by John Lennard - Humanities-Ebooks

Humanities-Ebooks
Genre Fiction Sightlines
Tamora Pierce
The Immortals
Ralph Thompson
Wild Magic
Wolf-Speaker
The Emperor Mage
The Realms of the Gods
View from
Mount Diablo
An Annotated Edition
Edited by John Lennard
by John Lennard
HEB ☼ Humanities-Ebooks, LLP

Ralph Thompson
View from Mount Diablo
An annotated edition
by
John Lennard
HEB ☼ Humanities-Ebooks, 2009

Publication Data
View from Mount Diablo © Ralph Thompson 2003, 2009
Introduction and annotations © John Lennard 2009
‘Launch Speech’ © Wayne Brown 2003, 2009. Published by kind permission of Wayne
Brown.
‘The Inner Part’ © Louis Simpson 1963. Reprinted by kind permission of Louis Simpson.
Cover image: ‘Mount Diablo’ © John Laidlaw
The editor has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this Work in accordance with
the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. Copyright in images and in quotations remains
with the sources given.
A material edition of this book ISBN 9781845231446 is published simultaneously by Peepal
Tree Press in Leeds, and is available both from their website and from all good bookshops.
http://www.peepaltreepress.com
This electronic edition published in 2009 by Humanities-Ebooks LLP.
Tirril Hall, Tirril, Penrith CA10 2JE
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ISBN 978-1-84760-093-6

CONTENTS
Acknowledgements 6
Map of Jamaica 7
Introduction “a cloud shaped like his island home” 8
Form (1) The verse-novel (and crime) 10
Pushkin and the nineteenth century 10
Seth and the late twentieth century 12
The Commonwealth and Caribbean Clusters 15
Versification and metrics 22
Form (2) The Bildungsroman 25
Background (1) Jamaica in World War 2 29
Background (2) “Blood / cheaper than drugs.” 31
A brief history of current drugs legislation 33
The new triangular trade 34
Early Reception 36
Wayne Brown, Launch speech 37
Fr. Gerard Leo McLaughlin SJ, Sunday Observer 43
View from Mount Diablo 45
Prologue 48
Chapter One 50
Chapter Two 53
Chapter Three 58
Chapter Four 62
Chapter Five 65
Chapter Six 68
Chapter Seven 74
Chapter Eight 78
Chapter Nine 81
Chapter Ten 86
Chapter Eleven 91
Chapter Twelve 96

5
Annotations 100
Prologue 101
Chapter One 104
Chapter Two 108
Chapter Three 113
Chapter Four 117
Chapter Five 122
Chapter Six 125
Chapter Seven 137
Chapter Eight 143
Chapter Nine 146
Chapter Ten 154
Chapter Eleven 160
Chapter Twelve 168
Bibliography 175
Poetry 175
Essays 177
Journalism 178
Reviews of Ralph Thompson’s Work 181
Verse-Novels and Poetry Cited 182
Bildungsromans and Memoirs Cited 186

