Sunderland
Praise for Life Underwater by Ken Barris: A remarkable evocation of a place, an era and family. Carefully crafted, and characterised by incisive descriptions, it brings into focus a time and place that has not often been the subject of such memorable literary treatment. – Craig MacKenzie, Mail & Guardian This is a lyrical, at times poetic book, layered with images. Adolescence, family ties, vignettes of meaning, snatches of history, all interweave into complexity. An interesting book, as rippled, shaded and at times as stark as the sea itself. – Jenny de Klerck, The Star His full power as a writer is unchecked, leaving the reader emotionally affected long after the final page. – Sharon Dell, The Witness
Praise for Intricacy by Michael Cope: Intriguing, evocative and honest. – Lindsey Sanderson, itsallwrite.net A profound and moving book. – Diane Awerbuck, Sunday Times Michael Cope’s intelligence, sensitivity and mastery are apparent. – Beverley Roos Muller, Cape Argus
1
Sunderland.indd 1
2014/04/16 11:51 AM
Sunderland
Sunderland
By Michael Cope and Ken Barris
3
Sunderland.indd 3
2014/04/16 11:51 AM
Michael Cope and Ken Barris
First published by Jacana Media (Pty) Ltd in 2014 10 Orange Street Sunnyside Auckland Park 2092 South Africa +27 11 628 3200 www.jacana.co.za © Ken Barris and Michael Cope, 2014 All rights reserved. ISBN 978-1-4314-1079-8 Also available as an e-book: 978-1-4314-1080-4 d-PDF 978-1-4314-1081-1 ePUB 978-1-4314-1082-8 mobi file Cover design by publicide Set in Sabon 10.5/14pt Job no. 002185 See a complete list of Jacana titles at www.jacana.co.za
4
Sunderland
For Charles, and Art
5
Sunderland.indd 5
2014/04/16 11:51 AM
Sunderland
It’s always just 26 letters of the alphabet and a handful of punctuation, and that is so staggeringly elegant. – Alan Moore
7
Sunderland.indd 7
2014/04/16 11:51 AM
Sunderland
Arthur
9
Sunderland.indd 9
2014/04/16 11:51 AM
Sunderland
11 March 2013 Dear Taryn As I write this, I hear you in the kitchen, slicing through one victimised vegetable after another. Why then do I write you a letter? Why not simply walk into the kitchen and talk to you? I don’t have an easy answer. I don’t understand this letter myself. Fear is part of it, believe it or not. Sometimes I actually fear you. Your precision, your accuracy, and – pardon this emotional and uncontrolled expression – your dead eyes. Your sometimes dead eyes. Your eyes that deaden when I bore or annoy you, that shut me out. Another part of the problem is myself. I feel wooden the minute I need to talk to you, to open myself – would it be purple to say “open my heart to you”? Anyway, I don’t want to take the risk anymore, not face to face, not in the tragicomic theatre of our kitchen. For all of these reasons, I probably won’t ever send the letter. Think of it as the conversation I would love to have with you, if things were different. Think of it as the conversation that I still need to have with you, despite everything I’ve said. Here goes then, the letter itself. Today has been an important and difficult day for me, a double milestone. I received my 27th rejection slip, this time from Umuzi Books. Three times nine agents, publishers, their readers and assorted fuckwits have condemned Summer Sonata as unpublishable. Regardless of its originality, regardless of the fact that it was shortlisted for the 2004/5 European Union Literary Award, regardless of the fact that I weighed each word, each sentence, each paragraph before and after committing anything to paper. But whatever its virtues, and they are considerable, given the stellar potency of three times nine and the blistering power of twenty-seven, I am at last forced to recognise that Summer Sonata is dead in the water. This is an extremely painful thing to face. I don’t have to tell you how greatly so, you’ve had your own share of pain. Yet I am capable of facing bleak truths and of making hard decisions. My decision is to bury the novel and let it rot. I am almost tempted to burn the one printout I have left and delete all soft copy, but I shall not. Not because I want to preserve it, but because the gesture seems selfpitying, so disgustingly melodramatic. Now this is the other side of my confession to you. Another milestone occurred this Monday. I received a call from a woman I 11
Sunderland.indd 11
2014/04/16 11:51 AM
Michael Cope and Ken Barris
