Sarah Gertrude Millin: A Study in the Tragic

by

Bernard Sachs

This is not the place to evaluate Sarah Gertrude Millin’s massive literary labours of a lifetime. It is enough to say that she is South Africa’s leading writer. Some would award this accolade to Olive Schreiner, a claim which rests mainly on The Story of An African Farm. But this splendid effort is far above her other work, which is not very distinguished. Mrs Millin, on the other hand, has to her credit at least three outstanding novels in God’s Stepchildren, What Hath A Man? and Mary Glenn---all this apart from her political writings which, to say the least, represent a major intellectual effort and reveal the vast and versatile range of the author’s mind. She has laid a solid foundation on which others will build.

Mrs. Millin is nothing if not forthright. She carries not only her heart but also her brain on her sleeve. What with her frightful insomnia the velvet of night has not sunk into her soul. Her body is as if flayed---prickly, resentful to every external impingement. Every little hurt becomes a pain and every pain a torment.

Take the way she battled it out with General Smuts when he passed over Philip Millin for promotion to the Bench. Smuts was in the Fusion days of the 1930s treading very warily, too much so, perhaps. He was obviously deferring unduly to the anti-Semitic agitation prevalent at the time. Mrs. Millin did not hesitate to tell him exactly what she thought, “I had your letter and another of a more diplomatic character from Phil,” wrote Smuts in reply. “You have a demon of a wife,” Smuts told Mr. Millin some months later when he gave him the appointment.

It would seem that Mrs. Millin was haggling over a matter that should be approached reverently and with dignity. But on reflection, it is not so simple. She has an ingrained sense of justice, possibly a link with the Old Testament. It is so absolute, that it does not take account of contingent difficulties or expedience, which is the stock-in-trade of every politician. She could gainfully have learned from Ecclesiastes: “But not righteous overmuch. Why shouldst thou destroy thyself?” Mrs. Millin has a self-awareness which extenuates her righteous anger, often bordering on feminine petulance, as if the censor within were acting as a corrective: “Phil  had not that ugly sense pf justice which, focused on oneself, can be so bad a defect, and which is among my own bad defects . . . I was never as good a sport as Phil.” Here is her touching finale on the subject: “It would have been a sin against the human spirit for Phil not to be a judge.” There is quite a charm about the audacity of this remark.

Mrs. Millin’s insomnia is an affliction which must be taken into account in the evaluation of her personality. The words describing her sleeplessness add up to a heartrending elegy. “My sleep was already murdered,” she writes, parodying Macbeth. And she was guiltless of any crime . . . “Every agony is multiplied, every hope nullified by these long nights . . . My nights have lengthened with the length of my life. I cannot conceive a greater bliss than sleep. Imagine, to put one’s head on a pillow and simply know nothing. As it is, I am not having any preparation at all for my long last sleep.” “My stroke is heavier than my groaning,” cried out Job in his night of agony.

Mrs. Millin has also made important incursion into the political terrain. Her biographies of Rhodes and Smuts and her war diaries are fine accomplishments. For the work on Smuts, she had to sort out, study and collate the rambling material from tomes of correspondence. Only a person with a vigorous intellect, rare nervous drive, and all day (24 hours) to do it in, could have achieved what she did. And yet, I have come away with the impression that Mrs. Millin’s essential métier is literature and not politics. If she made a success of her political writing, this is because with her boundless intellectual thrust she could address herself successfully almost to any task. At its deepest and intensest level, her mental energy has an aesthetic quality and abounds in creative originality. It is lacking in her political thinking, which is too intellectualised. The spark which is to be found in her best novels is not there. She is too rigid in her absoluteness to sense the jagged, lawless rhythm of the politics of this age going into decline, and where every absolute is being jettisoned as an encumbrance. The real Smuts eluded her---it eluded Smuts.

On the colour question, Mrs. Millin is, in the abstract sense of the word, a liberal, as anyone with a regard for civilized values and a conscience must be. But the realities tend to clash with the abstract here. It is my impression that, in the concrete, Africans jar on her. She as much as says so in print. “At the Vaal River” (where she spent much of her childhood) “I saw drunkenness, disease, hunger, miscegenation. To talk to these stepchildren of the vote was like Marie Antoinette offering cake to those who had no bread.” But what to Marie Antoinette? Another revealing quotation: “In the days before Jews were my chief misery, I could never get out my mind the plight of the natives.” Here Mrs. Millin is spinning round the Jewish axis like a Catherine wheel. It is one of her main emotional drives. What anguish Hitler caused her! It provoked the mild-mannered Philip into saying: “I wish the terrible subject of the Nazis didn’t prey so much on your mind. I wish you could forget it sometimes and let cheerfulness break in.” Mrs. Millin is both a fine novelist and a fine Jewish patriot.

