“A Password of Intellectuality”

Abstract

in A 1991 interview with frank birbalsingh, Jamaican author Andrew Salkey described himself as mad, letter-writing, publisher-finding, agent-hustler.1 Salkey was as profoundly committed to publishing and promoting the work of fellow Caribbean authors as he was to promoting his own work. He exemplified this agent-hustler persona when he was able to convince one of his contacts in the publishing world in England, Charles Monteith at Faber and Faber, to take the risk of publishing difficult but exceptional Guyanese author Wilson Harris's boundary-pushing modernist novel The Palace of the Peacock.2 Salkey's self-characterisation as not just an agent, but an agent-hustler, highlights a need for an aggressive pursuit, and his own use of the term hustler suggests a hint of the 'illicit' in his tireless promotion of all Caribbean authors, himself included. Yet his qualifier of non-charging undercuts the sense of hustler as someone in pursuit of profit and establishes his altruistic motives for engaging in tricksterism to advocate for fellow writers. Always invested in being a member of an artistic community, Salkey worked on the BBC's Caribbean Voices radio programme as a presenter and producer and, along with Edward (Kamau) Brathwaite and John La Rose, co-founded the Caribbean Artists Movement (CAM) in order to build a mutually supportive network of writers and artists whose mission it was to develop and publicise Caribbean art.3 Though Salkey credits Brathwaite with the specific idea for CAM, his enthusiasm played a major part in the organisation's development and success: said, 'Whatever we can do first of all to get noticed among ourselves as West Indians in Britain, and for others to notice us, that's fine.'4 Salkey's emphasis on the importance of connecting with fellow Caribbean writers in the UK reflects the necessity of collaboration and mutual support in order for Caribbean authors to succeed within the publishing infrastructure dominated by English voices.Self-positioning as an activist for an Anglophone Caribbean literatureSalkey's political, as well as his artistic, conviction of the need for Caribbean self-determination drove his efforts to encourage fellow Caribbean artists, in publishing and through CAM. At the third CAM conference in 1969, Salkey highlighted the interconnectedness of his work in the cultural and political arenas, as an author and promoter: Our struggle for change in the arts must be all of a piece with the new intention of our young people in the Caribbean . . . [demanding] political equality . . . The object of all their endeavours [is] radical change.5 His various roles within the literary culture reflect a desire to help cultivate a self-determined Caribbean literature without the precondition of reverence for the British literary establishment. Indeed, his fiction both implicitly and explicitly offers a trenchant critique of British imperialism. Salkey, along with other writers of his generation, received from his British colonial education the deliberately ingrained implication that literature is something imported from England and, as George Lamming describes in The Pleasures of Exile, that books, in that particular colonial conception of literature, were not - meaning, too, were not supposed to be - written by natives.6 Salkey's work strives to alter this conception in its form as well as its content. In this essay, I examine Salkey's 1969 novel The Adventures of Catullus Kelly7 as a culmination of this drive toward an autonomous Caribbean literature - shaped by a Caribbean canon - through both its paratextual structures and its interactions between characters that explicitly address Caribbean authorship.Unlike his contemporaries Samuel Selvon and George Lamming, Salkey remains relatively unknown; most of his novels continue to be out of print. When Salkey's work is discussed at all, the criticism chiefly focuses on his novels' portrayals of sexuality and on the experiences of Caribbean migrants to London during the 1950s and 1960s. …