The Housing Lark Read online

  PENGUIN CLASSICS

  THE HOUSING LARK

  SAM SELVON (1923–1994) was a Caribbean novelist and short-story writer of East Indian descent, known for his vivid depictions of life in the West Indies and elsewhere. Born in Trinidad, he came to public attention during the 1950s with a number of other Caribbean writers. During World War II, Selvon worked as a wireless operator for the Royal Navy on ships that patrolled the Caribbean, while also writing poetry in his spare time. When the war ended, he went to work at the Trinidad Guardian, before eventually moving to London in 1950 and clerking for the Indian Embassy. Soon after, in 1952, he published his first novel, A Brighter Sun, followed by eight other novels, among them I Hear Thunder (1962), The Housing Lark (1965), Moses Ascending (1975), and Moses Migrating (1983); a collection of short stories titled Ways of Sunlight (1958); and a collection of plays titled Highway in the Sun (1991). He died in 1994 in Port of Spain.

  CARYL PHILLIPS is the author of numerous works of fiction and nonfiction, including The Lost Child, Dancing in the Dark, Crossing the River, and Colour Me English. His novel A Distant Shore won the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize; his other awards include the Martin Luther King Memorial Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and lives in New York City.

  DOHRA AHMAD is Professor of English at St. John’s University. She is the author of Landscapes of Hope: Anti-Colonial Utopianism in America (2009), coauthor (with Shondel Nero) of Vernaculars in the Classroom: Paradoxes, Pedagogy, Possibilities (2014), and editor of Rotten English: A Literary Anthology (2007). Her articles have appeared in ELH, the Journal of Commonwealth Literature, Pedagogy, Social Text, and the Yale Journal of Criticism.

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

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  First published in Great Britain by MacGibbon & Kee, London, 1965

  Published in the United States by Lynne Rienner Publishers, Inc., 1990

  Published in Penguin Books 2020

  Copyright © 1965 by Samuel Selvon

  Foreword copyright © 2020 by Caryl Phillips

  Introduction copyright © 2020 by Dohra Ahmad

  Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Names: Selvon, Sam, author.

  Title: The housing lark / Sam Selvon ; Foreword by Caryl Phillips ; Introduction by Dohra Ahmad.

  Description: [New York] : Penguin Books, 2020. | Series: Penguin Classics

  Identifiers: LCCN 2019040159 | ISBN 9780143133964 (trade paperback) | ISBN 9780525505747 (ebook)

  Subjects: LCSH: Trinidad and Tobago—Fiction.

  Classification: LCC PR9272.9.S4 H68 2020 | DDC 813—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019040159

  Cover illustration: Ben Denzer.

  Cover photograph: Tony Davis / Stringer / Getty Images.

  Version_1

  Contents

  About the Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Foreword by CARYL PHILLIPS

  Introduction by DOHRA AHMAD

  THE HOUSING LARK

  Foreword

  The Housing Lark (1965) is a novel that will be immediately recognizable to readers acquainted with Selvon’s earlier, and best-known, work, The Lonely Londoners (1956). The narrative structure is loose, with various episodes casually strung together, but the “ballads” (or stories) eventually cohere and move toward a poignant conclusion. Selvon peoples his narrative with a motley cast of characters, none of whom we get to know well, but all of whom—as migrants—feel the pressure of living in a new country. They cope with their hurt and alienation by resorting to humor and indulging in outlandish scams. Selvon’s thematic concerns are familiar: the pursuit of money, the quest to find work, and the desire to sleep with women. The backbeat to the narrative is an often lyrical meditation on seasonal change as we move from the grimness of winter to the clear blue skies of summer.

