Stephen Gray
LEIPOLDT: ‘n LEWENSVERHAAL by JC Kannemeyer (Tafelberg)
When the literary historian, John Kannemeyer, tackles the biography of one of the Afrikaans-language founding figures (CJ Langenhoven, DJ Opperman), it is fair to expect professional thoroughness. He is a fine keeper of such records, a diligent researcher who does all the legwork uncomplainingly, amasses abundant evidence and reliably writes it up.
Here he doggedly tackles his biggest topic to date – Dr C Louis Leipoldt – and the result is truly monumental. Although simply called Leipoldt: ‘n Lewensverhaal, it demands the polyglot versatility its subject excelled in – it is mainly in Afrikaans, but with huge quotes in English and Dutch left untranslated. Rather poignantly, it serves to close the very century which Leipoldt opened, just about single-handedly, by pioneering the way writing in Afrikaans that deserves to be called of literary interest should develop.
On his Rhenish missionary genealogy and his quadrilingual background at Clanwillian, Kannemeyer is exhaustive. His account of Leipoldt’s Anglo-Boer War experience as a confirmed Cape liberal detesting martial law is a book all of its own. The record of his subject’s 12-year training in London as a gold-medallist pediatrician, with side- trips to the rest of Europe, the Caribbean and Java, shows very effective beavering. Then the first inspector of school health in the Transvaal, his term as editor of the South African Medical Journal in Cape Town, his support of JC Smuts and the World War II effort, the horrible heart-attack that laid him out, aged 67 in 1947 … well, the outline was always on the school syllabus. But here it is all abundantly filled in.
And yes, Leipoldt had casual ways and Kannemeyer’s quest led to some foggy areas, as he frankly admits. When in 1980, to celebrate the centenary of his birth, Karel Schoeman was commissioned to examine Leipoldt’s life, he had to resort to novelising it with rather a mystery-man at its core (simply called Die Reisiger, that is, The Voyager). Although Leipoldt himself was unbelievably prolific – he turned out a book or two a year right from his teens – he did indeed seldom reveal much of himself. Reticence was his self-protection. He was perhaps his intellect, and his intellect was tirelessly greedy (fine food, medicine and nursing, children’s diseases, South African history and flora, tireless journalism – he was for years a correspondent for the part-forebear of this paper, the Manchester Guardian – and a few biographies as well).
At least we know that he had no time for language-jingoes and Jaaps. He chastened those clergy who advocated discipline of the spirit while ignoring the welfare of the body; indeed, he was buried pagan-style without their benefit. Famously he condoned wine-drinking, masturbation, even alternative sexualities. He loved to straight-talk and to shock.
Of this dear Dr Chris one has indelible images: his sending naartjies to Queen Victoria for her jubilee; having his old Buick towed by a span of oxen into the backveld; his paying the printer’s bill for his first book of poems, those occasional Georgian ditties about the Gehenna of concentration camps, starving children and swinging rebels; his red tie and his unruly hair; his insistence from start to finish on equal rights and equal freedoms for all.
Of course he became exasperated with his Dominion backwater, loathed the rise of Afrikaner nationalism and Protestants who had forgotten how to protest, and of course he died of his own spleen.
On the vexed matter of the good doctor’s sexuality, Kannemeyer rather dithers about, though. Lots of lengthy mumbling about sublimation. Such a non-marrying man – who gleefully took over women’s kitchens, mothered dozens of pubescent, “pettable” bucks and adored photographing them in their wet bathing-costumes – could not really have been sexually conventional.
Leipoldt actually told his adopted son that he was homosexual, as Kannemeyer quotes, yet he still clings to his doubt. So he does not pick up the hot romance dashing young Christie had with that raunchy Italian peasant in the Alps, or any of a thousand other give-aways. From such a dysfunctional family (his mother had acquired beri-beri in the East and went screaming mad with it), what else could he be but gay? Since Leipoldt campaigned for candour over such issues, in this day and age Kannemeyer’s denial comes over as somewhat coy.
While on balance this is a blessed and superb work, it must also be said that it suffers from that late 20th-century prolixity called computer-bloat. Here is a fat book from which an even fatter one is struggling to get out. But it should have been cut back by a third, with R50 hacked off its exaggerated price.