Well, it was, of course, very hurtful to his artistic pneuma to be spoken to like that by those advertising people, and so he had to go to the library and trace a pair of smart trousers, also, out of an overseas magazine with tissue-paper. Endless trouble, they gave him.
That (even though it did not mean much to us) was still not the sort of thing we wanted to hear from Diederick Kleynhans about the life he had led, along with other artists, in Johannesburg. He had said nothing, as far as we could understand, about a den, so far. Nothing – as far as we could follow – about a couple of painted Jezebels. We started wondering if Diederick Kleynhans’s real trouble wasn’t, perhaps, that he hadn’t got into the right sort of artistic circles. It looked like Dominee Welthagen was more enlightened that way. Gysbert van Tonder was the first to hint about it, quite openly.
“It looks to me, Diederick,” Gysbert van Tonder said, “that you wasted your time not only in mixing paints, but in other ways, also. If you ask me, well, that’s what I think.”
Diederick Kleynhans looked somewhat surprised.
“Well, we also had to, at art school,” he said, “study things like tempera and water-colour washes and –”
“That’s what I mean,” Gysbert van Tonder said, giving Diederick Kleynhans a man-to-man sort of look, “they never let you into the really plain part of it, did they? It was all just high-sounding things you learnt. I mean, after your studies were over for the afternoon, and you had wiped as much paint as you could get off yourself with paraffin and sand – I’ve also done a bit of painting around the farm; like a door or a roof, say – and after you’d put the lid back onto the tin of paint, did you then go and spend the night in some low place? In some disgraceful haunt, like what Dominee Welthagen says play-actors frequent?”
Oh, that? Diederick Kleynhans asked. Why, yes, indeed, he said, the place he went to each night, after his day’s work was done, was pretty low. If any of us were to have seen it we would have been quite shocked, he felt. Like the way the ceiling was falling down in one corner, and the landlord not prepared to do anything about it. And the flies that would come in, through the municipal mule stables being just across the way.
And how he had to keep his window shut, also, he said, against the dagga-smoke that hung about the place like a mist on account of the proximity of the ricksha yard. Where he stayed was not only low, Diederick Kleynhans said, it was actually a blot on the city of Johannesburg. But that was all he could afford in the matter of rent.
“My finances were also low,” he said. “At a low ebb, ha-ha.”
Ha-ha, several of us said, too, then, our laughter sounding almost as tired as Diederick Kleynhans’s own laughter.
But he was glad, Diederick Kleynhans proceeded, that Dominee Welthagen was exposing from the pulpit the impropriety of the way artists lived in a big city. He only hoped it would do some good. The kind of life artists led was a public scandal and of a sort that must bring a blush to the cheek of innocence.
“Oh, yes, and I almost forgot,” Diederick Kleynhans added. “A lot of the floorboards were also loose.”
Well, we knew, of course, that Dominee Welthagen hadn’t meant about artists leading loose lives quite in that sense.
And from how he spoke was one way in which we realised that Diederick Kleynhans had come back home a failure. The other way we knew it was from how he looked and how he was dressed. For we had known many young men from this part of the Marico who had gone to the big city to seek their fortunes and, having achieved success, had returned to the Dwarsberge for a brief visit, just so as to have a bit of a look round before setting out again to make still more of a success of their lives in some great city, concrete-paved, where neon lights winked.
There was Prinsloo du Toit, for instance, with his hair slicked back with Haircream and with the striped socks above his pointed patentleather shoes held up by suspenders. You could actually see the suspenders each time Prinsloo du Toit changed his position in the riempies chair and pulled his neatly-creased trouser-legs up high.
Why, if Diederick Kleynhans wanted a model for a smart pair of trousers to draw from, there would have been Prinsloo du Toit’s trousers right away. Diederick Kleynhans wouldn’t have needed to go to the Public Library with a sheet of tissue-paper in his wallet and asking for an overseas magazine. And what was more, with all his success Prinsloo du Toit was amazingly modest about it all. If you asked him what he was actually doing in the great city, he would as likely as not just smile diffidently and puff a few more times at his cigar. It took quite a deal of straight-out questioning to get Prinsloo du Toit to confess that he had indeed in a few short years progressed as high as first-grade ganger on the railways.
Similarly, there was Frikkie Pienaar. Even if it wasn’t for his talking noticeably louder than we had known him to talk in the old days, when he was still just a Marico farm-boy, there were other ways in which Frikkie Pienaar had success written all over him, on the occasion of his paying a flying visit to the Bushveld during his three weeks’ leave from the Consolidated Goldfields mine where he was a rising young cocopan conductor. Just one way how you could see that Frikkie Pienaar had pulled it off was in his producing from his coat-sleeve, at intervals, a large white handkerchief with which he flicked at specks of cow-dung from the voorkamer floor that had landed on his pants.
And there were others like Prinsloo du Toit and Frikkie Pienaar. And so we knew the signs of success pretty well. And Diederick Kleynhans had none of those signs on him. For one thing, he wasn’t slick and clean-shaven. Indeed, his beard was longer and more matted than almost any Bushveld farmer’s you could think of. And his hair was wild: there was no Haircream on it, smelling beautiful. And so far he was from flicking specks of cow-dung from his pants with a white handkerchief, why, he looked just about like he had no handkerchief at all – the way he would at times, while talking, pass, across the lower portion of his face, the sleeve of a corduroy jacket of a style and pattern that had long ago ceased being worn in even the more mountainous areas of the Dwarsberge.
