But for you, darling, indeed: with love,
André.
Evening.
Having a guest here tonight eased the conclusion of a long, empty birthday. From my mother I got a marvellously bulky, thick jersey in autumn colours – and unavoidably thought back to our dress-buying on Friday; that hideous green thing the woman tried to pass off on us as an autumn hue. I also found myself thinking about the lovely dress that fits so beautifully over your petite little breasts. And everything else, too. Your formal dressing up, with handbag and coat, whenever you go to the toilet; all the things we can laugh about together, be happy about, get mad about. The changing shades of light on the mountain, and your eyes, with that beguiling little smile playing around your mouth, the defenceless surrender of your skin to my hands, the taste of your hair and shoulders, and everywhere, you.
This is all just reminiscence, and a very incomplete way of saying I love and miss you unbearably. Take good care of yourself; give our little girl a kiss from me, and be with me tonight. Last night I kept waking up and stretching out my arm to touch you, only to discover it wasn’t you; my sleep for the rest of the night was very lonely.
One of these days I’ll have to send you a little tape.
With love – once again, always,
André.
Grahamstown
Thursday, 30 May 1963
Precious love, my little thing,
Thank you for your glorious letter about sun and grass and longing. I left my tea – which was meant to be my breakfast – just where it was and withdrew into my office at the university, to a sunny corner of the table, and read, and read again. This is happiness: this reading, this assurance about being in love, this joy, inside of which one can wander for the rest of the day.
My virginal little bride! In a certain sense you are the most virginal person I know. And even in this separateness there is a kind of value, maybe a new means of purification?
I hope the small accompanying photo is useful for the exhibition. I simply don’t have any bigger ones, and I’m still struggling to get the negatives out of Mrs [Hilda] Brinkman. I just hope it’s not too late. Friday being a public holiday messes a bit with our correspondence – although I’m glad you’ll have a chance to rest for a change. Make sure you have a restful break!
Actually I wish you were able to grow little wings so you could come visit this weekend, because Estelle and her mother are leaving early tomorrow to visit the family of a friend who died last week; I’ll be on my own until Sunday night. I’ll try to phone, but must still work out which number to use. By the time you get this letter, it will all be old news in any case. (I hope the other one, which should be with Mrs Oxley on Saturday, reaches you.)
Bartho has written to say he’s planning an anthology of “younger writers” for next year, and he wants to include the two of us. I hope this plan works out – although I can hardly imagine when I’ll ever write again. (Prose.) I might distil something poetic during the long weekend that lies ahead – though I have a string of classes again on Saturday.
I’m glad to hear Jan and his crowd are at least not unpleasant, although the spectre of Uys still looms. Perhaps that will also go off surprisingly well. I don’t want them to make you unhappy.
Where do those lovely Hansel and Gretel lines come from?
My letters jump around so! It’s because with every sentence I think of a hundred other things I want to say at the same time – and eventually I never finish anything I start. Fortunately you won’t misunderstand me any more. We know each other too well for that, each and every pore. Have I ever known anyone in the way I know you? Besides: all the “secrets” I’ve ever possessed – in whatever way – are now in you. And you’re wrong: they don’t wash out that easily! Somewhere, who knows, one of them still hides, biding his time. I’m starting to get used to the pretty name Deirdre. (Do you know [Roland] Holst’s version of the beautiful Celtic myths about Cú Chulainn and Conchobar? That’s where Deirdre comes from, or am I wrong?) But I also like Heloïse. And Ingrid. Or shall we make a serene little Nicole, or an audacious Brunhilde? “Other names are still slumbering”!
(Do you have a copy of Tristia [N.P. Van Wyk Louw], or must I send you one?)
I walked into both bookshops here today and asked them – actually, demanded – that they each order six copies of Rook en Oker. And I gave the third-years notice that we’re definitely going to discuss it this year. (No one will be able to say we’re not “up to date”!)
All of this, still! – ways of longing.
Do you know Jacques Prévert’s little portrait, “Alicante”? Forgive my imperfect translation:
An orange on the table
Your dress on the rug
And you in my bed
Sweet gift of the present
Freshness of the night
Warmth of my life.
Today I encountered the letters of [Lawrence] Durrell and Henry Miller: a hefty collection that reads wonderfully. Personal insight into other people’s lives is always more “significant” than that which has been turned into objective literature! And a few new [Georges] Simenons arrived. Where will I find the time to read them all, on top of my schedule? And this while every so often I simply walk away from everything, lean back, with or without music, and sit thinking, longing for you.
Forgetful little femina! (Referring to the jacket that you had to go and retrieve from Jan’s in your blue sleep suit.) Light-footed deer, fragrant wisp of memory, sleep with me and be happy. Time is no longer of any importance.
I am happy. I long for you. I love you more than ever before,
André.
Entièrement à toi!
Grahamstown
Saturday morning, 1 June 1963
Little darling,
Greetings, my “morning bride”!