don’t know, one Lynda de Villiers. So who is Lynda de Villiers? It turns out that she is the daughter of Charles de Villiers. Now brace yourself, Taryn. She wanted to discuss the possibility of granting me access to her father’s laptop. I was bewildered at first as she explained why she had called. I had trouble focusing on her words. “Why me, of all people?” I asked eventually. “Your father was a major writer,” I said, “nearly as important as Coetzee or Gordimer. After all, there are other recognised De Villiers scholars around, more established by far!” Yet even as I questioned her, it dawned on me that this might be a result of the interview I did with Charles de Villiers last year. Which is exactly what Lynda confirmed. I cannot tell you what this means to me. I feel elevated. No gravity around here, at least while it lasts. I’m breathing nitrous oxide. She didn’t provide much detail – says she hates talking on the phone about personal things – but it seems that she wants more than research. Apparently he was working on a novel before he died. Perhaps she wants me to edit it or collate it, or something of the kind. Anyway, it turns out that De Villiers approved of the interview, and was kind enough to mention it to her. And by an odd coincidence, she also had read one of my short stories herself, which she liked. The bizarre thing is that she found the damn thing on his deathbed. She’s convinced he died reading it. So it appears that Charles de Villiers died reading a short story entitled “Five Minutes”, written by no less than Art Berger, published in New Contrast 151. “Hope it wasn’t my story that killed him,” I nearly blurted out, but held my tongue. Anyway, she calls it synchronicity, a threadbare term if ever there was one. It is a symptom of our relationship, our condition, that I don’t know how to end this letter. Much love? Yours sincerely? With best wishes? Warm regards? None of it feels right. I’ll just go ahead and plunge right in – Artfully yours Art *** 12
Sunderland.indd 12
2014/04/16 11:51 AM
Sunderland
15 March 2013 If I have amputated the part of myself that is a writer, I can at least keep a journal. Does that make me a journalist? Probably not, but I still need space to record personal observations, to keep my fingers alive over a keyboard. I am forced to admit that the need to write, this sharp obsession, is bred in the bone. Talk of obsession. There is a François Krige retrospective over at the Johans Borman Gallery in Buitengracht Street. I went to see it, partly because I like Krige’s work, and partly because it features a portrait of Charles de Villiers. I also had vague thoughts of buying the portrait, even though I know I can’t afford it. Thirty grand is out of my reach. This is probably a good thing. If I came home with the painting, Taryn would say something like, “You’re already in love with the man, do I have to stare at his face every day?” Krige completed the painting early in 1993, not long before he died. Not long after that, the scales tipped the other way for De Villiers, and he achieved recognition as a major writer. The painting is less delicately coloured than some of Krige’s works, perhaps in deference to his subject’s weatherbeaten and craggy aspect. Greying hair, fairly full and sensual lips, bushy eyebrows, the bagged eyes of a drinker. Krige captures that odd balance of cynicism and innocence in De Villiers’s expression. That balance, that paradox, was still there in his face when I interviewed him last year. Although the portrait predates my encounter with De Villiers by roughly 18 years, age and illness hadn’t entirely wiped out his youthfulness. Perhaps I’m oversimplifying. “Negative capability” might be more accurate, Keats’s term for the ability to live with uncertainty and irresolution. The ability to see into negative spaces, one might say. What I am trying to say with my thick tongue is that his openness to the world is visible: the unbreakable innocence of a man who has seen a great deal. Whatever Taryn thinks, I am not in love with him. Yes, I have devoted much of my professional life to the study of his novels. I won’t deny that I have a growing reputation as a De Villiers scholar. It is true that I am obsessed with his written self. But for the record, I am not in love with the man. For the record, what we have is a love– hate relationship. Sometimes I resent his importance, his weight and 13
Sunderland.indd 13
2014/04/16 11:51 AM
Michael Cope and Ken Barris
