A Fork in the Road Page 37

  To know who I am. To define myself through the why and the how of her death. To enumerate and name it all, trying to determine not what a man can know of man, but simply what I dare to know about myself …

  My first idea was to write a novel about Christ being reborn into the world of the twentieth century. In itself not all that original an idea; but I became fascinated by the possibilities of this birth taking place in South Africa in the throes of apartheid. It seemed inevitable to me that in such circumstances he could in no way be white. He would have to belong to the oppressed, to Fanon’s ‘wretched of the earth’. Of course there was, specifically, that moving passage from Isaiah 53: ‘He hath no form nor comeliness; and when we shall see him, there is no beauty that we should desire him. He is despised and rejected of men; a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief; and we hid as it were our faces from him.’

  But I could obviously not conceive of it as a moral or political sermon. I wanted to write about my own childhood and youth, the stories and the people that had made me what I was – not as autobiography or memoir, but as fiction, as an intimately lived world transposed by the imagination. By writing the life of a coloured man – rejected by the white power establishment, but also not acknowledged by the black majority struggling for their own liberation – I hoped to distance myself from my subjective involvement with my own life and to come to grips with some of the larger issues of my time and my country.

  Having become deeply involved with the theatre immediately after my return, the choice to make my main character an actor, was almost inevitable.

  And because I wanted to tell a story, not write an essay; and because storytelling has always, for me, in one way or another, been vested in love as the key to the life of an individual, a central impulse in the novel had to come from what is, surely, the central impulse in life: love. I believe that the one moment in Joseph’s life where he comes closest to what life is about, is the one where he contemplates his own imminent death and thinks about what his very last wish would be: to make love with his Jessica for one last time.

  Jessica. In several respects, Looking on Darkness was a way of finally taking my leave from Ingrid. But Jessica in the book is not Ingrid, and was never intended to be. There is a closer link. Among the treasures I brought back with me from Paris was the memory of H. And in the course of working on the novel, the whole course of our love came to life in me again. The first few months of caution while we were both huddling to protect our bruises. Until a magical naked day in Bains Kloof when we moved into a dimension where love finally became a possibility. The endless white beaches of the Eastern Cape at Kenton-on-Sea, where one could walk for miles and miles, without clothes and without encountering a single person; ramblings in the forest outside Grahamstown: one unbelievable night when everything was glittering with fireflies, and we stood among the trees under the moon and I held her face between my hands and said, in my most intense discovery of the Other I had ever had, ‘This is you’; her returns from the Hogsback where she went from time to time to meet with a remarkable priest, Father Mark, who knew not only about things spiritual but about the needs and the importance of the body; hours and hours spent talking and laughing and caressing and being together in silence – all of which in due course finding its way into the novel.

  Then her leisurely wanderings which took her the better part of a year, through Africa, back to London. Followed by the year we’d shared there and in Paris, until the devastating moment of the decision to part. Perhaps, in retrospect, it was unwise to construct the book around our love. I was too close to the experience, too overwhelmed by it, to do justice to the character of Jessica. Later, in An Instant in the Wind, I could stand back and allow Elisabeth to ‘talk back’ at me. For many years I almost compulsively fell in love with all the female characters in my novels, so that a measure of male possessiveness possibly curtailed their freedom and their fullness as people, as individuals; but at least, from Elisabeth on, they began to assert their independence. Until Hanna, in The Other Side of Silence, took the final step to emancipation by making it almost impossible, physically, for me to fall in love with her. I like to think that, indeed, I did not ‘fall in love’ with Hanna: I learned, more simply and more momentously, to love her. And not in spite of her hideous deformities, but because of her essential humanity.

  My working pattern of writing for Looking on Darkness deviated from the normal. My usual inclination, when I start out on a novel, is to get the first draft done as quickly as possible. If it is a mess, as it often is, it can be cleared up later: at this early stage I merely want to get it out of my system. So I may write twelve or eighteen hours per day. In the very final stages, after the four or five or twelve stages in between, this may even increase. But for this book I imposed a pattern of three pages per day on myself. I began soon after my return from that second long stay in Paris. By that time the relationship with H had ended, I had come back to South Africa, met Alta, and we were married. We were in the process of renovating an old Settler house we’d bought, and I knew that this would occupy most of my time. Also, Alta was pregnant, and Danie was expected late in June, and that, too, would not allow me to keep to any regular hours.

  The regime suited me. It left enough time for contemplation every day, and even though it stretched out the writing time on that first draft to extraordinary lengths, I relished the opportunity it gave me of really soaking myself into the novel. It also made the text much longer than I’d ever planned, as I found I could move deeply into every phase and facet of Joseph’s life – which to a large extent became also my own life.

  Having just come out of the production of Camus’ Les Justes, the whole theatre experience fell naturally into place. But for some sections, particularly those dealing with Joseph’s years in Cape Town, living in District Six, I needed the enthusiastic guidance of Daantjie Saayman. In a way, therefore, it was poetic justice that Human & Rousseau declined to take the risk of publishing it and I could give the manuscript to Daantjie, who had been its godfather since its inception.

