A Fork in the Road

by Andre Brink

  How could I have had the faintest intimation of the ways in which this small person with her large eyes and her unkempt hair would change the course of my life, and of my writing, how my choice of female characters in my books would be affected for the next forty years, how my notions of plot and my involvement with other people would be altered? To what extent all my perceptions of relationships would, from that moment on, be defined by the awareness – the fear – of betrayal, a scepticism about permanence, a mistrust of commitment, or guilt feelings about turning my back on stability and security?

  And why?

  It was not just because Ingrid was Ingrid. But surely also because, in an uncanny and unsettling way, meeting her was like being suddenly confronted with the living incarnation of a character I’d just written in a novel: Nicolette in The Ambassador. There was still time before the book was published, to introduce a few small references to Ingrid: the way she had of twirling a little curl on her forehead, whenever she was upset, until she fell asleep; a small birthmark on her thigh … There was even more ‘evidence’ of Ingrid in the character of Gillian, in the tempestuous relationship with her father, her excessive raging against religion … But these were almost irrelevant compared to the full reality, and the full impact, of the girl-woman Ingrid. The real problem is that from the outset it was almost impossible for me to see her clearly, cleanly, as she was, rather than as the projection of a preexisting fictional character.

  How could I ever again keep life and fiction apart? How could I prevent myself from attempting to turn my life into a series of stories, or to project imagined stories into events in my life? Perhaps, it seems to me now, more than forty years later, my only solution was to divide my own life into innumerable compartments – each friend, each acquaintance, each woman sealed off behind locked doors of memory and imagination from all others. It was the only way in which I could remain in control of my world.

  The simple backbone of facts about Ingrid is all too familiar by now; it has become the fibre of the legend, the image, the icon: the depraved innocence, the abused child, the misunderstood waif, the yearning for a father figure, the lure of death, the urge for self-destruction. All of it true. All of it just a bit too easy?

  Ingrid was born in September 1933 on the farm of her maternal grandfather Fanie Cilliers, near the small North-Western Cape town of Douglas, close to the confluence of the Vaal and Orange rivers, where I myself had spent some of the most formative years of my youth. In one of her earliest photographs, she stands naked on the edge of the swirling, muddy water, a small nymph escaped from another world, scowling defiantly at the camera, clutching one of the lips of her little cleft between a thumb and a forefinger.

  At that stage her mother, Beatrice, had just been abandoned by Abraham Jonker, who had accused her of carrying another man’s child. In due course he remarried twice and eventually started a new family in Cape Town with a woman who couldn’t stand the two ‘unruly’ little girls from his first marriage – Ingrid and her sister Anna, born two years before her. Beatrice remained ailing for several years: leukaemia, and a nervous condition which was to deteriorate so drastically that in the end she had to be committed to the mental institution of Valkenberg where, like Ingrid herself much later, she was confined more than once. ‘I saw my mother going mad in front of my eyes,’ Ingrid told me during that first weekend, and often afterwards. And then she would continue, ‘I remember how she would sit at the window with a rug on her lap, picking at a frayed edge, and talking to herself: “If I pull out this one, a strange woman comes. If I pull out this one, a strange man comes. And if I pull out this third one, Abraham Jonker comes!” And how she would then start howling and screaming hysterically.’

  After the grandfather’s death Beatrice, her mother and her two daughters moved to Durbanville, near Cape Town, where they lived in ‘the house with the pepper tree’; and from there to Gordon’s Bay, where Ingrid was to spend most of her early childhood. The girls played on the beach and in the sea – ‘like two small otters’, Ingrid said – or buried themselves in the fantasy world of books, or spent hours gathering and then hiding ‘secrets’ in the pine forest. These hidden or buried secrets became an indispensable part of her life – not just as a treasure trove, but as a repository for memories, a self-made subconscious to the ordinary world. Many years later, she would cryptically, in her poetry, refer to a lover’s sperm as ‘secrets’ too, as traces of a private space all her own. The sea was the background music to her verse. She was passionate about it and could swim like a fish. And yet there was often an ominous undertow. As a small girl, even before she moved to Gordon’s Bay, Ingrid had two frightening experiences of nearly drowning – once in a river, once in a dam. This, in a strange but significant way, linked in her mind the forces of life and death. And over the years all of it would find expression in her writing.

