Laird’s Literary Odyssey

The subject of Christopher Laird’s biography Equal to Mystery is the highly talented Trinidadian novelist and chameleon Harold Sonny Ladoo. Ladoo’s life was cut short—he was only twenty-eight—when, on a return trip to Trinidad in 1973 his body was discovered near his home village of McBean. The authorities blamed a hit-and-run accident for his death, but considerable doubt remains about this verdict. Ladoo, who was based in Canada, was on his way to becoming a critically acclaimed author. His first novel, No Pain Like This Body, published in 1972, was a brutal depiction of postindenture, turn-of-the-twentieth-century Indo-Trinidadian family and village life. The second, Yesterdays, published posthumously in 1974, offered a community-based satire built around three village families.

This uncovering of Ladoo’s life story—“the shape under the rug,” as biographers call it—reflects at the minimum a twenty-one-year odyssey. Biographer Christopher Laird records that the writing of Equal to Mystery took five years, and some interviews recorded in the text date as early as 2002. The task that Laird set himself was to tell the story of a promising and gifted author whose early death is unaccounted for and whose short literary life and its legacy contain surprising twists and turns. In undertaking his task Laird found it “incomprehensible” that no one else was asking, “How come, as Ladoo might have put it, ‘a little coolie boy from Trinidad’ had, within three years, earned a university degree in Canada, published two landmark novels, was later the subject of a long poem by Toronto’s first poet laureate, had a prize for creative writing established in his name at the University of Toronto, and an art project dedicated to him by a major Canadian artist who had never met him?” (9). At the same time, Ladoo was a chameleon. With his student friends he could be morose, with his family at times he was approachable but also neglectful of his children, and with his Canadian literary mentors he invented for himself a variety of background histories that he felt suited the occasion.

There are a number of ways of reading this biography. The first is through the conventional biographer’s strategy of interweaving elements of portrait and autopsy. This process involves the sifting of truth from falsehood, rumor, or myth making, as well as the avoidance of flattery and smoothing over uncomfortable evidence. Laird recounts how Ladoo escaped his rural upbringing in McBean in the Trinidad countryside and migrated to Toronto in 1968. Ladoo had perennial money worries in Canada and so first had to find ways to survive inner-city Toronto life. His strategies included washing dishes in restaurants, becoming a husband dependent on the financial support of his long-suffering wife, and neglecting his role as father to his son and stepdaughter in pursuit of a university degree, which in turn accidentally morphed into the goal of becoming a famous novelist. Laird’s closely documented analysis rattles along with many detailed interviews, while putting life and feeling into his subject. For example, he captures sympathetically Ladoo’s commitment to writing in the following snapshot: “But Harold was driven. He had left Trinidad with a ‘suitcase’ of his writing, with a dream of being a writer. If it meant locking himself away in the bedroom and typing or writing under the bed in all night binge sessions, then that is what he would do” (141).

Laird faced a number of challenges to capture the details surrounding his subject’s death in mysterious circumstances many decades before he began his research. For example, how far can his interlocutors be trusted? Were there contradictions in their testimonies? Besides the scrupulously annotated interviews with writers such as Peter Such, Dennis Lee, and James Polk, we also hear from Ladoo’s family, friends, teachers, and others who knew him both in Trinidad and in Toronto. So long after the fact, however, it is relevant to ask, How reliable are such testimonies that are inevitably reconstructions based on memory?

A second way of reading this biography is as a close study of the growth of an aspiring author. (For similar studies, see, for example, Bruce King’s Derek Walcott: A Caribbean Life (2000); V. S. Naipaul’s A Writer’s People: Ways of Looking and Feeling (2007); and the Caribbean Biography Series from the University of the West Indies Press (2019–). As Laird explores the warm relationship between Ladoo and his Canadian mentors, he includes letters between these mentors and Ladoo as they responded to his manuscripts and discuss issues of style and structure. The documents collected permit Laird, in the process of mourning the loss of Ladoo’s potential, to acknowledge Ladoo’s stylistic weaknesses as well as his strengths through generous quotations from his short stories and from early reviews of his novels.

