Until then: I miss you. Ezra Pound will have to help me say what I feel:
For my surrounding air has a new lightness;
Slight are her arms, yet they have bound me straitly
And left me cloaked as with a gauze of ether,
As with sweet leaves; as with subtle clearness.
Oh, I have picked up magic in her nearness
To sheathe me half in half the things that sheathe her.
And now our ritual to keep the “little pentecostal flame” going, a radiant greeting to all your parts – the abundant, honest desire of your small body; the quiet in your eyes, breasts and legs; the kiss of your hands and hair; and the smile of your mouth and your “fugitive little footpath”. I want to conjure everything into a new whole, as all the colours of the spectrum together become radiant and white with transparent light.
With love,
Your André.
Potchefstroom
Saturday, 6 July 1963
My one and only,
Today is not a writing day. Not for want of desire, because then I’d never do anything but write to you. But today is one of those days when everything is simultaneously so very subtle and so unutterably confused, that words fail to achieve any form. Still, here I am, writing, from a kind of heart’s necessity; this is because I hope, at least, that the the mere process of conversing with you – as in the past, on similar occasions – will make things peaceable again.
Don’t read anything ominous into this! All I’m trying to say is that my longing, and my need to see you, are now so acute that I’m no longer satisfied with anything else.
I received your lovely, depressed letter this morning. Perhaps it’s precisely the awareness of your desperate loneliness that’s making me so restless. That, and the frustration of my two-hour attempt this morning to make you a tape. But the machine – an enormous stereo apparatus in the psychology laboratory – simply refused to produce anything decent; my voice sounds so soft and faint on the tape that I have no choice but to wait until next week Wednesday, when I get back home. (Meanwhile, please write to me there – in Grahamstown – okay?)
About your – our – agony, or “distress” in recent times, one should perhaps seek consolation in [Søren] Kierkegaard: “Despair is one of the maladies of which it can be said that it is the greatest misfortune not to have known it ... because the awareness of the spirit can never be achieved but through despair.” And this experience is impossible on a purely theoretical plane. Schwarz (he of The Psychology of Sex) says at the start of his book: “One must suffer the laws of things, not only observe them.”
This is so precious and enriching in its own right that one doesn’t want – or dare – to be without it. To quote Schwarz one last time: “Essential problems of life permit of no solution.” I think this is humanity’s great blind spot, its error: why do people want ready-made solutions? They’re not necessary; they deny the irrational core of life. Indeed, life is not a calculation that one devises in order to arrive at an answer, where you can write Q.E.D.! (Even Francois in Lobola very nearly did this – in the book’s first impression, anyway!) Life is simply there to be lived (and felt). Once one accepts this certainty, then one has made good progress en route to the vague place called “happiness”. (Moreover, people seek “happiness” too abstractly, too distantly, and also too far in the future. It actually lies here: here in the yearning and the never-never fulfilment of love; it lies in your tired, happy smile when you, filled with secrets, fall asleep next to me; it lies even in this great longing of ours now that our little flame burns alone between us without its being physically renewed every day – like the eternal flame under the Arc de Triomphe. It’s in any case bright enough to keep burning between us in our away-from-each-other state.)
Thank you for your provisional comments on the MS. I think your objections to Erika will fall away when you see her “in action” in relation to the ambassador. And Nicolette? I’m going to rewrite quite a lot – and I look forward to discussing this with you in ten days’ time (do you realise, just ten days!).
By the way, I could hardly conceal my laughter (and embarrassment) on Wednesday at Van Wyk Louw’s when he said: “Tell me, what is the sign that Nicolette sometimes makes? I didn’t quite get it.”
“The fica sign – against the Evil Eye, or just a challenge to the Unknown.”
“But what does it look like?”
And so I had no choice but to make the sign in his direction. (You know: when you stick your thumb through your middle and index finger!) I don’t think anyone else has ever made this gesture in the face of the illustrious Louw!
