Flame in the Snow

by Francis Galloway

  Why do you say in your letter you’re going to do this and then – “forgive me” – just do it! A little red spot of wine has fallen onto my letter, I’m sheltering from the thunder with the heavy red glass and the little castle is clean and tidy, and you’re right. Simone’s “imperturbably false voice” is singing in the background.

  Oh, child! I miss you. Last night I had another one of those relentless evenings with Jack, it was my fault – I was upset about the “court case” – don’t let anyone know about it, I don’t want Piet to hear that I’m upset, according to Jack that’s precisely what he’s trying to do. “Terrorise.”

  André, one can look back and relive, and do you know what I think the biggest secret was? That dark early Sunday morning, when you took me like that and left, do you know that in your letter you spoke about the secrets of Saturday, and forgot about Sunday! Does Nicolette also say secrets? I know “Lonely”, he’s good. And [M.] Vasalis, or something like that, forgive my Dutch.

  Soms als gij zwijgt en door de venster schouwt

  grijpt mij uw schoonheid als een wanhoop aan

  een wanhoop door geen troost te blussen

  niet door te spreken, niet door te kussen

  even groot als mijn bestaan en even oud.

  And later: “Dat gij daar zit, zo buiten mij geboren …” When you talk about “belonging to each other”, as if that’s different from being one another’s, I don’t know from a logical point of view what you mean, even less do I now understand your inscription in Sempre. Loving is actually the only way of owning. Do you know this Walt Whitman? (Beautiful old Walt Whitman, with your beard full of butterflies …)

  I mind how once we lay such a transparent summer morning,

  How you settled your head athwart my hips and gently turn’d over upon me,

  And parted the shirt from my bosom-bare,

  and plunged your tongue to my bare-stript heart,

  And reached till you felt my beard, and reached till you held my feet.

  Liefsteling, there is so much that I would like to do with you without looking back, but one also has to live with reality. Still, it is nice to dream about the [?] mountains and the sluggish old Limpopo at night and we would lie there so lost in that beautiful old world.

  It’s going well with the leucodendron. It doesn’t get much attention. Little chick is lonely. It’s going well with me, I greet you with love with tenderness with longing,

  Cocoon.

  You don’t phone. Mrs Oxley is out. Lay for two hours thinking of you and missing you and wondering …

  The loss of the moesie-child happened after exactly one day: Strange! Perhaps disappeared temporarily because of the upset. Man, I miss you so terribly much; hope you aren’t horribly frustrated over there because of the phone call: I am! Night, beautiful man, night, and just sleep with me tonight.

  Your Ingrid.

  I’ve got Walt Whitman’s Complete Works. (Or as Breytie [Breyten Breytenbach] would say, I have a golden moon!)

  {What’s happened to those black-and-white photos? And when are the copies coming? THE WORD LAST!}

  Grahamstown

  Friday morning, 9 August 1963

  Darling, you, cocoon,

  It’s still early, with watery sun and an agitated wind that blows and comes after one, shredding your insides like an old newspaper that’s blown against a bush.

  I made a tape for you yesterday afternoon but it was just too late for the post; this means you’ll receive this letter and the tape at the same time (the latter at “Castella” when you get home). It’s not meant to be excessive. God, what I do give you or can give is already so little. I just want to talk with you a little so I can compose myself. Yesterday was another of those upsetting days. First there was the fact that I had to look after Anton the whole afternoon, from two to six, while I already had more work on my plate than I could deal with. (And if I resist then I’m apparently “not prepared to do my fair share”.) I’m always happy to look after him; he and I love each other so much. But when it gets forced on me and I have to work, it leaves me feeling disheartened.

  And then yesterday evening it was “story night” at the drama club – which (despite my sarcastic conjuring of spectres on the tape) actually went very well. I went alone. Estelle didn’t really “care” to go, whether or not I was one of the people reading. In itself this was of course a mere trifle, but it just made me think again: God, we have almost nothing to bind us, never did, although this was easier to camouflage in the past. Not any more. She shows no interest in anything I do; I, in my turn, show no interest at all when she comes home and tells me what the librarian said or what Mrs X said in reply. When I – ecstatically tired – told her the novel was finally done (now, after nine months), she said: “Oh. Nice.” I want no “fuss”. That would be even more loathsome than neutrality. It’s just that there’s a total, complete inability to share anything! And this must now go on and on. Ingrid, Ingrid, I don’t know what to think any more. I can hardly think at all, in fact. I’m so tired of everything. I just want to rest somewhere, find some quiet, where I can love, and work. How does one just “carry on” – “from day to day / till the last syllable of recorded time”?

  Oh God, child, I love you so much. I came back to Grahamstown and thought it might not be too presumptuous to expect happiness; the love has burnt itself out – but maybe we could at least continue with a kind of “agreement”, especially since I can take refuge in my work. But now even my work has to cave in under the pressure of something as banal as child-minding? It’s ridiculous. Humanity is not exactly something God can be proud of.

  Is it really so wrong to ask for just a little pure love, some heart and understanding, a little sharing of things with someone, the trust of eyes and hands, the assurance of a hungry young body?

