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The Piling of Clouds by Edgar Mittelholzer. London. 1961. Putnam. 262 pages. Jacket design by Oscar. hardcover.

DESCRIPTION - The suffering of children at the hands of sexual maniacs is a problem that haunts out time. This story is about it – and it is a horrifying story, not from any explicit violence or grimness, but because the author explores the roots of guilt with patient insight, and finds them more widely spread than most of us would like to think. Mr Mittelholzer’s novel concerns an ordinary – but alert and interesting – suburban family, husband and wife, with one growing daughter. Peter Elmfold is sharply aware of contemporary political and social problems, and holds strong views on how they should be tackled. For ‘pseudo-liberals’ and the advocates of gentleness he has nothing but scorn, calling them ‘would-rotters’, people possessed with a ‘fade-out wish.’ In the course of a few summer weeks, the clouds pile up over this couple with – for all Peter’s talk – their real tolerance and easy-going sexual morality; and eventually the terrible storm breaks.

Edgar Mittelholzer (16 December 1909 - 5 May 1965) was a Guyanese novelist. He was the son of William Austin Mittelholzer and his wife Rosamond Mabel, née Leblanc. Mittelholzer wrote virtually nothing but fiction and earned his living by it. He is thus the first professional novelist to come out of the English-speaking Caribbean. Some of Mittelholzer's novels include characters and situations from a variety of places within the Caribbean. They range in time from the earliest period of European settlement to the present day and deal with a cross section of ethnic groups and social classes, not to mention subjects of historical, political, psychological, and moral interest. CORENTYNE THUNDER signaled the birth of the novel in Guyana. Mittelholzer wrote CORENTYNE THUNDER in 1938 at the age of twenty nine. At the time he was living and working odd jobs in New Amsterdam. The manuscript was sent to England and had a perilous existence until finally it found a publisher in 1941. In December, 1941, Mittelholzer left Guyana for Trinidad as a recruit in the Trinidad Royal Volunteer Naval Reserve, and CORENTYNE THUNDER was published by Eyre and Spottiswoode. He served in the TRVNR, ‘one of the blackest and most unpleasant interludes’ in his life, until he was discharged on medical grounds in August, 1942, and decided to make Trinidad his home, having married a Trinidadian, Roma Halfhide, in March, 1942. In 1947 Mittelholzer decided that he should go to England since he was convinced that only by so doing would he stand a chance of succeeding as a writer. He had been maintaining himself and his family with a variety of odd jobs such as receptionist at the Queen's Park Hotel and clerk at the Planning and Housing Board. He sailed for England with his wife and daughter in 1948, taking the manuscript of A MORNING AT THE OFFICE with him. In London, Mittelholzer went to work in the Books Department of the British Council as a copytypist. Through a fellow worker he met Leonard Woolf in June, 1949, and the result was the publication in 1950 by the Hogarth Press of A MORNING AT THE OFFICE. Peter Nevill published his third novel, SHADOWS MOVE AMONG THEM in April, 1951, and in 1952 brought out the first volume of Mittelholzer monumental historical epic, CHILDREN OF KAYWANA. After its appearance, and despite hostile reviews, Mittelholzer took the crucial decision to give up his job at the British Council and to live entirely by his writing. In May, 1952, Mittelholzer was granted a Guggenheim Fellowship for Creative Writing. He decided to spend the year in Montreal and to use his time there finishing the second volume of the Kaywana trilogy. The long Canadian winter of 1952-53 made him decide to move to Barbados with his wife and four children, and he spent the next three years in the West Indies. In that time he completed THE LIFE AND DEATH OF SYLVIA (1953), the second volume of the trilogy, HUBERTUS (1954), and his terrifying ghost story, MY BONES AND MY FLUTE (1955). He was also to use this Barbadian setting for four other novels. In May, 1956, Mittelholzer returned to England. His marriage was deteriorating steadily, and he was granted a divorce in May, 1959, with his wife receiving custody of the two boys and two girls. In August, 1959, he met Jacqueline Pointer at a writers' workshop and married her in April, 1960. From 1950 to 1965 (with the exception of 1964) Mittelholzer had published at least one novel a year. He had stopped using an agent and handled all his books himself. At first it seemed a wise move, and in 1952 he began an association with Secker and Warburg that was to last over nine years and thirteen books, but in 1961 there was a falling-out over THE PILING OF THE CLOUDS, which they refused to publish because it was ‘pornographic.’ The novel was to be rejected by five publishers before Putnam published it in 1961, to be followed by THE WOUNDED AND THE WORRIED (1962) and his autobiography in 1963. He had promised them a second volume which never materialized after he broke with them as well. Mittelholzer's problems were steadily growing, and critical reception of his work was increasingly hostile. He had acquired the reputation of being ‘a problem author,’ and after 1961, he tells us, he lived ‘under an ever-darkening cloud-pall of opprobrium’ (Jacqueline Mittelholzer, ‘The Idyll and the Warrior,’ p. 86). He felt persecuted, convinced that the poor reviews of his books were damaging his literary reputation and interfering with the publication of his work. THE ALONENESS OF MRS CHATHAM (1965), for example, was refused by fourteen publishers. The difficulties he encountered in having his books published toward the end of his life affected Mittelholzer seriously. He was badly in need of money to support his first wife and children, as well as his second wife and son. Mittelholzer took his own life near Farnham, Surrey, England, on May 5, 1965. His works include - CREOLE CHIPS (1937); CORENTYNE THUNDER (1941); A MORNING AT THE OFFICE (1950); SHADOWS MOVE AMONG THEM (1951); CHILDREN OF KAYWANA (1952); THE WEATHER IN MIDDENSHOT (1952); THE LIFE AND DEATH OF SYLVIA (1953); KAYWANA STOCK: THE HARROWING OF HUBERTUS (1954); THE ADDING MACHINE (a short fable) (1954); MY BONES AND MY FLUTE (1955); OF TREES AND THE SEA (1956); A TALE OF THREE PLACES (1957); KAYWANA BLOOD (1958); THE WEATHER FAMILY (1958); A TINKLING IN THE TWILIGHT (1959); LATTICED ECHOES (1960); ELTONSBRODY (1960); THE MAD MACMULLOCHS (1961); THUNDER RETURNING (1961); THE PILING OF CLOUDS (1961); THE WOUNDED AND THE WORRIED (1962); UNCLE PAUL (1963); A SWARTHY BOY (autobiography) (1963); THE ALONENESS OF MRS. CHATHAM (1965); THE JILKINGTON DRAMA (1965); WITH A CARIB EYE (travel) (1965).

