deur Philip John
'You're as bad as they are,' she said. 'You're as ignorant and superstitious as the worst of them, and you a White woman who should know better.'
So word Nel, die hoofkarakter in Yvonne Burgess se eerste roman, A Life to Live, beskryf aan die einde van haar lewe. Dié roman vertel die verhaal van Nel wat vanaf 'n plattelandse dorp na die 'groot stad' Port Elizabeth gaan om geld te verdien.
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Die manier waarop die beskrywing van Nel my geraak het, het my laat dink dat Onse angeltjie iets moet doen oor Yvonne Burgess, ook omdat 'n roman wat onlangs gepubliseer is, Anna and the Colonel (1997), haar hertoetrede tot die literêre toneel na 'n afwesigheid van meer as twintig jaar aangekondig het.
Die titel wat ek wou gebruik, het ook reeds vroeg by my opgekom, 'n skewe vertaling van "in the antechamber to eternity." Die frase kom uit haar tweede roman The Strike waar Father Finlay, 'n Anglikaanse priester, mymer oor waarlike geestelike oorgawe:
What it must be to live, Finlay thought, like the condemned, under the threat of the gallows! How easy then to forget oneself, to truly lose one's life! Eckhart's thirty or forty thick hard skins which cover the soul would so easily be shed ... Fènelon's swarm of shameful things would then indeed crawl like filthy reptiles from the hidden cave...Life as understood by the unthreatened, no longer existed for the condemned. In the death cell one surely lived in another dimension, it was the antechamber to eternity ...
Finlay decided to walk up to the prison and parked his car near the railway line. Oh, to live in an antechamber to eternity ... Within a short while he forgot the smell of smoke, soot and worse from the shunting yards and breathed instead the cool air of cloistered walks. Sun, soot-blackened grass disappeared and he saw instead the cold marble walls of the monastery of his imagination (Burgess 1975: 62-63).
Die skewe vertaling van die frase in die titel behou vir my tegelykertyd iets van die geestelike problematiek waarop Father Finlay se woorde hierbo sinspeel en dui op 'n kenmerkende eienskap van Yvonne Burgess se romans, naamlik dat die aksie grootliks afspeel in geslote ruimtes: sit- en slaapkamers in losieshuise en woonstelle. In dié, soms benouend ingeperkte ruimtes word strak en ontstellende beelde aangebied van karakters wat al die ontsetting van ontredderde menswees uitleef: Nel in A Life to Live (1973) 
vasgevang in 'n hopelose verhouding met haar man, Piet Staines, die vrouekarakters Maggie, Mildred en Dulcie in The Strike en Girlie in Say 'n Little Mantra For Me (1979) wat haar ongehude swangerskap moet beskerm teen aanslagte van buite.
Ofskoon Burgess se visie op die wêreld meermale na die ontstellende neig, is die teenpool altyd teenwoordig in humoristiese beskrywings en 'n deernisvolle empatie met die randbestaan en menslike swakhede van die karakters.
By haar woonstel aangekom, kyk ek deur die sitkamervenster na die uitsig oor woonbuurte, Port Elizabeth se industriële gebied en 'n groot deel van die baai. Die karakter in Tinus Horn en Alistair Findlay se Hemel op aarde dink tydens sy aankoms in Port Elizabeth dat die roete van die trein deur die industriële area "die vieslikste view in die hele fokken wêreld" is (p. 21). Ek kan nie help om die kontras tussen die grys sink- en metaalchaos van die industriële gebied en die helderblou van die see wat vanaf die horison insekel, te assosieer met die kontras in haar romans tussen ontredderde menswees en die soms aangrypende mededoë nie.
Sy onderwerp my eers aan 'n lang en intense uitweiding oor hoe sleg dit tans met 'inheemse' ernstige letterkunde, veral Engelse letterkunde, gaan. Amper asof sy my wil oortuig dat ek met iets absoluut onsinnig besig is. Die prentjie wat sy oproep is uiters donker en ek moet hard dink om iets positiefs te kan sê. Wanneer ek later Anna and the Colonel lees wat sy my leen, herken ek iets van dié, amper moedswillige sardoniese swartgalligheid:
We'd sat down before the Colonel answered: 'Our universe is dying, Annie, don't you know? One day every star wil have used up its fuel. And then the lights will begin to go out, all over. Think about it. It's going to end, some day. So maybe it must have BEGUN sometime, don't you think? And if one accepts that,' he mused, ' the so-called linear view ... because if it BEGAN, the question is HOW? Have you thought about that?' (39).
