A Fork in the Road

by Andre Brink

  Other opportunities followed. It so happened that one of the actors in the cast of Les Justes was also drama manager of PACT, Gerrit Geertsema; and soon after my stint in Pretoria he moved to Bloemfontein as director of drama for PACOFS. It remains a standing joke between us that playing the role of the police guard in the prison scene of Les Justes Gerrit could not resist stealing the show with his vivid facial contortions, even when the main actors were on stage. The only remedy I could think of was to let him keep his back to the audience, persuading him that such an articulate back simply had to be exploited for its full theatrical value. We became very close, a friendship that has now survived and grown for nearly forty years. Once installed at PACOFS, he started contracting me as a director on a regular basis, several times for productions of my own plays. And when one of his actors, Johan Botha, moved to Windhoek, to the then South West African Performing Arts Council (SWAPAC), I was invited to do a production of a new play by the innovative Afrikaans playwright Chris Barnard for that company as well. Those years, until the mid-seventies, were the culmination of my work in the theatre, and as far as creativity was concerned, one of the most productive and satisfying periods of my life.

  Among the plays I produced during that time was Pavane, which was not published before 1974, although it was already written in 1970 as the direct outcome of a visit to Brazil. There were two prongs to this inspiration – one a place, the other a person.

  The place had a hauntingly beautiful name, Quitandinha, and it was lost in a tumble of tropical mountains, built as a casino in the thirties, later a hotel, now some kind of club. I had first heard about it from the improbably beautiful blonde-and-blue-eyed model, Claudia, who had accompanied a small group of journalists, and also including me, on an assignment to Brazil for a travel article and a fashion shoot. Claudia remembered Quitandinha as a magical dream-place from a previous visit, when she’d been high on LSD for most of the time; and now I could see it for myself in all its outrageous splendour: more like a theatre set than a building. In my play it started as a convent, before being converted into a brothel; and now it was a hideout in the mountains where the daughter of an American ambassador is abducted in South America and executed when the demands of the rebels who have kidnapped her, and with whom she comes to identify herself, are not met. It came as a shock when, soon after I’d written the play, Patty Hearst was captured in the US by the Symbionese Liberation Army and famously sided with her captors. The real trigger, however, was Claudia. An initial impression of a spoilt little rich girl, arrogant and supercilious and full of airs, was soon dissipated; and because we were the ‘young ones’, as well as the only two unequivocally heterosexual members of the group, we found ourselves spending more and more time together. We were not, as they say, ‘romantically involved’, although I predictably felt very soon that I could fall in love. She was surprisingly well read. And she had a great love of Paris, where she had also spent 1968. She had been in a relationship for the past few years, but it was now on the point of breaking up. So there was really no reason for resisting involvement. If I think back now, I believe we simply had too much to talk about to find time for more non-verbal pursuits. Except in the last minutes we shared, before she had to leave. Those minutes with her were unforgettable. It was as if both of us, our bodies and thoughts and emotions, were overwhelmed by desire. But there was, by then, no time; no time. We made all the inevitable promises, but we both knew that they were unrealistic and impossible. We still corresponded for some time after I went back to South Africa. But that was that. A door had closed. The play, however, survived. Although it marked a turning point in my involvement with the theatre.

  Since the banning of my novel Kennis van die Aand (Looking on Darkness) in 1974 I was a constant target for the state security authorities and their extension, the censors on the Publications Control Board. With books an author still had some space, however cramped, in which to manoeuvre: in the absence of pre-censorship a book had to be published before it could be banned, which at least made it possible, if one played it skilfully, to put a fair number of copies into circulation before the censors pounced. But the theatre was a most vulnerable target: a single complaint from a member of the audience might result in the cancellation of a play. Playwrights like Athol Fugard or the satirist Pieter-Dirk Uys who had their own companies and venues, could manage, more often than not, to stay one step ahead. But I had only students at my disposal at Rhodes University. In the professional theatre, subsidised by the state, there was little or no leeway. The Chris Barnard play we produced in Windhoek, was stopped before it could tour in the Cape Province, as scheduled. A planned run of Pavane was stopped even before rehearsals could begin. My friend Bartho Smit, arguably, with Adam Small, the best Afrikaans playwright of our generation, had an even rawer deal as play after play of his was banned. Given the costs of a production, management of subsidised theatres became less and less willing to court the risk of bans which would seriously cripple them financially.