  There was another inordinate delay, as my very dear friend Rob Antonissen, who was also my head of department and who’d been my mentor ever since I came to Grahamstown, had fallen ill with cancer, and I couldn’t face the idea of finishing the book unless he had read the manuscript. And it was one of the most terrible days in my life when it became clear that he would not be able to do it, and that it was beginning to weigh very heavily on his mind. But at the same time I knew – and I knew he knew – that asking him to give the manuscript back, would be like a betrayal; because that would make it clear that I did not expect him to survive. It became unbearable. I needed to set him free, to release him from this obligation; but that might be a death sentence – from someone he desperately needed to believe in his recovery.

  I discussed it with Rob’s wife, Liesje, and with his daughter Rike. They knew exactly what was at stake. But they both agreed that the presence of the manuscript in their home was becoming an unbearable weight on his mind.

  To this day I believe that my removal of that token of trust was like a final sentence. And the end was not long in coming after that.

  I could only hope that dedicating the book to him, even if he could not know it, would be, at least for those of us who survived, an affirmation of a friendship that had been one of the most precious things in my life.

  When I’d dedicated The Ambassador to Ingrid, that had been a consecration of our love. But six months after the publication of the book, she died; and the dedication had to be changed. In Rob’s case, the In Memoriam had been, from the beginning, an act of dedication.

  Apart from writing and the theatre, the heightened creative urge I brought back from Paris also drove me to explore other forms of expression. For several years photography became one of my main preoccupations. As a teenager I’d started experimenting with painting, only to find out, after a few overambitious exhibitions, that enthusiasm was no substitute for talent.
But photography presented me with new possibilities of satisfying a preoccupation with the visual dimension that had already informed much of my writing and my interest in the world. I began to spend twelve or fourteen hours a day in the darkroom. In those days, I worked almost exclusively in black and white, which seemed to me the closest I could get to writing poetry. Colour is a major component of our perception in the natural world; by excluding colour, the view becomes ‘unnatural’, which enables one to highlight other attributes, of tone, of form, of perspective, of texture – just as in poetry, language is to a certain extent made ‘unnatural’ by shifting syntactical form to the background, making it possible to foreground features like rhythm or imagery. Or phrased differently, the unit of communication in prose is the sentence, while in poetry it is the line, the verse. In photography, it seemed to me, elements of line and form, removed from their everyday context, acquire a heightened intensity and can be used in an almost plastic way. I’m not sure that at the time all of this was done consciously: it happened over the years, through immersing myself in the work of some of the great photographers – Cartier-Bresson, Ansel Adams, Capa, Salgado; in South Africa, Paul Alberts, Chris Jansen, Cloete Breytenbach, and above all David Goldblatt with his battered Leicas, who I am still proud to call a friend. There were shifts in my choice of subjects too. Initially, when I was still more spellbound by colour, landscapes were my main subject. In Paris, abstract shapes began to predominate. Soon, a fascination with the body, specifically the female form, took over. I began by returning to negatives of Ingrid; but soon a number of new models made their appearance. I even produced a book of figure studies, A Portrait of Woman as a Young Girl. And then I stopped, packed away my equipment and for many years hardly ever touched a camera.

  Why? In part, it had little to do with photography as such, and more with South African narrow-mindedness. The young girl I’d used as a model for ‘Afternoon of a Nymph’, the main story in the book, came from a family where nudity was as much part of the everyday world as music. In the sequence of images she wanders through a sylvan landscape with a flute, and everything is suffused with musicality. She brought an enthusiasm, an inventiveness, and a radiant innocence to our working sessions. But neither of us, nor her parents, were prepared for the outcome. As soon as the book was published, the local bookshops were besieged by hormone-driven teenagers who came flocking to leer at their classmate. She became the butt of crude jokes and the kind of viciousness only the young are capable of. For me it was one of the most disillusioning moments of my life.

  It was exacerbated when, in a quite unexpected way, my young model’s best friend also became a victim. On one or two occasions she had come with us on photo sessions, just as the model’s sister or one of her brothers had accompanied us on other occasions; one morning I impulsively invited the friend to join in as it occurred to me that the story of the nymph might be neatly concluded if, before falling into a sleep, she handed over her flute to someone else. Without a moment’s hesitation, she stepped out of her clothes to take part in the session, and some really good photos came from it. When the films were developed, I gave the girl some proofs to take home in a large envelope. Stupidly, I had never considered that her father was a Presbyterian minister. When, totally unsuspecting, she proudly and happily went to show him the pictures, he nearly had an apoplexy. But he never came to discuss it with me: instead, he confronted the parents of my original young model and started fulminating about the sinfulness of the body, the corruption of minors, and threatened prosecution. Fortunately, my model’s parents were more than able to talk him out of it, and it was only much later that I learned about the father’s reaction. The anger I then felt was provoked, above all, by discovering how something which had been pure, joyous, youthful innocence had been retroactively sullied and corrupted by the misplaced piousness of a man of God. When, not long afterwards, Kennis van die Aand was hauled before the censors, it confirmed some of the worst suspicions I already had about the mindset that informed the system.

