Telling Times: Writing and Living, 1950-2008

Footnotes

Censored, Banned, Gagged

1 My latest novel, Occasion for Loving (London: Gollancz; New York: Viking, 1963), was held under embargo for a while, but has now been released; its fate, once it is published in a cheaper edition, probably will be the same as that of the earlier novel. [In fact Occasion for Loving was not ultimately banned; possibly because, amongst other things, it dealt with the failure of an inter-racial love affair.]

2 Some of the younger Afrikaans writers are beginning to feel stifled by a literary tradition that ignores the glaring realities of our country’s life. If they are moved to write books that do not conform to the tradition of Afrikaans writing, who is to publish them? Afrikaans is not spoken outside South Africa, the European Protectorates, and the Rhodesias.

3 An imprecise definition in South Africa, at the best of times. Randolph Vigne and Peter Hjul are members of the Liberal Party who were running a liberal fortnightly, as was its founder, Patrick Duncan, at the time he was put under ban — subsequently he went into exile in Basutoland, left the Liberal Party and aligned himself with the anti-Communist, militantly black nationalist Pan-Africanist Congress.

A Writer’s Freedom

4 The Afrikaans poet Breyten Breytenbach returned to South Africa under a false name in August 1975 after years of self-imposed exile in Paris. Arrested shortly after his arrival he was sentenced on 26 November to nine years’ imprisonment, having pleaded guilty to twenty-two charges under the Terrorism and Suppression of Communism Acts.

5 Chatsworth and Soweto are respectively Indian and African ghettos. Dimbaza is the notorious ‘resettlement area’ for Africans which is the subject of the film Last Grave at Dimbaza.

Letter from Soweto

6 The South African Institute of Race Relations in Johannesburg released on 8 November the following analysis gleaned from cases reported in the national press between 16 June and 31 October: 1,200 people have already stood trial. Three thousand are facing trials not yet completed. Of the 926 juveniles tried and convicted, 528 have been given corporal punishment, 397 have received suspended sentences or fines, and one has been jailed.

Transkei

7 Where I have used ‘Transkei’ — the term for the so-called ‘independent homeland’ — instead of ‘the Transkei’ — denoting the region — it does not imply any recognition on my part of this integral area of South Africa as a separate country.

Relevance and Commitment

8 In 2010, 49,320,500. Unusual increase due not to birth rate but influx of refugees, principally from Zimbabwe.

The Prison-House of Colonialism

9 Ruth First was assassinated by the apartheid regime in August 1982. An apparently ordinary parcel sent to her in Mozambique exploded — it contained a bomb — as she opened it, killing her. 2010: she is one of the revered heroes of the South African freedom struggle.

Letter from the 153rd State

10 Now Harare.

11 2010: now become a dictator, Mugabe has brought his country to suffering and disaster..

The South African Censor: No Change

12 Published and banned that year …

13 Etienne le Roux’s novel.

Living in the Interregnum

14 Total population 1980, 20 million, of which 4.5 million are white. Survey of Race Relations in South Africa 1981, South African Institute of Race Relations, 1981.

15 Rainer Maria Rilke, ‘Ein Frauenschicksal’ (A Woman’s Fate), in Selected Poems of Rainer Maria Rilke, translated by C. F. MacIntyre, University of California Press, Berkeley 1941.

16 Edmundo Desnoes, Memories of Underdevelopment, Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1973.

17 Bishop Desmond Tutu, Frontline, no. 5, vol. 12, April 1982.

18 Czeslaw Milosz, ‘The Accuser’, in Bells in Winter, Ecco, New York, 1978.

19 Walter Benjamin, ‘What Is Epic Theater?’ Illuminations, Schocken, New York, 1969.

20 Nikolai G. Chernyshevsky, Polnoye sobraniye sochinenii, vol. 3. Paraphrased from the quotation in the English translation by Tibor Szamuely, ‘The Highroad of History Is Not the Sidewalk of the Nevsky Prospekt’, The Russian Tradition, edited by Robert Conquest, McGraw-Hill, New York, 1975.

21 Walter Benjamin, ‘What Is Epic Theater?’

22 The Star, Johannesburg, 4 August 1982.

23 The US has a 20 per cent slice under the weighted voting system of the IMF and so outvoted all loan opponents combined. The US consequently surely has a corresponding responsibility for how the money South Africa receives is being spent. Is there any evidence that this responsibility is being taken up?

