suicide, and suicide becomes an increasingly prominent theme in his later fiction: The Wounded and the Worried (1962) brings four would-be suicides together for a house party, and in the final pages of his last work, The Jilkington Drama (1965), published in the year of his death, the protagonist kills himself in a manner which foreshadows Mittelholzer’s own meticulously planned suicide. Apparently inspired by the ending of Wagner’s Götterdamerung,3 he burnt himself to death in an English field. He had attempted suicide on at least two previous occasions.
In Mittelholzer’s earliest fiction, his fascination with troubled mental states is held in check by an attempt to represent observed social realities. Corentyne Thunder deals with the East Indian peasantry living on the coast of Guyana’s easternmost county, Berbice, where he had spent his early years. A Morning at the Office (1950) offers a minutely detailed account of events in a Trinidadian office during the course of a single morning. For Mittelholzer, this novel was ‘a grand tract nicely dressed up […] in the guise of a novel’,4 and it displays an obsessive concern with the minutiae of responses to ‘race’ and colour in the late colonial era. However, realism was not Mittelholzer’s forte and with his third novel, Shadows Move Among Them (1951), he deserted the naturalistic veneer of the previous two in favour of a Gothic mode that allowed him to explore inner mental states without the constraints of having to make his characters conform to social norms. He had found his métier and Shadows Move Among Them paved the way for several subsequent novels, in which the Gothic liberated him to write about the preoccupations that most fascinated him. My Bones and My Flute (1955), set in the Guyanese interior, and Eltonsbrody, set in Barbados, are among the finest instances of this side of his writing.
Eltonsbrody opens with remarks that indicate a highly self-conscious use of the Gothic genre. The novel’s narrator, Woodsley,5 a commercial artist and landscape painter, says he has no capacity for handling colour on paper and is unable to manipulate facts to make them read like fiction. Nevertheless he claims that he is about to tell ‘a shocking story – a tale of real horror’ and warns anyone who ‘can’t stomach’ such horror not to read on. We may be sceptical of the claim to factuality, but predictably we do read on, experiencing the action through Woodsley’s eyes and like him wondering whether there is a rational explanation for the horrific events he encounters, or whether the accumulating horrors belong to the realms of the paranormal.
Eltonsbrody draws on several Gothic staples: an old house, from which the novel takes its title; a mysterious owner; locked rooms; mysterious past happenings; grisly relics; a rugged, inhospitable landscape; and ominously windy weather.6 Mittelholzer locates his action precisely, in a setting that befits its remoteness from everyday realities. Eltonsbrody is situated in Barbados’s ‘Scotland district’ on the island’s wild Atlantic coast and, though it is only thirteen miles from the capital, Bridgetown, it is light years away from the seat of Barbados’s civic institutions and the tourist beaches of its leeward Caribbean coast.
The central dynamic of the novel pivots on the relationship between Woodsley and Eltonsbrody’s owner, Mrs Scaife, who welcomes him into her home as a non-paying guest and initially seems to be the epitome of a kindly old lady. Woodsley is gradually disabused of this view of her, as apparent horrific events proliferate. He tries to tell himself he may be the butt of a bizarre practical joke and her grim humour provides grounds for such a belief, but he is gradually forced into realizing that her superficial benevolence belies a very different strain in her character. She openly admits to experiencing schadenfreude when thinking of the death of others and claims to have a psychic gift that enables her to recognize those with ‘the Mark’ (an attraction to the macabre) and those with ‘the Shadow’ (people who are about to die). She tells Woodsley that he bears the Mark, which is in keeping with his own admission that he has ‘a distinctly sinister mien’. He is the outsider who comes into the eerie Gothic world of Eltonsbrody by chance, he doesn’t share Mrs Scaife’s joy in horror, and he is repelled by the more gruesome aspects of her words and deeds, but nevertheless he has affinities with her. At the end of his narrative, when his worst suspicions have been confirmed, he still feels a degree of empathy for Mrs Scaife and wants to keep an open mind on her character. So, although he does not act out his own ‘dark’ fantasies, his attraction to the macabre, which Mrs Scaife quickly detects, makes him a kindred spirit to her.
Woodsley is fairly obviously a fictional alter ego for his creator, but in the view of Jacqueline Ives, Mittelholzer’s second wife, Mrs Scaife also reflects traits in his own psychic make-up: his ‘obsession with death’ and his ‘fascination with the dark, the weird and the strange’.7 There is nothing new in using the Gothic to probe aberrant mental states – founding Gothic texts such as William Godwin’s Caleb Williams and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein do just this – but, that said, the bizarre psychology that underpins Eltonsbrody has a flavour all of its own. It is Mittelholzer’s achievement that, through the medium of Woodsley’s narrative, he is able to bring Mrs Scaife’s world-view alive and strike a balance between seeing it as inhumanly repugnant and, taking her at her own estimate, as a source of grim humour. Woodsley ends his account saying, ‘The very name Eltonsbrody seems like a ragged, sticky piece of cobweb that will cling for all time round the nerve-cells of my brain’ and many of the book’s readers will find that it lingers long in their minds after they have put the novel down.