  But abandoning photography also had a much less dramatic reason: by publishing my photographs as a book, I had turned my favourite hobby into just another part of my main job. It was no longer pure escape or pleasure. It lost the magic that had first lured me to it. And the next step was inevitable.

  In other ways the first few years after my return also provided new ventures into the territory of black and white. On a visit to Brazil in 1970, there was a small excursion to the less salubrious outskirts of Rio, which I undertook purely as an act of homage to H, who had then been doing research for years on charismatic African churches in London. On this in many ways disturbing evening I attended a Macomba session in a bare, barn-like hall in a backyard, where an altar had been set up with cheap painted images of Jesus, the Virgin, Joseph, the Magi and assorted angels and saints. Under the watchful eye of a leader figure, wearing a blue cap, a long yellow Nehru tunic and white sandals and carrying a white book, the audience starts dancing. Both they and the leaders stop several times to smoke from ever-ready pipes, presumably filled with marijuana. ‘Prophets’ in white robes mingle with the dancers, attending to individuals who appear to be approaching an orgasmic explosion as they await possession by the Spirit. The music becomes more and more urgent. Some of the dancers are going wild, collapsing on the floor, their limbs beginning to jerk in seemingly uncontrollable spasms. Until one dark-haired girl loses all control and with hair tumbling wildly over her face, she starts uttering shrill bird-like sounds; the others begin to clap their hands and stomp their feet while they move more and more frenetically, whirling like dervishes. The girl’s beautiful face becomes contorted as she starts foaming at the mouth, screaming and shouting uncontrollably, rushing this way and that, colliding with everybody in her way. Until the leader, unperturbed, approaches her, removes one of the numerous necklaces from his scrawny neck and drapes it over her. With shocking suddenness she stops, her face becomes singularly serene, almost shining, as if illuminated from the inside, and very quietly she returns to her seat. She is followed by several others, coming to climax, before they fall silent, or start sobbing silently, and meekly sit down again.

  At last they all bow in front of the candles set up around the hall, kneel in front of the leader, bow to the prophets, and withdraw. Some are joined by boyfriends, and the couples disappear into small cloakrooms where they change into day clothes. And then they leave quietly, carrying the robes of their ecstasy in small bags. Then the audience, too, disperses. And on the pavement in front of the hotel a group of voodoo candles remains burning peacefully in the night.

  OPTION CLAUSE

  RELATIONS WITH PUBLISHERS have always been of importance to me. They involve so much more than business. So the decision, in the early eighties, to move from W. H. Allen to Faber & Faber was unnerving. Although I had been embarrassed by Allen’s sensationalist approach to their edition of Looking on Darkness, I spent several quite happy years with the firm – thanks, mainly, to Carole Blake’s wonderful work as foreign-rights manager and cordial relations with Robert Dirskovsky in the PR department and several of the editorial staff. Later, when the lovely Amanda Girling became my editor, I really began to feel at home; and even more so when a close friendship developed between myself and the fellow South African, Aubrey Davis, who took charge of the editorial side of my dealings with the firm. Apartheid had driven Aubrey from South Africa, and there was so much we shared – from a loathing of the politics of the time to a nostalgic attachment to the country itself – that my ties with W. H. Allen seemed assured. The only cause for uneasiness was the dizzying rate of staff turnover. More than once I would arrive at 44 Hill Street to find that, apart from Aubrey, there wouldn’t be a single face in that imposing building which I recognised.

  Then Aubrey also left. He joined the agency of Hughes Massie; and although he never tried to exert any pressure, I began to consider the advantages of being represented by an agent. The crunch came at the end of 1979, when W. H.
Allen ‘forgot’ to submit A Dry White Season for the Booker Prize, after both its predecessors, An Instant in the Wind and Rumours of Rain, had been shortlisted for the award and Rumours of Rain had actually been runner-up.

  I remember the consternation with which Francis Bennett, then newly appointed as managing director, conveyed the news to me. I got along extremely well with Francis and we have remained friends to this day, but his concern forced me to start thinking about a change – especially after he quite frankly broached it himself.

  ‘I want you to know,’ he said, ‘that, after what has happened, should you decide to move elsewhere, I’ll understand completely and respect your choice.’

  There was one problem in my own mind, however, which I mentioned to him: ‘What about the option clause?’

  He just shrugged dismissively.

  It was at the time, and perhaps still is, a traditional part of an author’s publishing contract to grant the publisher a right of first refusal on the next book. But every single publisher I consulted in those years – including W. H. Allen – assured me that ‘nobody pays any attention to it’. And so, when the matter came up after Faber & Faber made an approach to Aubrey, I also did not take it seriously. Even so, I did mention it to Francis again, just before he joined the merry-go-round into and out of W. H. Allen. Like the other publishers, he assured me that the option clause had no legal validity. He added that if at any stage I required written confirmation of the fact that, as MD, he’d given me permission to leave W. H. Allen, he would be happy to oblige. Not long afterwards, following a request by my counsel, I approached him for such confirmation and he readily gave it.