Never have you been so keenly with me, despite our state of separateness, than in my night of sleeping alone in this big, empty house. I woke up just now with thoughts of you, and now I’m sitting here writing in the early morning, while you’re still in your sweet Saturday slumber, and Simone’s busily zipping around somewhere, buzzing like a bee.
I wasn’t able to work alone in the house last night, so I took my marking to a friend and sat myself down in her flat. She’s a very understanding kind of person – the matron at one of the university’s residences, in fact. She can be quite embarrassingly superficial in company – but very different in one-on-one conversation. (Her husband left her a few years ago and is now married to Louise Conradie, someone you might know?) And so I told her about everything. I’m glad I did. She understands and appreciates things so well; she’s able to be happy about it, too, and she understands how complex everything actually is.
I got home at about midnight, laboured until almost two o’clock on diary-work, and only then went to sleep. This morning I felt a slight tristesse seeping into my day after reading the lead story on the dying pope. I’ve actually been aware of it all week. Why does it affect me so? One day we must convert to Catholicism, together. It’s another one of the wide range of things that bind us: we connect so precisely in almost every area. In this case: both of us agnostic, sceptical, and yet – am I right? – both with a kind of need to believe in something nonetheless, even if it’s just a greater sense of meaning or coherence; and the enchantment (for lack of a better word) of Catholicism. It’s just the idea of a large, organised system that always makes me feel uneasy.
Darling, demonic little angel, if I’d slept in the same bed as you last night, neither of us would have gotten much sleep. And it would have been the whole sonata, the glorious fire of the ecstasy, the more languid, restful togetherness con sordino, the playful light happiness, and then the quiet, the space, eventually, in which everything becomes bigger and one feels small and reverent towards the other, and the night.
I shouldn’t write so much! You’re doing the tape-thing today, aren’t you? But how can I do otherwise, once I start conversing with
you?
I marked the tape to indicate which is side 1; let Erik put it on – and then push off. There’s a little period of silence before I begin. Then, at the end, he can turn it around and play side 2. Tell him it plays at standard speed; 3¾. And ask him if his recorder has three speeds, then you can record your answer at the slowest speed (it plays twice as long).
I must have a glass of milk now and then dash off to class.
But here – since I’ve already put so much of [Paul] Van Ostaijen’s poetry on the tape! – is one more poem, a piece that you yourself might almost have composed:
NIEMAND
verstaat mij
mijn spel is zó eenvoudig
niemand kan het raden
Mijn handen voelen
al mijn voelen dat zij nooit wisten
en mijn borsten
sidderen
om de streling die komen moet
geen wet
maar
LOT
I’ll write again tomorrow, maybe tonight even, or maybe I’ll phone tonight.
With all my love, and a soft little kiss, you-know-where,
Your André.
Grahamstown
Sunday afternoon, 2 June 1963
My little bride-child, mine,
“The blind head butting at the dark” – that is what this weekend of being alone feels like. But in the midst of my minor descent into hell, I have you; you are the “blaze of light along the blade”. Yesterday’s telephone conversation, and your dear voice, your happiness and your love, meant such a lot to me. You must know the lovely epigraph that Graham Greene uses to introduce one of his books: “Man has places in his heart which do not yet exist, and into them enters suffering in order that they may have existence.” Like all births, this one is not without its share of suffering. But it’s indispensable; and despite how paradoxical it might sound, I wouldn’t want it any other way; there’s a kind of primeval happiness, pristine and unraffinated, in this clear light; I shall always be thankful for it.
You asked yesterday: “But what still needs to be thought about?” And yet you know. Now is the time for finding words, for confrontation, for standing up implacably to the chaos in one’s own heart. I am too endlessly tired, stripped too bare by two nights and a day of this kind of “being” to want to keep anything from you. And yet it’s actually unnecessary to say it: you know. I have to decide to shake myself loose from everything: not from someone I despise or hate or about whom I feel neutral, but someone I do love, after all, someone who has shared many essential moments with me; a soft person, and a vulnerable being. And is there any greater cruelty than that against the defenceless?
If I were to break my ties too easily, just shake off everything I have taken on and try to deny its value, I would break down something inside me – and you would be the first to abhor me for that.
This is the hell that I must get through this weekend. To put it humorously, in the words of a wise old lady (read it with a bit of a brrr-aay):
Die lewe is ’n brakwal:
hy kalwer uit
hy kalwer uit
tot hy in sy dônner val!
[Life is a brackish embankment
it hollows out
it hollows out
until it collapses completely!]
But I know I’m getting closer to the light. What remains is still more exhaustion. I haven’t really slept the past two nights. Or: it was a jigsaw puzzle of sleep and wakefulness, thoughts, dreams, associations, memories, expectations.
Many scraps of poetry emerged from all of this. It’s actually strange how often I wake up with a cadence in my head, a series of loose words; then, one by one, they start slotting into a rhythm until a line emerges – which I forget unless I write it down immediately. One more or less finished fragment goes like this:
Kom ons weeg: jý links jý regs
maar die hand bewe met die gewiggies
en niks lê roerloos op die klein agaatkant nie:
die siel weeg in die donker teen ’n veer.
