A J Seymour is Guyana’s greatest man of letters. Martin Carter is the nation’s most renowned poet; Edgar Mittelholzer, Wilson Harris and Roy Heath are our outstanding novelists; and Denis Williams combined in one man a Renaissance range of talents as artist, novelist and anthropologist. But AJS, in my estimation, as all-round contributor in the world of letters, is unsurpassed.
Arthur Seymour (1914-1989) was a very good poet and many of his poems have become an indelible part of our literary heritage. He founded and edited Kyk-Over-Al, Guyana’s leading and one of the most influential West Indian, literary journals. He wrote his memoirs in five fascinating volumes. He produced a number of anthologies including the comprehensive Treasury of Guyanese Verse. The bibliography of his work is astonishingly varied: it contains not only hundreds of poems in 43 collections large and small over the years, but also essays, monographs on Guyanese culture, Forewards and Introductions to other writer’s works, addresses, lectures, broadcasts, reviews and pamphlets in such profusion that one might be forgiven for thinking that this was the work of a school and not just one man.
One of the multitude of tasks AJS set himself was to compile a dictionary of Guyanese biographies – brief pen portraits of Guyanese whose name and deeds he felt should not be completely lost in the mists of time as the years passed. He compiled, I believe, two volumes of such bio-sketches and I have always felt that these volumes should be retrieved from oblivion, edited for errors and omissions and expanded into a multi-volume project which would seek to preserve the life-details and achievements of Guyanese from as long ago as we can trace until the present era. Perhaps the University of Guyana might undertake such a project. We need a full-fledged Dictionary of National Biography regularly kept up to date as the decades pass.
But my purpose in mentioning A J Seymour’s national bio-sketches is to record a particular aspect of his pen-portraits which I believe noteworthy. He naturally recorded the lives of the powerful and the prominent. But AJ also gave abundant space to those whose lives were spent out of the limelight. His portraits give full credit to revered village headmasters, hospital matrons, bush pioneers, farmers and a long series of others who made inestimable contributions in long lifetimes of dedicated service as much as he notices those who must have dominated the headlines in their time. A priest who served his parishioners faithfully for forty years was worth a Bishop’s space. Those who truly built the nation were as important as those who hogged the headlines.
This approach to history and biography I find correct and admirable. It is the unsung who get things done. It is the footsoldier who wins wars. It is the unseen and unheralded who give the great ones their victories and prizes. It is the toilers in the vineyard who grow the grapes which make the vintage famous.
Quite often I have found that a poem crystallizes in a few lines what I have thought or felt a long time. The other day I came across a poem by the very good American poet Tony Hoagland which sums up what has often occurred to me in my life-experience. It expresses a truth which all who lead and gain great prizes in life should remember always. Here is the poem.
The Hero’s Journey
I remember the first time I looked at the spotless marble floor
of a giant hotel lobby
and understood that someone had waxed and polished it all night
and that someone else had pushed his cart of cleaning supplies
down the long air-conditioned corridors
of the Steinberg Building across the street
and emptied all two hundred and forty-three wastebaskets
stopping now and then to scrape up chewing gum
with a special flat-bladed tool
he keeps in his back pocket.
It tempered my enthusiasm for “The Collected Sonnets of Hugh
Pembley-Witherton”
and for Kurt von Heinzelman’s “Epic of the Seekers for the Grail,”
Chapter 5, “The Trial,” in which he describes how the
“tall and fair-complexioned” knight, Gawain,
makes camp one night beside a windblown cemetery
but cannot sleep for all the voices
rising up from underground –
Let him stay out there a hundred nights, the little wonder boy,
with his thin blanket and his cold armor and his
useless sword,
until he understands exactly how
the glory of the protagonist is always paid for
by a lot of secondary characters.
In the morning he will wake and gallop back to safety;
he will hear his name embroidered into toasts and songs.
But now he knows there is a country he had not accounted for,
and that country has its citizens:
the one-armed baker sweeping out his shop at 4 AM;
soldiers fitting every horse in Prague with diapers
before the emperor’s arrival;
and that woman in the nursing home,
who has worked there for a thousand years,
taking away the bedpans,
lifting up and wiping off the soft heroic buttocks of Odysseus.
