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Evan Jones (writer)

Jamaican writer (1927–2023) From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Evan Jones (writer)
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Evan Gordon Newton Jones (29 December 1927 – 18 April 2023) was a Jamaican writer based in the United Kingdom. He was educated in Jamaica, the United States and England. Jones remains the most accomplished Jamaican international screenwriter to date. His poetry, especially "The Song of the Banana Man", is widely anthologised and his output as a playwright for theatre and television spans four decades. He is also the writer of novels, works of non-fiction and anthologies of Caribbean folklore.

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Early life

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1927–1949: family and education

Evan Jones was born on 29 December 1927 in Hector's River, Portland Parish, Jamaica.[1] His father, Hon. Fred M. Jones, was a wealthy planter and Custos of Portland from 1965 until his death in 1971. His mother was Gladys Jones (née Smith), a Quaker missionary and teacher. He was one of seven children and younger brother to the politician Hon. Kenneth Jones.[2]

Jones was named after his great-grandfather, Rev. Evan Jones, a Welsh clergyman who came to Jamaica in 1842, building Saint Thomas Anglican Church in Manchioneal, Portland.[2] His parents were likewise greatly involved in their community: the Jones family's land covered 10,000 acres, employing a large number of local people from settlements such as Duckenfield.[3] His mother also ran Happy Grove Secondary School in Hector's River as both Secretary of the Board of Governors and, at another time, its Acting Principal.[4][5] Jones's parents instilled in him an early love for poetry and theatre; his father would recite poetry as he made the rounds of their estates.[2][6] His mother wrote and delivered sermons to her congregation; she also directed pageants, in which his father often acted.[2]

Jones grew up with his parents being public figures of great significance in the parish of Portland. In an interview given to Dr Laura Tanna, writing for the Jamaica Journal, Jones said:

"I think because my parents were both very interesting and powerful [...] they had a strong sense of purpose. [...] We were all brought up to believe we had to be somebody and do something, in a very small way like the Kennedy family in the States. [...] It was your job as a human being, because you were born into the manor, to do something with it. [...] I chose to be a writer."[2]

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Jones (rightmost, middle row) as part of Munro College's football team (c. 1943)

Jones was raised in rural eastern Jamaica and was educated as a child by a governess. From the age of nine, Jones was educated at the island's prestigious boarding school Munro College. When he was 12, Jones was taught English literature by Reg Bunting, a Cambridge graduate, who inspired him to become a writer. At 17, Jones went to the U.S. to attend Haverford College, Pennsylvania, majoring in English and Spanish.[2] There he found both academic and athletic success, earning the nickname "the educated toe";[6] and began to write plays, the first of which was about the White Witch of Rose Hall.[2]

1949: relief work in Palestine

After graduating from Haverford in 1949, Jones volunteered with the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC), who dispatched him to the Gaza Strip, Palestine, in the aftermath of the First Arab–Israeli War. He and two other Quaker volunteers sailed on a Dutch freighter and, once landed, travelled by bus to Cairo, Egypt. They entered Gaza by train at the commencement of Eid al-Fitr.[7] Under the auspices of the United Nations, refugee camps had been organised by the AFSC. Jones had previously provided similar relief work for the AFSC in Mexico and was therefore tasked with overseeing the distribution of food rations to the inhabitants of a camp of 30,000 refugees, natives and Bedouins at Khan Yunis.[2][7] In 2018, a photograph of Jones working in this capacity was reproduced in the AFSC's online article "Quakers, Jews and Israel's BDS blacklist".[8]

Jones recruited a team of Arabs from the refugee population who carried out his orders; he credited his Armenian translator as the real power behind his leadership.[2] He also worked with an assistant, Mustafa, whose brother was a powerful Bedouin sheikh, known for his retainers' ability to smuggle themselves in and out of Gaza. Through this connection, Jones inadvertently became involved in a blood fued when a spare tire was stolen from his Jeep while he attended one of the sheikh's many weddings. This resulted in resprisals by the sheikh's men who felt that Jones, as the sheikh's guest, had been dishonoured.[7]