  A very painful choice had to be made: at a time when it was vital to counter the ravages of apartheid with all the means at one’s disposal, including culture, I could not take the risk of spending months and months on writing or producing plays which stood a real chance of being stopped before opening night. After Looking on Darkness my novels might indeed be banned again: but by now I had succeeded in thwarting the censors by having my books published abroad. Plays like Pavane, which might be regarded as contentious, found themselves in a cul-de-sac. And so I stopped writing for the theatre, preferring from then on to direct my creative energy towards the writing of novels.

  * * *

  There were many times when the temptation to return to the theatre became almost too strong to resist. Certainly, every time I saw Athol Fugard, the lure was there, naked and strong. His Blood Knot was the first South African play I saw after my return from Paris in 1961 – in the Rhodes University Great Hall – and from the very first time I met him, he had a special place in my life. Partly because so much of what inspired him, revived my indebtedness to Camus – and Athol’s published Journals meant almost as much to me as did Camus’ Carnets. The Beckettian spareness of his plays, his strong faith in Grotowski, and in Jan Kott, not only fed into my lectures on drama at Rhodes University, but clarified and justified my passion for the theatre. How can I ever forget some of his wise, often wry, pronouncements? – on some recent plays: There are plays that are shaped like onions: you start peeling them, and remove layer after layer, until you’re left with nothing: but at least you’ve had a good cry. Or on the need for storytelling: A story is the only safe place in the world.

  The conversations we’ve had over the years, and the way in which his theatre practice corroborated his views on the world, have sustained me in many dark moments. Athol brought home to me – through his passionate need for seclusion, his periods of withdrawal to Skoenmakerskop outside Port Elizabeth or New Bethesda in the Karoo – the need to draw both strength and solace from solitude, which often sent me back, both in reality and symbolically, to the semi-desert landscapes of my childhood. For much of my life, landscapes, more than people, have nourished my need for understanding or for insight. Withdrawal and return have, for me, always been redefined in Athol’s work and in the realities of his life, and they became keystones in my own world. And to a large extent my withdrawal from the theatre was made bearable by remaining in touch with what Athol was doing – his probing of inner landscapes in Boesman and Lena or The Road to Mecca, later in Playland, as he charted our way through the upheavals in South Africa, until well beyond the political change of 1994.

  This absence lasted for nearly twenty years, until the late nineties. Then came an invitation from the Salzburg Seminar to offer a series of master classes in drama with Arthur Miller and Ariel Dorfman. I had been to Salzburg before, but this occasion was something extraordinary. For a week the three of us, in the atmosphere of intense creative energy unique to the theatre, worked together with
people like the director Brian Herzov, the critic Benedict Nightingale, and the wonderfully inventive director David Thacker and his team of actors from the National Theatre in London, who were then engaged in rehearsals for Death of a Salesman. By the end of the week each of us had to mount a production. Ariel worked on a scene from his Widows; I presented excerpts from my plays Elsewhere Fine and Warm and Pavane. But the highlight of the week was the Salesman, where David’s interaction with his troupe was overseen by Arthur Miller. Throughout his many interventions, each a small masterpiece in its own right, Arthur did not once issue an instruction or a direction. At most he would say, ‘What about …’, or ‘Do you think we could …’, or ‘Suppose, when you enter this scene, you were to think …’ It was a reinvention of Stanislavski’s ‘magic if’ that had changed the course of stagecraft in the twentieth century. And once again the two-pronged nature of the theatre was brought to life: there was the play itself, after nearly half a century still as alive as an electric wire, Willie Loman’s tussle with his sons Biff and Happy, and with death, and with life; and there was at the same time David’s involvement with his cast, and Arthur’s interaction with all of them. I know that not one of us privileged to be in that group will ever forget that Salzburg experience. We were present at a thing of beauty coming to life in front of our eyes, drawing all of us into the act of creation itself.