Mrs. Millin visited Israel in 1949 for the first anniversary celebrations of the founding of the State. The visit proved ill-starred from the beginning. She was to have been the guest of the Weizmanns. But President Weizmann had taken ill while on a visit to America, and he was not there to receive her. The place was jammed with visitors, and Mrs. Millin had to rough it. Nothing went right after that. She had with her a beautiful dress which she had bought for the King’s visit to South Africa in 1947, and was going to wear it for some State occasions, but in the turmoil of those days she never got so far. There were other things to disturb her. In 1933, whe she first visited Israel, the Yishuv was scantily populated. She had travelled through Galilee and other places in the company of the Weizmanns. Everything was so idyllic and peaceful. By 1949, much had happened, including the revolt against the British Mandatory, and the influx of the bedraggled immigrants which was in full swing. This is how she saw them: “The people driven from the lands of Europe, and driven also to fight the Arabs, were a generation away from Weizmann and Smuts and the Balfour Declaration. Even those who had nothing to do with the terrorists the Sternists or Irgun were bitter men with violence in them. They were not concerned with my sort of person, and they had let me know it and I had not the experience.” Her hero Weizmann, who had linked his fortunes with an empire in decline, had lost his standing in all but name. “They built the country on the body of a broken giant,” was her caustic and explosive observation . . . “In 1933, when I had come to the Palestine of Weizmann, the dream was to show the world the sort of people Jews really were---a people who, after two thousand years of calamity, had still in them the stuff of greatness. After Hitler, Ben Gurion had to make a state simply out of what was left left.” The dust of the shovels and the hammering seemed to have got in her eye.

The flash-point in this fissionable material was soon reached. One day, driving in a car, she cried out: “I’m going. You have strays enough. I must get out of this bloody country.” She admits that the words shocked her, as it did the man driving her car, “whose hands tightened on the wheel.” This explosion had an echo. That evening, he telephoned her to ask if he could come over, as he wanted to speak to her personally. He came over. The gold and silver brocade she had not worn was lying on the bed. “ I have a great feeling for beautiful material,” he said with sarcasm. “A pity that you could not wear the dress in Israel.” His voice became tense as continued. “Why did you call me a bloody man?” “What are you talking about?” Mrs. Millin wanted to know. His reply came quickly. “When you called this country a bloody country, you called me a bloody man. I have suffered for this country, I have been to Siberia, and you call it a bloody country because the sea overflowed a little and your shoes got wet . . . Yes, it rained a little and your shoes got wet.” These Israelis certainly know how to defend their land.

“On the whole it was really quite old-time Russian,” was Mrs. Millin’s comment on this episode. It was. It is pure Dostoevsky---the insulted and injured hitting back. It is to Mrs. Millin’s credit that she recounts this incident, from which she did not emerge very creditably. It is perhaps a form of expiation. Her inward censor came into play once more. Confronted with a similar situation, she said: “And I, having been all my life too lucky, was complaining . . . The man made me ashamed.” When she arrived back in South Africa, she told Philip about her disillusionment. He begged her not to judge harshly. “I was the failure, the pariah, I,” she replied. Her final words on the subject were: “My culture was England and my home, South Africa. There I belonged.” Not very good words. What of her blood, which is sizzlingly Jewish? And her tears that flowed for the victims of Nazism, the broken remnants of whom found themselves in Israel? Yes, “Ben Gurion had to make a state of what was left,” to repeat her words. What else could he do? Is this a situation to look down on with sovereign contempt?

I know what it is that impels Mrs. Millin to be frank and outspoken. For all that, I feel that she should have been more reticent about her last visit to Israel. As for the words “I must get out of this bloody country”---the Germans have a saying: Es last sicht nicht lessen.” But her faults are trivial before her larger significance. Let us say that her harsh views about Israel were the importunities of a lover. But there are other explanations for her attitude to Israel. The country didn’t measure up to her rigid absolute standards of middle-class order and harmony. It is another important ingredient in her make-up. Mrs. Millin is not only middle-class but assertively so. She frankly believes in a world in which there is precedence and order---the feudalist Shakespeare was enamoured of degree and quality. I don’t say this disparagingly. Unlike the bulk of the meretricious Johannesburg Middle class, whose eminence is due to their heels of gold, she has genuine qualities that have enabled her to merge completely with England’s upper strata---the Readings, Monds, Lord Salisbury, etc. With what relish she describes a party of thirty celebrities at Claridge’s, the footmen in red plush and knee breeches. Mrs. Millin has come a long way from Zagar, Lithunia. Yes, have I forgotten to say it? She is one of the Chachmai Zagar.”

But the apotheosis of middle-class aspiration for her is John Galsworthy’s home. Here is her description of it: “There is a perfection of existence---a sweetness and politeness---that makes me uneasy. Everything is so good: the dogs so tenderly considered, the birds, the servants, the villagers, the traditions . . . “ Yes, if only Israel had this Elysian quality. But Israel was only one year old in 1949, while Galsworthy’s home and its tradition evolved over four hundred years of Imperial rule. But the underpinnings of the upper English middle class are a bit wobbly, what with the Welfare State and the Angry Young Men. Mrs. Millin did not evolve with this class---she came to it from outside with her literary qualifications, and she cannot hear the rumblings. There is no reason why Israel should look to this class for guidance and inspiration, when Britain herself is no longer doing so. The Israelis have a land to build---there is no room for a Chekovian nostalgia for the idylls of 1933 in the tempestuous pattern of their lives.