Jones and a colleague also travelled to Beirut and Damascas while on leave and, at the end of his service, he stayed for a short time in an Israeli kibbutz.[7] His experiences became the basis of his first television screenplay, The Widows of Jaffa (1957).[2][9]

1949–1952: Oxford and "The Song of the Banana Man"

Jones went on to attend Wadham College, Oxford, graduating in 1952 with a BA (Hons.) in English Language and Literature.[2] In order to reach England, he and a friend stowed away on a banana boat bound for London; from there, he took a taxi to Oxford paid for with money won playing poker during his voyage.[3] At Oxford, Jones was a member of a clique of Rhodes scholars and international students, two of whom were Jamaican: the future editor of The Gleaner, Hector Wynter, and Neville Dawes, who would go on to direct the Institute of Jamaica.[10] Other members included the American mathematician Robert W. Bass and the producer Christopher Ralling, who later collaborated with Jones on The Fight Against Slavery (1975).

It was in conversation with Dawes, however, that Jones declared his intention to synthesise English and Jamaican literary traditions; the result was his seminal poem "The Song of the Banana Man", which sets patois to English metrical verse.[2][3][10] Written in 1952, broadcast on the BBC World Service's programme Caribbean Voices in 1953 and published in Barbados literary magazine BIM in 1954,[10] the poem is frequently cited by other writers, including Lorna Goodison, former poet laureate of Jamaica,[11] and Raymond Antrobus,[12][13] who as a child had the poem on his bedroom wall, put there by his Jamaican father.[6] The Dub poets of the 1970s, namely Linton Kwesi Johnson, Mutabaruka and Mikey Smith, also recognise the poem as a significant influence.[3][10] "The Song of the Banana Man" is taught in schools throughout the Caribbean and published in anthologies worldwide.[14]

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Career

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1952–1959: early career with the BBC

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Jones on the set of The Widows of Jaffa (c. 1956)

After leaving Oxford, Jones was engaged to work at the Campbell Soup Company by friends in the US. Upon arriving in Philadelphia, he found that a policy decision that had impelled the company to hire non-white persons had been reversed and that his offer of a job had been rescinded. He then worked at a bubble-gum factory before teaching at Quaker schools such as The Putney School in Vermont, George School in Pennsylvania and Wesleyan University, Connecticut.[2]

In 1956, Jones married his first wife, the American actress Honora Fergusson, in J. Robert Oppenheimer's garden.[10] Jones had been a student of her father, the literary critic and Dante scholar Francis Fergusson, who was a close friend of Oppenheimer's.[15] Once married, Jones moved back to England with his wife, intending to begin his literary career in earnest. Jones's father-in-law gave him introductions to T. S. Eliot, Sir Stephen Spender and Stuart Burge. Within six months of arriving in London, Burge produced Jones's television play The Widows of Jaffa for the BBC, in a limited series that ran from 1956 to 1957. The series was met with great success and launched Jones's career.[2]

Jones then wrote In a Backward Country, which the BBC produced in 1959, a play based directly on his family and adapting the Biblical story of David and his son Absalom. Jones's play followed a wealthy Jamaican landowner, resembling his father, and his politician son whom Jones likened to his brother Kenneth. The play is a political parable about the contemporary issue of land reform.[2] After Jamaica gained her independence from the British Empire in 1962, the call for land reform was a major factor in the incitement of the Jamaican political conflict. The evocation of his brother in Jones's play proved to be ill-omened, as Kenneth would go on to become Minister of Communications and Works in Jamaica's first independent Cabinet but died in suspicious circumstances at a retreat in 1964, many suspecting him to have been murdered.[16]

1960–1967: collaboration with Joseph Losey

Jones returned to Jamaica after the production of In a Backward Country to run FMJ, the family's estates, for a period of six months between 1959 and 1960, taking up the duties of his brother Keith, Kenneth's twin brother. Evan found it difficult to work as a writer during this time and subsequently moved with his wife to New York City, United States, writing a third play for the BBC before returning to London for its production. Upon arrival, he discovered it had been cancelled. Through the American pianist Julius Katchen, a close friend of his from his Haverford days, Jones met Joseph Losey, who had been subpoenaed by the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) while in Europe and had chosen to ignore the summons, settling in England. Losey had seen In a Backward Country on television and mentioned to Katchen that he wanted to meet the writer. After being introduced, Losey commissioned Jones to rewrite The Damned (released 1962) for him. Jones moved in with him and delivered the redrafted script in two weeks. It was a body horror film about people who had been irradiated and was a political statement against nuclear war, adapting the 1960 novel Children of Light, written by H. L. Lawrence (1908–1990).[2][17][18]