  That week made me acknowledge just how much I had been missing in my life during the twenty years of absence from the theatre. The feverish involvement with a group of exceptionally talented, professional actors to pool all our inventive resources and bring into being something incomparably more than all our separate contributions and our separate selves, added an almost forgotten dimension to the experience of creation. It took me back to the first melding of theatre and religion in my youth – restoring, to my own life, the impulses which had, just as in ancient Greece or in ancient China, led to the birth of theatre from the religious breath of music. And given that events in South Africa around the release of Nelson Mandela from prison and the first democratic elections of 1994 had restored the possibilities of a free theatre in the country, I left Salzburg knowing that I had to resume playwriting again.

  The result was Die Jogger, written almost immediately after my return, and staged and published the next year. The play evolved around a retired brigadier in the security police, now in a mental institution where he is haunted by shadows from his past and the memories of a life of betrayals, both public and very private. How fortunate I was that a young director as energetic and inventive as Ilse van Hemert was placed in charge of the production; and that she invited me to be involved in the rehearsals. Her approach of free improvisation, of truly allowing all the actors to be drawn into the conception and execution of the text as a living, changing thing, brought new levels of understanding to my own view of the stage. At the beginning of every day I would rush to the office of the publisher who was already preparing the text for publication, to rewrite the section we had rehearsed the day before. This drew the printing process itself into the act of production.

  Since Die Jogger there has not been enough time to turn to another play. But as new novels take shape, I continue making notes – on scraps of paper, or in my mind – for plots and characters that are not primarily meant for the printed page but can come to life only on the stage. And I know it is only a matter of time before this crucial dimension of my life will be restored to its rightful place in my world.

  INGRID

  IT IS NOW more than forty years since Ingrid Jonker died. Yet, through her poetry, there may be more people to whom she is a living presence than she was during her short lifetime. In other respects she may be more remote than ever. She was drowned in the night of 19 July, 1965 when she walked into the fiercely cold Atlantic Ocean at Three Anchor Bay in Cape Town, and moved straight into myth. The myth of the maligned, rejected, abused, misunderstood nymph of sea and sun who had foretold her death in her poetry since she’d been a teenager, finally canonised when Nelson Mandela read her poem ‘The Child’ at his inauguration in parliament in May 1994. How little could we, could anybody, have expected this life after death in that dark time when she opted out of the world?

  Until recently, I have chosen not to be drawn into discussions or evocations of her life, notably in documentary films, some unforgivably bad. But precisely because of these I have begun to believe that perhaps I owe it to her at last to unfold, without drama or melodrama, some of the things I have kept to myself. Not the icon but the person. The woman I loved. And who nearly drove me mad. In some respects, it should be done to set the record straight; in others, simply to remember. To hold on.

  There is a photo of that sad, obscene funeral, four days after her death, with family massed in a dour black bank on one side of the grave and windswept friends on the other. Her long-time lover Jack Cope tried to jump into the grave like a latter-day Laertes, and everything threatened to implode in low drama. What strikes me when I look at it today, is the realisation that almost everyone in that photo, in fact, everyone involved with Ingrid in one way or another, is now dead. Her father, the arrogant loser, followed her to the grave within a few months. Jack, who knew, as I did, the agony of being with her and constantly losing her, and who faced, long before I had to, the dread of growing old, is dead. Uys Krige, the perennial golden boy of South African letters and the one who averted the most vulgar of explosions on the day of the funeral, is dead too – unbelievable as it still seems to all of us who have heard him reciting poetry or talking non-stop in five languages. Jan Rabie, beachcomber and romantic, the first modern writer of Afrikaans fiction, is dead. So is his wife, Marjorie Wallace, who sang the joys of life in sprightly colours on canvas. So is the gloomy and suspicious sister, Anna, who was prepared to do everything she could to cherish her own narrow view of Ingrid at the cost of everybody else’s. And Ingrid’s husband Piet, always a lone stranger among the artists surrounding his wife. So are Bartho and Kita, the friends who so anxiously urged Ingrid and me to have a baby they could adopt to exorcise their own childlessness. So are many others from yesteryear.

