The success of a biography stands or falls on two entirely separate points: one, whether the subject is interesting in him- or herself; and, two, whether the biographer has sufficient novelistic skills to make the subject interesting.
The points are separate because, even if faced with a subject who is not especially fascinating, a good novelist would still have something interesting to write. On the other hand, given the most fascinating personality in the world, an unskilled biographer will still pen a dull portrait.
But novelists are rarely interested in writing biographies, and biographers are never interested in the lives of mundane persons (unless, of course, such persons have money to pay to have their biographies written, in which case you don't get a biography but a very long brochure). So there is usually some sort of balance. Phyllis Shand Allfrey: A Caribbean Life, written by Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert, falls into the latter category: Phyllis Allfrey was probably quite interesting, but the reader can only deduce this from Gebert's highly-detailed account.
Phyllis was born in 1908. She was best known as the author of The Orchid House, a biographical novel which was made into a movie for British television. More importantly, though, she was the founder of Dominica's first political party, returning from Britain to Dominica in 1954 to organize the peasantry and estate workers into the Dominica Labour Party.
Gebert, an associate professor in the Department of Hispanic Studies at Vassar College, begins her portrait of Phyllis with standard fare: tales of prominent and wealthy forbears, with even a royal connection through a really long 17th-century pumpkin-vine to Anne Boleyn, the queen famous for being beheaded by her husband Henry VIII. Gebert emphasizes that Allfrey considered herself a completely Caribbean person, the emphasis coming because Phyllis was white.
"She was fond of describing herself as 'a West Indian of over 300 years standing despite my pale face' [writes Gebert] and would look upon her political work...as nothing but her duty 'to pay my obligations to the Dominican people.'"
Gebert knows this is nonsense, writing that "Phyllis did protest too much about her lack of ambition" yet, despite the rich details which follow, Phyllis remains somewhat two-dimensional as a political personality. Describing various aspects of Phyllis's political life, Gebert writes about "the wide-eyed naiveté of her boundless enthusiasm" and "She loved this aspect of campaigning...it seemed to satisfy an impish, child-like sense of politics as play" - trite phrases which stereotype rather than reveal. Indeed, the political sections,which should be the most exciting, given the events dealt with, are actually the most boring.
Nor does the portrait noticeably improve in those parts which deal with Phyllis as a novelist. At several points in the biography, Gebert mentions
that Phyllis was virtually incapable of writing pure fiction but usually based her stories on actual events. Despite this major advantage for a biographer, Gebert has been unable to capture the essence, the living character, of her subject. Again, there is detail aplenty, as well as liberal quotes from letters and stories. But the portrayal remains externalized.
The biography is the chronicle of the decline of a once-wealthy planter family, as well as the growth of a truly Caribbean sensibility within that class, as personified by Phyllis. The similarity between this theme and that of Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea is unlikely to be coincidental. Phyllis was often compared to Rhys (and, indeed, although Rhys was her friend in old age, Gebert records that Phyllis was resentful of this), and The Orchid House to Wide Sargasso Sea. But the comparison as writers is probably unfair: Phyllis wrote only this one novel and a number of short stories which never made a book. She was lucky with her novel: it was accepted by a publisher immediately and got good to fair reviews. But her talent was not outstanding: her second novel was considered far below standard by her agent and was never rewritten or published. In her late 60s, she attempted another novel: a fictionalized account of her political life, but this was never finished.
Phyllis, indeed, was more politician than writer, and often said that politics ruined her for writing. It ruined her in other ways, too: she was poor for most of her life. Not, of course, in the way black West Indians are poor: she and her husband had their own house, an old car and their own business. But there were many times when the food was just enough, as well as others when only a timely cheque from metropolitan friends, particularly the American socialite Adele Hammond Olyphant, saved them from total bankruptcy.
In 1927, Phyllis went to the United States and worked as a governess for a wealthy New York family. She had become acquainted with the family of J.P. Morgan II on one of the Morgans's Caribbean yachting trips and become friends with J.P.'s daughter and sister. She was thus well-connected to New York society when she emigrated, and also enjoyed the financial patronage of her two friends. She became engaged to one of J.P.'s nephews but the romance had to be kept secret since he had no independent income. Then, in 1929, one of Phyllis's sisters got married and Phyllis fell in love with the groom's brother, Robert Allfrey, and they were married a year later. According to the biography, he was a bad choice, with a notable talent for losing jobs through sheer obnoxiousness of character. Although they remained married for their entire lives, separating only once for any lengthy period, Phyllis had at least two known affairs, and probably a few others which remained undocumented.
