Taking the Drawing Room Through Customs: Selected Short Stories, 1970–2000

by E.A. Markham

When E.A. Markham writes a story about the Other World Cup (Montserrat loses 4-0 to Bhutan - the volcanic eruption has destroyed all the football pitches in Montserrat) and a few months later is actually invited to a literature festival in Bhutan, this chimes in with his fiction. In 1972, his alter ego, Pewter Stapleton, invented the island of St Caesare (next door to Montserrat, but more independent-minded) as part of an elaborate scam to enjoy the rich perks of a UN conference. Since then, the island has been pencilled in on a couple of maps; and a handful of people claim to have been there. Nothing is straightforward in Markham's fictive world. His stories constantly deny conventional expectations and make us rethink both how we interpret experience and what we expect of fiction. Conventional narrative could never convey the complexities of the recurrent and entertaining cast of mainly Caribbean characters as they make sense of their remembered and reinvented lives. Digression becomes an art form both in Pewter Stapleton's narration and in their stories. It is the rich web of words they weave that leads Markham to his image of the drawing room as a repository of the talk of family and friends as perhaps the most valuable possession taken by Caribbean people through Customs. This collection brings together new and uncollected stories and selections from E.A. Markham's two previous collections, Something Unusual (1984) and Ten Stories (1992). Each of the stories has its own crafted completeness, whether in the observant humour of 'The Pig Was Mine', the bleakness of 'Skeletons', the audacious mythologizing of 'A Short History of St. Cesaire', or the absurdist magical realism of 'Digging.' They confirm him as one of the most original users of the short story form in both British and Caribbean fiction. E.A. (Archie) Markham died unexpectedly in Paris on 23rd March, Easter day. Born in Montserrat in 1939, E.A. Markham worked in the theatre, in the media and as a literary editor.

300 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2002

About the author

Edward Archie Markham FRSL was a poet and writer, born in Harris, Montserrat, and mainly resident in the United Kingdom from 1956. Known for poetry in both "nation-language" (patois) and standard English, for short stories and a comic novel, he sometimes used the pseudonym Paul St. Vincent and other personae, and defies simple classification as an author. He edited two significant collections of Caribbean writing, and several literary magazines. His first work was in drama.

His family was large and relatively prosperous. He attended grammar school in Montserrat, and read English and philosophy at the University of Wales, Lampeter. He started academic research into seventeenth century comedy at the University of East Anglia, and then in London. In 1969, while lecturing at Kilburn Polytechnic, he formed the Caribbean Theatre Troupe, which toured Monserrat, Saint Vincent and other parts of the Eastern Caribbean. They performed The Private Life of the Public Man and Dropping Out is Violence.

He then worked in France for two years. His Lambchops poems, written as Paul St. Vincent, started to appear in the mid-1970s, and assume the perspective of a young urban Caribbean man. He would also use the voices of Sally Goodman, a Welsh feminist, Philpot and Maureen, and the character of Pewter Stapleton, an unimpressive academic, in his novel and stories. He built up a reputation gradually as a poet, through small press and chapbook publication.

He joined for a time the performers The Bluefoot Travellers. In the later 1970s he taught in Manchester, then had writing fellowships in Hull and London (on a C. Day Lewis Fellowship).

In a long itinerant period he took a position for two years 1983-5 in Papua New Guinea, working for Enga province. He followed that with two years editing Artrage, the magazine of the Minority Arts Advisory Service. He spent 1988-91 at the University of Ulster as a writer-in-residence; he edited Writing Ulster.

He also lived in Germany and Sweden, and in Britain, in Ipswich and Newcastle-upon-Tyne. He served in both the Poetry Society and Poetry Book Society.

He was awarded the Certificate of Honour by the Government of Montserrat, in 1997.

As Professor of Creative Writing at Sheffield Hallam University, a position he held until his death, he directed the Hallam Literature Festival. He also edited Sheffield Thursday magazine, and ran its competitions for poetry and short stories.

Markham died of a heart attack in Paris on Easter day, 23 March 2008, at the age of 69