John Thieme
John Thieme is a Senior Fellow at the University of East Anglia. He previously held Chairs at the University of Hull and London South Bank University, and has also taught at the Universities of Guyana and North London. His books include Postcolonial Con-Texts: Writing Back to the Canon, Postcolonial Literary Geographies: Out of Place, the novel The Book of Francis Barber, and studies of Derek Walcott, V.S. Naipaul and R.K. Narayan.
Further Reading
Brown, J. Dillon, Migrant Modernism, Postwar London and the West Indian Novel, Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press, 2013.
Gilkes, Michael, ‘Edgar Mittelholzer’, in West Indian Literature, ed. Bruce King, London and Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1979: 95-110.
Guckian, Patrick, ‘The Balance of Colour – A Reassessment of the Work of Edgar Mittelholzer’, Jamaica Journal, 4, 1 (1970): 38-45.
Ives, Jacqueline, The Idyll and t
he Warrior, 2012. http://www.prose-n-poetry.com/book_chapters/662.
Seymour, A.J. ‘The Novels of Edgar Mittelholzer’, Kyk-over-al, 8, 24 (1958): 60-74.
Thieme, John, ‘Catching Mullet and Chasing Shadows: The Early Novels of Edgar Mittelholzer’, Caribbean Review, 8, 4 (1979): 36-37 and 47-50.
Westmaas, Juanita Anne, Edgar Mittelholzer (1909-1965) and the Shaping of His Novels, PhD thesis, University of Birmingham, 2013. http://etheses.bham.ac.uk/4367.
NOTES
1 His experimental novels Latticed Echoes (1960) and Thunder Returning (1961) make extensive use of a Wagnerian leit-motiv technique, introducing this into stories which are otherwise told entirely in dialogue.
2 Children of Kaywana (1952), The Harrowing of Hubertus (1954; also published as Hubertus and Kaywana Stock) and Kaywana Blood (1958; also published as The Old Blood).
3 Jacqueline Ives, The Idyll and the Warrior, Chapter 8. http://www.prose-n-poetry.com/display_work/21671.
4 A.J. Seymour, ‘The Novels of Edgar Mittelholzer’, Kyk-over-al, 8, 24 (1958), 70.
5 The name suggests an authorial self-projection. Mittelholzer appears to have chosen it as an English equivalent of the third syllable of his own surname: ‘holz’ is the German for wood. He had already used it in My Bones and My Flute (1955), where the protagonist is named Milton Woodsley, and his novel The Mad MacMullochs (1959) had been published under the pseudonym H. Austin Woodsley.
6 Weather figures prominently in much of Mittelholzer’s fiction, e.g., Corentyne Thunder (1941), The Weather Family (1952), The Weather in Middenshot (1958), Thunder Returning (1961) and The Piling of Clouds (1961). In his early life, he worked as a meteorologist in Georgetown, Guyana. Jacqueline Ives, The Idyll and the Warrior, Introduction – 1. http://www.prose-n-poetry.com/display_work/21639.
7 Jacqueline Ives, The Idyll and the Warrior, Chapter 10. http://www.prose-n-poetry.com/display_work/22356.
1
I have read many horror stories, factual and fictional. In the fictional ones, I have noticed, the author generally manipulated things so that his readers could feel cosily certain that in the end all would come well with the virtuous and upright protagonists. Despite the turgidly harrowing atmosphere, despite the nasty black horror threatening everyone, the Right People would emerge safe and sound, the Wrong People would get their comeuppance. I wish it were something like that I was sitting down to write now—but it’s not. This thing I am about to record could make a really terrifying fictional horror story, and if I were a good journalist (or, better, a novelist) I would be able to colour it up nicely and put in a lot of meaty thrills, and I would be able to arrange matters so that the Virtuous and the Upright were left in the end not only safe and intact but happily poised for the sound of wedding-bells.
Unfortunately, I am a commercial artist (and landscape painter for my own amusement). I can handle colour on a canvas but not colour in words on paper. I am no good whatever at manipulating facts so as to make them read like convincing fiction, so I shall have to content myself with the Bare Facts. It’s a shocking story—a story of real horror—and anyone who feels that he can’t stomach real horror had better go no further than here. For those who feel they’re up to it, well, let’s be off!
It was on the fourth night of my stay at Eltonsbrody that things, so to speak, began to dip the wrong way. In answer to a light knock, I opened my bedroom door and saw the old lady, Mrs. Scaife. She was standing in the corridor with a lamp. It was the lamp I had seen on the table beside her bed in her own room. Her room was on the same side of the house as mine, and, in fact, adjoined mine, though there was no connecting door. She was in her olive-green dressing-gown, a smallish, slim person, partially grey, with a mild face but alert, practical-looking pale-blue eyes.
‘Has anything disturbed you to-night, Mr. Woodsley?’ she asked.
‘No. Nothing at all,’ I said. ‘Why?’
My voice and manner were surprised and wondering, but she gave no sign of being aware of this. Her air was as casual as though it might have been nine in the morning instead of nearly eleven at night.
