Stephen Gray pays tribute to poet Guy Butler, who died last week aged 83
The death of Guy Butler on 26 April in Grahamstown was not unexpected. He had been monitoring a leaky heart valve since the early 1980s, when he bowed out as professor of English at Rhodes University. Yet he enjoyed a productive retirement as a prolific author, as the rock on which many a South African institution (the English Academy, the National Arts Festival, the National English Literary Museum) was founded but he was growing frail, ever more shaggy and Lear-like, arguing his dispersed kingdom back into order. Then his heart gave out. Born in the shadow of one world war, he was made a creative person by the next. When in 1952 he returned from North Africa, Italy and Oxford, he grabbed the defining moment to turn South African poetry around for the next half-century by asserting he was not a European, but a “stranger to Europe”. He was the first white poet who opted to be African.
In 1978, when he acknowledged his pleasure at winning the CNA Literary Award for his Selected Poems, he pushed for research into literary history, advising colonial cringers to accept the change their more progressive writers punted for before it was thrust on them. His own plays were the centrepieces of no less than four Grahamstown festivals, his scathing Demea (anagram of Medea) that HF Verwoerd suppressed being premiered triumphantly there in 1990. So he was one to suit the stage-action to his liberal word.
Rather than a career on the international celebrity scene, Butler chose to hunker down in his local habitation. He became the laird of his open house at High Corner, heading a truly baronial table. When David Wright wrote an assessment of the values of his verse in the PN Review of 1979, Butler seemed indifferent. He would just keep on watching over Olive Schreiner’s tomb on the koppie outside Cradock, potter about in his own sweet garden.
Patiently he drew mandalas on the minutes of endless committee meetings, never quite sank into anecdotage, avoided being set up as the Aunt Sally of attacks from the radical literary left. When he was given the freedom of the city of Grahamstown in 1994 and the whole white dorp turned out, he took it in his stride, his wife Jean with him, as always.
Superb poet, anthologiser, educationalist, spokesperson for the less aggressive English values such was the multiform career that was forced upon him by a cultural scene which had yet to learn how to stand up for itself. Students would buy copies of his Collected Poems at the university bookshop opposite and tap on his bay-window for him to sign which he did, with flourishes. With regard to his ever-selling autobiographies (there were three in all) he remarked that the writer’s only job should be “to give an impression of what it is like to be you and no one else”. He was a Quaker at heart, a determined peacemaker. His hobby was the practical one of carpentry, which is how he lost a thumb. He is hitchhiking up Parnassus with it now.