Such As What? Find It. One Thing. Getting Married

“ Such as what? Find it. One thing. Getting married. (She crumples up her parents’ marriage certificate in her hand and throws it away.) Being born? Being dead? They’re mistakes.” The very passion of the dismissal shows she cares .... A moment later she refuses Johnnie’s challenge to kill herself. Her rare moments of fear in the play come when she faces the force with which things matter to her—such as her hesitation over searching the boxes when the first one reveals a dress redolent with her long dead and loved mother’s smell. (What Johnnie is afraid of is that things should come to matter.) The power that makes the character of Hester a great literary conception comes from the tension between the opposite poles of her caring. On the one side she hates. Her hatred seems all consuming. She hates her memories, she hates her father, she hates her present life, she hates the pious woman she met on the train, she hates the respectable world. “ Happy families is fat men crawling onto frightened women. And when you’ve had enough he doesn’t stop ‘ lady ’.” She has aborted to rid herself of an unwanted baby. She can say: “ The whole damned thing is a mistake. The sooner they blow it up with their atom bombs the better.” And yet she searches. And her search, after all, is for “ compensation ” in the broadest sense, not merely a chance for a few months of better life, but for the point of life, the reality of love, her own identity, perhaps even—though she hates the religious label—for God. Part of why she fails to find is because she fails until too late to make a sufficient identification between the goal of her search and her sense of the mother whom one side of her despises for her subjugation and early defeat. The mother after all embodied the reality of love. Only after a flare of hate in which she declares “ There is no God! There never was! ” and unwittingly flings her mother’s dress to the floor with the other rubbish and loses its smell, does Hester make the identification, in terms that are also the clearest and intensest expression of the positive side of her caring: “ It’s gone. Too late again. Just a rag. An empty rag. That’s how it happened. She got lost among the rubbish. I forgot she was here—in here, alive, to touch, to talk to, to love. I wanted to. The hating was hard. Hate! Hate! So much to hate I forgot she was here .... She was clean. I stink Mommie. I’m dirty and I stink.” Hester’s failure to find, or her loss after finding, is terrible. Terrible. Partly because—since she strips the labels off experience as intensely as Johnnie applies them—her search does not start from any mere idea but comes out of a pure and absolute hunger. And partly it is terrible, intolerable as I have suggested, 75 because of her aliveness to us, her intimate involving presence as a literary creation. Like Johnnie she is magnificently incarnated: though her body stinks she is revolted by Johhnie’s apathetic squalour; her memories include “ windy days with nothing to do,” “ the way the grass went grey around the laundry drain,” “ that special ironing smell ” ; she is placed for us in a world of impersonal hired rooms and unfriendly hotel lounges; the contents of her suitcase include a tin of condensed milk. Fugard is a poet of the familiar. Morry and Zach, for all their difference, were bound to gether by a blood knot: they were complementary to each other. Johnnie and Hester are absolute opposites, contradictions of each other. They can only be brought into conjunction for the briefest interval—hello and goodbye. This schematic contrast between them is the strongest evidence that the story of this play is not meant merely as a story but as a parable with several possible applications of meaning. I suggest that the meaning will go beyond the symbolic schemes that can be neatly articulated, but let me glance at one or two of those schemes. For example, the Afrikaner volk, much of whose history and culture is alluded to. Johnnie the conservative element, Hester the rebellious element, their father the Afrikaner past. The view, then, seems desperately pessimistic, since neither side has a healthy victory: the real triumph belongs to the dead and suf focating past. The same or parallel divisions appear in other peoples, smaller groups, individual minds. And one can apply the symbo lism on the philosophical level as well: if the father is that God who has died for modern man, what reverberations there are in the way Johnnie uses his supposed presence in the next room to subdue and silence Hester! The interest of such applications is obvious and strong. But meaning on this level implies intention, a message, an exhortation. And if, in the case of each interpretation, we are caught between Hester’s defeat and Johnnie’s surrender, the exhortation becomes a call to despair, the message threatens to turn out a meaningless “ What the hell! ” This would be a not unfashionable upshot. It is what the Beat writers have to say. It seems to be the burden of that paradoxical genius who is one of Fugard’s particular heroes and influences, Samuel Beckett. But I would regard Hello and Goodbye as chiefly a failure if this were the result. In faet, the meaningless pessimism is pre cluded by the qualities that chiefly account for the play’s im mediate (theatre-live) impaet—the aliveness of the writing, and the autonomous aliveness of Hester. Though frustrated over the compensation, Hester has clearly grown in the course of this search, at least in self-knowledge, self-awareness. Halfway through she admits she is looking for more than she thought she had come for—and her last words are: “ I’m too far away from my life. I want to get back to it, in it, be it, be myself again the way I was when 1 walked in. It will come I suppose. But at this moment—there she is waiting, here she is going and somebody’s watching all of it. But it isn’t God. It’s me.” The point is, surely, that she will always now, in this God-like way, be different. She is defeated, but she remains alive—and life has always the power to change both itself and the universe. Balkema’s mean edition is not worthy of this play’s importance.

