Further reading
Barlow’s own story can be found in Eddie Barlow: The Autobiography, edited by Edward Griffiths (Cape Town: Tafelberg, 2006). For more on Barlow and his times, see Luke Alfred, Testing Times: The Story of the Men Who Made SA Cricket (Cape Town: Spearhead Press, 2003), and Ramachandra Guha (ed.), The Picador Book of Cricket (London: Pan Macmillan, 2001).
Stephen Watson: The master of melancholy
Christopher Hope
* * *
Stephen Watson might have made a good secret agent. He liked to keep his past, his working methods and his secrets to himself. Very occasionally, rumour reported that he had been to school, in some earlier, unlikely life, at an exclusive Anglican college and had later become an ardent Marxist for a time. It was hard to credit, because no traces of either influence remained. If you met him in later years, as I did, those former identities seemed so incongruous as to be scarcely credible. Or perhaps they were just very well concealed, because Stephen was someone who kept the sides of himself very much to himself.
He always seemed to be in transit, keen to be off to some undisclosed destination – sometimes, quite literally, on the run. I was fascinated to learn later that his reputation for being so fleet-footed went back to his schooldays. His lifelong friend Hugh Corder recalled at Stephen’s funeral in 2011 that at school he had been a sprinter of note, known to his classmates as ‘Speedy’ Watson. I thought that very apt, even prophetic, because Stephen often gave me the feeling that he might be up and off at any moment, eager to be somewhere, or even someone, else. He wrote once of wishing ‘to slip the noose of my own identity’. It’s a brilliant metaphor of a most Watsonian kind; the shine competes with the shiver, and you almost feel the rope-burn.
But then, Watson’s was a temperament rich in contradictions: he was passionate yet rational; never religious, and yet his poems show a spiritual reverence for high and lonely places; he detested ideological orthodoxies, yet he savaged what he saw as the dishonesties of his times. This mix of contraries enriched his poems, diaries and essays, and it made him a formidable observer of South African life and its lunacies.
The side Stephen showed to me was his writerly self, and this was what interested me most of all. In his work, he aimed for total candour, no secrets, only the struggle to find the right words to say what he felt. He never assumed that he knew how to pull it off, and he had a saving diffidence about his own work. He understood that failure was built into the writer’s job description, as one who faced what T.S. Eliot called ‘the intolerable wrestle / with words and meaning’ and often lost the fight.1 ‘There is no such thing as a long-distance wrestler,’ I once said. ‘Very wise, too,’ said Stephen. ‘Only poets are tempted to try.’
I’d met Stephen but I hadn’t read anything by him before I left South Africa, in the mid-1970s. Then, while I was living in London in 1978, someone sent me the May issue of the literary magazine Staffrider. The preceding issue had been banned, as often happened to Staffrider, because censorship was simply an everyday fact of South African life. The May 1978 magazine is a remarkable time capsule; it brims with energy, talent and exuberant assaults on the stolid stupidities so beloved of the old apartheid regime. Nothing like Staffrider exists in South Africa today – when writers publish as they please and where, at least at present, no official censors lurk. That Staffrider of forty years ago included poems, photographs, stories, drawings and drama, in several languages, by writers from Cape Town to Kimberley, present-day Mpumalanga to Dube, and Orlando to Alexandra townships. Among its contributors were Athol Fugard, Mafika Pascal Gwala, Douglas Livingstone, Wopko Jensma, Miriam Tlali, Victor Sello, Ahmed Essop, Lionel Abrahams, Mtutuzeli Matshoba – and Stephen Watson, who contributed four poems.
A challenging and enlightening literary life: Stephen Watson in the 1980s
One of these, ‘Poor’, gives a tantalising glimpse of where the ‘early’ Watson was headed:
Poor
The hungering eat me, I utter dust.
The unemployed who asked, I can’t recall.
The grief of fat women unable to breathe,
I can’t feel. I empty in their asking,
A fear, abstract, estranging in its gape.