  The Lonely Londoners is populated with relatively newly arrived migrants—the novel opens with Moses, the main character, catching a bus to Waterloo Station to meet those disembarking from the boat-train—but the characters in The Housing Lark are settled in London, and they do not feel it necessary to flaunt their newly acquired knowledge of the streets and bus routes. Brixton is “Brix,” but without any fanfare. These Londoners are streetwise enough to know how to hire a coach and an English driver to take them on an excursion to Hampton Court, and they are able to talk about English history (albeit incorrectly) with a sense of proprietorial glee. These are postnostalgia migrants, whose dreams are not populated by thoughts of going home; they have adjusted to both the high and low streets of London and now wish to secure themselves in their new country.

  In the 1950s, finding a place to live proved to be a far greater problem for Caribbean migrants than finding a job. Between 1948 and 1962, 250,000 West Indians stepped ashore in Britain to help the Mother Country after the war, but they also wished to take advantage—as British subjects—of the greater opportunities for employment. However, on arriving in Britain, they soon discovered that landlords were disinclined to rent to “colored” people. Signs in windows often read “No Coloureds, No Irish, No dogs.” As a consequence, West Indians had little choice but to take inferior rooms in often run-down and unsanitary houses, a situation made worse by the overcrowding that followed as yet more “colored” migrants entered the country. Those who would agree to let to West Indians—most famously the slum landlord Peter Rachman in Notting Hill—charged exorbitant prices while not troubling themselves to maintain their properties.

  The rudimentary plot of The Housing Lark concerns itself with the efforts of Battersby—or Bat—a Trinidadian bachelor living in a basement room, to organize a group of his colleagues to club together enough money so that they might put down a deposit on a house and mount the bottom rung of the housing ladder. Such schemes were not uncommon during the fifties and early sixties, but few could have been as hilariously chaotic as that of Bat and his friends. What they are hoping to achieve is some form of self-determination and independence from the indignities visited upon them by being forever overlooked and ignored in their search for decent housing. What transpires is something rather different. Among Bat’s predominantly male cohorts there is much double-dealing, and the men feud and fall out until the West Indian women among them step forward and take control.

  The Housing Lark is a novel that effectively showcases the central purpose of Selvon’s work—the presentation of the truth, warts and all, of West Indian life transposed to Britain. He is unsparing in his depiction of the instability and unreliability of the men who, free from the shackles of the matriarchal Caribbean, now roam irresponsibly in patriarchal Britain. He details the feverish search for women, and the headlong rush to make conquests with local “birds.” In The Lonely Londoners, the West Indian women were marginalized, and even beaten. Not so in this novel, for it is three West Indian women—Jean, Matilda, and Teena—who save the day. However, this is certainly not a feminist novel—women are still grossly objectified, exploited, and commonly referred to as “the thing”—but the reality of West Indian survival in Britain, for this early generation, depended greatly on
the resilience and common sense of the women, and in The Housing Lark Selvon offers more than just a cursory nod of the head in the direction of this fact.

  Selvon’s gift was not plot in the conventional sense, although there is certainly some complexity to his “ballad” structure, and an eloquence to the manner in which he juggles his protagonists in and out of the storyline. Also, deep analysis of character was not Selvon’s strength, and those seeking a full engagement with the psychology of individuals will be disappointed. However, it would be a mistake to therefore judge Selvon to be a writer who is simply holding up a sociological mirror in which we might catch a glimpse of the realities of racial prejudice in Britain in the austere years between the end of World War II and the swinging sixties. Selvon was, in fact, a subtle technical artist who found a form that could best represent the chaotic group life of West Indians in the years when they came to understand that they had a narrow purchase on life in Britain, and sadly they could not necessarily rely on each other—coming as they did from different islands and different traditions. They all had a story to tell, and Selvon discovered a form in which he might not only give them the space to tell their individual stories, but also be able to give them a distinctive voice. Selvon’s language is lilting, humorous, and full of compelling imagery, yet always, like the men themselves, its principal aim is seduction. The insistent patter of his sentences, their honesty, and the urgency of their awkward delivery, immediately draws the reader in. For instance, the opening lines of The Housing Lark almost leap off the page with an accusatory exuberance.

