Flame in the Snow Read online

  I saw Rob [Antonissen] this morning, and without my asking, he referred to your poems in 60 (which he seems only now to have read). He says he’s “very taken” with them. You’ve told me you don’t care much what critics say, but maybe this will warm your heart a little. You’ve been through enough wintery things as it is. I know we relate as free individuals, hold each other to nothing, and don’t commit each other to any bonds, but I do wish I could be with you; and help a bit. Not only to find a place to live and share every day’s finicky little tasks with you, but maybe also to save you from the thought that “the cure for loneliness is solitude”.

  Please – for God’s sake, Ingrid – don’t do what you wanted to do in Jan [Rabie]’s house. No reasonable grounds exist for my being able – or willing – to persuade you otherwise. Maybe my insistence is based on purely selfish considerations. But don’t. You must still make things like “Begin Somer” [“Early Summer”], “Dood van ’n Maagd” [“On the Death of a Virgin”], “Bitterbessie Dagbreek” [“Bitter-Berry Daybreak”], “L’Art Poétique”, the series of “intimate conversations”; and we must once again make, together, what Afrikaans itself can’t: love.

  The sun’s calling me outside (it’s already fully winter here); I want to go sit in the garden and read [Paul] Éluard, and Jonker.

  Write, Ingrid. And allow me to do anything I possibly can to help. In whatever way.

  Send my regards to Chris [Lombard], and thank him again. And write – for us – a poem about: “The memory of evening is like an apple”; find a way to relate it to Adam and Eve’s apple; when you’re done, eat the apple; and then ask: what now? You will know how. I’m not a poet.

  With love,

  André.

  Monday, 29 April 1963

  LETTER FLOWERS RECEIVED STOP THANK YOU FOR EVERYTHING AND FOR YOU ANSWER FOLLOWS LOVE = INGRID

  Dept. of Afrikaans

  Rhodes

  Grahamstown

  Tuesday, 30 April 1963

  Ingrid, my dearest little child,

  I know I probably “ought” not write yet again, but why would I pay any attention to “shoulds” and “should nots” when I’m talking to you? I was thinking about the fact that you’re moving out of your flat today, and that you probably have no refuge after Jan, so I’m sitting here feeling frustrated that mere physical distance makes it impossible to help. God, and it also won’t help for me to tell you that I’m thinking about you. What else have I done this week? I’ve been forcing myself to work, but in the quieter moments in between I’m busy with you; at night I remember you, and I lie awake feeling happy about you.

  And – “oh, what nonsense!” you will say – but you have opened up something unsuspected in me and got me writing poetry! This is not a “high and compelling duty” – but perhaps a kind of emergency valve attesting to our few but precious little things, allowing them to endure. And I’m reckless enough to send you a few of these attempts – in the hope that you’ll also be reckless enough to tell me honestly if you think they’re rubbish. You would find it boring if I were to write above each of them, “For Ingrid”; but that’s how they were meant (“fire of my loins”!).

  I’m busy typing up the book [Die Ambassadeur] – 200 pages done. The few days with you meant a lot for this work; much of it now suddenly seems prophetic! You must decide for yourself when, in ten days’ time, you are saddled with it.

  But this isn’t a letter. I await yours first before I write another. This is just a note for the accompanying verses; a tiny effort to convince you that I want, especially in this current period, to be with you and nowhere else.

  Until later, with love,

  André.

  Oh, what I wanted to say right from the start: thank you for your telegram, which arrived at a very depressing moment, and changed much for me.

  As Ek Sê [When I Say]

  Jong Digteres [Young Poet]

  Ek Kan Sê [I Can Say]

  Deur die Spieëlglas [Through the Looking Glass]

  Slegs [?] [Only] [?]

