Two talks and a reading list
Winter School, Grahamstown, 1999
STEPHEN GRAY
Poetry in progress: Talk given on 7 July
Novel in progress: Talk given on 8 July
Reading listOf no significance in themselves, fin-de-siecles do seem to initiate a lot of abandoned behaviour, usually decadent, are great for religious revivals, and are followed by profound social change: at the Cape then it was from Leiden to London, from Rotterdam to Liverpool
(1) Poetry in progress: Talk given on 7 JulyFellow festival-goers, I'm not sure that anniversaries as such have much significance -- how is one number different from another, really? -- but they do provoke us into stocktakings and assessments that may be of some use. They are the lifting of the head to take breath and bearings, before moving on with the flow. Like the other old-stagers here, how can I not help feeling, has it been all of twenty-five years since that first Five Roses bush-festival out there off the main roads, when the free transport was provided by Joko? Is it a quarter of a century since the dead month of July became the liveliest on our national arts calender? What happened in 1974 to make 1999 different for us all?
Behind 1974 was 1949, another fulcrum when Smuts-power was phasing into the present we are only now escaping; 1924, when a rural country was poised to collapse into the present urban one; 1899 a century ago, with the Ultimatum and the tipping from Krugerism into Kitchenerism in my part of the world, as the last of Victorian Britain poured into the platteland -- about which there is much reinterpretation presently, and a break for the gung-hos and jingo-bells; behind that 1824, which is on my list today, and not at all to forget 1799 in my receding perspective: the first of South Africa's three fin-de-siecles. Today we have the millennium no less; a hundred years ago what General Ben Viljoen, the Boer leader who wrote in English, called with dismay, and said no one was prepared for -- "the first of the modern wars"; and two hundred years ago, the stepping ashore at the Cape of Good Hope of Dr van der Kemp as the first of the workers of the London Missionary Society. I'm sure he didn't just disembark either; he was rowed ashore by sturdy sea-salts from all over the West, and then portered through the breakers by the slaves from all over the East he had come to convert, his black book of poetry held aloft to keep it dry. Lunch at the Castle I am sure, where the laying of the foundation stone had been celebrated with this verse:
Thus more and more our kingdoms are
extended,
Thus more and more are black and yellow
spread ...
Of no significance in themselves, fin-de-siecles do seem to initiate a lot of abandoned behaviour, usually decadent, are great for religious revivals, and are followed by profound social change: at the Cape then it was from Leiden to London, from Rotterdam to Liverpool.
So I have been asked to make a sort of omnium gatherum of my thoughts about these twenty-five year tranches of our story, to gussy up some kind of statement about where we're at and how we got here. My approach will be more anecdotal than analytical. In other words, history as a kind of hopscotch ... and I've been asked to perform this feat using the same board twice. This morning I hop over the scotches in terms of poems, and tomorrow in terms of life-writings.
Let us jump right into the middle. Here is that Assistant Commandant-General of the Transvaal Burgher Forces, Ben Viljoen, making a passing comment in his My Reminiscences of the Anglo-Boer War, written once he was a prisoner on St. Helena:
It struck me again on this occasion [during mopping-up after the Battle of Zwartkoppies] what little bad feeling there was really between Boer and Briton, and how they both fight simply to do their duty as soldiers. As I rode along the stream of men I noticed several groups of burghers and soldiers sitting together along the road, eating from one tin of jam and dividing their loaf between them, and drinking out of the same field flask ... How sad, I thought, that civilised nations should try to annihilate one another, like so many sheep to the butcher's block.
One of the best studied periods of poetry in South Africa is that of the Anglo-Boer War, thanks almost entirely to Malvern van Wyk Smith's superb Drummer Hodge of 1978. A surprise there is that the commandos produced their own poetaster, ex-President and then State-Secretary F.W. Reitz; here he is on the Boers' capture of the big gun nicknamed "Lady Roberts", over New Year, 1900:
Let Roberts of Kandahar, and Kitchener of Khartoum,
Let Buller of Colenso make all their cannon boom.
They may mow down the kaffirs, with shield and assegai,
But on his trusty Mauser the burgher can rely.
They may annex and conquer, have conquered and annexed,
Yet when the Mauser rattles the British are perplexed.
Stand firm then, Afrikaners, prolong the glorious fight,
Unfurl the good old Vierkleur. Stand firm, for right is might!
Such is the jeering doggerel that appeared in pamphlets distributed to the front line -- a kind of literary spirit-raising, exactly what the warlords who subscribed to Punch deserved as a riposte, after all ...
In 1974 English-speaking South Africans had a way with anniversaries which over the last twenty-five years has perhaps become lost. For example, the Publications Sub-committee of the Council of the South African Library in Cape Town, chaired by that great Africana memorialiser, Frank Bradlow, produced two volumes in photo-litho offset of the first two numbers of a real collectors' item of 150 years before, until then hardly ever seen by South Africans except in the sanctuaries of special collections. These were Nos. 1 and 2 of The South African Journal, each some 80 pages long in book format, printed for the editors on the Government Press of the Cape of Good Hope by Mr Greig, who later started what he called the first production of the Free Press in the colony, The South African Commercial Advertiser. The original price of each was 2 ½ rix-dollars, and the reprints sold equally cheaply. Of course, one of the founder editors was that doughty Thomas Pringle, fresh from running The Edinburgh Review, placing the old Cape in the line of the Scottish Enlightenment, a movement that was concerned with more than developing mountain-passes, steam-engines, railways. Pringle's anti-slavery cause is well-known, as is his legacy of fine free libraries and conscientious schooling. His defiance of haughty tyrants like Governor Somerset, intent on turning the fairest Cape into his private hunting estate, is all familiar. Less remembered is that, as true Romantics, Pringle and his contributors let poetry ripple through it all, bearing the burden of commentary on daily social affairs. Here are a few of the issues these poems tackled: the infant mortality of all children in the south of one in three; the lack of access to educational upliftment for women confined to nursery management; and what Pringle's "Afar in the Desert" which opened No. 2 is really about: their chance, away from declining Europe, to make a clean start, plan for a better society. This commentary runs on throughout the nineteenth century, so that anyone who fancies South African English-language poetry was always a rather disconnected, aesthetic affair has not done sufficient homework.
