How important is it that a man born in Barbados, whose family goes back over three hundred years on the island and who wrote a novel that is among the best of Barbadian writing, is largely forgotten by his fellow countrymen?
The novel I refer to is Christopher, and the man who wrote it is Geoffrey Drayton.
While it is true that some of his early poetry has been reprinted in the pages of the resuscitated Bim, for a whole generation of Barbadian readers and writers it is as if he never existed. I plainly recall a conversation with a prominent young Barbadian poet who, when I mentioned that Drayton’s work had been an inspiration to me, reacted as if he had never heard of the man and expressed surprise that Drayton was a Barbadian author. Even today most online lists of Bajan authors omit any reference to Drayton.
There was a time when I naively believed that a work of art, in particular literary work, stood apart from its creator, that somehow it could be judged in isolation from the time, place and person of the author. While it is certainly true that those pieces of work we regard most fondly are those that engross us, in which we, as readers, forget we are reading words on a page, there is another important perspective. It is the meta-narrative of literature, that place where we are presented with hard truths, where we ask about the time and the place in which the work was written, and what the work says about the author and the world in which he lived. It is here that literature becomes about us, where we came from, where we are and, if we are open and honest, questions the assumptions under which we live.
Geoffrey Drayton was born on the island of Barbados on February 13, 1924, near Bridgetown. The Drayton family traces its roots in Barbados back to the seventeenth century. When Drayton was born, he was the latest in a long line of privileged whites who as part of the plantocracy ruled the island and its inhabitants from the middle of the seventeenth century until relatively recently.
Early in Drayton’s life, his family purchased the sugar estate Frere Pilgrim, and young Drayton lived there until he left the island at the age of twenty. At the time, Frere Pilgrim was a functioning plantation, where sugar was harvested and molasses was produced and sold. Like all plantations of the day, the owners and foremen where male and white, or nearly so, and the labourers were black. While some things had changed since the days of slavery, the colour of one’s skin, and the pedigree of one’s ancestors, still determined a person’s place in the plantation hierarchy, and in Bajan society in general. In many ways, that prejudice still holds today.
Drayton was a writer as early as primary school. He recalled composing short stories and poems at the age of six. It was during his time in secondary school that his interest in writing truly flowered, principally under the tutelage and encouragement of T. L. “Shoes” Evans, who taught Drayton the Classics at Harrison College. Drayton graduated from Harrison College at the age of 19, having tried and failed for the third time to achieve a Barbados Scholarship. He taught for a year at Lodge School before leaving Barbados for England, where he attended Cambridge and studied Economics, attaining both undergraduate and graduate degrees in that discipline. He returned to Barbados once his studies were completed and after another teaching stint he left for Ottawa. His aunt and uncle had lived in Canada for some time, and they had encouraged the young Drayton to join them.
After living abroad and returning to the island, Drayton had decided that Barbados offered too few opportunities, economic and otherwise. All the while, he wrote poems and prose, short stories and nascent novels. While he was in Ottawa, Ryerson Press in Toronto published, in 1950, Three Meridians, a collection of his poetry.
Eventually, Drayton found his way back to England, considered by most Bajans then the mother country. His time spent there as a student had been one of the happiest periods of his life, and after living for three years in Canada, an opportunity to return to Britain offered him the chance to fulfill his dream. He began a career as a writer for the Petroleum Times, a trade publication for the oil industry, where he assumed the role of editor a few years later. In that capacity he traveled the world, principally the Middle East, during which time he also acted as an advisor to many governments on matters concerning the petroleum industry. This was his job, but his first love was writing and that passion never waned.
Through the late 1940’s and 1950’s, various pieces of Drayton’s work appeared in Bim, perhaps the single most important literary journal ever published in the West Indies. In 1958, Coles Printery produced an excerpt of Drayton’s unpublished novel, reprinted from Bim, Vol. vii, no. 26, entitled “Christopher.” The printer had been contracted by the Barbados Advocate to do the job. In those days, it was not uncommon for the larger Caribbean newspapers to publish literary works through secondary presses, such as Pioneer Press in Jamaica under the sponsorship of The Gleaner. The owners and editors of the day saw it as their duty to nurture the local literary scene, and perceived their function as more than the selling of newspapers; they were helping to record and shape a society.
