#eric walrond

[asfaltics]

putterings, 355-352

                    too-too-too-too-too slow reading; too puttering we booke beneath the aspen scars all south and encautive, and incompleteness,                     puttering water sounding debris of an exotic kind somewhere in foetic blur of “uncollectedness”                     puttering water paused unbranched, unplaced  

—

puutterings     |     their index     |     these derivations     |     20230921  

[puutterings]

of puttering water . he paused

        “Oh, it’s you,” she exclaimed, and smiled wanly.       He was sourly sweeping dishes, forks, egg-stained things into a mossy wooden basket which he hoisted and dropped into a cesspool of puttering water.       He paused, blinking uncomprehendingly.       “You,” she was catching at mementoes, “you remember — you helped me — my trunk —”

ex Eric Walrond, “The Yellow One” in collection of his stories Tropic Death (1926) : 61-85 (74) U Michigan copy/scan, via google : link UC Berkeley copy/scan, via hathitrust : link beautiful endpaper art (artist unknown) partially visible in UC scan —

more on this (text and author) at html archive : 352  

[nedsecondline]

New biography sheds light on lesser-known Harlem Renaissance giant, Panama-born Eric Walrond

Columbia University Press will publish tome by Brooklyn College professor James Davis on Feb. 24th. Tobias Salinger reports for The Daily News. This book could start its own Renaissance. The first biography of Harlem Renaissance writer Eric Walrond will hit shelves later this month, shedding light on a literature pioneer who isn’t as well-known as his […]

http://repeatingislands.com/2015/02/04/n…

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[blackkudos]

Eric D. Walrond

Eric Derwent Walrond (December 18, 1898 - August 8, 1966) was an Afro-Caribbean Harlem Renaissance writer and journalist, who made a lasting contribution to literature; his work remains in print today as a classic of its era. He was well-travelled, being born in Georgetown, Guyana (British Guiana), the son of a Barbadian mother and a Guyanese father, moving early in life to live in Barbados, and then Panama, New York, and eventually England. Walrond's most famous book was Tropic Death, published in New York City in 1926 when he was 28. In it are collected ten stories, at least one of which had been previously published in small magazines. He had published other short stories prior to this, as well as a number of essays. The scholar Kenneth Ramchand described Walrond's book as a "blistering" work of the imagination; others described his work as "impressionistic" and "frequently telegraphic", reflecting his use of short sentences. The following extract from his short story "Subjection" illustrates his more lyrical narrative style: A ram-shackle body, dark in the ungentle spots exposing it, jogged, reeled and fell at the tip of a white bludgeon. Forced a dent in the crisp caked earth. An isolated ear lay limp and juicy, like some exhausted leaf or flower, half joined to the tree whence it sprang. Only the sticky milk flooding it was crimson, crimsoning the dust and earth. Much of the dialogue between Walrond's characters is written in dialect, using the many different tongues loosely centered on the English language to portray the diversity of characters associated with the pan-Caribbean diaspora. Early life and education

Eric Walrond was born in Georgetown, British Guiana, to a Barbadian mother and a Guyanese father. When Eric was aged eight, his father left, and he moved with his mother, Ruth, to live with relatives in Barbados, where he attended St. Stephen's Boys' School, before moving to Panama at the time when the Panama Canal was being constructed. Here Walrond completed his school education and became fluent in Spanish as well as English. Following training as a secretary and stenographer, he was employed as a clerk in the Health Department of the Canal Commission at Cristobal, and as a reporter for the Panama Star-Herald newspaper. In 1918 he moved to New York, where he attended Columbia University, being tutored by Dorothy Scarborough. He was a member of Alpha Phi Alpha fraternity. Harlem Renaissance writer

In New York, Walrond worked at first as hospital secretary, porter, and stenographer. His utopian sketch of a united Africa, "A Senator's Memoirs" (1921), won a prize sponsored by Marcus Garvey. From 1921 to 1923, Walrond was editor and co-owner of an African-American weekly called the Brooklyn and Long Island Informer. He was subsequently hired as associate editor (1923–25) of Negro World, the paper of Garvey's Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA). He subsequently became a protégé of the National Urban League's director Charles S. Johnson. Between 1925 and 1927 he was a contributor to, and business manager of, the Urban League's Opportunity magazine, which had been founded in 1923 to help bring to prominence African-American contributors to the arts and politics of the 1920s. He was also a contributor to The Smart Set, The New Republic and Vanity Fair and Negro World. His short stories included "On Being Black" (1922), "On Being a Domestic" (1923), "Miss Kenny's Marriage" (1923), "The Stone Rebounds" (1923), "Vignettes of the Dusk" (1924), "The Black City" (1924), and "City Love" (1927) - the year that Duke Ellington began his career in New York and the Harlem Globetrotters were founded. In 1928-9 Eric Walrond was awarded the Guggenheim Fellowship for Fiction. Later life in England

After a decade in America, Walford left for England, where he met English writers and artists during the 1930s, including Winifred Holtby. In later life he continued to employ his editorial skills from time to time, while working as an accountant. At the age of 67 he collapsed on a street in central London and was pronounced dead on arrival at St. Bartholomew's Hospital. Following an autopsy, he was buried at Abney Park Cemetery, Stoke Newington, on September 17, 1966. After his death, which was in reduced circumstances, his early literary work has enjoyed wider recognition, as reflected in Winds Can Wake up the Dead... and The Penguin Book of Caribbean Short Stories, both published in the last decade. At the time, however, his passing appears to have gone relatively unnoticed, although Arna Bontemps wrote of his death, from a fifth heart attack, in a letter to Langston Hughes, dated September 1, 1966, and Countee Cullen's well-known poem "Incident" is dedicated to Walrond.

http://wikipedia.thetimetube.com/?q=Eric+D.+Walrond&lang=en

Read the Ubuntu Biography Project article at http://goo.gl/9WBy9E

[damn-fine-books]

[gravalicious]

The Negro in London (1936) - Eric Walrond

Viewing the "Mother Country" with an adoring eye, the Negro in the British overseas colonies is obviously at the mercy of the rainbow. He sees England through a romantic and illusive veil. What he so affectionately imagines he sees does not always "square" with the facts.