The Idea of Gardening

24 ‘But wait till you can see HORROR,/my child, written on the sun.’ Friston, the missionary, in South Africa, in William Plomer’s Turbott Wolfe, The Hogarth Press, London, 1965.

New Notes from Underground

25 Terrace, verandah.

The Essential Gesture

26 From Writing Degree Zero, in Barthes, Selected Writings, edited and introduced by Susan Sontag, Fontana, London, 1983, p. 31.

27 Albert Camus, Carnets 1942–51.

28 Ingoapele Madingoane, Africa My Beginning, Ravan Press, Johannesburg, 1979; Rex Collings, London, 1980.

29 Ernst Fischer, The Necessity of Art: A Marxist Approach, translated by Anna Bostock, Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1963, p. 47.

30 See H.I.E. Dhlomo, ‘Valley of a Thousand Hills’, reprinted in his Collected Works, edited by N. Visser and T. Couzens, Ravan Press, Johannesburg, 1985; Sol T. Plaatje, Mhudi, edited by Stephen Gray, introduction by Tim Couzens, Heinemann, London; Three Continents Press, Washington DC, 1978; Native Life in South Africa, Longman, London, 1987; and The Boer War Diary of Sol T. Plaatje, edited by J. L. Comaroff, Macmillan, Johannesburg, 1973; Thomas Mofolo, Chaka: An Historical Romance, new translation by Daniel P. Kunene, Heinemann, London, 1981.

31 Among the most recent examples: Njabulo Ndebele, Fools, Ravan Press, Johannesburg, 1983; Longman, London, 1986; Ahmed Essop, The Emperor, Ravan Press, Johannesburg, 1984; and Es’kia Mphahlele, Afrika My Music, Ravan Press, Johannesburg, 1984.

32 George Steiner, review of E. M. Cioran, Drawn and Quartered, The New Yorker, 16 April 1984, p. 156.

33 Vissarion Belinsky, 1810–48. The quote is from my notebook: unable to locate source.

34 Octavio Paz, ‘Development and other mirages’, from The Other Mexico: Critique of the Pyramid, translated by Lysander Kemp, Grove Press, New York, 1972, p. 48.

35 The Letters of Gustave Flaubert 1857–1880, selected, edited and translated by Francis Steegmuller, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA and London, 1982.

36 Susan Sontag, ‘Approaching Artaud’, in Under the Sign of Saturn, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, 1980, p. 15: ‘… authors … recognised by their effort to disestablish themselves, by their will not to be morally useful to the community, by their inclination to present themselves not as social critics but as seers, spiritual adventurers, and social pariahs’.

37 Letter to Max Brod, quoted in Ronald Hayman, K: A Biography of Kafka, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, London, 1981, p. 237.

38 Michel Tournier, Gemini, translated by Anne Carter, London: Collins; Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1981.

39 John Bayley, review of Akhmatova: A Poetic Pilgrimage by Amanda Haight, Observer, 31 October 1976, p. 29.

40 From Isaiah Berlin, Russian Thinkers, The Hogarth Press, London, 1978, p. 303.

41 ‘The Story-Teller’, in Illuminations, pp. 108–9.

Letter from Johannesburg

42 A ‘State of Emergency’ in South Africa was declared by government in 1960, lifted, redeclared, extended, through the years to 1986, on and off.

Huddleston: A Sign

43 ‘… prayer consists of attention … Not only does the love of God have attention for its substance; the love of our neighbour, which we know to be the same love, is made of this same substance … The capacity to give one’s attention to a sufferer is a very rare and difficult thing; it is almost a miracle; it is a miracle … Warmth of heart … pity, are not enough.’ Simone Weil, Waiting on God, Routledge, London, 1951, pp. 51, 58.

The Gap Between the Writer and the Reader

44 Roland Barthes, S/Z, translated by Richard Miller, preface by Richard Howard, Hill and Wang, 1974, p. 5.

45 Richard Howard, ‘A Note on S/Z’, preface to S/Z by Roland Barthes, p. xi.

46 Harry Levin, ‘From Obsession to Imagination: The Psychology of the Writer’, Michigan Quarterly Review, no. 3, vol. 12, summer 1974, p. 190.

