A Fork in the Road Page 38

  It turned out that such an agreement could be legally binding only if I had offered something in return, even if it were no more than a token amount. But neither Francis nor I was aware of this; and counsel did nothing to enlighten us.

  I was not interested in approaching publishers before I actually had a new novel in my hands, and so there was some delay before I handed the manuscript of A Chain of Voices to Aubrey for submission to Faber. Even at that stage I suggested that he contact W. H. Allen in writing to make quite sure there would be no complications, but once again he made it very clear that an option clause was not binding and that we should simply go ahead. At some stage there was a letter from Allen’s to remind me of the clause, but Aubrey just shrugged it off and told me to do the same.

  It was only when A Chain of Voices was published by Faber in 1982 that the shit became airborne. By that time there was a new MD in charge of Allen’s, one Bob Tanner, known in the trade as One-and-Six; I showed his letter to Aubrey, who once again dismissed it. At any rate, he said, Tanner was a newcomer to W. H. Allen and had no idea of what the situation had been before I’d left.

  Tanner informed us that legal proceedings would be forthcoming. Bluff and bluster, Aubrey assured me. Assuming that he spoke with the authority of a respected agency like Hughes Massie behind him, I followed his advice to ignore the letter.

  Allen’s, who had by then lost most of their serious writers apart from Bernice Rubens, apparently needed some public bolstering and decided to press for prosecution. The trial was set for January 1983. I travelled to London. That was where everything turned serious. To begin with, Hughes Massie refused my request for a refund of my travelling expenses and accommodation during the trial: the matter, they said, did not concern them. It was something purely between W. H. Allen and myself even though the negotiations had been conducted between Aubrey as the representative of the agency, and me. They did graciously offer me the services of their counsel, at my own expense, though; but no one thought of pointing out that this might lead to a conflict of interest, given that this person had been acting for Hughes Massie for years and should have been expected primarily to protect their interests, not mine. Aubrey, who had been the kingpin in the negotiations leading up to the trial, was moved out of the action, and soon afterwards was made redundant by the firm – nothing to do with the Allen business, of course, I was assured: purely a matter of internal reshuffling – and I was left out on a limb. The Massie counsel strongly pressurised me to settle out of court, which would obviously have suited their agency. By that time the costs were piling up alarmingly: not only W. H. Allen’s exorbitant claim of £30,000 for compensation, but all the legal costs to date. I would be ruined financially. In the circumstances, and with no impartial advisor to turn to, I yielded to the pressure and agreed to settle on the opening day of the trial.

  There was a huge party at Allen’s and they celebrated with unseemly haste before the ink on the settlement was dry.

  The saddest part of the whole unpleasant business was that I never saw Aubrey again. He could not find another job in publishing and had to resort to making sandwiches for some fast-food concern. Not long afterwards Herta Ryder, who had left Hughes Massie to safeguard her integrity and set up an agency for children’s books on her own, conveyed the shocking news that Aubrey had been murdered in a rather sordid incident. This was heartbreaking. For my daughter Sonja too, who had become close friends with Aubrey’s lovely little Victoria.

  In due course, following Herta’s advice, I went to the wonderful Liepman agency in Zurich, who had previously been my subagent for Germany. Hughes Massie hobbled along and in due course disappeared from the map.

  One of the really good things to come out of the whole mess was a lifelong friendship with Herta Ryder, to whom I subsequently dedicated An Act of Terror.

  I’d first met Herta in her very small cluttered office at the Hughes Massie agency, where she was almost invisible among the books and paintings. She had, for paintings, the kind of compulsion a gambler has for betting, and her favourite artist was the British painter Bernard Dunstan. Most of my own collection of his work – oils and etchings and gouaches – came from her. She had the habit of first keeping a new acquisition in her already overcrowded office until she felt she could smuggle it home past her husband John, a typographer who had spent his most creative years with The Bodley Head. He, too, knew all about compulsion. When we talked about his wartime experiences – some of them quite hair-raising, like when he was dropped behind the enemy lines in Belgium as a spy – he had no hesitation recalling what to him had been his most exciting experience during the war: when, in a very old book in a library, he had come across a perfect specimen of the letter A in a font that had become almost extinct.

  There was a very specific reason for the close friendship that quickly developed between Herta and myself. She told me that in 1935, while still living in Germany, her fiancé had been in the SS. She was a Jew; when she fell pregnant her young officer forced her to have an abortion. It was very much a backstreet affair and it was botched to such an extent that she could never have children, which became the greatest void in her life. It was the end of their relationship; and soon afterwards she fled to Switzerland, and eventually from there to England, where she entered the world of publishing.

  When Herta discovered that I had been born in 1935, at the very time she’d lost her baby, I became, for her, the child she would never have. She began to give me paintings on every occasion we met: she had the touching habit of giving away precisely the ones she liked most. Once she and John took me along to a small village in Surrey, near Glyndebourne, where friends were housing the overflow from her own collection. I was invited to make a list of all the paintings I would like to inherit. There were priceless works among them. What I specifically remember, apart from the Dunstans, were a Vuillard and an Augustus John.