Afar in the Desert I love to ride,
With the silent Bush-boy alone by my side -
When the wild turmoil of this wearisome life,
With its scenes of oppression, corruption,and strife
And the proud man's frown, and the base man's fear;
And malice, and meanness, and falsehood, and folly,
Dispose me to musing and dark melancholy; -
When my bosom is full, and my thoughts are high,
And my soul is sick with the bondman's sigh -
Oh, then, there is freedom, and joy, and pride,
Afar in the Desert alone to ride!
Let met repeat -- inside South Africa the keywords were to be "freedom", "joy", "pride" ... between "Bush-boy" and "Boss" in the interior ... no "oppression", "corruption" or "strife". Not a bad founding declaration for a fine literature, well worth digging out and commemorating in the year this festival was founded.
Let met remind you also of the position as regards the literature leading up to 1974. In 1964, for example, the Institute for the Study of English in Africa at Rhodes University held a conference on what English to teach in Senior Schools. This is what one very senior academic actually had to say the new generation needed to be taught. They needed to know Thomas Hardy's The Return of the Native, and here is how the life of those particular natives was to be summarised in the classroom:
Eustacia [it must be explained] yearns away from the heath towards life and glory and excitement, rather pathetically symbolised by a jaunt to Paris. She lives in a state of permanent "Bovaryisme". She uses Wildeve; she is prepared to use Clymn. Her ambitions lead to her destruction and she is drowned at the end in a weir on a night on Egdon Heath. Clym on the other hand returns to the heath: he loves its grimness: he cuts furze on it, and is content; he has understood the vanity of human wishes and achieves, on a rather priggish level, something of the stoical resignation that permeates the activities of the peasants.
So we have advocated that bright young women should not be fretful, unsuitable suitors should become as resigned as peasants, rather keep cutting that furze, and the peasants should stay peasants. Have you ever heard of such a cravenly unsuitable programme? This is a parody of Thomas Hardy, and of course the one work of his not to be taught on any South African syllabus is his poem about South African concerns. The one about the shot bugler-boy of 1899:
They throw in Drummer Hodge, to rest
Uncoffined -- just as found:
His landmark is a kopje crest
That breaks the veld around;
And foreign constellations west
Each night above his mound.
Young Hodge the Drummer never knew -
Fresh from his Wessex home -
The meaning of the broad Karoo,
The Bush, the dusty loam,
And why uprose to nightly view
Strange stars amid the gloam.
Yet portion of that unknown plain
Will Hodge for ever be;
His homely Northern breast and brain
Grow to some Southern tree,
And strange-eyed constellations reign
His stars eternally.
Quite a jolt, that elegy, after Egdon Heath and all those furze-cutters ... instead, the dusty South and a lament for our terrible war that turned our land into a cemetery for dead children. Not the first dead children as you know, either, in the land where our so-called "natives" now really have returned.
Another even more startling illustration of how things were before 1974 was the conference of the English Academy of Southern Africa, also held at Rhodes, in July, 1969 -- that is, within living memory for most of us. At that conference, after an enormous amount of erudite toing and froing on the issue, as indicated in the proceedings, it was finally decided that at South African English-language universities English departments should not be duty bound to teach any English South African literature. The reasons were that teaching our own writers would tend to sever bonds with the motherland, weaken our dependence on their decision-making, take us off their golden standard.
Guy Butler refused to throw in the towel, and summed up ironically that nevertheless: "here is a community which is going to get a literature because their writers are determined to get it for them." He left unsaid the point that they would get it whether they liked it or not. The turning point had, however, already come at that conference, although it would take the retrograde academicians a few more decades to take stock of it: for the occasion Athol Fugard's Boesman and Lena was premiered at the Rhodes University Theatre, bringing all of the postmodern world to Grahamstown in one explosive night. That night was probably where the idea of the festival was born.
The year 1974 would see many other developments which would have longterm effects: the founding of the African Literature Association in the US, where South African authors have always enjoyed a prominent position; the publication of the late Ridley Beeton's Dictionary of English Usage in South Africa with Helen Dorner, which began the now pretty industrialised studies of ESA language: and in 1975 there were crucial conferences at the University of Texas at Austin and at York which showed that, while our institutions remained unsupportive of English-language cultural affairs and theoretically comatose, the growing exile community would be the one to move the discourse along.
1974 was also the year of the University of Cape Town's Summer School devoted to English-language poetry, following the previous year's stormy one in Afrikaans, where Breyten Breytenbach made his famous "walls of hate" speech ... there artists' projects were set for the grim years to come. And of course it was the year of the launch of the Grahamstown Festival as such, after several small starts. Conditions were right, it seems, for the festival to become one of the prime dynamos of South Africa's cultural regeneration -- and, as you know, the topic of many an overseas PhD and MA study, even if the local institutions still haven't got around to following the trail it has blazed, and gloriously continues to blaze.