  The childhood world beside the sea brought the girls such bliss that they were hardly aware of the dire poverty in which their mother and grandmother had to eke out an existence. On many days there was only soup or fish-heads to eat; and when there was nothing at all, the fervent faith of the grandmother somehow saw them through. She used to preach to the coloured fishermen’s families on Sundays, which provided Ingrid with an early inspiration for writing doggerel with a determined religious slant. Throughout her life the Bible remained a major frame of reference for her writing, not only in content but even more so in her choice of words, imagery, style. It provided the dark and the light, the dread and the exultation, the fear of hell and the expectation of heaven, as an answer to Ingrid’s need to find a mythology of her own. And where the Bible ended, Ouma’s elaborate commentaries, in the form of a Thought for the Day, took over. Often, while we were together, Ingrid would take out Ouma’s Thoughts and read from the small blue pages covered in meticulous handwriting, collapsing in laughter as she adopted the declamatory voice of a dominee; religion became even more important to her after she had broken away from all organised forms of it. In a curious way the rejection of religion made her even more dependent on it. And as I myself was right then in the throes of breaking with the church, meeting Ingrid was probably the decisive event in my own process of ‘moving out’.

  Death had first invaded Ingrid’s world when her grandfather passed away. In 1944, only a year after her mother, her beloved grandmother also died. This placed a barrier between the young girl and her most precious memories of an Edenic youth. From now on death would be a dark undertone to almost everything she wrote, but often in very ambiguous terms: sometimes as a dream-state she continued to yearn for, sometimes as a fearsome, threatening presence, as lover or dreaded enemy, as darkness or ultimate light.

  Abraham returned out of the blue to reclaim his daughters. He did his best to integrate them into his new family (he soon had two new children with his new wife) and sent them to good schools; but Ingrid continued to feel neglected, and in later years complained – perhaps with some exaggeration – that she’d been made to work like a Cinderella for a stern and forbidding stepmother. It was, as I now see it, part of her construction of herself as the rejected and misunderstood outsider. Whatever happened on the surface of her life, she found more and more of a refuge in writing poetry, encouraged by a sympathetic teacher; and before she turned sixteen she had written most of the poems subsequently published in Ontvlugting (Escape), in 1956.

  The small volume was dedicated to Ingrid’s father. But when she took the first copy to him, his tight-lipped reaction was: ‘My child, I hope there’s more to it than the covers. I’ll look at it tonight to see how you have disgraced me.’

  At the end of 1951, Ingrid had completed her schooling with a not very impressive D aggregate – but with an A in Afrikaans. She was eager to go to university, but her father would not hear of it. She could enrol for a secretarial course to qualify herself for a job, but that was that. ‘If you are old enough to write, you’re mature enough to fend for yourself,’ said Abraham, prompted by his new w
ife. And so Ingrid moved out of the parental home. ‘There was space in the house, but not in the heart,’ she explained laconically. She moved into a flat near the city centre, where for three years she did proofreading and copy-editing for various printers and publishers.

  Her life entered a new phase in 1954 when she met Piet Venter, seventeen years older than herself, with two failed marriages behind him; a businessman with ambitions to become a writer. And two years later, soon after the publication of Ontvlugting, they were married – which was more her decision than his. What she had always desperately desired, after the disruptions of her childhood, was the security of marriage. And one of her long-cherished dreams, to have a child, now came within reach. Still, an illogical fear of a miscarriage cast a pall over that eager expectation, as witness one of her best-known poems, ‘Pregnant woman’, which dates from 1957, the year of her pregnancy: it is dominated by the hallucinating, surreal image of a woman lying singing under the dark water of a sewer with her bleeding offspring. Ingrid had just moved into a cosmopolitan circle of creative artists among whom Piet, in spite of his ambitions, or perhaps because of them, felt sadly out of his depth. Among these friends were Jan Rabie, who had recently returned from a seven-year stay in Paris, and his Scottish wife Marjorie Wallace, the painter Erik Laubscher and his French wife Claude Bouscharain, and the young art student Breyten Breytenbach, with the renowned bohemian poet and world traveller Uys Krige as primus inter pares. Through Uys, who spent days and nights introducing her to his translations from the poetry of the French surrealists, or of Lorca, or the South Americans, she would soon meet his close friend Jack Cope, with whom Uys shared a bungalow on Second Beach at Clifton and who in due course became her lover. This circle transcended all the boundaries and taboos of the then newly established apartheid state, by including a number of coloured poets and writers as well: Piet Philander, Richard Rive, Peter Clarke, Adam Small.

