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Herman Charles Bosman: the Biographer’S Enigma

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Herman Charles Bosman: the Biographer’S Enigma HERMAN CHARLES BOSMAN: THE BIOGRAPHER’S ENIGMA by STEPHANIE LILIAN CARLSSON 24286185 A dissertation submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree MASTER OF ARTS in ENGLISH STUDIES In the Department of English in the FACULTY OF HUMANITIES UNIVERSITY OF PRETORIA SUPERVISOR: PROF. DAVID MEDALIE MAY 2014 © University of Pretoria I herewith declare that this dissertation HERMAN CHARLES BOSMAN: THE BIOGRAPHER’S ENIGMA is my own original work. Where all secondary material is used, this has been carefully acknowledged and referenced in accordance with university requirements. I understand what plagiarism is and am aware of university policy and implications in this regard. ………………………..… ……………………….. S.L. Carlsson Date i © University of Pretoria Acknowledgements I would like to thank my family for their constant support and encouragement during the writing of this dissertation. Thank you for never letting me give up on myself. I would also like to thank my supervisor, Prof. David Medalie, for his help in bringing this dissertation to life and for what he did for me during this long journey. And to my dearest Adrian—your love and encouragement never failed to motivate me through the toughest times. Thank you for your unwavering strength and support and for being my light in the darkness. ii © University of Pretoria Abstract This dissertation examines the five biographies or memoirs written about the renowned South African writer Herman Charles Bosman. The main aim of the study is to show how different, and often contradictory, the views of him are as presented in the biographies. I also investigate different theories of biography as expounded by Leon Edel, Ira Bruce Nadel and Ray Monk and explore to what extent each of the biographies conforms, or does not conform to the theory. It is the contention of this dissertation that though the existing theories are useful and do shed light on each biographer’s approach and practice, they are also limited in accounting fully for the diverse and often discrepant accounts of Bosman’s life. The dissertation opens with an explication of several different theories regarding biography, and gives a brief overview of the life story of Herman Charles Bosman. Some of the main elements of biography (including different forms of narration, language and myth) are discussed and how they might be used in biography. The subsequent chapters focus on and offers detailed analyses of the biographies of Bosman, beginning with Herman Bosman As I Knew Him by Bernard Sachs and My Friend Herman Charles Bosman by Aegidius Jean Blignaut. Thereafter Sunflower to the Sun by Valerie Rosenberg and Life Sentence by Stephen Gray are analysed. Finally, there is an analysis of several reminiscences of those who knew Bosman, including Lionel Abrahams’s important memoir. The strengths and limitations of the various biographies are analysed, thereby shedding light not only on the practice of biography itself, but also on the complex and enigmatic figure of Herman Charles Bosman. Key words: Herman Charles Bosman, biography, South African literature, Bernard Sachs, Aegidius Jean Blignaut, Valerie Rosenberg, Stephen Gray, Lionel Abrahams iii © University of Pretoria Table of Contents Chapter One: Introduction…………………………………… 2 Chapter Two: Herman Bosman As I Knew Him and My Friend Herman Charles Bosman....................………………. 20 Chapter Three: Sunflower to the Sun………………………… 52 Chapter Four: Life Sentence and Remembering Bosman……. 76 Conclusion…………………………………………………… 103 Bibliography………………………………………………..... 108 iv © University of Pretoria ‘There never was a good biography of a good novelist. There couldn’t be. He is too many people, if he’s any good.’ — F. Scott Fitzgerald (Updike, 2007:3) 1 © University of Pretoria CHAPTER ONE INTRODUCTION It is a constant struggle for most writers to reconcile the creation of art with the demands of daily life. Herman Charles Bosman was no exception. In his essay ‘Writing’, Bosman writes, ‘I am trying to write of life and its meaning, if any, and I have reluctantly come to accept a conclusion…that…the practising of the creative art of letters is contrary to the laws and demands of life’ (1964:136). His life was marred by his unremitting inability to support himself and his wives financially, but his love for and devotion to writing only grew stronger as times got tougher. George Orwell (1970:29) aptly writes that ‘one would never undertake such a thing [as writing] if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand’. Bosman was certainly driven by this irresistible demon, and was writing up until a few hours before his death. Aegidius Jean Blignaut (1980:69), Bosman’s friend and colleague, saw this unearthly drive