TRAVEL
En Suisse
With a Carib Eye. By Edgar Mittelholzer. (Seeker and Warburg, 18s.)
DUMAS was thirty-one when he wrote En Suisse; and although this is an edited translation, one- third the length of the original, great gusts and blasts of Alexandre's wonderfully ebullient tem- perament agreeably assault the reader. The gifts of an amiable nature, shameless curiosity, and an un- quenchable energy make him the ideal reporter on the bovine Swiss and their monotonously sensa- tional landscapes. In the 1830s Switzerland was not yet a universal Grand Hotel, and it is surpris- ing to read of needy natives and perpetually squalid hostelries. Dumas goes everywhere : up Alps, down mines, to the shrine of Voltaire, to the hotel of the exiled M. de Chateaubriand. At the great St. Bernard, he is splendidly horrified by the Morgue. At the Great Chartreuse, a repentant Father relates (for a whole chapter) the melo- drama that had led him to renounce the world. Alexandre, near Lucerne, stands second to a proto- d'Artagnan, called Alcide Jollivet, who blows out the brains of a greedy English milord, before falling lifeless in his second's arms. In his intro- duction, Mr. Craig Bell suggests that Dumas is unusual among French writers in being, in the Dickensian sense, a humorist; and certainly En Suisse is often very funny; for Alexandre had the enviable gift of mocking himself (as well as others) without losing one fragment of his self-esteem.
To be able to do this is, of course, one sign of an emancipated spirit; and, when reading books by Caribbean authors about the Caribbean, we have recently seen how a growing political emancipation has enabled West Indians to write of their islands in an objectively critical way. But in Mr. Mittelholzer's With a Carib Eye, inhibiting traces of an over-sensitive defensiveness still seem to linger on. This leads him to make statements that are most disputable. He tells us that 'illiteracy in the Caribbean is no higher than it is in many parts of . . . England.' He chides 'northerners' who write on the Caribbean for saying it is 'colourful' and `exotic'; and then gives us a description of the Carnival in Trinidad which shows that by drab 'northern' standards, at any rate, the island is precisely that. There is no shame in being 'colourful'—very much the contrary, and how one wishes that we were too. Nor is there any real shame in illiteracy, once the causes rooted in the history and economics of the islands are understood. In general, one must say that Mr. Mittelholzer is so grimly determined not to be deluded or enchanted that he sings the islands' praises with a sadly muted voice. COLIN MACINNES
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