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Uncle Paul by Edgar Mittelholzer. London. 1963. Macdonald. 222 pages. hardcover.

DESCRIPTION - To every man comes a moment of opportunity and recognition. At thirty-six, Paul Mankay has reached this point. His conflicting feelings about his racial origins-part Jewish, part Aryan-are paralleled by his ambiguous political allegiances, and his refusal to commit himself to a settled career. It is his perverse involvement with a neo-Fascist organization, whose headquarters he wrecks, which precipitates the crisis. To escape his past momentarily and to find time to face his future, he seeks shelter with his sister Freya whom he has not seen for ten years. Burying himself in the peace of the Hampshire countryside, Paul tries to resolve the violent dilemmas of his fate. He finds a new sense of responsibility in accepting the innocent love of the young girl Valerie and in his relationship with his mistress Delia. But the pastoral is threatened by the incursion of Paul’s past in the shape of the pursuing Fascists: the indifference point is of its nature temporary. Now at last Paul must determine his crisis of loyalties. With this novel we welcome to our list Edgar Mittelholzer who is particularly remembered for his Kaywana trilogy and for his recent novel Latticed Echoes. Pamela Hansford Johnson said of him: ‘Everything that Edgar Mittelholzer writes is blazing with life.’ Uncle Paul shares this illumination.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Edgar Mittelholzer (16 December 1909 - 5 May 1965) was a Guyanese novelist. He was the son of William Austin Mittelholzer and his wife Rosamond Mabel, nee Leblanc. Mittelholzer wrote virtually nothing but fiction and earned his living by it. He is thus the first professional novelist to come out of the English-speaking Caribbean. Some of Mittelholzer's novels include characters and situations from a variety of places within the Caribbean. They range in time from the earliest period of European settlement to the present day and deal with a cross section of ethnic groups and social classes, not to mention subjects of historical, political, psychological, and moral interest. CORENTYNE THUNDER signaled the birth of the novel in Guyana. Mittelholzer wrote CORENTYNE THUNDER in 1938 at the age of twenty nine. At the time he was living and working odd jobs in New Amsterdam. The manuscript was sent to England and had a perilous existence until finally it found a publisher in 1941. In December, 1941, Mittelholzer left Guyana for Trinidad as a recruit in the Trinidad Royal Volunteer Naval Reserve, and CORENTYNE THUNDER was published by Eyre and Spottiswoode. He served in the TRVNR, ‘one of the blackest and most unpleasant interludes' in his life, until he was discharged on medical grounds in August, 1942, and decided to make Trinidad his home, having married a Trinidadian, Roma Halfhide, in March, 1942. In 1947 Mittelholzer decided that he should go to England since he was convinced that only by so doing would he stand a chance of succeeding as a writer. He had been maintaining himself and his family with a variety of odd jobs such as receptionist at the Queen's Park Hotel and clerk at the Planning and Housing Board. He sailed for England with his wife and daughter in 1948, taking the manuscript of A MORNING AT THE OFFICE with him. In London, Mittelholzer went to work in the Books Department of the British Council as a copytypist. Through a fellow worker he met Leonard Woolf in June, 1949, and the result was the publication in 1950 by the Hogarth Press of A MORNING AT THE OFFICE. Peter Nevill published his third novel, SHADOWS MOVE AMONG THEM in April, 1951, and in 1952 brought