All the circumstances and ingredients were there for a small-town prodigy, but, thank God, by missing the encouragement and practical help usually offered to ‘talented’ children, I also escaped the dwarf status that is clapped upon the poor little devils before their time (if it ever comes). It did not occur to anyone that if I wanted to try to write I ought to be given a wide education in order to develop my powers and to give me some cultural background. But this neglect at least meant that I was left alone. Nobody came gawping into the private domain that was no dream-world, but, as I grew up, the scene of my greatest activity and my only discipline. When schooldays finally petered out (I had stopped running away, but various other factors had continued to make attendance sketchy) I did have some sort of show of activity that passed for my life in the small town. It was so trivial that I wonder how it can have passed, how family or friends can have accepted that any young person could expend vitality at such a low hum. It was never decided what I should ‘take up’ and so I didn’t have a job. Until, at twenty-two, I went to the University, I led an outward life of sybaritic meagreness that I am ashamed of. In it I did not one thing that I wanted wholeheartedly to do; in it I attempted or gratified nothing (outside sex) to try out my reach, the measure of aliveness in me. My existential self was breathing but inert, like one of those unfortunate people who has had a brain injury in a motor accident and lies unhearing and unseeing, though he will eat when food comes and open his eyes to a light. I played golf, learned to drink gin with the RAF pupil pilots from the nearby air station, and took part in amateur theatricals to show recognisable signs of life to the people around me. I even went to first aid and nursing classes because this was suggested as an ‘interest’ for me; it did not matter to me what I did, since I could not admit that there was nothing, in the occupations and diversions offered to me, that really did interest me, and I was not sure – the only evidence was in books – that anything else was possible.
I am ashamed of this torpor nevertheless, setting aside what I can now see as probable reasons for it, the careful preparation for it that my childhood constituted. I cannot understand why I did not free myself in the most obvious way, leave home and small town and get myself a job somewhere. No conditioning can excuse the absence of the simple act of courage that would resist it. My only overt rejection of my matchbox life was the fact that, without the slightest embarrassment or conscience, I let my father keep me. Though the needs provided for were modest, he was not a rich man. One thing at least I would not do, apparently – I would not work for the things I did not want. And the camouflage image of myself as a dilettantish girl, content with playing grown-up games at the end of my mother’s apron strings – at most a Bovary in the making – made this possible for me.
When I was fifteen I had written my first story about adults and had sent it off to a liberal weekly that was flourishing in South Africa at the time. They published it. It was about an old man who is out of touch with the smart, prosperous life he has secured for his sons, and who experiences a moment of human recognition where he least expects it – with one of their brisk young wives who is so unlike the wife he remembers. Not a bad theme, but expressed with the respectable bourgeois sentiment which one would expect. That was in 1939, two months after the war had broken out, but in the years that followed the stories that I was writing were not much influenced by the war. It occupied the news bulletins on the radio, taking place a long way off, in countries I had never seen; later, when I was seventeen or eighteen, there were various boyfriends who went away to Egypt and Italy and sent back coral jewellery and leather bags stamped with a sphinx.
Oddly enough, as I became engaged with the real business of learning how to write, I became less prompt about sending my efforts off to papers and magazines. I was reading Maupassant, Chekhov, Maugham and Lawrence, now, also discovering O. Henry, Katherine Anne Porter and Eudora Welty, and the stories in Partisan Review, New Writing and Horizon. Katherine Mansfield and Pauline Smith, although one was a New Zealander, confirmed for me that my own ‘colonial’ background provided an experience that had scarcely been looked at, let alone thought about, except as a source of adventure stories. I had read ‘The Death of Ivan Ilyich’ and ‘The Child of Queen Victoria’; the whole idea of what a story could do, be, swept aside the satisfaction of producing something that found its small validity in print. From time to time I sent off an attempt to one of the short-lived local politico-literary magazines – meant chiefly as platforms for liberal politics, they were the only publications that published poetry and stories outside the true romance category – but these published stories were the easy ones. For the other I had no facility whatever, and they took months, even years, to cease changing shape before I found a way of getting hold of them in my mind, let alone nailing the words down around them. And then most of them were too long, or too outspoken (not always in the sexual sense) for these magazines. In a fumbling way that sometimes slid home in an unexpected strike, I was looking for what people meant but didn’t say, not only about sex, but also about politics and their relationship with the black people among whom we lived as people live in a forest among trees. So it was that I didn’t wake up to Africans and the shameful enormity of the colour bar through a youthful spell in the Communist Party, as did some of my contemporaries with whom I share the rejection of white supremacy, but through the apparently esoteric speleology of doubt, led by Kafka rather than Marx. And the ‘problems’ of my country did not set me writing; on the contrary, it was learning to write that sent me falling, falling through the surface of ‘the South African way of life’.
