‘I have no name:
I am but two days old.’
What shall I call thee?
‘I happy am.
Joy is my name.’
Sweet joy befall thee!
Pretty joy!
Sweet joy but two days old.
Sweet joy I call thee:
Thou dost smile.
I sing the while
Sweet joy befall thee.
William Blake
Walking back from the Underground I pass three churches. Two of them are no longer conduits for celestial currents: one is a theatre, one derelict. In such a small bit of London, three churches … that other-worldly visitor so useful for enlivening our organs of comparison might, seventy years ago, have wondered, ‘What are they for, these buildings, so like each other, so unlike all the others, several to a district? Administrative buildings? A network of government offices? Newly built, too!’ But these days this person, she, he or it, would note the buildings are often unused. ‘A change of government perhaps?’ Yet certain types of buildings repeat themselves from one end of the city to the other. ‘Just as I saw on my last visit, there are “pubs” for dispensing intoxicants, and centres for fast movement by means of rail. Others are for the maintenance of machines like metal bugs or beetles – a new thing this, nothing like that last time I was here. And there is another new thing. Every few yards is a centre for the sale of drugs, chemical substances.’ A funny business – he, she or it might muse, mentally arranging the items of the report that will be faxed back to Canopus. ‘If I put them in order of frequency of occurrence, then chemists’ shops must come first. This is a species dependent on chemical additions to what they eat and drink.’ Within a mile of where I live there are at least fifteen chemists’ shops, and every grocery has shelves of medicines.
As I turn the corner past where the old man stood I leave behind the stink and roar of vehicles pushing their way northwards and I realize that for some minutes it has been unpleasant to breathe. Now Mill Lane, where shops are always starting up, going bankrupt, changing hands, particularly now with the trebling and quadrupling of rents and rates. Soon, I am in the little roads full of houses, and the traffic has become a steady but minor din. The streets here are classically inclined. Agamemnon, Achilles, Ulysses, and there is an Orestes Mews. Add to these names Gondar, and one may postulate an army man, classically educated, who was given the job of naming these streets. In fact, this was not so far wrong. The story was this. (True or false? Who cares? Every story of the past, recent or old, is bound to be tidied up, rounded off, made consequential.) An ex-army man, minor gentry, had a wife in the country with many children, and a mistress in town, with many more. To educate all these he went in for property, bought farmland that spread attractively over a hill with views of London, and built what must have been one of the first northern commuter suburbs… for remember, in the valley just down from this hill, towards London, were the streams, the cows and the green fields my old friend took a penny bus ride to visit every Sunday. The commuters went in by horse-bus or by train to the City.
Some of the buildings are Mansions, built from the start as flats, but most were houses, since converted into three flats. Hard to work out how these houses functioned. The cellars are all wet. In mine labels come off bottles in three months. Yet there was a lavatory down here. Used by whom? Surely nobody could have lived in this earthy cave? Perhaps it wasn’t wet then. Now a circular hole or mini-shaft has been dug into the soil, for the damp has long ago heaved off the cement floor, and in it one may watch the water level rise and fall. Not according to the rainfall: all of us in this area know the tides have something to do with the leaking pipes of the reservoir, which from my top window looks like an enormous green field, or village green, for there are great trees all around it: the Victorians put their reservoirs underground. (They say that if you know the man who has the task of guarding the precious waters, one may be taken through a small door and find oneself on the edge of a reach of still black water, under a low ceiling where lights gleam down. One may add to this attractively theatrical picture the faint plop of a rat swimming away from sudden light, and a single slow-spreading ripple.) The top of my house is a converted attic. But the attics were not converted then. There are three bedrooms on the second floor, one too small to share. Two rooms on the first floor, now one room, but then probably dining room and sitting room. A kitchen is pleasantly but inconveniently off a veranda or ‘patio’ – a recent addition. It was not a kitchen then. On the ground floor is one room, once two, and ‘conveniences’ also added recently. A garden room, most likely a nursery. In those days they had so many children, they often had relatives living with them, and every middle-class household had at least one servant, usually more. How were they all fitted in? Where did they cook, where was the larder, how did they get the washing done? And how did they keep warm? There are minuscule fire baskets in small fireplaces in every room.