In 1974 Unisa English Studies also put out a huge 164 pp. issue devoted to the state of English poetry in South Africa, all not previously published, as it had done after the 1969 disaster as well. Both prominently featured (the now alas late) Douglas Livingstone, whose definitive readings of his own work here in 1969, and then at the UCT 1974 performances, set the benchmark of our postmodern achievement in the world of letters. Remember, too, that our living link with the British mainstream, William Plomer, always very supportive of indigenous publishing ventures, like the establishment of New Coin, had just died (in 1973); in a way, thereafter, we were all on our own, with Livingstone in the lead.
This is one of the poems he read (from Eyes Closed against the Sun) here in 1969:
The Explainer
I beg your pardon, Misha
Levenski, widow, without
children, of the used-violin
and sheet-music shop; cattle-trucked
to Treblinka; gassed, cremated
alone with a batch in '43.
I beg your pardon, you who
went up: violin-shaped smoke
while I was a boy in the sun;
whose immortal remains sometimes
I still breathe and, making me sneeze,
exclaim Bless You! Forgiveness I ask
for not shutting up after
knowledge, for not confining
myself to chimneys or to the
Cyclon B. Incapable of
a talented silence: doing
my thing on birds and beasts of this earth
is to watch myself in case
I wake behind wire, holstered
with authority, jackboots on.
(ECATS, p.38)
The North-South awareness, the South African drift into that old European Fascism, the sniff, the smell of humanity burning ... a deeply neurotic apology for remaining wilfully innocent.
Other poets who read here in 1969 were Butler himself, Anne Welsh, Michael Macnamara, Perseus Adams, Sydney Clouts ... and Ruth Miller was remembered and celebrated. But I feel it was Livingstone's summing up at UCT in 1974 which described the poet's province best for me:
whether it's Adderley or Church Streets, the mine dumps, Soweto, North Beach, a sleepy lion at midday in a game-park, the Zambezi river, Sharpeville, a fishing trawler racing to port before a storm, the heartbreaks of a boy in a blue shirt on a swing, a particular vista of dusty thorn and scrubland with a rock and a fat cloud full of threatening promise, lamplight falling across a section of hedge in the rain, the love, the hate, the inhumanity and kindness we inflict upon one another and therefore finally upon ourselves -- it is all there, at least in parallel, already, within each one of us. I feel in all humility we can but find this and much more to confess and celebrate within ourselves; discovering in the process the miracle against which no wall nor law nor barbed-wire can ever prevail: our uncommon humanity.
Two more key moments in our history of poetry need to be recalled. One is the then President who declared this very building open -- quoting not the Thomases Pringle and Hardy, not President Reitz alas, or even Ruth Miller or Livingstone, but guess who? -- the immortal Patience Strong. At least State President Mandela had better script-writers when at his inauguration he read an Ingrid Jonker.
The other moment is at the 1974 conference right in this room, in July that year, which was called to survey the state of English-speaking South Africa of that day. I remember that I was one of the few delegates from the Transvaal, where most English-speakers live by the way, and was with Sipho Sepamla -- in to those days he was still Sydney Sepamla. And we sat at the back there through rather harrowing sessions given by the distinguished speakers of the day: the Hon. N Ogilvie-Thompson, Butler, Noël Garson, Michael O'Dowd, Lawrence Schlemmer, Frances Wilson, Monica Wilson, William Branford, Réné de Villiers and more ... only for Sipho, invited and paid for -- and the only black man on the list -- never to be scheduled to take this podium and make the address he had been preparing for weeks. He had to take his stand right in the gangway here, while everyone else was shouldering their overnight bags and exchanging cordial farewell handshakes ... to say what he felt about his exclusion, and of course about the exclusion of the entire black South African English-speaking majority of the country; they had apparently just fallen right off the rollcall.
This is the dry little poem he later wrote about that monumental occasion, published the next year in his first volume. He refers to another topic of the day as well, those terrible removals in progress then to Committee's Drift.
On Gunfire Hill
They were still shooting
they were still waving
On Gunfire Hill
Shooting words
Waving wooden flags
On Gunfire Hill
Their white heads bowed down with
knowledge
Their spirits were wavered by despair
As they hailed a past
On Gunfire Hill
Up there on Gunfire Hill
Is anchored a ship
Moored in a virgin green sea
Portholes glimmer at night
By day the massive ship stands forlorn
Awaiting sailors
To drop book-bottles and hurry up
In the twilight of a promise
From the shores nearby of Fingo Village
Bystanders must move to a wasteland
Faraway
These were hands on the ship
Which might never sail
I've known the agony of those deckhands
Now I stand alone
Waving a flag I don't see
Yet it really doesn't matter
I am a flagpost of steel
Like the spirits on the ship
On Gunfire Hill
Let none say:
I know only the shadow cast by the ship
The rides on the ship
Must be a joy to all
On Gunfire Hill.
(Hurry Up to It!, pp.46-7)
Since Sepamla's exceedingly temperate lyric with its salutary, wry message -- how can you keep the ship of state afloat without all hands? -- SA English poetry has boomed all right, within the country and of course quite separately outside as well. Poetry publishers like Ad. Donker, Ravan Press, David Philip, Bateleur, and later COSAW and so on, have come and now gone again; the journals have performed fine service, Staffrider come and gone, New Coin I have mentioned, and Contrast now continuing as New Contrast, and so on. Not always with the best standards -- sometimes with no standards at all -- but battered and, somehow, valiant. In 1989 the University of Natal in Durban launched its Current Writing to study the literature produced in the preceding twenty years, but since then the equally valuable Southern African Review of Books has bitten the dust for lack of sponsorship, which is rather pathetic, when you come to think of it, in such a wealthy land.
