Near the end of a 1966 essay reprinted in this reader ("Harrison College and Me"), Austin Clarke admits that, for him, his youthful achievements could not validly be collectively recognizable. "I understand now.why I did compete in individual sports. I could not share my honours with anyone. I must be in front alone, in victory, as I had been alone in the defeats caused by virtue of being, firstly black; secondly, poor; thirdly, illegitimate."
Formidable adversaries; they dogged a boy's work and play, at home in Barbados. Add to them later the decision to make it as an expatriate writer in Toronto and consider the conventional measures of the man's success: in forty-two years in this country (mainly), fifteen books published; vigorous by-careers as teacher, civil servant, would-be pol.
Barry Callaghan's selection from Clarke's journalism, essays, and short fiction is a splendid plate of hors-d'oeuvres: the kitchen is tested, the fare diversely tasty. Any main course to follow will also be a more-than-acceptable product.
A few quibbles, editorially directed. There are two useful introductions, by Rinaldo Walcott (who's he?) and the poet Dionne Brand. These little essays acknowledge and place Clarke's high achievement in Caribbean and Canadian literature, but the inclusion of a couple of sentences about their authors would also have been respectful. Dates of publication should have been added to the list of titles backing the last essay; that way, perhaps, readers not as familiar as they should be with Clarke's sometimes demanding style could watch its heft and complexity change from book to book. Again, it would be nice to know which titles are still in print. The dates (of writing? of publication?) tagged at the ends of each selection are only partially useful.
Clarke is a delicious stylist, a virtuoso of dialect. From story to story, he will insert and withdraw the Bajan voice, sometimes giving it prominence in a story, either just in dialogue or both in narrative and in repartee, with varying degrees of phonetic intensity. Alternatively, he will lower it out of hearing almost entirely, replacing it with a muscular, more immediately accessible prose narrative. Since almost all his characters are Wessindian, of course that's what most of them talk, to a greater or lesser degree, depending upon how long they've been away and how much conventional schooling or assimilation they've undergone, and to whom they're speaking.
Extreme examples now. "Doing Right" is a cautionary tale about how not to make it, told in Bajan by a cautious narrator about his friend, a Toronto police auxiliary with the responsibility of writing parking tickets. (Such officers used to wear green uniforms some years back, were roundly despised and called "green hornets"; now they dress in a couple of shades of blue, more like regular cops, and are harder to laugh at.) The unnamed protagonist says proudly that he has been run out of several Caribbean islands for zealous overticketing and continues his obnoxious ways in one of the black districts of Hogtown, to which he has been demoted from the legislature beat, for having ticketed the premier's limousine. The greedy hornet pumps up his income by working two shifts, the first as a tow-truck driver, skimming for every car impounded.
Nemesis appears in the form of an enormous, Thunderbird-driving African American, who the narrator sees mince a small East Indian hornet. "Well, multiculturalism gone out the window now!...all them speeches that ministers up in Ottawa make concerning the `different cultures that make up this great unified country of ours,' all that lick-up now and gone through the eddoes. One time. Bram!" When eventually the Bajan hornet tries in stealth to tow that chariot, he's caught in flagrante delicto. The narrator is paralysed with fear at the last: "I see how the hand become big big big like a boxing glove, and I watching, but I can't open my mouth nor find voice and words to tell my former green-hornet friend to look over his left shoulder.."
His comic stories must not be taken too lightly, Clarke warns in an essay. Those "immigrants" laughing in them "do so because they have become accommodating to a system, and their laughter is therefore a `tick', an adaptation to that society.. In most cases, it is only the language that laughs. The propositions and anger that the language describes-they do not laugh." (I am aware that Clarke, though the possessor of a great gift for comedy, does not view himself primarily as a humourist. Some of the stories reprinted in the Reader are full-tilt heartbreakers, taking as their subjects-even when a saving grace of endurance shading into bravery is displayed-the more serious or even tragic side of race relations, sexual politics; all that Dionne Brand aptly terms "the small, delicate lives of Black migrants to this country..")
Much of the fiction in the Reader sounds autobiographical (that "alone in victory" schtick again) or appears at least to take flight from Clarke's "real" life. (Or perhaps such speculation as observable internal details provoke is intended-a canny little marketing ploy.) He'll use at times a conventionally grammared and dictioned, richly toned prose when he chooses to speak in his "own" voice, with or without dialectal dialogue as counterpoint. "When He Was Free and Young and He Used to Wear Silks" (1973) is built in a style Clarke uses nowhere else in this collection. It is eight and one half pages long, a one-paragraph tour de force with sentences sometimes most of a page in length, a loving meditation on two women (one white, one black) in the narrator's life, one in Toronto, one in Georgia. Clarke's sentences are as majestic and coiling as Mailer's, as Joyce's (puns and all). He demands you read every word, every punkt and squiggle, to catch the rhythm of memory. To excerpt in quotation would falsify; it must be enough now to state that this is some of the most resonant prose I have recently had the good luck to see and hear.
