Publishing the Postcolonial

Anglophone West African and Caribbean Writing in the UK 1948-1968

Gail Low

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000155488
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This book explores how writers such as Amos Tutuola, George Lamming, Samuel Selvon, VS Naipaul, Chinua Achebe, Derek Walcott, Kamau Brathwaite, and Wole Soyinka came to be published in London in important educational series such as the Three Crown Series and African Writers Series. Low takes account of recent debates in the discipline of book history, especially issues that deal with social, cultural, and economic questions of authorship, publishing histories, canon formation, and the production, distribution and reception of texts in the literary market place. Searching publishing archives for readers reports, editorial correspondence, and interventions, this book represents a necessary exploration of postwar publishing contexts and the dissemination of texts from London that is crucial to literary histories of the postcolonial book. Taken together as a postwar generation, this cohort of now canonical writers helped "imagine" their respective national communities, yet their intellectual labors entered an elite transnational literary circuit, and correspondingly, were transformed into textual commodities by the economic, social, cultural, and institutional transactions that were part of an expanding print capitalism.

1 ‘The Natural Artist’

Amos Tutuola or Faber and Faber's The Palm-Wine Drinkard?

It seemed to me and to many of us to be a terrifying but quite fascinating book and we felt that we oughtn’t to let it slip. What the reviewers will say about it I cannot imagine, but it will be more than interesting to see how they take it. It is many a long day since I have looked forward to the press for a book more than this one!

Richard De La Mare, Faber

I am rather apprehensive of Mr Tutuola turning out a Problem Child. He promises a sequel . . . I fear [however] that the public appetite for this line of fiction may be satisfied with one book. (One would not have wanted a series of successors to The Young Visiters).

T S Eliot, Faber¹

The West African writer Amos Tutuola burst onto the postwar metropolitan literary scene with The Palm-Wine Drinkard published by Faber and Faber in 1952. The Palm-Wine Drinkard provoked controversy for its episodic rendering of Yoruba folktales in non-standard English. British reviews of the book at the time of its publication were generally, if not uniformly, positive. In his famous Observer review, the poet Dylan Thomas wrote warmly of the ‘brief, thronged, grisly and bewitching story’ written in ‘young English’ by a West African (Lindfors 1975: 7). Many others shared Thomas’s assessment. Arthur Calder-Marshall’s Listener review proclaimed that such a ‘very curious’ text had ‘much in common with other primitive literature’. However, he added, the book’s presentation of ‘Africanness’ was made distinctive ‘by the author incorporating into myth the paraphernalia of modern life, such as telephones, bombs and railways’. In Calder-Marshall’s view, such a text ‘herald[ed] . . . the dawn of Nigerian literature’ (Lindfors 1975: 9). Michael Swan’s London Magazine review was written with a nod towards primitivism recently made fashionable in the visual arts; Swan (1954: 94) wrote that Tutuola possessed ‘the vision of the pagan bushman setting down the ancient sagas of his people with his own additions’, and that European readers could not fail to be impressed (and reminded) that the author was himself ‘from the area of the superb classical bronze heads of Ife and the advanced art of Benin.’ The American literary reception of the novel echoed that of the British. Eric Larabee praised Tutuola’s ‘unschooled but oddly expressive’ style and declared the book a ‘work of fantasy, written in English, but not an English of this world’ (Lindfors 1975: 11). Selden Rodman in the New York Times Book Review labelled Tutuola a ‘true primitive’ (Lindfors 1975: 15), while Anthony West in the New Yorker extolled the virtues of the text’s ‘uncorrupted innocence’ and its ‘great charm’ (Lindfors 1975: 19). Amidst the chorus of praise from both sides of the Atlantic, Anthony Powell would seem to be a lone voice of dissent in the literary establishment. Objecting to Faber and Faber’s book blurb which represented The Palm-Wine Drinkard as a West African version of classical Greek mythology, Powell dismissed Tutuola’s collection of folk tales as not much more ‘than a mass of unassimilated material’. Powell (1952: 309) conceded that the novel was not without some ‘charm’ and ‘interest for the anthropologist’, but he also advised that any move to ‘set the fashion for a whole series of volumes of a similar kind’ ought to be firmly resisted.

On the whole, as can perhaps be expected, metropolitan critics who wrote enthusiastic reviews of Tutuola’s book dwelt less on Tutuola’s aesthetics or his rhetorical skills, and more on the text as an exemplar of naïve art. For example, Tutuola was in Swan’s words a ‘natural artist’, and The Palm-Wine Drinkard, a poetic, vivid and unselfconscious expression of African culture and beliefs.² One critic suggested that the magical realism of the text was the direct product of the ‘equatorial’ African’s belief that ‘the spatial and temporal of the spirit world . . . [was] co-extensive with that of the material world’ (Lindfors 1975: 10). Yet if metropolitan critics were enchanted by their The Palm-Wine Drinkard, the initial West African literary reception was by contrast highly critical. Influenced by a nationalistic agenda, and sensitive to the negative stereotyping of Africa, critics there objected to what they saw as very poor writing and expressed dismay at the uncritical promotion of the book. Many protested against what they saw as a European or American celebration of exoticism. For example, Babasola Johnson poured scorn on Tutuola’s ‘strange lingo’ and his inability to write standard English, while Adeagbo Akinjogbin attributed the novel’s success in the West to ignorance and a desire to believe ‘all sorts of fantastic tales about Africa’ (Lindfors 1975: 31, 41). For these critics, the success of Tutuola’s novel simply confirmed the West’s desire to see Africa as a place of backwardness and superstition. Bernth Lindfors, summing up this first phase of Tutuola criticism, describes it as one of ‘foreign enchantment and local embarrassment’ (Lindfors 1975: xi).