In 1959, Collins in England published Drayton’s first novel, Christopher, which was followed two years later by Zohara, published by Secker & Warburg, also in the United Kingdom. According to the author, Christopher was readily accepted for publication whereas Zohara was submitted to many publishers before it found a home. Christopher is a novel told through the eyes of a sensitive young white child born to a once wealthy family on a Barbadian plantation. By the novel’s end, the boy comes to an understanding of his place in a world of privilege and racial inequity. Zohara is a novel with a supernatural theme set in Spain, which contrasts the nature of superstition and religion in the life of a village and its inhabitants.
Most fiction writing is autobiographical in some sense, which seems especially true of first novels, and is certainly true in Drayton’s case. Christopher is divided into three parts, The Father, The Mother and Gip. In interviews, Drayton often spoke interchangeably of his own father and the fictional father in his novel. It was as if writing about the fictional father gave him a better understanding of his real father.
He wrote at least five novels, yet Christopher and Zohara are the only published novels Drayton has to his credit. He produced a number of memorable poems and short stories, one of which may be the most anthologized story yet written by a Barbadian, “Mr. Dombey the Zombie,” a whimsical supernatural tale that has appeared in numerous collections of ghost and horror stories over the years.
For all of this—his record of publication, his many appearances in Bim, his poems and two novels—Drayton thanked principally one man, Frank Collymore, whom many consider the father of West Indian literature. Collymore made it his business to seek out and promote indigenous authors and playwrights. His scope was not restricted to Barbados but included most of the English-speaking Caribbean. In doing so, he gave voice to writers who otherwise might never have found their way into print. Wealth, social position and skin colour meant nothing in determining the work he chose to publish. Of Collymore’s many admirable qualities, that is perhaps why he is most fondly remembered.
Given that Drayton wrote and published during the years between the publication of George Lamming’s seminal work, In The Castle of My Skin, and the emergence of Kamau Brathwaite’s poetic trilogy (The Arrivants – Rights of Passage, Masks and Islands), one might ask why his novels in particular have not found a place in the Barbadian consciousness. While there were other Bajan writers, such as Lionel Hutchinson and J. B. Emtage, who also wrote during the same period and were published in England, it is Drayton’s writing that comes closest to the literary quality of Lamming’s and Brathwaite’s.
A good deal of the responsibility for Drayton’s obscurity must rest with the man himself. Drayton, now eighty-eight, is by nature a shy, unassuming individual who did not intentionally promote himself or his writing. According to the author, it was at Collymore’s suggestion that he submitted Christopher to Collins, and it seems that the experience of struggling to get Zohara published deterred him from pursuing other opportunities to get his work into print. Although he lived in England during the emergence of many iconic West Indian authors, from Lamming to Edgar Mittelholzer and Sam Selvon to Jan Carew, just to mention a few, Drayton did not socialize with any of them. He mentioned meeting Lamming a few times, but he regarded his fellow Barbadian writer as an acquaintance, not a friend. Beyond that he had little or no contact with other West Indian writers. He did not attend any of the legendary parties hosted by Andrew Salkey and his wife, Pat.
Salkey, apart from being a fine writer in his own right, was instrumental in the promotion of many if not all of the West Indian authors who subsequently became famous in the England of the late 1940’s, 50’s and 60’s. He moderated the BBC radio show Caribbean Voices, which brought the writing of many new West Indian authors to the attention of Britain and the world. Some of Drayton’s short fiction was presented on the program, but it is telling that when Salkey’s huge library of West Indian titles was auctioned off after his death Drayton’s work was noticeably absent from his collection, even though the writing of lesser known Barbadian authors, such as Hutchinson, were included in the catalogue. Almost every book in Salkey’s collection was a gift, and contained a personal inscription of gratitude from the author. The fact that Drayton’s work is not represented in the collection is a reflection of Drayton’s self-imposed isolation from London’s West Indian writing community.
The Barbados in which Drayton grew up was more starkly stratified than it is today. In one of our many conversations, he spoke sadly of the separation between black and white in the island of his youth. One might mix with a black schoolmate on the grounds of the institution; that was as far as the association would extend. At the time it was considered taboo for Barbadian whites to publicly befriend a black person. Such connections had to be kept hidden. To some extent Drayton’s failure to pursue closer ties with London’s largely black expatriate West Indian literary community can be explained by the attitudes he acquired early in life, but his obscurity cannot be blamed solely on these factors.