  These wishes were duly recorded in her will. But sadly, after Herta’s death her will was not executed and I felt too bad to mention it to John on the many occasions I visited him again. When I made discreet enquiries after his own death, nobody seemed to know what had become of the paintings. I have often wondered about the rest of the treasures they had amassed in their small flat in Richmond – the artworks, the music, the first editions of Ulysses, Hardy, Caroll, Wilde – and I can only hope that they found the cherishing homes they so richly deserved.

  What mattered to me, was not the books, or the music, or the paintings, as material objects, but the way in which Herta’s life was left incomplete by leaving her wishes unfulfilled at her death. So much remained unfulfilled for her. By the time she was brought down by the cancer that took her away, the one thing she was still looking forward to was the undertaking by the German government that her family would receive compensation for the property confiscated by the Nazis. Next to paintings and books, travel had been Herta’s main passion; but during her life there never was enough money to travel as widely as she would have liked. John had never been keen on travelling much, but Herta still had so many voyages lined up. When the money came through at last, it was too late. That feeling of ‘unfinished business’ left her depleted. And for those of us who had known and loved her, there was something terribly unfinished, and unfair, about it all. For me, the only consolation was that, after she had seen several of my books through to publication, even though someone else took the credit for doing it, at least with An Act of Terror I could express something of the closeness and the gratitude I had felt for her for so long.

  Even after the court case about that damned option clause was all over, the attitude towards such clauses in the publishing world did not change much, as far as I know; but I should think that people would act a tad more cautiously in future. And I know that several publishers simply dropped the iniquitous clause from their contracts. For myself, it ended on a positive note when Faber decided magnanimously to take charge of all my liabilities. And for several years, until I moved to the welcoming embr
ace of Secker & Warburg, Matthew Evans and Robert McCrum, and most especially their brilliant, shrewd, generous, loveable foreign-rights director as well as deputy chairman, the legendary Tony Pocock, happily took care of my publishing needs. It was the end of the single dark chapter in my writerly career abroad.

  WRITING THE DEEP BLUE

  I’VE MET ARIEL Dorfman several times, in places as far apart as cape town and Stockholm and Galway and Duke University, and our encounters have always been immensely stimulating. But there are two that will always stand out, commemorating as they do a life and a death. The first was a visit to Robben Island, with the parents of Amy Biehl, in a small group guided by Achmat Kathrada, who had been one of Mandela’s close friends in prison. Standing in Mandela’s small, sober cell with Ariel, was truly one of the most intense moments of my life. It was an encounter, not only with the spirit of Madiba, but with unfamiliar depths in ourselves. Some time after this, a visit to Chile provided a rich opportunity to plumb other deep places inside our friendship.

  This was a gathering of writers from three of the southernmost countries in the world – Chile, South Africa and Australia. The encounter was titled Writing the Deep South, although someone in our Santiago hotel accidentally announced it as Escribiendo el Azul Profundo (Writing the Deep Blue) instead of Escribiendo el Sur Profundo. It was arranged on Ariel’s initiative, and the main organiser was Jorge Heine, the Chilean ambassador in South Africa at the time. The idea was to arrange three annual meetings, in each of the three countries involved. But after Jorge returned to Chile at the end of his South African tour of duty, our local organisers made a hash of their arrangements for the second year and so the rest of the project was, regrettably, shelved. The Chilean delegation included Ariel, as well as Antonio Skármeta, author of the novel Burning Patience, on which was based the beautiful film, Il Postino. Among the Australians were Peter Carey, the Aboriginal writer Roberta Sykes and Helen Garner. The South Africans were Nadine Gordimer, Mongane Wally Serote, Zakes Mda and I. Along the way we were joined by a Mapuche poet, Leonel Lienlaf, who brought the poetry of his people and their ‘alternative geography’ into focus, including rivers that run from Above to bring their stories of the ancestors down to us. After looking at a variety of themes and issues, it was Wally who suggested what became the key theme of all our deliberations: Unfinished Business.

  Nadine was accompanied by an unknown young West Indian man, Ronald Suresh Roberts, whom she had chosen as her biographer. He turned out to be an obnoxious person who seemed to have appointed himself as an official delegate and who interrupted almost every time Nadine spoke, even in completely private conversations. She might start a story about something she remembered from, say, September 1958 when he would imperiously interrupt, ‘No, no, Nadine, that was in October 1959 …’ He soon became quite insufferable, and the delegates were unanimous in regarding him as an embarrassment to the whole travelling conference. It came as no surprise when, in 2004, Roberts blatantly broke the terms of their agreement and Nadine fired him. In retaliation, he turned the biography into a scandalous attempt to insult and humiliate her.

  I was incensed by the book and would never have read beyond the first few chapters had I not been asked to review it. The biography became one of the most unpleasant literary events of the year in South Africa. Since then, Roberts has turned his writerly attention to Thabo Mbeki, publishing an embarrassing hagiography to which the brilliant cartoonist Zapiro responded with a picture of Roberts ensconced so deeply in Mbeki’s backside that it seemed impossible to extract him without surgery. Obviously, Nadine’s standing is such that the malicious back-stabbing by Roberts caused no dent on her reputation, whereas Roberts has become a laughing stock.

