Poet, novelist and critic Lionel Abrahams is one of the most influential figures in South African literature. Mark Gevisser pays tribute to him on the occasion of his 70th birthday
There is something transformative about a first encounter with Lionel Abrahams. At the outset, it is hard not to be overwhelmed by his extreme physical dysfunction: even the slightest manipulations – the scratching of a forehead, the minuscule movements required to shift his mechanised wheelchair, the enunciation of a response – require such effort that you are not sure how he will make it through the interview. You struggle to understand; you are frequently thrown off the course of an idea by his contortions.
But, ineluctably, the dynamics begin to change. It’s not just that you begin to become more familiar with his lexicon of staccato gestures, facial grimaces and slurred vowel-sounds. It’s that he entices you so fully into the world of his intellect that you buy into its own set of co-ordinates: before you know it, he has extended the walls of his world to encompass you. A few hours later (it’s never less than a few hours), you go back into the ambulatory workaday world and realise that it, rather than Lionel Abrahams, is different, strangely deficient. And you’re incomparably richer for the insights you have just gained.
A student of Abrahams explains his potency thus: “His mind is so powerful that he is able to use it to make you forget how useless his body is.” After a few hours with him, I felt the relationship between his body and his mind to be, in a way, less complicated. He was born with a severe neurological condition, a type of palsy known as Jewish Tortion Dystonia. But, unlike many disabled people, he does not attempt to perform the impossible conjuring trick of pretending his body isn’t there. It is there, in a very matter-of-fact, unprecious and unself-pitying way. Sometimes it needs help, other times it will manage fine by itself, as long as you exercise a bit of patience.
In The Celibacy of Felix Greenspan, Abrahams’s compelling autobiographical novel, the disabled young protagonist is seduced by the notion, supplied to him by a master at the home he lives in, that he can put “Mind over Matter”. So entirely does Felix embrace his master’s mystical, proto-Louise-Hayes-ish notions of “the power of positive thinking” that he stops himself just moments before trying to swim across a dam – a test that would surely have killed him.
Felix’s next mentor, based strongly on the character of Herman Charles Bosman (who was to exert a profound influence on Abrahams’s life as his creative-writing teacher) gives him the far more workable idea that he can move toward the achievement of creative – and physical – potency through willing his mind to engage with matter, with the world, rather than forcing it, impossibly, to transcend it.
His triumph is in how fully he took Bosman’s lessons to heart, in that he has put his difficult body so successfully into the world. He has single-mindedly gone about accumulating the experience he requires as writer – from eating fruit to travelling the world to having sex to engaging with politics and with the city he lives in – as if there were not so strong a barrier in his way. He has not retreated into cerebral celibacy. In fact, it is hard not to be struck by just how physically charged he is: he glows.
Unlike the South African “greats” who have made it into the planetary canon – Nadine Gordimer, JM Coetzee, Athol Fugard – Abrahams’s own literary output has been slender: four volumes of poetry, one novel. In fact, he published his first book only when he was 50. Perhaps, he volunteers with a chuckle, this is because he hasn’t been “ruthless” enough in protecting his own time. The result: his influence, as a publisher, teacher, editor and proponent of South African literature has been profound. He is that rare thing indeed in South African culture: a literary figure as much as he is a littrateur.
He has a generous knack for immortalising his mentors: he is significantly responsible for the popular revival of Bosman, and he spent years arranging publication for a comprehensive collection of the poetry of his other great teacher, Ruth Miller. His literary magazine, The Purple Renoster, defin- ed both quality and vanguardism in South African literature through the 1960s. His publication, in the early 1970s, of the first, soul-searing volumes of poetry by Oswald Mtshali and Wally Serote are among the most significant milestones in contemporary South African literature.
We sit now, on the eve of his 70th birthday, in the study of the rambling old Rivonia farmhouse he shares with Jane, to whom he has been married for the last 15 years. Abrahams does not hide the scars of a difficult life, but now there is something quite comfortable, almost sated, in his manner. His home with Jane is gemtlich, easy with itself. It has, about it, neither the self-conscious clutter that proclaims “intellectual” nor the self-conscious aestheticism that proclaims “connoisseur”.
I ask him what it was about Bosman’s ideas that gave him so compelling an antidote to the “Mind over Matter” credo supplied by his first mentor. “What was it?” he echoes, in his manner of repeating a question so that he can turn it inside-out, as if to expose its less immediately apparent implications to the light of day. “What was it? It had to do with his vision of art, art in the world, and one’s possible relation to art. It had to do with connection, art as means of entering into a relationship with strangers, across space and across time …” There is a mysticism to this response, a lack of the usual cloudless acuity, that points to the effect Bosman had on his young protg, an effect so profound that language eludes him when he tries to explain Bosman’s role in his life. Even Abrahams, for whom language is reason itself, must concede that there are certain topics – salvation, for one – that are mercifully beyond its grasp.
