St Francis of the Ritz

André Brink

Review of Karel Schoeman: Die laaste Afrikaanse boek*

In the mid-seventies, having decided that monastic life was not for him and after spending a few desultory years in Amsterdam, the Afrikaans writer Karel Schoeman decided to take a course in nursing at Stobhill Hospital in Glasgow. Amidst the “phlegm and blood and mucus and bile and the juices of chewed food” he experienced a kind of mystical identification with one of his heroes, St Francis. But the horrors were made bearable by regular excursions to London, where he would lodge at Brown’s Hotel and imbibe champagne at the Ritz. Some St Francis.

The contrasts and paradoxes of this kind of life persist throughout the “patchwork quilt” of his autobiography, a “strung-together series of digressions, deviations, improvisations and excursions” (pp 56-57) published by Human & Rousseau under the arrogant title of Die laaste Afrikaanse Boek (the latest incarnation, presumably, of Après moi le déluge). It certainly is a mixed bag — ranging from a keen sense of place and atmosphere to muddled thinking and stylistic aridity, from a sensitive evocation of mood to crude and crass simplification, from a keen and intelligent appraisal of literary texts to a strutting showing-off of erudition, from what seems delicate and sincere to the irritating self-indulgence of the poseur.

The impression of the poseur is established by the framework of the whole book: memoirs written from the edge of the grave as it were, as the author spends what he himself defines (ad nauseam) as his twilight years, looking back over a long life with the accumulated wisdom of extreme old age. Yet Schoeman was not yet sixty when he wrote most of these memoirs — a spring chicken compared with one of his heroes, Goethe, who at seventy-five could still fall passionately in love with a teenage girl; not to speak of Picasso, or Chagall, or Toscanini, or Chaplin, or Karajan, or Mandela, or Bertrand Russell, or others too numerous to mention who made some of their most powerful contributions to humanity when well into their eighties or beyond. In such company Schoeman is indeed a poseur.

Why? These autobiographical meanderings make it pretty clear that the author sees wisdom as the noblest attribute of age. And there are indeed gems of wisdom scattered throughout the book. Schoeman is at his best when, as in his best novels, he captures the poignancy of an illuminating moment in which the futility of life and love, of yearning and striving, stands revealed: the image of a mother and child returning home in the dark; a terminally ill old man raging against the dying of the light; a lonely figure crossing a canal in Amsterdam; monks at prayer … In such moments the reader catches Schoeman like Thomas Merton’s monk, “as he sits on the doorstep of his own being, the place where his existence opens into the abyss of God.”

The problem is that the landscape of this text, as (it seems) of Schoeman’s life, is so sparsely populated by human beings. There is a dismaying lack of “human interest”. This is confessed explicitly in a sad passage on his early years in Bloemfontein, which might be expanded to cover his entire life: “Friends I didn’t have, nor did I miss them as far as I can recall, as friendship is something I have never really experienced” (p 364). It is, in fact, his firm belief, expressed on p 460, that “a relationship, or at any rate a satisfying relationship, for anyone involved in creative work, is simply impossible, irrespective of the circumstances.” But it goes beyond friendship or relationships: more often than not it appears to affect his very interest in other human beings. It includes his attitude to women: in spite of a confident assertion that he “never had any particular problems with the phenomenon of femininity” (p 263) a throwaway reference to women as a “species” of their own speaks volumes. The whole text is informed by this lack of interest in, this lack of compassion for, at worst a lack of even the willingness to understand, human beings. Instead — in spite of some illuminating passages of true insight — rather a lot of the book is devoted to domestic trivia, or to the urge desperately to wring significance from the most minute incident.

One of the consequences is that Die laaste Afrikaanse Boek becomes an act of prodigious reinvention. In a sense, of course, that is part of the very definition of autobiography as a genre. What makes it problematic in much of Schoeman’s enterprise is the quite blatant attempt at creating a self which might accommodate his life as a privileged white Afrikaner in the midst of the depredations of apartheid. Schoeman makes much of his spiritual suffering during those terrible years: it was because of the unmanageable situation in the country, he intimates, that he had to go into voluntary exile in Amsterdam and Britain; it was from an urge to share with his “volk” a dark hour of need (1976) that he returned. The hollowness of this reinvention is revealed when on p 469 he refers to “some or other political trial in the Old Synagogue” and admits that it was only much later that he first learned the name of Steve Biko.

No one “requires” a political conscience of a writer (although it may be difficult to understand such a mindset in South Africa under apartheid). Schoeman wrote several novels which would hold their own in any literature; certainly it was perfectly in order for him (as a writer, not necessarily as a citizen) to refrain from political action or activism and to focus exclusively on writing — but then he should not attempt afterwards to present either himself or his work as something it patently never was (with the exception, notably, of the occasional remarkable novel like Na die Geliefde Land). So this rather laborious charade of political correctness in an attempt to turn himself, retroactively, into an “aware” or “conscious” citizen is not very convincing.

The point is quite simply that most of Schoeman’s fiction, set on farms and dorpies of the deep interior, presents landscapes devoid of any human figures who are not white. Some of these novels are indeed powerful; but by no stretch of the imagination could they be read as the work of a man with a conscience about apartheid, as Schoeman now tries to make himself out to have been. And that cannot but affect one’s reading of the entire text as the reimagination of a life.

There is much in the book which is admirable and moving. Even though he often misses the wood for the twigs, Schoeman’s grasp of something much larger than himself, namely an entire way of life, specifically of Afrikanerdom, through which the nineteenth century was perpetuated until at least 1948, is memorable and poignant. And his exploration of the world of literature — which, to him, is incomparably more “real” than the “real” world — deserves pondering. But the shifting sands underlying his views of himself, both in youth and in old age, cast an uncomfortable pall over large tracts of the book. One need only compare it with JM Coetzee’s spare, crystalline recent writing in Boyhood and Youth to realise just how much Schoeman’s goes to the other extreme: not a probing of the self, but a wallowing in it.

And as for this being the last Afrikaans book: I do have a suspicion that the language will outlive it.

This review was originally published in the Sunday Independent

* (More reviews of Schoeman’s book by: Hennie Aucamp, Chris van der Merwe and Johann Rossouw)

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