Wrecking Ball Press (website slogan: ‘Strictly no flowers, just blunt hammered-home words’) is a Hull-based publisher subsidized by the Arts Council. Its founding editor has agonized about what a publisher should or should not inflict on the public: ‘What is good writing. What is bad writing.’ He is particularly fond of what he calls ‘WORDS’ and likes them ‘still alive. Jammed in the middle of buckled sentences or spat out before the brain gets time to register the chaos’. He demonstrates these principles by publishing Daniel by the octogenarian author Richard Adams in November 2006. A launch for the book was hosted by Bristol Libraries at the Council House, to begin the city’s commemoration of the abolition of the transatlantic slave trade.
Until now, Adams has offered us the innermost thoughts and living words of rabbits, laboratory dogs, and north-country foxes. His latest book demands even greater imaginative powers and writing skills: it is a first-person narrative of Daniel, born into slavery on an American plantation. He kills a half-white pimp and escapes dire punishment by travelling to England in the company of a pederast. He works first as a servant in Bristol for the saintly ‘Lady Penelope’ and then as a ‘slave-basher’ on a slave ship (where he witnesses mass-execution). On his return he becomes a champion of the Abolitionists Wilberforce and Clarkson, and serves a spell as a manager on the experimental colony of freed slaves in Sierra Leone.
Given the paucity of evidence, one guess about the thoughts and conversation of rabbits and foxes is as good as any other, but when it comes to slave narratives, Adams has more serious rivals. Such narratives have been written before, and some are still in print: most notably perhaps the more-or-less genuine account of Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African, written by Himself (1789), to which there are interesting echoes in some passages in Daniel. Adams has Daniel refer to his narrative as ‘my voice – my singular, black voice’, and has to find convincing words for this voice, as well as for the various voices of those that Daniel hears and recalls. And since Daniel was born 1759, all these voices must come with the colouring of the eighteenth-century.
These challenges have been met in ingenious ways. Daniel has an odd manner of writing: ‘I dare say that if you’ve followed me this far, you’re puzzled that here’s a plain nigger talking to you like he was an educated man’. The phrases ‘plain nigger’ and ‘like he was’ are aberrations, for there are few other traces of Virginian idiom in his own narrative, which is a recollection of the events of his life in the tranquillity and comfort of a house in Clapham. He has been initially taught to read by a series of kindly mentors and his education was completed by the abolitionist Thomas Clarkson.
On many occasions, Daniel’s voice bears refreshingly little resemblance to anything actually written in the eighteenth century and is often interestingly ahead of his time: Wordsworth is anticipated when a baby is described as ‘trailing clouds of glory’, and with impressive political prescience he reflects sadly on the behaviour of ‘rich capitalist employers’.
But generally it is is not clear for whom Daniel is writing. IHs own verbal sophistication does not extend to the speeches of others: Daniel moves in a world of unashamed fuck-offs and piss-offs and a beyond-parody black slave patois -‘Mr. Grench, he want fuck Fahdah’ – which at the start of the novel appears to be the general idiom of slaves; Daniel remembers (or imagines) the words spoken at the moment of his birth ‘Dis baby gwine live’, which is answered with the question ‘How you tell? Mostly dey dies. You know dat’.
Slaves with whom Daniel is closely acquainted, however, sometimes speak rather differently. His friend Moses expresses his dislike of the pimp initially in a voice from some Boys Own Annual, ‘I’d like to strangle that swine’, and then, presumably remembering who and where he is, explains ‘He done get paid’ for selling ‘dem black girls’.’ Daniel’s beloved sister, saved from rape, thanks him in the language of gentility: ‘Oh dear Daniel, well done! You saved me from these horrible men!’.
Daniel registers the voices of a third category of characters in an unwaveringly colourless and blunt tone, presumably indicative of the moral superiority of the English middle classes. The paedophile priest is not allowed to leave the ship with young Daniel: ‘You have abused him in filthy ways. You buggered him several times. That is against the law.’ And, most crushing of all – “we very much doubt whether you are in Holy Orders!”