These are good, strong lines. But they are also the sort of verse that he was soon to turn his back on. Watson moved from a Brechtian lyric style to something closer to W.H. Auden, who had also turned his back on Marxism and declared that ‘poetry makes nothing happen’.2 Watson came to believe, as did Auden, that the poem must stand alone, shorn of political gestures and become its own landscape.
Naturally enough, he and I disagreed about this. I believed that in societies like South Africa, where the state intruded into every moment of daily life, politics invaded poetry, whether we liked it or not. Tell that to the Russian poets, I said to Stephen; tell it to Boris Pasternak and Anna Akhmatova or to the Chilean Pablo Neruda. After all, Auden’s great obituary poem, in which he denied to poetry the power to change anything, was addressed to W.B. Yeats, who had been a very political poet. And so, of course, had been Auden himself – until he repented and said goodbye to all that. ‘It was a fond farewell,’ said Watson, ‘as it must be, when saying goodbye to something, or someone, who has seduced you so completely. Politics is the wrong sort of passion and poetry doesn’t need that.’
He wasn’t well disposed, either, towards those he identified as ‘liberal-minded’ poets.3 Stephen’s view of these misguided souls is to be found in an early essay, once part of a University of Cape Town MA thesis that he wrote when he was twenty-four. It was called ‘Recent White English South African Poetry and the Language of Liberalism’. Even the title has about it the air of the schoolmaster who comes across certain unfortunate words, scrawled in public places, and is not happy about it. The ‘liberal’ tradition of certain English-speaking poets, Watson believed, encouraged them to write thin elegies to hopelessness. This poetic anorexia had a ‘disastrous’ effect on some English poets in particular, because it turned their local landscape ‘sterile’, ‘suburban’ and ‘tawdry’. Even worse, their world view became ‘costive, stranded and impoverished’.4
Watson was splendid on the attack. Unless, of course, you happened to be a target. I can speak from experience because I found my poems, along with Mike Nicol’s, singled out for censure. A Watsonian rebuke, if you were on the receiving end of it, was more painful than a frontal assault by some lesser critic because the pain lasted longer and, no matter how much you disagreed with his judgement, you suspected that he might just be on to something.
I was still living in London when Stephen published this particular diatribe. It was some time later, around 1986, that the banning of my first novel was overlooked and I was able to return home, so I did so several times a year, usually to write something for one of the London papers. Stephen and I met again and we began a friendship that endured until his tragically early death at fifty-six. We would meet a few times a year, whenever I was in Cape Town, and we packed a lot into those encounters. I’d arrive from somewhere in Europe, wanting to talk about South Africa, and Stephen would want news of France, Italy or England – anywhere but South Africa.
Our chosen Cape Town watering hole was the terrace of the old Harbour House restaurant in Kalk Bay, not far from his home. We gossiped about writers we knew, books written or abandoned, and careers and catastrophes of friends and colleagues. Over the years, the politics of the country pained him more and more. In the 1990s, he was as sharply sceptical about the rainbow visions of the new South Africa as he had been about the cruel idiocies of the old apartheid regime. We continued to disagree about the place of politics in South African writing. I suggested that his attacks on politically engaged verse reminded me of the classic position of converts who, once having been seduced by false gods, undergo a Damascene conversion that leaves them so dazzled that they are blinded to the larger picture. I remember citing St Paul, who began as a Roman, energetically persecuting Christians for being Chris
tians, but once he joined the faith, he was soon persecuting Christians for not being Christian enough.
Watson enjoyed this; he had a wry sense of the ridiculous. Who would have thought, he remarked, that he had something in common with St Paul? As his wife Tanya pointed out when his A Writer’s Diary was reissued in 2015, Stephen could be very funny. Our differences were never resolved and we never expected them to be. The waves crashing on the rocks below the glass cockpit where we sat with our wine continued their incessant argument, but our disagreements were without that sort of noisy drama. We enjoyed our differences too much to let them spoil things.
Today, I think he may have had a point about the damage politics did when it seeped into South African verse. As Watson said, and he was among the first to say so, a lot of very bad ‘protest’ verse appeared in the 1970s and 1980s. On the other hand, if you were writing in South Africa in those years, the politics of the place – in so many ways – was the place. You might have decided to have nothing to do with it, but it had everything to do with you.