  The birth of Ingrid’s daughter Simone was a watershed. The fulfilment of motherhood was accompanied by a discovery which she confided to me in the rather seedy lounge of the Clifton Hotel soon after we met: that at a house party on the day she returned home from the hospital, she surprised Piet with another woman. And less than eighteen months later the company he worked for transferred him to Johannesburg, which Ingrid was to describe as ‘probably the most primitive city on earth’, and which, moreover, meant leaving behind all the friends who had come to give sense to her world. Whether there was any direct link or not, it comes as no surprise, with hindsight, that an early attempt at suicide dates from this period. But one should bear in mind a memory evoked by Marjorie Wallace: that on the very first day she met Ingrid, the fledgling poet interrupted a carefree, happy conversation on Clifton beach by asking totally out of the blue, ‘Do you think I will commit suicide one day?’ This was one of the key questions she persistently asked me during our first weekend together.

  ‘We miss the sound of the sea, and of course everything,’ she wrote to Jack in her very first days in the north, ‘… I’m sorry my letter is so boring – there’s nothing I can tell which I can say – I am so “robbed”!’

  One of her earliest experiences in the then Transvaal was attending a cultural gathering, part of countrywide celebrations of the Afrikaans language, addressed by the infamous ‘architect of apartheid’, Dr Hendrik Frensch Verwoerd, whom she classified among the ‘animals’: ‘One form of verbal violence after the other occurred without a blush, until at last the seducer of our nation smugly sat down to the applause of White Afrikanerdom.’ How well I remember a cold, clear winter’s night on the balcony of her flat, when we discussed Verwoerd. Ingrid had already had rather too much to drink. In the middle of the conversation she stopped to peer at me through the smoke of her cigarette, and asked, ‘Do you hate Verwoerd?’

  ‘Of course,’ I said.

  ‘I mean, do you really hate him?’

  ‘Yes, I do.’

  ‘Then go and shoot him.’

  ‘How do you mean, “shoot him”?’

  ‘Go out this moment and get a gun and shoot the bastard.’

  ‘But Ingrid, one doesn’t just go around shooting people!’

  ‘If you’re really serious about what you feel you would do that.’

  ‘Now please be reasonable.’ How many times during how many conversations did I use those words! And every single time she sneered: ‘Stick your reasonable up your arse!’

  ‘If you don’t go and do it, now, I won’t ever again believe a word you say.’

  ‘Ingrid!’

  ‘You’re just a coward, like everybody else! You haven’t got the guts of your own convictions! I despise you!’

  It turned into a raging argument that lasted through most of the night. Until she was too tired to know what she was saying, and I had to take her to the bedroom and put her to bed, where she slept until the morning, without any recollection of what had happened.

  In most respects the sojourn in Johannesburg was disastrous. Within three months Ingrid fled back to the Cape, leaving her clothes and Simone behind. Despite her fierce, possessive, demonstrative love of Simone she could also be disquietingly negligent of the little one. When she had visitors she would readily pack the child off to Piet’s parents, or her sister Anna, or friends.

  Behind her decision to return lurked also the fact that she had developed a crush on Jan Rabie. They had become close friends earlier, while Marjorie was still in Scotland following their years together in Paris; and Jan, with characteristic frankness, had written to tell Marjorie that unless she came to join him very soon he would have an affair with Ingrid. But now, with Marjorie back at his side, there was no chance of a relationship: Jan was much too set on the fierce loyalty prescribed by the Calvinism of his father. Marjorie’s reaction to Ingrid’s return was just as characteristically forthright: Let Ingrid come and stay with them, she said: that would soon cure her.

