The BBC and the Development of Anglophone Caribbean Literature, 1943-1958

Glyne A. Griffith

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9783319321189
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism for Comparative Literature
• Index: Literature

This book is the first to analyse how BBC radio presented Anglophone Caribbean literature and in turn aided and influenced the shape of imaginative writing in the region. Glyne A. Griffith examines Caribbean Voices broadcasts to the region over a fifteen-year period and reveals that though the program's funding was colonial in orientation, the content and form were antithetical to the very colonial enterprise that had brought the program into existence. Part literary history and part literary biography, this study fills a gap in the narrative of the region's literary history.

© The Author(s) 2016

G. A. GriffithThe BBC and the Development of Anglophone Caribbean Literature, 1943-1958New Caribbean Studieshttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-32118-9_2

Begin Abstract

Chapter 1 The Genesis of Caribbean Voices: People and Policies

Glyne A. Griffith¹

(1)

University at Albany, Albany, NY, USA

End Abstract

Let us begin with two pieces of correspondence from near the end of Henry Swanzy’s term as editor of Caribbean Voices. On 27 November 1953, Swanzy sent a letter from his Oxford Street office in London to his sub-editor and submissions agent, Cedric Lindo in Jamaica. ¹ The letter sought Lindo’s advice on the appropriateness of editorial comments Swanzy intended to make during his next scheduled summary of the previous six months of broadcasts to the Anglophone Caribbean. The following excerpt indicates some of the concerns that Swanzy conveyed to Lindo:

On wider details, I am thinking of referring in the next summary to the death of Seepersad Naipaul, and to the illness of Sam Selvon, and the failure to send [Derek] Walcott to Europe. The last two would be critical remarks, and perhaps you think they would not be suitable in a thing like a summary. It does seem to me that the powers-that-be ought to be made aware of the value of literary work, from the prestige point of view, and the neglect of West Indian writers is really shocking … I might also refer to the arrest of Martin Carter in Guyana, one poet who was never a contributor [to CaribbeanVoices]. ²

In his 10 December reply, Lindo agreed that these concerns and references were well founded and therefore Swanzy included the comments in his editorial summary. The following year, 1954, Swanzy learned that Oxford University had received a gift of £30,000 for Colonial Studies from the Carnegie Foundation and he wrote to Margery Perham of Nuffield College, Oxford, a historian and scholar of colonial administration who worked with the BBC, in an attempt to procure funding for the Caribbean Voices program and to assist aspiring writers in the region:

The reason for my writing is that I learned yesterday from Arthur Creech Jones who was doing a broadcast that the latest gift to Oxford has been £30,000 from Carnegie for Colonial Studies. He also told me that you said that the authorities did not quite know what they were going to do with it. I wonder therefore, if you would be prepared to consider doing something to help creative writers in the West Indies particularly, but to some extent in Africa as well? ³

In his letter to Margery Perham, Swanzy also stated that the BBC Caribbean Voices allowance of £1500 per year was inadequate to help sustain promising Caribbean writers such as Samuel Selvon who was trying to get a London flat for himself, his wife, and their child, all recently recovered from a prolonged illness. He indicated that the sum was too little to help a young Derek Walcott who was looking to travel to England, and that it was too paltry a sum to help Eric Roach in Trinidad and Wilson Harris in Guyana. It was also inadequate, he concluded, to help a young Trinidadian student named Vidia Naipaul who was studying at Oxford University. ⁴

I have begun this examination of the history and importance of the development of Caribbean Voices with a glance towards the end of Swanzy’s editorship in order to show his consistent commitment over the years. But this is also a narrative journey that is retrospective and that therefore takes advantage of the privileges of hindsight. As we will discover across the arc of this literary history, this is also a story that offers a critical assessment of the literary radio program, its personalities, its cultural contexts, and its significant aesthetic and material achievements, a story that falls centrally within the present realities of Anglophone Caribbean literature and criticism. We cannot properly understand the shape and development of the literature of the region, or the challenges and triumphs of so many of the writers of that important shaping period of the 1940s and 1950s without a sustained critical examination of the BBC Caribbean Voices program and its most influential editor, Henry Swanzy. It is a critical examination of this important period of regional literary development that this book provides.

In our journey back to the beginnings of this literary radio program that had its birth on 11 March 1943 and was broadcast each Sunday to the English-speaking Caribbean until its close on 7 September 1958, we will explore vitally important developmental years for the literature of the region and also for Anglophone Caribbean literary and cultural criticism. As we will see, such literary and critical development occurred at the intersection of two different public media, that is to say, print publication and radio broadcast.

Una Marson, a Jamaican writer and social activist, with the assistance of Rudolph Dunbar, a classical clarinetist from Guyana, conceived the idea for the program and proposed it to the BBC, and Marson then nurtured it through its first five uncertain years of existence. ⁵ However, it was Henry Swanzy who, more than any of the program’s other editors, influenced its shape, direction, and development. He was the program’s editor for eight of its total fifteen years of existence, having taken it over after Marson’s return to Jamaica.

I have begun this literary history of Caribbean Voices with excerpts from two of Henry Swanzy’s later letters because they demonstrate, inter alia, his commitment to Anglophone Caribbean writers and their intellectual and artistic nurture at a time when there was often more disinterest, skepticism, and neglect than sustained support for such endeavor in the region. Thus, this narrative of Caribbean Voices is also the story of Henry Swanzy and his enduring commitment to the literature and the writers of the region. It is the story of friendships, collaborative efforts, and steadfast faith in the promise of literary achievements to come, even in the face of discouraging and, at times, hostile responses to such faith. It is a story of the intertwining technologies of radio and writing and the complex ideological tensions between a waning empire and its colonies. But for the most part, it is the story of the early years of Anglophone Caribbean literature, its nurture, and its experiments in self-recognition and self-definition.

A significant aspect of what this book articulates, therefore, is a clear sense of the value of Caribbean Voices and of Henry Swanzy’s nurture of writers, not only in terms of material sustenance and the marketing of their work via BBC radio, but also in terms of the aesthetic shape the developing literature took, partially as a result of Swanzy’s own literary perspective and editorial vision. Swanzy and the BBC Caribbean Voices program contributed much more to the development of Anglophone Caribbean literature than is generally known or widely acknowledged. Here, for example, is George Lamming’s account of one aspect of Swanzy’s contribution to the development of the literature:

Our sole fortune now was that it was Henry Swanzy who produced ‘Caribbean Voices.’ At one time or another, in one way or another, all West Indian novelists have benefited from his work and his generosity of feeling. For Swanzy was very down to earth. If you looked a little thin in the face, he would assume that there might have been a minor famine on, and without in any way offending your pride, he would make some arrangement for you to earn. Since he would not promise to ‘use’ anything you had written, he would arrange for you to earn by employing you to read. No comprehensive account of writing in the British Caribbean during the last decade [the 1950s] could be written without considering his whole achievement and his role in the emergence of the West Indian novel. ⁶

Here, Lamming highlights Swanzy’s efforts regarding material sustenance, something that is so easily overlooked when the critical focus is primarily, if not exclusively, on aesthetic matters, but any committed artist knows that such base prerequisites as material sustenance, a literal “room of one’s own” is absolutely necessary if the creative imagination is to be sustained, developed, and promoted. But Lamming also goes beyond material sustenance when he indicates that no “comprehensive account of writing in the British Caribbean during the last decade could be written without considering his [Swanzy’s] whole achievement and his role in the emergence of the West Indian novel.” ⁷ Thus the issue turns not only on material sustenance, but also to creative and aesthetic concerns relevant to the emergence of the Anglophone Caribbean novel.

Indeed, Swanzy’s work with the nascent literature demonstrated his great and abiding concern with aesthetic issues, and his early call for literary contributions from the region that expressed what he termed, “local color” was not indicative of a superficial or colonialist desire for the literary equivalent of tropical exotica. When Swanzy received, for example, a copy of Derek Walcott’s first collection of poems entitled 25 Poems sent to him by Frank Collymore in Barbados, who had coincidentally received them from Harold Simmons of St. Lucia, Swanzy wrote to Collymore and to Cedric Lindo in Jamaica, praising the young Walcott’s craft. Certainly some of Swanzy’s comments in his letter to Lindo ring prophetic now as a consequence of hindsight:

Dear Mrs. Lindo:

You will know what I think of Derek Walcott from the recent broadcast–I was advised to remove the substantive “genius” but I certainly agree that he is much the most gifted of all those writing verse known to me. I am sending the volume to Roy Fuller later, perhaps for a serious criticism. Incidentally, it is inscribed to “E.L. Edmett, for use in Caribbean Voices”… I gather that this misdirection was due to Harold Simmonds, who visited this country recently but did not call on me. I am sorry, because I would like Walcott’s autograph, which I think may well become valuable later on.⁸

On yet another occasion, Swanzy communicated to George Lamming his praise of the young writer’s first novel, In the Castle of My Skin (1953). Then, he wrote:

I think it is masterly … All in all, however hard I try, I find it difficult not to make high claims silently for this first full-length achievement of yours. The judgment runs so strong and clear. If you go on as you have begun, I feel it is possible that you may play a part in causing people to strike many of the camps of the world and march on into a new and quite different order of experience. ⁹

Henry Swanzy’s readings were generally critical and demanding, but when he encountered work that he believed bespoke excellence and promise, he was pleased to offer judicious praise and meaningful support. We might contrast his attempts at judiciousness and balance in critical activities with some other less encouraging and salutary comments of the day. Here, in contrast, was Eric Coddling’s (Eric Coddling was the pseudonym adopted by Cedric Lindo) response to Lamming’s first novel as conveyed in a letter to Swanzy:

[P]assed it on to Eric Coddling who read it through but found it tedious. In a review he has done he says that there are scores of good passages and ideas which one can quote but the whole doesn’t add up to an enjoyable book–says he is fond of children but there is a limited time he is prepared to spend with them, but the author doesn’t seem to be of the same mind. ¹⁰

In another letter to Swanzy, written in November that same year (1953), Lindo stated, “George Lamming’s book, I see, has appeared in America. It got a very good review in Time–not that I always agree with their literary critics.” ¹¹ But it was not just Lamming’s early work which garnered praise from Henry Swanzy in London while eliciting much less generous commentary from Eric Coddling back home in the region. Frank Collymore, the editor of the important literary magazine, Bim, in Barbados and himself the nurturing “godfather” of much literary talent within and beyond the shores of his island home, lamented to Swanzy on several occasions his concern with a local intelligentsia that seemed, at best, ungenerous toward the work of several writers whom Collymore believed to be genuinely gifted and promising. The lament from Collymore was, at times, a cry of despair regarding the continued publication of Bim magazine. Collymore wrote to Swanzy on several occasions decrying the lack of critical openness and generosity, as he perceived it, among several Barbadian critics:

Dear Henry,

Thank you for your very welcome and encouraging letter of January 11. I write “encouraging” because your comment on Bim 15 has been practically the only word of encouragement I have received since its publication. I cannot remember if I told you, but [Neville] Connell in the Advocate wrote such an adverse criticism of the contents that I almost began to wonder if it was worthwhile continuing. His criticism was for the most part of such a nature that it could easily be refuted, but it gives an indication nevertheless that the “intelligentsia” in Barbados are still far too conservative in their literary outlook to think that anything of remotest consequence can originate in the Caribbean.¹²

Among the writers included in Bim (Vol. 4 No. 15) who fell victim on that occasion to Neville Connell’s review were Samuel Selvon and Derek Walcott, as well as George Lamming. Regarding a Trinidadian character in one of Selvon’s narrative sketches, Connell argued that verisimilitude was compromised in the sketch because “no one who would listen to Chopin and be capable of propounding a metaphysical theory would … speak so ungrammatically.” Commenting on Lamming’s poem “Swans,” Connell suggested that “swans are not imperturbable since they are so easily disturbed” and he proposed that “aristocratic cannot be applied to the sky since the word is applicable only to a class of persons.” Finally, he said of Walcott’s poem “Sambo,” that it is “unintelligible–the writer should make use of a rhyming dictionary.” ¹³ But where Connell questioned Walcott’s use of rhyme, Cedric Lindo questioned the poet’s knowledge of syntax:

There are some passages I like in this latest lot of Derek’s work … But I am now inclined to agree with his English professor who claims that Derek does not know the meaning of words. In the poem ‘The Coming Easter’ he speaks of ‘anger of bannaret and drum’ and I am sure he believes that ‘bannaret’ is a kind of banner but I have not had time to straighten this out with him. Similarly in ‘Choc Bay’ he speaks about ‘errand’ tides when he must mean ‘errant.’ He also says that he has written you ‘an exhausting letter.’ I trust he means ‘exhaustive’ ...