Stephen Gray
THE latest number of the six-monthly English in Africa shows a change of policy. Instead of the usual miscellany of learned articles, most of it is devoted to printing primary material that would not otherwise be available to the general reader. This is the very raw material, before the biographer gets to it.
Under the guest editorship of Ann Torlesse, senior archivist at Grahamstown’s National English Literary Museum, where they are preserved, here is a selection of letters by Pauline Smith. Indeed, they prove to be a revelation.
Collections of letters by South African writers have always been scarce. So far only some of Bessie Head’s letters, and a selection of Es’kia Mphahlele’s, have become available, while the recent edition of Olive Schreiner’s seems to have ground to a halt halfway. That kind of book, supporting a career made in other genres, appears not to be a viable project. All to the good that English in Africa has moved in.
The great miniaturist, Pauline Smith, was born of Scottish parents in 1882. She grew up as the village doctor’s daughter in Oudtshoorn, during the ostrich-feather boom. Her output may have been slender, yet it was most distinguished: the Little Karoo stories, the novel The Beadle, and Platkops Children for young readers. In the 1980s, AA Balkema reprinted these for South Africans, but none of the further volumes Balkema commissioned eventuated, at least not until the University of Natal Press rescued the one edited by the late Ernest Pereira as The Unknown Pauline Smith (which receives a contextualising notice here from Michael Cosser). Harold Scheub’s edition of her South African journal, first announced all of 15 years ago, is currently being salvaged by the same team.
When Dorothy Driver put out her exemplary collection on Pauline Smith in the Southern African Literature Series in 1983, she did include a sequence of her then unknown letters, drawn from no less than five different collections. These rather focused on her professional interests.
The present sequence – stretching over the same period, from 1926 to 1958 – is more private.
As there are only two recipients, the letters read cumulatively. One of them is a Mrs Gray in Pretoria, the other designated only as “Sarie” (but she is a Smuts- connected aspirant writer, also living in Pretoria).
Throughout, Smith is stuck with her dour sister in wintery Dorset, first nearly bombarded by the German air force, then threatened by flooding or by fires in the Moors. If there is one word to describe their misery, it is rationing.
Their gallant South African well-wishers respond with food parcels – raisins in time for Christmas, sugar, marmalade, cream cheese, whole hams wrapped in old sweaters and coats. In the nature of things, Smith’s responses are beholden thank yous, seeped in nostalgia, catching the week’s mail on those Castle boats. Bread-and-butter in exchange for gold.
With her neuralgia, her encroaching rheumatism, Smith could grouse and witter on like a champion hypochondriac. Yet she pursued what she called “my slow sad work”. As it turns out, to little avail. Once she had left the sunny south, as a creative writer she had dried up. These loving memos were all that was left to her.
As noted by Sheila Scholten, who deciphered and transcribed her worsening handwriting, Smith’s grip on the pen may have slackened. But that did not mean she could no longer captivate her readers, even if she was down to an audience of one.
The special Pauline Smith issue of English in Africa is available from the Institute for the Study of English in Africa, Rhodes University, Grahamstown, 6140.