Flame in the Snow Read online

  Published in 2015 by Umuzi

  an imprint of Penguin Random House South Africa (Pty) Ltd

  Company Reg No 1953/000441/07

  Estuaries No 4, Oxbow Crescent, Century City, 7441, South Africa

  PO Box 1144, Cape Town, 8000, South Africa

  [email protected]

  Copyright in the letters of André Brink

  © 2015 Karina Brink

  Copyright in the letters of Ingrid Jonker

  © 2015 The Ingrid Jonker Trust

  Copyright in the translation of the letters of André Brink

  © 2015 Leon de Kock

  Copyright in the translation of the letters of Ingrid Jonker

  © 2015 Karin Schimke

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, mechanical or electronic, including photocopying and recording, or be stored in any information storage or retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher.

  The first portrait of Ingrid Jonker in the photo section is by Anne Fischer. The red jersey is by Izak de Vries.

  First edition, first printing 2015

  ISBN 978-1-4152-0878-6 (Print)

  ISBN 978-1-4152-0879-3 (ePub)

  ISBN 978-1-4152-0880-9 (PDF)

  Cover and text design by mr design

  Cover photography by André Brink

  Set in Garamond

  Damning Blue Words on Paper

  In one of her earliest letters to André Brink, Ingrid Jonker concludes with the following statement:

  I still want to tell you so, so much more, when we are alone and without damning blue words on paper between us – they look so banal, so crass, so unaccounted for.

  On the following day (that is, before he receives this communication), Brink expresses a similar frustration with words in letters:

  But letters and words are becoming more fraudulent by the day. I can’t remember ever experiencing the insufficiency of words as agonisingly as in the past while.

  If the letters presented in this volume were as unreliable and painfully deceptive for their authors as these quotations suggest, then how much more fraudulent and painful might they not appear to us, decades later? For contemporary readers, the likelihood that the words in these letters will appear banal and crass is far greater than for the writers themselves. At the time, Jonker wrote that genuine communication without actual physical presence was impossible: “Everything enlarged and out of context, because there are only words, without facial expression or the touch of a hand.”

  WITHOUT FACIAL EXPRESSION OR THE TOUCH OF A HAND

  Reading the letters today, with merely the words on paper before us, it is even more difficult to grasp the context, for two reasons in particular: firstly, we do not have access to their telephone conversations, or to the tape recordings they sent each other, containing information about the times they spent together and the situations in which they sat down to write their respective letters. All we have are scraps – scattered references to such details. And secondly, we read these letters today in the knowledge of how the rest of their lives played out. Readers are likely to be familiar with certain details of Jonker’s life, which came to an end surrounded by seawater and kelp. At the time, Brink was still in the early stages of his career as a writer. When the two met for the first time, Brink’s important early novel, Lobola vir die Lewe [Dowry for Life], had just appeared, and Jonker had published a single volume of poetry called Ontvlugting [Escape]. Today we think of Brink as a celebrated, prize-winning author with twenty-four novels to his name, and as a highly regarded academic. We view Jonker as an iconic poet whose reputation has grown to almost mythical proportions. In 1994, her poem “The Child Who Was Shot Dead by Soldiers in Nyanga” was recited by Nelson Mandela during his oration at the opening of South Africa’s first democratic parliament. Brink published a comprehensive autobiography, A Fork in the Road (2009), in which he devoted an entire chapter to his relationship with Jonker. Petrovna Metelerkamp’s biography, A Poet’s Life (2003), was enthusiastically received. There has also been Louise Viljoen’s pocket biography of Jonker (2012).