Tutuola’s first published text represents an important nodal point in the history of metropolitan publishing of Anglophone West African writing in general, and Nigerian writing in particular. Tutuola, himself, is conventionally hailed as the father of the Nigerian novel in English,³ though there were other black Nigerian novelists who were Tutuola’s contemporaries; for example, Cyprian Ekwensi, whose popular novel, When Love Whispers was published in Nigeria in 1947, and whose People of the City was published in London by Dakers in 1954. Although Ekwensi’s short stories and his stories for children had appeared in print prior to Tutuola’s Faber and Faber publication (for example, The Leopard’s Claw came out in the Longmans Green Lantern Library series in 1950) it was only with People of the City and Jagua Naga, published by Andrew Dakers and Hutchinson in 1954 and 1961 respectively, that Ekwensi gained an international reputation as a novelist. Ekwensi’s writing came into prominence after The Palm-Wine Drinkard; he was seen as a popular writer and associated with the market literature of Nigeria, producing novels essentially about urban life in Lagos. In contrast, Tutuola was established as a folk writer, published to great excitement and controversy, and touted for a time in the 1950s at least, as the black (West) African writer of his generation. For a very brief period, his name signified a certain commodifiable vision of Africanness—a virtue to cultivate or a vice to veer from. In his memoirs, Alan Hill, who launched the African Writers Series, wrote that Fred Warburg of the publishing house, Secker and Warburg, spoke of The Palm-Wine Drinkard as ‘the only sort of African book that he would want’ because it ‘represented the real Africa’ (Hill 1988: 121). Hill’s championing of Chinua Achebe, whose Things Fall Apart was published in 1958, was positioned very deliberately as opposite to the style and content of African writing that Tutuola’s work signified; Hill cast Achebe’s work, and subsequently the creation and marketing of the African Writers Series, as a foil to the type of African writing that Tutuola personified for the publishing world. In contrast to Tutuola’s ‘linguistic virtuosity or plain illiteracy’, Hill wrote of Achebe’s work that it seemed adept at rendering ‘traditional tribal society’ in terms that ‘the Western-educated reader could understand’ (Hill 1988: 121).

In the light of recent debates in book history regarding the material histories of the book’s emergence in print, the time is ripe for a reconsideration of the 1952 publication of The Palm-Wine Drinkard. A revisiting of some of the Faber and Faber-Tutuola correspondence is necessary to initiate a discussion about Tutuola’s manuscript as a Faber and Faber product and to explore the role the publishing house played in the moulding of their textual commodity. The Palm-Wine Drinkard is conventionally (albeit not uncontroversially) classified as a novel; but there was actually more uncertainty over its textual status and value in the run-up to the publication of the text, and its immediate aftermath, than is perhaps widely known. There was certainly some dispute over whether the manuscript’s importance lay in its valuation as an anthropological or literary artefact; this chapter seeks to revisit some of those debates in order to explore their significance for the editing and shaping of the book, and to comment on the processes of establishing value when cultural products move from West Africa to Britain. For if an ambivalence over the significance of The Palm-Wine Drinkard provided a window of opportunity that enabled the emergence in print of what was considered by many a strange and bewildering text, such instability also provoked acute anxiety over how to edit Tutuola’s manuscript, how to manage the meaning of Tutuola’s book and, subsequently, how to promote it. The chapter also raises some issues about authorship over and above assumptions about the usual editorial interventions which are part and parcel of the processes that transform manuscripts into books. Yet my narration of the processes which set into motion the publication of The Palm-Wine Drinkard is necessarily partial; the archive of Faber and Faber’s editorial correspondence, lodged at the company’s archive, is currently not available for public scrutiny. My account is thus based on what can be consulted within the public domain, namely, the Tutuola papers containing letters between Tutuola and his publishers, the handwritten manuscript of The Palm-Wine Drinkard containing Faber and Faber editorial emendations, and the Bernth Lindfors papers lodged at the Harry Ransom Center (HRC) at the University of Texas (Austin). Lindfors’ seminal essay on Tutuola’s search for a publisher also provides a useful account of how Tutuola came to be published by Faber and Faber, as does Jare Ajayi’s (2003) recent biography of Amos Tutuola, Amos Tutuola: Factotum as a Pioneer. Yet despite the very real limitations of archival sourcing and access, reconfiguring the book as a material process is all the more—not less—necessary, and some preliminary but useful observations can be made about the politics of authorship and the commodification of Tutuola’s first novel.