  But is no use dreaming. Is no use lying down there on your backside and watching the wallpaper, as if you expect the wall to crack open and money come pouring out, a nice woman, a house to live in, food cigarettes, rum.

  Selvon’s great “discovery” was that, unlike the British “Angry Young Men” of the period—writers such as John Braine, Alan Sillitoe, and Keith Waterhouse—whose novels are narrated in standard English with the dialogue in working-class, or northern, dialect, in order to best illustrate the realities of West Indian life in Britain he would have to offer up both narration and dialogue in dialect. As he stated (speaking about The Lonely Londoners):

  When I wrote the novel . . . I had in store a number of wonderful anecdotes and could put them into focus, but I had difficulty starting the novel in straight English. The people I wanted to describe were entertaining people indeed, but I could not really move. At that stage, I had written the narrative in English and most of the dialogues in dialect. Then I started both narrative and dialogue in dialect and the novel just shot along.

  Selvon’s meticulously observed narratives of displaced Londoners’ lives, using the rich linguistic chords of the character’s voices, created a template for how to write about migrant, and postmigrant, London for countless writers who have followed in his wake, including Hanif Kureishi and Zadie Smith.

  Between 1950, when Selvon arrived in England from Trinidad as a twenty-seven-year-old writer, and 1978, when he left for Canada, Selvon’s ear was attuned to the pain behind the laughter in the voices of the West Indians who had left behind their homes and were attempting to settle in Britain. The Lonely Londoners may be his most famous novel, but The Housing Lark is a fine, and unfairly neglected, companion novel that explores the same thematic material while reaching slightly different conclusions—particularly so regarding the role of West Indian women. But in this novel, Selvon, once again, rightly emphasizes the degree to which the difficulties of migrant life changed with the four seasons, and he points up the often spiritually necessary trauma-bonding among small dysfunctional groups of West Indians, all while drawing our attention to the individual courage required to simply endure when everything seems to be arrayed against you. Selvon’s Londoners are always lonely, but mercifully by the end of The Housing Lark they appear to be slightly more organized.

  CARYL PHILLIPS

  Introduction

  On every level, Sam Selvon’s The Housing Lark is a novel about community. From its unconventional narrative voice, to its ingenious ballad form, to its triumphant plot, to its wry observations about race, nationality, gender, food, music, and history, the novel at once depicts and enacts the coming together of West Indian emigrants in postwar London. The Housing Lark may not be Selvon’s masterpiece. That honor could belong to A Brighter Sun, Selvon’s complex Bildungsroman set in rural Trinidad, or The Lonely Londoners, his bittersweet exploration of new arrivals to London. However, The Housing Lark is a unique and wonderful novel, comic and serious, cynical and tender-hearted, that deserves a wider audience than it has had so far.

  Unlike A Brighter Sun, The Lonely Londoners, and others of his better-known novels, The Housing Lark rarely appears in courses on Caribbean, Black British, or postcolonial literature, and is all but absent from a scholarly volume of Critical Perspectives on Sam Selvon. Yet it is not for lack of quality that the academic canon has abandoned The Housing Lark. Rather, it seems that required reading lists often can’t accommodate humor. With its surprisingly happy ending and irreverent, spirited wit, The Housing Lark goes against the grain of much postcolonial literature. Typically of vernacular literature, The Housing Lark holds its lessons and its literary achievement lightly, offering lessons in history and politics without forcing them on readers. An extraordinarily unified artistic accomplishment, the novel presents a remarkably synthetic vision of West Indian diasporic community and its associated cultural, linguistic, intellectual, and political values.