A few observations about my personal contacts with Mrs. Millin, made within a limited acquaintanceship. I well remember when I was on the way to her home in Parktown, turning over in my mind some things to say to her. But then I recalled, to compare the lesser with the greater, that Heine had done the same when he was visiting Goethe for the first time. When he found himself in the presence of the master, all he could speak about were the beautiful plum trees he had seen on the way to Weimar. But Mrs. Millin is a good talker and she made me feel comfortable. I was disappointed when she started by speaking about her servant troubles---was it the eagle coming down to the barnyard fowl, I thought? Servants have never been a problem to me. As a child, in our Malay Camp Mission, the servants---footmen and others, in livery or out of livery---all did my mother’s bidding. But we soon got on to more important things and I felt completely at home in her presence during the dozen times I saw her after that. I found her exceptionally charming and friendly and very human. It was late afternoon during the deepening summer. We were sitting in the garden. I was sipping gin and viewing the affluent Parktown panorama from the eminence of her magnificent home. A full moon was coming up, golden and regal, above the distant rise. I felt good. “Sarah, you should have brought the gin and the moon out earlier,” I said. She excused herself for a few moments, she had to go into the kitchen to check up---a relation was coming to dinner. “Can you make latkes?” I asked. “Of course, I can” came the spontaneous reply.

On one occasion I saw the photograph of a youth in her home with a beautiful Byronic profile. I asked her who he was. It was her eldest brother Stephen Abraham. She was ashen when she told me that he had been a Rhodes Scholar, the most brilliant member of the family, captain of Guy’s Hospital rugby team---“He never came anything but first in all the years of his studies.” He had joined up in the First World War, and was blown to bits in March, 1918. His letters to her from the Flanders trenches reveal a rich and rare personality: “I am doing now what I did last year and the year before . . . Those who arranged this little picnic will have a lot to answer for. The mediocrity of ‘great men’.” Well, there was a bigger picnic twenty years after---the next one may even be a grand carnival. Mrs. Millin is fanatically devoted to her family. The death of this brother was a disaster---“I have never had any religion; but until the first German War, I had believed in God.”

Then came the death of Philip. With the death of her brother, she lost her God: with the death of her husband, she lost her life. For the lights of her universe went out with his going. She speaks of her widowhood as a suttee---that Indian ceremonial when, in an act of self-immolation, the widow throws herself on the funeral pyre of her husband. She descended with Phil into the depths of oblivion. A splendid lawyer, humane, and with a love of life, he was the softening element in her life of which her insomnia had robbed her---“How safe I felt as his wife, under the protection of his calm judicial mind.” Such is the strength of this woman and her mental realism, that even Phil’s death, and all it meant to her, did not restore her faith in God and the eternal, so that not all should be ended. She once wrote: “I cannot even go as far as Heine and say that I commend my soul, if I have one, to God, id there is one.” The link was broken for ever---all else is self-delusion, which she eschews. She believes death to be what it really is---Heathcliff’s conjuring up of Cathay from the beyond was only Brontë’s romanticism. For a moment she moved in the direction of God, when prayers were being held in her home after the funeral of Philip and she was upstairs listening---“I was an unbeliever, but as a quiet murmuring rose I turned on my light and opened my Bible in order to join them. I could not accept the words of their prayer. I put away the book and turned out my light . . . “

What is at the core of Mrs. Millin’s being? It is a question to which I have given much thought. Her lack of sleep is important, for it is something physical that spills over into the soul. But it is not all-important. The forces that moulded her are more subtle and intricate, and go much further into the centuries. Mrs Millin herself gives us a clue with her words: “My mother says I am a River Girl. My reality is the Dark River.” Related to this remark is Katharine Mansfield’s review of her novel The Dark River, in which she says: “Running through the book there is, as it were, a low, troubled throbbing note which is never stilled.” I believe that this note is the sense of tragedy, the Stygian gloom, which is at the root of her personality. Her being is a conduit for one of Nature’s tragic etudes, and it pours over onto the pages of her novels which won her a world reputation. The other day I reread Mary Glenn. It shook me for a week with its sadness. This tragic sense is an atavism going back to an ancestral source. What? The Measure Of My Days is a Jobian lament.

The last time I visited Mrs. Millin, she played a Bach Fugue on her piano from memory. Although out of practice, she has a real feel for Bach. I thought Bach too consolatory for her condition. The last quarterts of Beethoven seemed more fitting for they speak of Beethoven’s utter isolation---posthumous music, in that they appear to issue from the tomb. “I have no one to say goodnight to me---Now I like to shut the world out.” She accompanied me to my car. The sun had set, and she was in a gloomy mood. “I wouldn’t care if I died tomorrow,” she said at one point. I watched her go into her house. Her home was now a memory, and a poignant possessive grief.

She did not shudder. I did.
From: Bernard Sachs, South African Personalities and Places, Kayor Publishers, Johannesburg, 1959.