Just from all that we could see that Diederick Kleynhans could not have made much of a success of his career as an artist. Another thing, also, was that he didn’t talk loud. For we liked young men, when they came back to the Marico from the city, to talk loud. It showed they had got on.
We felt sorry for Diederick Kleynhans, of course. After all, he was no longer as young as he might be. And to think of all those years that he had wasted in the city. Good Lord, just look at Koos Pretorius. Koos Pretorius had been in the same class with Diederick Kleynhans, sitting at the same desk with him. And Koos Pretorius, just because he had had no nonsensical ideas about himself, was today a deacon. A thought like that must be pretty galling to Diederick Kleynhans, all right – the thought of what he had missed.
After a long silence, young Vermaak, the schoolmaster, spoke.
“Kleynhans … Diederick Kleyhans,” the schoolmaster said. “It’s not you that’s been writing those poems in the Tydskrif is it? You’re not that Diederick Kleynhans, are you?”
The note of admiration in young Vermaak’s voice was unmistakable.
“Yes,” Diederick Kleynhans said. “That’s me, all right. You see, the schoolmaster that turned my head didn’t say only that I was good at drawing. He also said I was good at writing composition. And I only hope you don’t go and give any youngsters in your class silly ideas, also. That schoolmaster should have looked, not at my drawings but at my hands. And I still believe I’ve got as good a pair of hands for holding a plough as anybody sitting here in this voorkamer.”
Diederick Kleynhans suddenly did not sound tired, anymore.
Shopkeeper in his store at Ramoutsa, Bechuanaland (Botswana). January 1966
Cemetery, Nietverdiend. December 1964
Herman Charles Bosman was born near Cape Town in 1905, but spent most of his life in the Transvaal. In 1926 he was posted as a novice teacher to a farm school in the Marico District. His spell at the school was cut
short when, during a vacation to the family home in Johannesburg, he shot and killed his stepbrother. Initially sentenced to hang, his sentence was commuted to life imprisonment and he was eventually paroled in 1930, having served four years.
After a period working as a journalist in London, he returned to South Africa in 1940 and was thereafter employed on various magazines and newspapers. Jacaranda in the Night, a novel, and a collection of Oom Schalk Lourens stories, Mafeking Road, both appeared in 1947. His gaol memoir, Cold Stone Jug, followed in 1949. A year later he returned to the Marico, the region that had made him famous, in a series of sketches written weekly for The Forum under the rubric “In die Voorkamer”. At the time he was a proofreader on the Sunday Express and working on Willemsdorp (published only posthumously in 1977). Bosman died in 1951.
A selection of the Voorkamer sketches first reappeared (after their initial publication in The Forum in 1950 and 1951) in Jurie Steyn’s Post Office and A Bekkersdal Marathon (both 1971), edited by Lionel Abrahams, but the entire sequence was printed for the first time, unexpurgated and in the original order, as Idle Talk: Voorkamer Stories I (1999) and Homecoming: Voorkamer Stories II (2005), edited by Craig MacKenzie for the Anniversary Edition. The Voorkamer stories appear here in one volume – and also in their entirety and in sequence – for the first time.
Craig MacKenzie has edited 10 volumes of Bosman’s stories, seven of which were part of the Anniversary Edition of Bosman’s works, a project that he undertook with Stephen Gray between 1997 and 2005. He is Professor of English at the University of Johannesburg.
David Goldblatt was born in Randfontein in 1930, attended Krugersdorp High School and later studied part-time to obtain his B Com degree. At age 33 he started to work as a professional photographer. His first book was On the Mines (1972), with Nadine Gordimer, and was followed by Some Afrikaners Photographed (1975); thereafter he went on to establish himself as the pre-eminent photographer of South African people, structures and landscapes. In 1964 he went on the Bosman trail, visiting the Marico and photographing people and places Bosman knew in the 1920s, which he published as “Bosman’s Bosveld” in The S. A. Tatler in February 1965 (reproduced in The Illustrated Bosman, 1985). Previously unpublished items from that collection are used here. Goldblatt’s photographic images also adorn the covers of nine of the 14-volume Anniversary Edition of Herman Charles Bosman.
The end
First published in this form in 2011 by Human & Rousseau,
Human & Rousseau,
an imprint of NB Publishers,
a division of Media24 Boeke (Pty) Ltd,
40 Heerengracht, Cape Town, South Africa
PO Box 6525, Roggebaai, 8012, South Africa
www.humanrousseau.com
Copyright © 2011 by the estate of Herman Charles Bosman
All rights reserved.
No part of this electronic book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including photocopying and recording, or by any other information storage or retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher.
This selection and preface © Craig MacKenzie 2011
Cover image and photographs in the text © David Goldblatt 2011
Cover photograph by David Goldblatt:
The remains of Jurie Prinsloo’s post office and voorkamer,
between Nietverdiend and Abjaterskop at the side of the
1964
Frontispiece photograph by David Goldblatt:
The barn in which Herman Charles Bosman and John
Callaghan taught school. The Haasbroek farm,
Heimweeberg, Nietverdiend. 1964
Epub conversion by Trace Digital Services
Available in print:
First edition, first impression 2011
ISBN: 978-0-7981-5298-3
Epub edition:
First edition 2013
ISBN: 978-0-9781-5595-3 (epub)
Mobi edition:
First edition 2013
ISBN: 978-0-7981-6152-7 (mobi)
The Complete Voorkamer Stories Page 49