Losey and Jones next worked on Eva (released before The Damned, also in 1962),[2] a project initially offered to Jean-Luc Godard.[19] The screenplay was an adaptation of James Hadley Chase's novel Eve (1945) and took additional inspiration from Raymond Chandler.[2][20] Hugo D. Butler, another blacklisted person, also wrote for the film. Eve was described by Losey as a "baroque" film: a romance set in Venice, Italy, starring Jeanne Moreau,[17] with an intended runtime of around 165 minutes.[2] Jones regarded Moreau as "the finest actress" he worked with in his career but shared Losey's disappointment with the final film, which had been massively cut on the insistence of the studio.[2]

In 1962, Jones and his wife divorced by mutual consent and he returned to London alone to write "The Lament of the Banana Man".[2][14] The poem is a companion piece to "The Song of the Banana Man", despairing of the experience of the Windrush generation and depicting the once-proud speaker of his earlier poem as an alienated London Underground worker, unfulfilled in his relationship. "The Lament of the Banana Man" seemingly brought Jones back to his preoccupation with the sociopolitical dynamics of his home country. In 1962, he wrote The Spectators, which ran for a week at the Guildford Theatre in Surrey. The play was a serious treatment of the relationship between tourists and Jamaicans, a dichotomy that was the premise of his earlier poem "The Song of the Banana Man". Jones also wrote the television play Return to Look Behind for ITV, where it was produced in 1963–64, about the troubled return of a Jamaican immigrant who had spent much time in England.[2]

During this same period, Jones wrote The Madhouse on Castle Street for the BBC, who produced it in 1963: a now lost television play featuring the acting début of Bob Dylan.[21][22] The play was about a boarding house and the director, Philip Saville, hired Dylan to play the lead. Dylan found acting to be difficult, however; so Jones rewrote his script to accommodate Dylan as a musician, playing the part of the chorus. After filming, Dylan consulted Jones and Saville for their opinions on his then unreleased single "Blowin' in the Wind" (1963), which he performed for them at Saville's home.[23]

In 1963, Jones also met his second wife, the English actress Joanna Napper (known professionally as Joanna Vogel), when they met eyes at a party; Jones almost came to blows with another man over which of them would drive her home, Jones prevailing.[6] The two would later be married in Jamaica in the mid-1970s, and Joanna Jones then retired from acting.[24] They had two children, Melissa (born 1965) and Sadie (born 1967).

Jones collaborated twice more with Losey, both films starring Sir Dirk Bogarde. Their third film was King and Country (1964), a First World War anti-war drama about the military trial of a deserter. It was very well received, earning nominations for four BAFTAs and two categories at the Venice Film Festival, winning the Volpi Cup.[2] In 2023, a restoration of the film was also selected as a Venice Classic.[25]

Shortly after, in 1965, Jones wrote an unproduced stage adaptation of Vladimir Nabokov's 1947 novel Bend Sinister.[2]

Jones and Losey's fourth and final project together was Modesty Blaise (1966), a spy comedy based on Peter O'Donnell and Jim Holdaway's eponymous comic strip. Jones wrote the screenplay to be a Surrealistic parody of the James Bond films, attracting the attention of Harry Saltzman and Albert R. Broccoli.[2] The production was fraught with Jones rewriting large portions of the script during shooting; and, although he was uncredited, Harold Pinter, another of Losey's friends and frequent collaborators, made additional contributions to the script, likely due to Jones and Losey having different ideas on the project.[2][26] Jones expressed his unhappiness with the final film, stating that he thought it was "dreadful" and "embarrassing".[2]

