Herman Charles Bosman

Herman Charles Bosman: Under the Lash of Fate

by

Bernard Sachs

With the death of Herman Charles Bosman in 1951, a South African writer of genuine stature passed from the scene. I first met Bosman about thirty years ago at Jeppe High School. I was standing next to him in line during a cadet parade, when a hefty cadet-officer approached him and told him not to stand like a backvelder. An altercation followed. The cadet-officer shot his fist at Bosman. A pair of poetic eyes peered out of a face covered with blood. Eyes that looked into regions beyond. I wasn’t too much of a cadet myself, and a close friendship grew up between Bosman and me. I learned quite a deal about his complex make up over the years of our association. Bosman just couldn’t fit into a uniform or into straight line, and his course through life was on that account jagged and hard. From the first moment that he opened his eyes on this world he was destined to be a tragic figure. Right through his chequered life’s course, Bosman kept some kind of balance with the aid of that humour redolent of the mad king and the fool in Lear---that humour which is the last concentrated word of the human being under the lash of fate. When Bosman was rushed to Edenvale Hospital with, what turned out to be a fatal coronary thrombosis, the doctor asked him where he was born.

“Born in Kuils River, Cape: Died in Edenvale Hospital,” Bosman replied. You couldn’t tell by the smile playing on his face that Death was clutching at his throat. And you couln’t tell by the joviality of his manner during all his forty-six years that Life was clutching at his throat.

As a schoolboy, Bosman already possessed literary qualities of a high order. His school essays were informed with that elegance and whimsicality characteristic of his mature years. It is significant that he was hopeless at mathematics. Things earthy and finite were beyond the compass of this man constantly preoccupied with the infinite. I was sitting close to Bosman during geometry test of the Matriculation Examination. He read the test paper nervously, and proceeded to write an essay to the examiner telling him---in flawless English, to be sure---why he should overlook his ignorance of geometry and pass him because of his literary talent. Geo-metry. The measurement of the earth. What had Bosman his elfin, fanciful mind to do with it! I would give a lot to recover that essay he wrote to the examiner.

Edgar Allan Poe was the greatest influence on Bosman spiritually. It was with the utmost reverence that he would pronounce his name. I have a letter from Bosman in my possession in which he wrote:
            “When I was at Jeppe High School they opened a new school       
              library. This was my first serious introduction to literature.
              Thousands of wonderful new books, that smell of newness
              coming from them when you opened the pages. And in a
              ponderous tome entitled Masters of Literature, I saw, on a page
              next to some poems, a daguerreotype portrait of a man
              whose I liked. I read the caption Edgar Allan Poe. That was the
              first time I heard of Poe. But I sensed, even then, that the
              moment of that encountering was an immortal moment.”

Our nocturnal wanderings often took us to the edge of Johannesburg, and to the edge of human speculation. Through the mist of the years. I can still remember him saying to me one night: “Edgar Allan Poe was the poet of the letters gh---ghost, ghastly, ghoulish.”

“All except---ghetto, “ I added, “which fell within the purview of Heine.”

“But Poe jumped over the ghetto wall out of the world,” Bosman countered. Flight was the dominant theme in Bosman’s life. Flight from reality. And this fanciful romantic who that night also spoke about the need to reach out beyond the cold infinities of space, beyond the palace of the brain standing confined within the steel bars of thought, to a vaulted grace of the divinest emptiness---this romantic was, through a series of unfortunate circumstances, fated to be thrust for a long number of years behind prison bars of real, cold steel, into the very nadir and apotheosis of realism. In his Cold Stone Jug, Bosman wrote with excruciating poignance of the impact of prison on his life:
            “This is really a love story---a story of adolescent love, my first
               love . . . Her eyes were heavily fringed with dark, lashes, like
               barred windows. Her bosom was hard and pure and cold---
               like a cement floor. And it was a faithful and chaste love.
               During all those years of my young manhood in whose arms
               did I sleep each night but in hers?”

Speaking of his prison experiences, Bosman once said to me that he felt queer sort of intimacy with some other men who have been in prison: Villon, Verlaine, Oscar Wilde, O. Henry and St. Paul. My own feeling is that St. Paul would have been out of place in this colourful company. He was too much of a realist. Despite the strong streak of the divine in him, he was of the earth and mankind, in the way Bosman was not. Bosman stood outside society. His dislike of society, the social processes and human beings was unqualified and complete. It is not easy for me to pen these words. But any delineation of Bosman would be meaningless without stating these hard facts. It was inevitable that the world battered Bosman about. And he hit back. There were occasions when he struck back savagely. That is not to say that Bosman was without humanity. He just couldn’t direct it into social channels. But he showered his love and affection on those who, like himself, were battered and maimed by life. One of Bosman’s most brilliant essays was a slashing attack on Osbert Sitwell because he had written contemptuously of dwarfs.

