Sunday night, 12 May 1963, 11 pm
Can also never sleep. (Just wanted to tell you how much I appreciated your phone call yesterday morning – what did we actually say?) I went to look at a boarding house here in Green Point this evening – the R10 per week – double room (for me and Simone!) with eavesdropping old people everywhere – lots of annexes and “small sitting rooms” and a suspicious middle-aged woman who said she might have to put my cousin in a room inside the building … when I asked whether she had a single room near mine for my country cousin!!! Child, I’m really going to enjoy myself! Florals everywhere, little cupboards, and washbasins and washstands – as if these are the chief desire of humankind … doilies and little ornaments and vulgar furniture …
Had a lovely day with Uys – read about forty pages of your MS which I don’t want to say anything about quite yet: must see how it develops, you know how it is.
Look forward to your promised letter tomorrow. Look after mine nicely, will you, there’s no getting away from it.
Find that terrible!
Sweet dreams. Till later.
Jo.
PS: That’s my new name at the Press. Derived from Jonker and especially for you and the Press. I love changing my name and will be duty-bound to marry –
J.
PPS: Will you let me know soon where and how and from when you want a place?
I Jonker.
Grahamstown
Saturday, 11 May 1963
God, my dearest Ingrid,
Nowadays futility is calculable in small doses of three minutes each. And I can’t even claim that I didn’t know this in advance. It wasn’t the phoning itself that frustrated me so mightily, but mainly the fact that I could hear almost nothing you said. And, time and time again, the little bits that I did hear – precisely because I heard it out of context – sounded vaguely upsetting. Something “not proper” in connection with the boarding house. Something to do with being angry or afraid about a letter. Etcetera.
So then I rushed off to the university to get the anticipated letter. Nothing! And immediately after the confrontation with my empty postbox I had to deliver two lectures. (At least I compensated for my misery by finding a minor pretext in [C. Louis] Leipoldt to recite your “Die Kind” and discuss it with the third-year students! Good for them, too. In this way they get something lovely and I get some relief.) After this I had to go and buy meat, milk, and vegetables. Only then could I sit down to write. Committed about eight letters to paper; threw them all away, and had something to eat; now I can talk to you more calmly.
Ingrid dear: don’t seek out bogeymen in my letters! I’m sure I didn’t ever say I have to learn to know you “all over again”. At the most – and this is surely forgivable – I said I wanted to learn more about you. Never stop drinking from your fountain.
As far as my coming down alone is concerned: there’s nothing to be afraid of. It will happen that way. Let’s rather not talk about it in disembodied words, or about the future. Let’s wait until we’re together again and everything’s clear; rather that than one-dimensional words on paper or words in the mouthpiece of a telephone.
Just to confirm the arrangements: as I understand it, you’ll be booking accommodation for me, too, together with you, from Sunday to Sunday; send me the address (please also leave it with Jan). I should be there between three and five in the afternoon, I hope (leaving here Saturday afternoon and staying over somewhere). Is it impossible to get the flat earlier? In any case, insist on the 25th – the Saturday; then I can at least help you move, and wet the roof with you.
I’m glad to hear you’re no longer ill. I felt quite trapped this week after you wrote to say you weren’t feeling well. Look after yourself.
If my calculations are correct, you would have known by this week whether your little search in the wardrobe that night had the desired (?) outcome. Poor me, I got such a roasting about it that night; so I now deserve to know, at least!
I heard from Bartho yesterday that he’s quite eager to see a volume of my poems. (I sent him two or three.) But in the past I’ve too often been overeager to publish, and now I’m sitting with a long row of books that should rather have remained in the bottom drawer; I don’t want to make the same mistake again. Luckily, this time I can rely on you. Perhaps it will become a practically valuable thing between us over time: that one of us remains clear while the other is hot-headed.
Child of love, here I sit again, putting words on paper! All the while, I want to be with you. Do you know John Donne’s “The Ecstacy”? – even in that austere, loquacious time they sometimes came up with beautiful lines. He talks about bodies in love:
They are ours, though they are not we, we are
The intelligences, they the sphere.
