Pitch Lake

This impressive debut novel, published in 1934, is widely regarded as one of the early Caribbean literary classics in the English language. Its central character, Joe da Costa, bears some similarity to the author being a diminutive young man from the Portuguese community (the author's height is recorded as 5 ft 4½ in his army service records). Unlike the author, however, who was the eldest of the family, Joe is a younger brother arriving in Port of Spain from a provincial town and aspiring to match the achievements of Henry, his elder brother, and Philip, his cousin. The novel details how his life is torn between the aspirational romance with English-educated Cora, which his sister-in-law has contrived, and the legacy of his lustful exploits of the past and the present. When Joe and Cora get engaged, his affair with Stella, his brother's housemaid, threatens to destroy the future he had dreamed of.

The author, Alfred Mendes (born 18 November 1897), grew up in the Portuguese community of Trinidad. (His grandson is Sam Mendes, the Oscar-winning director of American Beauty). At the age of 15, he went to England to complete his secondary education. The outbreak of war prevented him from going on to university. He returned home in 1915, soon joined the 2nd Merchants’ Contingent of Trinidad and travelled back to England to enlist in the army. He joined the 23rd Battalion, King’s Royal Rifle Corps in January 1916 but transferred to the 1st Battalion, Rifle Brigade in September. Serving as a Rifleman in Flanders, he was awarded the Military Medal. He returned to Trinidad in 1919 and subsequently became a leading member of the literary movement associated with The Beacon magazine. He lived in New York between 1933 and 1940, associating with contemporary writers such as Thomas Wolfe, and his first two novels (including this one) were published during this period.

For Joe da Costa, society in Port of Spain is all about reaching the required standards. People discriminated between whites, coloureds and blacks in general terms and between different kinds of each ethnic group. The Portuguese community itself has two groups, the immigrants from Madeira and those born in Trinidad, as well as ostracising any of its members that married a non-white. Joe is expected to get a respectable job and marry a respectable woman. He, however, is split between healthy aspiration and unhealthy appetite (alcohol, sex), between uplifting exhiliration and destructive depression:
“In the mornings he would wake up quite happy. It was now December and the mornings were cool, often with the pinch of cold in them, and the skies were as blue can be, with the sunlight falling everywhere. He would lie in his bed listening to the keskidees flinging their song-questions across to each other from the guava and sapodilla trees that grew in the yard. He would hear the bread-boy come into the yard, banging the gate after him as he always did, and often whistling, as happily as the keskidees living in the air and in the trees: and he would think that all the world was happy.”
A few chapters later, however, he is considering death (“The thought of death, irrevocable, was terrifying.”) and apparently prescient of a personal disaster:
“He caught a glimpse of Stella passing by the open door and somehow an uneasy sensation crept over him. It was just as if a tiny voice had whispered a warning into his ear, a premonition of tragedy.”