After the production of Modesty Blaise had ended, Saltzman and Broccoli offered Jones the task of adapting Len Deighton's 1963 espionage novel Funeral in Berlin. It was the second in a series of films where Sir Michael Caine would play the spy Harry Palmer. The director, Guy Hamilton, planned the film meticulously, an approach that was in direct opposition to Losey's, who preferred to "make the film up as he went along" and to keep his writers—such as Jones, Pinter and Tennessee Williams—on hand while filming as he felt they "contributed genius".[2][17] This was Jones's first experience writing for a more impersonal big-budget production and he was surprised to find that his role ended once filming started.[2]

In 1967, Jones wrote the play Go Tell it on Table Mountain for the BBC's Thirty-Minute Theatre series (1965–73). The play would go on to be performed in 1970 at both The Little Theatre in Kingston and at the Richmond Fringe Festival in England.[2] It took Rhodesia as its setting, on the verge of the state's 1965 Unilateral Declaration of Independence, and follows a group of black actors in their attempt to improvise a melodrama based on the ongoing racial turmoil. The situation is complicated by the arrival of a white actor, blurring the lines between reality and fiction.[27]

1969–1981: collaboration with Ted Kotcheff

Jones's next great partnership was with the Canadian director Ted Kotcheff, with whom Jones made two controversial and critically acclaimed cult classics. In 1969 Jones wrote Two Gentlemen Sharing, adapting David Stuart Leslie's 1963 novel of the same name, writing about a black Caribbean diaspora man and a white Englishman belonging to an in ruinate gentry family. Both were educated at Oxford and are fascinated with the other's background. The film explores fetishisation, homosexuality and racial politics, receiving an X certificate due to the censors fearing it would incite race riots.[6] The film however performed well in the US and Europe, and was lauded at the Venice Film Festival, where it was chosen as the official British entry.[28] The British Film Institute (BFI) have since rehabilitated and re-released the film, regarding it as a lost classic and giving it an honourable mention among their selection of the "10 Great British Gay Films".[29]

The two would then collaborate on Wake in Fright, adapting Kenneth Cook's 1961 novel of the same name. The film follows John Grant, an English schoolteacher who loses his money at two-up and becomes beholden to the residents of the outback town of Bundanyabba. It is a disturbing psychological thriller that features shocking uncensored footage of a real Kangaroo hunt. Wake in Fright would come to be regarded as the first important work of the Australian New Wave and is generally considered the movement's finest film.[2][30][31] The film premiered at Cannes Film Festival in 1971 and was nominated for the Palme d'Or. Until 2009, the film was thought to be lost but miraculously a negative in good condition was found in Pittsburgh and painstakingly remastered.[32] It was re-released the same year at Cannes Film Festival where it was again met with universal acclaim. It was selected as a Cannes Classic by Martin Scorsese, who championed the film, and it remains one of only two films to have ever been presented at the Festival twice.

In 1973, Jones was asked to rewrite Brian G. Hutton's horror film Night Watch to make the lead actress Elizabeth Taylor's part more to her liking. Jones obliged, finding Taylor's eccentricities amusing. He explained in an interview that he had written Taylor's character as murdering someone and fleeing the country. Taylor then ordered from her designer a costume to wear while murdering and another to wear while fleeing, requesting Jones rewrite the scene again to give her time to change.[2]

Jones was then approached by an old friend from Oxford, the producer Christopher Ralling, to write an episode of a documentary drama about the transatlantic slave trade which would be jointy released by the BBC and Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) in the US. He agreed, on the condition that he was given creative control of the entire limited series—Ralling accepted. The project would be called The Fight Against Slavery and take two years to produce, it took Jones a year to research, with the aid of an assistant, and Ralling another year to film,[2] being released in 1975.[33] Jones also wrote, with the aid of Terence Brady, an illustrated book that served as a companion to the series, which was also published by the BBC.[34] Jones considered the project his magnum opus, introducing each episode of the series in person. The project was groundbreaking as a more nuanced history of the slave trade, with the academic Martin Stollery suggesting it may have been the first piece of British television to depict Olaudah Equiano since his literary rediscovery in the 1960s.[35]