A hushed reverence for his betters becomes most marked when he begins to mingle with the Abolitionists. He believes that ‘an archangel was speaking’ in the ear of Wilberforce, but refrains modestly from giving his readers any examples of the resulting eloquence. There is little any Abolitionist can say that could possible cause Daniel offence. When Thomas Clarkson tells him ‘You’re black. Frankly, I often wish I was black myself ’, Daniel makes no comment.
Daniel’s increasing sense of superiority is one of the peculiarities both of his style and of his personality. As the story progresses he becomes more distant from anyone intellectually beneath him. When he sees some about to be enslaved people ‘capering and chanting’ on the beaches of Benin, this young David Attenborough of the Plantations explains such ‘African’ behaviour loftily: ‘Black people – I should know, should I not? – are excitable and usually noisy with it’.
Daniel is over-modest here: he is rarely excitable or noisy. In fact he has the natural disposition of an English civil servant. His fastidiousness extends even to his heroes when they exceed the bounds of English restraint. Of Clarkson’s over-enthusiasm Daniel observes prissily ‘he had embarrassed his fellow-abolitionists … by openly commending extreme Revolutionary ideas’. Even when Clarkson is back on message Daniel ‘saw to it that Mr. Wilberforce received a full report’.
It becomes clear as the novel reaches its second half that the most acute imaginative challenge facing Richard Adams was to create the voice of a dull and humourless mind. His self-possession is remarkable and seemingly associated with a peculiar blindness or self-deception. Most astonishingly, despite having first-hand experience of the state of slavery, he is easily persuaded to sign-up as a ‘slave-basher’. On this horrific voyage (on the interestingly named Frisky Shark) Daniel becomes strangely fastidious. Cleaning the stinking floor of a slave ship is, he finds, more unpleasant than disposing of corpses or whipping slaves until the instrument of torture runs with blood. The trauma must be so deep that a second slave journey is dismissed in one short paragraph again, it is ‘the stench’ that most appals him. By now Daniel (and he is in good company here) is becoming bored with his own narrative, and the rest of the book is occupied with a detached plod through the achievements of the Abolitionists.
But every now and then the narrative explodes into Wrecking Ball specifications, when Daniel suddenly experiences moments of epiphany: ‘I had not realised before that the African slave trade … was the greatest collective sin ever committed by mankind. Cruelty impregnable, all-conquering! … O Master, those are Thy flames roaring through ransacked villages, Thy foolish mothers bereft, Thy silly, defenceless victims screaming, Thy whips striking home!’ Wrecking Ball are so impressed by these outbursts that they reprint one on the back cover: ‘By what Name are we to call Thee, Master, to worship Thy divinity?’
The answer booms back in Upper Case out of the narrative ouija board: ‘I AM THE AFRICAN SLAVE TRADE. I AM ULTIMATE EVIL. FALL DOWN BEFORE ME. THERE IS NO CRUELTY GREATER THAN MINE’.
And there, clearly, is a demonstration of the limits of the language of moral indignation, as Daniel atrophies under an attempt to convey the unimaginable sufferings of others. When at the very end of his tale Daniel recalls Wilberforce praising him: ‘Your evidence couldn’t be refuted … It was unique; the authentic voice of a black man speaking of what he’d experienced himself ’ it is, perhaps, Adams’s irony at its most daring –– since ‘the authentic voice of a black man’ is what this novel is manifestly not.
Perhaps we should leave the last word to the publisher’s own website where he reassures us: ‘I feel that bad writing just reinforces its own right to anonymity and therefore obscurity. End of story.’
Catherine Mason
Daniel,Richard Adams,£14.99,Wrecking Ball Press (ISBN:1903110378;Special signed edition ISBN 190311036X)
