Life Sentence: A Biography of Herman Charles Bosman
by Stephen Gray
(Human & Rousseau)
February 3 2005 was the centenary of Herman Charles Bosman’s birth, and Stephen Gray’s biography of the man often referred to, with reason, as South Africa’s best-loved writer reaches the shelves with not a moment to spare. Not that it is a rush-job (some gaps in the proofreading notwithstanding): in many ways, this is the culmination of a lifetime project for Gray. Decades ago he edited the first critical reader on Bosman, produced collections such as Bosman’s Johannesburg, and has long been involved in what was for Bosman the bigger picture — the creation and understanding of a truly indigenous South African literature.
Gray is also one of the editors (the other is Craig Mackenzie) of the centenary edition of Bosman’s works. This 14-volume set restores to their most complete form the stories, novels, poems and occasional pieces that in Bosman’s lifetime and after his death were often published in less than perfect shape. With lovely covers, often by David Goldblatt, who followed Bosman’s trail through the Groot Marico, the series is flawed only by lacklustre type-design and too-narrow margins.
Like Goldblatt (and Bosman’s previous biographer, Valerie Rosenberg), Gray has followed the Bosman trail — in this case, the paper trail that snakes through the many publications for which Bosman wrote from the 1920s to the 1950s, from The Sjambok through The South African Opinion up to Trek. It is amazing today to realise how vibrant and noisy an “alternative press” South Africa had then; not just the various literary-political journals, but the earlier pamphlets that could be produced fast in response to any topical issue. Bosman himself, a master of this quick-fire medium, wrote two pamphlets on the murderess Daisy de Melker and hawked them personally outside the courthouse while she was on trial.
He also caused a huge amount of trouble. You’d have thought that having been sentenced to death at the age of 21 for murdering his stepbrother, and having spent four years in jail after the sentence was commuted, he would have been more careful. But he and associates such as Aegidius Jean Blignaut repeatedly found themselves in court for their provocative press activities during the 1920s and 1930s; Bosman was the first person in South Africa to be charged with blasphemy, in 1932.
Blignaut later wrote a highly unreliable memoir of Bosman — Gray says he had to check every single fact averred by Blignaut, a self-mythologist and con man to outdo even the expert “trickster” Bosman. (Bosman, who first wrote as Herman Malan, using his mother’s maiden name, went so far as to put a false name on his first marriage certificate.)
Then there was the 1971 memoir by Bosman’s longtime friend and editor, Bernard Sachs (Judge Albie’s uncle), which is not just unreliable and plagiaristic but deals with less than all of Bosman’s life — and is heavily implicated in Sachs’s claim that he basically made Bosman the writer he was.
Gray is very good on this part of the paper trail, too — how other writers tried to come to terms with the elusive, contradictory Bosman. For example, he has made extensive use of Bosman’s widow’s unfinished and unpublished memoir. Rosenberg, he says, cleared the way with her 1974 biography, Sunflower to the Sun; she did indeed, but her book is superficial and she is often gullible.
Gray is little interested in psychoanalysing Bosman, feeling perhaps that the attempts made in this endeavour by Rosenberg and others are unsatisfactory — not to mention embarrassing. Rosenberg, in fact, promoting a later work on Bosman, collaborated on an article that would outdo even the literary-biographical coverage of today’s Sunday Times. Appearing in The Star, “Secret Sex Life of Herman Charles Bosman” accused him of fear of incest (he had no sister) and, bizarrely, cannibalism — for sexual purposes? Not that Bosman didn’t have a complicated sex life (at one point, for instance, he lived with both his second and third wives), but this piece was scurrilous nonsense that would have made even the sometime blackmailer Bosman blush. Amid the outcry, Rosenberg said she’d been misquoted.
Instead of trying to sum up the psyche of this deeply complex man, Grey lets hints slip through the lines of what is essentially a literary-historical biography. It is up to the reader to make what he or she will of the often ugly facts of Bosman’s life: this man who killed his stepbrother, apparently in rage, but also rescued beetles off the carpet in case anyone at a party should step on them.