We owe them thanks, because they thus,
Did us, to us, at first convey.
Lobola has appeared for a second time – and they actually went and set the title page in capital letters again instead of using lower case, as I requested. One always has to cut back on expectations and ideals – right down to the smallest things. The past few weeks have delivered their full measure of disenchantment. Except for one big difference: you, the neverending you.
Dearest, dearest creature, just one more week.
André.
Sunday.
Strange – it’s a new discovery every time! – how in the final analysis one is influenced, in fact determined, in one’s reactions by physical things such as time and distance. Today, just because a lovely sleep and a happy Sunday morning lies between now and yesterday, I can hardly understand why that silly phone call frustrated me so! Everything seems so certain and “undoubtable”, as our ministers would say. I hope your Sunday morning was similar. I slept late, with a quiet sun after last night’s unexpected thunderstorm. Anton tumbling around on the double bed like a washing machine, clambering and playing. Then slowly getting dressed – and driving for twenty miles through beautiful countryside where the aloes are just beginning to flame. Return, nibble at Sunday papers; make food. (I love playing chef! As long as I can do it when I want to.) And while it’s all cooking up, I can sit here and converse with you, my little penny from heaven.
I look forward to the lovely open road next week, because you’ll be waiting for me at the other end. Do you know what part of me remembers you the most, in the nicest way? Not my ears or eyes or mouth, but my hands. Actually more than just my hands, but everything that can experience you in a tactile way. Every day at dusk I take an hour to myself and walk along a hilly pathway, taking pleasure in my memories.
From the sublime to the more normal – I remembered with a shock that I didn’t give you (and Lena [Oelofse]) money for the calls I made from your flat. Must be about R3 altogether. I wanted to send it along with my first letter, but it just seemed too banal to include a cheque. I’ll bring it with me. And forgive the lapse! I didn’t mean to sponge.
Just today I began a translation that I must finish off this week if I want to get my cheque from John Malherbe: a children’s book about archaeological activities in Egypt (Leonard Cottrell). Quite interesting, although I could surely spend my time more “fruitfully”. Meanwhile I’ve read [William] Golding’s Lord of the Flies: a terrifying, special novel. Do you know it? Starts deceptively – a group of boys who find themselves alone on an island. Then they develop into a primitive community that gradually disintegrates for fear of the Unknown. And, if you think about it, it’s the primitive being with whom we have the greatest affinity – rather than a Greek or Roman or Renaissance man or whatever.
I am glad you like Pot-Pourri – a little. Weglouw[W.E.G. Louw]’s wife [Rosa Nepgen] gave me a regular tongue-lashing about it last time around. But I have a soft spot for it, for non-literary reasons. It’s in any case just reportage. One can’t, and doesn’t want to, always be in a state of high tension when “creating”.
I am so afraid you won’t like the novel! Precisely because it’s so important to me that
you do!
Meanwhile I have dug out Ontvlugting. There are more good things in there than a lot of people think. And I suddenly found myself wondering: Freda [Linde] is surely also going to make one of those HAUM records with you? Maybe we can “wangle” it in such a way that both of ours come out together – I’ve only just done my recording. Ask her.
Now there’s really no choice: I must stop writing (and wasting your time?).
With love,
André.
Have I asked you yet – or was it during your drug-coma?! – if you know these lines by [J.H.] Leopold? –
O nachten van gedragene extasen
en diep gedronkene versadiging,
als elk met zijn geluk te rade ging
en van alleenzijn langzaam wij genazen.
Grahamstown
Monday night, 13 May 1963
Dearest little girl,
I’m very tired tonight. Spent the whole day fiddling with the Stellenbosch lectures – which are still far from done – and then did another shift of translation. It’s such soulless work. And even though the book is in English, it’s still the kind of style that translates very laboriously. I’ll take French any day. But if one has no choice in the matter, complaining won’t help. I simply need the money. And in the meantime I must prepare a lecture for my second-year class tomorrow.