Let me leap to a conclusion with another reminder of a historic moment in the history of our poetry. I don't want to give the impression that the entire development of South African literature has taken place in this room -- in fact, quite a lot of it has happened in equally dynamic centres like Cape Town, PE, Kimberley, Johannesburg, and yes, Soweto, and also in Natal, I suppose, in Pietermaritzburg, even in Durban ... in New York, Texas, London, Paris, Moscow, Lusaka, Gaborone... as Grahamstown knows only too well when they all come and visit here and all too hastily withdraw again. In fact, very little of South African English literature happens in Grahamstown; it's just that bits of it get left behind. That's what hospitable spaces are for.
But I cannot resist recreating this moment: the bit that got left behind at this very podium by Barbara Masekela at the festival in July, 1990. She was then head of that liberation movement's cultural department, newly back from exile:
Comrades, fellow writers and cultural workers [she began], I greet you in the name of the African National Congress.
Welcoming herself to what she characterised as the English equivalent of the Voortrekker Monument, Masekela sailed her way through a somewhat poorly informed critique of settler culture. The Queen's English should now be beheaded (this she advocated in quite capable Queen's English), and we should stop trying to do Die Fliedermaus (wrongly spelt) as well as the Vienna Opera does. Why the organisers didn't manage to send her some past festival programmes, I'll never understand. Mind you, the earlier festivals were a bit along those lines -- do you remember Mostly Mozart, Boldly Beethoven, Baldly Brahms? ... Until the fringe of low-budget and loud-mouthed South Africans took off, and took over.
Typifying white English culture as exclusive and resistant to "genuine national influences", Masekela said she found Afrikaans more inclusive and of the soil, yet like Eustacia before her, she has been sent not to Potchefstroom for her pains but to Paris instead. Then the whole Albie Sachs debate broke out, about the appalling notion of now inspanning all cultural forces to tow the Black waggon out of the political slough, but because that battle did not occur in this venerable chamber, I shall not burden you with it, except to remark that the Black waggon has of course turned into a BMW, and that State President Mbeki's recent inaugural address was not made in eloquent Afrikaans or in any other authentic African language ... And who would have thought Afrikaans would so collapse as an expressive medium once its state sponsorship was withdrawn? Another truth is this: poetry is far too demanding a discipline to serve anything but itself. Don't let any politicians whatsoever continue to bluff you on that score.
Here is another Ingrid, Ingrid de Kok, depicting where we stand now -- from her 1997 volume, Transfer, published by Snailpress:
Safe Delivery
I claim kin, giddy newborn sprite
since you were conceived after the close dancing
of your begetters and deliverers
in my living room late one August night.
Your birth was a constricting band
denying you familiar dark circulation;
then a rush of air, gush of light
splashed you through the net of your mother,
slippery into your own body
into your own nine lives
and into the amateur hands
of your parent midwives:
One hand attached to a phone,
one holding a do-it-yourself book,
a third adjusting the bed and a fourth
basketting your pulsing head.
Born in a caul, coughed out of the belly
of the whale, wide-eyed, quivery.
Now blossoming into family flesh.
I wish you well in your human livery.
(Transfer, p.42)
Friends, fellow furze-pickers, that is the one route down my historiographical hopscotch. Tomorrow I will trace another, but by following the bloodline of the other half of our literature -- its more literal side, occupied by the novel and related works especially of the last twenty-five years. I have now to go to a poetry fest, followed by a poetry reading, followed by a poetry book launch, followed by a poetry signing session. But on the morrow I promise to reveal to you the hidden shallows of our fiction-writers, and I swear I'll leave no stone unthrown.
To top of article(2) Novel in Progress: Talk given on 8 July
I've looked up "furze" in Chambers since yesterday and it says it is "whin" -- so, fellow whin-gatherers, dear festival fundis ...
Yesterday's was the poetry perspective on our anniversary situation in the arts in South Africa, and today I said it would be life-writing. That is just to draw a rather arbitrary line between the more imaginative arts like poetry and drama on the one hand, which flourish at festival venues because they are primarily spoken and performance arts which attract and interact with audiences; and the other arts, which are fine for the rest of the year -- like novel- and short story-reading, which one may do privately at home and individually at one's own convenience. So I am opposing "poetry" to "novel", just as an organisational principle ... but also, as the wordfest shows, books are not right for the festival mood; they deal more sombrely, more literally I suppose, with our lives, and we have become used to reading them for social information rather than for what I would call symbolic group playfulness.
Yesterday I suggested anniversaries may be arranged in a kind of hopscotch, a perspective of history receding into the past, and also extending into the future. I suggested 99 was always a dangerous year, on the cusp of big, fundamental changes to we never know what. We become edgy, anxious, it's TRC time, reckoning time. A great moment for religious revivals, like the LMS's two centuries ago, like Rhodes's a century ago.
Here is a quote -- one of many I could have chosen -- from the psychologist Chabani Manganyi, about the value of the historical perspective especially if you have been deprived of one, as I think we all have been to various degrees during those fifty years of apartheid -- call it our lifetime of enforced forgetfulness.
Indeed [writes Manganyi], to be oppressed, subjugated, is to be forced to live without a past. In the histories of individuals and societies, the appropriation of the past serves a restitutive function, and there is no doubt that in the social and cultural spheres, blacks in Southern Africa can only benefit from such an appropriation of the past as biography makes possible.
Biography, life-writing, individual stories. Think how in 1978 Elsa Joubert's telling of the Poppie Nongena story began the unstoppable change in all our attitudes; after Poppie who could ever go back to the old thoughtless ways?
But do you also remember that thirty years ago, in 1969, Guy Butler put out an anthology called When Boys were Men, which was meant to humanise the whole Settler mythology with diaries and other documentation, showing the handful of very human beings behind it all. To which at the time a ready retort was that their boys may have had to be men, but as part of their maturation rituals didn't they reduce the real men around them into "boys"? This festival which Butler helped found twenty-five years ago has been trying to disentangle that double bind ever since.
