She’s a South African New Yorker whose first novel is set in the Oudtshoorn of caves and ostrich farms. Shaun de Waal meets Anne Landsman
In Anne Landsman’s debut novel, The Devil’s Chimney (Jonathan Ball), the Cango Caves form the central, or perhaps one should say underlying, metaphor. Their chambers and lakes, stalactites and stalagmites almost come to represent another, parallel world, a dream world where the fantasy or hyperreality of the novel erupts.
But this underground network of caverns is also the female body and its cavities, physical as much as spiritual. The Devil’s Chimney itself, of course, is the vagina and the birth canal. Childbirth is problematic in the novel, the newborn child not assured of survival.
“While I was writing it, I was pregnant with my first child,” says Landsman. “I realised that a hundred years ago a pregnant woman would think, `I’m pregnant and my chances of dying are great.’ That’s how I would have felt had I been Beatrice at that time.”
Beatrice Chapman is an aristocratic English immigrant of the early years of this century. Miss Beatrice is a strongly determined and perhaps somewhat repressed woman whose ostrich-farmer husband one day disappears. This tale is told, in the novel, by Connie, an alcoholic stuck in present-day Oudtshoorn, paralysed by her life’s losses and drinking herself to death.
The novel is dense and sometimes ponderous (“It is a demanding read,” admits Landsman), but it builds in momentum and the intensity of the writing increases, reaching an extraordinary pitch in the last third of the book.
The Miss Beatrice stream of the novel once took the form of a screenplay, written by Landsman as part of her masters thesis at Columbia University in New York. She went there to study film in 1981, expecting to be back in South Africa a year or two later, and “seventeen years later I’m still there. New York is a hard place to leave.” (She still has most of her South African accent, but the cadences of her speech are American.)
The film department in which she studied was run by Czech migrs. “Milos Forman was the chairman of the department,” says Landsman, “but he was busy making Amadeus, so his second-in-command, Frantisek Daniel, who is one of the world’s great screenwriting teachers, taught me screenwriting.
“He believed that a film department should focus on scripts. Technology, special effects, nothing matters unless you have a good screenplay. We did do some shooting and directing, but we concentrated on writing.
“When I first came to the States, I kept looking for American subject matter, and I kept drawing blanks. But in his class, perhaps because he was from somewhere else too, I thought, now I can do a screenplay about South Africa.”
She fixed on Oudtshoorn, with its caves and ostrich-farming, because she knew that area from childhood holidays (and “the ostriches are very cinematic”). Her father was a country doctor in Worcester. Once she had her masters, the script was put in a drawer.
Ten years later, frustrated by the experience of screenwriting (one unrealised project was a docu-drama about the American architect Frank Lloyd Wright and the murder of his mistress), she started writing fiction.
She wrote a story, now the prologue of The Devil’s Chimney, in which she discovered the voice of the alcoholic Connie. Connie, in turn, would come to retell the story of Miss Beatrice and her child, a fantastical and sometimes improbable story which is an escape for Connie, as well as a way to heal her own wounds.
In its most visionary moments, the novel’s language seems to strain beyond itself. It is that, more than sudden impossible happenings like characters floating away, which exemplifies Landsman’s take on magic realism.
“It’s a kind of a hyperrealism, in a way,” she says. “For me, that was dictated by Connie’s voice, which is really dictated by the amount of alcohol she drinks. It’s hallucinatory. There’s a certain sharp focus she has; she dwells on things obsessively.
“I always think in terms of character – the characters and their compulsions drive the language, and then the language takes on a life of its own.” (The first chapter was originally published in The American Poetry Review, which usually publishes only poetry.)
“I decided to trust the characters, let Connie tell the story. She’s a case of arrested development, a child who never grew up, and she lives out these sorts of fantasies, that loop around each other, circle back, but they’re all tied to this tremendous sense of loss that she carries.”
What Landsman calls Connie’s “childlike sense of things” colours the whole novel. Her ingenuous quality accounts for the prose’s childlike tone, its air of a fairytale being told, though not perhaps for the most nerve-rackingly phantasmic passages.
“At moments, I’d think, that was a really odd piece of writing. I’d say to my husband, `You can’t believe what I just wrote.’ Then I’d just go with it. Writing the book was an act of liberation after all these years of writing screenplays, of having to adhere to this really tight format, 120 pages, terse descriptions, in the third person …
“I wanted two characters, someone who throws themselves into situations, and someone who’s totally hemmed in, who’s afraid to step out of her front door. I try to get close to these characters and experience them. In the beginning experiencing Connie was a bit rough, but then I got used to it.
“For me, it was just a matter of getting to know these people as intimately as possible, and trusting them and trusting my voice.
“I was trying to let that happen, and not to second-guess myself. As my Czech teacher used to say, as a writer you have to give yourself as much freedom as possible.”