6
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
My greatest debt, of course, is to Ralph Thompson, not only for View from Mount
Diablo itself and the many rewards it has afforded me in reading and annotating, but
for his patience in answering queries, help in compiling the bibliography of his
work, careful reading of the typescript introduction and annotations, and supply of
some additional glosses as well as various corrections. Frequent hospitality in a
fascinating house with its own stunning views over troubled Kingston, and the
gracious kindness (and cooking!) of his wife Doreen, made an always interesting
project a great and memorable pleasure.
Professor Emeritus Edward Baugh, of the University of the West Indies–Mona, a
very fine poet as well as the doyen of Caribbean critics, was also kind enough to
read the typescript, and greatly improved the introduction; his generosity with his
time and skill, memory and understanding, were remarkable, and deeply appreciated
by an annotator always conscious of his own less than Jamaican credentials. At both
early and late stages in the project Professor Kwame Dawes, another fine poet who
read a draft MS for Peepal Tree, was with Jeremy Poynting rightly firm in directing
me to a range of Caribbean echoes, resonances, and contexts I had missed or
slighted, and the whole is far stronger for their care; Jeremy also kindly and cleverly
supplied very useful wording in a score of notes. Some fruitful disagreements having
remained disagreements, I should add that some of the views expressed, like all
mistakes, are mine alone. Mr Aeon Forbes, of the Library Department of The
Gleaner, was helpful in tracking down items for the bibliography; and Ben Ramm,
editor of The Liberal, was kind enough to commission a piece on verse-novels (for
the Spring 2009 issue) that helped me to focus what I wanted to argue.
Louis Simpson was kind enough to grant permission to reprint the text of his
poem ‘The Inner Part’, and Wayne Brown equally kindly granted permission to
include the text of his ‘Launch speech’ for the first edition of the poem in 2003.
Finally, I would like to thank those students at UWI–Mona to whom I have
taught View from Mount Diablo, and whose responses, both enlightening and
puzzled, persuaded me that an annotated edition could benefit readers everywhere.
JCL

8
Introduction
“a cloud shaped like his island home”
Like its author, View from Mount Diablo is powerfully hybrid—a verse-novel that
won the Jamaican National Literary Award in manuscript in 2001, and was
published in the UK by Peepal Tree Press in 2003. Ralph Thompson (b.1928) is a
white Jamaican, of crypto-Jewish and Irish stock, who received a Jesuit education.
Through his absent father’s US nationality he was eligible for military service, and
after graduating in law from Fordham University in 1950 spent two years as a USAF
officer in Japan, but he is married to a Jamaican and has lived in Kingston save for a
brief period in the 1970s when political violence forced the family overseas.
Thompson’s career was largely in business, with Seprod Ltd (a large firm supplying
household commodities and consumer products, for whom he was a long-serving,
highly successful CEO), but included educational activism with extensive
journalism, exhibitions of paintings, and latterly two well-received poetry
collections—The Denting of a Wave (1992) and Moving On (1997) 01 —before
expanding with View from Mount Diablo to embrace the verse-novel. Itself
intrinsically hybrid, that form is stretched by the generic models for Thompson’s
plot, the Bildungsroman and the crime novel, and additionally distorted by wideangle
narration bending an account of Jamaican social and political history from the
1930s–2000s into one truncated and foreshortened fictional life.
The protagonist, reporter and family-man Adam Cole, remembers the war-years
of the 1940s, and cannot be much younger than Thompson himself—born sometime
in 1930–5. He married after graduating from university, c.1955, and by chapter 6 has
a daughter of 15, making it the early 1970s. The violent, tragic events that dominate
chapters 6–12 thus seem at first to invite mapping onto the ‘Manley Years’ (1972–
80), and the final killings might be thought specifically to summon the later 1970s, a
very bloody time in Jamaica—but the ‘Manley Years’, however neat a tag, marked
an escalation as much as an inception, and all later events in the verse-novel
subsume continuing, generically similar events of the 1980s–2000s. The particular
role of the cocaine trade in the dénouement also points to a more recent date than the
1970s, and it is clear the Jamaican history Thompson presents, if profoundly verisimilar,
is as much an archetypal assemblage of chronic political and psychological
1
Both are published by Peepal Tree Press.