It is futile to speculate whether Bosman would have been a greater or lesser artist if he had accommodated himself more readily to social routine and convention. The question whether the artist should go into society and help to remove its crudities---or fly away to the ivory tower to weave artistic patterns in space, is one that has been debated since time immemorial. With Villon, Verlaine and Rimbaud, Bosman could well be called a decadent, in that he stood outside of the interests of society---its hopes and fears. But the way things are going these days, the decadents can well argue that society itself is not too hot. I mention this in their extenuation.

This is not the place to estimate the value of Bosman’s literary work. But I feel that I must tender a few general impressions. Bosman was a highly cultured man---far more so than most South African writers. And his horizons were also wider and more sweeping. Unlike the majority of our writers, he did not borrow from the book-shelves of Europe, but had assimilated the essentials of European culture. He knew English literature thoroughly, and he also had a first-class knowledge of French literature. A few days before he died he recited to me in French the whole of Poe’s short story “The Cask of Amontillado”. Although the setting of his short stories was on the edge of the Kalahari, and his characters indigenous, hard-bitten Boers, these stories have a universal application and are the product of a mind universal in its comprehension. Those who can see in Bosman’s stories only the Boers of the Marico have missed their essential quality. Technique and imagination are perfectly harmonized inn these stories.

Bosman’s finest literary achievement was his collection of short stories Mafeking Road, a slender volume, but exquisite. I would place it on a very good level of European or American writing. It stands, in my view, above John Steinbeck’s Tortilla Flats, which deals with the comparable setting of uprooted Mexican paisanos languishing on the edge of a desert. The essential quality of Bosman’s short stories is their humanity. Bosman did not like human beings, but he loved humanity in the abstract---a schizophrenic phenomenon common to artists, including Beethoven, it is said. That humanity which Bosman possessed, and which he could not direct into society, flowed with marvellous profusion into his short stories. The dagga-smoking kaffirs, rooineks, seducers and plain crooks all glow with warmth as they are touched by his humanity. And hid humanity also carried him well over the racial chasm. I believe his finest short story to be “Unto Dust”. In it a kaffir and a Boer fall in battle and are left to rot in the field side by side, exposed to [the] sun and the rain and the wild beasts. When six months afterwards the Boers return to the scene to bury the remains of their dead comrade, they experience great difficulty in sorting out the bones. Another story “Marico Scandal” conveys to us the searing tragedy of Colour in South Africa more effectively than volumes of political declamation.

Bosman also essayed a novel with his Jacaranda in the Night. But it was not successful. The novel was not his métier. That realism, which is an important ingredient of the modern novel, clashed with his whole spiritual make-up. Bosman was, more than anything else a poet and a dreamer, a perpetual child. His stories were actually prose poems etched in wisp-like lines, in which he barely touched earth. It is my belief that he should have devoted himself to poetry, which was his essential talent. He has actually left behind---in random places---a substantial body of poetry. Only the other day I came across a bundle of his poetry in y drawer. I don’t know how it came there. And I am quite sure Bosman knew nothing about it either. When war broke out in 1939, Bosman returned to South Africa from England. He told me that he had left behind a file of poetry in a house in Hammersmith. We wrote to a friend in London asking him to recover it. We received a reply saying that the place had been bombed out.

On the Friday before Bosman died, he had a house-warming party at his place out on the veld near Edenvale. It was a very lively party, and at one point Bosman said: “It’s so jolly, that I feel his house will never get cold again . . . “ When in the early hours of the morning we proceeded to make our way home, we found that our cars were bogged down in the mud---the rain was coming  down in torrents. We went back to the house and were entertained to a recital of excerpts from Shakespeare. But one of the revelers insisted on making his way home to Auckland Park across the veld. As he walked into the night, Bosman said that it would be the correct thing for him to declaim from the stormy scene in King Lear. Well, the day after, Bosman, too, walked out into the night.

May it be a still, tranquil night.

From: Bernard Sachs, South African Personalities and Places, Kayor Publishers, Johannesburg, 1959.