THE BEGINNERS, by Dan Jacobson. Published by Weiclenfeld and Nicolson, London. I don’t understand this book. Not that there is anything ob scure in what it recounts or in the style—on the contrary, every thing seems as ordinary and straightfoward as breakfast—but 1 can’t find what holds it all together. What scheme or theme or feeling makes just this lot of material, presented in just this way and this order with these comments, necessary, alive, a single working whole? One wouldn’t ask such a question if there were a story making its own visible progress through all the parts of this very long narrative and reaching its end by the end. But this seems to be an anti-story novel. An enormous number of things happen during its course, and there are many small stories embedded, either complete or in fragments or in bare outline in its fabric: Life wants to tell stories, and this book presents a hefty slice of life. But it is as though Dan Jacobson had set out to frustrate life’s story-making proclivity: again and again he begins a tale and then drops it out of sight, or else traces a remote chain of accidents consequent on an event that has no story-link with them. But perhaps I am wrong, and life is like that—against the telling of clear, neat stories—and Jacobson is being more than commonly faithful to life. All the same, as far as a novel is concerned all this gives us is a negative quantity, absence of a story, with the possible advantage that this could force us to look deeper into the material for its unifying principle. What could this principle be? The title and the epigraph (“ It is not thy duty to complete the task; but neither art thou free to desist from it ”) should serve as clues. And indeed, the book has many references to beginners and beginnings. It opens with an episode (a good story this) involving Jewish immigrants to South Africa early this century, in which an errand begun is not completed. Later we have several cases of men beginning love affairs and abandoning them. An African learning to read at a night school refers to his class as “ the beginners.” A man embarks on a political career and drops it for the sake of the woman he desires. Another begins as a successful author and ends as a cynical politician. A stowaway from Cape Town is discovered and trans-shipped in mid-ocean to be returned to his port of embarkation. Someone starts a business and dies before he can reap the benefits. We are shown initiation ceremonies at a university; Jewish youths preparing for emigration on a Trans vaal training farm; Zionist pioneers on a new kibbutz in the newly established state of Israel; newcomers to London groping, losing the selves they brought, attempting fresh beginnings, in that bewildering world. And so on.

Joel Glickman, the character of whom we see most in the book, repeatedly makes a new beginning for himself, first in a world newly at peace, as an ex-service student at Wits, later as a kibbutznik in Israel, later as a lecturer in London, finally as the father of a young family, with many other starts between. Per haps he, and indeed his brother and sister, who also figure prominently, are to be seen as condemned to be always beginning, and learning how to live with it.

“ Are to be seen.” The trouble is they are rather hard to see. Joel himself, especially, is so colourless, so without a continuing pattern of aspirations and concerns that it is almost impossible for the imagination, and thus the heart, to take hold of him. Why should we care where this faceless name is reported to be drifting to next?

Perhaps this quality of Joel’s, that is to say his lack of qualities, is necessary to Jacobson’s design in the book. (It becomes possible, after all, to guess at a design—rather than just a motif, which the idea of ” beginning ” has looked like so far.) Early on, one of the characters, a pioneer psychoanalyst, pro nounces on our century; “ We know that that old self no longer exists. It’s dead .... We’re simply the first . . . to recognise what has happened. And the first to say that if it’s dead then you must throw it away . . . .” He has previously described “ that old self ” as the ” self or soul ” which “ everybody thought he’d been given . . . which he could learn to know and could struggle to improve.” Born into an ever more rapidly ehanging world in which life is increasingly dominated by “ process of process,” Joel is burdened with the death of selfhood. This is why, from the novel’s point of view, he is an anti-character, and no doubt it is also why he has to move through an anti-story. The lack of continuity, in persons and events, is exactly what is being illustrated.

The trouble is, it doesn’t make for interest, urgency, involve ment. Also, it offers the author a license to make his structure loose and introduce any irrelevancy (since who is to determine what is irrelevant to this theme, or when enough has been given to demonstrate it) which it is almost impossible not to abuse, artistically speaking. He has used this license to introduce an enormous amount of matter describing our era and the way we, especially South African Jews, live. If his purpose was to bolster the interest he has mainly succeeded, for he is a conscientious, sometimes sensitive, observer and an acute commentator. But the chief value of the book then is as social history (or would “ geography ” be the apter term?), not as fiction.