Man … and, by the way: can you feel how the tristesse of this letter’s beginning has just vanished? I feel radiantly happy, so much that I almost can’t write fast enough … yesterday I bumped into Prof. T.T. Cloete, who has just returned from overseas. He lectures Afrikaans and Dutch literature here and is one of our finest critics. Only Rob is more or less his equal. (You might have read some of his work in Standpunte?) Anyway, in the course of our conversation, Die Blomblaar Is Requiem [The Petal Is a Requiem by Pieter Venter] came up – and naturally he also thinks it’s rubbish (although his judgement of certain writers is not as harsh as mine). I told him, just by the way, that he [Pieter Venter] used to be married to you.
“Goodness,” he said, “now one can more easily understand why they got divorced! Ingrid Jonker’s work is so lucid and polished.” Nice, isn’t it? And he said this purely on the basis of Ontvlugting. I then informed him about Rook en Oker – and I wouldn’t be surprised if he doesn’t prescribe the book here, at a later stage. In any case, he ordered a copy immediately.
Child, girl, little woman: I feel so proud when people say such lovely things about you. I’m so hell-bent in love with you. And be warned: when I get there, you’re going to say “Hell!” whether you like it or not.
On the beautiful tape you made, you said: “Why are people so afraid of passion? Why do they treat us like children?”
It’s true. I believe that the masses fear passion because it exposes them to the freedom and honesty of love. The masses feel safe only on well-trodden terrain, and love is terra incognita – “Ultima Thule”. And: children? Perhaps this is actually a compliment. Doesn’t the Bible say one must have the heart of a child to pass through the eye of a needle?
Against my will and best intentions, I must start saying goodbye, because the house is beginning to wake up from its afternoon nap and my short period of merciful solitude with you is over. But now I feel satisfied and happy and fulfilled, because all this time I’ve been – and am – so clearly aware of you. I hope the long weekend won’t be too dismal, my little angel. Make a few tapes (I’ll send a small cheque). And I’ll phone you soon. We might leave Jhb on Monday – but “everything is uncertain”: I’ll first have to see whether I can find a discreetly positioned telephone.
The Cape Cultural Circle: Okay, for your sake, then. I think I’ll be with you from 21–30 Sept. Alas too late for your birthday, but we can postpone the celebration just a little (you will in any case have your second birthday on the 23rd!).
I’m going to see if I can’t siphon off some of the money from the Huisgenoot articles to pay for your things at the Bantry Bay hotel. I find it just too awful that you should have to live without your stuff.
Out of curiosity: who’s the presumptuous (and mysterious!) “friend” who wanted to sleep with you and who had to make way for De Lima?! (“I appoint you with an appointment …”!)
Darling, dearest, smallest, loveliest: be sweet and light; I’m coming, and I miss you. I “sleep” with you far more than you might imagine!
With all my love,
André.
Are the little chick’s tail-feathers starting to grow again?
Castella
Monday, 8 July 1963
Darling of the letter and the phone call and Hout Bay and darling of Franschhoek, Castella and at Koos’s and lots more at Bill’s,
Thank you for your letter, which arrived out of the blue on that godforsaken family day, and the phone call that was such a struggle – we’ve had beautiful days here (as far as nature is concerned), and I’ve had to get out with Simone. Just after the phone call, went to Marjorie and them for a meal – she can be pretty venomous – sometimes. Jack says they’re jealous of me – now I think maybe they are! He told me about the house he would build me – my god! André! I almost cried.