  Meisie [Girl]

  Citadel Press

  145 Bree Street

  Cape Town

  Wednesday, 1 May 1963

  My dear André,

  I started writing to you on Sunday, but after five interruptions I gave up and went for a walk up the mountain, then an ice-cold swim at Clifton, a warm bed and a drink, and in the meantime I’ve sent you a telegram. I want to thank you again for your lovely letter – so open and honest and innocent! I’m already looking forward to the next one! But first I have to scold you. Why did you accept the Eugène Marais Prize? André, André! That easily you must not compromise, and I’m not going to congratulate you on it. Are you also glad about the fuss over the “stance” of the writers? A whole lot of new names have been added, including Ina Rousseau. F.L. Alexander said that no artist with any self-respect would allow himself to be associated with the [Publications Control] Board. Did you see all of that? Also, the editorial in The Friend?

  I’m glad you’ll soon be coming to Cape Town again – you must see my beautiful flat (with garden) in Green Point; such a cosy and intimate little home. At the moment I’m staying (till 15 May) in Jan and Marjorie’s [Jan Rabie and Marjorie Wallace] house. The two of them left for a holiday in Hangklip today. Everything still good, or same as usual. My friends still make me bitterly angry, and then I miss your calm protection. Chris is the same. Of course, he sends you his regards – last night we had a meal together at 191; he took me home at about eleven o’clock and I still had to pack … But tell me, when are the lectures?

  Right now I’m writing from godforsaken Citadel Press, which dulls my imagination … I’ll write more from home tonight. I remember some of your questions: whether a body can remember? There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in our philosophy …

  No, André, I would really like to see you one more time before, screaming and cursing like [J.] Slauerhoff, I leave this life.

  I’m sorry that on the weekend you were there stuff like that had to hit me. But I’ve always had a surprising capacity to recover, and your friendship is healing and cleansing too.

  Thank you for the news about Rob. I am of course happy that he liked some of my poems in 60. One can rely on his judgement and it looks as though a few new horizons have also opened up for him in the last while.

  Went and poured tea now. Still at work.

  Just after you left, I heard from “reliable sources” that my former (always sounds like deceased) husband has no intention at all of returning Simone to me. I received a highly upsetting letter, wrote back to him immediately – no answer – and, just now, a registered letter in which I demand Simone back. I hope this mess turns out well and that he and I don’t have to see one another in court again.

  I haven’t written a single word in the past two weeks with all these things. How is it going with Die Ongedurige Kind [The Restless Child] …? The poem is beautiful. You must please not call the book Die Ambassadeur. No one will buy it … it’s such a fusty old title. Die Ongedurige Kind is poetic and light and ephemeral … You’re welcome to send me the first chapters … I’ll also pick up any typing errors.

  Oh yes, with regard to the people, the citizenry, you’re a little muddled in the way you speak. They are precisely not free, it is their bondage that grieves me and bores me into the abyss.

  But apart from that, I bought myself a lovely new coat (Chris says it looks absolutely French) and I’m already beginning to pamper myself for the coming winter … went to sleep with Simone’s teddy bear last night, it’s so wonderfully warm and woolly, and yellow as a Bantry Bay summer.

  Have you seen May’s Drum yet? I haven’t. I hope you get it in Grahamstown. It should be on sale somewhere today.

  Do you know George Barker’s “News of the World: 3”?

  … before

  The serried battalions of lies and the organizations

  of hate

  Entirely encompas
s us

  …

  Lie one night in my arms and give me peace.

  Write soon, you hear!

  Love … Godspeed … gratitude,

  Ingrid.

  {Sorry about the typing – am perpetually in a hurry! What I said about the Marais Prize is not because I don’t believe in your talent as a playwright, you hear; also, I’ve again read Lobola vir die Lewe.}

