A Fork in the Road Read online

  And then he was back. Once again he addressed the nation. This time it was not the weary and almost desperate old man of the previous speech. He had rekindled some of the old flame that had inspired his people during the Nazi occupation, or brought new hope to a torn and wretched land sick of war and confusion, when he announced in 1959 that I am ready to assume the powers of the Republic. Not everyone was fooled by it, of course: and in retrospect one had to acknowledge that – even though he himself might not have been prepared to concede it at the time – this was really his farewell to power. A year later he was gone: in Thackeray’s unforgettable words it was time to shut up the box and the puppets, for his play was played out. But it was a masterful performance. At the same time it was one of the most memorable demonstrations in our post-war world of sic transit gloria mundi. Even in South Africa, at that time still gasping for breath in the stranglehold of apartheid, it should have brought a small, chilling reminder of the way in which all regimes with totalitarian tendencies must reach their end. At the time of our own student revolts in 1969 I had the occasion to remind Prime Minister John Vorster of what had happened in France. His reply, as I have noted elsewhere, was flippant – and, in its own obtuse way apocalyptic: I wish you a good night, in spite of the curlers in your hair – but it is satisfying to recall, today, that our own hourglass was very slowly but surely running out.

  By mid-June the French government had stormed and taken back the Sorbonne; a plain-clothes policeman had climbed to the top of the Odéon, torn down the red and black flags and hoisted the tricolour; the small group of hardliners who called themselves the Katangese, under the command of an ex-mercenary known as Lucien, was driven from its stronghold in a wing of the Sorbonnne. And slowly life in the exhausted city returned to its previous rhythms and occupations.

  There was a sense of futility and deep disappointment about it all. One accepts that ‘life must go on’. But was this the only way in which it could have happened? Was it worth the price? As I write this, forty years later, France is again in the throes of social constipation. So many of the issues of 1968 are still unresolved. There is only more weariness, and disillusionment, and cynical resignation all around.

  And yet …!

  All of us who lived through those days of madness and exhilaration and dreams and impossible hopes in which we realised our own ‘Ode to Joy’ – in whatever form it manifested itself, building a barricade, throwing stones at a phalanx of armed police, making love with somebody encountered in the heat of the moment, scaling walls, uprooting traffic signs, braving odds to deliver a message, dragging a bloodied victim to the safety of some stranger’s apartment, addressing the crowd in the Odéon, or simply allowing oneself to be dragged along by a demonstration, walking through deserted streets at four or five at night, crossing over the dark arches of bridges guarded by dark lines of police, inspired by the anticipation of love or cherishing its memory as one moves to, or leaves, the room or apartment of a lover, and hearing far, far in the distance the rumours of warfare – will bear with us, inside our blood and memory, the spark of that discovery: that all is never lost, that the impossible can come true, that the most overt political act can be the most intimate. The humdrum of ordinary days may tone it down, or temporarily mask or muffle it, but it cannot be obliterated, it cannot be ultimately denied. It was there. It happened. And having happened, it may happen again. Perhaps not in such a dramatic way, but still as a presence in the mind, a small glowing ember against the winds of the world.

  Through all the upheavals I never stopped writing. There were many interruptions, of course. But behind it all, and in between, my little portable typewriter was prepared to submit to all my onslaughts. During the first months of the year, there was a novel – mercifully never published, at one stage called Ballad of the Boer, and at another Death of a Bee. This was inspired by a famous essay on bees written by Jean Paulhan – the author of that great aphorism, Not everything needs to be known. In the essay he argues that if you hold a bee in your hand and try to smother it, it is bound to sting you before it dies – a negligible thing in itself, but if it hadn’t been for that, there wouldn’t have been any bees left in the world. The idea for the novel was fine, but the execution execrable. The storyline was partly inspired by Antigone: my main character was a dour farmer who kills the son who dares to challenge his authority, and then forbids his daughter to bury the body; when she disobeys, she is also killed, and it is found that she is pregnant by the black labourer. I also followed the outline of The Waste Land; but it was too ‘literary’ and contrived. At that stage, after the failure of Back to the Sun I was low on confidence, and urgently needed this short novel as a lifeline. But it was turned down, rather scathingly, by my South African publishers, Human & Rousseau. They felt, once again, that H had been my kiss of death and that for as long as I was with her I would not be able to do anything worthwhile again.