Meanwhile, this quadrangle still provides a lot of entertainment. One remark by a well-meaning artist friend is as follows: “You cannot break up André and Estelle’s home and then go back to Jack, who is carrying on with a nineteen-year-old but maybe only for a screw.” Child, if this remark wasn’t good enough for the theatre one might lock oneself up in one’s flat and never dare come out again. My sense of humour wasn’t immediately accessible, and I was annoyed. But almost as funny was one of Ouma’s letters to an auntie (years ago): “A wool farmer, angered, called on my daughter …”
And then there’s Bill’s outrageous letter and of course one wants to laugh at it before rage and the sense of the dramatic gain the upper hand … If you need any further information about the Cilliers-Jonker family, you can go and find out about my mother at Valkenberg any time. “Mad from loneliness” and driven by the “small murderous world” …! But now I’m probably just bitter and every person probably just gets what they deserve, or so the Old Testament teaches us. The “item” concerning the letter to Bartho I’ve mentioned to M., so that Cape Town can get it properly wrought and welded and embellished tomorrow, after that I spake not a word, and went off to read a mysterious book. Darling André, do I sound bitter? But you will probably understand. Until you arrive, I’m going to stay here in my flat and be good. You say that my last letter was “despondent” but I’m sure there’s at least one you didn’t receive … probably only arrived after you left. I’m still reading Sempre.
All that bothers me of course is us. But I find Pot better. Admit that I’ve already been spoilt by the lovely Pot-Pourri! Wrote you something about Die Ongedurige Kind (bravo!) in the letter you didn’t get. As for Rook en Oker, well that heart attack was of course amusing to me at the time. A thing like that would of course happen to my book. Glad you found comfort in the little tape. Sometimes I chat to you on our “home tape” because “between stone and stone, and between human and human / how terrible, God, the silence and the reticence”.
Do you know, darling (my handwriting really does look just like yours now!), sometimes (today) I think like Van Wyk that “die dood is mooi”. As in the past, one beauty, familiarity – know, forgive, accept. But that’s when I get SCARED, let’s get a drink and talk, people, have courage, evil will change into good … (!!!) And for me those (people) are so lekker-Afrikaans. Also don’t want to think any more. When you hear from me again, it will be my own body.
Ingrid.
PS: Which suddenly makes me think of these rather good lines from [Pieter] Venter (and inspired by the paranoia that every good artist must have and which you and I, darling person, can now develop beautifully!):
My lords, drink of me, no spoon is necessary.
The trial will continue
and end
like a scorpion tail
There will be further evidence later.
And so to bed. As you say in your letter, one always thinks (it’s such a covert, guilty thought, always, in every experience, almost immediately, in “literary” terms). I know this, of course. The corpse isn’t even cold yet, then … It would be disgusting, should we write a poem: Poetry, the Vulture …? The desolate, lonely walking away of a person, the genuine grief about it, and at the same time THE THING. How I laughed, my André, when you quote Van Wyk Louw: “die drel trek oral saam …” Went and read the poem … But it’s probably not something to feel guilty about, just part of an inevitable self-awareness.
Till Wednesday, then.
God bless, God bless.
I.
Tuesday: Better this morning! This dew-ripe innocent grey dawn!
IJ.
PPS: Tomorrow back in the deafening machinery.
{Simone has neatly sealed all my airmail envelopes. Perhaps just as effective, without anything inside.}
Grahamstown
Tuesday, 23 July 1963
My little darling,
Just two days – and already I’m caught up in the unavoidable daily business of living, the river that like the proverbial “show” simply must go on (To where? Until when? And why? Ours is not to reason why). When our little paragraph gets written one day, our three months might well look like no more than a sentence in parenthesis – but it’ll be one of the most meaningful sentences of all, bringing with it a new dimension and changing the course and meaning of that paragraph forever.
Ironic: the ambassador also only had three months! Or is it actually true that three is a kind of holy number? And holiness, say the exegetes, means something like “seclusion”. Or, perhaps: exception. In which case our three months were precisely that: a small piece that splits off from predictable time (“Render us immortal for a single hour”!).
As to what lies ahead, I know nothing and I dare not hope or predict anything. One has to become quite humble in one’s predictions! Still, I don’t want to think about the future as empty – that would be too defeatist, in advance. Rather, then, welcome the kind of tristesse upon which Françoise Sagan based her novel. By the way, do you know the Éluard poem from which the title Bonjour Tristesse is taken? It reads – translated very poorly – like this:
Vaarwel tristesse
Gegroet tristesse
Jy is geskryf in die lyne van die uitspansel
Jy is geskryf in die oë wat ek liefhet
Jy is nie geheel-en-al misère nie
Want die armste lippe verraai jou
Met ’n glimlag
Gegroet tristesse
Liefde van die geliefde liggame
Mag van die liefde
Wie se beminlikheid orentkom
Soos ’n monster sonder liggaam
Ontnugterde hoof
Tristesse skone aangesig.