And here is another of those contradictions in Stephen Watson the writer. He fought hard to distance himself from our race-obsessed, often boring, if lethal, political passions, and yet he remained a rebel – with a cause. And the cause, I think, was to keep language in working order so that it might offer, at the very least, flashes of authenticity, moments of truth-telling, instead of the noisy lies to which South Africans were much given, along with bombast, humbug and a penchant for violence: familiar traits that he denounced and resisted in his work.
It would be wrong to imagine that Watson turned from politics to culture as a way of escape. He criticised Sydney Clouts for what he saw as his retreat into romanticism. Clouts chose inwardness, or internal immigration, as an escape from the mindless ugliness of everyday life. It was this route, Watson notes, that some German writers took when Hitler came to power. He agrees that there are periods when it might seem sensible to escape into the arts or into culture. He cites William Plomer, another South African poet who chose exile and who remarked that when ‘culture’ is regarded in your own country much as ‘a dog views a lamppost’, it may be best to take cover.5
Yet attempts to divorce yourself from the realities of the place that has made you who you are seldom succeed. Clouts might have managed better, Watson writes, in a calmer country than South Africa. But he came of ‘an unkind and frantic place’.6 Clouts was patient, erudite, naive and visionary: someone who wished ‘to remake the world – at least the South African world – not through the obvious means of social thinking, politics and collective action, but through poetry’.7 The implicit rebuke rings a little strangely – because something of the same might be said of Stephen Watson. He misses in Sydney Clouts a quality people often missed in Watson: his wonderfully wry wit. I’m thinking of Clouts back in 1968, then camped in a small shack in a Grahamstown back garden, ruefully telling me, ‘I’m marooned here, a bit like Gauguin – but without the maids.’
I think Watson undervalues Sydney Clouts, whom he calls a Romantic, much as he overvalues Guy Butler, whom he paints as a poetic patriot. I’ve always found that Clouts was simply more original and more interesting than Butler. However, my views and my prejudices are coloured by the fact that I knew them both. But it was never about where I felt Watson got it wrong. Whether looking carefully at our own writers, or at those others from Europe and America whom he made his own, there was no critic so fastidious or so enlightening. He paid writers the compliment of taking them seriously, even when he disliked their work. Whether looking at Albert Camus or Leonard Cohen or Sydney Clouts, Watson preserved and enriched a standard of criticism that we have too little of and which few come close to matching.
I think what most moves me when I read him, now that he is no longer here, is his boldness. Back in the heady 1970s, when so much was froth and fury, Watson preferred clarity and accuracy when he measured the strengths and weaknesses of South African writing. If he looked hard at white poets and found them rather thin, he looked as unsparingly at the new black poets, who began to publish in the 1970s. Oswald Mtshali’s Sounds of a Cowhide Drum and the powerful verse of Wally Serote certainly made a splash when they first emerged. But by the 1980s, Watson detects a falling off, and he is prepared to say so. The verse being produced at the time by several black poets, with signal exceptions like Chris van Wyk, he often finds banal and clichéd. Black may well be beautiful, but in a prescient remark Watson cautions that ‘Blackness’ does not make a programme for young poets any more than ‘Whiteness’.8
Such plain speaking did not always win him friends, but Watson never wavered. Of course, he would have preferred to be more ‘positive’. But these things counted – he did not simply deplore the dearth of good new poets, black and white – it distressed him. Good writers were sorely needed in what he called, all those decades ago in a phrase that echoes down the years, ‘the comprehensive lunatic asylum of present-day South Africa’.
Nor did he retreat or withdraw when under fire. He looked for ways to remedy the deficiencies, and the urge took him beyond his academic day job of teaching literature, towards aiding and abetting fledgling writers. It is very largely to Stephen that the quality of the writing programme at the University of Cape Town must be attributed. Those lucky enough to have had him as a tutor testify to his gifts. He was exceptionally good at helping writers to begin mastering their craft. He told me, more than once, how much time it took from his own work, but when I asked why he went on with it, he said, ‘It’s something I feel I need to do.’
