Kunapipi XXVI:1

PHILIP NANTON
Frank A. Collymore: A Man of the Threshold

Frank A. Collymore of Barbados, 1893–1980, was perhaps best known as the editor of Bim, the regional literary magazine in the English-speaking Caribbean. He was also a poet, short story writer, eminent amateur actor, school-teacher and artist. Between 1944 and 1971 Collymore published five collections of poetry and an often reprinted study of ‘Barbadian dialect’. In 1991, a collection of his short stories was published posthumously. In his later years he was often described as a ‘literary genius’ and as ‘The Grand Old Man of West Indian literature’. He won honorary awards and wide recognition in the English-speaking region for his role in the development of Caribbean literature.

The methodological dilemma posed by Collymore as a subject of research throws light on two competing paradigms of Caribbean culture that operate at different levels of analysis. These are the case study and the study of a cultural area. The former places emphasis on what is sui generis in each case. This level of analysis recognises the unique features that operate at the individual or societal level. The focus on a cultural area points rather to the broad similarities within a cultural area and differences between cultures. The problem for my research was: should the study reinforce the unique features and diverse skills of Collymore, or should it present an interpretation that consciously re-frames the many categories in which he excelled and so seek some common ground? Could I find some synthesis between the two? Two recent studies by eminent scholars of the Caribbean, Bruce King and Antonio Benitez-Rojo, illustrate the contrasting approaches.

Bruce King’s biography, Derek Walcott: A Caribbean Life, offers a detailed chronology of Walcott’s 70 years in all its complexity. In the preface to his book, King claims that it is ‘a story about important moments of West Indian culture but also about American and recent international culture’. He regards as misleading the approach to biography that organises a life by topics. He considers and rejects the presentation of ‘a chapter here on poetry, a chapter there on painting, another chapter on New York÷. The next biography can have the privilege of simplicity, selectivity and clarity, but it will be misleading. Lives are not clear unless you take the blood out of them and reduce them to ideas and illustrations’ (viii).