A Fork in the Road Read online

  In some other respects I know they were wrong. It was not the relationship with H that was at fault: that was, and remains, one of the most wholesome and rewarding and most necessary experiences of my life. It was the writing that was bad, in and of itself. Back to the Sun may be the worst book I have ever perpetrated – and that is saying something. But that was not because of H: it was in spite of her. I was simply not yet equipped for what I tried to do at the time. But its very failure inspired me to go on. For better or for worse.

  Until that moment, before I spent that second spell in Paris, life in Grahamstown had continued in its seemingly undramatic way, to prepare me for the changes that lay ahead. Many of the events that later turned out to have been crucial, happened so quietly that I myself may have been unaware of their full significance at the time.

  There was my friendship with Mr Naidoo. We became remarkably close friends, yet to the end we maintained a pattern of decorum and formality. Mr Naidoo. Mr Brink. Much of our daily contact was restricted to his selling, and my buying, his vegetables: he had, beyond doubt, the best fruit and vegetable shop in town; and he could discuss his produce with much more than expert knowledge – he was a connoisseur, he loved vegetables. He had a reverence for life, for all growing things. He also had a degree from Oxford.

  And there were special days, when there were no other clients around and he would offer me glimpses into his two related passions. One was the major ambition in his life: to marry a white woman. She had to be naturally and emphatically blonde. ‘In all the right places,’ he calmly affirmed. And he was resigned to waiting for the day when that would be legally possible. He had no doubt that this day would come. Even if he had to wait for a very long time. He would never rant and rave about the injustices of the country, the inhumanity of its laws and restrictions. Composed and quiet, imperturbable, bolstered by his firm and fervent Hindu faith, he was prepared to bide his time with a patience that passeth all understanding.

  His second passion, intimately linked to the first, was his admiration of Marilyn Monroe. It was more than admiration or even veneration. It was love. One of the most frighteningly pure and focused loves I have ever witnessed. He did not have photos or press cuttings of her on his walls. But he did have one small and much-thumbed passport-sized photo of her in his wallet, which he once – only once – shared with me, without ever giving an indication of how and from where it had come to him.

  One morning when I stepped into the shop, I knew immediately that something awful had happened.

  ‘Good morning, Mr Naidoo.’ I said, as every day. ‘How are you today?’

  ‘Good morning, Mr Brink.’ He made a small movement with his head. ‘Not well, I’m afraid.’

  ‘What’s the matter?’ I asked, with real concern.

  ‘She died,’ he said very quietly.

  I had a sinking feeling. His mother? A sister? A dear and special friend?

  ‘Who?’ I asked after a silence.

  ‘Miss Monroe,’ he replied. And then he started to cry. There was nothing dramatic – and most certainly nothing melodramatic – about it. Just tears that ran down from his eyes. And a single sob.

  ‘Please excuse me,’ he said, and turned his back to me.

  It was as if something had closed inside him.

  After a long time he turned back to me. His face was as inscrutable as a dark woodcarving.

  Then he added, and that was the closest I ever saw him to despair, ‘Now I know I will never get married.’

  And only a few months later he died. He was barely fifty.

  There was also Chief Albert Luthuli. Like the majority of South Africans, but very few whites among them, I was elated, and deeply moved, when he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. When he travelled to Oslo in December 1961 to accept the Prize that had already been announced the year before, it was, in fact, after coming back from my studies in Paris, the first intimation I had that there might be some hope for South Africa after all. If someone like him could be afforded this kind of international recognition, there might yet be hope. How wrong one can be. It became evident very soon that, far from relenting, the apartheid government was going to be more vicious in their attempts to silence and subdue this great man of peace. For in a country that was becoming increasingly polarised and turbulent in the wake of Sharpeville, Luthuli represented an almost old-worldly faith in human goodness, and in peaceful relations. There are indications that he was sidelined by his own people at the time when, in reaction to Sharpeville, the ANC made its watershed decision to embark on violent resistance. Living in the internal exile imposed by banning orders, kept out of reach of the public, he was forced into a private and painful existence largely confined to his home in Natal. Gradually, his memory began to fail and his ability to act or to lead was emasculated. Still, his name remained a beacon, if largely as a reminder of what the country could have become if he had been heeded in time.