Gelukkig raak die atmosfeer effens ligter en sy praat meer in die algemeen oor skryf:
....first we battled along with the manual typewriter and then the gholfball-machine came out. Then the electronic typewriter and now we have the computer. Nowadays you have email. You can have the whole novel in a file, send it overseas by email and there they have it. That is a marvellous help, modern technology. We used to have to go A Life to Live (1973) Ad Donker The Strike (1975) Ad Donker Say a Little Mantra for Me . Anna and the Colonel (1997)
down to the post-office, get an international reply coupon, and then you send it overseas and it takes the Union Castle ship months to get there. And then maybe next year you get it back. Boeke deur Yvonne Burgess:
(1979) Ravan
Ravan
Ek probeer die gesprek in 'n ander rigting stuur - ek wil by haar vroeër boeke uitkom. Ek vra dus oor 'n manuskrip van haar wat by NELM in Grahamstad lê:
PJ: I read that you wrote a novel at the age of eleven. Is that true?
YB: Yes, I started when I was eleven. But I had that manuscript until recently. It was a historical romance. I don't know where it is now. But they may have it.
PJ: All your other papers are at NELM?
YB: Yes. I was very flattered when they asked me for my papers. They asked Athol Fugard as well, but then someone suggested that he sells them to an American University.
Die pratery oor die manuskripte en dokumente bring haar by wat sy noem haar "first retirement":
YB: And then when I cleared my things out, I wasn't really going to write anymore, I thought I was finished. Everything went, you know old magazines, old Contrasts. That was my first retirement. And then suddenly, suddenly the writing came back, and I wrote these two new novels in three years. But as a result of that I now have got a whole new lot of material - letters, manuscripts, etc. So I'll have another box for them one of these days when I retire again.
Ek wonder watter ander betekenisse die woord "retirement" ook kan hê en dink aan die karakter, Mildred, in The Strike wat 'n boek wil saamstel oor mense se sterfbedwoorde, "...an anthology of famous last words, inspirational dying" (21).
PJ: When was that; when did you decide to stop writing the first time?
YB: I retired in 1974. I also moved to Nelspruit where I spent over ten years. But then I did a HUGE piece of work with the title, The Third Day. A Study on History and Prophecy. So although I stopped doing 'fiction', I actually never stopped writing as such. This study will never be published, I think. It hasn't got a popular angle. I've never tried very hard, I must say. It's been twenty years of work. It is very expensive to publish things with diagrams, very costly.
PJ: It still sounds very intriguing.
YB: I make the point mainly because throughout the twenty years I was writing, I didn't stop. I just stopped writing fiction until three years ago. Three years ago I just started again. And then I wrote Anna and the Colonel.
Dit is duidelik dat dié boek haar na aan die hart lê. Weg is die swartgalligheid, die klem op die negatiewe:
YB: I thought after Anna and the Colonel I'd retire again. But at five o' clock in the morning I would wake up, and one of the characters - the colonel - just would not die, you know, he just grew, he was totally alive. And that was The Colonel's Story, which is the one I'm hoping to publish now. He's quite a character, the colonel. He was quite a bit of work when I had all the notes, quite a bit of work to getting it into chronological order, I must say. That's quite a job in novel writing, you know, if you write like I write. I don't know that anybody starts with chapter one, page one and goes chapter after chapter, to chapter thirty, page hundred ... you know I don't know I write all over the place. The trick is to get the ideas down. You have got to get the ideas down when they flow, without even any thought of where they are going. And possibly there are parts ... I've often found there are parts that fit in somewhere else ... things that I could never have foreseen.
There was no way that I could get rid of him. I ended up having a pad and pen next to my bed, because I would just wake up and it just flowed, it just wrote itself. It was one of the easiest things I've ever written.
PJ: When you say ideas - I'm jumping around here - one way that I understand your first three novels is to see them as a kind of 'metaphysical' literature.