  Despite the authors’ dissatisfaction with the inadequacy of words on paper, their correspondence was in fact a major part of the relationship, a love affair that lasted just under two years. The physical distance between Grahamstown, where Brink was a lecturer at Rhodes University, and Cape Town, where Jonker worked as a proofreader, meant they had very limited time to actually be together, to supplement a relationship that consisted of mere words. For the most part, the lovers had to rely on correspondence to conduct their relationship. The often fiery exchange of letters began immediately after they met at the home of Jan Rabie and Marjorie Wallace on 18 April 1963, when Brink was on a short visit to Cape Town. In the two days before Brink returned to Grahamstown, they fell passionately in love. Following this encounter they periodically spent “stolen” time together: no more than a handful of weekends, or whenever Brink visited Cape Town to give lectures or attend meetings. On one occasion, they were able to spend ten days together. In addition, they undertook a disastrous tour of Europe that was cut short after a disagreement.

  Apart from the fact that their correspondence constitutes a very large part of the relationship between the lovers, and opens a window onto it, their exchange of letters also provides a fascinating perspective on a particular period and on the daily routines and experiences of two literary figures, including their personal and literary insights, not to mention their own work as writers. The letters contain frequent references to the literary scene at the time, as well as bits of gossip about other writers. In addition, Brink and Jonker give voice to their deepest beliefs with regard to religion and politics, and they frequently refer to their most intimate sexual experiences. Ironically, despite the lovers’ despair concerning the efficacy of words, their writing displays a unique ability to communicate, and a remarkable facility with language.

  AN “EPISTOLARY NOVEL”

  The apparently insatiable appetite for literary material relating to the near-mythical figure of Ingrid Jonker will no doubt entice many readers to read Flame in the Snow, especially because of speculation concerning the role of her relationship with Brink in her suicide. While these letters may, on the one hand, satisfy readers’ curiosity about the enigmatic figure of Jonker, they will also transport the reader in the manner of a gripping epistolary novel. One is likely to be captivated by the head-over-heels love affair, with its insider-view, and the perspective provided by a poet and also a novelist. The language in which these two authors lay bare their feelings, and by means of which they learn to know each other – across vast distances and with revealing candour – lends the correspondence a lyrical quality, with references to planned encounters creating a sense of suspense.

  The first letter begins with flashbacks to a meeting that swept them both off their feet. This event is described as mutually life-changing. Frequently, suspense builds up as they anticipate their next meeting, and their letters urgently express their longing to be together. Opportunities have to be planned with great circumspection within a conservative community (even hotels were reluctant to accommodate unmarried couples in shared rooms), and in conditions where the lovers have to avoid provoking gossip, even among friends and acquaintances.

  About the time they spent together little is disclosed. Subsequently, it is only in the first letter after each such meeting, with the mutual expression of rapture in the afterglow of intimacy, that readers can begin to draw conclusions concerning the nature of the relationship. On some occasions, inferences may be drawn from expressions of regret, along with confessions of guilt, or attempts to put misunderstandings asi
de. The actual details of their tempestuous fights, and of their intimacy, are left to the reader’s imagination. The two letter-writers’ varying versions and interpretations of the same events come across much like the inner workings of an adroit narrative technique adopted by a novelist. Suspense builds up via misunderstandings, and especially the frustrations that arise with delayed postal delivery, unhappy telephone calls, and when the lovers’ precious trysts are tainted by arguments that must then be patched up in subsequent letters.

  The correspondents are caught up in the daily grind of work obligations, child care, and labouring to earn enough income – Jonker just to survive, while Brink seeks to earn additional funds to finance a middle-class life, to buy the many books he needs, and to send his lover money every now and again. The letters voice the discontent and frustration that flows from the tedium of daily existence, and articulate the lovers’ loneliness and longing, as well as their mutual admiration, in moving prose (and sometimes verse, too). At times the prose tends towards the purple, and there are also frequent sexual references.