A hundred years ago this suburb, these houses, were built, and they are solid and thick-walled and all the builders who come to mend roofs or fix plumbing tell you how well they were put up, how good the materials were. ‘We don’t build like that now.’ Nor are these experts dismayed by the wet cellar. ‘You keep that clay good and wet around your foundations, and it won’t shrink in these summers we are having now, and you won’t be sorry.’
As I turn the corner into the street I live in the light is arranging the clouds into tinted masses. The sunsets up here are, to say the least, satisfactory.
Ivy loads the corner house, and starlings are crowding themselves in there, swooping out, swirling back, to become invisible and silent until the morning.
Wilson Harris
[1921-]
Wilson Harris was born in New Amsterdam, British Guiana (now Guyana), into a middle-class family of Amerindian, African and European heritage. He was educated at Queen’s College in Georgetown, a highly regarded boys’ school, where he was able to study the standard works of English and classical literature. Such reading greatly influenced his own work, which, while far from classical in structure, is rife with allegory and mythical references.
In 1939 Harris studied land surveying and from 1942 to 1958 he worked as a government surveyor. The evocative landscape of Guyana, the isolation of the jungle and the people of varying race and class all have descriptive and symbolic roles in his fiction. Harris began his apprenticeship as a writer during this surveying period, contributing poems, stories, critical essays and reviews to the literary journal Kykover-al. In 1951 he published his first volume of verse, Fetish, under the pseudonym Kona Waruk. His next work, Eternity to Season, also a collection of poetry, was published in 1954. In the same year Harris married his first wife, Cecily Carew.
The year 1959 was a turning point for Harris. He and Carew divorced, and Harris moved to Britain, where he met and married the Scottish writer Margaret Burns. Not only did he establish a new residence in London but he also decided to abandon surveying and concentrate on writing. He supplemented his income with a lecturing and academic career, and his first compilation of speeches and essays, Tradition, the Writer & Society, was published in 1967. Later collections are Explorations (1981) and The Womb of Space (1983).
Harris’s fiction, like his poetry, does not provide ‘easy’ reading. His first novel, Palace of the Peacock (1960), was greeted with both excitement and some bewilderment. Since its publication, he has been a prolific author. While his works do contain common themes – cultural heterogeneity, the unity of humans and nature and individual redemption – his thirst for originality keeps his writing from becoming stale and repetitive. With each novel, he takes the English language even further beyond the boundaries of its conventional usage in order to explore his complex vision of the world. Other important works include The Secret Ladder (1963) and Carnival (1985).
As a lecturer, Harris has taken his ideas and experiences to universities around the world. In 1970 he was writer-in-residence at the University of the West Indies and the University of Toronto in Canada, and in 1972, 1980 and 1981–2 he was a visiting professor at the University of Texas at Austin. He was also writer-in-residence at Newcastle University in Australia, and he has guest-lectured in Denmark, India and at Yale in the United States. In 1972 Harris received a Guggenheim Fellowship. He has been the recipient of many other awards, including honorary doctorates from the University of the West Indies (1984) and the University of Kent at Canterbury (1988), and the Guyana National Prize for Fiction (1987). He most recently received an honorary doctorate from the University of Essex (1996). Despite the abundance of travel, Harris remains based in Britain, and it is here that he has produced the majority of his work. Perhaps he, like his fictional counterpart in Da Silva da Silva’s Cultivated Wilderness (1977) hears voices ‘at the heart of this great city, the regional accent of birds and bells, the voices of the past, the voices of the present’.
Although he has been a resident in Britain for almost forty years, everything Harris writes is underscored with evocations, both physical and mythical, of his native Guyana. Only Harris could describe a ‘straightforward’ colonial encounter between three West Indians in London, as he does in the following extract from his novel The Angel at the Gate (1982). Harris overlays it with a disturbing edge, yet still manages to render the whole as poetic. Perhaps more so than any West Indian-born author who has resided and worked in Britain, Harris has been innovative and original in language, theme and form.