The other sections in the Reader contain a few of Clarke's 1,000-odd columns written for the Nation, a Barbadian newspaper; a pair of undergraduate poems; and a clutch of political and autobiographical prose pieces. Clarke has been turning these columns out weekly for two decades, beginning in 1976. The quality of the writing in the samples displayed here rivals that of anything by the best postwar humourists in any corner of the language. "Tom" Clarke (nom de journal) is easily a match for Flann O'Brien or S. J. Perelman. All are written in straight-up Bajan, which Clarke turns to a superb vehicle for satire, skewering several follies, political, familial, sexual. He also provides step-by-step instructions for making breadfruit cou-cou, a savoury dish that demands the addition of "a snap o' rum", or some other liquor. Earlier in the recipe, "the breadfruit bile, the Irish potatoes bile; the pig-tails soft, and sweet, and juicy, and nice. This is the time to fire one. Yuh can't cook, not even a bake, if you don't fire one. And since um is Sunday forenoon, what more better to whet the palate with, than a rum-and-soda. Fire one. Yuh going-need um." And so on. By the end of the preparation of this symphonically complicated dish requiring several pots and skillets on the go simultaneously, it is time to prepare an accompanying condiment. "Yuh prickle. Cumcumber slice thin like pages outta the Good Book; yuh salt, yuh fresh parsley, a lot; and yuh lime and yuh lemon, a teaspoon each-without the seeds. Slice yuh pear-if pear in season-and lay out yuh prickle 'side o' yuh pear. By now yuh-going-be blind-drunk! But the food done. Serve um when you sober-up, nuh!"
Among the political pieces is an interesting archive; Clarke interviews Malcolm X in 1963, the Malcolm X mark one, pre-Mecca, pre- the split from Elijah Muhammad. The interviewer asks leading questions, and "Mr. Malcolm" frequently inserts his foot firmly into his mouth. (Or so it appears, thirty-four years on.) And add this: five years later, Clarke wrote a carefully argued, scathing appraisal of what he saw as the failure of Martin Luther King to even begin to effect a partnership between black and white Americans.
Our author is an fascinating political beast. He tells us, in "Public Enemies: Police Violence and Black Youth" (1992), "I was the first to advocate a black nationalism [here in Canada, one supposes]. But then, in the heat and hipness of the Civil Rights movement, I was faced with the schizophrenia of living on a landscape that I cursed and denounced, until I realized that, with wife and children born here, I was in a very real sense Canadian, and no longer Barbadian, and, most certainly, not African." In 1977 he ran for the Tories in Ontario. In 1994, as his bio states, he resigned from the Immigration and Refugee Board, on which he had served since 1989.
Also in 1994 he produced "Exile", a short account of his anger and despair at his adopted country (not sufficiently adoptive), still north of and different from the States, though increasingly not different enough. "I have retained the ethnic and cultural flavour of Barbados, and the winters here can do nothing to transform them through a drop in the enthusiasm of Barbadian-ness.. It was my choice not to permit this freezing of my expectation, to have me swallowed up culturally during my long temporary sojourn here." Clarke hears a racial slur on the street during the annual Caribana festival in Toronto and it turns him around: ".intent, motive, and cause were now irrelevant. If I had ever thought of `exile', of the cutting off from known and accustomed ways, it happened that beautiful bright afternoon in August."
"Public Enemies" can be read first as a companion piece to "Exile". In this essay, which patrols the perimeter of Canadian racism, he says, "I do not regard myself as an immigrant in that negative sense, that I have no security against which to ask for the loan of decency, of recognition as a man, that I have no right to be here." The problem remains, though; what is to be done when the claim is made, and then rejected by others? Black Canadians cannot go "back where they came from," because there is no "back". "There is, at present, no mutually creative and no mutually acknowledged relationship between whites and blacks in the general sense; and.the goodwill that exists is expressed in inter-personal relationships (my white neighbour may be my most trusted friend, and vice versa, because we know each other).." Violence Clarke can certainly understand and cannot totally reject. But by the nineties, he is also interested in what he calls "improvisation", a certain resilience in the face of stupid oppression. He suggests, "The hope for all of us lies in our apprehension of the fact that anti-social behaviour is not a function of race or ethnicity." Clarke concludes, mixing metaphors gloriously, "There will be no fire next time, even though there have been bricks [this was written after the Yonge Street riot of 1992]. For we have trodden in the wine press too long not to realize the sweetness of the grape here, not to acknowledge the labour of those who went before us, those who were killed, those who were emasculated; not to be pleased, however, that we, all of us, have lifted this place from what it was when we met it, to a new residence, and a renaissance."