YB: Yes, that's because the novel ... I think serious fiction is always by nature a quest. There is always a question and you go on your quest, you explore in order to find the answer. You are quite right, they are novels of ideas. I find novels that are just stories, you know page turners, I find incredibly boring. What the characters think next, I think, is far more important to me. And that is why I'm particularly pleased with the new novel, The Colonel's Story. It's really one of the best that I've written. I thought when I finished that, you know, if I never write another word, I'm going to die happy, because this is really what I want to be saying. The Colonel actually ends up as an old man in an old-age home. And he spends his declining years, or his last few months really, reviewing his life and what I found so fascinating was that it was a life winding down which was looking back and actually taking stock, all along the line, and to me, that was valuable from the point of view of ideas, philosophical confusions you know, as he keeps on talking about his, my 'final commentary and conclusion'. And he speaks, although he is a clearly defined independent character, I think he speaks for mankind. Because his question is: what is the meaning of life? He thinks: Here I am, I'm eighty-five, what have I achieved, what have I done, what has it all been about. And then that leads logically into, what is the meaning of death? These are questions that man should be wrestling with. And if he isn't, it is because he is escapist by nature and plain chicken.
| Die eerste hoofstuk van The Colonel's Story is gepubliseer in Ravan Twenty-Five Years, 1972-1997: A Commemorative Volume of New Writing (1997), geredigeer deur G.E. de Villiers en uitgegee deur RAVAN. |
Ek kan sien dat as ek haar kans gee, sy eindeloos sal kan praat oor die nuwe romans, maar ek wil nog steeds by die vroeër werk uitkom. Miskien sal dit werk om by die mees resente een te begin, dink ek, Say A Little Mantra For Me (1979).
PJ: Apart from clear descriptions of the way in which people seemingly prevent themselves from observing what actually goes on in reality, I find that your novels frequently seem to be built on an acute body-spirit dichotomy, but that this dichotomy is effectively cancelled out in Say a Little Mantra For Me. I read the four generations of women in the flat as a completed cycle, as a kind of mantra in actual fact.
YB: You sound as if it might be something almost New Agy in the circularity. I don't think so. Obviously there is ... Vern was a Buddhist ... OK ... But what was important is what Girlie did what was right. And there was almost like letting in a benediction at the end of four generations. She did what was right. In the circumstances. It was quite simple. I didn't have any real sort, I don't think, of deep message there, or anything like that. To tell you the truth, do you know Faulkner's As I Lay Dying? - I think (I talking from memory) it is at a funeral, and each member of the family at this funeral gives voice to a monologue and out of these monologues the story and characters emerge, and to tell you the truth, I just wanted to see if I could do something like that - write a novel purely using monologue. That is on the lowest level.
PJ: Well, I think is works. It is definitely one of your most accessible and enjoyable novels.
YB: Of course I have been thinking whether it hasn't dated by now. You know these days people are having babies all over the place without being married. It wasn't like that when I wrote that. Today people might think what was I going on about. But at that time it DID matter.
Wanneer ek na die onderhoud die band transkribeer, begin die gesprek van hier af aan al meer onhoorbaar raak. Die woorde verdwyn agter geluide wat soos statiese elektrisiteit klink, of asof 'n sterk wind oor die mikrofoon gewaai het. Ek kan nie help om te dink dat die opname beïnvloed is deur uitstralings wat van haar af gekom het nie. Dit is asof die kwaliteit van die opname 'n teken is dat die vroeëre werk minder belangrik is - wat sy oor haar nuutste werk gesê het, het so duidelik uitgekom....
PJ: How did you actually start writing, what was the process behind A Life to Live?
YB: When I was in my early twenties (and still a Van der Merwe), after leaving Rhodes I entered a competition organised by one of the big Afrikaans publishers, as far as I remember it was Tafelberg. I entered a novel with the title The House on Uitenhage Road. It was about people in a house in an area not far from here, in North End. It used to be quite a well to do area - two storey houses, but it changed and they ended up being tenements. The manuscript won a commendation, it didn't win THE prize. The comments I received were so positive that I thought I had to continue and do something with it. I changed it to a short story which was translated into German and published in a German anthology as well as here.
PJ: "If you swallow you're dead." [in Contrast 6(1) Augustus 1969 ]
YB: O good heavens, you've actually read that. I've got an awful lot of stuff in magazines and other places. My. Anyway, so that started off as a novel and then the writing bug really bit me. I got married, stopped teaching and began working as art critic for The Eastern Province Herald. I wrote a weekly editorial and book reviews. While I was doing that I was writing A Life to Live. When it came out, people in my family carried on and said they were in the book, but that is not true. That novel was the most successful of all of my work. I was compared to illustrious people such as Bosman, and Faulkner, Steinbeck ... I was placed with social realist writers, you know stark realism.