However much the theme of “ beginners ” philosophically justifies the inconsequentiality of events in this book, that inconsequentiality is a defect for a novel. The momentum of one’s involvement is checked again and again. If there are related themes that justify and unify all the given material, one doesn’t develop sufficient interest in the book as a whole to be tempted to search out these other themes. Apart from the anti-story structure, there is the pallour of Jacobson’s world—or is it his style that is pallid, or the detachment with which he presents so many of these events? He gives us a familiar world, all right, but what it seems to be illustrating is the futility of ordinariness and the ordinariness of futility. Surely everyone’s experience of reality frequently becomes more intense, more fantastic, more tragic and more marvellous than what he shows. On reflection, he does recount a fair share of fantastic events—most notably those in the story of a Jew who managed to survive the Nazis: the tame elTect comes from the manner of presentation.

Jacobson appears to me to have miscalculated at some point. Perhaps his error lies in his choice of a realistic picture of the world as a means of conveying his comment upon the real world today. The literalism defeats the life of the novel—because life has to be shown refusing to complete its stories. Perhaps some sort of allegory, or a surrealistic approach, might have set the novelist free to remain a novelist, a creator of that complete ness that we call a story, and yet to make his point about the uncompleteness of things. Or perhaps the death of “ that old self,” if one believes in it, also carries with it the death of such personal forms of art as the novel.

TALES OF AMADOU KOUMBA, by Birago Diop, translated by Dorothy S. Blair—London, Oxford University Press. According to Dorothy Blair’s Foreword, a griot in West African society is a sort of custodian of the artistic heritage- something like a one-man museum, library and conservatoire. Among other things he is the official communal story teller. Birago Diop claims no more than to have set down and translated into French the tales of Amadou Koumba, the griot of his native district, Dakar. But it is plain that he has done rather more than merely record the stories he nostalgically remembered when he was far from home acquiring his scientific education. The style of this book is not that of the fireside raconteur, however pro fessional and official, but of the writer of books. This is true not only when Diop is speaking in his own voice, as in this description of the French climate: “ Winter is an unskilled weaver, who never manages to comb or card his cotton; he spins and weaves nothing but soft drizzle. The sky is grey and cold, the sun is pale and shivers; and so I huddle near the stove to warm my numbed limbs.” It also holds when Amadou Koumba is supposed to be speaking: “ Many a woman weeps and laughs, shouts and sings in the villages, driven out of her mind because she has poured boiling water from a cauldron on to the ground and scalded the spirits who were passing by or who were resting in the courtyard of her dwelling.” Diop has edited, retold the stories in his own more literary manner. But in doing so he has apparently done only so much as was necessary to make the material readable rather than listen- able. The material itself has the look of genuine stuff from the fringe of folklore which must have been the colonial griot's field. Thus, through the double window of its twofold translation (in which, to judge by the liveliness of this prose. Diop’s French image comes unblurred through the clear glass of Dorothy Blair’s English), this book affords us an unusual glimpse into the culture of Africa. I use the word “ culture ” advisedly. The forms and images, customs and beliefs, attitudes and values that come to light have the variety, sophistication and soundness of civilised products. For values, look for example at the humane wisdom of “ Mother Crocodile ”—a little masterpiece of sidling narrative that overwhelms one with a flank attack in the last sentence. The young crocodiles are impatient with the stories about the doings of men with which their mother insists on regaling them. They wish instead to hear about crocodilian affairs, and can see no sense in heeding their mother’s warning to remove themselves from their home river when a war breaks out between the Moors to the north of them and the Wolofs to the south. And indeed, the course of the fighting, which is described at length in a characteristic story-within-the-story, seems to justify their aloof ness. But a final, unforeseeable twist of events brings them fatally into the heart of the human affairs they scorned. My brother’s keeper . . . ? For whom the bell tolls . . . ? Yes, obviously. But perhaps in addition the griot was making the point of his artistic right to seem to be irrelevant in what he tells. And that is an advanced doctrine of cultural life which, one way and another, we can afford to have more widely spread in this southern bastion. My impression is that a fuller knowledge of this African heritage would prove any special concern with the values of Western Civilization alone to be nothing but crude chauvinism. From what this volume shows of the moral and aesthetic world of Amadou Koumba, my spirit, for one, would be pretty much at home there. Turning one’s attention from meaning to matter and form in these stories, one again finds familiarity rather than strangeness giving them their particular flavour. Does one expect “ tales from West Africa ” to run in the alien vein of Amos Totuola’s dream like surreal fantasy? These pages will disabuse one of that narrowness. The taste of Koumba’s fantasy reminds one re- repeatedly not only of Aesop, Uncle Remus and the Bushman legendry about the Mantis and his friends (which are either at root or all in all African), but also of the Arabian Nights, Grimm, Kipling’s Just-So stories and the Yiddish master Sholem Aleichem. Occasionally one even recognises features of a familiar plot, like that of Scheherezade’s “ The Fisherman and the Geni ” which is recalled here by “ The Reward ” in which the ungrateful Geni and his bottle are replaced by an ungrateful crocodile wrapped in a mat. But if several of these stories are not new to us, and if one or two others reach weak or downright silly conclusions (“ The Flying Fox ” is not excused by the explanation in the Foreword), there are others that are of a perfect freshness, and some with a poetic richness of reverberation—most notably the mystical fable of quest called “ The Inheritance.” In any case, it is the manner of the telling that chiefly accounts for this book’s individuality and charm. On any page one may discover sentences such as: “ When a man says to his character, ‘ Stay here and wait for me,’ scarcely has he turned his back than his character is close on his heels.” Here is an engaging narrative technique combined with a fine mature informality of procedure full of piquant asides and enriching digressions; and as well as wit, mystery, comedy and wisdom, in several passages effects of high poetry. BIOGRAPHICAL NOTES