47 Roland Barthes, S/Z, p. 21.

48 Jorge Luis Borges, ‘The Congress’, The Book of Sand, translated by Norman Thomas di Giovanni, Penguin, 1979, p. 33.

49 Italo Calvino, ‘Whom Do We Write For?’, The Literature Machine, translated by Patrick Creagh, Secker and Warburg, London, 1987, p. 86.

50 John Berger, ‘An Explanation’, Pig Earth, Pantheon, New York, 1979, p. 9.

51 Lorrie Moore, New York Times Book Review, 3 December 1989, review of Love Life by Bobbie Ann Mason, Harper and Row, New York, 1989.

Censorship — The Final Solution

52 Three of Nadine Gordimer’s novels were banned successively in South Africa: A World of Strangers, The Late Bourgeois World and Burger’s Daughter.

53 I had gathered this information by questioning some reaction, from all those violently opposed to Rushdie’s visit, to obvious points in the narrative any reader would recognise. Blank response. I was a member of a group of writers and journalists who met with the Muslim religious leader and his followers who declared to us that if Rushdie set foot on South African soil he would be killed.

Censorship and its Aftermath

54 Gilbert Marcus, ‘The New Enlightenment’, Centre For Applied Legal Studies, University of the Witwatersrand, 1990.

55 ACAG UPDATE, March 1990.

56 The Star, 19 March 1990.

57 ACAG UPDATE, March 1990.

58 The Weekly Mail, 5–11 April 1990.

59 Ibid.

60 Gilbert Marcus, ‘The New Enlightenment’.

61 John le Carré, Guardian, 15 January 1990.

62 Albie Sachs, ‘The Gentle Revenge at the End of Apartheid’, Index on Censorship, April 1990.

63 Albie Sachs, ‘Preparing Ourselves for Freedom’, ANC In-house Seminar on Culture, 1990.

64 Letters of Gustave Flaubert 1830–1857, selected, edited and translated by Francis Steegmuller, Belknap Press, Harvard, 1980, p. 224.

65 Barbara Masakela, ‘Possible Strategies for Culture in a Post-Apartheid South Africa’, paper given at UNESCO Working Group on Apartheid, Dakar, Senegal, November 1989.

Joseph Roth

66 In a letter to his translator, Blanche Gidon, quoted by Beatrice Musgrave in her introduction to Weights And Measures, Dent, London, 1983, p. 9. Roth lived in Paris for some years and two of his novels, Le Triomphe de la beauté and Le Buste de L’Empereur, were published first in French. Le Triomphe de la beauté probably was written in French; it appears not to have been published in German.

67 I have been told that the standard German biography, David Bronsen’s Joseph Roth: Eine Biographie, Kiepenheuer and Witsch, Cologne, 1974, is now in the process of translation for Roth’s English publisher, Chatto and Windus. Another biography by Nat Cohen of Toronto is planned for publication by the Overlook Press.

68 Robert Musil, The Man without Qualities, vol. I, Secker and Warburg, London, 1961, p. 64, translated by Eithne Wilkins and Ernst Kaiser. Musil was born in 1880, and though long neglected as a writer outside German-speaking culture, was not forgotten as long as Roth. Musil became a figure in world literature in the fifties; Roth’s work had to wait another twenty years before it was reissued in Germany, let alone in translation.

69 The Silent Prophet was edited from unpublished work, with the exception of fragments published in 24 Neue Deutsche Erzähler and Die Neue Rundschau in 1929, and published after Roth’s death, in 1966. The English translation by David Le Vay was published in the United States by the Overlook Press in 1980. The work appears to have been written, with interruptions, over several years. The central character, Kargan, is supposedly modelled on Trotsky.

7 °Czeslaw Milosz, ‘To Raja Rao’, Selected Poems, Ecco Press, New York, 1980, p. 29.

71 The dates I give are generally the dates of first publications, in the original German.

72 Walter Benjamin, ‘One-Way Street’, Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings, edited and with an introduction by Peter Demetz, translated by Edmund Jephcott, Schocken, New York, 1986, p. 83.