symptoms as a chronological account of events. Historicised narrative with
explicitly political chapters create this verse-novel as (beyond its other genres) a
state-of-the-nation report, shaping it “like his island home” (48).
What that report fundamentally posits, theologically, politically, and culturally,
is fratricide. Properly speaking, Adam’s killer Nathan is neither his blood- nor milkbrother,
but he is his greatest childhood friend, a sometime heart-brother in
adventure—though not education, for while Adam goes to Oxford, Nathan goes
nowhere, and must grub privilege through ruthless entrepreneurial success in the
drug trade/s. Adam’s parents welcome Nathan as playmate but do little for him
financially, allowing him to foster ambitions and breathe atmospheres he would not
otherwise have known and will never have the means to satisfy. So doing, they
inadvertently make their thin care seem to Nathan like callousness, and so pave the
road that leads to a reprise of Cain and Abel. Adam’s terminal death is profoundly
bleak, in the personal and theological senses of love failed and perverted, but also
politically, for beyond the prophylactic slaughter of a playmate it represents a defeat
of investigative journalism by organised crime. Ultimately, it also speaks to the
bloody brotherhood of the two major Jamaican political parties, the Jamaica Labour
Party (JLP) and People’s National Party (PNP), schismatically dividing during
World War 2 and becoming with independence and its aftermaths like psychotic
Siamese twins, fused through the skull but forever trying to kick one another to
death.
Given Thompson’s subtle mixing of specific and typical events, precision and
suggestion, readers unfamiliar with Jamaica’s political development and social
difficulties since the 1930s might best begin by consulting a good, short article
outlining them. 11 Particular references are annotated and some general background
given later in this introduction, but greater knowledge than I have space to provide
of the late colonial period, West Indies Federation (1958–62), subsequent Jamaican
independence, ‘Manley Years’ in the 1970s, and social and criminal trends throughout
the later century, will be of real value to readers. Subsequent sections of this
introduction deal with the verse-novel and Bildungsroman as formal models,
including Thompson’s relation to other Caribbean examples; with the World War 2
background that dominates the early part of View from Mount Diablo and the
cocaine trade that dominates its later part; and with its launch and early reception in
Jamaica.
9
1
See e.g. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jamaica or
http://www.discoverjamaica.com/gleaner/discover/geography/.

10
Form (1)
The verse-novel (and crime)
The term ‘verse-novel’ has (like ‘prose poem’) an intrinsic paradoxicality often
taken as a sign of levity—but recorded narrative begins in verse, with the anonymous
pre-classical epic Gilgamesh (written c.1200 BCE, and perhaps a millennium
older). The highly wrought forms of the great classical epics, Homer’s Iliad and
Odyssey (probably 9 th century BCE) and Virgil’s Aeneid (written 29–19 BCE), attest
to the advantages of verse in casting narrative, and in Virgil’s case to the explicitly
political purposes verse-narrative may serve. Both lessons are reinforced by
mediaeval and Renaissance examples of long verse-narrative—including the
anonymous French Chanson de Roland (12 th century), Dante’s La Commedia
(completed c.1320), Boiardo’s Orlando Innamorato (1487) Ariosto’s Orlando
Furioso (1532), and Tasso’s Gerusalemme Liberata (1581)—but later writers
followed Virgil in fusing epic with romance, and were in turn followed by Spenser
in The Faerie Queene (1596) and Milton in Paradise Lost (1667). Spenser in
particular was by Book VI of The Faerie Queene also anticipating significant
aspects of the kind of prose narrative now called ‘novels’, particularly in naming and
handling character.
The post-/Renaissance emergence of long prose fiction, culminating in the novel,
was matched in poetry. The Restoration and eighteenth century saw many extended
poems, from Butler’s Hudibras (1663–78), Pope’s The Rape of the Lock (1714), and
the great 1716 translation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses to which Dryden contributed, to
James Thompson’s The Seasons (1726–30), Macpherson’s Fingal (1762) & Temora
(1763), 21 and Cowper’s The Task (1785). While not in any simple way ‘novels’ all
clearly contested the growing supremacy of prose narrative; in a similar fashion the
seventeenth- and eighteenth-century emergence of prose autobiography had by 1800
provoked the emergence (with the first version of Wordsworth’s The Prelude) of the
modern verse-autobiography.
Pushkin and the Nineteenth Century
Long verse narratives embracing epic and romance forms continued throughout the
nineteenth century, but late Romanticism saw the emergence of what has come to be
1
These were supposed ‘tales of Ossian’, and contain free translations of Gaelic fragments, but
were revealed by the Mackenzie Committee in 1805 to be substantially Macpherson’s creation.

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