This deception, common to the virgin gaze of African and West Indian alike, is partly a case of "distance lends enchantment," partly a by-product of the black man's extraordinary loyalty to the Crown.

On coming to England the first impression the black man gets is that of utter loneliness. He is not greeted with a friendly eye as in France nor looked upon with a disdain or kindly benevolence as in America; the reaction to him is one of cold indifference. The Negro is made to feel as some species of exotic humanity from another planet, and this despite the 50,000,000 negroes in the British Empire. 

It takes a Negro longer actively to enter into the corporate life of England than it does in France or America - two countries whose treatment of the Negro can compare favourably with that of England.

In the British Isles, despite so little one hears about it, there is a peculiar Negro problem. Large colonies of Negroes exist at Cardiff, Liverpool, Tyneside and London. For the most part the majority of the Negroes are discharged seamen. They are a polygot mixture from the farthest corners of the Empire. Most of these men have settled in England with the idea of seeking a wider social and economic opportunity. Most of them sooner or later marry English wives. In communities where there has been a great deal of inter-mixing the feeling among the whites is one of subtle antagonism. Although there is no universal segregation of blacks in residential areas, Negroes are not permitted in certain districts. The colour bar manifests itself in other ways as well.

In the case of the Negroes isolated in the distressed areas of the North of England, the colour bar is probably severest. Most of these are seamen by profession and are constantly on the look-out for a chance to ship to sea; but owing to the depression in the shipyards the number of white unemployed seamen is considerable. This results in a keen competition for jobs - a competition which is sometimes marked by racial clashes. Moreover, the coloured seamen are for the most part unorganised, owing to the inability to unite in a common cause and ignore the facts of their diverse origin. They therefore find themselves at an acute disadvantage with their white competitors, who are not only well organised but are frequently given the preference of jobs.

Few of these men are ever successful in leaving the class of seamen. No opportunity is given them to enter in other trades or in industry. Many of them are married to respectable English women and are bringing up a rapidly growing number of half-caste children.

With the economic barriers set up against them, there is nothing left for them to do but fall back on the dole or eke out a miserable existence in some shady precarious undertaking.

Unlike the position in the north, the problem of the Negro in London is much more complex and varied.

In the East End, where there is a large colony of seafaring men, the conditions of the Tyneside area are reproduced with close fidelity. It is after one has left the West India docks that the problem in London becomes enmeshed in a maze of bewildering subtleties and paradoxes.

There is no clean-cut definition of the Negro's position. So far as accommodation is concerned, the policy of individuality - or the legend that a man's home is his castle - is extended to both hotels and lodging houses. A Negro coming to London may secure a suite at the Park Lane Hotel, although Mr. Robeson has been barred from the Savoy, and the Mills Brothers were refused admission to forty hotels. Some landladies manifest a touching sympathy towards Negro lodgers, but others prefer not to have them. A Negro entering a Bond Street shop or a bank in the City may occasion a derisive sneer, or on the other hand, subterranean currents of sympathy. The black man never knows just how the Englishman is going to take him. Though the feeling of Empire is strongly present in the average Englishman he frequently displays an abysmal ignorance of the coloured races within the Empire. He does not pretend to distinguish amongst them: he lumps them all together, and is invariably astonished to find them in command of the English language.

The Negroes who come to London to study at any of the big Universities experience little or no prejudice, but are subtly discouraged from settling in England upon the completion of their course. In consequence, the number of Negro professional men residing in England is negligible.

The educated Negro who is neither a doctor or lawyer is of necessity "a bird of passage." With the clerk and artisan there are no openings for him. If he wishes to remain in England by the sweat of his brow he has to create something for himself. Many of these men, side by side with compatriots from the dives of Soho and the East End docks, occasionally find employment as "extras" in the big film studios outside London. This is well paying but erratic and unreliable work. Possibly the best recognised outlet for Negro talent in London is in the theatre and on the variety stage. From the days of Ira Aldridge, the great Shakespearian actor of the middle of the nineteenth century, the English have always been quick to recognise the genius of the Negro artist. This is a field in which the American, over and against the competition of Africans and West Indians, excels. This fact is illustrated by the enduring place which artistes like Florence Mills, Paul Robeson, John Payne, Leslie Hutchison and Louis Armstrong have made for themselves in the hearts of the English people.

Not only have film, stage and variety artists of colour secured from time to time a warm welcome in England, but musicians and poets as well. The popularity of Coleridge Taylor's music remains undiminished. The persoanl visits and lyrical beauty in the works of Paul Lawrence Dunbar and Countee Cullen - two Negro poets separated by a span of nearly thirty years - shall always have a warm place in the secret heart of the English.

It is indeed a paradox that London, the capital of the largest Negro Empire in the world - the cradle of English liberty, justice and fair-play - the city to which Frederick Douglass fled as a fugitive from slavery - should be so extremely inexpert in the matter of interracial relations. But in this respect London may be easily compared with New York twenty years before the big migration which resulted in the establishment of Harlem. 

From: Black Man