Despite being awarded the Martin Luther King Memorial Prize in 1976, The FIght Against Slavery was somewhat overshadowed by the popularity of Alex Haley's novel Roots (1976) and its television adaptation, which American audiences found more entertaining.[36] However, the Jones's series has since been re-evaluated by academics who have recognised its anticipation of Haley's later melodrama.[37]

He then wrote The Man with the Power for the BBC's Playhouse in 1977, a television play about a black immigrant labourer, Boysie Fuller, who experiences an awakening of latent psychic powers; and, in 1981, the first episode of The Racing Game, a horse racing crime series adapted from Dick Francis's novels. Between 1979 and 1980, he also wrote Kangaroo, released in 1986, adapting D. H. Lawrence's eponymous novel from 1923.[2]

Jones's next film was his only foray into Hollywood, a part of the industry he had chosen to avoid so as to live and work in London. Jones wrote the script for John Huston's Escape to Victory (1981), starring Caine, Max von Sydow, Sylvester Stallone and the Brazilian footballer Pelé. The film was a sports drama set in a prisoner of war camp during the Second World War.[2]

1983–2006: later career and novels

After almost 30 years of working as a screenwriter, Jones embarked upon a passion project of his: a biographical picture on the jockey Bob Champion that charted his recovery from cancer to his win at the Grand National. The film was named Champions (1983) and starred Sir John Hurt and Edward Woodward. Jones felt attracted to the Champion's story as his mother, Gladys, and his elder brother, Keith, had both died of cancer in previous years. Jones also had a love of horses,[2] which were bred by his family on the FMJ Estates.[3] The film in its original incarnation was 135 minutes long and Jones regarded it as "the most wonderful thing [he]'d ever seen". However, like Eva, it was cut down by half an hour.[2]

In the mid-1980s, feeling that he was missing out on the writing of prose, Jones began to write his work of familial autofiction, Stone Haven, first published by the Institute of Jamaica in 1993. The novel revolves around the Newtons, a fictionalised version of his own family.[2] Hector Wynter, Jones's friend from Oxford, wrote that

"the novel which recounts the story of an affluent Portland family 'contributes the novelesque and the historian with strong and beautiful descriptions of Hector's River and Manchioneal. Evan uses history constructively, and gives us an excellent insight into rural life, particularly in Portland, and the mixture of races'".[38]

Stone Haven has come to be regarded as "a classic of modern West Indian literature";[39] and has been recommended by the writers Ishion Hutchinson and Ian Thomson as an aid to understanding Jamaican history.[40][41] As a historical novel with its basis in memoir, it has also been used as an important academic source. The novel, with relation to upper-class Jamaican society, was interpreted alongside the works of other Jamaican writers, such as H. G. de Lisser and Anthony C. Winkler, in Kim Robinson-Walcott's text Out of Order! (2006),[42] although Jones criticised the study as being overly preoccupied with race, ignoring the human condition as a whole.[43] Also in 2006, the novel was used by the architect Brian J. Hudson to interogate the social function of the veranda in Jamaican culture.[44]

During this time, Jones also returned to the subject of Australia, writing a screenplay about the 1629 wreck of Batavia, a Dutch East Indian flagship. Jones became an expert on her history, identifying it as the first events of Australian history.[2]

Jones's second novel, Alonso and the Drug Baron (2006), is a crime novel influenced by blaxploitation and the Afro-Caribbean folk mythology figure of Anansi.[43] The story centres on the titular character's struggle to exonerate himself after he is framed for murder by a corrupt police detective. In 2008, the novel was longlisted for the International Dublin Literary Award,[45] nominated by Trinidad and Tobago's National Library.[46]

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Personal life and death

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Jones was a founding member of the influential and radical Caribbean Artists Movement (CAM),[47][48][49] attending its first meeting in 1966.[50][51] He contributed to the movements journal, Savacou, until at least 1973.[52][53] Although Jamaican, he was also a member of the Australian Writers' Guild.[2]

Jones belonged to the Stage Golfing Society where he would often play against his friend Sir Sean Connery.[23] Other friends of his included the Irish screenwriter Brian Phelan and the English producer Michael Whitehall.[6]

As a child, Jones owned a dog called Captain Blood, named after Michael Curtiz's 1935 film of the same name.