  Piet Venter soon followed to take her ‘home’ again, but for all practical purposes the marriage was over; and from this time, Jan being out of bounds, the relationship with Jack Cope became serious – even though at first he tried to keep her at a distance by warning her that he was ‘just like an old broken reed’. In a letter to Uys Krige, written at about the same time, Ingrid manipulates the exchange by telling her father-mentor-friend that what Jack had actually written to her was: ‘Uys thinks you’re a broken reed.’ Whatever the correct version, it found its way into the poignant poem, ‘The Song of the Broken Reeds’, a lyrical lament about death and loneliness.

  Moving into the more lively, cosmopolitan Johannesburg suburb of Hillbrow made life more bearable for Ingrid; but not for long. Early in 1960 she finally left Piet and returned to Cape Town, this time taking Simone with her. The divorce was finalised in early 1962. It was, of course, a critical moment in the country’s history, precipitated by the massacre at Sharpeville on 21 March, 1960. Violence erupted all over South Africa. In Cape Town, among other shocking incidents, a black baby was shot dead in his mother’s arms by police in the black township of Nyanga. Driven by outrage and morbid fascination, Ingrid went to the police station at Philippi to see the small body. And in a single burst of inspiration she wrote what many readers still revere as one of the very best poems in South African literature, ‘The Child Shot Dead by Soldiers at Nyanga’. Although many friends voiced fears about possibly dangerous repercussions from the poem, she refused to change a word, and like the baby she addressed in it, the poem has since travelled the world in many languages. ‘I am surprised when people call it political,’ Ingrid wrote in an article in Drum soon after we met. ‘It grew out of my own experiences and sense of bereavement. It rests on a foundation of all philosophy, a certain belief in “life eternal”, a belief that nothing is ever wholly lost.’

  In other respects, too, those years were difficult for Ingrid. The relationship with Jack offered her a sense of security, although its open-endedness, and Jack’s persistent refusal to get married – inspired, perha
ps, by the way he continued to be haunted by his first failed experience of matrimony – was a source of frustration and friction; a nadir was reached when she discovered, in the middle of 1961, that she was pregnant. She postponed telling Jack for two months; when she finally mustered the courage to do so, his only reaction, as she told me two years later, was to ask, ‘What are you going to do about it?’

  As to what she did, accounts differ. Her sister Anna, always keen to cover up, reported that Ingrid had checked herself into a hospital. Ingrid herself maintained, in gory detail, that it was a backstreet affair, performed by an old coloured woman armed with a knitting needle. The brush with death intrinsic to the experience found expression in another of her best-known poems, ‘Little Grain of Sand’, in which an unborn child cries from his mother’s womb about futility and nothingness. It was one of the most traumatic moments of her life, which continued to haunt her till the end. And although the relationship with Jack resumed, it could never be the same again.

  What particularly distressed Ingrid about the abortion was remembering her mother who, when abandoned thirty years earlier by Abraham Jonker during her pregnancy, had chosen, nevertheless, in dire circumstances, to keep her baby. That Beatrice, who had had much more reason than Ingrid herself for getting rid of a child, had rejected this option, caused Ingrid guilt feelings of which she could never absolve herself. Often, in moments of high tension, she would confuse herself, the child who had survived, with the foetus she had aborted. No wonder that in the period following the abortion she had to be hospitalised more than once in the Valkenberg mental institution, where among other forms of treatment she submitted to electric shock therapy. And her fixation with suicide became near-pathological.

  These dark years – the final months in Johannesburg, the return to the Cape – resulted in heightened poetic activity. Much of the verse in Ontvlugting had been written in rhymed couplets, which persisted in her work for a long time; but gradually, notably under the influence of Uys Krige and his magnificent translations of Éluard, Lorca, Neruda, Andrade and others, she turned to free verse. And soon she had the small collection of poems that was destined to become the cornerstone of her legacy, Rook en Oker, published in October 1963 by Bartho Smit at APB Publishers in Johannesburg. The cover was designed by a young Cape artist, Nico Hagen.