  Structurally, too, Flame in the Snow reads compellingly as an epistolary novel: it traces the course of a love affair, from its breakneck beginning, with lengthy, eloquent letters that gradually alter in content and tone as the correspondents describe the more mundane details of their daily existence, detailed narrations that are attempts to get to know each other better. Later still, the letters are dominated by practical arrangements, and there are many references to repeated clashes, along with efforts to repair matters. At times their romantic dreams hold sway, bolstered by hopes of a more satisfying mode of mutual existence, until the relationship eventually unravels. Very few of Brink’s letters in the final months of the affair have survived (significantly, he no longer kept copies during that time, while certain letters were torn up, resulting in a lacuna). This means that Jonker’s increasing loneliness and desperation are accentuated as her letters follow one upon the other in rapid succession, with apparently fewer letters from her lover.

  There is no overarching narrator’s voice in the letters, and so the reader relies entirely on two, sometimes divergent, interpretations of events. The effect of this is an awareness that no final truth is possible regarding events that are perceived from different perspectives; there is no access to a “reality” that lies beyond the words – either for the two correspondents at the time, or for the readers of this book, many years later.

  A WORLD IN WHICH NOTHING WOULD EVER AGAIN BE CERTAIN OR SAFE

  Flame in the Snow is of course not fiction, and this correspondence bears witness to a relationship that had a far-reaching influence on the lives of both of these famous writers. Brink writes, in A Fork in the Road, that his life after meeting Ingrid Jonker would never be the same again. He was a mere twenty-seven years old at the time, had already obtained two MA degrees at the University of Potchefstroom, and had written a handful of novels that drew on the heritage of realism in Afrikaans literature. His first genuinely innovative novel, Lobola vir die Lewe, had just appeared. Brink had recently returned from a two-year period in Paris (1959–1961), where he studied at the Sorbonne on a scholarship, and had taken up a lectureship in the Department of Afrikaans-Nederlands at Rhodes University. In a letter to Jonker, he refers to three events that radically influenced his life – his residence in Paris, the birth of his son (Anton), and his encounter with her. More than forty years later, as he coolly assesses his long life, he retains the same sense of being breathlessly swept off his feet as he had expressed in his very first letter to Ingrid Jonker:

  It was in the late afternoon of a blue and golden late summer’s day, Thursday 18 April, 1963, that Ingrid walked into my ordered existence and turned it upside down. Until that moment I was ensconced in an ultimately predictable life as husband and father, lecturer in literature […] And afterwards? A world in which nothing would ever be sure and safe again, and in which everything, from the most private to the public, from love to politics, was to be exposed to risk and uncertainty and danger. (A Fork in the Road, 91–92)

  Jonker was at the time employed as a proofreader in Cape Town. She was divorced from her husband and lived with her daughter in a flat. At this point, Jonker was just twenty-nine years old. She had published several poems while still in high school, and her first volume, Ontvlugting, made its appearance in 1956. She had an extensive circle of friends among writers and artists in Cape Town, and had, since 1961, been involved in a complex relationship with the much older writer Jack Cope. During her two-year relationship with Brink she repeatedly broke off and resumed her affair with Cope, and this became a source of conflict between her and Brink. Some time before her fateful meeting with Brink, she had received treatment at Valkenberg, a psychiatric hospital.

  As the letters clearly show, Jonker was engaged in a constant battle merely to survive. She frequently complained that the employment she was able to find (as a proofreader) was soul-destroying, and she worked in difficult circumstances (in what she called the “Grey Pit”). As a single mother, she was also involved in an exhausting struggle to arrange her daughter’s care. Time and time again, she thanks Brink for financial support. However, Jonker makes it clear to Brink from the start that she refuses to be possessed by anyone, and that he must not labour under any illusion that he can ever pin her down or fully understand her. This freedom, upon which she prides herself and for which she so stubbornly fights, is precisely the quality that Brink finds irresistible – yet it also frustrates him.