out the first volume of Mittelholzer monumental historical epic, CHILDREN OF KAYWANA. After its appearance, and despite hostile reviews, Mittelholzer took the crucial decision to give up his job at the British Council and to live entirely by his writing. In May, 1952, Mittelholzer was granted a Guggenheim Fellowship for Creative Writing. He decided to spend the year in Montreal and to use his time there finishing the second volume of the Kaywana trilogy. The long Canadian winter of 1952-53 made him decide to move to Barbados with his wife and four children, and he spent the next three years in the West Indies. In that time he completed THE LIFE AND DEATH OF SYLVIA (1953), the second volume of the trilogy, HUBERTUS (1954), and his terrifying ghost story, MY BONES AND MY FLUTE (1955). He was also to use this Barbadian setting for four other novels. In May, 1956, Mittelholzer returned to England. His marriage was deteriorating steadily, and he was granted a divorce in May, 1959, with his wife receiving custody of the two boys and two girls. In August, 1959, he met Jacqueline Pointer at a writers' workshop and married her in April, 1960. From 1950 to 1965 (with the exception of 1964) Mittelholzer had published at least one novel a year. He had stopped using an agent and handled all his books himself. At first it seemed a wise move, and in 1952 he began an association with Secker and Warburg that was to last over nine years and thirteen books, but in 1961 there was a falling-out over THE PILING OF THE CLOUDS, which they refused to publish because it was ‘pornographic.' The novel was to be rejected by five publishers before Putnam published it in 1961, to be followed by THE WOUNDED AND THE WORRIED (1962) and his autobiography in 1963. He had promised them a second volume which never materialized after he broke with them as well. Mittelholzer's problems were steadily growing, and critical reception of his work was increasingly hostile. He had acquired the reputation of being ‘a problem author,' and after 1961, he tells us, he lived ‘under an ever-darkening cloud-pall of opprobrium' (Jacqueline Mittelholzer, ‘The Idyll and the Warrior,' p. 86). He felt persecuted, convinced that the poor reviews of his books were damaging his literary reputation and interfering with the publication of his work. THE ALONENESS OF MRS CHATHAM (1965), for example, was refused by fourteen publishers. The difficulties he encountered in having his books published toward the end of his life affected Mittelholzer seriously. He was badly in need of money to support his first wife and children, as well as his second wife and son. Mittelholzer took his own life near Farnham, Surrey, England, on May 5, 1965. His works include - CREOLE CHIPS (1937); CORENTYNE THUNDER (1941); A MORNING AT THE OFFICE (1950); SHADOWS MOVE AMONG THEM (1951); CHILDREN OF KAYWANA (1952); THE WEATHER IN MIDDENSHOT (1952); THE LIFE AND DEATH OF SYLVIA (1953); KAYWANA STOCK: THE HARROWING OF HUBERTUS (1954); THE ADDING MACHINE (a short fable) (1954); MY BONES AND MY FLUTE (1955); OF TREES AND THE SEA (1956); A TALE OF THREE PLACES (1957); KAYWANA BLOOD (1958); THE WEATHER FAMILY (1958); A TINKLING IN THE TWILIGHT (1959); LATTICED ECHOES (1960); ELTONSBRODY (1960); THE MAD MACMULLOCHS (1961); THUNDER RETURNING (1961); THE PILING OF CLOUDS (1961); THE WOUNDED AND THE WORRIED (1962); UNCLE PAUL (1963); A SWARTHY BOY (autobiography) (1963); THE ALONENESS OF MRS. CHATHAM (1965); THE JILKINGTON DRAMA (1965); WITH A CARIB EYE (travel) (1965). 

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The Aloneness of Mrs. Chatham by Edgar Mittelholzer. London. 1965. Tandem Books. 176 pages. paperback. T29. Cover design by James Nunn.  

