A tainted paradise

Ian Fleming’s voodoo extravaganza Live and Let Die finds James Bond in rapt consultation of The Traveller’s Tree by Patrick Leigh Fermor. ‘This, one of the great travel books, is published by John Murray at 25s’, proclaims a footnote in the first edition. Fleming was a friend of Leigh Fermor, so this is to be expected. Published in 1950, The Traveller’s Tree may still be the best non-fiction account of the West Indies. ‘It’s by a chap who knows what he’s talking about’, M tells 007, knowingly.

But Paul Morand’s 1929 Hiver caraïbe comes a close second. The question is: why has it taken 90 years for this masterwork to appear in English? Morand (1888–1976), a pro-Vichy collaborator and occasional Jew-baiter, was made persona non grata in post-Liberation France, and was shunned by mainstream publishers. Only in recent years has his reputation been revived somewhat.

His glancing, aphoristic prose did have its admirers, among them André Breton, Ezra Pound, Jean Cocteau and Leigh Fermor himself (who knew Morand personally and translated one of his books into English). For all that Morand was a sentimental, narcissistic snob, he remains a fine writer, whose Caribbean travelogue memorably conjures a tainted earthly paradise caught between the sun and the sea.

The result of two trips made to the West Indies in 1927, Caribbean Winter is inevitably distinguished by the casual racism of the time. ‘Gobineau’s theories seem quite sound to me’, Morand says of the half-baked 19th-century ethnologist Joseph Arthur de Gobineau, who viewed people of colour as little better than metamorphosed orangutans. Like Fleming after him, Morand was repelled by notions of hybridity; just as the Jamaican Chinese baddies in Dr No are depicted as yellow-black ‘Chigroes’ (an impure race, no less), so Morand quaked at the ‘filthy epoch of the half-caste’, as he found it in the Caribbean.