The Gestation of an Idea Rod Jackman
The year is 2000. Caryl Phillips digresses for a paragraph— almost a throwaway. But great writers do not throw away great ideas. Those ideas gestate.
In his non-fiction book, The Atlantic Sound, Phillips visits Liverpool. While there he reflects on Wuthering Heights, which has been haunting him since childhood. He recalls Emily Bronte’s descriptions of Heathcliff: dusky, Lascar, a regular black, dark almost as if it came from the devil. Heathcliff also wishes for “light hair and fair skin.”
What if Heathcliff is unambiguously Black? That alters our reading of Wuthering Heights. Liverpool was Britain’s largest flesh port, in Europe’s second largest slave trading nation. Before the Windrush migration of the 1950s, of which Phillips’ parents were a part, England was home to a significant Africoid population. Some identify themselves as LBB — Liverpool Born Blacks.
Can that slender genealogy cement the claim which Philips doesn’t advance? Consider the locale of Wuthering Heights. West Yorkshire is just sixty miles from Liverpool. Mr. Earnshaw walks there and returns in three days. Port cities are cosmopolitan; they tend to harbor mixed populations. Earnshaw comes back home with a “gipsy”, who’s often called “it”. Phillips affirms there’s no textual evidence of the child’s “having any negro blood.”
But what Bronte takes for granted is not obvious 270 years later. In A Writer’s People, V.S. Naipaul claims that “Every kind of writing is the product of a specific historical and cultural vision.” Bronte codes Heathcliff for her contemporaries; they share a cultural shorthand. Her readers grasp the implications of Liverpool’s flesh market. They know that Catherine can’t marry Heathcliff not only because he’s a nameless man of the lower orders.
Whether one accepts or rejects this idea is immaterial. The key is its gestation. Tormented by Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre, Jean Rhys writes a prequel decade later: Wide Sargasso Sea. Her novel rehabilitates Bertha, the archetypal mad woman in the attic. Something similar happens to Phillips. In 1991 he levels a critique of plantation society with Cambridge. In 1997 he enfleches Shakespeare’s Moor in The Nature of Blood. Finally, he circles back to Emily Bronte with The Lost Child, his prequel to Wuthering Heights.
The year is 2015. Phillips’ output is prodigious. Between 2000 and 2014 he publishes four novels plus three collections of essays. However, The Lost Child rescues a peripheral paragraph from 2000 to reimagine Heathcliff. Phillips’ insight generates lapidary prose which gestates for fifteen years.
Touchstone 11.1