CJ “Jonty” Driver — novelist, poet, South African expat yet decidedly English in many ways, teacher and headmaster who came to terms with being an exile while running a school in Hong Kong — is both highly engaging and attentive as a conversationalist and clearly curious about the vibe around us. At a Melville café, we talk about his life, about politics and literature, and in particular his new book Shades of Darkness (Jonathan Ball).
In this new novel, his fifth, we are presented with a tragic story of love and loss, an Orpheus and Eurydice story rooted in the very familiar South African backdrop of struggle and exile, return and reconciliation. It has a three-fold time structure (the mid-1990s, the late 1980s and the late 1960s), and the voice of the major narrator is occasionally intercut with the voices of minor characters who try to articulate their own angles on the action taking place. Jamie Cathcart is a teacher, exiled to Britain together with Jenny, his girlfriend, after a spell in security-police detention in the late 1960s. He returns without official permission to South Africa to be with his dying brother, Peter, and meets a young woman, Allie, one of the 1980s “new generation” of white United Democratic Front activists. She is uncannily like his beloved Jenny, who had died in an accident. During his sojourn in 1980s South Africa, Jamie realises that much has changed, while much more has stayed the same. Years later, after 1994, he will return again for another purpose.
“Things have changed!” Driver declares, as we drink our coffee. “This — this kind of place,” pointing to what is around us, “would never have been possible in the early Sixties.”
Perhaps so, certainly so in the Sixties. But are these signs of the social intermingling of the new and old middle class enough in themselves to declare our democratic transition a success? When I press him on this matter, Driver tells me how in 1989 he gave a lecture in the United States in which he said, soberly and with conviction, that he doubted he would see democratic change in South Africa in his lifetime: “And then the following year …” he says to me, his voice trailing off.
“What happened here I would describe as a miracle.” Though by no means naive, Driver clearly does not subscribe to any “elite pact” or compromise theory of the transition. Despite the many problems South Africa faces, for Driver the struggle did not — as he and many others expected — end in violent conflagration.
Another part of the transition that has moved him was the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC). “My inspiration for this novel came from reading TRC transcripts,” he says, “the powerful, shocking, sometimes deeply tragic testimonies of ordinary South Africans who lived and suffered under apartheid.” In at least one of the “stories within the story” of Shades of Darkness, the TRC testimony format is used to stunning effect. We encounter a woman who has struggled to survive all her life, living between the white world where she must keep up her “image”, and a community and family torn apart by struggle politics. She herself has lost a husband to the comrades’ “necklacing” and a son to the armed struggle; she has searched futilely and at great personal cost for her son’s body.
Driver himself is no stranger to the bizarre and frequently brutal history of apartheid. The son and grandson of Anglican clergymen, he grew up in Grahamstown, in an environment that rejected white racism as a matter of course. Black priests and their families were frequent visitors to the rectory: “Black clergymen frequently came to visit my father, often for breakfast and it was taken for granted that we accord them the same respect as any guest at our house.”
This early life translated later into greater social ease with black South Africans than most whites of the 1950s and 1960s, even perhaps white liberals and radicals, could probably manage. While training to be a teacher at the University of Cape Town (UCT), Driver’s circle of friends included many black student activists, including some whose thinking was more Pan African Congress than African National Congress (among them Njongonkulu Winston Ndungane, now the Anglican Archbishop of Cape Town), or people whose thinking prefigured what would become black consciousness in the late 1960s. As a student leader and sometime president of the National Union of South African Students, Driver attracted the hostile attention of the security police and at least once raised the hackles of fellow liberals: “I told a gathering of them that any future South African revolution would have to be black-led, that whites could not and should not try to take over the revolution. Today this would be called prescient; then it was seen by many, including friends, as ‘inverted racism’.”
At least offended liberal sensibilities did not extend, as the Security Branch did, to official sanctions such as detention and exile: “The security police really picked on me. I later discovered that [John] Vorster had a deep personal dislike for me. When I tried to return many years later to visit my dying brother without the visa — I was by then a prohibited immigrant — I discovered that all those years Vorster had kept a copy of my branch file in his personal filing cabinet.”
