A Memoir from the Archives:
Vol. 15, No. 60, Pages 303–309 (June 1976)
I met Edgar on a coach—on the way to the Writers' Summer School in Derbyshire (the school is an annual event). He said: "Is this seat taken?" and I said: "No." Our first conversation included graveyards and old churches; reincarnation, in which we both believed; and writing, in which I too was interested. He told me how he liked to make some characters in his novels "a little nutty", for he felt that this would excuse any extraordinary views they expressed, or any extraordinary incidents he invented. In one of his books, "The Weather in Middenshot,” there is an old man who believes—or pretends to believe—that his very living and present wife is dead; whenever he needs to communicate with her, he stages a spiritualistic seance.
I remember being impressed by the way Edgar (who, in 1959, when we met, had fourteen published novels and one non-fiction work, "With a Carib Eye", to his credit) behaved at the school with all the modesty of a beginner—or with the modesty a beginner should have.
Born in British Guiana, he was living in London—Maida Vale—when I met him. He had been previously married, and had four children, but was divorced. His first wife was a Trinidadian Naval Reserve, he lived for six years in Trinidad. Then, when he first came to England, he worked with the British Council, until he began to try to live entirely by his writing.
Another job he once had was as a meteorologist. He was fascinated by weather, and at home we had—I still have—a number of charts, thermometers, barometers and hygrometers.
He had always had a chequered career with his writing. Perhaps not more than have a number of people, for surely it is a chancy career for anyone, but he felt that he was fated to be unlucky. His first novel to be accepted, "Corentyne Thunder", was published (in 1941) only after a lot of ups and downs, and there was a nine-year interval before the appearance of his next novel—the much better known "A Morning at the Office”. Yet at the time when I met him he was publishing two novels a year; he could write very fast, straight off the typewriter, seldom making a rough draft before the fair copy.
In spite or because of a very religious family background, Edgar found no consolation in orthodox religion.
Of recent years, he had written two books very important to him, as if they must be written before too late. "A Swarthy Boy" (autobiographical) and "The Aloneness of Mrs. Chatham". The latter contains much of his thoughts and feelings—from his political opinions, sociological ideas, to his belief in Yoga and the occult.
He had composed several versions of this novel before the published one.
For the five years of our marriage we were living in a rented cottage in the grounds of a larger house. We used to collect wildflowers. We didn't have a garden of our own, although in the time of our first landlady we were allowed to use part of the garden. My husband planted some of the flowers in a pot just outside the cottage.
Edgar used to make dandelion wine and blackberry wine.
He loved the countryside. We went for country walks (rather circumspect ones by my standards because he didn't like mud and, in any case, from where we lived it was difficult to get farther into the wilds than fields and lanes). He painted watercolours mostly of trees—and we had several of his paintings in the cottage, of views we could see from the window or nearby. And in one of his lighter novels, "Of Trees and the Sea", his sketches of Caribbean trees are the most delightful part. He had a deep feeling for beauty, as shows too in the descriptive passages in his novels. His love of this kind of thing was part of the softer side of him.
His death was, in a sense, violent. He has been described as having this streak of violence which found its outlet in demanding that violence be used against violent criminals. This may be true. In writing and speaking, he expressed his views strongly, even violently. Certainly the conflicts between softness and hardness [were] even stronger in him than in most people. Edgar stressed so much the theme of strength versus weakness (i.e., the need to fight strength with strength; not with "weakness", into which category he would put, for instance, non-violence), and it may be significant that he himself has been described both as "strong" and "weak" according to the viewpoints of the people who have spoken to me.
But, to return to the views he held on crime, there is an obvious logic in these quite apart from anything else which may have been going on inside him. He was far from advocating violence for violence's sake. The aspect he stressed was that the law should see, unsentimentally, certain (homicidal or potentially so) criminals as incorrigible, and put them to death for the sake of protecting society (he recommended cyanide as more merciful than hanging). He was in favour of sterner punishments altogether, seeing them as deterrents. He realised that the majority of ordinary people were on his side; but he knew that the fashionable intellectuals were against him, and guessed that this was why he had difficulty in finding publishers for some of his latest books. Notably "The Aloneness of Mrs. Chatham" and "The Piling of Clouds”.
A passage from "The Aloneness of Mrs. Chatham”:
"Every day we read in our newspapers of some ruthless thug or band of thugs attacking decent people, injuring, murdering, robbing. Well, surely, we have to look at the matter realistically. If we simply take these men and put them in prison for a few years and then release them, isn't it obvious that they are going to return over and over again? What really effective means of curbing them
have we got save extermination? ... Prison doesn't cure them ... And they keep escaping.”
Psychiatrists and their attempts to cure homicidal lunatics? N.B.G., according to Edgar.