The first of the Anglo-Boer War centenary polemics takes just that point about the enforced loss of manhood caused by colonialism as its theme: I mean a book called The Boy: Baden-Powell and the Siege of Mafeking by Pat Hopkins and Heather Dugmore, published a few weeks ago. There the once "Hero of Mafeking" really turns out to be the "Monster of Mafeking". We have BP the boy-man, founder of the Boy Scouts of course, with his young lover Kenneth McLaren, and it's serial pederasty in the dugouts from there on, while the real men are the ones they call boys, like Sol T Plaatje who seems to emerge as the only real grown-up who knew what was going on. I quote from the blurb: "When the glossy cover is jerked from the fetid pit that is Mafeking, a crime unfolds that goes beyond denunciation ..." So now read on.
I'm trying to find a tidy way of crystallising the difference between 1974 and today. Here is one neat example. In 1974 Leon Rousseau first published his biography of Eugene Marais; it was called Die Groot Verlange, and parts of it were first serialised in the Sunday Rapport. It created a furore, to the extend that attempts were made to stop it. Remember that in those days the only literary critics who had any power, thanks to the abdication of the academics, were not called literary critics at all, but censors -- hundreds of them, all busy pruning back our artistic affairs.
Rousseau's wonderful work was in for a rough ride, as how could he possibly maintain than an Afrikaner founding figure, in penning "Winternag", was not writing so much about his oppressed people, but -- of all things -- about the terrible morphia addiction with which he was afflicted and which he could not shake. A volksheld not only with feet of clay, but a wretched dwelmslaaf nogal ... Twenty-five years later the work has been reissued, only slightly revised, and for the first time in a mass-market paperback. Oh yes, and one other change: it is in English and it seems as if all of South Africa is now taking this magical, tough story in its stride. In quarter of a century could it be that at last we've all grown up? The censors have gone, anyway, and so we can make up our own minds from now on, thank you very much.
Let's survey that long darkness we've been through. Fifty years ago, in the aftermath of Cry, the Beloved Country -- as Oliver Walker reported in his bouncy "Leaves from my Diary" column in Trek (April, 1948), Dr Wulf Sachs was publishing his Black Hamlet, or Black Anger, recently also rediscovered and republished by Wits University Press. And of course Stalin, the all-time terror of all writers, was still surviving. Here is Walker's comment:
I cannot resist ... this story which is now doing the rounds in Moscow. Recently the Politburo instituted a prize for the best design for a new memorial to Pushkin. It was won by an unknown sculptor who submitted a huge figure of Stalin holding in his hand a tiny volume of Pushkin's Eugene Onegin.
Walker also reported that South Africa was due to take its place on the British literary map as HV Morton was adding a book on us to his hugely successful series, and In Search of South Africa duly appeared later in 1948, and was reprinted annually thereafter. Here is Morton on his visit to Grahamstown, reporting an interview he had with a local:
"Why is Grahamstown called the City of Saints?" I asked.
"Some people say that we have more than our share of churches, but there is another story. They say that about 1846, when the Royal Engineers were here, they were held up for want of building tools. A message was sent to Cape Town asking urgently for a vice to be sent to Ordnance Stores. The reply came back, "Buy vice locally". To this, the Royal Engineer replied, "No vice in Grahamstown."
In due course Morton settled in South Africa and, like Francis Brett Young, the British poet and saga-writer, also decided to write our literature for us, and became an apologist for segregation later on.
The year 1949 also saw another, radically opposite strain of writing crest confidently in urban Johannesburg. That year saw Nadine Gordimer's first collection of stories, Face to Face, put out by a group of supporters as a Silver Leaf Book, and the publication by APB Bookstore of a whole range of the work of the new, realist post-war generation, who were intent to make a huge impact and included Herman Charles Bosman with his frighteningly direct Cold Stone Jug, his prison memoir, which really set the tone for what was to follow. For many readers and scholars outside our country, the literature of South Africa has been just that -- uniquely a prison literature, with a very long list of distinguished gaolbird authors, with ex-State President Mandela top of the list: his prison career is a perverse source of pride to us nowadays, but really such a literature should be considered an enduring national disgrace. It was Bosman who first probed that crushing of the South African spirit, portraying how intellectual liberty could be -- and indeed routinely was -- beaten and tortured into stone.
Of his more than a dozen books, Bosman saw only three into print himself -- Mafeking Road with Dassie, Jacaranda in the Night and Cold Stone Jug with APB -- before his premature death in 1951. But I know I may count on your warm support when I record that since then he has come into his own as our most popular, and probably our greatest, mid-century practitioner. As South Africans we still enjoy him as ours, and it is hard to put one's finger on why: the dry humour, the professional polish and skill, and I would guess a certain recklessness, a wildness we enjoy -- we postcolonials are antinomian berserkers at heart perhaps, and the first to laugh at our own lazymindedness. There has also not been since a writer who took the entire scope of South African life as his duty to cover ... we have all become ghettoised by the apartheid system, imprisoned in ever smaller categories, in a way in which Bosman's imagination refused. For us Pretoria Central Prison covers the land, with a note on the vast door saying remember the others of the Big Five: Schreiner, Plomer, Campbell and Smith, two fiction-writers and two poets ... of course Bosman was both ... Knock three times and open up ...
