Among avocado blossoms  •   John Robert Lee writes: My friend Alwin Bully, who has died aged seventy-four in his home island of Dominica, after battling Parkinson’s for many years, was a ‘renaissance’ figure of the Caribbean. He came of age in the dynamic 1970s when so much was happening in the region – in the arts and culture, popular music, politics, literature, ideas. He was the leader among us, excelling as an actor, dancer, playwright, director, painter, sculptor, carnival designer, film actor and director – and designer of Dominica’s flag.

We first met in 1969 when, as a student, his University of the West Indies (UWI) theatre group came to St Lucia from Barbados: directing and playing the lead role, he was brilliant,  and I was captivated by his huge youthful talent. When I arrived at the same university I joined the drama group that Alwin led. Thus began our friendship. We shared the dreams of mentors including Derek Walcott and Kamau Brathwaite for the growth of Caribbean arts, literature and theatre.

Alwin was born in the centre of Roseau, the capital of Dominica (home of Jean Rhys). His family and especially his cousin Mabel Cissie Caudeiron, who is credited with inspiring a roots revival in Dominican music and culture, were early influences.

He was educated at the Dominica Grammar School (where, later, he became acting principal) and St Mary’s Academy before leaving for university in Barbados and graduating in 1972. (In 2011, UWI awarded him an Honorary Doctorate of Letters.)

Returning home in 1972, Alwin founded the People’s Action Theatre and was its artistic director until 1987. The group’s work marked some of the most productive years in Dominican theatre.

When Dominica became independent in 1978, he became the first director of the new Department of Culture. In 1987, he moved to Jamaica, to work at UNESCO as Senior Programme Specialist and later as its Caribbean Culture Advisor. Back home in 2008, he became advisor to the Minister of Culture.

He wrote and directed films, including his last production, Oseyi and the Masqueraders (2017) – a story after his own heart about a boy’s relationship with his village’s carnival rituals. By then he was already ill, but he was still working two years ago, dictating a final short story to his wife Anita for his collection The Cocoa Dancer and Other Stories.

Alwin Bully was kind and generous, with an unflappable personality, ready smile and easy laughter. He remains a seminal influence in my life. Now, I write in an elegy for him, ‘I must catch the ferry to his island, I must wear my shades for the glare off heaving waters of the channel’.

Anita, whom he married in 1977, survives him, along with his daughter Sade and son Brent. Another son, Peron, predeceased him. His sister Barbara Bully-Thomas and brother Colin live in Dominica.

Masquerader fallen
(for A.B. 1948–2023)

Among avocado blossoms, gospelling yellow-breasts –

he died, companion of my youth,
star of stages, late-night laughter,

irrepressible visions – around golden-brown mango
blossoms
white butterflies sign algorithms of infinity – under
red lilies,
their erect stamens, fallen masqueraders

of banana trees, pay banan, sensay – his eyes closed.
his heart stopped. he is over.
the rose of sharon near my stairs has bled bright pink

under an overcast sky, chilling air,
a dog howling, howling at something –

I must catch the ferry to his island, I must wear my
shades for the glare
off heaving waters of the channel –

All his women friends and mistresses  •   Nicolas Tredell writes: The novelist, essayist and editor Philippe Sollers died in Paris on 5 May 2023 aged eighty-six. Sollers (originally Joyaux) was born on 28 November 1936 into a well-off family in the city of Talence, near Bordeaux. Destined to run his father’s factory, he studied economics at first, but then embarked on a literary career under the aegis of the poet Francis Ponge. In 1957, his short story ‘Le Défi’ appeared in the journal Écrire under his adopted surname ‘Sollers’ (Latin for ‘clever, skilful’) and won the Prix Fénéon. Both François Mauriac and Louis Aragon praised his first novel, Une curieuse solitude (1958), and three innovative fictions followed: Le parc (1961), Drame (1965) and Nombres (1968). His greatest impact, however, came through the magazine Tel Quel [As Is] that he co-founded in 1960. Stephen Heath, now Professor of French and English Literature and Culture at Cambridge University, knew Sollers well and, interviewed in PNR 83, judged Tel Quel ‘one of the great avant-garde literary reviews of the twentieth century in its influence and the quality of its writing’. But the original Tel Quel project of fusing literary and political revolution broke down, in Heath’s view, because of the ‘romantic Maoism to which [it] became attached, the whole self-confirming investment in China and the cultural revolution’. This investment collapsed after Tel Quel’s 1974 visit to China.

The novelist Christine Brooke-Rose, resident in Paris in the 1960s, was more sceptical about the magazine when interviewed in PNR 75: ‘I don’t think we should take that Tel Quel phase too seriously’. She pointed out that by the 1980s, Sollers had ‘gone back to writing completely mimetic novels’, as exemplified by the bestselling Femmes (1983), which is about ‘all his women friends and mistresses’ (Sollers had married the feminist theorist Julia Kristeva in 1967 and they had one son, David Joyaux). In 1983, after Tel Quel had closed, Sollers founded the journal L’Infini, which, as its title suggests, took an interest in religion and mysticism that he would pursue throughout his life and which emerges in later novels such as Une vie divine (2006), which pitches Nietzsche against Schopenhauer, Yea-Saying against Nay-Saying, and inclines towards the former. In later life, Sollers kept a lower public profile and would never regain the heights of Tel Quel, but his considerable oeuvre shows, throughout its ideological variations, a constant interest in language in relation to philosophy and ethics.