  The conference started in Santiago, then moved to Valparaíso, and south via Concepción, all along the Andes until the cordillera broke down in a string of snow-topped, smoking volcanoes, to Valdívia. On the way to Valparaíso, we spent a morning at Isla Negra, where Neruda had lived for an important part of his life. The front of the building had been altered, disconcertingly, but I suppose inevitably, to accommodate the needs of tourism. But once we had made our way beyond restaurant and shop and public spaces, the house was undisturbed. It is a long and narrow edifice, every nook and cranny crammed to capacity with the bric-a-brac the poet compulsively collected throughout his life: bottles in weird shapes and many colours, woodcarvings, a variety of large painted figureheads from sunken ships, pictures and ornaments from Asia, Africa, South America, India, God knows where, covering every square centimetre of space – interrupted by windows overlooking the turbulent sea beyond a sandy beach with piles of bizarrely shaped black rocks. The bedroom is upstairs, relatively bare, with a wide panorama from the large bed across the whole bay.

  Outside is the boat where Neruda usually spent time drinking with his friends: there is a huge bell which he used to strike to let all and sundry know when he was in a mood for drinking. When he did not feel like having guests, he would hang out his pirate’s flag. His grave lies just beyond the flag, flapping gently in the breeze.

  Standing there in the high wind, I recite soundlessly in my mind two of my favourite lines from Neruda:

  I want

  to do with you what spring does with the cherry trees.

  And while we are still assembled around the boat, a busload of small children – eight- to ten-year-olds – arrive. Ariel starts talking to them – a brilliant lecture in geography, history and anthropology. He shows them newspapers with the photos of our group in it. And suddenly we are all stars, and have to sign our autographs. Not all of the kids have paper, so a number of them have their small hands signed. A moment I will never forget: standing on that high rise above the sea, signing and signing and signing small hands shaped like starfish.

  Back in Santiago, Ariel accompanied us to the cemetery. And that is where the second of my epiphanies with him takes place. We pass the rows of enormous, ostentatious baroque sarcophagi where members of notable families lie buried. Among them is also the monumental grave of Salvador Allende – perhaps too ostentatious for a man with his reputation, although one understands the wish to make it imposing. Then we follow a flight of stone stairs to the tomb which lies below the ground. And as we assemble in front of the grille, a small procession arrives: an elderly man, a retired railwayman from Valparaíso, we learn later, with his sister and her daughter. Without paying any attention to us, he grasps the bars in his hands and calls out at the tomb where Allende lies buried: ‘Compañero!’

  We all freeze to listen. The old man continues, in spite of his sister’s efforts to silence him – obviously conditioned by so many years of not daring to speak out in front of strangers, not even now, in the wake of Pinochet’s arrest. He continues: ‘It’s me, compañero. I have come to tell you that they’ve caught the bastard. At last he’s going to pay!’

  Once again his sister, terrified, tries to intervene, motioning anxiously towards us. But Ariel steps forward and places an arm around his shoulders. ‘You needn’t be scared, compañero, we are friends. We are with you.’

  The old man starts crying. He half turns towards us and starts telling the story of how he was tortured. And about a family member, a woman nine months pregnant, who was also tortured. In the process her labour pains began and she gave birth to a baby surrounded by her torturers. And then – it takes a while before he can utter the words – the baby, too, was tortured to death. It goes on and on. Before he has finished we are all in tears. It is an inside glimpse of a country still torn asunder. What we are witnessing is the suffering of a people who can only now begin to face their terrible past. It is profoundly reassuring to think that, whatever its glaring mistakes, and however much still remains unresolved, South Africa’s Truth Commission has at least tried to look its own past in the eyes.

  After we have said goodbye to the railwayman and his family, Ariel guides us to the monument for the disappeared, the desaparecidos: just a simple, long wall on which the thousan
ds of names of the victims have been written. On one side, against a railing, someone has left a sheet of paper and a few roses: it bears a simple inscription in large, clumsy capitals: I HAVE BEEN TRYING FOR 22 YEARS TO FIND A PLACE WHERE I CAN LEAVE A FLOWER FOR YOU.

  Has this not been the most devastating consequence of the Truth Commission too – the many mothers who still do not know where their dead lie buried? The often-repeated plea: Just show me his bones, that I can sleep again.

  That, and the passionate phrase that reverberates around the world wherever atrocities have happened: Nunca, nunca, nunca mas! Never, never, never again!

  A resolve among all of us on that trip: as writers we have nothing with which to counter the horrors of history, except our words. But surely that should never be underestimated. In a society under siege, as South Africa was for such a long time, while we have the word, our humanity remains confirmed. And even after the darkness has passed, we need the word to continue discovering or rediscovering the truths hidden in that obscurity.

  THE PINK SHOE

  AN HOUR OUT of the lovely city of Kraków, stand the blunt watchtowers in the barbed-wire enclosure where the cattle-trains stopped and the sign above the wide gate still says Arbeit Macht Frei. Oświęcim. Auschwitz. A space still beyond the grasp of the imagination. I had to battle everything inside me that drove me to revolt; but there was a morbid compulsion that forced me to go through with it.