Clarke's newest novel (his eighth), The Origin of Waves, takes for an implicit secondary subject much of what he has said elsewhere about leaving home and not leaving it. On the small surface of the novel-in fact, almost all of it is a long one-chaptered story-not much happens. Timmy, a sad, aimless Canadian of Barbadian origin, deeply sunk in middle age, retired and solitary, trundles north up snowy Yonge Street like a silent lunatic, away from Lake Ontario early on a winter afternoon (it's part of a patterned walk he takes, daily). He bumps into another man, who turns out to be John, his best friend from childhood, who lives in the States now and is up here on a visit. They immediately go and sit down in a bar to drink (impressively, since they both remain quite coherent, despite their matching intake) and catch up "forty-fifty years" of absence from each other. In the course of the rest of the day, many lies are told and truths confessed. Clarke's narrative is an exercise in eventual honesty.
A few things to look at: Clarke sets up the relationship between Timmy and John with a little memoir from long ago. They're on a beach in Barbados, John is stung by a "cobbler" (sea urchin?), and, while the two boys are distracted by this, their inner tube drifts out to sea because Timmy can't swim to retrieve it, though John orders him to do so. Eventually, the two of them also leave the island and drift, a bit like the patched tube, it turns out.
Clarke portrays Timmy as an Eeyore, a fairly conventional sexual loser. He's impotent, admits it, at length, holding nothing back (and incidentally giving Clarke a chance to blow off definitively, in the back-and-forth between the two friends, the myth of the black stud). Moreover, he also has had a love who died before they consummated their relationship. John, who'd always been dominant when they were kids together, now has "set myself up as a therapist. You can take big risks in the States." and listens to Timmy attentively with many an interjected "Goddamn!" and much caring, sorrowful advice. Timmy's disclosures are a form of payback. When it's John's turn to talk, the stories are detailed and energetically contrapuntal: ten kids from four wives in four countries (one with the current partner). Timmy muses while these yarns are spun. "Why is he here?.I no longer see him as my best friend. I see him as my therapist. But I still have to ask him why he is here." It takes him all day and evening to manage this, and by closing time certain truths are out.
Like the habits of listening, the story-telling styles differ. Whereas John is committed to a Bajan or to a southern American diction (he lives in "Durm-North Carolina" and loves the south) and doesn't push conventional grammar too far into his pithy, slightly histrionic narratives-mainly about his marriages-Timmy speaks with the tongues of men and of angels. A poet (or a preacher), he's not ostensibly talking for victory, but, employing a different kind of display, he enlists confession as a hook on which to play his listener:
"Perhaps what I just narrated is nothing more than what my mother called a `friction' of my imagination. I used it to light the loneliness I live with. The boredom. Nothing so good in real life has ever happened to me. Not even in a dream."
"Ain't no dream, brother. You was fucked!"
"It is a dream. Take it as a dream."
"Dream, my black ass. You was fucked, brother. Goddamn!"
"It could be a dream."
All the women in the stories, earthy and exalted, that the two old men volley at each other, are cherished mightily. Multiply divorced John still can find little bad to say about his ex-wives, and he's crazy in love with number four. Timmy's dead darling, a young Chinese woman, takes on a little of the role of Dante's Beatrice. Memories of her help get him through his empty days in his empty house and on his empty walks to the lake and back. He holds back a little information, from us and from John (why he isn't working, hasn't worked for ten years; "an injury"), but all his confessions eventually elicit a set of admissions from his friend, who has heard him "in compassion, in understanding, in consolation, and at the same time, in shock." John then demolishes his own stories as a kind of offering, a late-night obeisance to the truth, while Timmy continues to reminisce silently. The contrast is excruciating.
Lest this brief explication tell you that the pair are merely sad sacks, let me disabuse you, right now. The Origin of Waves is also betimes a very funny book, especially when its blood alcohol level is on the rise. Timmy tries to explain a bit to John about where he lives and what he does, when he isn't sloping around downtown.
"I am a man, sitting, looking at the pattern in the carpets and the knots in the hardwood floor, looking, waiting for ants. And when I see one, squirt! Out goes the son of a bitch!"
"Any cockroaches?"
"No cockroaches."
"What about rats? And mice?"
"Occasional. But I live in Rosedale."
"The Black Flag can out-out those too?"
John at last admits he is not brave, but he does have an appointment to keep with his watching wife and gravely ill son in Sick Children's Hospital. He leaves Timmy in the midnight blizzard. Not brave? Well, he did leave his wife all day at the hospital, but he is heading back, for and in love. And Timmy has more or less kissed him off, with a scattering of coyly plausible rationalizations about the unsuitability (for guests) of his ghost-ridden house.
Timmy is a man who lives in his head and is aware of that condition. In a coda, he shows us that usually self-absorbed characteristic, both as fault and as saving ability, in all its magically realistic depth. Memories of his love fill his consciousness, and memories of childhood, both crossed by eidetic visionings of John and his family in the hospital. Clarke's tired old men matter to us. He leaves us with jesting Pilate's trite question at the end of his tale, but we have also been offered plenty of knowledge about the power of love to combat such nastinesses as Timmy's admitted "wish of personal cruelty and selfishness." We're willing to provide answers to the silent query, and to muse upon where they may lead his heroes, as the winter morning dawns after their long agonic night of talk and listening and reverie. 

Ted Whittaker lives, works, and reads and reviews books as often as possible, in Toronto.