He was endlessly paradoxical, particularly when it came to politics: he gave practical assistance to the Afrikaner fascist Oswald Pirow, but was also friendly with many communists and wrote sensitively, and at an early date, about what the political degradation of South Africa’s black working class would reap in the future.
In this densely packed work, Gray is particularly good on the evolution of Bosman the writer, tracing how Bosman’s different styles and attitudes appeared and developed. He was by no means a literary naif, as is sometimes made out. A classics scholar, he was aware of and inspired by Surrealism; he was also a very fine critic of the arts.
Of course, his Oom Schalk Lourens stories are his most famous works, and are certainly central to his oeuvre, but Gray shows how the lines of Bosman’s literary work crossed and recrossed, or spiralled out into other, stranger projects. Among them, naturally, was Bosman’s ongoing project of self-fashioning, as this Anglophone Afrikaner ducked and dived his way through life, often lying and stealing, but always loving and charming too, and always believing in literature.
Bosman published only three books in his lifetime: the bestselling stories of Mafeking Road, the novel Jacaranda in the Night (“sordidness almost unrelieved”, said the Sunday Times) and Cold Stone Jug, a fictionalisation of his prison experiences (sold, with Bosman’s collusion, as pure non-fiction). Up to his death at age 46, he felt like a failure. He confessed, though, that his dearest wish was to become a household name. And that, after death, he achieved.
Pinning down the shifting enigma
To date, several attempts have been made on Herman Charles Bosman’s life, putting the mosaic of bits and pieces together to make some sense of him, writes Stephen Gray. Some have been valiant efforts, but failed, principally because he was routinely self-protective, even evasive, about himself and had every reason to be so. Since he was a certified murderer, he understandably thought it better never to spill his guts in public. Once he had served his time (1926-30) in one of our elite penal abodes, his dues paid to society as prescribed by law, he necessarily wished to turn his back on all that, so much so that with his third marriage, when he was an utterly reformed character, his wife did not even know he had ever been to jail.
He was also South Africa’s first ever officially certified blasphemer, under some Roman-Dutch law dusted off with the intention of committing him back to prison. But then he allowed Aegidius Jean Blignaut, as his responsible editor, to go ahead and take the rap in his place.
Pinning down this shifting enigma of the bad-boy early Bosman has led to some peculiar results, too, more the products of credulous fantastification than any responsible quest for verisimilitude. But during the course of my research, informant after informant has sworn blind to my face that the following slanders have to be factual: that he was a product of incest, for example, or was illegitimate, mentally unstable and even a cannibal!
He was none of these things and — sorry to be such as spoilsport — that is that. Nor is it wholesome, in professional circles, without a shred of documentary evidence, to adduce any such peekaboo defamations as have become a commonplace part of the legend.
Much more penetrating is the notion that Bosman was a perfectly normal citizen, after all — but, well, with the distinction of being a killer, as you or I could be as well. And that after he was officially reformed, but mentally in no way off the hook, he could only spend the rest of his days with other confidence-men like the one he had been forced to become. Naturally he was an unreliable type: isn’t each and every one of his famous Oom Schalk Lourens stories just a narratological scam, pulled off with flair on his credulous victim, the reader?
So the other difficult factor in pursuing the real Herman Charles Bosman has to do, not with his nature, but with why what he wrote is so gleefully contested by his circle of South African dupes. What is it that Bosman still calls up in us that leads to such devotion, even fanaticism, and the spur to keep arguing in his favour, defending his integrity, more than half a century after his death, when surely his place in our skimpy pantheon is by now secure? The answer has to do with us, and how we feel about ourselves — rather than with him per se.
This is an excerpt from the 2005 Percy Baneshik Memorial Lecture, given at the University of Pretoria Conference Centre, by Stephen Gray, on the writing of a biography of Herman Charles Bosman. A reading from Bosman’s poetry will take place at the Boekehuis, 34 Fawley Street, Auckland Park, Johannesburg, from noon on Saturday February 5.