She smiled. ‘In that case I’ll be going to bed.’ She glanced past me into the room. ‘You seem to have been reading.’
‘Trying to—by lamplight. Not good, though. Straining my eyes.’
‘Yes, you shouldn’t read by lamplight. The wind doesn’t disturb you, does it? It seems unusually strong to-night.’
‘Just as usual to me. Seems to have been blowing like the dickens from the instant I topped the cliff three evenings ago. Does it ever get calm on this side of the island?’
‘Sometimes—but very rarely.’
‘Is there anything wrong, Mrs. Scaife?’
‘Wrong?’
‘Yes. I mean, what do you think could have disturbed me to-night? You didn’t come last night to ask me if anything was wrong—nor the two nights before.’
She did not lose her composure. ‘You’re certainly blunt, Mr. Woodsley. It’s a good trait. I like bluntness.’
I laughed. ‘Everybody won’t agree with you. Some people dislike me for my bluntness.’
She smiled. ‘I suppose so. My husband, Michael, was much like you so far as bluntness goes. I think it indicates a probing mind. Most forthright people have probing minds. Well, good night—and I’m glad you haven’t been troubled by anything.’
‘Good night, Mrs. Scaife—and I hope I won’t be.’
Going back to the easy chair by the window, I said to myself that had she been a young woman I would in no way have been puzzled over the incident. Indeed, I should have thought it perfectly understandable, and would even have been half-expecting it, for my vanity knows no limit, and she and I were alone in this big house, she the mistress and I her guest—and not a paying guest, either.
She had taken me in for the very simple reason that I had found myself stranded (if that is not too strong a word) in this part of the island. I had travelled here from Bridgetown on the chance that I would be able to secure a room at one of the two hotels. My fellow-boarders at the place I was staying had assured me that there would be no difficulty and it was a safe chance. But, on arrival, I found that the Easter holiday crowds had swamped every available room in both hotels. Even the little guesthouse called Shepherd’s Rest House had been filled, and the time being a quarter to seven in the evening and no buses leaving for Bridgetown until the next morning, I would have had to choose between sleeping in the open air or on the veranda of one of the hotels (if permitted). The fisherfolk seemed to look upon me with suspicion, as though I might have been an agent sent by Mr. Khrushchev to investigate the possibilities of secret submarine bases in Barbados. I felt afraid to ask any of them for accommodation. (My face, I admit, is one that can easily excite suspicion in the most trusting strangers. I have deep-sunk eyes, heavy brows, a glum expression and, generally, a distinctly sinister mien).
It was the bus-driver who advised me to try Eltonsbrody, the big house on Staden. After hearing my tale of failure he said: ‘Go up and try de big house you see yonder, chief. De ole lady, she’s a koindly lady. She sure to help you out for de noight.’
He was more than right. Mrs. Scaife’s face had become so lit up with pleasure on seeing me that I might have been a long-expected guest, or a beloved son or nephew who, after protracted travels, had, at last, returned to give her joy in her old age.
‘How long are you in Barbados for?’ she asked me. I told her a month.
‘The first time you’ve come to this island?’
‘The first time. I’m from England.’
‘Oh, you’re from England!’
‘Well, actually, I was born in Antigua, but my parents took me to England when I was two years old. I grew up in England.’
‘How long have you been in Barbados?’
‘Five days to be exact. I arrived last Saturday. I’m staying a month.’
‘Well, you must spend a week or two with me. This is the most beautiful part of the island—the Scotl
and District.’
‘So I’ve heard. That’s what has brought me this way. But I’m afraid too many other people thought the same, and the result is both the hotels, and even the resthouse, are crammed.’
‘That’s always the case at Easter. But never mind. I’m quite alone in this house. And strangers are always welcome, I’m sure.’ She smiled as she added this, and it was a cordial, good-natured smile. There was nothing in it that could make me feel like a lonely wayfarer about to be murdered in his sleep.
We argued a bit over the question of my paying for board and lodging, but it was I who lost the argument (not that I minded losing), for she refused absolutely to accept a penny from me. I must believe her that it was a pleasure to have me. The house was so dull and empty that it was a relief when she could persuade anyone to stay. There was a room which was always kept prepared for guests, as her son, Mitchell, in Bridgetown, and her little grandson, sometimes came to spend a week-end. ‘No, please don’t let the matter of money trouble you for an instant, Mr. Woodsley. Just make yourself at home and stay as long as you like.’
So within less than fifteen minutes I was well installed in my room. And within half an hour I was sitting down to dinner, a meal Mrs. Scaife herself prepared, for the servants had all gone home, she explained. She apologised for the scanty meal (a fried flying fish, bread and butter and jam and a cup of cocoa), but added that, of course, she had not expected me and she herself never ate a heavy dinner. In fact, for dinner she never had more than a piece of flying fish, two slices of bread and a cup of tea. Anything heavier would have given her indigestion. She generally retired at half-past seven, and to fall asleep with an undigested meal on her stomach meant bad dreams and possibly vertigo the following morning. She dined punctually at six every evening.
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