The newspapers just ran with that idea. And then everybody came down on me. My family ostracised me, but the book is definitely not autobiographical. The characters are all amalgamated out of different people. I gave the manuscript to the Head of the English Department at UPE, Prof. Eddie Davis, whom I knew, and he said, "Yvonne, I wouldn't mind if I had written that myself." That really encouraged me. And then Adriaan Donker came to South Africa. He eventually started a publishing firm. I sent the manuscript to Lionel Abrahams, who gave it to him. A Life to Live was the first novel to be published by Ad Donker.
PJ: And after that came The Strike in 1975.
YB: With that one I'm not that satisfied. It is the one that I am furthest removed from. I suppose part of it was an attempt to be relevant, you know in the general climate of the time. I actually got a lot of stuff from magazines of the time, such as Drum. I feel that it is rather contrived, don't you think?
PJ: Not really...
YB: I read it again not long ago, because I really couldn't remember much and I was surprised to see how much is in there that I understand now from a Pentecostal viewpoint. You know at the time I was agnostic.
Ek probeer haar pols oor die kritiese reaksie wat haar boeke geniet het, omdat dit vir my voorkom asof daar relatief min aandag van akademiese kant gekom het, veral omdat die romans nie geredelik in heersende diskoerse ingepas kan word nie. Sy blyk egter heel tevrede te wees. Waaroor sy wel klagtes het, is die voorblaaie van haar boeke. Sy sou eenvoudige titels verkies het soos in die geval van The Strike: die vrou op die stofomslag van die eerste uitgawe van A Life to Live is nie Nel nie, sê sy; die mense op die familiefoto wat vir die buiteblad van Say A Little Mantra For Me gebruik is, is nie soos sy haar die karakters voorstel nie en die buiteblad van Anna and the Colonel lyk soos 'n jeugboek, wat dit nie is nie. Anna and the Colonel het dit ook ongelukkig getref omdat dit gepubliseer is op 'n tydstip toe Ravan finansiële probleme ervaar het. Die boek is toe nie ordentlik bemark en versprei nie. Exclusive's in Port Elizabeth het byvoorbeeld tien kopieë bestel, wat almal vinnig verkoop is, maar sou verdere kopieë slegs aankoop wanneer mense spesifiek daarvoor vra.
Die laaste vyftien minute van die opname op die band wat ek vir die onderhoud gebruik het, is suiwer statiese geraas. Ek forseer myself egter om dit enduit te luister, net nou is daar dalk tog oomblikke van helderte. Hoe langer ek luister, hoe meer word die geraas op die band 'n soort metafoor vir die eksistensiële pyn wat uitgebeeld word in haar boeke, dié van die uitgeworpenes, die hulpeloses, die ontredderdes. Uiteindelik het die geraas in my ore egter 'n vreemde effek, wat my van die meer liriese, ekstatiese momente en beskrywings in haar romans laat onthou, waarvan die mees treffende miskien dié een is op bladsy 21 van Anna and the Colonel:
And there she was again: Katy and her beloved chickens, calling them with her clucking 'hier, kiep, kiep, kiep...' while they strutted and preened, responding with the brush of a wing, the cock of a head, the nod of a comb, a slant-eyed look .... and the ducks, only pretending to back away with their flirty waddle, and the geese, bunching together, necks stretched out, to serenade her with their raucous chorus, all of them quite unmanned, if poultry could be unmanned; disarmed, anyway, intensely aware of her, and of me, because I was already, in spite of myself, projecting myself into the picture again ....With time the images had become less sharply etched, settling into hazy half-tones, pastoral pastels, misty and Constablesque: "Coloured Woman with Poultry", or some such, because the uncompromisingly chiaroscuroed reality had been too much to bear. She'd gone so suddenly, she'd been so irrevocably cut off, leaving me alone and disconsolate in the idyllic setting; and bereft as I myself was, trying to make it up to them, the chickens and the ducks, to comfort them with my childish imitation of her 'hier, kiep, kiep, kiep...'
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