  Dept. of Afrikaans

  Rhodes University

  Grahamstown

  Friday, 3 May 1963

  Feather-fluff-girl,

  While an apathetic U.E.D. [University Education Diploma] class sat and wrote a test (the best solution when one doesn’t feel like lecturing), I read your letter. God! Here I am, fretting about your accommodation problems and your other daily tribulations – and then your letter steals in and mocks me! Perhaps it was a bit bold of me to think (or to hope) that I could “know” you after getting to know you in a biblical sense! And then yesterday I also went and bought a copy of Drum and read your poem – which, like “Die Kind” [“The Child Who Was Shot Dead by Soldiers in Nyanga”], grows on me more and more. I read the note about you and looked at your picture, slotted in most tastefully amid Tennis Biscuits, Edblo mattresses, Powa Pills for Men, Sunbeam Polish and Mum. Theatre of the absurd without any words, this particular little combination; and in itself a commentary on the comédie humaine? But what I actually wanted to say about all this is the following: I sat and looked at the photo and didn’t recognise you; it was “the poet Ingrid Jonker”. And I read your own declamation or declaration (“sweet” – for a Mum-public?) and noticed, among other things, that you were born in Douglas where, Christ Almighty, I also lived for seven years; and realised all over again: what minuscule little piece of you do I really know? (I don’t even dare ask: which minuscule little piece do I even have? Can you, of all people, be “have-able”?) Which almost makes it a matter of necessity to come back to you and learn more about your beautiful land.

  This is why it’s quite some consolation that the lectures in Stellenbosch have been arranged for earlier than I’d thought: the week beginning Monday 20 May. In 2½ weeks’ time. Things are still being ironed out right now. If they can see their way clear to paying at least half of my air ticket, I’ll be arriving in Cape Town on Friday the 17th, and leaving again the following Friday morning. The lectures themselves will keep me busy for just three days: Monday morning (“Experimental Novels”); Tuesday evening (“Novel and Taboo”); Wednesday afternoon (“Theatre of the Absurd”). Plus, somewhere in between, a small party. If it can be so arranged, I’ll need to be in Stellenbosch for only a minimum of the time. And Thursday, a public holiday, we’ll have all to ourselves. The only complication in this whole business is the back-and-forth travelling between Stellenbosch and Cape Town, for which the South African Railways and Harbours doesn’t really make modern provision.

  Otherwise I’ll come down by car: in that case, it’ll be Sunday afternoon the 19th; and then I’ll stay until the following Sunday morning – leaving very early! Either way, I’ll let you know. That’s assuming you want me there, and have space for me.

  I’m happy about your nice flat. Where you found the time to arrange that on top of everything else, I don’t know. Is it your own – just for you? And Simone’s? In the picture she looks just like her lovely, petite mother. And for me you will – once again – be a new “you”. I hope it won’t be necessary to go through all the misery of a court case. Is there any way I can help?

  I must type-type-type; and try to keep my usual work going, too. Thank god I have no “social conscience” forcing me to pay back and forth visits to people I want nothing to do with, or to attend things I have no interest in. And so the MS is at least coming along, slowly; I think it will be done by next Wednesday. I know Die Ongedurige Kind is the nicer title. But first read the MS and see if it fits. That’s the main issue. Maybe you’ll come up with something completely different, a better suggestion.

  We can talk about it when I’m there. In the meantime you can – and must – please mark up the MS wherever you find it necessary; please be merciless. (Not that I doubt you will.) You’ll in any case be the first to receive it. And it’s probably best that, if surgery is needed, it be deep and clean and quick. For me this is always the most bitter thing about a writing life: during the joy and sorrow of the process itself, and afterwards, you have the words all to yourself, virginal, completely untouched. But then the work calls out to the world; and the first set of eyes that looks upon it, whether approvingly or otherwise, disturbs that inviolate state. Or is this just that very old line that something magical cleaves to everything young and new?

  I did not mean, in my first letter, that your average civilian, or the public, are themselves free. I myself have a phobia for the bourgeoisie; pattern-people. What I meant was simply this: some people (like me) find the masses a bigger threat than others do, because they have an inner tendency to go along with things, and to settle for a life of home and wife and child and servant … I find that, to remain free, I have to live in a continuous state of conscious rebellion against such a life. Others (you?) have within themselves so much freedom that they remain untouched despite living in a bourgeois environment. The masses don’t threaten them, they’re invulnerable. But I must also admit – and this is not to be sentimental, just honest – that, after you, I feel freer in relation to the world than ever before. Let me acknowledge, in addition: I have had only two singular experiences in my life that completely, and in an instant, scorched me open – the first was the birth of my son, Anton, seven months ago (or: the almost 24 hours that I had to be there, present but powerless, until a Caesarean put an end to it); and the second was: you. Maybe there was a third, though it wouldn’t have been a single experience, but a long series of events that rendered true Henry Miller’s words, “There is only one adventure, and that is inward, towards the self” – and this was Paris.

