It isn’t often one South African columnist gets the chance to say helpful things about another. A splendid opportunity has now come my way and I’m grabbing it to write with enthusiasm about the publication last week of a collection of South African humour, satire and so on. For the life of me I can’t remember the name of this book, but I do know that its contents were gleaned — if a little on the cheap side it would appear — by the noted Star columnist James Clarke, in collaboration with Harvey Tyson, once of the long line of industrial-strength white liberal editors of the same newspaper. But for the courageous editorial stance of Tyson the horrors of the apartheid regime would have lasted at least another thousand seconds.
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By all reports the book is a collocation of published South African ‘humorous” material over the past heaven only knows how many years. What will make it even more desirable is that the collection contains not one word of my own tedious efforts. What better reason to rush out and acquire it?
It’s not that Clarke and Tyson didn’t consider including one of my flaccid trifles in their assortment. Last year Clarke contacted me and asked me to send him something. I did and, to my great excitement, he seemed to approve — called the stuff ‘brilliant”. He was later to dismiss my material on the grounds that I don’t have a sense of humour, but that’s another story.
Once Clarke had expressed interest in adding my contributions to his book, I made the unforgivable mistake of asking him whether any sort of payment was in the offing. As distorted and selfish as it now appears to be, my logic was that if the book was going to be sold, those contributing to its contents deserved some sort of pittance. Some token perhaps? Something to keep the thing professional? Perhaps just the offer of a free copy of the book. After all, you have to pay for the petrol that powers your car.
No such luck. I’ve no intention of boring readers any further with this story except to say that Clarke’s response to my inquiry was to tell me that my only reward would be the prestige of being published along with distinguished South African satirists, such as Tom Sharpe and PJ O’Rourke and who were giving their work for nothing. As I was currently overbanked on prestige I demurred. When the book was published last week there was a line of explanation as to why my work was not among the collection: ‘…in his inimitable fashion Robert Kirby demanded payment and threatened us with lawyers”.
Not quite that simple. In the bustle of publication, Clarke or Tyson hasn’t quite remembered it all, or didn’t keep copies of the e-mails between us. I did and, in service to the record, I’ve published the e-mails, unedited, on my website so that all may admire the style and approach of one of these two fine gentlemen journalists. You’ll find them at www.cockroach.co.za. The website also reveals details about another South African publisher who doesn’t like paying for work he commissions.
Purchasers of the Clarke/Tyson opus will be delighted to know that the collection also excludes any work by South Africa’s elder statesman of cartoonists, Mr Dov Fedler — an exclusion reeking of spite.
What will also no doubt help to sell a lot of copies will be the inclusion in the book of humour written by the wide-ranging columnist of several Independent Group newspapers, Darrel Bristow-Bovey.
That alone should amplify sales. It seems that Bristow-Bovey’s writings are a bit like opening a tin of Pick ‘n Pay spicy pilchards. You never know what extras you’ll find. Bristow-Bovey, bless his magnetic pen, has been shown to be quite a deft hand when it comes to lifting, almost word for word, whole paragraphs from the writings of the English writer, Bill Bryson, and passing these off as his own. Bristow-Bovey’s inventive practice was revealed in a brilliant piece of investigative reporting by a trainee journalist, Rob Boffard, and published in last week’s Saturday Star. In return for this Boffard received a decidedly menacing e-mail from Bristow-Bovey warning him of the dangers of ‘kick-starting a career in journalism by seeking to tarnish a colleague’s reputation”.
Bristow-Bovey is one among the proud graduates of Professor Lesley Marks’s inspirational English department at the University of Cape Town. He’s also a recipient of the Mondi Award for journalistic writing — even a judge in the same competition. Boffard’s article is available on www.independentnewspapers.co.za — search under Darrel Bristow-Bovey.
The book, in which the words of Bryson are so faithfully reproduced as Bristow-Bovey’s own, is called The Naked Bachelor, brought out by Zebra Publishers, who are believed to be about to sign up Darrel’s next fine work: The Uncovered Plagiarist.
Note: no respectable South African journalists were injured or harmed in the writing of this column.
Archive: Previous columns by Robert Kirby