It was about this time, during a rare foray into the nursery bohemia of university students in Johannesburg, that I met a boy who believed I was a writer. Just that; I don’t mean he saw me as Chosen for the Holy Temple of Art, or any presumptuous mumbo-jumbo of that kind. The cosmetic-counter sophistication that I hopefully wore to disguise my stasis in the world I knew and my uncertainty of the possibility of any other, he ignored as so much rubbish. This aspect of myself, that everyone else knew, he did not; what he recognised was my ignorance, my clumsy battle to chip my way out of shell after shell of ready-made concepts and make my own sense of life. He was often full of scorn, and jeered at the way I was going about it; but he recognised the necessity. It was through him, too, that I roused myself sufficiently to insist on going to the University; not surprisingly, there was opposition to this at home, since it had been accepted so long that I was not the studious type, as the phrase went. It seemed a waste, spending money on a university at twenty-two (surely I should be married soon?); it was suggested that (as distinct from the honourable quest for a husband) the real reason why I wanted to go was to look for men. It seems to me now that this would have been as good a reason as any. My one preoccupation outside the world of ideas was men, and I should have been prepared to claim my right to the one as valid as the other.
But my freedom did not come from my new life at university; I was too old, in many ways, had already gone too far, on my own scratched tracks, for what I might once have gained along the tarmac. One day a poet asked me to lunch. He was co-editor of yet another little magazine that was then halfway through the dozen issues that would measure its life. He had just published a story of mine and, like many editors when the contributor is known to be a young girl, was curious to meet its author. He was the Afrikaans poet and playwright Uys Krige, who wrote in English as well, had lived in France and Spain, spoke five languages, was familiar with their literature, and translated from three. He had been a swimming instructor on the Riviera, a football coach somewhere else, and a war correspondent with the International Brigade in Spain.
When the boy (that same boy) heard that I was taking the train into Johannesburg for this invitation – I still lived in Springs – he said: ‘I wouldn’t go, if I were you, Nadine.’
‘For Pete’s sake, why not?’
‘Not unless you’re prepared to change a lot of things. You may not
feel the same, afterwards. You may never be able to go back.’
‘What on earth are you talking about?’ I made fun of him: ‘I’ll take the train back.’
‘No, once you see what a person like that is like, you won’t be able to stand your ordinary life. You’ll be miserable. So don’t go unless you’re prepared for this.’
The poet was a small, sun-burned, blond man. While he joked, enjoyed his food, had an animated discussion with the African waiter about the origin of the name of a fruit, and said for me some translations of Lorca and Eluard, first in Afrikaans and then, because I couldn’t follow too well, in English, he had the physical brightness of a fisherman. It was true; I had never met anyone like this being before. I have met many poets and writers since, sick, tortured, pompous, mousy; I know the morning-after face of Apollo. But that day I had a glimpse of – not some spurious ‘artist’s life’, but, through the poet’s person, the glint of his purpose – what we are all getting at, Camus’s ‘invincible summer’ that is there to be dug for in man beneath the grey of suburban life, the numbness of repetitive labour, and the sucking mud of politics.
Oh yes – not long after, a story of mine was published in an anthology, and a second publisher approached me with the offer to publish a collection. The following year I at last sent my stories where I had never been – across the seas to England and America. They came back to me in due course, in hard covers with my name printed on the coloured jacket. There were reviews, and, even more astonishing, there was money. I was living alone in Johannesburg by then, and was able to pay the rent and feed both myself and the baby daughter I had acquired. These things are a convenient marker for the beginning of a working life. But mine really began that day at lunch. I see the poet occasionally. He’s older now, of course; a bit seamed with disappointments, something of a political victim, since he doesn’t celebrate his people’s politics or the white man’s colour bar in general. The truth isn’t always beauty, but the hunger for it is.
1963
Censored, Banned, Gagged
Peter Abrahams, Harry Bloom, Hans Hofmeyer, Daphne Rooke, Ezekiel Mphahlele, and I myself are some of the South African writers who share the experience of having had books banned in our own country. Why were our books banned? If one were to judge by the monotonous insistence with which the necessity to protect pure young minds from ‘cheap filth’, etc., was invoked as justification for the new censorship bill in recent parliamentary debates in South Africa, one would conclude that these books must be pornographic. In fact, of the six writers I have mentioned, none deals sensationally or with more than passing frankness with sex, and two (in those books of theirs which were banned) do not, by reason of their subjects, touch upon sexual relations at all. Although the Minister of the Interior and the Nationalist Members of Parliament never mention political reasons for censorship, these books, and almost without exception all those books by South African writers which have been banned, have been banned for a political reason: non-conformity with the picture of South African life as prescribed and proscribed by apartheid.
