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How Much Does Anyone Need to Know About Eugène Marais?’ the Guest and Die Wonderwerker

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How Much Does Anyone Need to Know About Eugène Marais?’ the Guest and Die Wonderwerker ‘How much does anyone need to know about Eugène Marais?’ The Guest and Die Wonderwerker Lesley Marx Abstract Comparing and contrasting two film versions of Eugène Marais’s life by means of close analysis, this article explores the relationship between film and history, where history includes both that of the film-makers and that of the referential world they seek to represent, in this case specifically history as it is embodied in the enigmatic figure of Eugène Marais – naturalist, short-story writer, poet, journalist and morphine addict – whose protean nature enables individual film-makers to appropriate those aspects of his life and persona that mesh most creatively with their own creative and ideological sensibilities. Thus the contexts out of which Ross Devenish and Katinka Heyns develop their respective projects are examined, taking note of the key roles of their collaborators, writers Athol Fugard and Chris Barnard. Central to the discussion are the choices and effects of casting (especially drawing on the work of Jean-Louis Comolli’s idea of the ‘body too much’), genre (the art film and domestic melodrama) and formal aesthetic (realism, formalism and heritage cinema). The shifting forms of representation of Marais speak to the multiplicities of his own identity, the shifting forms of his own biography. Brits is a town west of Pretoria and the Hartbeespoort Dam, blessed by fertile lands and rich platinum deposits. It also boasts a primary school attended a few decades ago by director Ross Devenish, who recalls his first teacher, Mrs Gibson, a Catholic who could not divorce her husband and whose relationship with Marais’s only child, Eugène Charles, was thus very discreetly conducted—her house was at the bottom of the koppie, his room at the top (Interview). An awareness of Marais senior was strengthened by the young Ross’s father talking about The Soul of the White Ant (Marais, 1970, first published in 1937 as Die Siel van die Mier) and adult conversations about the naturalist, short-story writer, poet, journalist and morphine addict who had shot himself on Gustav Preller’s farm at Pelindaba, east of the Dam, just three years before Ross was born. As a schoolboy, the future film director had also been fascinated by the photograph of Marais included in the prescribed anthology of Afrikaans poems: ‘I was haunted by the photo,’he remembers. ‘The eyes were so disturbing, I used to turn the page quickly.’ Leon Rousseau, author of the magisterial biography Die Groot Verlange (1974, translated by him as Dark Stream in 1982),1 notes how witnesses offered varied descriptions of those eyes: ‘… it seems that Marais’s eyes could change colour, from grey or light blue to violet’ (2012 [1982], p. 464). It might be argued that this undecidability is merely one token of the resistance of Marais to easy readings, be they verbal or filmic. Sandra Swart (2004a) describes the changing fortunes of Marais’s image through the twentieth century: from pioneer of the Afrikaans language early in the century to popular historian of Afrikaner heroism in the 1930s (and himself the object of such mythmaking after his death by champions of Afrikaner nationalism such as Gustav Preller), to ‘lonely rural genius’ (p. 861), championed by Robert Ardrey in the 1960s (a version of Marais she sees portrayed in The Guest, p. 863) to Afrikaner dissident, honoured by 1 Jack Cope and André Brink in the 1970s and 80s. During the 1990s she writes, ‘Marais was once again re-deployed as an icon of alternative chic, anthologized in a collection of “Green poetry”, as an early “ecological poet”’(p. 866). Swart’s key concern is to show how these varying interpretations of Marais are the product of their specific socio-political contexts and the particular interests of the authors of these images. In another article she debunks the image of Marais as miracle doctor, arguing that where C. Louis Leipoldt was indeed a qualified medical practitioner who ‘despised quacks, Marais was one’ (2004b, p. 253). Most recently, Stephen Gray has offered a detailed and iconoclastic account of the ways in which the Marais myth has been served by his editors and by his own skill as ‘a confidence-trickster’ (2013, p. 63). So the lens on Marais shifts.2 It is clear that The Guest and Die Wonderwerker, separated by 35 years, are also the products of both their times and the vision of their film-makers. In his acerbic review of The Guest, J.M. Coetzee prefigures the sceptical view of Marais and notes sardonically: In Eugène Marais, South Africa came its closest yet to producing a Genius. Think of Marais’ qualifications. He had deep-set piercing eyes. He loved many women. He lived in wild and dangerous places. He was addicted to an exotic drug. He wrote poems about death and thought morbid thoughts. He was mainly unhappy and finally slew himself. (1977, p. 4) Analysing the nature of Genius as product of European Romanticism, Coetzee remarks on ‘two contradictory attributes’: On the one hand he is the prophet, the man of godlike vision (hence the piercing eyes) who foresees the future.