STEPHEN GRAYoffers his own view of the late Sir Laurens van der Post
‘And so there then I stood on the night of 21 August 1945, in the street in Bandoeng where my book The Night of the New Moon ended …’ ‘As I stood there watching my men …’ Because I had skipped the last dozen Van der Posts, I was enjoying catching up, reading his latest, The Admiral’s Baby (John Murray). ‘Laurie, from now on consider yourself my Military Governor of Batavia …’
A bit blimpish, surely: ‘There was only one way of dealing with riots, and that was not to allow them to happen.’
And the name-dropping: ‘Wavell said to me …’ ‘I said to Mountbatten …’
And the mawkishness of Prince Charles’s coach, this ‘White Bushman’ (whatever that is): ‘I remembered far back to my own beginnings, to my Bushman nurse telling me moon stories …’
Rather like General Smuts’s holism, Colonel van der Post’s mysticism, while reorganising the whole of the known world, seems unable to solve even what was known as the ‘native question’.
I was beginning to wonder if the whole wit of the world could not turn up something less self-indulgent for Christmas, when the phone rang to say: Sir Laurens van der Post had died. That certainly changed the mood.
He did recently weigh in tenderly in favour of the nature-conservation lobby. For a ‘backveld boy’ (his own label), born in 1906, he did also have an astoundingly long career ‘ three quarters of a century, surely a record in English letters.
In the second number of Voorslag, published in Durban in July 1926, he wrote on ‘Kuns Ontwikkeling in Afrikaans’. When he received an honorary doctorate from Rhodes University in 1978, he still considered himself an Afrikaans writer (who wrote in English), and praised Britain for its rule of law. He had confessed in an interview in 1974 that ‘If my life has any meaning it’s as a kind of footpath between Africa and Europe.’ Yet he never explained why his allegiances switched from one to the other, Boer to Brit.
He first wrote of his Bushmen (in Trek in June 1952): ‘From the time they are first strapped as babies in a reeking, dirt-stained antelope-skin to their mothers’ backs up to the day they die, they are forever travelling …’
Not for much longer. When I came across Van der Post’s pet tribe, I was gravely shocked to discover they were confined to a pink dune in the Kalahari, living on tins of pilchards he had arranged. Rather than sharing the Jungian subconscious with me, they were bumming stompies.
By chance, some 20 years ago, I found myself marooned on a traffic-island with Van der Post. Gallantly I stopped the flow, chivvying the national treasure to safety. He in turn ushered me to tea on the balcony of the old King Edward Hotel, convinced I had come to interview him. I hadn’t, and didn’t take notes.
But still I hoped for some titbit about his Voorslag cronies, Roy Campbell and William Plomer, who had rendezvoused right there to reform South African literature. He had recently re-introduced Plomer’s Turbott Wolfe at inordinate length, managing to upstage his subject by miles.
‘Of course,’ he confided at last, ‘the truth is ‘ he killed his own mother!’
The apricot jam stuck on my lip. I thought he meant Farouk, our affable waiter.
‘Gosh,’ I gulped, ‘surely not.’
‘Shaka Zulu,’ he blathered on, ‘slaughtered her without compunction! It’s a litttle known fact! I heard it at the knee of my Zulu nanny …’
When, in that time-honoured ritual among South African writers, he climbed up to Olive Schreiner’s tomb above Cradock at Buffelskop (which he insisted on translating as Vulture’s Hill), this is what he reported for The Flying Springbok: ‘I thught of the Zen Buddhist garden without flowers, trees or grass, but composed entirely of raked river gravel and stone which I first saw as a boy in 1926 in Kyoto.’
The tourist exploitation of his name has already begun. His birthplace in ‘quaint, historic Philippolis’, 60km north of Colesberg, now offers bed and breakfast …
The truth about The Admiral’s Baby, his last book, is that it is clotted with digressions and repeats. At its core is a 50-year-old report about how our man prevented the Indonesians retrieving their own country from the Dutch.
It is lethally dull. Should have been rattling stuff, but it isn’t. It is an immodest, unfortunate end.