/ 26 March 2010

Look back at Butler anew

Look Back At Butler Anew

Guy Butler: Reassessing a South African Literary Life
by Chris Thurman (UKZN Press)

It was Guy Butler’s good fortune and curse to become a powerful symbol of English settler culture: he gained stature as the “grand old man” of South African letters (even among those who scarcely knew his work) as a consequence of this symbolism; at the same time, however, it set him up as a highly visible target for the left in the tense and fractious 1960s and 1970s. A further unfortunate consequence was that the man himself, with all of his nuances and contradictions, became elided.

Butler got it from both sides. Having championed the cause of local literature at a time (the 1950s and 1960s) when snooty members of the local literary academe considered it beneath their notice, he was vilified in the politicised 1970s as an exemplar of all that was bad about English-speaking liberalism: complacency, assumptions of superiority — even complicity with the regime. Mike Kirkwood’s assault on “Butlerism” at the “Poetry ’74” conference at the University of Cape Town stands out as the most memorable instance of the latter form of attack.

The time is ripe, then, to reconsider Butler and what he stood for, something Chris Thurman attempts with commendable evenhandedness. Astutely fixing on Tim Couzens’s remark to Butler (apropos Trader Horn) that “another human being is infinitely varied, infinitely mysterious” and that “the responsibility of someone else’s life is quite heavy”, Thurman uses this as his watchword throughout this rich, if somewhat problematic, study.

In Thurman’s book we find a more complex, self-doubting, likeable Butler than his liberal-settler-colonial caricature would suggest. His increasing inability as he got older to take himself seriously “except in a fairly comic light” and his “deep-seated dread of certainty” — “I am put off by, and sometimes fly from, people who are too sure”, he once observed — make of him a highly sympathetic figure.

Drawing extensively on unpublished materials contained in the treasure trove that Butler himself set up (the sterling National English Literary Museum in Grahamstown), Thurman provides a series of fascinating glimpses into the man behind the public image.

Butler’s unpublished manuscripts are also given an airing and Thurman’s discussion of Thirst (about an alcoholic artist whose unbridled lusts were both fascinating and repellent to Butler) is a particularly engaging part of the book. Also praiseworthy are Thurman’s copious footnotes, many of them an absorbing read on their own.

After this promising beginning (Part 1 of the three-part book) the reader starts becoming uneasy and then gets lost. Frustrated by the bland evasions of Butler’s autobiographies, Thurman turns to the literary work (principally Butler’s fiction and drama) for biographical revelations. However, the reader grows increasingly uncomfortable with this procedure the longer it goes on — and the more tenuous the connections between the man’s life and work appear to become.

A related problem — and this is not Thurman’s fault — is that Butler’s peccadilloes (if such they were, we never really discover) are of no great interest. It appears that he wasn’t bad enough in his personal life to be interesting, and as for occasional, unacted-upon feelings of longing for other women, well, these are unremarkable enough.

And then comes the disorientation. This is largely a consequence of Thurman’s deployment of theory (which is disconcertingly haphazard) and his inability to sustain an argument. Readers are thrown this way and that: positivism, Romanticism, Hans-Georg Gadamer, William Hazlitt, a little Butler, back to Gadamer, then Dilthey — then Butler’s institutional role at Rhodes University and back to Gadamer and the Enlightenment.

My rendering is perhaps unfair, as a mere listing of topics covered inevitably gives the appearance of disjointed randomness, but there is a worrying lack of continuity and systematic development of argument in the second part of the book in particular.

Thurman’s métier is the fragment — most of which are illuminating enough. Indeed, despite his choppy style in constructing his portrait, one feels that Thurman understands his man. It is the overarching argument that falters and one begins to wonder whether his rejection of the chronological approach in favour of thematic clusters was not a mistake. One does get vivid glimpses of Butler, but almost as if in the shards of a broken mirror. These glimpses also traverse time and place — sometimes bewilderingly — and the arc of the man’s long, productive life is largely lost.

Guy Butler is probably most profitably read as a rich, assiduously researched resource. And, providing there is sufficient interest in the man and his moment, this is perhaps how future scholars will use it. My sense, however, is that Butler’s moment has passed (“The fact must be faced that no literary critic has found me either good or bad enough to get excited about,” he sadly remarked in 1977). His long-time friend and colleague Don Maclennan probably got it right: “What ignominy ended you: / no lions walked the streets; / no graves that yielded up their dead; / no comets” (“An Epitaph for Guy”, 2002).

Craig MacKenzie is professor of English at the University of Johannesburg

Julia Lovell’s books include The Great Wall: China Against the World, 1000BC-AD2000 (Atlantic)