Jones was a keen equestrian, owning horses named Baccari, Quantro [sic], and Special Branch,[2] as well as shares in race horses.

Jones was a collector of the sculptures and prints of Elisabeth Frink.

In the mid-2010s, the University of Oxford's Bodleian Library acquired a collection of documents from Jones's life, including drafts of scripts.[54][55] In 2024–25, drafts of his poem "The Song of the Banana Man" were displayed by the institution as part of their Write Cut Rewrite exhibition curated by Prof. Dirk Van Hulle and Prof. Mark Nixon.[56]

Evan Jones died on 18 April 2023, at the age of 95.[6][10][23] He is survived by his second wife, Joanna, and their daughters, Melissa and Sadie, who are both novelists.[57] He has four grandchildren, two by Sadie and Hon. Timothy Boyd; and two by Melissa and Prof. Neil Spiller.

On 12 October 2025, Jones is scheduled to be posthumously inducted into the Munro College Old Boys' Association Hall of Fame.

Works

Theatre

  • Inherit this Land (Little Theatre Movement of Jamaica, 1951)
  • Bend Sinister (unproduced, 1956)
  • In a Backward Country (The Theatre Guild of Guyana, 1959)
  • Go Tell it on Table Mountain (Jamaican Theatre Company; Richmond Fringe Festival, 1970)
  • The Spectators (Guyana, 1972)

Television

Films

Books

  • Protector of the Indians: A Life of Bartolomé de Las Casas (Edinburgh: Thomas Nelson, 1958)
  • The Fight Against Slavery, with Terence Brady (London: British Broadcasting Corporation, 1975)
  • Junior Language Arts of the Caribbean (London: Longman, 1977–1983)
  • Tales of the Caribbean: Anansi Stories (Boston: Ginn & Co., 1984)
  • Tales of the Caribbean: Witches and Duppies (Boston: Ginn & Co., 1984)
  • Tales of the Caribbean: The Beginning of Things (Boston: Ginn & Co., 1984)
  • Skylarking (London: Longman, 1993)
  • Stone Haven (Kingston: Institute of Jamaica Publications, 1993)
  • Alonso and the Drug Barron (London: Macmillan Caribbean, 2006)

Poetry and memoir

  • Tropic Rain (1946)
  • "Black boy, naked on jutting bough..." (1948)
  • June Eleventh (1949)
  • "How far is it to Bethlehem..." (1950)
  • "There is a country spot..." (1952)
  • "Press your fingers on your face..." (1952)
  • Memories of Oxford (1953)
  • The Poet (1954)
  • Walking with R.F. (1955)
  • Firenze (1955)
  • "In a town of shopping centers..." (1955)
  • Six a.m. Nov. 7 (1956)
  • The Song of the Banana Man (1956)
  • Epithalamion, with Suntan Cream (1960)
  • The Lament of the Banana Man (1962)
  • "Man sitting still..." (1972)
  • Grandpa Spider (1977)
  • A Cushion for my Dreams (1999)
  • A Birthday (n.d.)
  • Can you Remember? (n.d.)
  • The Communist interprets American Policy (n.d.)
  • Drowned Girl (n.d.)
  • For Jason and Gabriella (n.d.)
  • Genesis (n.d.)
  • "Good God, the dogwood is in bloom..." (n.d.)
  • The Jamaican Husband (n.d.)
  • "Kindled between the clashings..." (n.d.)
  • "The Lament..." (n.d.)
  • "Listen, you listen to me..." (n.d.)
  • "Look at it this way..." (n.d.)
  • Monday morning (n.d.)
  • November, 1956 (n.d.)
  • "Of silence..." (n.d.)
  • Poem (n.d.)
  • A Prayer (n.d.)
  • "Quick..." (n.d.)
  • Ramblers (n.d.)
  • The Season of Planting, Evening (n.d.)
  • The Talent (n.d.)
  • The Tears of Troy/We were westward bound (n.d.)
  • "There's a clump of violets..." (n.d.)
  • "These are child's hands..." (n.d.)
  • Songs of Exile (n.d.)
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References

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