What is it about Ladoo’s writing that so captivates Laird? “It is Ladoo’s dialogue that drives his work” (114), Laird suggests, which he views as a major stylistic achievement. He contrasts Ladoo’s blunt and brutal child-centered peasant dialogue, laced with the dread of obeah and spirit fears, with Naipaul’s “perfect sentences” (9) and Naipaul’s and Selvon’s “charming and idiosyncratic” (55) characters. Thus, he suggests that Ladoo’s characters, “undiluted by puritanical and colonial editing[,] come blazing through the colonial landscape onto the page” (114). It is unfortunate that the three novelists are presented in a kind of zero-sum way; the implication is that Ladoo’s work is more “authentic.” Though all three deal in fiction, the time in which their novels are set and their locations are very different. Whereas Ladoo imaginatively recreates the period of early indentureship in a rural village setting, Naipaul and Selvon locate their early novels decades later in a more clearly creolized and urban Trinidad. Ladoo’s rendering of a raw Indian-inflected dialectal English may suggest to some a greater closeness to “reality.” However, Selvon’s style, in his London novels, is so effective that in 1986 at the Commonwealth Institute in London he received an infamous slap from a feminist critic outraged at his representation of female Black Power revolutionaries.

A third way of reading that this biography might inspire is a reflection on the parallel learning practices that both Ladoo and Laird employ. Laird guides the reader through the mentoring paths that Ladoo took to become a novelist, and how he achieved his “fierce reckoning” (12) with colonialism and his originality of form. Laird, an established documentary filmmaker, in turn openly took up the challenge of biography writing. The reader is told that Laird’s study of Ladoo began as a film project before it became a biography. Laird’s filmmaker’s eye was drawn also to the cinematic features of Ladoo’s writing, especially his use of dialogue in his narration. In his acknowledgements Laird reflects on his contrasting experience in working in these two genres: “Writing a biography to be published as a text demands much more research, detail and precision than writing a biography for a film. It also requires one to be literate enough to keep the reader engaged” (183).

Laird is also caught up in the mystery surrounding the loss of some of Ladoo’s work after his death, when a number of manuscripts went missing. They are described in the biography as “hijacked papers” that were “fairly substantial” (125). Ladoo’s wife, Rachel, in an interview with Laird, offers a “rather evasive account” of their loss (123)—she entrusted them to a Trinidadian acquaintance, a person whom she does not remember but whose rationale for their removal was for safe keeping from “conniving Canadian colleagues” (124). The question remains: Who were these people from whom the acquaintance was protecting the manuscript? Trinidadians in Canada? The literary people (or, in other words, “White Canada”) that Ladoo had worked with and who had provided him with a grant, editorial support and a publication opportunity? By choosing not to pursue the question, the biographer lets Rachel—and himself—off the hook rather too easily.

Chapter 13 explores another element of the “mystery” highlighted in the book’s title—that is, the different modes of self-presentation Ladoo employed for the groups with which he had regular contact. With his Canadian mentors he was in turn affectionate and easy going and at times willfully misleading; he could be distant and argumentative toward his Trinidadian student colleagues and selfish and uncompromising to his immediate family. Ultimately Laird, the sympathetic critic, prefers to focus on Ladoo’s more positive self-awareness as revealed through various characters in the short stories that he creates. It is at this point that the reader has to choose whether to follow the biographer’s lead in accepting Ladoo at his own estimation.

Such cavils apart, Laird’s depth of research suggests that he has probably gotten as near as anyone is likely to in unpacking the elusive Anancy character that was Harold Sonny Ladoo. The book’s splendidly detailed sixteen chapters and nine appendices, plus introduction and epilogue, combine to present Laird as a devotee of Ladoo’s writing, committed to reviving literary interest in the writer. Laird was clearly hooked first by Ladoo’s writing and then by his story. Equal to Mystery offers valuable source material and a strong argument for bringing Ladoo back to the awareness of the reading public and Caribbean literary circles. This biography will go a long way to reviving interest in the man and his work.

Philip Nanton is the author of four books—Island Voices from St. Christopher and the Barracudas (Papillote Press, 2014); Canouan Suite, and Other Pieces (Papillote Press, 2016); Frontiers of the Caribbean (Manchester University Press, 2017); and the biography Riff: The Shake Keane Story (Papillote Press, 2021). His work has been featured in the online magazine WritersMosaic, a division of the UK Royal Literary Fund, and some of his recent writing can be found on his website, philipnanton.com.