In the last few weeks Picador have published their controversial The Modern Library: The Two Hundred Best Novels in English since 1950. This is a challenging and moving guide, in the context of which we should orientate ourselves. Its compilers make many points about the fortunes of the novel of our lifetime. They point out that, while English-language Modernism was held together with London as its hub, by an Englishwoman (Virginia Woolf), an Irishman (James Joyce) and two anti-Semitic Americans (T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound), in the second half of our century that their collation reflects women, for one, now predominate -- Doris Lessing and Gordimer are key examples. For another, the writers of the postcolonial world of India, Australia, Canada, etc., with more modestly South Africa in there somewhere, are now the whipcrackers, keeping the old team rattling along. The selectors themselves are both ex-colonials: Carmen Callil, formerly of Virago (from Australia) and Colm Toibin (the novelist, Irish), but their outsider perspective is no longer a novelty; all of London seems to agree that English fiction is no longer in its own hands. The movement of American writers into Britain, from Hemingway to Toni Morrison and Edmund White, is also so remarkable that it passes without comment: to a large extent English literature nowadays is American, too.
Callil and Toibin's work is really a plea for the pleasures of the book, now that's its very survival seems placed in doubt -- by the rise of computer technology on the one hand (the Internet, CDs), and on the other by mass culture with its audiotapes and celluloid versions of things. Yet they point out that we are still the beneficiaries of the postwar paperback boom, bookshops offer more choice than ever before, and never has it been easier to have access to so many splendours of literature past and present. I would add that, with new book prices so unreachably high in South Africa, I have that old bookbuying frenzy feeling only when I tumble into one of our now flourishing second-hand bookshops. I am "of a generation", I know, and one that is disappearing.
Their way of expressing the pleasure of reading is wonderfully from the heart:
We both have memories from childhood and adolescence of being wrapped up in books. Books were a way of escaping the world, and also of entering it in a way that was more intense; a way of discovering feeling; a working out of how to live. Both of us were constantly reminded, as we did our research, of moments from childhood and adolescence finding a book we hadn't read or had forgotten, and after a few pages, suddenly being enclosed, cocooned, absorbed and totally involved in its world ...
And so here they are: books which we offer wholeheartedly to the reader as you would give to a friend going on a journey ...
Now which of their list of 200 comes from us? With the starting date of 1950, Alan Paton's Cry, the Beloved of 1948 -- and we have just been celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of our all-time bestseller -- narrowly misses inclusion. But perhaps that is right: it looks more "modern" than "postmodern" today, of a previous world-order straining against the urban sprawl of the old colonial city, a cry of despair from the neglected fringe. No longer topical; merely quaint.
Included is Gordimer's Burger's Daughter of 1979, although they admit to having difficulties deciding if The Conservationist or July's People wouldn't be more representative of her work, and JM Coetzee's Age of Iron of 1990. Only three other African works are listed: one each by Chinua Achebe (Things Fall Apart), Whole Soyinka (The Interpreters) and Nguni wa Thiong'o (A Grain of Wheat). Callil and Toibin do include short story collections by single authors under their overall category of "the novel, and some notable short story writers are smuggled in as honorary novelists, as it were, but it's fairly clear that to make a publicity splash, claim bookshelf space and become a prizewinner, be it a Pulitzer, a Booker or a Nobel, don't have a shot with anything other than that nifty package.
My flesh crawls to think that, while no less than two out of four of the founding Modernists were poets, the word "poetry" is not even mentioned once in Callil and Toibin, and even the greatest dramatist of the era, Samuel Beckett, is included only because of some dubious novels he once wrote. Thus have market forces skewed and constricted the traditional literary range right down to only one component, that commodity the mere novel, never the most intelligent or even interesting of literary forms, yet the one that reads most easily and thus sells best. They even slip into calling it the contemporary "book" sometimes, as if no other types of book existed.
So how does our world figure within their survey? I'm afraid only 2,5% of their listings come from us, as you see, the continent which contains over 24% of the world's countries. We may safely conclude that interest in African literature in general in London today is at an all-time low, and its influence is felt to be insignificant. This is a sadness from our point of view, since the half-century covered by their survey is of course also the half-century of Africa's coming into its own. India, by contrast, a single country and curry being the flavour of the decade, has twice the number of entries than the entire African continent ...
I want to hop along another anniversary date -- 1924 -- in order to explain a bit more about that problem of our book-world, that most of our best books have been written not by us, but for us by foreigners. A classic example is the American Thomas Pynchon's magnificent outcry against racism of the Western order, V. of 1963; the only critical reception it received here then, as far as my research reveals, is a quick banning order.
Pynchon's V. ranges far and wide on the topic of racist ideology, but his Chapter Nine is a novella on its own called "Mondaugen's story", set in the days when dominion South Africa in turn became a coloniser -- specifically at Warmbad on the 28th parallel in the then territory of South West Africa, which of course we held as a spoil of war under a League of Nations mandate. There, in the crucial year of 1924, Pynchon's young Munich intellectual is collecting and recording sferics on his antennae, listening in to statics in the hope of deciphering universal messages. The year 1924 was just pre public broadcasting as well, something hard for us in our polluted media scape to imagine back to ... Who would have thought that in seventy-five years we'd move from crystal sets to M-Net decoders, from deliveries of post by camel, in his case, to e-mail?
Anyway, woven into Mondaugen's awake-asleep state is all the material that M-Net and e-mail are designed to screen out: the tale of how mighty technology causes atrocities, how the communications network forbids the telling of what pacification campaigns really did and still do to their victims. Through Mondaugen we learn of the Herero uprising of twenty years before, including the Von Trotha extermination order and the concentration camp at the Shark Island at Lüderitzbucht, of the Hottentot uprising also of 1904 with the 1922 Bondelswaartz revolt, including South Africa's notorious aerial bombings of a ragged band and their beasts of burden in the desert; and of the siege party at encircled Duwisib Castle in the Namib, including Gothic tortures and rapes of indigenes before portraits of Prussian martial ancestors ... In short, Pynchon's demonstration was that this, the unreported side of our history and the true province of any serious fiction, was disallowed in South Africa, and of course it still is, because it is now buried under that final chop of forgetfulness ... It's all soap-opera now, stain-free.
