A Morning at the Office - Edgar Mittelholzer

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"To hell wid you" love struck Horace shouts to the Laura Laballe before he walks off his job.  Trying to imagine Edgar Mittelholzer writing this and wondering if he said this to all the people who rejected his writing and before he killed himself less than twenty years after writing this book. I read My bones and my Flute in 2009

"A morning at the office" is set in the 1940's Trinidad office of Essential Products Ltd. The office has this mix of characters.. sexes, ages, class, shades and types of hair. Edgar Mittelholzer is unrelenting in his class/race/colour descriptions and how the people interact. The white expats come in for some cuss out  too.. Sidney writing home to his mother about ".. a club that considers you an aristocrat, and therefore eligible as a member, simply on the strength of your pink skin and English accent. I've met chaps there, who , in England, would be sniffed at by a Hoxton charwoman... " Sidney starts hanging out with coloured folk but is threatened with 'ostracism from the pseudo and real whites who pretend to be 'leaders of the smart set'. 

There was an exchange I had with a (white) expat who was living in Guyana and who was searching for intellectual company of all kinds. I believe he had a genuine interest in contributing in some way to Guyana but was conscious of being an outsider. Before I finally convinced him of my lack of intellectual ability, he had told me "So, whether you are  'from here' or not - and whether you like it or not - you have a lot in common with the more 'intellectual' classes, among which expats (mainly because expats tend to come from metropolitan centres) tend to gravitate towards." 






Some other things which I thought made this an awesome book :-

• creolese dialect is used and there is a nice comedy around the hypocrisy of the Santanya-reading-gas stealing Mr Benson who has contempt for Jagabir the bright accountant with the grease stain from his roti in his pocket
• Mittelholzer the author makes an office seem more interesting - even the door and the desk and pen nib have stories,  And Mittelholzer inserts himself as a coloured writer who fascinates the white man who did not have much work to do.
• the characters are all likeable, with all their quirks and foibles.
• Mittelholzer talks about sex.. all kinds including Mr Reynolds thinking of the young man in a green beret who escaped from a train crash in a story told by a travel agent about the makers of a key which Mr Reynolds was playing with.
• There are happy endings of sorts.. it is only midday and everyone has a chance to live  happily ever after . (Mr Reynolds will try to find a job for Horace who has walked off )

The only things I regret about this are that it was not sent in Guyana/British Guiana and that I did not read it much earlier before I started working in an office. The race/shade thing was not so much an issue but I remember the quirks like the people squabbling of the Baygon/Air Freshner used to chase mosquitoes out in the morning. In the book, Jagabir admits to filling his pen with ink from someone else's desk - I remember tying a  long thin elastic (used in underwear)  to a pen and then attaching the elastic to the desk so that people would not steal the pen.


The edition I read is from Peepal Tree Press . It has an introduction with more scholarly stuff. The book is highly recommended.