1. Francis BEBEY, short-story writer and poet, was born in 1929 at Douala in the Cameroons. Has worked with Radio Ghana and broadcast on the Africa Service of the French Radio. Now works at UNESCO in Paris. 2. Dorothy BLAIR is Senior Lecturer in French at the Uni versity of the Witwatersrand. For some years she has made a study of Franco-african literature, has published articles in literary periodicals and translations in revues and antholo gies. Her translation of the Tales o f Amadou Koumba by Birago Diop appeared this year with Oxford University Press. 3. Driss CHAIBI was born in Morocco in 1929. He attended the French Lycee in Casablanca, pursued a course of classical Arabic studies at the Theological University of Karawiyine and finally went to Paris to study Chemistry. After five years working as a chemist, he launched into literature in 1953. He has published five novels and a book of short stories. In addition he regularly publishes articles in literary magazines in France and elsewhere and is the literary critic for the Morrocan revue “ Confluent.” He serves as producer for the French Radio and Television Service. 4. Bernard DADIE. Born in 1916 in the ivory Coast. He was educated at Dakar, Senegal. After 1960 he joined the Ivory Coast Information Service. He has published two volumes of poems, and four books of prose, short stories or novels. 5. Birago DIOP was born in Dakar, Senegal, in 1906. A brilliant pupil of the Lycee Faidherbe in Saint-Louis, he was awarded a scholarship to study Veterinary Science at the University of Toulouse. He returned to Africa to serve as Chief Veterinary Officer in what was then French West Africa. He published his first volume of folk-tales in 1947, two further collections in 1958 and 1963, and one book of poetry. Since 1960 M. Diop has held the position of Ambassador Extraordinary and Penipotentiary in Tunis, for the independent Republic of Senegal. 6. Irmelin LEBEER is a journalist of German origin, married to a Belgian and living in Paris. She specialises in the cultural and artistic productions of contemporary Africa. She contributes regularly to different revues interested in African affairs, and in particular to Afrique. 7. Edouard MAROUN works as a clerk in an agricultural office in Diourbel in Senegal. 8. Leopold Sedar SENGHOR. Born in 1906, in the little fishing village of Joal on the Senegal coast. After a University education in Paris he became for a time a teacher of French in a Parisian high school. At the outbreak of war in 1939 he joined the French forces and spent most of the war as a prisoner in Germany. In 1946 he was elected to the National Assembly and in 1960 became the first President of the Republic of Senegal. He has published five volumes of poetry and some philosophical and political works. 9. Felix TCHICAYA U TAM’SI was born in 1931 at Mpili, Congo Republic (Brazzaville). He went to Paris in 1946 with his father who was a depute (Member of the National Assembly) for the Moyen Congo, as the Congo Republic was then known. He has remained in Paris ever since. At present he works for UNESCO. He has published four volumes of poetry, the first one appearing in 1955. 10. Joseph ZOBEL was born in 1915 in Martinique, in the West Indies. He has written several novels and novellas, which have been well-received. At present he works for the Senegalese Broadcasting Service at Dakar.

Collection Number: A2696 Collection Name: Nat Nakasa Papers, 1962-2014

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