DESCRIPTION - THE ALONENESS OF MRS CHATHAM (1965) was refused by fourteen publishers before finally finding a home with a British paperback publishing house, Tandem Books. Edgar Mittelholzer, author of the best-selling KAYWANA series, returns here to an English village, charged beneath its peaceful exterior with eccentricity, perversion, madness. This is the story of a woman fighting to be alone, the intrusions of those surrounding her, and the calculated attempts to destroy her by a bitter and frustrated psychopath obsessed by sex and driven by jealousy. Edgar Mittelholzer brings to this novel the maturity and experience of a writer whose insight into human tragedy is frank, ruthless, and unnerving.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY - Edgar Mittelholzer (16 December 1909 - 5 May 1965) was a Guyanese novelist. He was the son of William Austin Mittelholzer and his wife Rosamond Mabel, nee Leblanc. Mittelholzer wrote virtually nothing but fiction and earned his living by it. He is thus the first professional novelist to come out of the English-speaking Caribbean. Some of Mittelholzer's novels include characters and situations from a variety of places within the Caribbean. They range in time from the earliest period of European settlement to the present day and deal with a cross section of ethnic groups and social classes, not to mention subjects of historical, political, psychological, and moral interest. CORENTYNE THUNDER signaled the birth of the novel in Guyana. Mittelholzer wrote CORENTYNE THUNDER in 1938 at the age of twenty nine. At the time he was living and working odd jobs in New Amsterdam. The manuscript was sent to England and had a perilous existence until finally it found a publisher in 1941. In December, 1941, Mittelholzer left Guyana for Trinidad as a recruit in the Trinidad Royal Volunteer Naval Reserve, and CORENTYNE THUNDER was published by Eyre and Spottiswoode. He served in the TRVNR, ‘one of the blackest and most unpleasant interludes' in his life, until he was discharged on medical grounds in August, 1942, and decided to make Trinidad his home, having married a Trinidadian, Roma Halfhide, in March, 1942. In 1947 Mittelholzer decided that he should go to England since he was convinced that only by so doing would he stand a chance of succeeding as a writer. He had been maintaining himself and his family with a variety of odd jobs such as receptionist at the Queen's Park Hotel and clerk at the Planning and Housing Board. He sailed for England with his wife and daughter in 1948, taking the manuscript of A MORNING AT THE OFFICE with him. In London, Mittelholzer went to work in the Books Department of the British Council as a copytypist. Through a fellow worker he met Leonard Woolf in June, 1949, and the result was the publication in 1950 by the Hogarth Press of A MORNING AT THE OFFICE. Peter Nevill published his third novel, SHADOWS MOVE AMONG THEM in April, 1951, and in 1952 brought out the first volume of Mittelholzer monumental historical epic, CHILDREN OF KAYWANA. After its appearance, and despite hostile reviews, Mittelholzer took the crucial decision to give up his job at the British Council and to live entirely by his writing. In May, 1952, Mittelholzer was granted a Guggenheim Fellowship for Creative Writing. He decided to spend the year in Montreal and to use his time there finishing the second volume of the Kaywana trilogy. The long Canadian winter of 1952-53 made him decide to move to Barbados with his wife and four children, and he spent the next three years in the West Indies. In that time he completed THE LIFE AND DEATH OF SYLVIA (1953), the second volume of the trilogy, HUBERTUS (1954), and his terrifying ghost story, MY BONES AND MY FLUTE (1955). He was also to use this Barbadian setting for four other novels. In May, 1956, Mittelholzer returned to England. His marriage was deteriorating steadily, and he was granted a divorce in May, 1959, with his wife receiving custody of the two boys and two girls. In August, 1959, he met Jacqueline Pointer at a writers' workshop and married her in April, 1960. From 1950 to 1965 (with the exception of 1964) Mittelholzer had published at least one novel a year. He had stopped using an agent and handled all his books himself. At first it seemed a wise move, and in 1952 he began an association with Secker and Warburg that was to last over nine years and thirteen books, but in 1961 there was a falling-out over THE PILING OF THE CLOUDS, which they refused to publish because it was ‘pornographic.' The novel was to be rejected by five publishers before Putnam published it in 1961, to be followed by THE WOUNDED AND THE WORRIED (1962) and his autobiography in 1963. He had promised them a second volume which never materialized after he broke with them as well. Mittelholzer's problems were steadily growing, and critical reception of his work was increasingly hostile. He had acquired the reputation of being ‘a problem author,' and after 1961, he tells us, he lived ‘under an ever-darkening cloud-pall of opprobrium' (Jacqueline Mittelholzer, ‘The Idyll and the Warrior,' p. 86). He felt persecuted, convinced that the poor reviews of his books were damaging his literary reputation and interfering with the publication of his work. THE ALONENESS OF MRS CHATHAM (1965), for example, was refused by fourteen publishers. The difficulties he encountered in having his books published toward the end of his life affected Mittelholzer seriously. He was badly in need of money to support his first wife and children, as well as his second wife and son. Mittelholzer took his own life near Farnham, Surrey, England, on May 5, 1965. His works include - CREOLE CHIPS (1937); CORENTYNE THUNDER (1941); A MORNING AT THE OFFICE (1950); SHADOWS MOVE AMONG THEM (1951); CHILDREN OF KAYWANA (1952); THE WEATHER IN MIDDENSHOT (1952); THE LIFE AND DEATH OF SYLVIA (1953); KAYWANA STOCK: THE HARROWING OF HUBERTUS (1954); THE ADDING MACHINE (a short fable) (1954); MY BONES AND MY FLUTE (1955); OF TREES AND THE SEA (1956); A TALE OF THREE PLACES (1957); KAYWANA BLOOD (1958); THE WEATHER FAMILY (1958); A TINKLING IN THE TWILIGHT (1959); LATTICED ECHOES (1960); ELTONSBRODY (1960); THE MAD MACMULLOCHS (1961); THUNDER RETURNING (1961); THE PILING OF CLOUDS (1961); THE WOUNDED AND THE WORRIED (1962); UNCLE PAUL (1963); A SWARTHY BOY (autobiography) (1963); THE ALONENESS OF MRS. CHATHAM (1965); THE JILKINGTON DRAMA (1965); WITH A CARIB EYE (travel) (1965). 

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The Life and Death of Sylvia by Edgar Mittelholzer. London. 1953. Putnam. 288 pages. hardcover. Jacket design by Roy Sanford.