A very long poem  •   It is sometimes forgotten that the celebrated novelist D.M. Thomas, author of The White Hotel (1982), who has died at the age of eighty-eight, was a poet. ‘I’ve decided I’m a poet who sometimes writes novels,’ he affirmed, ‘rather than a novelist who used to write poetry.’ The fiction is better remembered than the poems. American readers and critics took up The White Hotel after its modest English success, and it sold over a million in paperback and 100,000 hardbacks. This success was beamed back to the UK where it was shortlisted for the Booker but pipped at the post by Midnight’s Children.

During National Service, Thomas studied Russian to become an interrogator and fell in love with Russian literature, translating Pushkin, Akhmatova and others and writing a biography, Alexander Solzhenitsyn: A Century in His Life (1998), as well as his five Russian novels. He also published several books of poems. His main legacy (beyond his fiction) may prove to be his translations of Russian poetry. Much of his best fiction draws on the lives and deaths of poets: ‘my novels follow the creative laws of poetry, based very largely on symbol and image. If I’d have lived two hundred years ago, I’d have written a very long poem instead.’ It’s as well he didn’t.

An Israeli modernist  •   The Israeli poet Meir Wieseltier has died at the age of eighty-two. He had received many of the big cultural awards of Israel, most notably the Israel Prize for Literature (2000). He went to Israel from Moscow, where he was born, soon after the state was established, eventually making his home in Tel Aviv. Over time, he published more than twenty books of poetry and translations into Hebrew from Russian, English (including Shakespeare) and French. He was a teacher, magazine editor and poet. One award citation characterised ‘his outspoken, mixed poetry, which combines political and social rhetoric with existentialist dimensions’, and noted his ‘modernist’ impact on Israeli poetry.

A remarkable acquisition  •   The Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas has acquired James Fenton’s archive, a remarkable acquisition. When the Elgin Marbles are returned to Greece, perhaps the Fenton papers will be repatriated to – for example – Oxford. ‘Fenton’s body of work traces the political upheavals of our time, including the regime of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the suppression of political protest in China’s Tiananmen Square, and Northern Ireland’s fratricidal bloodletting.’ Even as an undergraduate Fenton was politically alert as a poet and critic. He was also close to some of the most interesting writers of his generation, with whom he conducted correspondences. The Director of the Harry Ransom Center declared, ‘In his poems, James Fenton bears witness to the collective traumas of the twentieth century, and for generations to come his poems will be read and reread for the way they transform that experience into art.’

The spirit of Menard  •   HetMoet Publishing and Menard Press merge, a happy afterlife for a brilliant, eccentric imprint. Menard’s founder Anthony Rudolf writes: In recent years Menard Press, founded in 1969, has been dormant, although not completely defunct. Running a small press has no longer been a priority for me. I am eighty and hope to spend my remaining years completing books of my own, revising French and Russian translations, collecting my best essays, and working on a few poems. Small presses have a natural life span. Menard was vanishing into the sunset, without fanfare or regret. Then something unexpected occurred: Elte Rauch of HetMoet Publishing in Amsterdam and I had a lot in common. I have to make a big effort to keep up with her: she is a force of nature, and of culture, too: poet, novelist, translator, song-writer, editor, go-between extraordinaire, publisher and, unlike me, possessing a business head.

Half my age, she has plans to publish many titles in the coming years. While available to give advice, I don’t want to be consulted about the choice of titles. But, given that we have similar literary tastes and ethical concerns, I know and rejoice that the spirit of Menard will live on. Thus the merger felt right for the best reasons.

This surprising development gives me pleasure. End of story, as Louis Armstrong says in High Society. No, beginning of story, as he also says: the story of HetMoet-Menard Press.

Elte Rauch adds: Anthony Rudolf has been a friend and inspiration for many years. Through our connection and conversations I soon became aware of his Menard Press, its literary and ethical narrative as well as its history and legacy. For me to take on Menard Press and integrate it as a sister branch of my Amsterdam-based indie press HetMoet Publishing seemed a natural development of both our personal and  professional kinship.

It is not a burden. A true passion rarely is. I am committed to engaging in modernisation and publishing new authors and translations, while keeping Menard’s spirit alive and honoured. ‘The end is where we start from’ (T.S. Eliot).

Words that bring us together  •   Mererid Hopwood has been awarded the Hay Festival Medal for Poetry 2023. She is the distinguished Professor of Welsh and Celtic Studies at Aberystwyth University. The other laureates this year are author, illustrator and screenwriter Alice Oseman (Medal for Fiction), Ukraine’s rock star poet Serhiy Zhadan (Medal for Songwriting) and prize-winning novelist Salman Rushdie (Medal for Prose).

‘In accepting this Medal,’ Professor Hopwood said, ‘looking back there are many whom I would like to thank for their support from the early days. These include friends at Ysgol Farddol Caerfyrddin for the learning, the Talwrn community for the listening, the students for their enthusiasm and Peter Florence and the Hay Festival for the encouragement. Looking forward, I would like to express the hope that all of us who love literature will continue to search for the words that bring us together in peace rather than drive us apart in war.’ Professor Hopwood has, in the words of the Festival announcement, ‘spent her career weaving connections between language, literature, education and the arts. She joined Aberystwyth University as Professor of Welsh and Celtic Studies in January 2021, and is secretary of Academi Heddwch. For her poetry, she has won the National Eisteddfod of Wales’ Chair, Tir na n’Og prize, Crown and Prose Medal and Welsh Book of the Year prize. She is a regular contributor to the Hay Festival, and has taken part in literature festivals in Europe, Asia and South America.’ Hopwood is a  worthy and richly Welsh recipient. Among earlier recipients, since the award was established in 2012, PN Review readers will remember Gillian Clarke (2016), the Austrian poet Evelyn Schlag (2018) and, last year, Robert Minhinnick.