Twenty-five years after William Plomer’s death, Stephen Gray searched out more of his literary remains
A quarter of a century ago William Plomer died in England unexpectedly. His revision of his two memoirs into one Autobiography was not yet complete. His Collected Poems of 1973 – including all of his best South African items – was still in press. At the topsy-turvy age of 69, a messy end for such a natty record- keeper.
He liked still to be remembered as a founder of South African literature. While his partner in the Voorslag review of 1926, Roy Campbell, steered himself embarrassingly into Spanish fascism, Plomer kept on the British left. The most heartfelt elegy he wrote was on the suicides of this country’s young hopes, Nat Nakasa and Ingrid Jonker.
Backstage he helped South Africans abroad, made a point of sponsoring efforts like Contrast and New Coin. He would not phone or type, but he answered correspondents on postcards in inky, italic script. The National English Literary Museum keeps packs of them.
Plomer left treasure-maps of his scattered young life in South Africa: of Pietersburg (he was born there in 1903), of St John’s in Johannesburg. Pacing out the pages of his Double Lives, I once found on Marsh Moor farm near Molteno that the genial Pope family still hoarded a stash of his drawings, dated 1922. With them were sketches for what would soon rattle the colonies as the confession of an artist, one Turbott Wolfe, in the explosive novel named after him. In 1979 it was easy to co-opt the likes of Laurens van der Post, Nadine Gordimer and Peter Wilhelm to contribute to a South African reprint which used this material.
Now Anthony Akerman was working on a four-part TV serial of Turbott Wolfe. He had gone scouting out locations north of the Tugela River, around the wild trading-post where Plomer worked for three years and where the main action takes place, and suggested the trail. Obviously the railhead in the book was Eshowe, once the capital of British Zululand, with its Anglican Church opposite the Magistrates, its dusty main drag about a gorge of high-canopied forest.
And the old fort, where there is always a curator of the local history like Jenny Hawke, who knows someone like Norma Saunders. She is now retired, but still the young one of the Bishops, who took over the lease from the Plomer family, up in the hills at Ntumeni.
The British artist Tom Phillips made the pilgrimage (in 1976), taking a famous snap of Walter Battiss and Nils Burwitz before Plomer’s workroom. Saunders has one better: a portrait of Plomer himself, in late 1924 or early 1925, on that very stoep. He is diffident-looking, gangly. But something of a genius, really, to have written such a decadent colonial masterpiece under that tin-roof, on wrapping paper from the native store in which he served, and even in pencil when his inkhorn ran dry.
Margery Moberly, memorialiser of the early Eshowe district, lined up some full-colour shots of the original bungalow, once baldly sited on the open hillcrest, now grandly added on to and well vegetated. The store alongside is the full Ntumeni Post Office these days, and also the pre-primary school run by the new occupant. There is always a problem with Plomer’s name. I say Ploomer like bloomer, Moberly and Hawke go for plumber. Norma comes out with the definitive Pl-oh-mer. But we agree that he could have changed it once he became famous …
Down in the gum-trees is still the Norwegian mission station of old Bishop Schreuder (Klodquist in the book). This I had thought a bit of fantasy, like Swedish Mozambique at the end of Turbott Wolfe when the frustrated intellectual hero turns to dagga and gun-running. But no, Nordic Lutherans are clumped about here, juicing up their mud-spattered car at Plomer’s pump, convincing the Zulu customers lazing about to wear more than a few beads and furry cache-sexes.
As for general dealing, Plomer made meticulous inventories in his stories of the truck that factories in four continents smoked and roared to provide. In Doris’ Ncane Store, as it is now, one item still does a roaring trade: that Imperial fuel, the boiled sweet. Otherwise it’s beer, and a certain balsamic, pungent smoke. Ah, backpackers in trainers are striding up the dirt for an ethnic ritual.
Plomer himself returned to his remote shack 30 years later, in 1956, once he had opened a conference at Wits university on the future of literature in South Africa. He longed as we all do for the place of thorns of his youth, grossly overgrown and busy, but with its old good cheer gone sour under apartheid. In his very great poem, Tugela River, he pondered whether the end wasn’t just a flood of hatred.
Look at him in the picture Norma Saunders saved. He is at the other end of time, not convinced that democracy would be an alternative for even a radical talent to imagine.