  For me it’s hard to remember, and to believe, what came before Paris. A life of friendly, adventureless obedience to a pattern. Oh, I was constantly in a state of rebellion; in my second year already I was thrown out of the synagogue of the Christian Nationalists – but even this revolt was a kind of play with the pattern; properly breaking loose was something I would never really do. I still needed my religious opiate; I knew – unavoidably, after seven years at university – that I had been “accepted”. Nobody found it necessary any longer to judge anything I did on its own merits. It was done according to a particular public “image” that created a series of “achievements” in advance. A model boy. I even attended intervarsity along with a textbook from which I would study during breaks. My only real release was writing. But even that was conformist. God, the most daring image in anything I wrote before Paris was: “The crowing of a cock rips through morning’s mystical hymen.” And then – serves me right – even that was cut by the publisher! See? You read my palm correctly, little diviner-star. This sweet youth of mine: only now do I recognise and appreciate all those frustrated attempts at rebellion. And then came Paris. Nobody knew me. Nobody took me at face value. The fact that I existed meant precisely zero to the rest of the world. And so on. The congregation will find it written up in Lobola. That’s why [W.E.G. Louw]’s reaction was so adolescent (and maybe old Fransie [Malherbe] was not quite so wrong in this respect?).

  Well, then: next thing I had to come home, after just two years – which was too short. It did give me the chance, though, to start dismantling everything I’d previously accepted. And I mean everything. But there wasn’t time to start something new; to seek and find a “new myth”, as Stephen [Etienne] Leroux would put it. For that reason, my first reaction back in SA was fairly hysterical. I wanted to write letters to newspapers about all the things that filled me with disgust; and just about everything did. Don Quixote and his windmills. [J.D.] Salinger’s young boy, in The Catcher in the Rye, who wants to remove all the dirty words from all the world’s lavatory walls �
� but finds that one can never actually do this. Even my reply in DH [Die Huisgenoot magazine] to Prof. Fransie [Malherbe] was a little along these lines: an attempt to hold forth against stupidity and pig-headedness. But does one achieve anything by doing that? Does one actually wipe out stupidity and ignorance? Or must one rather learn, not to “accept” that which is supposedly “mature” (in that case I don’t ever want to be mature), but to “live ironically” – with justness, a little pride, and much love.

  And it was about this time that you, with your lovely blouse and your green slacks and your little feet and beautiful eyes, entered Jan’s house and said “hello”, setting everything in motion. You will understand: it’s not something for which one can say thank you. It’s a thank you that has to be lived.

  The Eugène Marais Prize. I have a knack for doing the wrong thing. Bartho put it with such nice irony: “The day the Akademie awards you a prize, you must know that you’re on the wrong path.” But this is something I myself knew very soon after the publication of Caesar. And it is without the least shred of illusion that I’m accepting the thing. I won’t attempt to justify it. It’s done now, beyond the range of regret. All I’m allowed to be happy about is that it will bring me back to Stellenbosch on 29 June!

  Meanwhile there is something else on its way, too, which you will find equally unappealing: Sempre Diritto, an Italian travel journal. I have only just been through the proofs; Bartho has promised to have it out by my birthday on the 29th. This one is literally just my diary during the journey. And I’m beginning to realise more and more: people say things in a diary that are personally valuable as a result of associations, but which decidedly don’t make interesting reading for others. Unless it’s in the nature of [W. Somerset] Maugham or others’ “Writer’s Notebook”, but that’s a different kettle of fish. I told Bartho at the time I felt sceptical about the whole business, but he insisted it be published. Now it’s coming out, and I’ll have to play father to it. {So be it, then.}