Even so, I think it cost him a good deal. Stephen Watson had only just taken up his first post as a university lecturer, in the 1980s, when his disillusion with what he had done almost laid him low. With his usual frankness, he went on to record his feelings in an essay. The university, once a place of open-ended debate, of ‘intellectual daring and liberty’, had metamorphosed into a Tower of Babel where, he said, contending ideologies clashed by night and day and where the vocations of teaching or learning were seen, increasingly, as ‘nostalgic fancies of yesteryear’. Those who had stood once for the freedom of the mind had gone the other way, displaying ‘a moral and political frivolity’ that he found scandalous. It was well and good to attack the apartheid regime, but the attackers too often squandered their energies by also aiming their fire at anyone who disagreed with their own fixed orthodoxies.
Published three decades ago in his Selected Essays, 1980–1990, this polemic still packs a punch, and it is alarmingly pertinent to the witch-hunts that today disfigure the campuses of South African universities. Watson’s refusal to kowtow to self-righteous orthodoxies drew fire from politically subservient observers who called him a variety of names, among which elitist, reactionary and bourgeois were both the politest and the least accurate. He did not live to see the recent troubles on the campus of his old university and others, where libraries have been torched, teachers harassed, and paintings stripped from the walls and hidden away until certified inquisitors decide which images are fit to see the light of day. Then again, I don’t think he would have been surprised.
If I wanted to know what Stephen Watson believed, I’d turn to ‘Poetry and Absence’, an essay that stands as his manifesto, because so much of the man himself is in the title. In exploring why some writers matter and why solitude is at the heart of their art, he moves, among others, from C.P. Cavafy, Joseph Conrad and Samuel Beckett to Czesław Miłosz, who survived the Nazi and Communist oppression of his native Poland and whom Watson admired this side of idolatry for his belief that a creative artist’s calling is to stand for freedom and to resist the unbridled power of those who want to redefine what words mean. In each of these writers, Watson finds truth and transparency but also helpful confessions of failure.
‘Poetry and Absence’ is a testament to the values he held dear. All the Watsonian landmarks are here, linked by the common theme he looks for in his models and mentors: the way in which an obsession with words, such a
frail, unreliable medium, has a way of turning writers into ‘special intimates of absence’. His journey, traced in this essay, takes in T.S. Eliot and Ernest Hemingway, invokes Franz Kafka, pauses at Harold Pinter, glances at Paul Celan, and rounds off with Carl Jung, Jorge Luis Borges, Kurt Vonnegut and Andrei Sinyavsky. Each is cited with point and purpose: never a litany but a series of life choices unfolding in a dazzling display of his range of reading and learning, always lightly worn.
In some ways, Watson’s true gift was to explore how it was that some South Africans – whites, in particular – found themselves to be exiles from what they loved and from the place they called home. I once said to him that I had felt homesick long before I ever left home, and he knew what I meant. In ‘Poetry and Absence’, he cites Dan Jacobson, an expatriate writer from Kimberley, whose short novels The Trap and A Dance in the Sun home in very precisely on the question of ‘home’ and what it means. Jacobson calls South Africans this ‘multi-tongued nation of nomads’ who, despite claims to the contrary, have never fully adapted to the country that they call home, a place that, in a stunningly perceptive phrase, he pictures as ‘this wide, sad land we mined and did not cultivate’.
The two particular qualities I admired in Watson were his refusal to surrender to political dogma and even less to sentimentality. He explores our very personal, home-grown disenchantment – a feeling as likely to strike on the slopes of Table Mountain as in some dreary supermarket car park and which envelopes us in a sadness that is our very own. If his feelings about South Africa were sometimes tinged with despair, it was what he did with his despair that made for remarkable work. However sharply he recoiled from what faced him, he never stopped trying to express what he saw and felt, in the only medium writers have at their disposal: a mess of words. It made him a master of melancholy.
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