  Even the physical act of the writing was problematic. In the midst of the uprising my small typewriter broke down and there was no way of getting it repaired. Marion was kind enough, albeit with a hidden agenda, to lend me hers. But then, just as I was getting warmed up, this second machine also collapsed. I had to go on in longhand for some time, but at last I was on my way again. Not that it availed much. If only I’d read the signs correctly, I could have let the story die a peaceful – and, in retrospect, well deserved – death. As it was, I had to keep hoping all the way to the final verdict before I gave up.

  After that, I thought of writing a non-fiction book on the student revolt; and H was eager to work on it with me. But once again my publishers killed it in the bud. The climate in South Africa, they argued, was so negative about this whole experience – and they made it clear that they subscribed wholeheartedly to the notion of these worldwide revolts as a ‘communist-inspired plot’ – that there was no prospect of its ever being published.

  I was having my own doubts about communism. Although I had been sympathetic to some aspects of the Marxist view of history and of literature, I had always been suspicious about both its utopian overtones and its devastating practices under Stalinism. The 1956 invasion of Hungary had effectively killed off any lingering doubts I might have had. Aragon’s appearance among the students in May 1968 had strengthened my disillusionment. And if further evidence were needed, it was provided by the brutal squashing of the Prague Spring in August 1968 – coming at the very moment when H and I were planning a visit to Czechoslovakia.

  During that year, as the American offensive against Vietnam intensified and more and more atrocities came to light, I developed a romantic admiration for Ho Chi Minh. I even had a poster of him in my little garret room. And at one stage I wrote a long poem against Lyndon Johnson’s criminal involvement in what had once been French Indo-China: this was published in the rather staid literary journal Standpunte. As I served on the editorial board, my contributions had to be printed. Within days the security police raided the offices of the publishers and confiscated all the copies. This placed the political establishment in a serious quandary, as there were several cabinet ministers on the board of directors of the publishing firm. But then Uncle Ho came out in defence of the Soviet Union’s action and I removed his poster from my wall. Another small ridge of hope on the political rock face on which I was hoping to find a toehold, had flaked off. It seemed, more and more, as if I would never find a system of thought or belief that could inspire enough trust or confidence to harbour my own uncertainties and yearnings. I was, indeed, living in a crumbling world. And more and more I was forced to acknowledge that there was no point in finding anything outside myself to provide a platform or a starting point. Whatever I could use to construct a future action or involvement, would have to come from within myself.

  Ever since the outbreak of the student revolt I knew that sooner or later I would have to make up my mind about going back to South Africa. Living in Paris was, in itself, the reward for being there. There was a sense of freedom I simply cou
ld not experience back home. But the revolt had placed it all in the balance. So many of the interminable discussions in the Odéon and elsewhere had focused on the peculiar exchange between the individual and her or his social context. There was suddenly something hollow in being where I was, 10,000 kilometres away from the place that had shaped me. I honestly didn’t think it ‘needed’ me. In the larger context I was readily expendable. I was not, nor could I ever be, in the full sense of the word, a ‘freedom fighter’. What I had was, at most, a pen. A broken typewriter. But even that seemed, at such a distance, preferable to sitting on such a distant sideline.

  Yet what could I really do, by going back? Every bit of news that filtered through from South Africa was enough to turn my stomach. The parochial smallness of it all. The myopia. The sickening arrogance. Even within the severely restricted territory of my own, immediate interest, writing, the novel, there was nothing in South Africa that attracted me: how could one go back to do what almost everywhere else in the world was already old hat? I did not have the stomach to fight battles from the day before yesterday.