presence in my life. I state it openly. I did return home with a painting after all, one that was far less expensive. It was a miniature, a nude by an artist named Riordan. The first name isn’t on the signature, and I didn’t ask. The image is about four by six inches, oil on board. The figure is a lanky woman, her posture free and assertive, with the pubis given dark, scrubby prominence. The head is cut off, which I knew would annoy Taryn. I hung it up in the entrance hall before she came home, on a narrow flank of wall that faces the front door. I heard the door open, then shut, and then there was silence. I stopped typing to listen. It’s easy to tell when people move in our house because we have wooden floors and no mats in the passage. I heard nothing for some minutes. I’m not sure how long, exactly, but it was a fairly long time to contemplate a very small painting. Then Taryn came into my study and asked, “What are you trying to tell me?” “Tell you?” I responded blankly. “I’m not trying to tell you anything. I do say hello, Taryn. But you don’t have to greet me back, I’m used to that.” There is a kind of irregular perfection in her features which didn’t change at all as she stared at me, waiting for me to stop being obtuse. I blinked first. “I merely hung a picture in the entrance hall. It’s a good little painting. Does it have to be a message as well?” “You were attracted by her sexual openness. Even more by the grotesque touch of the thing.” “Well, so I was, so I am. But why does it have to be a message, anyway? I think it’s a skilfully executed figure, and well worth displaying in our home.” “In the entrance hall?” “Why not? Where should it hang? Is there a correct place to hang a nude?” She went into her own study and shut the door. I made this note in my journal. ***
14
Sunderland.indd 14
2014/04/16 11:51 AM
Sunderland
17 March 2013 I’ve scanned in this obituary by the poet Michael Cope, which appeared in New Contrast 165. A useful reference, one that is not at all diminished by the personal approach he has taken. Nor is it diminished by Vernon Freshwater’s low opinion of New Contrast. Obituary: Charles de Villiers South African literature has suffered a terrible loss with the untimely passing of Charles de Villiers on 28 December last year, after a struggle against a brain tumour that proved inoperable. I am not the only one who is devastated. Our literary scene is almost unimaginable without him, and Charles’s many friends will miss his warm, wry and intelligent insight, his humour and above all his willingness to listen, an empathetic quality that not only made people love him, but was, I suspect, a source of his narrative genius. Charles was the son of Adriaan and Mary de Villiers. His father was a vet, a visionary who read the poems and prose of Eugène Marais aloud to his family after dinner. His mother was a minor South African poet during the 1930s, publishing in various magazines under her maiden name, Mary Tatham. He was born on his father’s farm Weltevrede near Malmesbury (delivered by his dad) on 1 September 1939, the day the Germans invaded Poland – hence the title of his 1979 novel Warchild. This makes him, at least chronologically, a part of the Sestiger generation, though he was always ambivalent about being identified as a Sestiger. He was an almost exact contemporary of Breyten Breytenbach (the same month), Oswald Mtshali (January 1940) and J M Coetzee (February 1940). He was home-schooled on the farm, along with his sisters Michelle and Anna, and his first encounter with formal education was at Paarl Boys’ High (English medium). He entered high school as a boarder in 1952, just as the Nationalists were consolidating their power. Although he was an athletic boy and played first team rugby, being English in a predominantly Afrikaans school, a SAP in a Nat environment, turned him into a loner and drove him further left and inward – towards the life of the mind. He matriculated in 1957 with distinctions but declined the scholarships he was offered. As he once told me, he had come to regard education as a prison from which he
15
Sunderland.indd 15
2014/04/16 11:51 AM
