WILLIAM PLOMER

A Wilder Fowl

by

Nadine Gordimer

More than forty years ago a boy of nineteen working in a country store in Zululand began to write a novel. He finished it when he was twenty-one and sent it to Leonard and Virginia Woolf, who published it in 1926. Turbott Wolfe was the work of an angry young man, but it was no tantrum; events have shown his voice to have been prophetic, echoing louder and louder from legislation to bloodshed, down the years. The boy of nineteen understood what the world, from Alabama to Johannesburg, has come realize only recently: that the impact of Western materialism on Africa was not a one-way process. In the words of one of his characters---‘Native question indeed . . . It isn’t a question. It’s an answer.’

Yet I hope that the occasion for the republication of Turbott Wolfe after so long is not going to be put down to the fact that black-white racial themes, and Africa, are news. The book has triumphantly resurfaced not only because political events have affirmed it, but also because in the writing of it the young William Plomer was exercising extraordinary gifts in what---as an older man and with reference to other writers---he has himself defined as the proper function of a writer: giving shape to forms of life hitherto unperceived or unrecorded. Plomer didn’t read the teacups or throw the bones; his was the prescience of a great talent.

As a rule (whatever Americans ‘authenticating’ D.Litt. theses may think), the umbilical cord between a man and his work is his own business. But Turbott Wolfe is one of those books that it doesn’t seem possible could have come from the environment in and about which they were written and to which one reasonably looks for a clue in the particular, personal situation of the author. Turbott Wolfe is an Englishman who is sent to Africa (like Rhodes?) to regain his health. He runs a store in a native reserve and turning away in distaste from the unreality (Reverend Fotheringhay and his wife, living in the ‘warm, sweet savour of English wall-flowers’), the coarseness (Bloodfield, the farmer, looking at the natives playing their music in Wolfe’s house saying, ‘Surely you don’t have these blooming niggers in here?’), and the spiritual impotence (the missionary, Nordalsgaard, who had gone out ‘with gifts and weapons . . . this old-world man, with a deliberate, elegant, mincing step to conquer Africa’) of white consciousness fossilized within its own skin outside Europe, finds himself faced with the impact of African consciousness on his isolation. He falls in love with Africa in the beautiful form of Nhliziyombi, a black girl, he tries to rationalize the terror and beauty of this unrequited love in friendship with black people, he tries to create a black-and-white consciousness beyond colour, for the future of Africa, in the Young Africa society. He fails in all these things and goes back to England to die. The story is told mainly in the form of excerpts from Turbott Wolfe’s diary and in a narrative supposedly recounted by Wolfe to Plomer. It is all telescoped after the event, like a swift and terrible dream in which the present in seen to exist only in the past and the future. In the course of it Turbott Wolfe spikes on a flaming sword every piece of cant by which the white man has lived and---despite his hospitals, schools and mines---failed, in Africa.

In 1926 almost nobody thought that he had failed. Certainly no white person in the circle that Plomer knew in Zululand, Johannesburg, or the Cape; nor, I imagine, in the family and school circle that he had known in England. Even the Africans in South Africahad not yet made the accusation, though already they had been dispossessed by the Act of Union in 1910 and the Land Act of 1913. William Plomer happened to be born in Africa and to spend the early years of his life alternating between the frontier society there and the serenely doomed one of middle-class Edwardian England, and in his memoir, At Home, he analyses the effect of this sort of life. ‘My irregular education had . . . sharpened my curiosity, powers of seeing, enjoying and discriminating and my dismay at the want of justice for the larger and more vulnerable part of mankind, unprotected by money or power.’ In the measured language of maturity, he gives some explanation for the explosive prescience of the nineteen-year-old, nurtured by two conservative societies 6,000 miles apart and sponsored by (of all things) the English 1820 Memorial Settlers’ Association.

Turbott Wolfe was being written when I was born, and I suppose my experience in relation to the book may be taken as the general one of South African intellectuals who have grown up since its publication. We were reared on Jock of the Bushveld while our parents were busy reading Francis Brett Young and Sarah Gertrude Millin---the latter’s novel, God’s Stepchildren, was as close as anyone came to considering the morality South Africa had built on colour and if the author had any doubts about its validity, they were well disguised, not the least by the title, which suggested that the whole business of people suffering because of their colour was out of human hands, anyway. Most of us were able to find copies of Turbott Wolfe (it is said that libraries locked it up; certainly it was out of print) only well on in our lives after we had done a lot of reading and some thinking and writing for ourselves. And here was a revelation: before we were born, Plomer has seen the hypocrisy of white supremacy, before Sharpeville and the political trials he had seen the tragic consequences attendant on the colour bar, long before any colonial possession became a black state, he had read in everyday relationships with Africans the answer the Afro-Asian block has given to the ‘native question’. The human truths in Africa that were struggling to give expression to had been revealed while we were in napkins---and the mass of the white population was exactly as self-righteous and indifferent to these truths today as then.

Turbott Wolfe has worn well as a novel precisely because it is a work of imagination and has more in common with Conrad’s Heart of Darkness than with any ‘penetrating study’ of ‘the situation’. There are crudities; a young man’s spleen makes Flesher and Schwerdt beastly beyond credibility and the inauguration and collapse of the Young Africa movement is too scamped---but the presentation of Wolfe himself is brilliant, heightened by the terse poetic force of a monologue striking zigzag across the plod of events and yet never missing the subtlest paradoxes of his predicament down there among them. And if Nhliziyombi belongs to the romantic order of noble savage rather than ordinary woman, this is part of the predicament. Unable to see the Africans as ridiculous and ugly, animal-like, as the other whites do, Turbott Wolfe has no choice but to see them as noble and beautiful, god-like. There is no plane of normality on which he can meet them simply as fellow-humans. The long shadow of this insight reaches over us still; since then, South Africans black and white may have conjoined in all sorts of activities, from plain enjoyment of each other’s company to risking their lives in political action, but all this has been, and is, clandestine to the curious norm of the colour bar ‘way of life’.

Nine years ago [1954] William Plomer came back to South Africa after thirty years. We met at last the writer of the only novel of poetic vision to come out of our country since Olive Schreiner’s The Story of an African Farm. A tall man, quietly and handsomely dressed, exquisitely courteous, receiving with a slight smile the gushing accusation: Mr. Plomer, why have you written so few novels, why haven’t you gone on writing about Africa?

But he had given the answer elsewhere, when he wrote ‘Literature has its battery hens; I was a wilder fowl’.

Source: The London Magazine, June 1965.