my bones and my flute by edgar mittelholzer

Undeterred, Mittelholzer wrote Corentyne Thunder, in 1938. Nearly all his approaches met with rebuffs, as in the 1920s and 1930s the idea of Caribbean fiction was as yet unknown. He took refuge in reading and writing from an early age – again, to his father’s dismay – and kept voluminous diaries while bombarding London magazines and publishers with short stories. Race, racism and neurosis appear to have filled Mittelholzer’s early colonial years. Family life was genteel and repressed. For his father, Edgar’s colour was “a momentous disappointment”: “I was the Dark One at whom he was always frowning and barking.” Photos show a tall, rather gaunt man, with staring eyes and a sallow, rather than dark, complexion. In race-conscious British Guiana the Mittelholzers were firmly “white”, yet Edgar’s birth seemingly revealed some hitherto hidden family history, as he was – as he himself put it – “swarthy” – A Swarthy Boy is the painfully self-conscious title of his 1963 autobiography. Mittelholzer was born in British Guiana – now, of course, independent Guyana – into a family of predominantly European descent. His father was of Swiss-German origin and his mother from a light-skinned family from Martinique. There had previously been writers from the region, such as the Jamaican journalist HG de Lisser, who made money from their fiction, but Edgar Mittelholzer, born on December 16, 1909, was the earliest recorded author from the region to make a living – and a very precarious one it would turn out to be – from his pen. This year marks the centenary of the birth of the Caribbean’s first professional novelist. James Ferguson celebrates his struggleīy James Ferguson | Issue 100 (November/December 2009)

Edgar Mittelholzer produced over a dozen books, despite the shadows that closed around him.

My bones and my flute by edgar mittelholzer