… On the other hand he is a child, a weakling, fleeing from a reality which more solid people easily sustain, into a world of illusory gratifications, obsessed with death rather than getting on with the business of living. (1977, p. 4) This scepticism does not inform the two films devoted to Marais, yet neither do they offer us an uncomplicated portrayal of ‘Genius’. While Die Wonderwerker betrays its more hagiographical intent in its title, the narrative and generic framing of the character displaces him from centre screen. In the more complex case of The Guest, however, conventional expectations of, even, sympathy for the protagonist are repeatedly unsettled. Many years after his boyhood in Brits, and having completed his first collaboration with playwright Athol Fugard, Boesman and Lena (1973), Devenish was looking for material for a second collaboration. He read The Soul of the White Ant and the idea of making a film about Marais was born, significantly helped on by Rousseau allowing him to read the manuscript of his biography of Marais. Devenish was struck by the chapter called ‘Die Hoek van die Kraal’ (the corner of the pen): ‘This is it’, he thought, ‘this spells it all out’. He adds, ‘It was an emblematic episode. It set the pattern for the rest of his life’. As the basis for a film, it also had the advantage of being ‘complete in itself, with a beginning, middle and end, a crisis and 2 the hope of recovery, showing both the dark and the light of Marais’s life’ (Interview). It might be argued, as Rousseau does, that the pattern had been set many years earlier and ‘consolidated’ with Marais’s sojourn in the Waterberg on the farm Rietfontein, the focus of the Barnard/Heyns production, Die Wonderwerker (2012). According to Rousseau: This pattern was as follows: Marais always lived with friends (sometimes with family) or with people he could befriend—usually a family with children—and almost always in a stoep room, outside room or rondavel. He very seldom had a permanent job, he seldom worked hard and sometimes not at all. He would devote a great deal of time to observing nature. To an increasing extent, he veered away from criticism of his morphine addiction, which restricted his social intercourse to those he had known for a long time, strangers who knew nothing about him, and especially children. Finally, he always had to find actors to play four crucial roles in his life: the supplier of morphine; his host; an influential patron; and a protégé—a young person or animal—to whom in turn he could give his love and care. (2012 [1982], p. 249) It is unsurprising that the two films centring on Marais should adapt sequences from his life that conform to the pattern described by Rousseau. Following Devenish’s comment, they accord so well with the conventional expectations of the well-made script: an inciting incident, conflict, turning points, crisis, climax and resolution; even, with some creative licence, Aristotelian unities of place and action, and a sufficiently contained time span to sustain tension and cohesion. While the episodes have much in common, and do endorse Rousseau’s view of a pattern in Marais’s life, they also represent different stages of that life: between 1908 and 1926 lie nearly two decades of achievement, abortion and, crucially, addiction. The choices made by the two sets of film-makers are initial indicators as to the different view they will take of Marais’s life and the different ways in which source material will be transmuted through translation, elision and invention. As Robert Rosenstone (2014), points out in History on Film/Film on History, the same life may yield entirely different biographies (or biopics): Biographer and film-maker both appropriate some of the trace details left by a life and weave them into a story which has a theme that infuses meaning into the days of their subject. The resulting work is ultimately based less on the raw data than on that data incorporated into a vision created by the literary (or filmic) skills of the biographer. That is why very different bios can be made about the life of the same individual, without any new data having been found. (‘Telling Lives’) Writing of the evolution of biography in the early 1900s, Hermione Lee makes the point even more strongly: ‘The biographer could be the equal, not the respectful or awe-struck disciple, of the subject.
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