Lionel Abrahams, who died this week aged 76, was one of South Africa’s most influential and beloved literary figures. He was responsible for getting key 1970s poets such as Oswald Mtshali and Mongane Serote into print for the first time, but also took a huge amount of flak in the 1980s and 1990s for his views on the inadequacy of political rhetoric as a poetic programme.
Abrahams was himself one of South Africa’s leading poets, publishing his first collection, Thresholds of Tolerance, in 1975. That volume was followed by Journal of a New Man (1984); The Writer in Sand (1988); and A Dead Tree Full of Live Birds (1995). Abrahams was a master of the contemplative lyric form, examining personal experience in a time of political upheaval in South Africa. While he got into trouble for upholding high literary standards as more important than the political content of much apartheid-era protest poetry, his own poetry now often seems more political than it did at the time. He always had a sharp awareness of both personal and social concerns — its expression was just more subtle than most.
Abrahams battled with more overtly political poets, and yet his own work (and his eloquently detailed critical perspective) prefigures the later shift in thinking about art’s relation to political struggle. Abrahams foreshadowed the appeal made by Albie Sachs in the late 1980s, when he asked whether culture always had to be a weapon of the struggle, and he pre-empted Njabulo Ndebele’s later call for a ”rediscovery of the ordinary”. For him, the political always began in the personal.
Born into a Lithuanian-Jewish immigrant family, Abrahams suffered from Jewish torsion dystonia, a form of palsy that kept him confined to a wheelchair for the last decades of his life. His autobiographical novel (in 18 stories), The Celibacy of Felix Greenspan (1977), describes with candour and wit the formative emotional, intellectual and sexual experiences of a young man suffering from the same disability. Abrahams continued the tale with The White Life of Felix Greenspan 25 years later. Together, they form a powerful autobiographical document and a portrait of Johannesburg artistic life over five decades.
Besides his own writing, Abrahams was an inspirational figure in the creative lives of many others. For many years he ran creative-writing workshops, and even those participants who did not turn into serious writers found such workshops invigorating. Many South African writers were beneficiaries of Abrahams’s encouragement — and critique.
In this respect, Abrahams was doing for others what Herman Charles Bosman had done for him. Abrahams’s father had hired Bosman as a teacher of creative writing (and thus, as Abrahams said, life) for his son, who had just dropped out of Wits University. After Bosman died, Abrahams devoted years to ensuring that Bosman’s legacy lived on, editing the first posthumous collection of Bosman’s work. Such a job was not as easy as it may appear today, now that Bosman is well remembered and being reprinted yet again. But for Abrahams, Bosman might have been forgotten as a writer.
Abrahams’s work on literary journals such as The Purple Renoster (begun 1957) and, later, Sesame, and in small publishing (Renoster Books was founded with Robert and Eva Royston in 1970) provided invaluable support for beginner writers. He understood that such forums were needed if writers were to begin to find their way into print, that without them there would be no progress in the development of South African literature.
At a time when the South African literary industry in general is increasingly enslaved to commercial demands, it is to be hoped that the spirit represented by Abrahams — generous, stubborn — will not die.
Lionel Abrahams, born April 11 1928, died May 30 2004