  Early in 1967, I was invited to give a series of lectures at the University of Natal in Durban – which would be my first experience of that city, apart from a visit of only a few hours immediately after my first marriage, when Estelle and I went there to place her wedding bouquet on her father’s grave. When the invitation came, it was almost like being afforded another occasion of laying flowers on a grave. I immediately wrote to the authorities to ask permission to visit Luthuli. There was no answer. I resigned myself to the inevitable.

  Then, a day after my arrival, there was a telephone call for me, from a senior officer in the security police. A very friendly, almost fatherly voice told me that they had considered my request but that, unfortunately, it was not possible to give me the permission I had requested. But anyway, the officer assured me, there was no point in such a visit. The old chief was no longer the man he had once been, and one should respect his privacy. And he added, as the kind of afterthought the security police are so good at, that to be absolutely frank, Chief Luthuli was a grossly overrated man. No real influence at all. Not highly regarded by his own people.

  If that were true, I thought, why would the government be so strict about keeping visitors at bay, imposing such near-total silence on a frail old man, trying to deny his very existence? There were, it occurred to me, good reasons for getting to know this country more intimately than I had done over the past few years.

  A pity, almost, that I was practically on the point of returning to Paris.

  SESTIGERS, CENSORS AND SECURITY POLICE

  IT WAS DURING the years leading up to my return to Paris in ’68 that censorship turned really bad. The situation was surprisingly complicated. Among the events that held me in South Africa, there was the emergence of a new generation of Afrikaans writers, the Sestigers (Sixtiers); among those that prompted me to leave was the almost simultaneous crackdown of censorship. The complication lay in the fact that, in the South Africa of the sixties, neither could be imagined without the other.

  Within only a few months of my return in August 1961, I received a letter from the young author Chris Barnard (no relation, I should make very clear, of the surgeon who a few years later became famous for succeeding with the world’s first heart transplant). Chris was then fiction editor of the magazine Die Brandwag, for which I had during my student years, and even during my stay in Paris, written potboiler short stories. He offered me an opportunity of emptying my drawers of old manuscripts. But much more importantly, he broached the subject of ‘a new generation’ of writers in Afrikaans. This was something that had much preoccupied me in Paris. I had even written an impassioned essay for the magazine Huisgenoot pleading for such a new wave of writing: taking my cue from the Dutch writers known as the Tagtigers (Eightiers) of the previous century, who had swept away all the dead wood of conventional writing in Holland to establish a spectrum of bold and passionate prose and poetry that infused the Romantic movement in the Low Countries with the inspiration of Impressionism and Symbolism. In our context, of course, it was no longer a matter of Romanticism, but all th
e ripple effects of modernism and existentialism. My essay wasn’t published until several years later, as a kind of nostalgic backward glance, but from the correspondence with Chris it was soon evident that we were fired by the same kind of vision for a drastic overhaul of Afrikaans fiction.

  Ever since the thirties, when a group of young Afrikaans poets had boldly established radical new forms of individualism, our literature had been striving to break away from the more conventional expressions that had characterised it since the time of the First Language Movement in the late nineteenth century. Various spasms of renewal had followed, but these were invariably restricted to poetry. Fiction and drama still lagged depressingly behind; and by the time European literature was already experimenting with exciting new forms of writing, Afrikaans fiction was still largely stuck in nineteenth-century naturalism, echoing, at second or third hand, the surface features of the bleaker endeavours of the form, but without the passions of the great Russians, or the genius of a Hardy or a Hamsun, let alone an Undset, a Proust or a Musil. Our fiction, as the poet N. P. van Wyk Louw characterised it, was still locked in a local, cosy kind of realism dominated by locusts, drought and poor whites.

