Herman Charles Bosman is back

Peter Merrington

Jacaranda in the Night

Herman Charles Bosman ed. by Stephen Gray Human & Rousseau Cape Town 2000

Old Transvaal Stories
Herman Charles Bosman
ed. by Craig Mackenzie
Human & Rousseau
Cape Town
2000

These two titles are part of a project to ‘re-edit all of Herman Charles Bosman’s works in their original, unabridged and uncensored texts’, timed to mark the fiftieth anniversary of his first full book of stories, Mafeking Road, and to mark the centenary (in 2005) of his birth. The general editors of this anniversary series of Bosman are the literary historians Stephen Gray and Craig MacKenzie. Four titles have already been re-edited, namely Mafeking Road, Willemsdorp, Cold Stone Jug, and Idle Talk: Voorkamer Stories (I) .

In Old Transvaal Stories Craig MacKenzie has selected short stories by Bosman which do not fall into the ’Oom Schalk Lourens’ series. They range from 1931 to the early 1950s. Some have been published before, while others appear for the first time. MacKenzie provides an interesting introduction to the collection, as well as several short pieces by Bosman himself on the practice of writing short stories in South Africa.

The novel Jacaranda in the Night is a peculiar mixture of D H Lawrence and the gritty realism of the British post-war generation of ‘angry young men’. It is markedly different from the Herman Charles Bosman, vernacular raconteur, whom we are used to in the Oom Schalk Lourens stories. In this novel, Bosman ventures into ‘modern’ (that is, post-World War II) social mores, and he presents us with a kind of roman noir, a study of the seediness of sexual desire within the confines of a small Northern Transvaal town. The setting is a fictional version of Pietersburg, where he once lived and worked, and as the introduction by Stephen Gray suggests, characters are derived from his own experience. Two worlds are sketched: the arid and depressing environment of the post-war teaching profession, with frustrated staff and petty officialdom, and the world of the cramped and sticky bedroom, the unlovely and abusive lovelife of bored folk in the overheated semi-tropical summer of this small town. The link between these two worlds is the lounge bar of the Northern Hotel, with its ‘brown pegamoid’ décor, brandy and ginger squares, and communal dances on Saturday nights. The teaching profession is the ego of this novel, the bedroom the id, and the lounge bar mediates between these two, between arid manipulation on one hand and vivid but destructive sexuality on the other. Intriguingly, this pattern seems to reflect Bosman’s own outlook on life. On one hand he is familiar with the stifling professional lives and the hypocritical conventions of a Calvinist petit-bourgeoisie. One the other, he is obsessed with irrational behaviour, with desire, with ‘darkness’. The lounge bar (or the men’s bar) is a mediating realm where the ego is laced with alcohol until repressions are lifted, where stories are told, gossip is shared, and information traded. Two stories in the collection Old Transvaal Stories (‘Louis Wassenaar’ and ‘Underworld’ both take place in bars, where the central characters are in fact gathering material for the writing of stories.

Jacaranda in the Night is a daring novel for the South Africa of the late 1940s, with some very explicit between-the-sheets scenes. It is a period piece, and it is useful as a reminder that the youth of our parents (or grandparents) was not as placid and innocent as popular lore would have it. Sunny South Africa has its dark underside. The headmaster of the primary school is given to sexual impulses beyond the control of surface mediocrity and convention. His newest teacher is drawn, against her better judgement, into a sticky vortex of violent passion with the town’s most notorious Lothario. A would-be attorney ends up in Pretoria Central for the murder of his rival. Over all presides the bottle-blonde proprietress of the Northern Hotel, dispensing cheap whisky and cheaper advice.

Jacaranda in the Night is a modern, liberated, Freudian version of Madame Bovary, where the female lead has the means to live her own life, make her own emotional and sexual choices, and comprehend clearly all the time the very danger into which she deliberately plunges. Darkness is a recurring motif in all of Bosman’s writing. The darkness of the underside of human life is a realm which Bosman and various of his characters actively seek. Darkness is both the Freudian id, and the kind of potent libidinal source of life, which D H Lawrence spent his career pursuing and declaring. At the same time, Bosman is very much aware of the pathos of human desire, and the ways in which circumstances (social class, poverty, survival tactics, hypocrisy and conventions, urbanisation) compromise the grand power of the id.

For Bosman, the intrepid single woman is the object of recurrent abuse, and she ends up in a situation of sexual compromise if not outright prostitution. His view of petit-bourgeois sexual expression is bleak to say the least. In Old Transvaal Stories elderly widowers make sexual advances on the orphan girls whom they adopt; a viciously repressed Calvinist farmer takes an oxhide whip to a young girl as his only means of sexual release; these victims end up in wretched lodgings in marginal Johannesburg, surviving off prostitution and pretending that they have a ‘better class of client’.

The dry irony that we know so well — sardonic, wry, amused and distanced, marshalling the local characters of the Groot Marico district in a kind of langarm or tiekiedraai dance performed on the stage of history — this has been made out to be ‘classic’ Bosman — acceptable, consumable, raising superior chuckles. Then the lid comes off the pot, and we enter the ‘dark’ world of sympathy and desire, and here we find taint, weakness, hurt, contempt, alcoholism, and violence. Old Transvaal Stories is a mixture of these two modes of writing. When Bosman stops being distanced and ironic, he becomes immersed in the seediness of ’forties Fordsburg. He reveals his own vulnerabilities, identifying, in a mixture of love and hate, with the lost, the failed, and the abused, with human weakness as our defining feature. Thus there are two Bosmans — the bushveld raconteur, and the peri-urban student of degeneracy.

This is understandable. Romance is his primary topic. Romance is under siege from within and without, from twisted personality to crippled circumstance. Romance is brief, transient, a thing of adolescence and innocence. Thus his most ‘untainted’ stories are short sweet cameos of young love, such as ‘Politics and Love’ or, in particular, the ghost story ‘A Tale Writ in Water’. ‘Night on the Veld’ seems similar, but it has a sequel, the fiendishly understated ‘Old Transvaal Story’, which completes a progression from love to obsession to jealousy to murder. ‘The Ox-Riem’ and ‘The Clay Pit’ both deal with the vicious abuse of orphan girls and their inevitable slide into prostitution. The second-last story in this collection, ‘Onsterflike Liefde’, is a very short cameo set on the pavement outside the ‘Male Section of the Johannesburg Fort — as grim a prison as any that there is in the world’. A poster in red letters announces the ‘forthcoming presentation of an Afrikaans play with the flaming title Onsterflike Liefde (Undying Love)’. Bosman meditates as follows:

And love also stands as a gateway to those underground labyrinths of the human heart that are, alas, more tortuous than any of the passages twisting underneath the ramparts of the Fort. And more soulfully laden with the solemn intensities of life than are those passages. And more dark.

This is rather sententious but it sums up Bosman’s subject matter and his approach to the human world, and his combination of pessimistic irony and sympathetic understanding. Desire triggers deep and irrational impulses below a very superficial carapace of Calvinistic social conventions. Vicious circumstances (so prolific among the poor white communities of the 1930s and 1940s) turn a ‘girl who had only two print dresses which she washed until they were threadbare’ into a runaway ‘painted strumpet’ (‘The Clay-Pit’). Sixteen-years-old Gerhardina Brink is pregnant by the new schoolteacher, and is contemplating drinking sheep-dip (‘In Church’). This is a world of bywoners and bittereinders, love, shame, and lack of opportunity. It is in fact a book which may be read against present-day discussions of poverty and sexual behaviour. AIDS is our present scourge. Back then, in Bosman’s world, the scourge according to these stories appears to have been repression and exploitation

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