Stephen Gray
HERMAN CHARLES BOSMAN:THE PROSE JUVENILIA (Unisa)
Here’s a thing. While other South African scholars could not be bothered, Mitzi Andersen has taken the trouble to do the legwork to trace the earliest published pieces that have always evaded even the bibliographers of Herman Charles Bosman. As she says with feeling, here are 16 stunning, lively pieces (with some other previously known youthful squibs), searched out of those dusty stacks of crumbling pulp. And to its endless credit her campus, Unisa, has republished them in an attractive pamphlet for all to enjoy.
Nowadays at least precision xerography may serve the academic winkler. Long gone are the days when dear Yvonne Vorster had to copy out lost Bosman items in the Johannesburg Public Library’s reference section – in shorthand on an exam pad – before typing them up for Lionel Abrahams to assemble.
But still the question nags: has literary palaeontology any point, is the adolescent Bosman’s work really worth recuperating? Byron may have published his own juvenilia at 19, but here we have our rather dicier lad, at all of 16, having the nerve to dress out of his uniform in order to sell pieces to Johannesburg’s Sunday Times.
Is it of more than biographical interest that these transactions took place under the pseudonym of “Ben Eath”, too, doubtless to protect his very respectable family and his highly conventional school (Jeppe High)?
The evidence is that with his energy and able pen he set out to leave no stone unthrown, to reveal to the rattling 1920s its hidden shallows. So I feel it is good to know just how bumptious and exuberant he could be before life kicked the stuffing out of him. And also that a national weekly was spirited enough to encourage him to persist in his daft career, week after week, while paying him pocket money in return.
Andersen, however, goes a bit tone deaf attributing these premature effusions only to the influence of the Americans, dismal Edgar Allan Poe and dry O Henry. Her material shows more skittish Saki, the bathos of Jerome K Jerome, and the irrevent verbal highjinks of those Punches the weekly mailboats brought in. The reduction of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle to the dithering old fart he appeared to be to jaunty colonial kids derives from irresistible music-hall burlesques seen nightly down at the Empire, after all.
She also keeps calling her recovered pieces “tales”, when they were really “sketches”, a well-used Edwardian form, complete with snapper endings, not yet stories. As is evident here, they were sometimes written in dialogue and not yet plays, either. So silly was this type of humour that all it could induce was groans of pleasure. Schoolboy japes, what else?
On balance it is also fine to know our mature national satirist apprenticed in a great British press tradition of humour, long forgotten otherwise. He really was a bundle of joy from the start. I would not have missed this selection for anything, although like many other scholars I have failed to tumble on it.