Above Abrahams’s desk is a huge blow-up of a newspaper photo of his mentor. A jaunty Bosman strides down a Johannesburg street with a woman on each arm, above the caption “Herman Charles Bosman with his two wives.” Abrahams obviously loves the raffish boulevardier in Bosman, loves the mischief-maker and the dissident, and has modelled for himself a similar role in literary society. Bosman remains his guide in many ways – from the importance of having a sense of “place” in Johannesburg, to the notion, that Abrahams often expounds, of “aesthetic patriotism”, a belief in rigorous standards that would enable an indigenous South African literature to become world-class.
There is, says his old friend and editor, Patrick Cullinan, a core of mischief to Abrahams’s personality. “When I first met Lionel, I’d find it difficult to be in public with him. I’d always feel so bad for him. But then Barney Simon [one of Abrahams’s closest friends] said something to me I have never forgotten: ‘Don’t ever forget that Lionel is the one who is amused. He’s looking, and laughing at them a lot harder than they’re laughing at him.'”
In The Celibacy of Felix Greenspan, the young Felix overcomes the terrible ostracism he experiences at the home (not least for being a smart-alecky Jewboy in a very Afrikaans environment during the war years) by inventing the character of Professor Mac-U-Laff, a stand-up comic routine in which Felix “makes you laff”, gets the other kids slapping their sides by parodying himself and playing the court jester.
Abrahams the chortling jester – which is how his friends know him: head thrown back in gleeful mirth – is not a figure with which the public is familiar. He has taken on, in the literary world, a perhaps more difficult persona, one of a self-confessed curmudgeon; the cranky old liberal firing fusillades against a new order in which language and reason and standards are under perpetual threat.
But this, believes Cullinan, also has a fair dollop of self-parody in it. “Sometimes,” he says, “it’s as if Lionel is playing it up a little bit, the elderly man of letters tut-tutting.” “Let’s put it this way,” says Jane Fox. “Lionel has no problem being combative. He’ll fight for something he believes in. Letting off his popgun, he calls it.”
Here, for example, is Abrahams in the mid-1980s, decrying the “death” of English: “As we rush toward [the new dispensation], the anticipatory excitement in many takes the form of an appetite for demolition. The coming new man is not allowed to have anything in common with us, is not conceived of as having any use for our proven values and proven structures. Out they must go! Down they must go! pater les bourgeois! Whee! I believe this negative radicalism is strictly limited in its thinking and promises us a dull, impoverished mental world with less language and therefore less freedom than ever.”
Ten years later, does he feel this prophecy to be accurate? “It’s not as bad as all that,” he chuckles. “Perhaps I wouldn’t put it so strongly. There are a number of people holding on to what is right.” The laughter stops. He is dead serious now. “But I’m far from altogether happy. In the field of language and literature, authority has become very timid. One of the swearwords of the day is prescriptiveness, and as a result linguistic imprecision is not so much tolerated as embraced as the norm.”
With this he launches into a tirade against the use of expressions such as “job situation” rather than “job”, “problem area” rather than “problem”, “lifestyles” rather than “life”, “intelligence levels” rather than “intelligence”. “To me it suggests that among the movers and makers, there is a defensiveness, a preference for vagueness, to obfuscate the fact that they can’t deliver on promises.”
This is classic, curmudgeonly Abrahams. I too am irritated by the reign of jargonish sociospeak over governance. But if a bit of linguistic sloppiness is the by-product of democracy, as opposed to the extreme linguistic precision of apartheid with its taxonomy of rules and fixed locations, then I’ll put up with it. Why can’t Abrahams? “He has become,” explains his friend, the writer Peter Wilhelm, “something of an icon of classic liberalism. What seems to annoy him more than anything else is the breakdown of language, which he sees as the breakdown of rationalism, because he identifies the coherent use of language with the power of reason itself. Bad art or bad language, in that light, represents bad thinking, and out of bad thinking you get social dislocation, random murders, genocide …”
Abrahams is inherently conservative. He was only really roused into rage at the excesses of Verwoerdian apartheid when the government passed its infamous “gagging” clause, silencing 102 writers – many of whom were not even communists – in 1966. When they were at university, says his old friend, the writer Rose Moss, “Lionel just didn’t believe that politics was that important, because of his credo about literature, which is that you solve things through personal interaction.”