in him to write and called it ‘a gift from the gods’. Every experience in his life, good or bad, was fodder for a story, poem or essay. Most notably, Bosman’s experiences in prison were used as the basis for his best known non- fictional work, Cold Stone Jug, which he described as ‘a chronicle: being the unimpassioned record of a somewhat lengthy sojourn in prison’ (Bosman, 1971:quoted on dust jacket). His friend and schoolmate Eddie Roux wrote to Lionel Abrahams, Bosman’s protégé, that perhaps ‘the queer things Bosman did…were done out of sheer cussedness, or from a desire to experience sensations’ (cited in Gray, 2005a:60). Whatever his reasons may have been, he managed to transform his experiences into great art that has touched the lives of the generations that have followed. There has been a great interest in Bosman’s life since his death in 1951, particularly because of the ‘queer things’ he did. Valerie Rosenberg (1976:9) was the first to write a fully- researched biography of the elusive author, called Sunflower to the Sun, and in it she tries to make it clear that Bosman’s life ‘can never be defined within the dusty frontiers of facts’. Bosman himself supports the idea that dull facts must be interwoven with imagination in order for both the facts and the life story to survive through the ages, and for the writing to be interesting and captivating for the readers. He writes in his essay entitled ‘Ghosts’ that ‘it is not the dull fact…that is going to survive. If you wait long enough you will see in the end that historical fact, carefully checked up and audited by the historian, cedes place to the poet’s embroidered lie’ (Bosman, 1974:66). Perhaps what Bosman is trying to express here is that 2 © University of Pretoria readers of lives, and of literature, do not want to be bombarded with facts because our lives are not lived in that way. Our lives are lived with emotion, personality and nuances unique to ourselves that mere facts cannot adequately express. Biographers, then, have a difficult time because lives cannot be fully defined by means of facts alone, and imagination must play a part in their work. They cannot ever really know their subjects exactly as they were, or how they lived their inner lives. They must also delve deeply into a subject’s life to find possible connections between the life and work, while, in the case of more reliable biographies, avoiding sensationalism. It is up to them to try to understand the inner lives of their subjects as best they can. The inner life of the subject is always going to be difficult to express in a biography because the only person who knows the truth is the subject himself or herself. Ray Monk (2007:530) summarises Samuel Johnson’s ideas about biography and one of the issues that is central is the idea that it is not possible to know a person’s inner life because all we have to rely on is the biographer’s conjecture. The biographers will always have their own ideas about the subject’s inner life, but the biographer and the reader can never know how close those ideas are to the truth. An important reason for not being able to know the truthful inner life is that ‘facts are external and life is essentially internal’ (Monk, 2007:542). When we need to use the facts to understand the life we are forced to write something that resembles fiction because what we are writing are our own ideas, and not necessarily the ideas in line with the inner life of the subject. Monk (2007:542) eloquently states that biography is ‘doomed to remain forever unsuccessful in its endeavor to capture the “rainbow- like intangibility” of personality through the “granite-like solidity” of external facts’. Since biographers are ultimately writing for an audience—an audience of followers, whether they be admirers of the subject or not—they must present the life as they understand it and be as true to the subject as possible. Readers are frequently more attracted to theatricality and melodrama than to a staid biography, but this does not give the biographers licence to write whatever they want in order to keep their readers interested. The acclaimed biographer Michael Holroyd (2002:12) asserts that ‘most readers prefer theatre, prefer melodrama and romance, to a laborious reconstruction of actual life’. What Holroyd does not mention is that our lives are, at some point, melodramatic, romantic and theatrical and it is up to biographers to ‘chart illuminating connections between past and present, life and work’ (Holroyd, 2002:19), and in doing so they must remain steadfast in their approach and ensure that they present a life in a well-written way, clearly and imaginatively, and in as unbiased a manner as possible. 3 © University of Pretoria But before one can understand the biographer’s approach to a life, it must be made clear what exactly is meant by biography and autobiography.
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