Turning the Page

73 References here are to Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe, The River Between by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Up in Arms by Chenjerai Hove, Fog at Season’s End by Alex L. Guma, Down Second Avenue by Es’kia Mphahlele, Song of Lawino by Okot P’Bitek, Mission to Kala by Mongo Beti, Nervous Conditions by Tsitsi Dangarembga, The Money-Order by Sembene Ousmane, The House of Hunger by Dambudzo Marechera, A World of Strangers by Nadine Gordimer, Fools by Njabulo Ndebele, Blame Me on History by Bloke Modisane, The True Confessions of an Albino Terrorist by Breyten Breytenbach, The Interpreters by Wole Soyinka and A Tough Tale by Mongane Wally Serote.

Letter from South Africa

74 2010: O. R. Tambo Airport, renamed for the great Oliver Tambo, a hero of the struggle against apartheid, up on the heights of Mandela.

75 Oliver Tambo along with him; and the renaming of hospitals, many other institutions, and high roads for freedom fighters.

Our Century

76 Jawaharlal Nehru, The Discovery of India, Meridian Books, London, 1951, p. 16.

The Status of the Writer in the World Today

77 Quoted, in paraphrase, by Vladimir Nabokov, in Nikolai Gogol by Vladimir Nabokov, New Directions, New York, 1961, p. 129.

78 ‘Congress of Negro Writers and Artists’, at the Sorbonne, Paris, under the auspices of Présence Africaine, 1956.

79 Publishing and Book Development in Sub-Saharan Africa: An Annotated Bibliography, Hans Zell Publishers, Oxford, 1996.

80 ‘Time To Be Truly Part of Africa’, Lebona Mosia, Dean of the Arts Faculty, Technikon Northern Gauteng, Soshanguve, The Star, Johannesburg, 26 September 1997.

81 Octavio Paz, In Light of India, translated from the Spanish by Eliot Weinberger, Harcourt Brace, 1997.

82 Henri Lopez, Le Lys et le Flamboyant, Éditions du Seuil, Paris, 1997. My translation from the French.

83 Amu Djoleto, ‘A Passing Thought’, Messages: Poems from Ghana, edited by Kofi Awoonor and Adali-Mortty, Heinemann, London, 1971.

When Art Meets Politics

84 Franz Kafka, Kafka’s Diaries, 1922.

85 Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time.

86 Ernst Fischer, The Necessity of Art.

87 Pablo Picasso, Lettres Françaises.

88 Gustave Flaubert, letter to Turgenev, 13 November 1872, The Letters of Gustave Flaubert 1857–1880, translated and edited by Francis Steegmuller.

89 George Steiner, Language and Silence.

90 Pablo Neruda (my notebooks do not give the source — probably his autobiography).

91 Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters on Cézanne, translated by Joel Agee.

92 Milan Kundera, Life Is Elsewhere.

93 Czeslaw Milosz, ‘To Raja Raó’, Selected Poems, Ecco, New York, 1980.

A Letter to Future Generations

94 George Soros, ‘The International Crisis: An Interview’, New York Review, interview with Jeff Madrick, January 1999.

95 Amartya Sen, ‘Economics Laureate Condemns Arms Sales’, The Star, Johannesburg, 5 January 1999.

96 Kofi Annan, Secretary-General of United Nations, speech at launch of UNDP ‘Eradication of Poverty’ programme, UN, 1997.

Hemingway’s Expatriates

97 Walter Berthoff, ‘Fitzgerald and Hemingway in the 20s’, American Trajectories 1790–1970, Penn State Press, 1990.

98 Joan Didion, ‘Last Words’, The New Yorker, 9 November 1988.

99 Berthoff, American Trajectories.

100 Berthoff, American Trajectories.

101 Toni Morrison, ‘The Kindness of Sharks’, Playing in the Dark — Whiteness and the Literary Imagination, Vintage, New York, 1992.

102 Ibid.

Personal Proust

103 William Blake, The Notebook of William Blake.

What News on the Rialto?

104 In Search of Lost Time: now accepted as a more accurate translation of Proust’s title formerly in English as Remembrance of Things Past.

The Entitlement Approach

105 Mamphele Ramphele, ‘World Bank Will Reward Good Governance’, Sunday Independent, South Africa, 11 March 2001.

106 President Abdoulaye Wade, ‘African Leaders, IMF and World Bank forge new strategy on poverty’, The Star, Johannesburg, 21 February 2001.

