Family legend has it that in the late 1880s, when Billy the Kid was on the run after the Lincoln County War, Sir Robert Brandon-Kirby — a soldier and explorer in New Mexico — hid the fugitive under his bed as the posse passed by. There is an element of knight-errantry and moral decisiveness about the tale: it incarnates a tradition of noblesse oblige that Sir Robert’s great-great-grandson, Robert Kirby, playwright, novelist, superlative wordsmith and no stranger to controversy, instinctively implemented.
On Saturday morning, February 10, Kirby — best known in his final decade as a fearless columnist for the Mail & Guardian — died of complications after cardiac surgery. He had been in intensive care for three and a half months, leaving a few already-written columns for his wife Dulcie to submit while he went under the knife. He was firmly — though not without an inner, habitual caution — optimistic.
In health he was a tall, striking figure — radiating a fine, comprehensive, profoundly witty intelligence that intimidated many, not least many younger imitators.
Kirby was born in Durban in 1936. If there was a reckless, restless gene, it does not seem to have manifested itself in his father, an ordinary travelling salesman who died when Robert was 11. Initially a product of that remarkable state school, Durban Boys’ High, he hit some emotional reefs at Treverton — from which he ran away three times, once hiding, not under someone’s bed, but in a Zulu village.
He was ”very errant”, Dulcie says, reflecting on his membership of the Overpoort Lavatory Chain Gang, which sought to erode authority by sneaking smokes at school. For far too many years a prodigious, compulsive smoker — perhaps signalling an inner agitation that needed damping down — he eventually quit. But the habit helped kill him.
In another school, an inspiring headmaster inculcated an abiding love of literature and steered Kirby towards radio — he was to work for both the SABC and BBC. Before that — most significantly for his life and career — he studied music at UCT. Dulcie credits her own abiding dedication to music to his ruthless but caring discipline. He spoke of writing as ”music in words”.
He had a splendid catholicity of taste in literature and he and I would exchange books we had discovered that seemed to us authentic and often dispraised. The last one he lent me was Rules for Old Men Waiting, a novel by Peter Pouncey, which reflects on the wars and horrors of the 20th century. Quite early I introduced him to Cormac McCarthy. We shared a love for TS Eliot, WH Auden, John Betjeman and Philip Larkin.
His difficult though romantic personality was seized on by journalists; and his stifling, in-between marriage to Baroness Nina van Pallandt (”She kidnapped me and kept me on an island for a year,” was one taciturn comment) delighted them. There followed an ”expensive” divorce. The baroness was one half of Nina & Frederick, a pop duo of the early 1970s. According to Wikipedia, the baron became a drug trafficker and was shot in the Philippines.
Robert’s enduring love — a mirror of Nina — was Dulcie, whom he met shortly after she left university (around 1980) and whom he beguiled into his play, Separate Development. Wed in 1983, they became that rare composite animal, a successful marriage. Some visitors sensed them as one being; but they had their ”outrageous fights” since, as Dulcie gently puts it, he could be ”a bit dogmatic”.
He would play piano duets with her; she played recordings of Count Basie and Scarlatti for him in intensive care. He was her ”husband, lover and mentor” and, in the end, told her ”you’re on your own, kid”.
A Pygmalionesque relationship? No: Dulcie might have learnt something of the craft of music and words from him, and taken on his combative stance, but she has her own genius and an inbred, stony eye for the fake.
His plays are innumerable. Many written for radio have been lost, thanks to the SABC’s archival shambles. But, over the years, such works as Quodlibet, Brave New Pretoria, It’s a Boy, Panics, Heliotrope Bouquet, Weedkillers, The Bijers Sunbird and Wrong Time of Year became part of the national repertoire and consciousness and will, in time, be reassessed, as more politically pleasing works — and ”satirists” who suck up to power — fade with their historical moment.
There are more than 2 000 articles and columns; a published novel (Songs of the Cockroach) and an unpublished one, Eyenosemouth, which intrigued Elia Kazan, the Greek-American film and theatre director, best known for his direction of the film version of A Streetcar Named Desire among many others.Some of his acerbic commentaries were published in 1997 as Rude Shelters. There was heavily censored television work. He won an array of prizes; those from the English Academy pleased him most. He was a master of the barbed skit, balanced on the idea of a free society. Dulcie has thousands of his poems, many about love, the quality that his critics unerringly missed.
He hated authoritarianism and censorship (except for such matters as child porn), and suffered from censorship, often in the name of political correctness. When The Bijers Sunbird (an anti-apartheid work) was picketed by the ANC in London because of the cultural boycott, he refused to go to Lusaka to beg permission to stage it. He asked Mongane Serote of the ANC cultural desk why the poet permitted his work to appear in school setworks in apartheid South Africa.
What truly embittered him was the lack of support from his more feted contemporaries at, for example, The Market. He believed that without such an architecture of brave commitment to freedom of expression — particularly in opposing corruption in any past, present or future government — the materials for sustained art are diluted in our society, leaving only false decorations and advancement for the mediocre; hypocrisy in the name of liberation that debases the prospect of a humane society. The cruelty and prevalence of crime appalled him.
His last home was in Muizenberg. He and Dulcie would visit an old friend and his wife in Kalk Bay and listen to music, talk of books and ponder the wreck of idealism. That friend, a distinguished poet, told me that with Robert’s death ”we’ve lost the most civilised man I’ve ever known”. His death has silenced a check on hypocrisy.
It was with only a few friends — some of whom he could disconcert by abruptly deciding to take a ”rest” from them — that he could display his sense of fun and joie de vivre. His latter travails took their toll.
He did not believe in any orthodox god. But he did in his sense of the austere, beautiful symmetries of art, literature and music; in the grace of flying, particularly gliding; the quietness of fishing (he usually returned the fish to the water); in origami and puzzles — in these things he discerned a transcendental order in the universe.
His ashes will be scattered in a place to be chosen by Dulcie. There will be no memorial service; if there is to be a plaque it will carry these lines by Auden:
Nights of insult let you pass
Watched by every human love. — Peter Wilhelm
Robert Kirby: born April 26 1936; died February 10 2007