  Jonker’s death by drowning occurred on 19 July 1965 at Three Anchor Bay, Cape Town. The tragic end to her tempestuous life has, over the years, led to comparisons with, among others, the poet Sylvia Plath. Despite the fact that Jonker’s oeuvre is far from extensive (consisting of three volumes of poetry, a play, and a handful of short stories), her poetry had an immediate and overwhelming impact on readers. Her deceptively simple poems capture something about the human condition that found favour very widely, as attested to by the translations of her verse into multiple languages, as well as the setting of her work to music (Chris Chameleon in two albums, Ek Herhaal Jou and As Jy Weer Skryf). The enigma that is Ingrid Jonker continues to hold readers’ attention and has given rise to several films, as well as a play, about her life.

  When Brink first met Jonker, he was working on his novel Die Ambassadeur (later translated as The Ambassador). He heeded her comments on the manuscript and made changes on the basis of her recommendations (like Jonker, the character Nicolette is not “have-able”). Brink altered the second edition of Lobola vir die Lewe as a result of Jonker’s influence. Furthermore, their relationship serves as the basis for Orgie [Orgy], published in 1965, which is presented as a dialogue between a man and a woman; from the correspondence between Brink and Jonker, it becomes clear that Orgie was the product of their collaboration (in one letter, he refers to it as “our novel”). It emerges from the letters that Orgie is in fact an (auto)biographical work. This opens up an alternative approach to reading the novel, which has often been regarded by critics as merely an experimental, modernistic work. The fact that Brink’s tone is noticeably more detached after the publication of Orgie suggests that the completion of this novel signalled, for him, something akin to an end of their relationship.

  THE OPIATE OF BOURGEOIS LIFE

  From the very first letter that Brink writes to Jonker, the enormous impact of their sexual relationship, not only on his life but also on his work, begins to emerge. When he reflects on their encounter, he resorts to a register of religious language – for him, their sex is “a sort of holy Mass, in which transubstantiation is complete”. Brink then rhetorically asks whether sex might not perhaps be “the most pure religion for us ‘non-believers’”. Jonker, too, writes in quasi-religious language about sex when she mentions that she is suffering hunger on a “spiritual-sexual level”.

  For the young Brink, exploring sexuality is crucially important. His and Jonker’s sexual relationship, and his experience
of her permissiveness, but also her refusal to be bound, had a liberating influence on him. It was a liberation on the intimate level of love that worked its way through to every aspect of his existence. From this moment onwards, the power of sex to liberate, to break established patterns, and to call into question restricted, bourgeois values, plays a central role in Brink’s novels. Sex is often a subversive plot device that challenges social boundaries – across colour and class, and between slaves and masters. Significantly, sex serves as a means of communication when no other avenue exists. It is an act of freeing the self, surrendering to the other, and becoming one with this other in a manner that extends beyond words. Apart from the role of sex in Brink’s novels, his relationship with Jonker liberated him from the suffocating confines, the “respectability”, of the middle-class existence in which he found himself.

  Brink’s ideological and literary convictions seem, at this stage, to have been moulded by everything he had thus far read and thought about. He was already in a state of rebellion against social exclusion and political and sexual repression, but he hadn’t yet lived out this rebellion in his own life. He hadn’t yet escaped his own middle-class comfort zone. Indeed, he explains to Jonker that his writing, up until this early stage, has remained “conformist”, and that his rebellions have occurred within the bounds of acceptability. It is only when he gets to know her, along with her absolute contempt for parochialism and her own form of personal sexual freedom, that he realises how boxed in he himself is, how comfortable he has become in his own life as a lecturer, a spouse and a father. He tells her he admires her for the fact that she will never have to resist middle-class values. This, he says, is because she runs no risk of becoming bogged down in that particular morass. He explains that he needs her to continue liberating him from the “opiate” of bourgeois life.

  The extent to which Brink was dependent on Jonker to make him aware of his own, established patterns, is apparent, inter alia, from the manner in which he describes, in one letter, an idyllic dream-existence for the two of them. He writes how he, after sitting and working the entire day in their little house, would get up and meet her in the afternoons on her way back from work. In writing this, he shows no awareness at all of the attitudes that underlie his dream. Jonker then confronts him about the fact that she is expected to go work while he sits at home writing.