DESCRIPTION - The heroine of Mr. Mittelholzer's new novel is the child of a mixed marriage. Sylvia's father is English, her mother half negro, half Guiana Indian. The scene is Georgetown, the capital of British Guiana, and THE LIFE AND DEATH OF SYLVIA gives us an unforgettable picture of the polyglot society the Whites, Eurasians, South American Indians, half-castes and negroes - which inhabits this strange exotic land. Georgetown, in the pages of this novel, is a city where love and hate, sex and violence, jealousy and deceit, are covered only by the thinnest veneer of civilisation. It is a vibrant, dangerous world and into it Sylvia is plunged defenceless while still on the threshold of adolescence. Her childhood is happy. Though with her whining, slattern mother she has nothing in common, she adores her father. And then, when she is thirteen, her world is shattered by her father's death - murdered in the company of his mistress by an unknown hand. What happens to her subsequently - her struggle against poverty, her fight to preserve her virginity, her glimpse of security and her death when that glimpse seems to vanish - makes up a novel whose exceptional emotional force cannot be conveyed in a brief synopsis. Mr. Mittelholzer is a born story-teller, and his characters come magnificently alive: Charlotte, Sylvia's mother, is tremendous, animal in her torpor interrupted by sudden fears and rages. Sylvia's father, the unregenerate womanizer; her friend Naomi, the good-hearted, free-living Eurasian who is beaten up by her motor-mechanic lover and loves it; Diego, the Portuguese boy who loves Sylvia but will not sleep with her before they can be married: these and a host of minor characters fill out the canvas. And above all there is Sylvia, coming to precarious maturity in a world whose harshness and animal instincts she is powerless to combat. Here is a portrait so touching and true that it gives this novel the significance of tragedy.

The first American Edition:

The Life and Death of Sylvia by Edgar Mittelholzer. New York. 1954. John Day. 316 pages. hardcover.

DESCRIPTION - Telling the tragic story of a young Sylvia Ann Russell, this novel focuses on the dilemmas of a young woman of mixed race in 1930s Guyana. After the death of her English father, Sylvia constantly struggles for economic survival and against attempts to exploit her sexually. Impossibly torn between her desire for emotional closeness and the integrity of her independence, Sylvia willfully accepts her dark fate when she falls ill. This brilliant and moving novel explores the plight of a Caribbean woman who demands more meaning from her life than her society will give her.

And in a paperback edition from Dell Publishing:

Sylvia by Edgar Mittelholzer. New York. 1955. Dell. 383 pages. paperback. D151. Cover by Bob Maguire.

DESCRIPTION - The one man she loved . . . Her father rose and gripped her shoulder. His thumb sank hard into her flesh, and hurt. His eyes were cold; he might have been about to murder her. It doesn't matter how long you've known him. You slap him if he gets fresh. Hear me? Lam into him. He's foul.' She found herself getting warm in the face. She turned her back hastily and pulled on her nightgown.