  On the other hand, what was there I could really achieve in Europe, where I would have to be measured, in a foreign language, against writers ten years younger than myself, who in the context of their own world were already so much more experienced, in their world? Unless I gave up writing altogether. Yet that was the one thing I could not contemplate. No matter at what low ebb I found myself, writing remained all I wanted to do. All I could do.

  Here in Paris I was beginning to despair about the power of a majority within a democracy. How could it be ethically acceptable for fifty-one per cent of a nation to have a decisive say in the affairs of a nation, in its present, its future? Yet how much worse was it in South Africa, where not a minority was excluded from the making of decisions but a vast majority?

  From the journal notes of those days:

  My beautiful, damned, despicable land. Already the plague has entered so deeply into its very fibres and sinews that no salvation seems possible. The terrible sickness of intolerance. Over these last few months I have totally and irrevocably broken free from that life. I cannot take the pettiness and viciousness and dull stupidity of that world any longer. It threatens every grain of creativity in me and in ‘my people’. I’m no longer interested. I cannot even think of attempting my book on the student revolt any more: it would, at best, be seen as ‘furthering the cause of communism’.

  To what extent is even thinking of writing in that context, in that language, a show of dishonesty?

  But what else can I offer? I cannot handle a gun or blow up a building or maim children.

  The alternative remains writing. But how can I think of that if nothing I may be interested in saying will be tolerated, will even be allowed to be said? It is no longer a matter of wanting to have the right to argue in favour of an alternative, let alone to defend it. It is the mere notion of an alternative that is being denied.

  And so: Must I stay here and shut up because I lack the means and the talent to say something worthwhile?

  Or must I go back where even the attempt to say something worthwhile may be suppressed?

  Poor old Hobson.

  ‘Why,’ Marion asked that night, ‘can’t you stop planning your future? Why don’t you just give up planning and unplanning yourself all the time and try to be just what you are?’

  *

  Perhaps that in itself was an aspect of the problem. It is the ‘masochistic ecstasy’ the political essayist Stanley Uys once spoke about. The Afrikaner’s idea of heroism: to stand alone against the world. And even when you break away from the system, from the laager, you still find it necessary to define yourself in relation to that same system. That is the starting point of why we are so screwed up.

  This is when I find some comfort in Basho:

  In the autumn wind

  There will at least be

  A lotus to sit upon

  For eternal peace

  The break with H, inevitable for so long, came soon after our return from a wonderful voyage through the Midi. It was a devastation for which there were no words. And yet it also brought a strange, shocking illumination. Thinking about the violence I had lived through during that long year, and about the revolutionaries – Guevara and others – who had inspired it, I slowly began to see beyond the immediacy of ‘activism’. Gradually, but unstoppably, I began to think (because, as a writer, there was no other way I could think about it), not only of the actions that constitute change or mark revolutions, but the context within which such actions become possible. Over the years I have often reduced it to the glib formula: for those who do or die, there also have to be those who reason why. But I do believe there is a grain of truth in it. And although, of course, there are gifted people who can assume both these responses to the world, writers by and large belong to the second category. Which meant that if I decided to return, it did not have to mean defeat or failure. There could be something very creative about such a choice.

  And perhaps there was another way of looking at it: late in November several of us planned a trip to Amsterdam to be with Breyten at the opening of a major new exhibition. There was some talk about where to spend the night: Belgium, or the north of France? It was Pierre Skira who came up with the final word: ‘Ah well, the night is everywhere the same.’

  Perhaps the choice between going and staying might not be decisive after all.

  Even at that stage I was still trying to think of ways and means to bypass the finality of such a decision. But on 16 November we received two visitors, Prins and Marais, who brought a sudden end to all the dithering. They were not ‘representatives’ of any organisation or grouping in South Africa: they simply came to see the rugby Test match between the Springboks and Les Bleus of France. One was a businessman, the other a journalist, and they moved very close to the establishment. In the course of the meal we had together on the Saturday night after the match, they provided me with a very clear view of my position in Paris. Given the present climate in the homeland, my closeness to Breyten might soon narrow down my choices to very few. Damned in advance by our friendship, I might soon not have any guarantees about ‘effective action’ back in South Africa.