I have chosen that "Mrs. Chatham" passage for the way it puts across the logic of his views, rather than for vehemence of expression. There are other, more vehement passages; Edgar's readers will know what I mean. Not only may he have found, in expressing these views, an outlet for the conflict in himself; but he may quite simply have hated the violence in others (criminals) all the more because of his own conflict. Many people, by the way, have been struck by the gentle aspect of his nature—an aspect very apparent to me.
As a husband, he was gentle and protective. Domestic. He used to be a familiar sight in Farnham where we lived, a tall, thin figure, striding rapidly, doing the shopping with his holdall. In the early days, of our marriage particularly, I—being much younger, and less strong-willed, than he was, and not very confident or practical—used to be afraid that I would never have a chance to learn to do things for myself. I have explained that he was gentle, but he also liked to have his own way, and was extremely argumentative. The other person always had to be the one to know where to stop in an argument (being fairly argumentative myself, I had some difficulty in learning this). Yet he could evoke great affection and sympathy. He could make me enter into his world—his own peculiar way of seeing things.
He was also a marvellous lover.
What I call "his world" was individual—unique—like Edgar himself—giving rise to the very individual style of writing, as in the unusual similes.
"She had a wide face and hair the colour of dead bracken, yet alive with wispy waves and unexpected lights like spiritfuzz or lint in a sunbeam.”
"She had full breasts and they bounced vibrantly beneath her pullover like young pumpkins electrified by elfin lightning.”
Those are two descriptions of the same character in "The Wounded and the Worried”.
Did Edgar have a sense of humour? A friend of ours wrote about him:
"An ascetic who likes his electric blanket—he is genuinely different, really modest, and the only person I've ever liked who entirely lacked a sense of humour.”
"Entirely lacked" is not really true. But he did have a knack of being on a different wavelength from anyone else in company so that he would miss the humour of something. I remember, once while we were having dinner with another friend, he told her in a shocked way about how he had found out that I didn't know what black pudding was. Our friend teased him: "But, Edgar, do you mean to say you married Jackie although she didn't know what black pudding is?" (her italics; she talks in italics). Edgar replied, still quite seriously, merely stating a fact: "I didn't realise then that she didn't know," and couldn't understand what we were laughing at.
In fact, it would have taken much more than black pudding to keep Edgar and me from marrying (to him, by the way, I was never "Jackie". Always "Jac" or "Jacqueline". More feminine, he said.)
Many of my memories of how his sense of humor did function concern intimate things, jokes between the two of us.
Over these things he was a lively and delightful companion. At school apparently he was noted as a humourist, but one gathers that was schoolboy buffoonery. He would repeat over and over something which had gone down well the first time, and on one occasion the master had to tell him: "Mittelbolzer, the point of that joke has deteriorated.”
I don't think Edgar saw much humour in the ordinary annoying things which go wrong in life, and which can make one laugh afterwards (which is a lot of what is meant by a sense of humour, of course). Even as I write this, it occurs to me more strongly than before that this may have been one of his great misfortunes.
The cottage we lived in had trees—beeches and elms—around it in the grounds of a bigger house. It was quiet. Was it too quiet? But Edgar loved his routine. He got up before I did and prepared the breakfast; shopped and went to the library in the mornings; wrote in the afternoons; read or listened to the radio in the evenings. He also liked to have a brief afternoon rest. In the evening we sometimes listened to records. Wagner perhaps. Sometimes we went to the theatre, usually the Farnham repertory. Our visitors were close friends. And relatives—Edgar's brothers and sister-in-law, my mother and aunts.
People didn't serve a[s] distractions to Edgar's worries as I—though far from madly social myself—hoped they might have done. I am not thinking so much of the times when he avoided going to see people as of how—even when he was with them, and even when they were the sort of people with whom he could discuss literature, ideas, etcetera—one could see they were not serving as distractions (this in the period when he was particularly worried). Perhaps this was natural. It is not my purpose here to discuss these "worries"—except to say that he had a strong sense of responsibility which did not go easily with an artistic temperament. Another of the contrasts. Part of the contrast between the poetic streak and the love of discipline and order.
It wouldn't be true to say that he disliked people. He liked women particularly. He told me how, when he started work with the British Council, he was delighted to be working in a roomful of women—to the surprise of the very English man who offered him the post!
My husband had a way of not listening to someone with whom he strongly disagreed. He really was not interested. He felt, temporarily, that such a person was beneath contempt. This could give an impression (unusual in a novelist?) of Edgar not liking or being interested in people. And yet when people were in trouble, as when some friends of ours suffered a serious misfortune (or when he heard of people starving; this seemed to make a great impression on him), nobody could be more sympathetic than my husband; nobody could more sincerely and unselfconsciously feel for them. He was considerate in the presents he gave. An umbrella was obtained promptly for my mother when he noticed hers was broken. And he sent money presents, whenever he could afford it, for his parents, sister and aunt in British Guiana.
Edgar had a catalyst effect on people. Once he cured a woman who had a neurotic fear of going out alone. He cured her simply by arguing with her. By the extreme honesty he had about things, his integrity to something at least as how he saw it, he could make people see themselves without his necessarily having understood them. He did not dig deep into motives, but could frequently hit the nail on the head about the facts. Or even if he got the facts wrong, he could still do something…. Often when he criticised my work for me, I felt he didn't understand what I was trying to say—even when other people could understand it! Yet, if ever I make a success of my writing (and I came to realise that he himself thought I might), I shall probably feel that Edgar helped me a great deal.
He was keenly observant, as a novelist, or any kind of artist, needs to be, and he has taught me something that way, too.
Edgar thought that one became part of the "rot" (which he felt had set in on British society) if one kept animals as pets. Yet more than once he brought home a bird for me to feed and look after—a sparrow or a chaffinch which had been knocked down by a car. And he took great interest in feeding the birds which came on to our windowsill.
He himself, in talking to me, and in "A Swarthy Boy", spoke of the conflict in him between "the warrior" and "the idyll". My insistence on the conflicting "soft" and "hard " streaks reminds me of the well-known "Kaywana" trilogy of novels in which the old plantation family, whose history Edgar traces, have a dominant "strong" streak battling all the time with the undercurrent of a "weak" streak. I call this trilogy Edgars great “strength versus weakness" epic.
He had been experimenting recently with a style of writing in which he eschewed "stream of consciousness" and, in fact, what the characters were thinking was not mentioned directly at all. "She seemed to be thinking" would be used instead of "she thought". The effect was supposed to be of the story unfolding objectively, as it would be seen through the eyes of a perceptive observer. I think this worked. Most of the characters' reactions had to be seen through the dialogue, as in a play. My husband had, without finding a market for them, written a number of plays, and at one time belonged to a play-writing circle.
Edgar's hero—perhaps his greatest hero—was Wagner. I like Wagner's music tremendously myself now, but—not having noticed it much before I met Edgar—I shall perhaps never know how much my liking for it is straightforward and how much connected with my memories of my husband. Though I do know what I like about it. It is the range from power to tenderness—and also the descriptive power of the music, as in the leitmotivs. What I am trying to lead up to is another kind of experimental writing which Edgar did in the last few years. It was to make use of the Wagnerian leitmotiv system in writing. You really need to read the books to understand it. "Latticed Echoes" and "Thunder Returning". Especially "Thunder Returning" as this contains an explanatory foreword! The two books are novels—with readable stories easy to follow because of the dialogue; the leitmotiv technique is all contained in the descriptive passages.
Edgar loved England. Yet, once settled here in England, I believe he felt he might have been still more at home in Germany. As with many people who have German blood, the German fought with all the other blood, trying to come out stronger. From the German in him came the great admiration he had for discipline in any form. Perhaps the romantic streak, too. It is his contrasts which make him so interesting.
He never liked to have the label put on him of "West Indian novelist". And all his more recent novels have been set in England though the early ones were, naturally, of the Caribbean; he always liked to write about a setting with which he was familiar. As it happens, one of his favourite among his novels was a Caribbean one—"Shadows Move Among Them”.
We spent our honeymoon—beautiful, romantic, not very disciplined—on the Rhine (German part of the Rhine). Oberwesel; Boppard, where bells were ringing nearly all the time…. We picked a sprig of privet in Boppard. We brought it home, and Edgar planted it just outside the cottage where we lived, and it flourished. I don't live there anymore, but I still have a cutting.
Other contrasts in our life together were the actual contrasts between Edgar and me. The difference in our ages and extent of experience. And Edgar pouring scorn on "idealists" or any "progressive" movements. Me interested in the C.N.D. and similar movements, and having marched from Aldermaston (even a few days before our wedding) and done other hopeful things. Me hating everything I hear about apartheid; Edgar always putting the case for the whites in South Africa. Edgar voting Conservative for want of something better. Me voting Labour for the same reason. And I am very fond of animals, while Edgar preferred them at a distance. But we liked many of the same kinds of books, almost all the same kinds of music. Edgar introduced me to some. And we were both very interested in the occult; read books about Yoga, astral projection, reincarnation—and a sprinkling of ghost stories among our fiction reading. We both liked, too, Omar Khayyam and T. S. Eliot.
Sometimes scolded by Edgar for not being sufficiently orderly, I found it rather steadying to live with someone who liked a strict routine. Of course, the routine changed a bit after the birth of our son—whom we called "Leodegar", a family name of some kinsmen Edgar discovered, the Mittelholzers who had lived for centuries in Appensell, Switzerland.
When Edgar first saw Leodegar (who[se] very dark eyes, in particular, are unmistakably Edgar), he pretended to be appalled at how much the child resembled him. "He scowled at me, man!" The baby had its thumb in its mouth; Edgar took it out; the baby put it back. Foretaste of battle of wills in the future? He was very fond of Leodegar. Called him "Boy"; used to give him his bath; feed him if I went out; teach him German phrases. But “the future" only went on for a little more than two years after the baby's birth.