  I shouldn’t actually post this letter. I shouldn’t upset you too. You already have so much to bear. What right on God’s earth do I have first to bring you some happiness and then to break it down – and then to come complaining to you about how unhappy I am? Forgive me, darling. It’s just that – in this morning’s mad wind – I arrived at a place where I no longer know what to do.

  Thank you for your beautiful poem. Did it just arise spontaneously – or did you start working on it, almost as a premonition, some time ago? It’s so well-finished; with its contrast between “late / April” (which tells us more than it does the “reader”, who’s looking in from the outside; because it was late in April, that time) with its autumn, its dying leaves – and the blossoms of “tomorrow”; the double meaning of that beautiful, sorrowful “blood”; the phrase “your seed spilt on the ground” that becomes “our un / refined seed”. Very lovely. And ter-ri-bly sad. But above all, beautiful.

  In these few weeks I myself have been thinking a lot about our child, our little girl, Heloïse or Deirdre.

  By the way, on the tape I expressed some doubt about your title “Us”; but I’ve increasingly come to realise how perfectly it does in fact work. Precisely because the “you” dominates at first and the “I” is detectable only through her voice, until the third stanza says it outright: “us” – and it breaks up immediately afterwards into “you” and “I”.

  Child, my whistle, my song, my own: with everything that’s going on, and everything being so unpredictable, we still remain, now, us, and I love you, and it’s only the knowledge of your being there that still makes everything possible. “We are fellow actors in this comedy” – but we are not exactly blindfolded. And love remains full of light, caressing light.

  Write soon, my dearest cocoon. I would love to be able to crawl inside you and hide away there, and enable you to take shelter inside of me at the same time (“fade far away, dissolve, and quite forget”).

  soos ’n seeblom uit die water t’rugvou

  en sy eie moer word en sy eie

  donkerte, en louer, die kou buitewater

  weerstand bied, en twee-twee (binne toe)

  ritsslu
itend ín-paar.

  With all my love,

  Your André.

  Grahamstown

  Monday afternoon, 12 August 1963

  Little cocoon, little delicous, little you,

  Thank you for your dearest, higgledy-piggledy letter of this morning, written from all four corners of the earth, so to speak (last Wednesday night before I phoned). I want to say thank you, just for the hell of it.

  I feel so guilty about my mad, bad-tempered, downhearted letter; I should never have posted it. It’s not right for me to make you unhappy, or make you even more unhappy. In the meantime my carousel has at least turned a little. I’m feeling more restful and quiet again, and glad about the things we do at least have. Something like Han Suyin says in The Mountain is Young (Do you know her? At times nicely poetic, but also often sentimental; a bit of a crescent moon) –

  I had the feeling from the first day I met you, that we were setting out on a journey together. I didn’t ask whether it would be long or short, and certainly I did not know how far together we would go. But dreary it would never be, and no one else did I want for a companion. And that it would last till death is far too much to ask. It was enough that I had found you, to walk with, a little moment or a long time. And all my life I would love you for this being together a while.

  This, every word, is what I want to say, myself.

  I have been going around all weekend humming bits of that feeble little tune Simone loved singing so much, the one the two of you sang together that time. Oh, God, it’s the little things that claw at one most deeply!

  You ask so many questions in your letter! – what I mean by “belong to each other” and “be each other’s”. Difficult to paraphrase but there is a difference. “Belong” is possessive, smotheringly proprietary, material – like a book that belongs to me (the physical book); the book’s content can be mine. “A state of being” – as against “a state of having”. “Be each other’s” is more pure, fuller, more complete, and lasting. See?

  And you say loving is indeed having. No! Loving is: wanting to have: want to have, the always-reaching, always-exploring of the land that is yours but which can never lie before you, mapped and complete. It’s a quest, a journey of discovery. That’s what I meant in Sempre when I said I want to love you; have you, or possess, I can’t. You’re free, ungraspable – and invaluable. But now it easily becomes a play with words (“the stench of burnt offering”!).

  The other things in your letter:

  I’m sending your beautiful poem to Bartho for 60 (he is in charge of No 2 as well); I will keep the title as “Us” (it’s better than “So”). I shall leave the dedication out, as per your request: we know, after all. (Who doesn’t know?!)

  The photo-prints – I have been too broke to have them done. But I’ll send them away promptly.

  The virginal white photos – I have added nothing further to the film and therefore can’t yet do the prints.

  Nicolette’s “secrets”. Naturally. (When will I get her back?!!!!!)

  What your friend says, about your love poems that are too sensitive: not so. They are delicate, like gossamer, a few of them far more tender than anything in Eybers. But never overly so. That’s precisely what makes them so meaningful for me: that the words remain so finely balanced.

  Unfortunately Bartho has written to say it’s too late to change the order of poems, as the reprint has already been done. (They moved very fast, it seems to me.) I will immediately ask him about copies for critics. Rob has received a copy (he’s one of the prize judges).

  Thank you for the nostalgic drop of red wine. For me, red wine will always, always be you. From the very first night, remember? (I still remember how I spent almost half the night leaning against the wall with a heavy head, down-in-the-mouth and full of longing, hearing you go to the bathroom every so often –)

  I’m glad to hear our leucodendron’s doing well. And the poor lonely little chick! But the papie is also lonely and longs “for cosmos and coherence”, and I so badly want to make a moesie-girl who won’t again be naughty and choose the drain over your tiny inner chamber.

  One of these days I want to start a novella, which begins with the arts ball where you were the deer and came home wearing only your little horns. And then connect that with the old Sumerian ritual at their fertility feast: beautiful young people play the roles of gods and then take poison afterwards – because anyone who has once been incarnated a god, may not continue to live as a human. And then connect that to the Eastern myth about the god of love who assumes material form only when two lovers embrace. It must be a vortex of movement, the whole story – start off almost incomprehensibly like the chaos of Genesis, and then become more luminous and clear, and it must all be us, eventually becoming very chaste and still, in a holy way. It’s still just an idea, a rhythmically sensory idea; perhaps it will take a long while before it becomes word or flesh. But it will come. I feel it rumbling.

  Please make me a tape in which you only read poems. Éluard, [N.P. Van Wyk] Louw, your own, Van Schagen, Whitman, anything. Will you? I’ll send you some money.

  (I received royalties for Sempre! – sold almost 700 in the first two weeks.)

  Lovely, gorgeous child – I say goodbye with the glowing respect that runs in me like an attuned current, with everything I have in love (“we haven’t got anything in asparagus” refers!) “all I have done is yours, all I have to do is yours, being part in all I have, devoted yours”.

  Your André. {so at-one are you & I that I tried to write “André” with a J!}

  Tuesday, 13 August 1963

  Darling my André,

  Thank you for your wild letter of yesterday and your urgent little tape – I wrote to you last night and again this morning on the way to work, soaked through in the rain, it rained into my bag and onto my letter too, and now I am writing again, here in a café close to the Press, having coffee, smoking a cigarette, and trying to be reflective and considered – today’s reading is Lord, search my heart. Because while I love you, André, and would accept you with joy if you managed to come back to me, it would be a fiasco if I came to Grahamstown, it would mean the end of your marriage, because then Estelle would definitely not stay with you, and what about your father? Also, it would encourage Piet to go ahead with his plan, which might then also have the same consequences if it becomes public. The bald facts, which we both know so well, but which we try to skirt around; why not first go and speak to your mother – maybe she already knows?

  Oh, child, I so badly want to comfort you, and I wish I had an answer, but what? And I believe that you love me, and that does make me happy. You say (naturally) that you don’t actually want to hope that “everything between me and Jack” will “come right”. Whatever that might mean – I don’t know. Of course, I am still attached to Jack, but in a destructive way – on Saturday night I had such a fight with him again that I had to take some pills and fell asleep with a burning cigarette in my hand – irresponsible! As you say, it’s caving in. So I doubt far more than before whether it will ever “come right”. Now that, on top of everything, in the midst of our “work and play”, I am able to run away and sit on a rock for hours and imagine that you are there, and imagine, like last night after I heard your tape, a house in which we share a “natural life”. It’s all so difficult and complicated, and one must of course do the right thing and choose correctly in order to live in peace with oneself and others? Not that it looks to me as if there is much of a choice, and then, then it just gets more difficult. “Irascible”: plaything of your own vacillating emotions. I would that we could just have a CHANCE, just six months or a year, to live together, even if it’s just to get to know one another better, but on the other hand no one could know you better than I know you.

  My lovely good André, there is so much I want to pack into this letter, but there’s always a rush: in half an hour I have to go to the Press again. It’s so difficult even just to begin to say something, never mind having the c
ourage to write down just one true thing; there are so many facets. And I miss you so much, I am so grateful for you; and even though I forgot the cheque (thank you very much!) today, I’ll bring it tomorrow and buy a tape, it is after all better than a letter. And thank you for your phone call, I just don’t want you to be unhappy, or restless, although the tension has made even me so touchy this past week that I am constantly fighting with or wanting to fight with someone.

  You mustn’t blame old Bill de Klerk alone for “stories” – maybe it wasn’t actually his fault.

  And congratulations on Die Ambassadeur; I’ll be sending your MS tomorrow; I’d very much like more of Nicolette; congratulations creative, generous, tender man with your amazing enormous understanding and knowledge and insight and energy and organisational ability. I am reading (one comfort) your translation at the moment. Meticulously and systematically I am reading it, every word that you typed. Anne says it’s a pleasure having a copy like this. (Ten minutes, heavens, then I must leave for work.)

  Was delighted to hear your naughty little baby’s voice: I miss you both! Thank you, impractical, beloved as earth which always wishes to grow and gives strength for growth, for your suggestion to testify in court that we plan to marry. Won’t they perhaps think it a little irresponsible? “You must lie low.” We’ll see what happens. I don’t think it’ll reach that point. You can mention it to Bartho, I’ll also write to him because he requested “Die Bok” [“The Buck”] for an anthology. And now I must have my coffee and stop: but I carry you with me to the Press and wherever I go; and let me know immediately please exactly how many moesies you have! This uncertainty is terrible, when I try to count until I fall asleep; slept with the teddy last night. Send me the revised MS. I promise to return it soon.