Edgar Mittelholzer was a Guyanese novelist. He was the son of William Austin Mittelholzer and his wife Rosamond Mabel, née Leblanc. Mittelholzer wrote virtually nothing but fiction and earned his living by it. He is thus the first professional novelist to come out of the English-speaking Caribbean. Some of Mittelholzer's novels include characters and situations from a variety of places within the Caribbean. They range in time from the earliest period of European settlement to the present day and deal with a cross section of ethnic groups and social classes, not to mention subjects of historical, political, psychological, and moral interest. CORENTYNE THUNDER signaled the birth of the novel in Guyana. Mittelholzer wrote CORENTYNE THUNDER in 1938 at the age of twenty nine. At the time he was living and working odd jobs in New Amsterdam. The manuscript was sent to England and had a perilous existence until finally it found a publisher in 1941. In December, 1941, Mittelholzer left Guyana for Trinidad as a recruit in the Trinidad Royal Volunteer Naval Reserve, and CORENTYNE THUNDER was published by Eyre and Spottiswoode. He served in the TRVNR, ‘one of the blackest and most unpleasant interludes’ in his life, until he was discharged on medical grounds in August, 1942, and decided to make Trinidad his home, having married a Trinidadian, Roma Halfhide, in March, 1942. In 1947 Mittelholzer decided that he should go to England since he was convinced that only by so doing would he stand a chance of succeeding as a writer. He had been maintaining himself and his family with a variety of odd jobs such as receptionist at the Queen's Park Hotel and clerk at the Planning and Housing Board. He sailed for England with his wife and daughter in 1948, taking the manuscript of A MORNING AT THE OFFICE with him. In London, Mittelholzer went to work in the Books Department of the British Council as a copytypist. Through a fellow worker he met Leonard Woolf in June, 1949, and the result was the publication in 1950 by the Hogarth Press of A MORNING AT THE OFFICE. Peter Nevill published his third novel, SHADOWS MOVE AMONG THEM in April, 1951, and in 1952 brought out the first volume of Mittelholzer monumental historical epic, CHILDREN OF KAYWANA. After its appearance, and despite hostile reviews, Mittelholzer took the crucial decision to give up his job at the British Council and to live entirely by his writing. In May, 1952, Mittelholzer was granted a Guggenheim Fellowship for Creative Writing. He decided to spend the year in Montreal and to use his time there finishing the second volume of the Kaywana trilogy. The long Canadian winter of 1952-53 made him decide to move to Barbados with his wife and four children, and he spent the next three years in the West Indies. In that time he completed THE LIFE AND DEATH OF SYLVIA, the second volume of the trilogy, HUBERTUS, and his terrifying ghost story, MY BONES AND MY FLUTE He was also to use this Barbadian setting for four other novels. In May, 1956, Mittelholzer returned to England. His marriage was deteriorating steadily, and he was granted a divorce in May, 1959, with his wife receiving custody of the two boys and two girls. In August, 1959, he met Jacqueline Pointer at a writers' workshop and married her in April, 1960. From 1950 to 1965 Mittelholzer had published at least one novel a year. He had stopped using an agent and handled all his books himself. At first it seemed a wise move, and in 1952 he began an association with Secker and Warburg that was to last over nine years and thirteen books, but in 1961 there was a falling-out over THE PILING OF THE CLOUDS, which they refused to publish because it was ‘pornographic. ’ The novel was to be rejected by five publishers before Putnam published it in 1961, to be followed by THE WOUNDED AND THE WORRIED and his autobiography in 1963. He had promised them a second volume which never materialized after he broke with them as well. Mittelholzer's problems were steadily growing, and critical reception of his work was increasingly hostile. He had acquired the reputation of being ‘a problem author,’ and after 1961, he tells us, he lived ‘under an ever-darkening cloud-pall of opprobrium’ He felt persecuted, convinced that the poor reviews of his books were damaging his literary reputation and interfering with the publication of his work. THE ALONENESS OF MRS CHATHAM, for example, was refused by fourteen publishers. The difficulties he encountered in having his books published toward the end of his life affected Mittelholzer seriously. He was badly in need of money to support his first wife and children, as well as his second wife and son. Mittelholzer took his own life near Farnham, Surrey, England, on May 5, 1965. His works include - CREOLE CHIPS ; CORENTYNE THUNDER ; A MORNING AT THE OFFICE ; SHADOWS MOVE AMONG THEM ; CHILDREN OF KAYWANA ; THE WEATHER IN MIDDENSHOT ; THE LIFE AND DEATH OF SYLVIA ; KAYWANA STOCK: THE HARROWING OF HUBERTUS ; THE ADDING MACHINE ; MY BONES AND MY FLUTE ; OF TREES AND THE SEA ; A TALE OF THREE PLACES ; KAYWANA BLOOD ; THE WEATHER FAMILY ; A TINKLING IN THE TWILIGHT ; LATTICED ECHOES ; ELTONSBRODY ; THE MAD MACMULLOCHS ; THUNDER RETURNING ; THE PILING OF CLOUDS ; THE WOUNDED AND THE WORRIED ; UNCLE PAUL ; A SWARTHY BOY ; THE ALONENESS OF MRS. CHATHAM ; THE JILKINGTON DRAMA ; WITH A CARIB EYE.

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Tambourines to Glory by Langston Hughes. New York. 1958. John Day. 188 pages. Jacket design by Paul Sagsoorian.

DESCRIPTION - Laura Reed and Essie Belle Johnson, two attractive Harlem tenement women with time on their hands and no jobs, decide to start their own gospel church on a street corner. Laura wishes to make money. Essie honestly desires to help people. ‘Money! I sure wish I had some. Say, Essie, why don't you and me start a church like Mother Bradley's? We ain't doing nothing else useful, and it would beat Home Relief. You sing good. I'll preach. We'll both take up collection and split it. ’ ‘What denomination we gonna be?’ asked Essie, amused at the idea. ‘Start our own denomination, then we won't be beholding to nobody else. ’ Laura and Essie are successful beyond their fondest dreams. They are joined by Birdie Lee, the little old lady trap drummer who can work the congregation to a feverish pitch, and by Deacon Crow-For-Day, impassioned confessor. In no time they have moved to a converted theater with a thousand seats and their names in lights on the marquee. Then, to tempt Laura, the serpent appears in the form of Big-Eyed Buddy, handsome front man for a numbers ring with designs on the temple, and the serenity of this Garden of Eden is shaken until Sister Essie and Birdie Lee return it to the Rock of Comfort. The author says, ‘Tambourines to. Glory is an urban folk tale set against a background of colorful independent, unorthodox churches which have sprung up all over Harlem in the last decade. It is in no sense an attack on organized religion, or on cults as such, but is a fictional expose of certain ways in which religion is misused in large city communities today by various types of unscrupulous leaden who might be called `gospel racketeers,' preying upon the gullibility of simple people.'