Pynchon has continued to write the fiction we should have been writing for ourselves, more recently with his altogether more light novel of 1997, Mason & Dixon. They were the British surveyors who in the 1960s demarcated the boundary between Pennsylvania and Maryland (the Mason-Dixon line), dividing the free states of the North from the slave states of the American South before the Civil War. Part of Pynchon's point is that such lines actually cause wars, and he invites us to pursue boundary studies, the new field to do with resolving conflict. South Africans have more opportunity for that than most.
In Mason & Dixon the first 100 pages is given to an early frolic of theirs at no less than Cape Town, where they are sent to observe the solar parallax of a transit of Venus with their telescopes, in the footsteps of the Abbe de la Caille, who had recently put us on the world map with his star-chart of the Southern heavens. They call their merry episode "Dutch Ado about Nothing" -- the style is jocular and tangled a la Laurence Sterne -- and their Cape is notable for its spicy dishes on the fringes of town and their hostess's frequent attempts to ensnare them into fertilising slave-girls, whose offspring would sell all the better for being lighter skinned. The action is bustling and hugely enjoyable, the tone hedonist and hearty. And here are Mason and Dixon in one of our Cape stews:
Out in the Dark where the Malays all feast,
Spices and Veg'table Treats from the East,Peppers as hot as
the Hearth-sides of Hell,
Things that Papa has neglected to tell, -
Curried wild Peacock and Springbok
Ragout,
Bilimbi Pickles, and Tamarinds, too,
Bobotie, Frikkadel, Fried Porcupine,
Glasses a-brim with Constantia wine,
singing,
Pass me that Plate,
Hand me that Bowl,
Let's have that Bottle,
Toss me a Roll,
Scoffing and swilling, out under the Sky,
Leaving the Stars to go silently by.
That was the old Cape, before Dr van der Kemp, and in 1999 it seems to have come around again, at last ...
The other point I wish to make is that the South African novel that is written by insiders is actually doing fine as well -- indeed, in the last twenty-five years has really taken off as a sound and reliable business. And I stress that it is largely in the hands of women.
For example, the Time Literary Supplement has recently given major space to Ann Harries's new work, Manly Pursuits, the perfect text for my purposes as it goes back one hundred years to 1899 -- proving the usefulness of anniversaries -- taking the opportunity to rearrange the events about Rudyard Kipling, Oscar Wilde, CJ Rhodes and Joe Chamberlain into a womanly domestic order. Also the TLS has given space to Patricia Duncker, not South African, but whose James Miranda Barry, as its double-sexed title suggests, has to do with some rather transgendered goings-on hereabouts. Dr Barry, that is, who could swear like a trooper, and even smoked publically, while clutching her secret to her breast.
Yvonne Burgess is back, after an eighteen-year break, with her delectable Ann and the Colonel (Ravan, 1997); Sheila Roberts continues her most distinguished progress, pretty well unremarked upon, however. And here are the names of other career women writers, who continue to be productive and of the kind of interest that makes one always pick up a new work of theirs with grown-up expectations. I give them a mention in alphabetical order, so as to avoid any suggestions of a competition: Lesley Beake, Elleke Boehmer, Lyn Freed, Jenny Hobbs, Farida Karodia, Barbara Kinghorn, Caroline Lassalle, Alison Lowry, Sindiwe Magona, Nomavenda Mathiane, Rose Moss, Beverley Naidoo, Marguerite Poland, Agnes Sam, Jenny Seed, Gillian Slovo, Marita van der Vyver, Rose Zwi.
And this is the observation I really wish to make: that while men cause the occasional splashes, like Mark Behr (with The Smell of Apples), or like André Brink and Breyten Breytenbach -- by despite their differences -- both defecting to English ... the work-horses who really keep the wheels of the literary laundry going are its women authors. People get really angry with me when I point this out, but after all Sarah Getrude Millin kept the literary maw stoked for over thirty years, from The Dark River of 1920 right up until her The Burning Man of 1952 -- her magnificent meditation on the meaning of none other than Dr van der Kemp. And taking over from her, the one who kept the CNA in profit was, of course, that large lesbian lady of Camps Bay, dear Mary Renault ... Such reliable work has always been major; it has also been shamefully overlooked by the male establishment.
And here's a story for you; it's a story about a story, which should also satisfy any postists in our midst:
Long ago terrible things happened in stories and nobody complained. They just knew that's what happened in that particular story. They thought about the meaning of it. These days when you write a story, you have to be so careful. People can accept a magic door, invisible people, love at first sight, and that sort of thing, but there are other things they just can't stand anymore. They feel attacked. They don't know if you're just telling a story or somehow taking advantage of them. They get cross. Some of them do anyway.
These days, in a story, when parents go and die before the beginning of a story and leave two children, a son and a daughter, that is a brother and a sister, all alone in a house together, some people get cross with the writer on the spot.
They get agitated. A defensiveness gets into their voices. Their chests get tight. Their palms sweat. What if there's pornography in it? What if incest? They wish you hadn't chosen to write it like that.
As if you had the choice.
Thus one of the early passages of the South African-born Lindsey Collen's new novel, Getting Rid of It, actually set in Mauritius where she now lives and works, and I know of no other more wickedly ingenious way of soft-soaping the reader into a fiction. By vacillating like that, by bluffing and then revealing in the best coy style, Collen invites the reader into her construction, to take sides from the start. We want the best, but are prepared for the worst; we are a bit cautious and repelled ... but, above all, so curious we are attracted. For an opening gambit it is very masterfully done.
