One of the many memorable details that needs retelling about the life of the late Sheila Roberts, who has died aged 67, has to do with her date of birth: May 25 1942. That was the official day, although the truth was surely closer to 1937.
How else could she have known, and written so graphically about, all those Potch troepies of her childhood during World War II?
And then her raw upbringing in Johannesburg’s poor-white Mayfair, nowadays unrecognisable, was also cashable to this stringent realist. She made it all right by her own resilience into politer quarters, but always writing about those ”outside life’s feast”.
Outside Life’s Feast was the title of her tough, shocking debut collection of stories, which won her the Olive Schreiner Prize in 1976. In 1984 came a Pringle Award for further stressful, disillusioned items.
But it was her brutal novel of the following year, He’s My Brother, which brought her the distinction of being utterly forbidden by the Censor Board. By the time it was at last released, after a harrowing appeal made by her shaken publisher, Ad Donker, and sold thereafter with a bright red ”NOW UNBANNED” sticker on the cover, she of course had emigrated. Enough was enough.
Another detail is that as she quit she left behind two more novels in typescript which the typesetters had refused to set up for printing. To this day they are held in the Special Collections of the Johannesburg Public Library, where any researcher may decide if they are all that pornographic or not. Or were they just true to the type of woman’s life she had experienced and wished to record?
She had the experience, playing up the gap-toothed blonde role, and taking on more marriage partners even than André Brink (five in all). From 1986 she had found her scholarly home in the United States at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, as director of their creative writing programmes and chair of graduate studies. There she ran a notable doctoral course in fiction techniques, right up until her recent retirement.
Always keeping in touch with the developing literary scene of her home country, she was reliably anthologised. She made frequent return trips to friends and family, latterly to her many grandchildren. Her superb last novel, Purple Yams, about her sojourn in Japan, crowned a publishing career of a quarter of a century, and was shortlisted for a Sanlam Award in 2001.
Although by then her vocabulary was more ”diapers and candy” than the old ”nappies and suckers”, there was an outspokenness and resilience that remained thoroughly hardbitten South African. In an interview she gave to Shaun de Waal for this paper in 1993, when he queried how she felt about being so forthright as a woman, she replied: ”The technical process of writing is so engrossing that whether I am writing as a woman, or as a frog, just doesn’t come into it.” Which reminds one of her most reproduced short story of all: it was called Coming In. She was a classic of her kind.
Sheila Roberts, writer, born May 25 1942, died August 11 2009