Gebert, of course, merely mentions these details in passing. "Phyllis was at heart solidly respectable, despite evidence of a passionate sensuality that surfaced occasionally and that she almost always managed to stifle," writes Gebert, further stifling with trite prose any liveliness of Phyllis's character which might emerge from these surprising details. This, I suppose, is because of Gebert's academic perspective: she is strenuously objective where she needs to be gently didactic. A novelist creates effective characters against a value system which is never intrusive and includes only those details which are essential for characterization and theme. However, a biographer who cannot do this leaves her subjects in a sort of limbo of personality. A biographer also naturally wants to give as much information as possible, but that information cannot only be told: it must also follow the basic novelist's rule of being shown. Gebert does not strike this balance.
Still, the information in itself is interesting. Moving to Britain, Phyllis joined the Fabian society in 1939, a move which laid the foundation of her literary ambition and political vision. Everything came together in the 1950s: she wrote and published The Orchid House. founded the DLP, taking part in two successful campaigns, and became a Minister in the West Indian Federation. But this was also her period of greatest pain: she had two children by then and her son, Phillip, was committed to an asylum for life because of schizophrenia and her marriage nearly ended because she was so busy with political work. The Federation soon collapsed and, with growing nationalism, she was expelled from the party she created because she was white. In other words, there is a dramatic story here, pretty much killed by Gebert's bloodless prose.
Other dramatic moments are also underplayed because of Gebert's unfamiliarity with West Indian political culture. For example, in 1974 Edward LeBlanc, the man who ousted Phyllis from the DLP and became Prime Minister, resigned on the eve of the general election. He had spent 13 years as Prime Minister and Gebert describes his resignation as "surprising" and opined it was because of his thin-skinnedness, Phyllis having published just days before in her newspaper, The Star, a damaging article about how he threw her out of the DLP. But anyone with the least understanding of Caribbean politics knows that it is quite improbable that any Prime Minister would resign merely because he is revealed to be an ungrateful, conniving Brutus. So, only a few pages later, Gebert recounts how Patrick John, LeBlanc's second-in-command, who succeeded him as Prime Minister, was arrested for planing a coup in Grenada with the help of an American mercenary. But it never occurs to her that LeBlanc might have resigned under fear of death - instead, she illogically speculates that LeBlanc was collaborating with John.
In the middle part of her life, Phyllis's political life was confined to that of newspaper publisher and editor. She had no direct involvement in the important events of the Caribbean and Dominica in the 1960s and 70s, such as the Independence Movement, Black Power, and the spread of Rastafarianism in Dominica. There is much of potential interest in this section, but the way Gebert writes it gives the story a 'you had to be there' kind of impact. So it is interesting that Winston Churchill, according to an account given by Phyllis, once boofed Eric Williams for not having visited the Churchill's ancestral home while Williams was a history student at Oxford. It is interesting to hear the story of Al Akong, an artist and a Mirror columnist, being refused a visitor's permit renewal by the Dominican government solely because he was a friend of the Allfrey's, and Phyllis through her newspaper and as a member of the newly-formed Freedom party was at the time waging a campaign to have the Seditious Publications Act repealed. Dominica's three newspapers were all very critical of the government, and the Act was passed one month after the Herald ran a story charging that 16 lots of land had been set aside for relatives of Government Minister Ronald Armour. Also of interest was the fascist laws passed and the aggressive action taken by the Dominican government to eradicate Rastafarianism and Rastas on the island. But again, Gebert has no natural gift for anecdote, and the drama of these events is subdued in her telling.
Phyllis died in 1986, just a few months after undergoing a successful operation for colon cancer. As is too often the case in the Caribbean, "The honours Phyllis had not received during her lifetime were accorded to her after death." Gebert's biography, published ten years later, is part of that honour - one which only answers nearly every trivial question a reader might have about Phyllis Shand Allfrey's Caribbean life, and almost no important ones.
Copyright ©1998, Kevin Baldeosingh