  Now came the discovery that a new generation of Afrikaans prose writers was waiting in the wings: we had widely different backgrounds and styles and interests, but one passion we shared – to bring Afrikaans literature, particularly fiction and drama, up to date with the rest of the world. Most of us, by that time, had spent shorter or longer periods abroad, mainly in Paris, and that experience emphasised the parochial closeness of the local cultural scene. Chris had not yet taken his gap year, but was preparing for it – in spite of the misgivings of his then wife. I can remember her arguing: ‘I’m really not eager to go to Europe. I’m scared that it may change my view of the world, and I’m so happy with the one I have right now.’ What made the comment memorable was that it exactly captured the attitude of all too many Afrikaners at the time.

  Several authors had begun to move into prominence during the fifties. The early leading figure was Jan Rabie (born 1920) with his piercing brown eyes and defiant black goatee, his work strongly inspired by French writers like Henri Michaux and the existentialists during his long stay in Paris. His fiction was in no small measure one of the reasons why I ultimately decided to go to Paris myself – and one of the consolations about coming back in 1961, when he broke new ground with his passionate explorations of the Afrikaners’ early interaction with Africa. There was also Etienne Leroux (born 1922), a Mephistophelian figure always obscured behind dark glasses, soon to become the leading novelist of the generation, whose outrageous satires in the vein of the myth-mongering of his time provoked the religious and political establishment with his irreverence and wit. But he presented this establishment with a peculiar challenge: as the son of a respected cabinet minister in the Nationalist government, he was not an easy target for ostracism or attack. Bartho Smit (born 1924), a dramatist, deceptively gentle in manner and appeareance. As a publisher, uncomfortably ensconced in the right-wing house of Afrikaanse Pers-Boekhandel, later Perskor, he was something of a mentor to most of the rest of us and was the moving spirit behind the quarterly journal Sestiger which, for the two years of its existence, became the mouthpiece of the whole group. After early work in a conventional, if charming, vein, Dolf van Niekerk (born 1923), a self-effacing loner, made an electrifying impression with his existentialist reimagining of early twentieth century Afrikaner history. The other Sestigers were younger. Adam Small (born 1936) was the only coloured writer in the group, an affirmative presence with his angry and satirical poetry, his virulent rejection of apartheid, and his brilliant play, Kanna hy kô hystoe (Kanna Comes Home), which brought Afrikaans drama up to date with what had been happening in the rest of the world: an evocation of the lives of a coloured family who are forced to bear the brunt of the only one among them who manages to break away and lead a prosperous life in Canada, until the death of the materfamilias, Makiet, forces Kanna to return home. Abraham (Braam) de Vries, born in 1937, whose eyes, forever gleaming behind thick glasses, missed nothing, soon became adept at exposing the terror and magic that lurk below the surface of the everyday. And of course Chris Barnard (born 1939), a gentle giant, revealed an early interest in the taboos of apartheid before making a decisive break with realism in favour of symbolism, and an exploration of the absurd.

  On the fringes of the Sestiger group the most important new writer was Breyten Breytenbach, who had settled in Paris in 1960, while I was still there, although we did not meet until 1964, when Ingrid and I were on our disastrous way to Spain. Breyten hit the world of Afrikaans letters like a force of nature, splashing a black-southeaster of surrealism, existentialism and Zen Buddhism across the still arid South African landscape. For many years, and in the minds of many people, the appellation of ‘Sestiger’ applied preeminently to Breyten. Yet he persistently refused to be regarded as a member of the ‘movement’, both before and after his imprisonment from 1976 to 1983 on largely trumped-up charges of ‘terrorism’.

  Others on the periphery of the core group of Sestigers included the master of Chekhovian impressionism, the short-story writer Hennie Aucamp; Elsa Joubert with her explorations of Africa and her persistent redefinitions of the Afrikaner world and heritage; and Karel Schoeman, who rather preciously cultivated the image of the enigmatic outsider, whose delicate prose explores the human condition within a South African context. In his best work he was a consummate novelist, but he resolutely steered a course separate from that of the Sestigers.