Amid all this, however, one lovely thing happened today. I received a letter, seven pages long, which I stood and read in the Common Room among all the learned, qualified gentlemen drinking their tea, “an island entire of myself”. Just a missive from a light-haired girl with whom I am in love. Her name is Ingrid. It’s a pretty name, isn’t it? But she’s even more lovely than her name. And even though she kept on saying “Hm-hm, Chris, no Chris”, she did allow me to see how lovely she is. And then one night, in the hours after midnight, actually – but you won’t in any case believe me. Besides, one isn’t allowed to write such things, because there’s a Publications and Entertainments Act.
There were some other good moments too: the education department will be making a special appointment from July for someone to teach the diploma students grammar – and then it’ll finally be off my back. (It was always my greatest hell, even though it’s only been two periods a week this year.) In addition, our department’s going to get a typist and Rob said I can give her all my manuscripts for typing if I like. Thirdly, we had to decide on prescribed books for next year. Because I’m the one who deals with prose, Rob said that I couldn’t myself include Lobola – but he then offered to take over some of my lectures so that he can discuss it.
Usually I prescribe the third-year poetry volumes during the course of the year. I’m very tempted to find a place for Rook en Oker this year. Do you realise that as far as poetic form and character are concerned, it’s actually completely new in Afrikaans? I’m so impressed with you, and proud – as if it’s my own achievement!
Girl, what on earth do you mean by “loyalty”, or: “not being loyal”? I don’t know who said that to you. But either she doesn’t really know you, or she doesn’t know what “loyal” really implies. If it means that you must always “protect” someone you love, or a friend, or an acquaintance, because you don’t want to hurt them by being honest – then you should never be loyal. I said to you on our first night already (what does “first” or “second” or “third” night mean to us? – it was one moment that made three days timeless) that above all you are honest, and free. You must stay that way. But not in loneliness. I want – even though it must frequently be on paper only, from a distance – to wrap myself up in you: not to smother you, but to protect, and to shield you from the Southeaster.
For this reason you should also not be afraid that you, in the true words that you quoted from Lytton, will “pretend what you don’t feel or overestimate what you do feel”. Your honesty will not allow it. Just remember: one can also “underestimate”! And it’s just as wrong to underestimate a feeling or experience as to exaggerate it. I know how precious this lucid angoisse is with which I’ve been living over the past three weeks. (And you?) I know, too, that you won’t allow me to live in a state of illusion out of pity or consideration if things are no longer what they used to be – just as little as I would do this to you.
I can very well understand your hesitation after the many hurts you’ve suffered. “To love is to give a hostage to fate” goes one facile maxim which, like all sayings, announces a truth but also oversimplifies it. But getting hurt happens so often because one creates a particular image of, or for, the future, as if this trajectory, this “one day” is the most important thing of all. It is not. This is what seduces people into being false to each other, making promises for a “one day” over which they have no control. And that’s why what I offer – God, it’s very little, I know, but it’s so precious to me – is now. It’s not the fatalism of hedonism or whatever “ism”, maybe not even realism. But isn’t this, in the final analysis, all that we, as humans, can be certain about? And it’s a “now” that actually makes time less important. It might be days, or weeks, or years, or “for ever and ever”.
Why am I even writing this? You know it just as well as I do, don’t you? And isn’t that which we do have, can have (and, I hope, will have next week), not on its own wonderful enough? Precisely: wonder-ful, “in the shape of a wonder”. As people, we are an insect race upon the surface of the earth, my little Ingrid; we have so little; and we have little about which to feel proud. But what we do have – God, how beautiful it is. “There is only one thing that matters,” goes a quotation I remember vaguely, “and that is being together”.
Good night, my Ingrid. And allow me to do in my thoughts what the whole of me would like very much to do tonight.
Tuesday morning.
