The poems, he would later say, were ‘puppyrel’ – verse that failed even to reach the level of doggerel. Citing a line from Ezra Pound’s Hugh Selwyn Mauberley, Carter recalled that her opening lines were enough to convince him that the rest of the work was unreadable, that his open-hearted gesture had been “wrong from the start.” Nevertheless, with unusual patience, he set aside personal feelings and asked her to tell him how she had come to poetry, which poets had influenced her, and what she hoped to say in her work.
Faced with these questions, the woman countered that she was an original and needed no influences. She explained that she scrupulously avoided reading poetry written by other people, lest it adulterate her style. Somewhat flummoxed, Carter could only express his admiration and ask, as politely as he could manage, how someone who made a point of not reading poetry could remain so confident that she had written some. Shortly afterward the conversation ended.
The encounter makes a point that is relevant to matters that lie beyond the confines of literature or culture, even if those terms are given the broadest understanding. Carter’s larger point, surely, was that too many people assume that they can simply arrive in a profession without an apprenticeship. Many areas of public life remain susceptible to this sort of egotism. There never seems to be a shortage of those who speak with little or no awareness of the traditions they inherit. Lawyers with comparable historical ignorance rarely let this stand in the way of wide-reaching public statements. Even West Indian cricketers, the chosen few who represent the whole region, often complete an entire career with only a vague idea as to who Frank Worrell, George Headley or Garry Sobers were, or what they might have stood for.
After such ignorance, what forgiveness. We would laugh at someone who professed to be a surgeon or a dentist without putting in years of painstaking education, so why do we tolerate such laziness in public figures? Part of the problem, undoubtedly, is the understandable postcolonial scepticism towards the degrees and titles that are so fetishized elsewhere. (A recent editorial in this paper addressed the German and Italian weakness for these honorifics.) But a much larger part of the problem is the lapse in what we have come to expect of ourselves.
Many of this region’s most important intellectuals, among them CLR James and Carter himself, were largely self-taught. They read voraciously, argued and occasionally quarrelled about what they had read, and earned their opinions the hard way. They saw no reason to discard the culture of the vanished Europeans, or not to rediscover what a poem, novel, play or constitution should do. They certainly saw the need to ‘make it new’ – as Pound would urge his fellow literary Modernists − to adapt what they had inherited so that it spoke the truth about life in the Caribbean, to take account of the distortions of the plantation economy, the insufficiency of the Westminster model and the long history of racial mistrust. But they never assumed that this could be done with mere originality.
Pound’s poem – a work that is usually taken as a gloss on his own life – recalls the effort of working “In a half savage country [America], out of date; / Bent resolutely on wringing lilies from the acorn.” Few West Indians would describe the early years of independence so harshly, but the struggles to create national cultures worthy of the political moment did eventually leave many of them, Carter included, as despondent. And yet, despite everything, and drawing on the work of the very men who ended up in cultural despair, an impressive number of local artists, writers, singers and sportsmen have persevered and produced significant bodies of work despite the obvious shortcomings. If excellence in the humanities, sport and the arts was ever taken as seriously in the Caribbean, as it has been in other postcolonial societies, it isn’t hard to conceive of a future in which more of us would know “puppyrel” when we saw it, and be prepared to undertake the much harder task of writing masterpieces.