Michael Cope and Ken Barris was eager to escape. Charles followed a road that young intellectuals had followed throughout the 20th century – to Paris, working his way over as a ship’s cook. He got there after Jan Rabie and Marjorie Wallace had left, but before Breyten Breytenbach arrived. During this time he wrote his first stories, some of which were published in 1959–60 in Atlantic Monthly, and one in the New Yorker. He spent three years in Paris, where he was influenced by structuralism in particular and French culture in general. He returned from Paris after Sharpeville. As he put it in a recent interview, “I thought if the country was in shit, I’d better go home and help. But I was a sort of avant-garde fop. I was, what, 21? I decided that I could at least bring some of Paris’s freedom home. I was already writing – poems and stuff in imitation of the people around me – but I decided to become a South African writer. I think I was drunk at the time.” He studied English at the University of Cape Town, graduating in 1965 with an MA in English Literature. His short stories from this period appear in Contrast, and he published a number of poems in little magazines. It was at this time that I first met him, when I was a boy of nine or ten. He was an infrequent visitor to our house in Clifton, and my first memories of him are of a shy, well-built blond man with whom Ingrid Jonker flirted. He seemed very old and serious, though he must have been in his early twenties. We became friends in 1967, when he arrived at the bungalow one wintry afternoon with a brand new copy of Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. My father was down on the beach. We set the hi-fi on repeat. It was around this time that Charles met the dancer Irene Cook, and they married in 1969. Together they established the Paardeberg Press, publishing works that struggled to find acceptance elsewhere. Paardeberg lasted until 1981. Charles and Irene had two children, Lynda (1973) and Justin (1977). They bought a house in Vredehoek, and never left it. He published his first novel, The Troublesome Man, early in 1970. Set on the Cape’s northern frontier in the early 1800s, it chronicled the life and untimely death of the bandit Boontjie Wessels. The book was well received, and in my opinion somewhat overdue. After that he produced a series of novels, each better than the previous one, until
16
Sunderland.indd 16
2014/04/16 11:51 AM
Sunderland 1983, when there was a long eleven-year hiatus as Charles poured his energy into ecological and conservation issues, using his rhetorical skills to try to introduce a green tinge to liberation discourse. And then in 1994 he published his most successful book, Flag in the Sky, which became emblematic for so many South Africans of the time leading up to liberation. This success revitalised interest in his other books, nearly all of which are still in print. After Charles’s wife Irene died from an unexpected complication during a routine operation in 1998, he lived alone in the family house, editing and consolidating his work. Collected volumes of poems, stories and essays appeared between 2000 and 2003. He did not publish any new work after Irene’s death, though my hope is that he was hiding some masterpiece under the mattress, still to be revealed. When Mike King emailed me after Charles had died, he asked me to write something for New Contrast which would include a brief biography and say something about his work. But a critical industry, albeit a minor one in the scheme of things, has already grown around De Villiers’s work, with all the latest literary-critical apparatus, and I am loath to enter that arena. Rather I will point to moments in Charles’s works that have particularly affected me. I’ll work through the books in chronological order: in The Troublesome Man, the death of Boontjie. The simple clarity of the prose, the sun picking out each stone in the dry Bushmanland pan, the moment when the unnamed child tries to shield him from the bullets and is flung aside, stayed with me for days, and are with me still; in The Lift Cage, the central image: “As the plane descended, I had the sensation that I had left the world of light, as though I were in a mine-lift cage, going inexorably downward into the dark of apartheid.” Vice-Versa is the one I have never read. It was banned at the time, and although it was reissued recently, I still haven’t got around to it. The scene in The Vanwykspoort Chronicle where Hettie substitutes her husband’s baby by the slave woman for her daughter’s stillborn infant, and the multiple complicities, all told from the point of view of the dispossessed slave; of Warchild, the fact that he wrote a Bildungsroman that wasn’t Catcher in the Rye or anything American, but which still worked and spoke to us; Umlungu and Perversity for the way that each is a mirror of the other, in a huge number of ways, so that although each book