What does one do when a first-year comes and asks: “Sir, I have to go to class in a minute, but can you please tell me quickly: what is existentialism?”!
That, however, is more or less how my day began.
I held this letter back, in case the “severe”(?) letter you spoke about on the phone arrived this morning. But my postbox was quite empty. Miserere mei!
Meanwhile, yesterday’s lovely, lustrous letter is more than enough to keep me going.
I hope your work today isn’t as claustrophobic as usual. I’m living within such an open, free happiness today that it wouldn’t be right for you to feel alone or depressed.
Love to you, my fleet-footed child,
André.
Wednesday, 15 May 1963
THANK YOU FOR LETTER DUNCE PHONE ME TONIGHT LOOKING FORWARD TO SUNDAY LOVE = INGRID
Wednesday, 15 May 1963
Lovely little thing,
Your funny, moody, dearest jumbled-letter arrived today, at last. Thank you! From the inaudible telephone conversation, I’d expected much worse. And your fears, in any case, are unfounded. First of all, I’m coming alone, as you already know (and I do hope your backveld cousin’s room is close to yours). Secondly, the poem about the red rooster has nothing to do with us. I wanted mainly to protest against the fact that the church as an institution renders a life of passion powerless. Third: now you’re lashing me because I say “inspiration” might wane – while my words were simply an answer to your reference to “one day when the original inspiration has waned”: and I also said: it’s a lot more than “inspiration”. And it doesn’t all depend on my “Cape detour”: all I said was that this visit may determine whether or not I will continue writing poetry.
Beloved little minx, I don’t come to you because I expect certain things from you or because I’ve formed a certain image of you and want to “test” you! I come unquestioningly, because I love you, and because I want to leave it to the visit itself to determine what will happen. Satisfied?
The suspicious old aunties must just not undermine our plans. But that, in itself, might become quite a fun little game!
I don’t agree about my second name (which you spell incorrectly each time). “Brin
k” is actually Danish, apparently; but my original ancestor Andries came from Germany, somewhere around 1730. How, no one knows. All that’s known is that he was in fact here and took a wife and began his contribution to population growth. I like to imagine he was a stowaway who came hidden in a vat – and then sneaked out at night in his striped shirt and big bare feet, stealing an enormous joint of ham or a tin of rusks and a pitcher of water.
I feel a bit bleary-eyed this morning: had to get up four times last night for Anton, who sometimes absolutely refuses to sleep at night; then I had a class at eight. In the meantime I need to finish preparing the St’bosch lectures. The most important one, at least, is complete – for Tuesday evening. By the way, would you be able to drive with me to St’bosch on Tuesday after work? There might be a party afterwards. Then we can return together afterwards. Or do you have an aversion to such hoity-toity stuff? We can discuss this in one of the floral lounges, or in our single room, or in Simone’s double room. (So there!)
Rob will tell me tomorrow what he thinks about the book. Meanwhile, your silence – even though I know it isn’t intended as such – is ominous!
After our lovely autumn weather it began to get miserable today, with little gusts of wind, dry leaves, and occasional rain. It hems me in. I want to hit the road and come to your little spot of sun.
By the way – and please forgive the fact that this letter is jumping around so much – do you know this lovely poem by Erich Fried (“Traum vom Tod”)?:
Traum
Traum aus der Nacht
Traum aus der Nacht vor dem Tod
Traum aus der Nacht vor dem Tod einer Welt
einer Welt aus Angst vor dem Traum
Angst
Angst vor dem Traum
Angst einer Welt vor dem Traum
Angst einer Welt vor dem Traum vom Tod
vor dem Traum vom Tod aus der Nacht.
Talking about poems: do I still need to say what I think of Opperman’s opinion about “Begin Somer”? Opperman also rejected [Peter] Blum’s Enklaves van die Lig [Enclaves of Light] at one point. You’re in very good company! In his best work O. is brilliant, and he’s apparently an excellent lecturer. But as a critic I’ve never had much time for him.
Flame in the Snow Page 6