Why?
“Well, I think it can be summed up by what the head of the security police in Cape Town said to me while I was in detention: ‘Driver,’ he said to me, ‘Driver, you like beer, you like girls, you like rugby, so why the hell did you get mixed up with all those communists?’ To him, and to Vorster, I was the typical, the archetypical white South African male. They simply couldn’t handle it.”
Many of Driver’s experiences resonate with his character Jamie Cathcart. But he strongly denies this is literature as autobiography: “No, I am not Jamie Cathcart.” Unlike a lot of writers today, Driver is firmly opposed to blurring the lines between biography and literature: “I really, as a rule, do not like novels that feature real, historical characters. Or biographies that incorporate elements of fiction. I like to keep my history and my literature separate.”
Yet, he adds, one always draws upon elements at least of one’s life experience to write a novel: “The part about Jamie trying to return to South Africa illegally, that’s true. That happened to me, even the bit about the sympathetic immigration official, the nasty one, and calling up the minister [of the interior]. On the other hand, my father was not dead when I was at UCT, I grew up with two brothers and a sister, and my mother was nothing like Jamie’s mum.”
Many of the characters are purely invented, or sometimes composites of activists and academics Driver knew. While Jamie’s great love, Jenny the ballet dancer, is loosely based on someone Driver once knew the character of Allie — in Jamie’s imagination frequently seen as Jenny returned from the death, another echo of the Orpheus-Eurydice myth — is purely fictional.
Exile in Britain proved hard at first for Driver, though, like Cathcart in the novel, he landed a job as a teacher and later a headmaster. It was while in Hong Kong that he started to come to terms with exile. “Hong Kong is and has always been basically part of China and we [he and his wife] frequently visited the mainland, where I met a number of Chinese intellectuals who taught me that, as one put it, ‘Exile is a very old condition’. It’s been a part of Chinese — and ancient Greek and Roman — life for centuries. As my one Chinese friend put it, exile is what happens when you speak the truth. You don’t like it, certainly. But it happens.”
There is a certain almost stoical attitude in Driver, I think, as we drink our coffee. When I ask him about writing, creativity and his literary vision, this becomes very clear. “I suppose my vision of the world is tragic,” he says, “which is why I cannot find it in me to write comedy.” Flying in the face of many post-modernist attitudes, Driver also insists: “Literature must have a moral vision. Even the attempt to make it amoral is a moral statement.”
Writing is about periods of highly concentrated hard work, made difficult in the past by Driver’s full-time job as a teacher and headmaster: “I wrote the bulk of both of my first two novels [Elegy for a Revolutionary and Send War in Our Time, Oh Lord] over three-week periods during the Easter holidays.” These books, he adds with a grin, made him, in at least some of his writing, a South African novelist: “They were South African enough for them to be banned here!”
He shows his manuscripts to family and a close circle of friends. His wife and daughter are valued advisers: “They are very good, very helpful, but kind.” I observe that perhaps one of the best effects of such a reading is that, unlike many male novelists, his women characters are on the whole well-developed, interesting and complex, without lurching into the bizarre or boring. He agrees. “My wife and daughter would not let me get away with such poor writing.”
Shades of Darkness certainly seems to show signs of close observation of characters in general and women characters in particular. Although strongly plotted, with a complex narrative structure, it is at bottom a character-driven novel, which succeeds or fails on how we respond to the characters. For me, it succeeds admirably as a tale that tries to suggest love as the stabilising force amid tragedy.
Interestingly, Driver sees himself more “as a South African poet, primarily, than as a South African novelist. My poetry is very, very South African in tone and content. Many of my novels — including the one I have just finished in manuscript — are neither set in South Africa, nor have a South African theme. I suppose in many ways I have become very English.”
His Englishness notwithstanding, Driver has produced a remarkable novel about love, loss, exile, return and, ultimately, the victory of human decency over our more brutal instincts.