 Langston Hughes (1902-1967) was born in Joplin, Missouri, and grew up in Kansas, Illinois, and Ohio. He moved to New York City when he was 19 years old to attend Columbia University. He was one of the most versatile writers of the artistic movement known as the Harlem Renaissance. Though known primarily as a poet, Hughes also wrote plays, essays, novels, and a series of short stories that featured a black Everyman named Jesse B. Semple. His writing is characterized by simplicity and realism and, as he once said, ‘people up today and down tomorrow, working this week and fired the next, beaten and baffled, but determined not to be wholly beaten.’

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Budding Prospects by T. Coraghessan Boyle. New York. 1984. Viking Press. 326 pages. Jacket design by Michael Doret. 0670194395. May 1984. hardcover.

DESCRIPTION - From a brilliant young novelist who has already been compared to Gabriel Garcia Marquez, John Fowles, Thomas Pynchon, John Barth, and Tom Robbins, here is a hilarious and pyrotechnic yarn about marijuana farming in northern California. Its hero is Felix, an oddly attractive 31-year-old wastrel who has taken a left turn from the mainstream but is still powered by its illusions. He has run out on practically everything in his life - the Boy Scouts, graduate school, his wife - and now he has hit a solitary low point. As he tells it, 'I woke alone, I flossed my teeth alone, worked at odd jobs, ate take-out burritos, read the newspaper and undressed for bed alone. ' He is, in short, ready to be talked into farming a crop of sinsemilla by his enterprising friend Vogelsang, an entrepreneur who collects antique esoterica, cases of dry red wine from little vineyards with names like Goat's Crouch, and girls like the punkette Aorta, a singer with an all-female group called the Nostrils. Felix enlists two other lost souls in this pastoral labor: an old school Friend named Phil Cherniske and Phil's 200-pound housemate, Gesh. Together the three of them set off for the lonely hills of northern California where - sustained by booze, exotic chemicals, masculine conversation, and the occasional woman - they propose, under conditions of the greatest secrecy, to carry off a major agricultural coop worth more than a million dollars. But they haven't reckoned with the not-so-benevolent neighborliness of the farmer on the next hill and his mentally unbalanced son, or the depredations of wildlife and the vicissitudes of nature, or the havoc wrought on their necessarily hermetic solitude by the lusts of the flesh. And most of all they haven't prepared for the fact that Felix will undertake - on behalf of a wayward sculptress with whom he has fallen improbably in love - a one-man vendetta against a drug-busting state trooper named Jerpbak. What follows is an irresistible, exuberant narrative that brings its author's full-throttle wit and dazzling gift for storytelling into balance with deeply sympathetic characterizations and an affirmative moral vision. As Salman Rushdie said of WATER MUSIC, Mr. Boyle's first novel, 'Gulp it down; it beats getting drunk.'

Tom Coraghessan Boyle (born Thomas John Boyle; also known as T.C. Boyle; born December 2, 1948) is an American novelist and short story writer. Since the mid-1970s, he has published fourteen novels and more than 100 short stories. He won the PEN/Faulkner award in 1988, for his third novel, World's End, which recounts 300 years in upstate New York. He is Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Southern California. 

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Cathedral by Raymond Carver. New York. 1983. Knopf. 228 pages. Jacket art & design by Sara Eisenman. 0394528840. September 1983. hardcover.

DESCRIPTION -  It was with a collection of short stories called WILL YOU PLEASE BE QUIET, PLEASE? that a young, unknown writer from Clatskanie, Oregon, took the critics by surprise and first established his claim to national notice. Thereafter, on the evidence of a second collection, WHAT WE TALK ABOUT WHEN WE TALK ABOUT LOVE, Cambridge University's Frank Kermode declared Raymond Carver a master of the short form. A new vision, a new method, a new tonality - these are the components of the program that has elevated Carver to international prominence. What is promptly recognizable in his work is the queer effect that issues from its surface simplicity. It is a plainness that gives off yeasty intimations of menace, as if weirdly unhygienic tales were being told, warnings of malignancies that might overtake you if you picked up the wrong utensil, uttered the wrong word. And yet Carver's world is really the world of the homely and the unexceptional, colorless people going about the business of their colorless lives. How Carver makes of their uninflected histories a primer on moral terror speaks to the magic of his force as a literary artist. But nowhere in his earlier fiction is the alchemy by which he transmutes the banal into the numinous so strange and so potent as it is in Cathedral. Indeed, the twelve stories in this book constitute a kind of grammar of that feathery language only the heart ever hears, and only at four o'clock in the morning. There is something morbidly forbidden in the places these stories go, in the sensations mere objects are made to deliver - packages of frozen food thawing on a kitchen table, a plaster cast of teeth set atop a television cabinet, the figuration of a spaceship on a birthday cake decorated for a child who must die. But none of the images will grip you as ferociously as will the one at the close of the title story - the hand of a blind man seen riding the hand of a sighted man. It is as if Carver has passed a wand over words on paper, and thus made of this story, and of those that precede it, a version of the thing itself, the charmed interior of that edifice, the cathedral - a spaciousness that is hushed, severe, transporting.

Raymond Clevie Carver, Jr. (May 25, 1938 - August 2, 1988) was an American short story writer and poet. Carver was a major writer of the late 20th century and a major force in the revitalization of the American short story in literature in the 1980s.