Christopher was reprinted five times by Heinemann, beginning in 1972, as part of its Caribbean Writers series. It is now out of print. The Heinemann editions of Christopher include an introduction by Louis James in which James compares Christopher to Lamming’s In The Castle of My Skin and Michael Anthony’s A Year in San Fernando. As James notes, each novel presents a different view of West Indian childhood. He could have included McDonald’s Hummingbird Tree in that list. In his introduction, James dissects Christopher from a literary point of view.
His criticism of Drayton’s novel is for the most part well reasoned. He notes the novel’s uneven narrative and structural weakness; but his assessment of the novels’ unbalanced character development, especially with regard to the black characters, is almost too obvious. Is this portrayal not how a white child like Christopher would see black people in the Barbados of Drayton’s youth? It is the extension of this reasoning that diminishes much of the fiction written by white West Indians, causing work to be labelled as either substandard or, at best, as views from the outside. There is a strong tendency to see everything that a writer writes as a reflection of his world view, and while it must be true that Drayton’s fictional child is rendered largely from the author’s own experiences, it is presumptuous to think that by reading his work we know the author’s real voews on matters of race when the work was written, much less now.
Literary critics and cultural historians often group Drayton’s novel Christopher with the work of authors such as Elma Napier, Phyllis Shand-Allfrey, Jean Rhys, and Christopher Nicole. With the exception of Napier, all of the above were native-born West Indians. Apart from the colour of the authors’ skin, the one commonality noted by certain critics is the way in which the Caribbean world of whites and blacks is separately portrayed. (It could be argued that the writing of Mittelholzer falls into this grouping as well.) Drayton’s Christopher can be read as an expression of the awareness of the potential reconciliation between the two solitudes, and still the novel is often relegated to this sub-genre of West Indian literature. Perhaps, because there are relatively few examples of Caribbean writing from the white perspective, it is natural to see these works as forming a separate space, but the distinction is artificial and is one of the reasons it is so difficult to define a Caribbean Literature, or more specifically a Barbadian Literature.
The irony is that in self-identified first-world countries, notably Britain, Canada and the United States, West Indian Literature is increasingly seen as a sub-genre of so-called Black Literature. The mainstream white culture in these countries accepts and propagates the notion that voices of authority in matters Caribbean should be exclusively black. Rather than exploring other divergent perspectives for ourselves, it has been so much easier to let others tell us what is legitimate and what is not. This is why in these so-called multicultural societies tolerance of others does not translate into an understanding of others and may actually impede a deeper knowledge of matters Caribbean.
Over the course of more than a year I searched for a way to contact Geoffrey Drayton. It wasn’t until Barbadian poet Esther Phillips put me in touch with Professor Henry Fraser that I began to make some headway. I had been told he was quite difficult to contact and was unlikely to respond, so after posting a letter to the address Professor Fraser provided me I was not surprised to receive nothing in return. Many months passed until one day I came home to hear a phone message, the caller identifying himself as Geoffrey Drayton, after which he hung up without leaving his number. I thought I had missed my one and only chance to speak to the man I’d been pursuing for so long. The next day he called again.
Drayton now lives in Spain, and has done so for the last 26 years. For a period of about twelve months, beginning in late February of 2011, we have corresponded in writing and have spoken a number of times. Though his voice is enfeebled by age, his mind is sharp. The topic of his writing, in particular his novel Christopher, came up often, and despite the time and space that more than 50 years of distance have placed between himself and the island of his birth, the legacy of his writing remains an unresolved issue for Drayton. The ambivalence he affects about his place in the literature of Barbados is not convincing. In our exchanges, it has become clear Drayton cares very much about whether his work is read by contemporary readers, especially Barbadians.
Nothing would please me more than for Drayton to see his work in print again, and especially to see copies of Christopher on the shelves of Bajan bookstores. Barbadians do not need to invent a literature, they have only to discover their own, and the first step of that discovery should be to recognize Geoffrey Drayton’s important and unique place in within it. AE
Editor's Note: Geoffrey Drayton died in Spain in 2017.
Last Modified: May 2, 2022