From The Angel at the Gate
Lucy Brown, archetypal Jamaican tea-lady, of the electrical factory from which Sebastian had been fired in the summer of 1979, came to see Jackson during the week of the Brixton disturbances in 1981. She brought her daughter (whose name was also Lucy) – a young woman of nineteen – with her, and Jackson could see from the younger woman’s manner that she did not altogether relish coming. It was her first visit to North Pole Road but her mother – who was attached to Jackson – spoke of it often. Young Lucy sniffed and cast an unappreciative glance at the spartan room with its mist of faces on the ceiling. The cat lay coiled and still in a corner.
Lucy’s boyfriend had been arrested three days before in Brixton, and the older woman was unhappy over her daughter’s political acquaintance. She hid her anxieties and bustled all the more strenuously with trays of tea. Few of her friends saw her as she was, sagging body, psychical exhaustion. For nothing was self-evident on the surface. She dressed to preserve a robust appearance. Her composure in public was wooden save for a sudden, occasional flicker of alarm when she became enlivened – almost ecstatic – in confessing that blessings and misfortunes came three or four in a row.
Lucy Brown (the mother) had arrived in England from Jamaica on the day Jackson fell from a ladder. Lucy (the daughter) was born in Notting Hill Gate. Her birth coincided with the death of Indian Lucy in India after which Khublall had come to Europe with his shaven head. It was all recorded in Mary’s automatic writing and Angel Inn mirror’s wealth of a-causal coincidence enfolding series of ‘absences’ and ‘presences’ through which to read a conception of the family of Mack the Knife.
Lucy Brown had had a difficult time as an unmarried mother bringing up the child. She had met Jackson comparatively recently, scarcely more than four years ago, by chance, when he was returning home from his portering duties in a large hotel. They were sheltering from the rain in the wide doorway of the Odeon Cinema close to his workplace and he had casually asked her, on hearing her accent, whether she was interested in having some old furniture he had decided to get rid of.
It was what she wanted and she jumped at the opportunity, and that was how she first came to visit him in North Pole Road. Spartan as his flat was, it needed cleaning at times and she cleaned kitchen, bath, sitting room, etc., everything except the garden at the back in which the cat roamed and killed the occasional bird or mouse.
It was a curious friendship since Jackson was of middle-class Jamaican origins (he no longer possessed a bean of his father’s money) and she was of peasant stock from the hills and had retained traces of her accent and a modified pattern of West Indian speech.
She grew to trust him implicitly and he found himself by degrees linked to her by wry comedy, exasperated spirit, yet ominous and serious understanding.
‘Oh Mr Jackson,’ she said, ‘I been promising myself to bring Lucy to see you these past four year. She need counsel. The girl headstrong. She won’t listen to me …’
On the surface it seemed a familiar enough story to Jackson, the gulf between the generations. ‘You look well, Lucy,’ Jackson said, trying to make light of her woebegone countenance. ‘I mean your dress,’ he added soberly. ‘It’s new, isn’t it?’
Lucy was wearing a full dress that disguised and suited her large figure. ‘I not feeling as bright as I look, sir. And if I collapse on the road and got to be taken to hospital…’ She lifted her dress almost unconsciously to reveal a snow-white, spotless petticoat. ‘They say I would win a prize for the best-dressed tea-lady in London.’ Her voice rumbled into a laugh.
Jackson smiled. Lucy, the daughter, stared into space. It was astonishing how swiftly the older woman’s mood could change from sad to bright like flickering shadows in Angel Inn mirror.
‘You know, Mr Jackson,’ she confessed, ‘there’s nobody else in the world I talk to like you. You know my private feeling.’ She turned to her daughter. ‘I don’t mean by that what you thinking Lucy. All you young people is a hard generation …’