[Let us weigh things up: you left, you right
but the hand with the weights trembles
and nothing lies motionless on the agate-surface:
The soul balances in the dark against a feather.]
(Should we call it “Osiris”? He’s the one who weighed people’s souls, after all. And in ancient Egypt the feather was a symbol of truth.)
Another one, which grew longer:
Kon mens maar sonder sê
van liefhê liefhê
wéés
sodat niks gemeet hoef te word
aan die tyd nie
want hoe lank duur duur?
is is?
moet ek my voortdurend gysel aan die lot
prakseer, bereken, uitsorteer
iewers-heen “word”
op Francesca se donker wind
of die son en die ander bewegende sterre
in plaas van net
die klein prikkie is
te is
wat nie geheue of verwagting het nie
wat niks doen op grond van gister
of in hoop op môre nie
wat selfs vry kan wees van my en jou
en dergelike toevallighede:
’n onverbonde
ongebroke
is?
[Can one exist
without ever saying
“I love you”, “I love you”
so nothing has to be measured
against time
because how long does time last?
how long is is?
must I constantly make myself a hostage to destiny
devise, calculate, sort out
somewhere “becoming”
on Francesca’s dark wind
or the sun and the other moving stars
instead of just being
the little dab of is
without memory or expectation
that does nothing on the basis of yesterday
or in the hope of tomorrow
that can even be free of me and you
and similar incidentals
an unbounded
uninterrupted
is?]
(Are the three concluding lines necessary?)
And the other one is still just a few scraps. Like:
Wie-weet-waar in die wilde lewe
woon jy, kind,
met jou heilige sonderlinge oë.
[Who knows where in this wild life
you live, child,
with your holy, singular eyes.]
And:
Slaap, poësie, ’n berg, en jy. [Sleep, poetry, a mountain, and you.]
Etcetera! (I want to work the final one in the manner of a fugue: develop all four elements one by one; mix them up, switching their roles, and then eventually reunify them. Easier said than done!)
Last night I did a little translation work – not too much – and now I want to continue; but first I feel like lying in the sun a bit, perhaps to sleep, perchance to dream, and be with you, deliciously, and happy – as Van Ostaijen (him again!) says in his poem:
IK LACH
ik lach niemand
zelfs niet mijzelf
mijn lach is zó
ik lach
ik ben gelukkig
om
het wonder mijn lacht niet te begrijpen
Heavens, this letter is becoming an anthology. Forgive me! How else can I think about you, though, except through poetry? When I simply write your name, it becomes the title of a poem.
Girl with the little feet and big eyes. Last week this time, at three in the afternoon, my last “secret” disappeared deep inside your wonderful darkness. And even in that banal, uncomfortable environment, it was beautiful and delicious. Because I love you. I need you endlessly. And I want to be needed by you.
Thank you for listening to my talk-on-paper all this time. It’s such a mercy to know in advance that you understand, because you are in love. Don’t ever stop
being in love. Don’t ever stop being yourself. You are, like St Francis’s “Sister Water” – “molto utile et humile et pretiosa et casta” (“very needed and humble and precious and chaste”).
And I am yours, darling,
André.
Evening.
Thank you, again, for your dear voice. But don’t be sad. Because “you are one-and-all breath and sun”. And what I said is true: this afternoon’s few verses – after I wrote the previous part of my letter – and the quiet, cool walk through the bush, brought a new sense of repose in me. Perhaps it cannot last, but I’m thankful for the comfort as long as it does. And I’m happy. If I have to say how much I long for you, I won’t have sufficient words for the task. Our little time of “sleeping together” last night at nine-thirty was also so lovely, so replete with longing.
I have never yet felt so whole and so aware of life as in the past six weeks, and especially this past week.
I hope your meeting up with Jack [Cope] again, when he brings the lamp, won’t create a difficult situation. I think about you all the time, and nothing happening here can disturb my thoughts enough to prevent my constant concern for your happiness.
A few days ago I managed to translate your “The Child”, as I promised I would, into English. I did so without looking at Jack’s version – taking a peek only afterwards out of curiosity. Unavoidably, the greater part of the translations is exactly the same – the poem’s short, gritty words lend themselves to this – but I’m perverse enough to think that my version, where it does deviate, is better! In any case, it’s for you to decide. I’m sending it along, as well as one or two of the pieces I composed this afternoon (including the one I read to you over the phone).
Damn, I keep forgetting to send you these two clangers from my first-year students’ essays. One writes: “Erns van Heerden was deeply pressed into everything he saw in America.” Another writes about Paris: “Picasso, Renoir, Chopin, Mendelssohn and Mona Lisa all lived there.”
Things like this make the slog worthwhile, after all!
Now I have to switch back to translation. Haven’t done a stitch of work all day. Luckily I don’t have any lectures tomorrow, so I can catch up then.
Flame in the Snow Page 8