Or take the Capetonian Anne Lands-man's The Devil's Chimney, a first novel also launched in 1997, and also remaindered in hardback piles at the recent Exclusive Books sale, where I could at last afford to purchase my prized copy. This one is set down the road in the Oudtshoorn district, past and present. It is a group of interweaving monologues by some rather stranded characters, one of them a real mental defective of the kind Erskine Caldwell or William Faulkner used to love using, and Morrison has now shouldered the burden of -- to reflect just how incompetently adjusted to the real world their Southern Gothic way was, and is:
I don't understand that. Real scorpions are bad enough. Sometimes we find them in the bath and Jack has to bang on them with a broom or something to squash them. The worst is when they escape and go down the plug. Sometimes when I sit on the toilet I worry that same scorpion is now in the toilet and is going to sting me with his tail on my tail and kill me.
Meerkats aren't so friendly either although they say Scorpion used to eat out of Miss Beatrice's hand. They don't just lie in the sun like dassies and get fat. When you're out on the veld, you look up at Pienaar's Koppie and sometimes there's a dassie lying on every rock. They can't be bothered with you, those dassies. They're too busy getting a tan. Meerkats make me nervous. But there's less of them.
Landsman's work is ultimately a mystery farrago of lust and murder down on the ostrich farm -- in the shadow of the vast Cango Caves, as the blurb would have it. Ah ha, so someone killed Miss Beatrice's pet ... are you picking up the clues?
Interestingly, The Devil's Chimney was copy-edited in New York, where nowadays veld is spelled veld, koppie is koppie and meerkats are acceptably roman, but we are asked to believe Landsman's dwaaling dreamer over the long drop thinks of dassies in strictly italic: dassies, see glossary: rock rabbit. The new Oxford Dictionary of South African English on Historical Principles would doubtless have something to say about which South Africanisms have penetrated overseas, and which utterly not. I suppose it depends on equivalents: Americans have ostriches, prairies and mesas, but no basking brown bunnies, hell no.
And for us, the home audience, to think that fifty years ago Dassie Books meant South African literature more than anything else: remember those modest paperbacks with their scrambling rats on flimsy checkerboards, those floppy local classics that the CNA introduced to the market to serve the local appetite for our own books, now collectors' items all.
And so to conclude my rather odd skip and jump down memory lane. I think South Africa's poets, as I hope I made clear yesterday, are doing fine with interesting work, as are those in the related arts of theatre and so on, of which this fine festival is now the major established seedbed, showcase, whatever you wish to call it; and that its more literal-minded half-section of the novel with its related forms is also prospering, though locked more into market forces, and at the mercy of the monopoly of Exclusive Books; and so is less free-spirited, but still -- the word is challenging. As ever, the academy is miles behind. Since the Grahamstown festival has moved South African work into the centre of the arena, thanks perforce to the crucial factor of boycotts and bannings as well, to be sure, so have the conditions become right for it to take off and proliferate with a certain reliable bulk as never before, leaving the academy even further behind.
But in front of the arts, as I may see, are their audiences, who must maintain and control the momentum ... I salute you, and I thank you, for it is you who really shape emergences and divergences in the arts; your applause, that will continue to demand and direct the quarter century to come.
To top of articleREADING LIST
Pereira, E & Chapman, M (eds). 1989. African Poems of Thomas Pringle. Pietermaritzburg: University of Natal Press.
De Kok, Ingrid. 1997. Transfer. Cape Town: Snailpress.
ISEA Proceedings, No 2. 1965. Grahamstown: Rhodes University.
Livingstone, Douglas. 1970. Eyes Closed against the Sun. London: Oxford University Press.
Masekela, Barbara. 1990. We are not returning empty-handed. Die Suid-Afrikaan, Cape Town, No 28, Aug.
Wilhelm, P & Polley, J (eds). 1976. Poetry SA: Selected papers from Poetry 74. Johannesburg: Donker.
Proceedings of a conference of the English Academy of Southern Africa, July, 1969. English Studies in Africa, 1975. Johannesburg, Vol 13, No 1 (March, 1970).
Sepamla, Sipho. 1975. Hurry Up to It! Johannesburg: Donker.
Smith, Malvern van Wyk. 1978. Drummer Hodge: The poetry of the Anglo-Boer War (1899-1302). Oxford: Clarendon.
The South African Journal, No 1 and No 2 (Jan-Feb, Mar-April, 1824) reprint. Cape Town: S.A. Library, 1974.
Viljoen, General Ben. 1977 [1903]. My reminiscences of the Anglo-Boer War. Reprint. Cape Town: Struik.
Callil, Carmen & Toibin, Colm. 1989. The modern library: The two hundred best novels in English since 1950. London: Picador.
Collen, Lindsey. 1997. Getting Rid of It. London: Granta.
Harries, Anne. 1999. Manly Pursuits. London: Bloomsbury.
Hopkins, Pat & Dugmore, Heather. 1999. The Boy: Baden-Powell and the siege of Mafeking. Johannesburg: Zebra-Southern.
Landsman, Anne. 1997. The Devil's Chimney. New York: Soho.
Manganyi, NC. 1982. Biography: The black South African connection. Paper distributed at the Wits Sociology of Literature conference, Johannesburg.
Morton, HV. 1948. In search of South Africa. London: Methuen.
Pynchon, Thomas V and Mason & Dixon. 1997. London: Jonathan Cape.
Rousseau, Leon. 1999 [1974]. The Dark Stream: The Story of Eugene Marais. Johannesburg: Jonathan Ball.
To top of article
|
