It seems that since his death in 1951 at the age of 46 his fame has burgeoned exponentially. Certainly more of his work has come out in book form than appeared during his lifetime — by a considerable margin.
Now, on the 50th anniversary of his death, and aiming to have it all done by 2005, the centenary of Bosman’s birth, publishers Human & Rousseau are doing Bosman proud. His oeuvre is being re-edited (sterling work by Stephen Gray and Craig MacKenzie) for the attractive anniversary edition set — and, this year, there is also a two-volume box-set for those who want the cream of the crop for Christmas.
Like Elvis, too, Bosman is often seen as a great original, an innovator who appeared ex nihilo. Bosman is viewed as a founding father of South African letters in English, perhaps the one writer of historical importance to achieve a wide appeal to both serious-minded critics and the general public.
He is a figure whose life fascinates, and his books keep selling and selling. His story collection Mafeking Road has been a bestseller since 1947, and his Groot Marico tales are rightly judged as the peak of his achievement.
But there is much more to Bosman (including some dreadful poetry and two stolid novels), and, as critics such as Gray and LH Hugo have noted, he is not so much the great original of South African literature as the culmination of a long tradition, with many intriguing forebears.
Bosman appreciated and learned from great story-writers such as Edgar Allan Poe, Mark Twain, Jerome K Jerome and O Henry, bringing their techniques of narration and plotting to bear on the genre of the “fireside tale”, which already had a substantial history in South African writing.
The canny Boer teller of tall tales is prefigured in Carey Slater’s Oom Meihaas stories, in Ernest Glanville’s Abe Pike tales, and in the work of Bosman’s contemporary, friend and colleague Aegidius Jean Blignaut. Here, a rural oral tradition is being translated into the written word, and Afrikaans is being transported into English — often with many of its inflections intact.
Bosman’s work — and life — is also prefigured by the fascinating character who was Douglas Blackburn. Like the Slaters and Glanvilles of South African literature, Blackburn is largely unknown outside the academy. Yet to read a work of his such as Prinsloo of Prinsloosdorp, a satire about a wily but often outwitted Boer, is to hear the precise tone of Bosman’s Oom Schalk Lourens tales — the artful mix of cunning and naivety, the narrative technique of using an unreliable narrator through whose telling we read much more than he says, often finding contradictory information between the lines.
Prinsloo of Prinsloosdorp, subtitled A Tale of Transvaal Officialdom, was first published in 1898. The 1989 reissue of this little book is most insistent about the Bosman connection: “You can almost hear the voice of Herman Charles Bosman,” the blurb trumpets in capital letters. “The characters sound like Bosman’s people. The incidents [are] reminiscent of Bosman’s invention. Delightfully written in a style that reminds you of Bosman.”
It is not known whether Bosman read Blackburn or not, though it is possible. At any rate, they were drawing on the same tradition, three or four decades apart, as was the playwright Stephen Black, who used his satirical plays to comment on and discuss issues of the day round the time of Union and after.
Black, in fact, between tours of his highly successful plays, edited a mud-slinging publication called The Sjambok, and it was Bosman who brought to life its successor, The New Sjambok. These were scurrilous, gossipy rags dedicated to exposés, satires and general trouble-making — the “alternative press” of their day.
And here Blackburn is a forebear as well. Arriving in South Africa on the eve of the second Anglo-Boer South Africa War, he at first worked as a journalist for The Star, which was anti-Boer, before switching to the opposition, and then restarting a Krugersdorp paper as The Transvaal Sentinel.
From that base, Blackburn crusaded against the corruption that was rife in the Boer republic, as well as pursuing a profoundly anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist line. He took great delight in poking fun at anyone he found disreputable, and must have held the newspaperman’s record for libel suits in his day — most of which he won.
Blackburn, however, was not above telling the odd tall tale about himself — his level of involvement in the War and his possible part in espionage are murky areas. Yet before he returned to Britain and became embroiled in an odd scandal to do with spiritualism, he had retired to a remote corner of Natal to write his novels, including Prinsloo of Prinsloosdorp‘s great sequel, A Burgher Quixote (1903), hilariously retelling and reworking the shaggy dog stories of his day.
It’s hard not to see this burly Englishman, for all his pointed moustaches and maverick dedication to socialism, as, in some way, a bit of an Oom Schalk himself.