I think I am the only one who has ever been favoured with an explanation for a book banning. I was informed that the official attitude to my second novel – banned in the Penguin edition in which it would have reached its widest public in my country – was that the book ‘undermines the traditional race policy of the Republic’.1
That was the truth, for once, the truth behind pious concern for young minds: it’s not four-letter words that menace them, but the danger that they may begin to think, and, under the stimulus of certain books, come up with some doubts about the way their lives are ordered. The minds of people who can afford five shillings for a paper-cover edition of a book are apparently considered more tender (or more susceptible?) than those of people who pay eighteen-and-six for a hard-cover edition, since some books are banned in the paper-cover edition only. This is not as illogical as it seems; it assumes that more affluent people (affluent = white) are likely to be living too easy to want to see any change in the ‘traditional race policy of the Republic’ whereas poorer people (poorer = black) are likely to be encouraged by any suggestion that it is possible to ‘undermine’ it.
The machinery of censorship which has served to ban all these books has now been superseded by a more stringent, sinmongering, and all-devouring system under the new censorship laws, promulgated in the Publications and Entertainments Act of 1963. Among the defects of the old machinery – from the point of view of a state evidently bent on introducing thought-control – was that it did not provide for internal censorship (that is, of publications produced within the Republic itself) other than in respect of pornography. This is not quite such a gap as it sounds; English-language publishers in South Africa are few, and they stick mainly to graceful, gift-book Africana and adventure yarns; the thriving Afrikaans publishing houses draw both authors and readers from that section of the community which loyally supports the government and, so far,2 has been unlikely to produce anything that undermines any government policy. At any rate, whatever is published within the country will now be subject to censorship along with whatever is imported, and the decisions as to what should be banned and what may be read will be made by a Publications Control Board, presently to be set up by the Minister of the Interior.
The Board will consist of nine members, all appointed by the Minister, of whom not fewer than six shall be ‘persons having special knowledge of arts, language, and literature, or [my italics] the administration of justice.’ The chairman (Minister-designated, again) must be one of the ‘special knowledge’ members, but a quorum is constituted by only four members and, in the absence of the chairman and vice-chairman, an ordinary member may preside. Special committees can be set up to deal with the work of the Board – which will be prodigious, to say the least, since it covers films, plays, ‘objects’, magazines, etc., as well as books. A committee is to consist of one member of the Board (not specified that this should be one with ‘special knowledge’) and at least two other persons appointed as members from a panel designated by the Minister. So that, in fact, whether South Africans will be permitted or not to read any particular piece of literature can and frequently will be decided by three persons, all appointed by the Minister, not one of whom need have even the dubious qualification, where literary judgement is required, of ‘special knowledge’ of the ‘administration of justice’.
There will be no representation whatsoever on the Board or committees outside the Minister’s personal choice; but any person may, at any time, upon payment of a nominal fee, submit for the consideration of the Board a publication which he personally thinks ought to be banned. Under the old system there was a board of censors which examined books referred to it by Customs, Post Office, or other officials under various relevant Acts, including the Suppression of Communism Act; but the old Board was not a Grundy ombudsman to whom, as well, cranks, crackpots, and political informers could take their grudges, confident, on the incredibly wide grounds on which there is provision for them to claim offence, of a hearing.
A publication is deemed ‘undesirable’ if it, or any part of it, is
indecent or obscene or is offensive or harmful to public morals; is blasphemous or offensive to the religious convictions or feelings of any section of the inhabitants of the Republic; brings any section of the inhabitants into ridicule or contempt; is harmful to the relations between any sections of the inhabitants; is prejudicial to the safety of the State, the general welfare, or the peace and good order.
The definition of what may be considered indecent, obscene, offensive or harmful to public morals includes the portrayal of:
murder, suicide, death, horror, cruelty, fighting, brawling, ill-treatment, lawlessness, gangsterism, robbery, crime, the technique of crimes and criminals, tippling, drunkenness, trafficking in or addiction to drugs, smuggling, sexual intercourse, prostitution, promiscuity, white-slaving, licentiousness, lust, passionate love scenes, sexual assault, rape, sod
omy, masochism, sadism, sexual bestiality, abortion, change of sex, night life, physical poses, nudity, scant or inadequate dress, divorce, marital infidelity, adultery, illegitimacy, human or social deviation or degeneracy, or any other similar or related phenomenon.
My italics are there as a reminder that the racial laws of the country, and its traditional race policies, are such that social as well as sexual intercourse between white and coloured people could be interpreted as ‘human or social deviation or degeneracy’; and that, in the practical and ideological pursuit of apartheid, any mixing between the races is considered ‘harmful’, and criticism of or satire on this curious belief could easily be construed, by those who uphold it, as ‘ridicule and contempt’.
In determining whether a book should be censored or not, ‘no regard shall be had to the purpose’ of the author; which means that no distinction can be drawn between Ulysses and What the Butler Saw in the Boudoir, or between a revolutionary pamphlet advocating the bloody overthrow of the white man and a serious study of such aspirations. There is a provision that the Board may exempt, at its pleasure to recall the exemption at any time, a publication of a ‘technical, scientific, or professional nature bona fide intended for the advancement of or for use in any particular profession or branch of arts, literature, or science’. But how the Board will go about deciding what is bona fide and what is not, is not stated.
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