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Little Novels by Arthur Schnitzler. New York. 1929. Simon & Schuster. Translated From The German By Eric Sutton. 279 pages. hardcover.

DESCRIPTION - Faintly reminiscent of the clinical casebooks of Freud and Stekel are these ten compact novels, no longer than short stories, written at various times in Schnitzler's career, now translated into English for the first time. CONTENTS: The Fate of the Baron; The Stranger; The Greek Dancing-Girl; The Prophecy; Blind Geronimo and His Brother; Andreas Thameyer's Last Letter; Redegonda's Diary; Dead Gabriel; The Murderer; and The Death of a Bachelor.

Arthur Schnitzler was an Austrian dramatist and novelist. The son of a prominent Jewish Viennese physician, he studied and practiced medicine until he attracted critical notice with his drama ANATOL, a cycle of one-act plays concerning a philanderer. He followed a similar format in LA RONDE, a cycle of plays about related sexual liaisons, which later served as inspiration for a 1950 Max Ophuls film and a 1998 David Hare drama. Schnitzler's plays, novellas, and novels of fin-de-siecle Vienna are distinguished by their sparkling wit, brilliant style, and clinical observations of human psychology and social disintegration. His concern is with individual happiness, his approach is subtle and amoral, his tone unsentimental and ironic, and his dramatic problems often focused on love and sexual faithfulness. Among his more significant dramas are Liebelei ; THE LONELY WAY, on artistic dedication; THE VAST DOMAIN ; and PROFESSOR BERNHARDI a tragedy about anti-Semitism. Of his novels, THE ROAD TO THE OPEN is autobiographical; he also wrote several novellas and numerous short stories.

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Fraulein Else by Arthur Schnitzler. New York. 1926. Simon & Schuster. Translated From The German By Robert A. Simon. 145 pages. hardcover.

DESCRIPTION - Fraulein Else is the story of a young woman who, while staying with her aunt at a fashionable spa, receives a telegram from her mother begging her to save her father from debtor's jail by approaching an elderly acquaintance in order to borrow money from him. Forced into a reality entirely at odds with her romantic imagination, Else realises that her world is one in which everything has a price.

Arthur Schnitzler was an Austrian dramatist and novelist. The son of a prominent Jewish Viennese physician, he studied and practiced medicine until he attracted critical notice with his drama ANATOL, a cycle of one-act plays concerning a philanderer. He followed a similar format in LA RONDE, a cycle of plays about related sexual liaisons, which later served as inspiration for a 1950 Max Ophuls film and a 1998 David Hare drama. Schnitzler's plays, novellas, and novels of fin-de-siecle Vienna are distinguished by their sparkling wit, brilliant style, and clinical observations of human psychology and social disintegration. His concern is with individual happiness, his approach is subtle and amoral, his tone unsentimental and ironic, and his dramatic problems often focused on love and sexual faithfulness. Among his more significant dramas are Liebelei ; THE LONELY WAY, on artistic dedication; THE VAST DOMAIN ; and PROFESSOR BERNHARDI a tragedy about anti-Semitism. Of his novels, THE ROAD TO THE OPEN is autobiographical; he also wrote several novellas and numerous short stories.

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The Road to the Open by Arthur Schnitzler. New York. 1923. Knopf. Translated From The German By Horace Samuel. 412 pages. January 1923. hardcover.

DESCRIPTION - A finely drawn portrayal of the disintegration of Austrian liberal society under the impact of nationalism and anti-semitism, The Road into the Open is a remarkable novel by a major Austrian writer of the early twentieth century. Set in fin-de-siècle Austria-the cafés, salons, and musical concerts frequented by the Viennese elite-Schnitzler’s perceptive exploration of the creative process and the private lives and public aspirations of urban Jewish intellectuals ranks with the highest achievements of Karl Kraus and Robert Musil. The novel’s central character, Baron Georg von Wergenthin, is a handsome young composer whose troubled relations with women, musical collaborators, and representatives of the old social order make Schnitzler’s book a revealing investigation of individual psychology and social allegory.

Arthur Schnitzler was an Austrian dramatist and novelist. The son of a prominent Jewish Viennese physician, he studied and practiced medicine until he attracted critical notice with his drama ANATOL, a cycle of one-act plays concerning a philanderer. He followed a similar format in LA RONDE, a cycle of plays about related sexual liaisons, which later served as inspiration for a 1950 Max Ophuls film and a 1998 David Hare drama. Schnitzler's plays, novellas, and novels of fin-de-siecle Vienna are distinguished by their sparkling wit, brilliant style, and clinical observations of human psychology and social disintegration. His concern is with individual happiness, his approach is subtle and amoral, his tone unsentimental and ironic, and his dramatic problems often focused on love and sexual faithfulness. Among his more significant dramas are Liebelei ; THE LONELY WAY, on artistic dedication; THE VAST DOMAIN ; and PROFESSOR BERNHARDI a tragedy about anti-Semitism. Of his novels, THE ROAD TO THE OPEN is autobiographical; he also wrote several novellas and numerous short stories.

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