HERMAN CHARLES BOSMAN

Writing

by

Herman Charles Bosman

The older I grow, the more puzzled I get as to what life is for and how to live it.

Since my early adolescence I have had one fervent longing: to have twelve months of leisure in which I should be able to devote myself in exclusiveness and abandonment to the task of writing the things that have surged blindly inside me for expression. Just a quiet room somewhere and a piece of floor space to lie down on, and pen and ink, and a ream of 34 pound cream laid paper cut into quarto size. That is the one thing I have wanted all my life, and always it has evaded me. There have been times when I have seemed on the verge of achieving to this ambition, and then on each occasion what has seemed to be the beginning of this period of leisure has in actual fact been to preclude to fresh turmoil, the calm before the storm.

I can always get the ream of cream laid easily enough, and my connections with the printing industry make it a simple matter for me to get a quad cap ream cut up into the right sized sheets, and ink is cheap. A piece of quiet floor space and a strip of hessian to lie on, though more difficult to procure, are not completely beyond the range of my organizational capacity. But it is then, when I have got all these things together, and I am well set on Act 1, Scene 1 of a sublime, high tragedy, and I have got to “Enter Bernadus van Aswegen”---it is then that the outside world enters with shouting and banners, and I proceed to roll up my strip oh hessian and I sighfully set a light to the 48 pound cream laid, and I take the nib out of the pen holder and break off the points and fasten a strip of folded paper to the back of it, and shoot it into the ceiling.

I don’t remember, just offhand, how many times in my life I have got as far as “Enter Bernadus van Aswegen”---and at that point the world has entered, swearing and flat footedly trampling. Sometimes it has been creditors. On one occasion it was the bailiffs. Once it was a demolition gang come to tear down the building. Once, also, it was the police. And always I have had to get up from the floor, with Bernadus’ momentous opening speech unwritten.

I have got so, now, that I accept it as inevitable that there is a curse on Bernadus van Aswegen. I feel that the world won’t allow him to have his say, any more than it will allow me to have my say. It gives me a queer sense of intimacy with Bernadus. What he feels, I feel. His hopes are my hopes. And we have both learnt this same truth from life, Bernadus and I---and it is knowledge as ineluctable as death---and that is that we are both doomed to eternal frustration every time we really want to open our mouths.

And I regret to say that with the years Bernadus van Aswegen has begun to grow embittered. There is today a cynical twist to left part of his upper lip that I don’t like. It doesn’t help him to win and keep friends. And it is no use my trying to reason with him, either. “Aren’t I as good as Lear?” he asks me. “What has Othello got that I haven’t got? And you know I can make rings round Hamlet, can’t I?” “Well, Bernadus,” I reply, “I wouldn’t say rings. But as good, yes. And there is that soliloquy I’ve got for you on the death of your little daughter. But I started it all so long ago, and we have both grown so old in the meantime that I am afraid it will now have to be your little granddaughter. And there is that opening speech, right in the beginning, in the first scene, when you say . . . “

“Oh, cut it out,” Bernadus replies petulantly, “I never get so far. If it isn’t creditors it’s men with picks and shovels. Or it’s a couple of ‘johns’ from Marshall Square.”

“Don’t use such dreadful solecisms, Bernadus,” I answer, soothingly. “Remember you are a character in a great tragedy. Don’t say ‘johns’.”

And so it goes on.

But I am trying to write of life and its meaning, if any, and I have reluctantly come to accept a conclusion that has been persistently forced on me by external circumstance. And I can’t evade this conclusion. Within my experience the same situation has repeated itself over and over again. I believe that, speaking strictly for myself personally, the practicing of the creative art of letters is contrary to the laws and demands of life. It is always when I have turned out my best work, and I have got the right sort of recognition for it, too, in terms of people dubiously enquiring as to whether I think that I should go on writing at all---it is at these times, when my creative powers, such as they are, have been at their peak, that the worst kinds of disasters have invariably overtaken me.

And this is something I can’t understand. I have become afraid to pick up the pen. Or, when I do, to dip it in too deep.

And this is something that, I have noticed, applies to other writers as well. Recently I read another biography on Edgar Allan Poe, in which the story of his life is related with a strict regard to chronology. I got to 1845. This year, states the biographer, was a year of great literary creativeness for Edgar Allan Poe. “Next year, 1846,” I thought, “Edgar Allan Poe will have dropped in the . . . “ I read on and found that, by 1846, he had.

Taking it by and large, it is far better not to write.

But I think I have solved the problem of Bernadus van Aswegen. I shall keep him out of the play until right at the end. He will enter only in the last scene of Act V. He comes on at the opposite prompt side. He knows his lines. He walks on to the centre of the stage and raises his right hand, and just as he opens his mouth the curtain falls. Title: Bernadus van Aswegen, a Tragedy in Five Acts.

From: Herman Charles Bosman, A Cask of Jerepigo: Sketches and Essays, Cape Town (Pretoria), Human & Rousseau, 1964. With a Biographical Introduction by Lionel Abrahams (June 1957).