Njabulo Ndebele is one of the black writers with whom Abrahams clashed in the 1980s. “I have been,” says Ndebele now, “impressed by one thing in Lionel Abrahams: the consistent thread, in his thinking, of the importance of the humanising values of literature, and that these values can only be achieved through a rigorous attention to the exacting demands of making art.” Nonetheless, Ndebele feels that there is also “a core of innocence, a certain lack of understanding” in Abrahams’s positions: “Man, how could someone not understand that the poetry of wild gesture and stance-taking in the Seventies and Eighties was imperative?”
There is a clue, perhaps, to Abrahams’s polemical intolerance of any position other than one that adheres to cast-iron standards of aesthetic value, in something he said recently in a public lecture: he made the “brutal but necessary remark” that, “in the arts, as I see it, the deserving case – the poor widow, the paralysed beggar, the child of the oppressed, the hero of the struggle, the survivor of genocide – has no special claim. Genius, talent, meaningful accomplishment, the aesthetic transmutation of experience, are the only justifications.”
To many, Abrahams would seem, by virtue of his physical incapacity, just such a “deserving case”. And yet he has made it, as a writer, through no special privileges, no affirmative action, but by dint of his own talent, hard work and perseverance. There’s more than a little of a “pull yourself up by your bootstraps” intonation to his polemic.
Yet Abrahams lays bare the contradictory tensions of his life and work: the tension between the self-involvement he requires to keep his body intact, and the public engagement he needs to exercise his credo of communication; the tension between cast-iron aesthetic and moral values, and the more shifting exigencies of life and politics; the tension between the attraction of putting “Mind over Matter” and the realisation that he must engage with “Matter” if he is to write.
In person, he is very comfortable with the irreconcilability of these tensions, and with the articulation of self-doubts. Unprompted, he itemises these for me: that he is a bad liberal because he is impatient and intolerant, that he has not read enough, that “there are times when I talk as though I know, even when I don’t”, that he is not always “brave enough” to possess the “thoroughgoing honesty” so central to his beliefs.mmmmm
I am astonished when he goes on to tell me, following the Monday night writing workshop I attended, that he fears he performed only at around 35%. “Oh come on, Lionel,” Fox interjects. “I think you’re being hard on yourself! I’d put it at 45%.” I sat through the four-hour session, somewhat agape, watching a performance that I would have put somewhere up around 100%. His criticism was unerringly accurate, and almost aphoristic in its acuteness. Most remarkable was to see, in practice, what I had often been told of – his ability to understand the writer’s intention and to help the writer achieve this intention, even when he’s not always in sympathy with it.
On the night I attended, 20 or so people clustered around a long table in the Abrahams’s living-room. They ranged in age from 20s to 70s, and took turns to read their offerings, in prose or verse. “Delicious!” one older woman said after someone’s recital of a poem – and the gathering around a dining-table did make it seem, at times, like a feast of language; a careful feast, for Abrahams is no voluptuary, and the environment he engenders is more workmanlike than precious.
Abrahams encourages people to write from their own experience, and although this is the most helpful way to teach the craft, it does sometimes result in a walled-in generic suburbia that seems to be floating atop, rather than engaging with, the kind of South African experience about which Bosman was so passionate. This can be seen most clearly in his literary magazine, Sesame, which, despite being a child of the turbulent 1980s, is devoid of the formal and spiritual adventure of The Purple Renoster that preceded it.
At the workshop I attended there were only two contributions which so much as nodded at the transition we are living through. There was, though, mercifully little of the pseudo-therapy that plagues writing workshops and specifically autobiographical work, and although there was some platitudinous affirmation, there was just as much bracing, on-the-ball critical comment: Abrahams has encouraged a culture of honest generosity. Some students take much pleasure in sparring with him, as does he with them. Others hang on his every word, beaming in his beneficence, or even his opprobrium. “Thank you! Thank you!” said one, after he had cut her to ribbons.
On guruness, Lionel Abrahams has this to say: “I have been presented as an establishment figure, as though I were part of an important institution. In a way I wish I were. I’d be better off than I am now. I’m usually aware of how fortunate I’ve been, in terms of friendship and creativity. But I haven’t worked out a way of getting fat. I’ve just gone about my life, doing what I feel I must and can, as the demand arises, and the demand is as likely to be an internal as an external one. If the results add up to a particular position of guruhood, well, that has never been aimed at. It exists as a nice kind of accident.”