Anthropological or Literary Value

Lindfors’ account (1982) of the parties involved in the championing of an unknown writer with a peculiar manuscript is the fullest account thus far of the steps which led to The Palm-Wine Drinkard’s publication, and I shall not retell his story here. Instead, with the help of additional letters, I want to tease out the confusion that greeted the reception of Tutuola’s manuscript by both Lutterworth Press and Faber and Faber, and their different responses to it. It is widely known that Tutuola first sent the manuscript of The Palm-Wine Drinkard to Lutterworth Press. Lutterworth was owned by the United Society for Christian Literature (USCL), and had a policy of encouraging African writing of a religious nature and on a Christian theme. Some literary work was also issued by the Press, notably, T Cullen Young’s New African Writing published in 1947 which included short stories by Timothy Aluko, Cyprian Ekwensi and Mabel Dove-Danquah among others (Lindfors 2002: 114). It was Mary Senior, the Assistant Secretary of the African section of the United Society, who received the original manuscript of The Palm-Wine Drinkard. She showed it to Martin Lewis, General Manager of USCL/Lutterworth Press, who dismissed the manuscript. Senior then approached Thomas Nelson and Sons, the educational firm based in Edinburgh, who were then publishing Daniel Fagunwa’s Yoruba novels for a local readership; however, Nelson also declined to publish it.⁴ Finally, in frustration, Senior showed it to Jocelyn Oliver who was then employed as book editor with Lutterworth Press. Oliver was very taken by the manuscript; he turned to Faber and Faber, a publishing house he believed would have the flair and temerity to publish what ‘by all the rules of commerce’ would have been ‘a costly flop’.⁵ In a rush of enthusiasm, Oliver wrote to Richard de la Mare who was on the board of directors at Faber and Faber in February of 1951 asking if T. S. Eliot would read the manuscript. Despite his own company’s rejection, he felt that providing Tutuola’s manuscript was authentic, his text would be ‘the one work of real genius’ he had come across in all his ‘twenty-five years of publishing!’ Oliver also added as an afterword, ‘ I hate to think of its blushing unseen’ (Lindfors 1982: 95). Two days later, Oliver wrote again to say Faber and Faber would indeed be the ‘courageous publisher’ he thought it was if the company went ahead with such a ‘remarkable manuscript’; he added, a ‘Faber book . . . with Peggy Fortnum illustrations?’⁶ Much later, in a personal exchange with Lindfors, Oliver was to differentiate between Senior’s reaction to the book as ‘ethnological’ and his own as ‘literary’, observing, ‘Mary Senior’s was a nobler aim than mine: She cared passionately for the manuscript as a remarkable work by an African. I didn’t care whether the writer was African or Chinese: It was as a literary work that I felt something must be done about it’ (Lindfors 1982: 95). From such letters, one can surmise the emergence of two different responses to Tutuola’s manuscript—anthropological and literary—and while he did not clarify the terms of his own judgement, Oliver saw himself as a figure who recognised the literary value of Tutuola’s text and supported it on those grounds.

Oliver’s choice of Faber was based on the company’s literary reputation and their willingness to take risks which extended to unfamiliar topics or new types of writing. This is evident from their publication of James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake in 1939, William Golding’s Lord of the Flies in 1954 and Wilson Harris’s complex literary Caribbean masterpiece, Palace of the Peacock in 1960; the latter two had been also approved for publication despite strong reservations expressed by the company’s own readers. Faber was to publish almost all of Amos Tutuola and Wilson Harris’s oeuvre. The company also had a very strong general list in other creative departments such as poetry, fine arts, music and drama. The company’s poetry list which included high modernist as well as 1930s poets such as W. H. Auden, Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot and Stephen Spender, would later attract Sylvia Plath, Philip Larkin and Ted Hughes. Drama grew with Charles Montieth’s acquisition of John Osborne’s celebrated Look Back in Anger in 1956 and the company’s publication of new European and British drama included writers such as Samuel Beckett and Jean Genet.⁷ If Faber and Faber’s reputation as a literary publisher was well-founded in the pre-war period, it was certainly formidable in the postwar period.

The manuscript prompted an equal measure of interest and bewilderment at Faber and, much like the Lutterworth correspondence on Tutuola’s manuscript, a similar uncertainty characterised Faber and Faber’s internal letters. An undated memo by Miss Sheldon, secretary to the Chairman of the Faber and Faber book committee who was tasked with the approval of the manuscript for publication, recorded a decision to send it to Daryll Forde, an anthropologist specialising in Africa. The memo also sketched the possible ways that the company could market the book, obser...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 "The Natural Artist": Amos Tutuola's or Faber and Faber's The Palm-Wine Drinkard?
• 2 "Profitable and Politically Expedient?": Oxford University Press and the Three Crowns Series 1962-76
• 3 "In Pursuit of Literary Gold": HEB and the African Writers Series 1962-67
• 4 The Pleasures of Exile: Publishing Anglophone Caribbean Writing in Postwar Britain
• 5 The Magic of Books: Authorship, Cultural and Symbolic Capital
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index