  The Housing Lark shares with The Lonely Londoners and Selvon’s Moses trilogy the topic of West Indian migrant lives in London. In response to a postwar labor shortage, the United Kingdom’s government encouraged its Commonwealth citizens to emigrate beginning in 1948. After arriving, the new inhabitants faced white supremacy and xenophobia in multiple forms, including social segregation, housing bias, and employment discrimination. Yet Trinidadians, Jamaicans, Barbadians, Grenadians, Guyanese, and others continued to emigrate until the British government erected legal barriers in 1971. Published in 1965, The Housing Lark belongs to a slightly later wave of immigration than the better-known novels of Selvon, George Lamming, V. S. Naipaul, and others; its characters are already somewhat established in London but still figuring out their way. Most significantly, whereas the government predominantly recruited male migrants in the 1950s, more women began to arrive in the following decade. Accordingly, the novel’s female characters play a significant role in its plot and themes.

  That plot, roughly, involves the “lark” or quixotic idea of buying a home together. Each of the novel’s main characters has encountered variations of racist and predatory rental markets, and together they scheme to find a literal and figurative place of their own. From its opening scene, The Housing Lark poses the question of whether the lark can become a reality: Will these motley folks, male and female, black and Indian, from Trinidad and Jamaica, prostitutes, housecleaners, factory workers, and hustlers, manage to achieve this milestone of upward mobility? More than any other of Selvon’s novels, The Housing Lark explores the possibility of unity in difference. Its genius is the way that it expresses that possibility on the multiple levels of form, language, plot, and themes.

  * * *

  * * *

  The Housing Lark explores the quest among migrants for a place to be fully human. Before we think about how that topic manifests itself on the more obvious levels of plot and themes, it’s important to begin by thinking about how the novel conveys its central interests. Rather than a conventional chapter structure, Selvon has chosen to shape his novel according to “ballads,” or character-based episodes. Though carefully thought out and brilliantly executed, this unusual structure has the effect of appearing spontaneous and unmediated. Our impression is of a friend associatively recounting stories; the novel, in fact, is perfectly assembled to make the points and create the effect that Selvon intends.

  As the Barbadian poet and literary theor
ist Kamau Brathwaite writes in his critical study History of the Voice, calypso has often provided a central format and aesthetic for West Indian writing. Whereas Brathwaite’s topic is poetry, in The Housing Lark calypso influences the shape of the work of art on the most macro levels of plot and novelistic form as well as at the more line-by-line level of rhythm and language. To my mind, The Housing Lark represents one of fiction’s most fortuitous marriages of form and content: every character’s fate is linked to that of others; they form a community together; and that interdependence comes across perfectly in the overall shape of the novel. Whenever we move from one character to the next, the anonymous narrator navigates the novel’s terrain in a very careful, deliberate way: out to a new ballad, then back in again to the main storyline, the search for a place that these individuals, together, can call their own. Thoroughly in control of the narrative, Selvon’s narrator masterfully balances individual and communal stories.

  Selvon employs an extraordinarily innovative narrative voice, which I would call “embodied omniscient.” Like a traditional omniscient narrator, this one has no name or specific persona, and is aware of the inner thoughts and motivations of all the characters. Yet he also identifies himself as part of their community, an individual with raced, nationalized, gendered characteristics. He is clearly male, of West Indian origin, a fellow migrant. At once mocking and sympathetic, he is immersed in the lives of his characters, respects their linguistic choices, and follows the main character Battersby’s cues to label him “Bat” and his modest apartment “number 13a” according to Bat’s preference.

  Anglophone vernacular fiction, i.e., fiction in any nonstandard variety of English, tends to fall into two categories: either an omniscient narrator uses Standard English, while characters speak in vernacular (as in Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God or Roddy Doyle’s Barrytown Trilogy), or there is a vernacular-speaking first-person narrator (as in Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn, Sapphire’s Push, Ken Saro-Wiwa’s Sozaboy, and many others). Selvon’s novels are extremely rare in their choice to bestow narrative authority—in other words, objective knowledge—on a vernacular narrator. Perhaps only Earl Lovelace (in The Wine of Astonishment and other fiction) and Oonya Kempadoo (in Tide Running) have also created omniscient vernacular narrators, and those came decades after Selvon’s innovation.