now-archaic terminology the bandsmen
were using. Less perceptively, he found pre-
Columbian rock engravings risible in the
extreme, and had little better to say of
Shakespeare's Julius Caesar as per-
formed in St. Lucia, or "Mackandal," (in
blackface) in Haiti.

Words and Details
Leigh Fermor is intoxicated with words and,
to a certain extent, with his own ability to put
them together. A reviewer of his later novel,
The Violins of Saint-Jacques (1954) de-
scribed it as "written with deliberate, some-
times overconscious artifice, scattered with
French and native words and adored with
litanies of picturesque names." One re-
viewer remarked tartly that "In patches, the
author can write as well as any man alive,"
but recommended that a hard-boiled editor
trim it by several thousand words. But still,
the words are impressive: Jamaican revival-
ists are "Pocomaniacs," the political struc-
ture of the Maroons is a "hospodarate" and
the Caribs an "elective voivode." Combes,
appanage, fanes, fustian, eupepsia, euphu-
istic, sward, cantrips, and historion send
one back to the old dictionary. Similarly
Istanbul must be called Constantinople, its
Greek name until 1453, and the French
spelling is de rigeur for the inhabitants of
Greenland and Northern Canada, the
Esquimaux.
 Vivid writing is the rule: the Pitch Lake
"has the colour and texture of a gram-
ophone record a hundred and fourteen
acres in extent," and the asphalt itself is
"black gruyere"; Guadeloupe trees are
"giant pale green parsley" and their shade
"as welcome as a waterfall"; Trinidad Saga
Boys' neckties "have the splendor of lanced
ulcers"; on the map, Carriacou follows Gre-
nada "like an abandoned puppy"; night de-
scends "all in one piece, like a shutter"; a
bandstand in Grenada looks "like an empty
birdcage"; during a storm at sea, the trav-
elers "lowered comforting stalactites of
whiskey down [their] throats"; in Jamaica
they traversed "Hanover Street, down the
mouldering length of which a dejected and
unconvincing brothel-quarter damply
blossoms"; and possibly most memorable
of all to anyone who has lived in West Indian
boarding houses, the desserts in Sutton
Hall Hotel, Roseau, "were marvels which
only the names of Crimean battles seemed
to fit: Inkerman Mould, the Redan,
Sebastopol Pudding and Balaclava
Helmet," crowned by "coffee that must have
been made out of a bedstead which had
been hammered to powder." Although
sometimes a bit contrived, such facile writ-
ing admirably fulfills the stated goal of the
book, "to retransmit to the reader whatever
interest and enjoyment we encountered. In
a word, to give pleasure."
 In spite of his colonialist posture, his polit-
ical naivet6, and the unseemly levity with


which he dares describe other cultures,
Leigh Fermor is a clear-eyed observer with
an instinct for the significant detail. He is
rarely dead wrong, and is never fooled for
long by his infinitely wily informants. At his
best, he is a brilliant observer and analyst of
culture. In his preface to The Traveller's
Tree he summed up, a quarter of a century
before David Lowenthal's sweaty synthesis
(in West Indian Societies), the central par-


 Scholarly \
multidisciplinary
 journal BI )
devoted entirely C T EII
 to Cuba OIUT E O


adox of Caribbean research: "Each island is
a distinct and idiosyncratic entity, a civiliza-
tion, or its reverse, fortuitous in its origins
and empirical in its development There is
no rule that holds good beyond the shores
of each one unless the prevalence of oddity,
the unvarying need to make exceptions to
any known rule, can be considered a unify-
ing principle ... all this excludes any pos-
sibility of generalization." 0


Revista
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dedicada por entero
a Cuba


Cuban Studies/Estudios Cubanos is published twice a year by the University of
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