[Farewell tristesse
Hello tristesse
You are written in the lines of the heavens
You are written in the eyes I love
You are not poverty absolutely
The poorest lips betray you
With a smile
Greetings tristesse
Love of beloved bodies
Power of love
Whose lovableness arises
Like a bodiless monster
Disillusioned head
Sadness beautiful face.]
At the moment everything remains static; anything is possible – but nothing is an accomplished fact, and nothing, above all, is certain. There is a mass of work to be done (sometimes it’s a mercy to be busy), increasing financial worries, and the daily to-do with this, that and the other. But in between, actually a quiet background to all of this, are the things that mean so incalculably much: your voice, your eyes and hands, your restfulness in the white nightdress – ready for anything, timid, certain, undiscovered earth, suspected little paradise, unconditionally full of love; there is, also, Simone’s imperturbably false voice singing in the background; early daylight through a crack in the bright yellow curtains; the abstracted gaze in your eyes when you look out over the sea from a hotel room; even the manner in which you say “God” –! The tears, and the stirring of your body against mine, your breath, the swish of your hair against my face.
Little child, my own little child, it’s true: “two who once have lain together / are forever almost one”. I wander forth and carry you with me in my blood. And I worry about your loneliness in that empty little castle at night, not to mention your grey working day. I know well, very well, that everything I have inflicted upon you in this process, and in everything, will always remain with me as an immediate sense of distress and an
inescapable destiny.
But you, you: that’s not something one can say thank you for, little Cocoon; it’s something for which one must be thankful: a lasting condition. But not passively – positive, creative, even though it’s never without a little nostalgia. (Like [Édith] Piaf’s “Milord” song in El Picador –! Such a neverending “good morning fiiiiish” to light and life, which in future I will “recognise at first sight”.) A sort of sustained birth-rebirth because we loved each other and were together – and, because we were: are.
Therefore: in the uncertainty of the future, in light as well as dark, in the daily trifles and the few joys, in doubt and in the moments of recognition in between – in everything you are mine, and always, and in everything, I love you. The epigraph I wrote at the front of Sempre must now become true: “Allow me to experience love even though I may not possess it.”
Unlike your ouma, I cannot pray for you. But I can try to live so that life itself is a kind of prayer, a reflection, a kind of thankfulness, love.
Protect yourself, precious, remain pure, stay radiant, keep on being yourself – girl, child, and woman, shamelessly one and the same.
Let me know immediately if we’re going to have a baby.
Look after your little chick.
Give Simone a kiss from me.
Love me. And try to forgive me for what I’ve had to inflict upon you without ever wanting to do anything but make you happy. I love you.
Still,
Your André.
Friday, 26 July 1963
WRITERS PRAYER LORD MAKE US BREAD FROM THE STONES LOVE = COCOON
{Answer. 27/7: Writer’s prayer or poet’s? Remember the invisible umbilical cord that can never be severed. Love. André.}
Castella
Sunday night, 28 July 1963
André darling,
A week of a thousand different emotions – or different facets of the same emotion, a week of “herinnering, o pragtige skip …” A morning at 7:30 in the Gardens, still misty, darling child, fresh, lovely, a pool of naked water before the Gallery, and a rebellious belief that “everything will be all right” whatever happens, and a stubborn belief in goodness and in the “benevolence” of your body. Really only began on Wednesday morning to heave a sigh after the knockout blow – Uys once said: “Oh well, now anything can happen, M. gave me the death blow.” Simple memories, the handling of a book, or your woollen jersey (the hairy one) by my head when I go to sleep and wake up, like that second day. And all those crazy small things will probably be nothing more than an accent on a letter in our little sentence, won’t they?
Flame in the Snow Page 13