17
Sunderland.indd 17
2014/04/16 11:51 AM
Michael Cope and Ken Barris can stand alone, reading them together creates, as it were, a third novel. Flag in the Sky is everybody’s favourite, so I’ll not impose my choice; finally, the deconstruction of evil in the lyrical central passage of Man with Gun: A portrait, Charles’s novella about David Pratt. I’ll end this with a short poem from his only book of verse, String of the World: On making the Golem Form a lump of clay and whisper “maybe” into its ear. Breathe your life into it (maybe) in the dark of the year. In the dark night by candle-light breathing clay takes life – Dissolve it away in a basin and say nothing to your wife. Charles de Villiers is survived by his children, Lynda and Justin, as well as his sisters Anna and Michelle. Books by De Villiers: The Troublesome Man (1970) The Lift Cage (1973) Vice-Versa (1975) The Vanwykspoort Chronicle (1977) Warchild (1979) Umlungu (1981) Perversity (1983) Flag in the Sky (1994) Man with Gun: A portrait (1998) String of the World: Selected Poems (2000) Selected Essays (2003) Selected Short Stories (2003) Michael Cope 2013
*** 19 March 2013 I met with the De Villiers heirs this morning, Justin and Lynda, and their lawyer. This project is important to me. I feel compelled to record its moments, its nuances. If I can’t be a writer, as I’ve said before, let me be a faithful hack, servant of the moment. 18
Sunderland.indd 18
2014/04/16 11:51 AM
Sunderland
I had been to Charles de Villiers’s home before, when I interviewed him. It is an unpretentious house in Belvedere Avenue, overlooking the Molteno Reservoir. By the way, Cope’s obituary gets this detail wrong – the house is in Oranjezicht, not Vredehoek. The place is small and neglected, crammed between two much larger houses, and easy to overlook. The plot reflects the topography, and the steps leading up to the front door are steep. As I climbed them, I recalled our single encounter – I stopped then, caught by an uncanny feeling that De Villiers himself would open the front door. I’m not expressing this well: it really felt as if an entrance into the past had briefly opened, and I was standing in past and present simultaneously. Moments like this fortunately don’t last long. They tend to collapse under their own weight. I should mention that there is a sly garden gnome, half buried in the scraggly slope into which the steps are cut, sporting the features of a young Breyten Breytenbach. I hadn’t noticed it before. And a mossy ceramic owl, a horned owl, which resembles no one in particular. I was let in by Lynda de Villiers. Her father was not a handsome man, and I expected her to be plain. I was quite wrong. I don’t mean that she is beautiful, exactly, but something about her is striking. It took me a long time to understand it – in fact, throughout our meeting I was unable to stop myself mulling over why I found her so pleasing. For the record, she has very dark eyes, almost black, and contrasting blonde hair. I don’t know if this occurs naturally, or if it comes out of a bottle. Her eyebrows and the down on her forearms are also golden, so I suppose her hair colour must be natural. There is something absorbent about the blackness of her eyes, as if she takes one seriously, and listens intently. She takes one in, so to speak, and I find that greatly appealing. She wore red lips, red fingernails and a black dress. I think one could describe her as sympathetic, in the Italian sense. She shook my hand in a firm, professional way – I learnt from her card that she runs an estate agency in Fish Hoek – and led me to the same study in which I had interviewed her father. One obvious difference was that the room was much neater – the books appeared to be better ordered and less dusty, the desk had very little on it. The most glaring absence was his laptop. After my experience at the front door, I half expected to feel his brooding presence, but didn’t. 19
Sunderland.indd 19
2014/04/16 11:51 AM
Michael Cope and Ken Barris