  What it brought home to me was the awareness that my presence was beginning to curtail Breyten’s own choices. I’m pretty sure that in the course of that year he’d had ample opportunity to see that I was not ‘revolutionary material’. His concern about me, and the closeness of our friendship, might soon become a burden to him. That alone was enough reason to make up my mind. But there was my own life to consider as well.

  For a brief period I thought of moving to Amsterdam instead: after the exhibition I stayed on for a few weeks to explore the possibilities, and found that the Free University might indeed be willing to accommodate me. There was even, briefly, the attraction of a blue girl who lived on a riverboat with nine cats, an artist with streaks of paint on her face, dirty fingernails and a provocative, explosive nature. But I realised that this would merely postpone the final and inescapable decision. My place, for better or almost certainly for worse, I now knew, was back in South Africa. I would not slink back in despair, but assume the burden, above all the responsibility, of a choice made lucidly. To be there. Even – and perhaps most especially – if being there might mean living on a sinking ship.

  It was no longer, as it had been in 1961, a reluctant and resentful choice: going back because I had no other option, because my money had run out. This time I wanted to return. Not because I was hoping for ‘victory’, whatever that might mean; not because I was either masochistic enough to sink with the ship, or determined enough to try and ‘do’ something about it. But because this was what I had to do and wanted to do, a decision that came from deep inside me and was no longer imposed from outside.

  À nous deux maintenant? Maybe. But there was little defiance in it. More grim determination. And even a new and strange sense of happiness. At long, long last
writing was being integrated into the woof and warp of my whole life. And I couldn’t wait to take up the challenge.

  I went to London for one last week, and then H came back to Paris with me for another. All of this had been plotted at the time of our parting in October. We knew it might be disastrous. Or simply a mistake. By that time she was already in another relationship. But in some indefinable way we felt that we owed it to one another. There were days of real agony. But above all there was a belief in the profound necessity of that decision. It brought a strange kind of happiness with it. An inner freedom such as neither of us had known for a long time. If it was a parting, we also knew that we could never again be truly separate. Each had been assimilated as part of the other. And forty years on we still knew that it had been the right thing to do. The only thing.

  HOME SWEET HOME

  WHAT 1968 HAD brought home to me, above all, was the realisation that however solitary a writer’s work might be, as a person one is irrevocably linked to others, to an entire society. Even if the relationship with that society might be antagonistic, hostile, rebellious, angry or destructive, its existence cannot be denied and will always be part of whatever comes out of it. And this time I wanted to find out where I came from, what had shaped me, what had made that entire society what it was, for better or for worse.

  The first novel to come out of this mindset was Looking on Darkness. Even so it took several years for it to reach the point where I could start writing.

  It began with the title which, in its original Afrikaans form, was inspired by St John of the Cross to whose writings I was first introduced by Breyten and who, in one of his meditations, distinguished between nocturnal knowledge (la noticia vespertina), which is the knowledge of God through his various manifestations within the temporal world, the kind of knowledge a lover might have of his beloved, through the mingling of their bodies – and daytime knowledge (sabiduría matutina), that immediate and total communion with God which really lies beyond the reach of mortals. What inspired me was that phrase, ‘knowledge of the night’, or, more literally, ‘knowledge of the evening’; and because roughly at the same time I started reading Dostoevsky’s The Idiot, those two worlds soon started interacting in my mind. I wanted to explore the notion of the idiot – as Dostoevsky defined and complicated it with, among so much more, the fusion of Christ and Don Quixote in one mind, one figure, with a hint of Erasmus thrown in, and further nuances inspired by Sartre’s magnificent study of Flaubert in L’idiot de la famille. The very first paragraph became a variation on Sartre’s opening: