Because, delightful, essential one: I am yours, you mine, we are one flesh and one future. If I didn’t have this to believe in, there wouldn’t be anything left for me.
Tomorrow it’s back to Johannesburg again for a few days, until Thursday morning. I’ll be seeing all my friends, chatting with everyone, helping to plan Orgie’s typography, and talking about you a lot. Bartho said he wants to start the reprint of Rook en Oker soon – with the same setting and paper, but in a larger format – like Adam Small’s. And then he’ll do the revised arrangement of the poems – which we can discuss again when I’m in the Cape. (And the Dedication? Or do you want to keep it the way it is, after all?)
Child: write to the Population Registrar, Dept. of Internal Affairs, Pretoria – IMMEDIATELY – and ask for an identity card. You will need it for passports etc. and they can damn-well take their time if you don’t get the process going soon enough. I must also renew my passport one of these days.
Remember to let me know at the Grahamstown address, by telegram if necessary, and before next Monday (the 13th), at what number I should call you before I come down. When exactly in February do you get leave and your holiday bonus?
It’s only now – after completing the translation, and getting Orgie print-ready – that I’m actually begining to take a few days’ holiday, and swimming a lot. But it’s always damn-well cloudy when I go, so I’m still barely “off-white”; pinkish, like suckling pig. But with a little mercy – and some sun – from Above, the worst of my “whiteness” might yet be camouflaged before I make it to Gordon’s Bay. (Oh the ecstasy of those sun-and-sea days, for us; you’ll be having so many Martinis, and getting so lazy again, sleeping a lot, and grumbling when I want us to stay awake.) Then you’ll say: “No, André”, “Hm-hm”, “HM-HM” as I slide in behind your smooth, brown little back and lazily begin searching for your cocoon. And, I’ll be giving the leucodendron another bath. And I’ll run my hands through your hair. And maybe I’ll start itching and scratching at myself, as always, to your great annoyance and dearest exasperation. You’ll be wearing your whitest, most see-through little nightie – just so that I can pull it off again for a big little wet-and-warm sleepie. And we’ll go swimming, and talk, and read poetry, and your play, and eat asparagus, and bath, and laugh a lot, and be still, and passionate – hell! so lekker – and be consoled. Together, in the reaffirmation of the flesh, the new and far flight of the spirit, and all of it, entire, poetry.
Virginal child, ripe, ripe woman, blessed person: fill your little lamp, your bridegroom is coming.
Meanwhile I hold my hands over you and say an incantation against evil; I lie on you and protect you in love, and become with you: human, and free.
Your André.
Castella
Sunday night, 5 January 1964
Dearest beloved man,
Do you know what the time is? 2.45 am. Iris and I are sitting here with a drink of “sea, carnations” – gin – but then I have to add that I slept from eight to ten. Thank you, my dearest, for your letter – child, child, where you write that you “accept the separation”, and for what you said to Bartho and Kita [Redelinghuys] in Jhb. It makes me feel so much surer. Not that I’m not sorry about the mess – but still, still, we need each other so much. Ten days. Already said I was sorry about the letter where I climbed into you again: thank you that you are so understanding: knew you would understand how utterly difficult things are here most of the time. Of course you can be as possessive as possible; when we live a reasonably natural life! Estelle’s reaction is STRANGE, but you will probably have to bring it home to her; the “columns” in Femina say one should … (cat).
Still. I’ll send you the HEART-greeting when I can find it amidst the radiance of all your letters – or record the 17th on tape …? Haven’t ever flown before, hope you’ll be able to from Grahamstown – god, it would be unutterably wonderful! Did I tell you about my beautiful golden yellow “twistdress” and my white BABY-DOLL DRESS – wait a bit. I’ll write everything. Now I’d like to meet Estelle, so that she can see I exist (and I can see that she exists?). Darling André, I’m just saying goodnight to Potch and greeting you, you must drive safely and well; I am waiting for you, IMPATIENTLY.
Apart from this, you’ll just have to read Die Wit in die Poësie [The White Space in Poetry].
Date: Early, again; Friday. That’s right. Right?
Stay with me, my treasure.
Your darling COCOON. (Good.) Fixed up?
(I’m getting a real kitten in two weeks’ time.) Simone is flying to Jhb on Tuesday for a holiday. Otherwise, everything flourishing. And my garden is full of flowers, both inside and out.
{Dearest Papie
Man mine
André P. Brink
Bye, Potchefstroom. Welcome, Grahamstown. But not too much like last time. I accompany you with love.
Your Ingrid.}
Thursday, 9 January 1964
My dearest André,
The wings of your “child of light” are fairly creased today – I’ve had a swinish letter from my father; I wrote him that I would very much like to give him Rook en Oker personally (a first edition, which he collects), and this was the answer.
Dear Ingrid,
After all you’ve done to me in interviews with the Sunday Times and other newspapers in the past year, I am not inclined to meet you in a café or any other public place.
If you want to discuss anything with me, you know where I live. All that is required is to call me to enquire as to a convenient time. On weekend afternoons I usually go fishing.
With love from
Pappa (ABR. H. JONKER)
Typed. All day I’ve been wondering whether it’s really possible – how and where and why it all began – the injury, mostly the secrecy – and does he honestly think – does he expect – that I, who may no longer meet him in public – will do so in secret – not on an equal footing, not as one person to another – never mind daughter to “father” – and WHY? Where does the pettiness and the rot and the “narrowness and smallness and bitterness and closedness” begin – and where does it end?
Teach us to care and not to care
Teach us to sit still
But thank you for your preciousness and for your darling letter of today – you must come and tell me everything you said to your mother – I am so glad she understands – and yes, the double bed (!) but my little treasure – does the gradual dying and uncertainly really help us all? Questions. Questions. I don’t want you to have to remove this little irritation for me – but only for yourself, if needs be. And now I must say good night again, and that after such a “piece of misery”! But first: while I was writing, old Jan and them hammered at the door, visit – and I went for coffee and Van der Hum at theirs – it was nice – Jan quite kind and courteous and friendly, and showed me the favourable review of Rob’s new Standpunte and Rook en Oker. And your Schutte satire and her humourless little sentence; and the attack on you by the journalist in J. at the back – and the little Van der Westhuizen article. Just scanned it – wasn’t your satire cut? News: mostly alone with my little chaperone – reading Sê Sjibbolet [Adam Small]; African Poetry; swoon, and have (had) slight kidney infection; done with pills – just don’t want to swim in Clifton cold yet. I can never get properly sick – everything just so latent, constitution like a (little) bull.
Ag, my André, my beautiful and rich human being and man-mine in your red-pyjama surrender, with your hands and feet safe for ever – in less than a week you’re in the city – may I then have a meal at your place one evening? I want to meet Estelle and especially Anton (my little word). Arrange it. It’s probably necessary that the three of us become more aware of one another’s existence: Estelle, me and Anton. And we’ll order a bottle of wine for Dutch courage.
It’s been a while since I saw Jack – went away to the Koue Bokkeveld with his two-faced mother – and I am completely good and pure and virginal. I greet you with my body, my Royal Highness.
> Love for the papie with the scar of light and love.
Love for the redhead and the green eyes without glasses
and the creative hands that make the world of my body blossom
and for his laughing tooth.
Till then till then,
Your Cocoon-est.
PS: Monet left by plane for Jhb; she looked beautiful and was very excited. There is our child of light. I.
{Drive safely, precious. IJ.}
Potchefstroom, for one last time
Thursday, 9 January 1964
Child of light, my Cocoon,
Thank you for your two letters – the one on Monday, just before my trip to Jhb; and the other, today’s brief missive just as we’re leaving Potch. Both luminous; the first one with a kind of lucidity that I read and listen to over and over again.
I had three days of hell in Johannesburg. The whole idea behind my going was that Chris would be back and that I’d be able to talk to him during the day, but in the end he returned only yesterday – after mixing up the dates – and so I had to sit in Bartho’s office day in and day out, talking about the same old stuff. And then last night the visit came to an appropriate end, with Cleopatra. Oh my good Lord! If there’s one thing that makes me the hell-in (as Gert Pretorius might say?!) it’s those two saggy tits with Elizabeth Taylor’s face looming above them.
But there were some light moments, too. Bartho (and Abraham!) are crazy about Orgie – they’ve already sent it to the printers – with the understanding that I can still make changes on the proofs. And I will. I told them that you and I would be going through it all from scratch. Bartho says he doesn’t think there’s any self-pity in the closing poem; Chris thinks there may still be one or two passages I could clean up in this regard. Strange, they all prefer part 1 – and I think it rests far more firmly on the solid (impure) earth than the rest; not quite so lyrical, so “clean”. One valid point of criticism, I feel, is that I should make more of her search for herself amid all the roles she plays. But that’s something we can talk about – DO YOU REALISE – in a week’s time.
But the expense! The format’s going to be identical to Sê Sjibbolet, bound with the same fine German thread as Rook en Oker, on that Finnish paper. Printed in roman, italics, and purple (the underlined parts). And, as I’ve already mentioned, the book reads sideways, with broad left-hand margin, and two identical page numbers:
I’m very excited. Delivery date provisionally set for my birthday, end of May; but given the layout issues there could be delays.
I’ve received a copy of Rook en Oker where we must make our changes next week (sequence etc.) for the book’s reprint. Bartho wants to put the dust-cover design on the back of the book, too, so it no longer has an empty white space. Nice, isn’t it? My poet, my Sappho, my Ingrid Jonker, Cocoon; you!
I’m reading a book on magic – or maybe I should say nibbling at it. The Key of the Mysterious. Beautiful things in this volume. This is specially for you:
The least perfect act of love is worth more than the best act of piety.
Judge not; speak hardly at all, love and act.
My only issue with this is that every act of love is an “act of piety”, is essentially religious. That’s all the religion we have, all we can be certain about, and – perhaps – all the religion we need.
The book also provides a magical explanation for all the different numbers in the occult. Your birth-number, 19, goes like this: “It is the number of light.”
Unfortunately, the magical numbers only go up to 19! I therefore remain in outermost darkness!
My thoughts are jumping all over the place: back to Jhb and the three days among Naas’s yelling children. The youngest is just four months old, a little girl, as sweet as honey. And, like a mushy sentimentalist, I walked around with this smiling little thing in my arms and looked forward to our own little girlie with all her moesies!
But your date is so early – the 3rd. That means it will come around again by the 28th; the best “period” – by my calculations, and conviction – is therefore between 12 and 16 Jan. But I’ll be sure to come and fetch you from work before the 17th, take you home, and send Iris to the beach …! Hopefully I’ll arrive in the Cape on Wednesday evening the 15th, probably quite late. I’ll make arrangements – Thursday afternoon at lunchtime and at five or so.
This time Estelle will know – not by deduction, but by my telling her – that I’m going to stay with you and not Jan. I want to walk openly with you – under the sun and the moon and the stars.
I live in a state of anticipation, in peaceful ecstasy; you were such an object of desire for me during the dreary Jhb days.
Tomorrow, the long road back home.
And soon thereafter: you, us.
Live sweetly, my precious Cocoon, live happily and in love, even inside that grey cage of yours.
And let Maggie spread the chaste white sheets across our bridal bed.
Yours, impassioned and whole,
André.
Monday, 13 January 1964
SIX FIFTEEN TONIGHT OXLEY STOP WEDNESDAY THE WORD BECOMES FLESH LOVE = COCOON
Grahamstown
Sunday night, 26 January 1964
My darling, Cocoon,
Verse for today:
But wherefore could not I pronounce “Amen”?
I had most need of blessing, and “Amen”
Stuck in my throat
…
Glamis hath murdered sleep, and therefore Cawdor
Shall sleep no more. Macbeth shall sleep no more.
Nights, nights – not of “ecstasy’s duress”, but of lying in burning wakefulness, lasting agony, the knowledge of love and yearning; and so mixed up, so confused. And the future: absence.
And then your voice that night: “That I asked you to lie for one hour against my bosom to be consoled, and to console me, and you refused – that I cannot forget.”
And me? Ever?
And this from a sense of anxiety that seems meaningless in retrospect, but was meant from the bottom of my heart: such an hour would just hurt you all over again because you would face this inexplicable confusion for which I haven’t been able to find any answer – not even for myself, nothing.
May I just say that you can be sure – even just a little – that I look upon myself with repugnance? And this when my only certainty is that I love you; need you.
On that first night with you, you said No – you didn’t want “it” to happen all over again; you were wounded, tired, suspicious. But later you heeded my call and we learnt to love each other; and then I did to you what you’d predicted that first night.
My tender thing, my sensitive, precious child: if only I could give you some sense of what these past few days have been like (a prelude to my future?) – every little blonde girl I see becomes Simone; here, a small gesture by an unknown girl in a café reminds me of you; there, the colour of a dress; or someone wearing a white shirt with black slacks. You, you, darling, everywhere, you.
And in the wakeful nights, still, despite everything, the certain knowledge – this much at least, thank god – that our nine months together were expectation and fulfilment, an encounter with life, an intensity and a kind of poetry without which everything would be pointless.
“News”: an urgent telegram from Bartho saying he needs Rook en Oker for a reprint; I’ll send it off tomorrow morning, after discussing that one change with Rob.
Did you see the review (P.D. van der Walt) in Tydskrif vir Geesteswetenskappe? Ignorant. I’m sending it along “for the record”.
Rob will be getting Orgie tomorrow. After that I’ll send you the original copy, as I promised a while ago.
Tomorrow I must start working on the Colette translation for Bartho. (How am I going to get into working mode with such an unsettled heart – and with the practical, daily confusion of a boy for whom I must care day and night, along with an ill wife? Nerves. And, of course, the unbridgeable chasm.)
Last night,
as I sat here on my own – I arrived home only late yesterday afternoon after two days of neglect, from sheer necessity, in the wake of the Great Brak River trip for Estelle’s illness – a bunch of policemen arrived to arrest my “trusted” gardener, whom I had paid extra to look after the house and who, in the meantime, had been breaking into houses elsewere, also stealing some of my clothes. And I had such absolute faith in him.
You will say: the minor upheavals of middle-class life.
Perhaps.
But child, woman, human being: more urgent than anything else is you, along with the love I feel for you, and the great burden I must always carry with me – knowing in my own heart that I have damaged the most precious thing of all: unquestioning trust.
Misschien, misschien, blijft het hart ons over.
And in the twilight I lean wordlessly towards you and hail you.
Your hair all mussed-up on the pillow.
Your eyes half-closed, and free.
Your naked ears with their little lobes.
Your mouth that laughs, possessing poetry.
Your lovable arms and your small, still hands.
Your dark back, like the earth, and your freckled shoulders.
Your soft, playful breast, tender-tipped.
Your coy, labile tummy.
Your plumpest, most provocative mound with its deep quiet and plunging happiness.
Your narrow, smooth thighs, and the moesie.
Your calves, around which my fingers fit.
Your lovely feet, made for sand and sandals.
And your leucodendron.
All you.
And in the future, also you.
Want héel dit leven is een wond’re, bange,
Ontzétbre dróom, dien eens de nacht weer vaagt –
Maar in dien droom een droom, vol licht en zangen,
Mijn droom, zoo zoet begroet, zoo zacht beklaagd.
In quiet affliction and love,
Your
André.
Castella
Wednesday, 29 January 1964
Flame in the Snow Page 33