/ 22 November 2001

A dithering fibber

The long-lived South African author, Sir Laurens van der Post (1906 to 1996), we are getting to know, lived many lives and most of them were more fantastical than factual. Only now that he is put to rest — and can no longer defend himself as an African explorer, a celebrity guru, best-seller and adored British establishment figure — may the whistle be blown on his career.

The allegations catching up with the great rip-off artist are pretty steep. Purportedly he was a poseur in literary circles who, cuckoo-like, stole others’ work. He was a compulsive liar about his military achievements in the East. He was a fraud when he came to losing his own family’s fortune in his numerous Swiss bank accounts. The English language has many other words to describe the type: crook, hypocrite, charlatan, cad.

But that is just the beginning. He was also a charming drunkard who deserted his first wife and offspring, while a serial seducer of ever younger women (one teenager he had in the Mount Nelson hotel at all of 78, the old goat).

Worse still, although he never acknowledged his own illegitimate daughter, he was, of course, considered morally suitable to be godfather to the next in line to the British throne. As for all those whispering dinners in his Chelsea penthouse with Margaret Thatcher, trying to persuade Chief Mangosuthu Buthelezi to secede from the new South Africa …

JDF Jones leads the way in the ghastly exposés, showing up his clay-footed acquaintance from the Free State for the phoney we always suspected he was. But at some point in his sprawling effort, this reviewer began to lose sympathy with Jones’s tactics.

If Thatcher was taken in by Van der Posts’s reactionary hogwash, was not she the fool (not him)? If Prince Charles believed, as millions of others did, that Van der Post was really a white Bushman who roamed all of Africa (instead of a humbug who travelled first-class), was not he the dupe? Con men profit from the credulous, after all, and once they succeed, carry on, right to the top. And haven’t the British gentry always behaved as dubiously anyway? Tripping Sir Laurens up now seems like a poorly timed betrayal.

Rather than merely putting the life-record straight, Jones indulges himself in all the put-downs he trusts will be unputdownable. He sifts every whopper from every bloomer, stripping off doctorings and apocrypha. All is for the maximum sensation of such a basically gutter-press procedure. He fuels himself up, it must be said too, at unconscionable length, for his work could readily have come in at less than half the bulk without loss.

Often one finds oneself catching Jones out with woeful inaccuracies in turn. Why is the mulberry tree in which Van der Post read all those boys’ adventure stories that turned his mind, at his birthplace of Philippolis, denied to have ever existed on page 105, but back in place on page 440? (Indeed, it is now a stump venerated by the prophet’s faithful.) Why have his local proofreaders left us with kopjies (sic) and many other such anachronisms, and with misspellings that change as one proceeds down the page?

Most serious of all, where is all the fun to be had in portraying this backveld Don Quixote, who set off from small beginnings to right the world, starring himself? He nearly succeeded, only to die a dithering fibber of osteoporosis.

Jones is not the Cervantes needed for the job. He is merely a spoilsport.