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Mittelholzer was a mulatto, of old mixed race; but, unlike Walcott, he didn’t put himself on the black side. Mittelholzer made a great play with his name, sometimes spelling it with the umlaut on the “o.” Sometimes he spoke in a general way of a Dutch ancestor, sometimes (towards the end, like a man who had done research on the subject) he spoke of a Swiss ancestor who migrated to Guyana in the eighteenth century. Some of this would, of course, have been true.
    The office of Edgar’s novel was in Trinidad, the characters a gallery of racial stereotypes, quite shocking to local people; but that was Edgar’s Dutch or Swiss way in these matters. Two novels later, Edgar moved to the publishing house of Secker and Warburg. It pleased him then to find that he was not too much darker than his publisher Fred Warburg; it was an unexpected way of judging a publisher. He had begun to write slave-plantation melodramas (race and sex and the whip) set in Guyana, and he wrote as a planter and a Dutchman. His books,
Children of Kaywana, Kaywana Blood, The Harrowing of Hubertus
, had a kind of vogue. But it was or became a crowded field, and Edgar’s books have now disappeared.
    Every writer of the region has to find a way of going on, of not drying up, of overcoming the limitations of the place. Walcott borrowed Spanish plays and did them over with local characters. The plantation novel was Edgar’s way. It gave him room; he liked the idea of the large narrative. He couldn’t stay with the quiet Trinidad material of
A Morning at the Office
. That novel, with its simplicities, had said all that he wanted to say, from his special point of view, about the colony. And Edgar might have said that the simplicities, his way of dealing only with the externals of things, matched the setting and the material. There was no depth to go into.
    Some time in early 1965—I had long moved away from
Caribbean Voices
and the BBC Caribbean Service and from radio generally—Edgar sent me a little green-covered booklet that had been printed in Trinidad in the late 1940s. The booklet, closely printed and only a few pages long, contained work that had been read to a local writing group. This writing group was the idea of an Irish judge who had arrived in the colony not long before. He provided the drink and the encouragement and would have paid for the printing of the little booklet. There was a story by Edgar in this booklet; a piece by George Lamming, I believe; and a story by my father.
    I knew the story well. My father had written it in painful circumstances. We had been reduced at the time to living in one room in my grandmother’s house in Port of Spain. It was quite a short story, but I remember how my father had laboured on the writing. The material was precious to him, part of his small store as a writer: an account (which he wouldhave had from his mother) of the wretchedness that attended his birth: his mother chased away by his father and going in her destitution, perhaps walking all the way, to have her child at her mother’s. Everyone in this story of 1906 was very poor indeed, unprotected, close to helplessness, no one truly a villain. My father handled this background of poverty and heartache in his own way. He overlaid it with the beauty of the old ritual that had to follow the birth of a child. This would have made it easier for him to write; yet at the same time he must often have thought (though he said nothing) that more than forty years after the time of his story he was still unaccommodated in the world.
    The booklet was precious to me. I kept it longer than I should. I suppose I had some idea of having it copied, not as easy then as it became later, and didn’t know how to go about it. And then there came a furious letter from Edgar. He wanted the booklet back. He was quite enraged. He couldn’t be denied. I sent the booklet back with an apology.
    Not long after there came a shocking