Diary of a Shopkeeper, 9th June 2024

While south for the London Wine Fair, I bought a second-hand book to pass the time on my long tube journeys across the city. This 1971 paperback of VS Naipaul’s The Mystic Masseur kept me amused as I travelled, but it also evoked powerful memories and emotions. It wasn’t the novel that touched me as much as the introduction, written by Kenneth Ramchand, a pioneering historian of Caribbean literature, and Paul Edwards of Edinburgh University.

Paul Edwards was the first teacher I met when I enrolled as a student in the week of my 18th birthday. He beamed at me from the end of a large table strewn with books, papers and ashtrays. (It’s inconceivable now, but students were allowed to smoke in his office classroom.) The walls were lined with books, the windowsill with spider plants. There was a fridge at his left hand which was, I later found out, stocked with homebrew and fruit wine. Paul would offer a glass to students halfway through his two-hour tutorials: discussion in the second half was always much livelier.

That first one-to-one meeting involved him giving me a poem typed out on a piece of A4 and telling me to read it. ‘What do you think?’ he asked after a few minutes.

‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘I don’t really understand it.’

‘Okay, that’s what you think,’ he said. ‘You think you don’t understand it. Why not?’

‘Well, it’s written in simple childlike language, but it’s a serious meditation on death. A young child could never write that.’

‘So why would an adult want to write about death in the voice of a child?’

I can’t remember what I said next, but I’ve never forgotten the lesson he taught me that day:  prior knowledge was not necessary to read and appreciate the poem – or any poem. What was necessary was to pay attention to both the text and my own reactions to it. My own reactions were valid, as long as I recognised that that’s what they were: impressions formed in my head, and not inherent in the poem itself.

This insight encouraged me to read books from all over the world, by writers I knew nothing about. I approached them with an open mind, aware that understanding was a process rather than an instantaneous insight. It was okay for me to say, ‘I don’t understand’. That was the first step on the road to understanding.

As well as being an inspirational teacher, Paul Edwards was an editor and promoter of writing from areas almost entirely neglected at the time, including the Caribbean (hence VS Naipaul) and Africa. He was a tireless promoter of African writers like Egyptian Waguih Ghali, whose Beer in the Snooker Club is one of the funniest novels I’ve ever read. Beer, humour and Paul were a frequent combination.

While living in Ghana and Sierra Leone in the sixties, he edited several groundbreaking anthologies including West African Narrative and Through African Eyes. He was a moving spirit in the development of Heinemann’s epochal African Writers Series.

I didn’t realise Paul’s importance in this area when I was a young, naive student, and he was too modest to mention it. Now I dearly wish I could talk to him about his involvement with major writers like Chinua Achebe and Kole Omotoso, and his work rescuing early black British writers from obscurity.

If the name Paul Edwards is firing sparks in the mind of anyone reading this, it’s likely because of his second main area of literary interest. He did a post-graduate degree in Icelandic, and from 1968 onwards edited and translated, with Hermann Pálsson, a string of Old Icelandic sagas, from Egil’s Saga to Magnus’ Saga to, yes, the Orkneyinga Saga.

If you have the Penguin edition of that on your shelf, have a look at the title page. There’s his name. I’m lucky enough to have a copy signed by both translators, given to me by Paul when he heard of my fascination with Orkney’s history.

Paul Edwards died in May 1992, in the same week I came to live in Stromness.

Paul’s early anthologies of African literature (like the one pictured above) are well worth a look if you can find them. Being 60-odd years old, they inevitable seem dated in some of their editorial decisions and commentary, but overall they’re well put together - and of real historical importance. Sadly, there’s little about Paul online: I can’t find a single photo of him. WIki has a bibliography, at least.

I mentioned above that Beer in the Snooker Club is a very funny novel. It is, but it’s also politically incisive. It’s very different from the work of Ghali’s contemporaries like Yusuf Idris and Nawal El Saadawi, not least because it was written in English, but above all because of its satirical, world-weary tone. Susie Thomas has written an excellent essay about the author and his one remarkable book here.

This diary appeared in The Orcadian on 13th June 2024. A new diary appears weekly. I post them in this blog a few days after each newspaper appearance, with added illustrations, and occasional small corrections or additions.