  And then there was Ingrid. Who was a Sestiger in all but name, and who produced the major poetic work of the time in Afrikaans. Her prose alone, a handful of exquisitely wrought stories and sketches, should qualify her for inclusion in the group. So did her dramatic break with the ancien régime represented by her father, her uncompromising rejection of apartheid, and her embracing, under the influence of Uys Krige, of the free-verse forms of Lorca and his South American successors.

  What all these different talents and energies needed, was a public forum. It was Bartho Smit who used his contacts in the publishing world to obtain access, during 1962, to an existing literary magazine, the moribund Tydskrif vir Letterkunde (Journal for Literature). At the time, this journal was edited by an anthropologist, Professor Abel J. Coetzee, a literary nonentity – but one with vast aspirations. In 1963 he published, in Holland, a survey of Afrikaans literature in which he presented himself to the European public as the greatest novelist in the language, and an entirely unknown individual, Soul Erasmus Smit, as the undisputed monarch of Afrikaans poetry. SES, as it happened, was a pseudonym of the same Coetzee. Eager for recognition, Coetzee was readily persuaded – perhaps conned by the smooth-talking Bartho? – to turn his little journal into a mouthpiece for the Sestigers. The title was changed to 60 (retaining Tydskrif vir Letterkunde as a subtitle), and all of us were co-opted as members of the editorial board. But Coetzee insisted on being allowed to write the first editorial. This was a catastrophe. Out-Heroding Herod, in the firm belief that he was doing us a favour by masquerading as the patron of Renewal, Coetzee enthusiastically presented the Sestigers as nihilists and iconoclasts. There was an immediate outcry in conservative circles, and a serious threat that Coetzee’s generous government subsidy for his journal might be withdrawn.

  He made a precipitate volte-face. In his editorial for the next issue he totally rejected everything he had said in the previous article, intimating that he had been brainwashed by the Sestigers for their own devious purposes, and asked Bartho to withdraw from 60. The whole editorial board resigned in protest, and while Coetzee continued to fulminate in every subsequent issue throughout the year, Bartho managed to find another publisher for our own project. In November 1963 the new journal, Sestiger, made its first appearance. Bartho remained the main inspiration behind it, but because of his editorial ties to APB Publishers I was asked to take over as editor of the journal for the next two years. It had been
decided from the outset that we would not allow it to run for too long: we needed to put our case as clearly as possible to the public, after which we wished to go our separate ways in order to avoid being perceived as a ‘group’ or a ‘movement’ with a sinister agenda. I now believe that the impact could have been stronger had we persisted for another year or two.

  There were only two occasions on which all the Sestigers came together: the first, when we decided to launch the journal; the second, when we decided to kill it. As it turned out, they were also the only occasions on which I ever met Dolf van Niekerk. The others all remained good friends – with occasional misunderstandings and blow-ups, but never serious enough to jeopardise the underlying ties.

  Thinking back now, those early days inevitably appear, through the romantic haze of nostalgia, as an unforgettable experience. Why? Because we were all so very young, most of us in our twenties; we were engaged in a revolution of our own, colliding head-on with all the forces of our social and political establishment, threatened by dire punishment and violent repression, yet at the same time borne along on a wave of enthusiasm among the young generation. On both sides of the great generational divide we were taken seriously, out of all proportion. The establishment saw in us the embodiment of all the destructive forces of Satan and the Antichrist. Sunday after Sunday we were attacked from the pulpits of the Dutch Reformed Church. There were clamorous debates in parliament about our work. Our books were burned in autos-da-fé on the church squares of East London and several other towns. In due course the central political faultlines in the country – those between verlig (enlightened) and verkramp (narrow-minded) – were defined by attitudes for or against the Sestigers. There were public debates where staunch pillars of the community denounced the enemy within. One mother-of-the-nation made a lasting impression by recounting in a choking voice how, while reading Etienne Leroux’s Seven Days at the Silbersteins’, she had been sexually aroused exactly sixty-nine times. And a patriarchal dominee assured a public meeting that this same novel was a vehicle for filth and anarchy and moral destruction, ‘not only because of what is described on the pages, but most especially because of what one can imagine happening between the chapters’.