Phyllis Byam Shand 70
- Born: 1908, Dominica, West Indies
- Marriage: Robert Edward Allfrey on 1 January 1930
- Died: 4 February 1986, Princess Margaret Hopsital, Dominica, West Indies aged 78
General Notes:
In 1927, Phyllis went to the United States and worked as a governess for a wealthy New York family. She had become acquainted with the family of J.P. Morgan II on one of the Morgans's Caribbean yachting trips and become friends with J.P.'s daughter and sister. She was thus well-connected to New York society when she emigrated, and also enjoyed the financial patronage of her two friends. She became engaged to one of J.P.'s nephews but the romance had to be kept secret since he had no independent income. Then, in 1929, one of Phyllis's sisters got married and Phyllis fell in love with the groom's brother, Robert Allfrey, and they were married a year later. According to the biography, he was a bad choice, with a notable talent for losing jobs through sheer obnoxiousness of character. Although they remained married for their entire lives, separating only once for any lengthy period, Phyllis had at least two known affairs, and probably a few others which remained undocumented.
From The Guardian, Saturday January 22, 2005
Read Phyllis Shand Allfrey's short story "A Real Person", and you are immediately convinced that you are in the presence of a literary talent. It 's a magnificent tale of a white West Indian teenager, two bizarre cats, a black watchman, a goat-girl and her black Buddhist master, the mystery and enchantment of their encounters set in a landscape of crotons, tropical fruit and crick-crick beetles. It's ending is vintage Allfrey, a Lawrentian assertion of the triumph of beauty over death. "Walter might never resolve the doubt, but at least he was certain that he was blissfully alive, that he was capable of practically anything, and that in spite of the mysterious and inexplicable conflict of faiths and races in the world, it was still a world in which miracles happen." So why is Allfrey virtually unknown or ignored in Dominica and in the wider literary world? What went wrong with her life and writing career? The a nswer has partly to do with Hurricane David, which in 1979 devastated her home and left her destitute. It is also because two years earlier, h er beloved daughter Phina had been killed in a car crash. Her friend Lennox Honeychurch wrote: "I can never forget the howl of anguish as I arrived at her house after hearing of the death of Phina." However, the substantial reason for her invisibility is her whiteness. Allfrey was born in 1908 into a white elite family which had dominated Dom inica for centuries. Her ancestors included Napoleon's Empress Josephine and a descendant of Anne Boleyn's sister. Allfrey's father was Crown Attorney, and the family were considered as royalty. The emancipation of slaves (the source of their ancestral wealth) in 1838 began the long and painful process whereby the white grip on the island was loosened. By the 1950s and 60s, when the struggle for independence and the black power movement were taking root, the whites were in retreat, many fleeing from the prospect of black government by emigrating to England. Allfrey's father, by her own account, was hostile to black Dominicas. "He kept his family apart from other races," she wrote, and Allfrey was denied formal schooling to prevent encounters with Catholics or people of colour who would soil her purity. She was taught privately at home, reading works such as the Oxford Book of English Verse, Rupert Brooke's poetry, and English Pastorals. The lush Dominican landscape, loud with Creole voices, was shut out from literary appreciation. Her father's house was a piece of foreign fields that was forever England. There was nothing in Allfrey's childhood and youth to suggest the trail-blazing radicalism of her later life. She was a scion of privilege, moving with the wealthy white visitors who anchored their yachts in Dominican waters. The American millionaire banker JP Morgan was a family friend, and through his patronage Allfrey was able to leave Dominica as a teenager and live in New York and then London, where she met and married an Oxford graduate. It was her encounter, in her transatlantic travels, with the depression in America, and then with the emerging Labour party in 1930s Britain, that changed the course of her life, awakening her to socialist struggle. In the London of the 1930s and 40s she engaged in welfare and grassroots work (including giving support to her fellow Dominican Jean Rhys), as well as the international campaign on behalf of the Spanish Republic an cause. She wrote copiously, short stories and poetry which rediscovered the island of her childhood, striving to capture the flavour of creo le life that had been denied to her. George Orwell, editor of the left-wi ng Tribune, published some of her work. So did the Manchester Guardian. Vi ta Sackville-West awarded her a literary prize and in 1953 she published her major work, The Orchid House, a novel exploring the racial situation in Dominica, and about the emergence of feminism as well as the beginnings of the political agitation that would put an end to the old order. In the novel the black person is given a central voice, black aspirations are given rare expression. The irony of course was that the shaking-off of the shackles of colonialism would also mean the shaking-off of Allfrey herself, but she still embraced the cause of nationalism. In 1954, she returned to Dominica and found the first political party, the Dominica Labour party, whose motto was: "No-one is truly free who does not work for the freedom of others." "I campaigned all over the island, walking or riding on a donkey," she said, describing her travels through mountainous terrain to meet isolated black communities whom she addressed in the local patois. Her party won the 1958 elections by a landslide and Allfrey was appointed minister of health and social affairs in the newly formed Federation of the West Indies. Three years later the federation collapsed, and race politics saw her event ually expelled from the Dominica Labour party. She fell victim to what VS Naipaul once described as the black and coloured instinct for racial revenge. Her whiteness was now a liability. She would be shoved into the margins of society in an attempt to make her invisible. Allfrey, however, fought back, setting up a newspaper, in her words "an artistic and political weapon", and she continued to campaign tirelessly against social injustices, until the death of her daughter and the hurricane sapped her strength. She died practically penniless in 1986, having dedicated whatever money she had to social causes over 40 years of political struggle. The last 20 years of her life were lived in acute poverty. If politics sapped her resources, it wrecked her writing. Her short stories and poems dried up. "Oh yes, politics ruined me as a writer," she once said bluntly. But sufficient work remains to allow us to appreciate her talent and her contribution to West Indian literature. The 14 short stories now gathered together under the title It Falls Into Place exemplify what the writer Olive Senior calls "her delicate touch, discerning eye and heart wise to the human condition". Her true virtue, however, lies in her intense, almost overpowering feeling for the West Indian landscape, reminiscent of the qualities of Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea. Derek Walcott once said that at the beginning of his career he was shy about putting mangoes or breadfruit in his poetry since respectable literary landscapes were populated by oak trees and the like. Allfrey's true radicalism, which will outlast her political work, is a fearless description of local landscape, her naming of it. And it is within this sensationally beautiful landscape that her characters of all races exist in strife and idealism. It is the landscape which is their potential benediction.
Phyllis married Robert Edward Allfrey on 1 January 1930. (Robert Edward Allfrey was born on 14 December 1906.)
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