  So many people have claimed her for their own purposes over the years, transforming her into South Africa’s own poète maudite, another Anne Sexton, another Sylvia Plath. Songwriters have used her poems as lyrics on which they could ride to their own easy fame. Broadcasters and cineasts and playwrights have tried to trace her light footsteps on soundtracks and in films – sometimes, but not always, with the best of intentions. All the vultures Ingrid had scorned and feared so passionately during her life.

  It was in the late afternoon of a blue and golden late summer’s day, Thursday 18 April, 1963, that Ingrid walked into my ordered existence and turned it upside down. Until that moment I was ensconced in an ultimately predictable life as husband and father, lecturer in literature; dreaming about a future as a writer after the early surprising shock of a novel, Lobola vir die lewe (Dowry for Life) that caught the Afrikaans literary establishment unprepared, but painfully aware of the claims and the curtailments of domesticity, the threat of bourgeois complacency, of being a small fish in a small pond. And afterwards? A world in which nothing would ever be sure and safe again, and in which everything, from the most private to the public, from love to politics, was to be exposed to risk and uncertainty and danger.

  We were in the dusky, dusty front room of the rambling old house in Cheviot Place, Green Point, were Jan and Marjorie lived, perhaps the only truly bohemian artist’s house in the Cape – a group of writers gathered to plan a protest against the new censorship bill which was then taking shape in parliament. Several of us had already launched individual attacks on the proposed onslaught on the arts sponsored by a prominent right-wing parliamentarian, Abraham Jonker, whose own early forays into realist fiction had failed to live up to their initial promise, and who had become notorious for proclaiming that even Shakespeare could do with some censoring. But it was now time for organised resistance on a larg
er scale. The discussion was energetic and passionate, but there was nothing yet to mark the day as exceptional.

  And then she came in, small and quiet, but tense, her blonde curly hair unruly, her dark eyes guarded but smouldering. The daughter of the would-be chief censor, Abraham Jonker. She was wearing a white, loose man’s shirt several sizes too big for her, and tight green pants, a size or two too small. She was smoking. Her bare feet were narrow and beautiful. I would never again meet a woman without looking at her feet.

  In the course of the weekend that followed I saw her eyes move through an amazing range of expressions, from cool and detached to flashing with ferocity, from serene to exuberant to apathetic to disillusioned to eager, from brazenly challenging and defiant to outraged and contemptuous, from widening with childlike wonder to burning with passion, from quietly content to scathing and vicious. And her sensitive, sensuous, mouth: cynical, content, angry, vulnerable, playful, bitter, mocking, tranquil, raging, happy, generous, wild. Unpredictable and endlessly fascinating, those quicksilvery changes of mood and expression.

  It was love at first sight, for both of us – even though I was married and she had been, for several years already, but unbeknown to me, in an intimate if unstable relationship with Jack Cope, twenty-odd years older than either of us.

  Even in the course of that first tumultuous weekend, before I had to return to Grahamstown where I taught Afrikaans at Rhodes University, our head-over-heels conversations introduced me to the landscapes of her life – often in brief, cryptic, unsettling flashes of almost blinding intensity, sometimes in longer, sustained journeys of discovery. Landscapes, moonscapes, seascapes, bodyscapes, eyescapes.