Perhaps it had been erased by the ordering of his books and objects. Perhaps ghosts are easily frightened away. Two others were present. Her brother Justin seems to be a likeable fellow, with bluish, rather weak eyes, and a damp handshake. He looks bemused but not unhappy, as if he enjoys the world but doesn’t have a clue about how it works. He told me he was in information technology, which could mean a great many things, or nothing. He doesn’t seem to be a very capable person – perhaps he is technically adept, but lacks social grace, to say the least – and it was obvious in the meeting that he plays second fiddle. He gave the impression that he was anxious for the business to be concluded as soon as possible, that he wanted to be elsewhere. Their lawyer had a more formidable presence. Cynthia Mollenhauer is a severe woman with tightly controlled hair and glasses that dominate. She has a thin face, and clear skin and eyes. She looks like a vegetarian who does t’ai chi and runs every morning before sunrise. Her diction is exact, no doubt her thinking too. Her sharp features kept reminding me of a hatchet; I suspect that in a legal case she would do quite a hatchet job on the opposition – a surgical hatchet job, if that makes any sense. I was offered tea, which I accepted. I kept wondering where the laptop was, and slopped tea into the saucer. I was a bit annoyed with myself. When the introductions were over, and everyone had tea, I grew impatient with the small talk, and led off with what I thought I was doing there. I found myself mostly addressing Lynda, with the odd glance towards the lawyer. She responded with a gaze that I can only describe as opaque. “If I understand the situation correctly, you would like me to collate and order your father’s documents – for archival purposes, I presume. You do know, of course, that this collection will have considerable value. Financial value, I mean, not only its cultural and intellectual worth. And in return, what I get out of it is access. Which of course is hugely valuable to me as a researcher.” “No, it’s not quite that simple,” replied Lynda, while Cynthia Mollenhauer shook her head primly. “Of course there is no problem with what you’ve suggested, and we’re quite happy for you to do as much research as you like. But we want you to do something more important than that.” Then she smiled and added, “I don’t mean to 20
Sunderland.indd 20
2014/04/16 11:51 AM
Sunderland
say your research isn’t important.” The warmth of her smile undermined me. Hope I’m not exaggerat ing if I say that it briefly stole my self-possession. I understood why only later: her manner is so unlike Taryn’s. “What we need you for – what we would like to ask you to think about – is rather different. You probably don’t know that my father was working on a novel before he died.” “I didn’t know that,” I replied. “He said absolutely nothing about it during my interview with him last year. Oddly enough, I asked him that question. He just shrugged, which I took to be a negative.” “His last book-length publications were in 2003,” announced Cynthia. “Yes, I know. But what do you want me to do with the material?” “It’s the book,” replied Lynda. “We think he had got quite far with it. He’d been working on it for some years, longer than he spent on most of his novels. We want you to go through his documents and see if you can make sense of it. Reconstruct it.” It took me a long time to reply. They waited patiently, expectantly. “Well, I’m honoured,” I replied eventually. “I feel very surprised, extremely surprised, but still honoured. This is a rare opportunity indeed. But surely it can’t be that difficult? Normally when one writes there would be a single file containing the work as it emerges, alternatively a synopsis, or some kind of obvious naming protocol that makes the chapter sequence clear.” “The brain cancer,” interjected Justin. “Everything’s in a mess.” “I went through his files and folders,” said Lynda. “But what Justin said is true. There are folders inside folders that repeat names of other folders elsewhere. There are documents in different folders with similar file names, sometimes even the same file names. He must have been saving things chaotically. There are more recent files that have less in them than older versions, and so on. It will be very difficult.” “This sounds daunting,” I replied. “I begin to understand . . .” I trailed off then, struck by the implications: what a monumental challenge it would be, and what a minefield of issues. “We use the word ‘reconstruct’ advisedly,” said the lawyer. “I take it you realise that . . . that what I finally produce will inevitably be somewhat different from what your father intended? 21
Sunderland.indd 21
2014/04/16 11:51 AM