107 Amartya Sen, Poverty and Famines: An Essay on Entitlement and Deprivation, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1981.

Joseph Conrad and Almayer’s Folly

108 Author’s note to Almayer’s Folly.

109 ‘The world is a will to power — and nothing else besides.’ Nietzsche, Will To Power, translated by Walter Kaufmann, Random House, New York, 1967, p. 550. Quoted by Edward W. Said, ‘Conrad And Nietzsche’, in his collection Reflections on Exile and Other Essays, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 2000, p. 75.

Witness — Past or Present?

110 Jorg Lau, Die Zeit, 2000 (no precise date given).

111 Philip Gourevitch, ‘What They Saw at the Holocaust Museum’, New York Times Magazine, 2 December 1995.

Living with a Writer

112 Reinhold Cassirer died in 2001.

With Them You Never Know

113 Olaudah Equiano, Equiano’s Travels: The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano or Gustavus Vassa the African.

114 Wulf Sachs, Black Hamlet — The Mind of an African Negro Revealed by Psychoanalysis, Geoffrey Bles, London, 1937; Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, 1996; Witwatersrand University Press (with a new introduction by Saul Dubow and Jacqueline Rose), Johannesburg, 1996.

115 Cecil Rhodes, attributed by Olive Schreiner, Trooper Peter Halket of Mashonaland, T. Fisher Unwin, London, 1897.

116 O. Mannoni, Prospero and Caliban: The Psychology of Colonization, translated by Pamela Powesland, Praeger, New York, 1964.

117 Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism, Knopf, New York, 1993.

118 Generations later, among South African whites who joined the South African black liberation struggle, Jews were prominent, including Dennis Goldberg, sentenced to life imprisonment, Albie Sachs (post-apartheid Constitutional Court judge for fifteen years in free South Africa) who lost a leg and the sight of one eye when a bomb was hidden in his car, and Ruth First who was killed by a parcel bomb. Both these acts the work of the apartheid forces.

119 A colony: in Roman usage ‘a settlement of Roman citizens in a hostile or newly conquered country’, Oxford English Dictionary. Colonialism: ‘a policy whereby a nation maintains or extends control of foreign dependencies’, American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language.

120 Nosipho Majeke, The Role of the Missionaries in Conquest, publisher unknown.

121 Said, Culture and Imperialism.

122 Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, Grove Press, New York, 1967.

William Plomer and Turbott Wolfe

123 Mongane Wally Serote, Scatter the Ashes and Go, Ravan Press, Johannesburg, 2002, p. 55.

124 Edward W. Said, ‘Challenging Orthodoxy and Authority’, Culture and Imperialism, Knopf, New York, 1993, p. 319.

Witness: The Inward Testimony

125 Franz Kafka, Diaries, 1921.

126 W. B. Yeats, Collected Poems.

127 Mongane Wally Serote, Yakhal’ Inkomo.

128 Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness.

129 Czeslaw Milosz, Native Realm, Selected Poems.

130 Georg Lukács, The Theory of the Novel.

131 Primo Levi, If This Is a Man.

132 Marcel Proust, Within a Budding Grove (from Remembrance of Things Past).

133 Albert Camus, The Rebel.

134 Milan Kundera, postscript to Life is Elsewhere.

135 Pablo Picasso, from my notebooks, unknown source.

Faith, Reason and War

136 Salman Rushdie, Guardian, 19 November 2005.

137 Amartya Sen, Identity and Violence — The Illusion of Destiny, W.W. Norton & Co., New York, 2006.

Naguib Mahfouz’s Three Novels of Ancient Egypt

138 Georg Lukács, The Historical Novel, translated by Hannah and Stanley Mitchell, Merlin Press, London, 1965.

139 Naguib Mahfouz, Palace Walk, Palace of Desire, Sugar Street, translated by Peter Theroux, Doubleday, New York, 1990.

140 Naguib Mahfouz, The Dreams, Dream 5, The American University in Cairo Press, Cairo and New York, 2005.

The Lion in Literature

141 See Shylock’s speech in The Merchant of Venice, Act III, Scene i.

142 Olaudah Equiano, Equiano’s Travels: The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano or Gustavus Vassa the African.

143 Sol T. Plaatje, Native Life in South Africa.