Bernard Sachs

by

Harold M. Blumberg

The critic, like the joiner, the plumber and the doctor, is a person who goes about the world with a bag of tools, according to one of the contributors to that brilliant collection of profiles, The Great Victorians. The bag carried around by Bernard Sachs is full of surprises, as you will discover in this book. He is a craftsman who has chosen the tools of his trade with love and care, and uses them only on jobs he enjoys doing. He began to pick them up, it seems to me, in the Little Lithuanian village of Kamaai, where he was born. He has been adding to them ever since, in places as remote as London and Lichtenburg, and the End Street Park and Stock Exchange in Johannesburg. He has been perfecting them with an autobiography, a novel, a play (at the moment overseas) and a series od excellent literary essays in the past decade which happens to coincide, incidentally, with the number of years I have known him. Some of these tools have been forged in the crucible of life itself, and the several chapters of Multitude of Dreams, written in 1949, reveal how the flames have singed him, as he plunged hand and heart into the fires of our time.

When he arrived in Johannesburg, after a highly impressionable childhood in the Jewish world, hemmed in by the Bohr Forest and the Old Testament, he implored his mother to take him back to Kamaai, and it was only years later that he, too, learnt that you simply can’t go home again. It was a hard lesson, and in some ways Bernard Sachs did not take kindly to it. Even now, ostensibly part and parcel of the Rand’s rough and tumble, it takes very little to transport him back to the cornfield, market place, church spire and synagogue of his home town.

Ferreirastown became his playground, with Commissioner Street what Charing Cross was to Dickens. In fact, if Mr. Pickwick had strolled into the Gaiety Café, the boy Benny would have derived great pleasure from presenting to him the Alter Afrikaners of that Nimrod Club---Long Harry, Snake-Eye, Boots, Cucumber, Yisrolke der Tsinder and all the others, who had over the years indolently raised their heads from their dominoes as gold ruches and rebellions surged past their grimy window.

Ferreirastown was the one important influence in the life of Bernard Sachs; Jeppe High School was another. It gave him a good formal education and brought him together with Herman Bosman. To this day, Bernard regards Bosman as the genius of South African letters, and even after the untimely death of the author of Cold Stone Jug and Mafeking Road, he has been paying homage to his friend, to the very seamark of the utmost sail of his tragic journey.

What a strange and fruitful friendship these two teenage radicals of Jeppe High struck up on a day, when both cheered in the history class because the invading English army had been thrown back in the battle of Fleurus by the French revolutionaries. Sachs and Bosman, the one spiritually rooted in the Testament, and the other in the aftermath of “a century of wrong,” were a perfect foil for each other. They tired the sun with talking about heroes and heresies. Through all the dramatic vicissitudes of Bosman’s life story, Bernard has been a sort of Boswell to his Johnson. He has scores of anecdotes about this febrile, richly gifted, grossly underestimated writer. No mean raconteur, you don’t notice, listening to Benny, that the evening has glided into the early hours of the morning. There is one I cannot resist telling.

It was the time when Bosman, a highly erratic spirit, was recklessly wasting his talents on journalism of vicious kind, on a paper aptly called The Sjambok. When the police pounced on The Sjambok, he looked around for other avenues. This was in the days when Nazi clouds were looming over the country and the world. He went along to Willie Bloomberg, well known public factor, and laid a scheme before him.

“Willie,” he said, “if you will let me have £50, I’ll start an anti-Nazi paper.”

“And if I don’t let you have the £50?” asked Willie.

“Then I’ll start a pro-Nazi paper,” countered Bosman.

Now how is that for bargaining?

Nothing to laugh about, perhaps, but Benny Sachs, half way between laughter and tears, always has an eye for the funny side of things and people. It has very nearly got him into trouble, and as far as these profiles are concerned, I take no responsibility! Sacred cows are sitting ducks for his kind of humour, which, by the way, is seldom cruel or malicious. Had he been able to draw a tree without having to label it, he would have made a top-notch cartoonist, with a knack for caricature. As it is, a sense of timing and situation gives a piquancy to his jokes---which means that they inevitably loser something in the retelling. It is an odd thing that although we have more fun together in the course of a day than Bob Hope has when Bing Crosby is not around, I find it difficult to record a sample of his quips. A recent one does come to mind.

We were talking about Mahler’s first symphony. More about how knowledgeable Bernard is musically later. He said he found the name Titan, which Mahler gave to this symphony, far too grandiloquent, since much of it is not more than elegant Viennese pleasantries---“A little Titan, perhaps,” was Bernard’s assessment of it. 

There comes to mind another, from this “Eckerman’s” conversations with Sarah Getrude Millin, who will, I am sure, not mind my reproducing it.

Mrs. Millin was telling Bernard of a maid-servant of hers who had strayed morally and was bestowing her favours  on the tribesmen of the neighborhood. “I didn’t know these amenities were being purveyed on my premises,” she said.

“Amenities being purveyed!” said the astounded Bernard. “Why this is nineteenth century George Eliot prose---what you’ve got on your premises is a kaffir whore.”

Don’t conclude from his use of the word “kaffir” that Bernard suffers from any Colour prejudice. Nothing is further from him, and his relations with the African staff are absolutely human, as the following incident will illustrate.

Rummaging around some shelves in his office one day, he covered his hands in dust. “Look at my hands,” he said to Africa, one-time Nubian Jeeves of the S. A. Jewish Times. “Look how black they are!” “Not as black as mine,” said Africa, wryly.

He recognizes irony, whether its expression is subtle and sophisticated, or plain and down to earth.
 
In the Arts, he finds that the moderns make very little impact on him---whatever they do to people who know more about them. He has little time for experimental writing on the James Joyce level, and I’ve never heard him quote modern verse. Highly cultivated musically, his taste is conventional---Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms, Wagner, Sibelius. Mozart operas, the quintessence of rococo refinement, are among his favourite records. He finds the fastidious heroes and heroines out od Cosi Fan Tutti thoroughly absorbing, and if it were possible would have encouraged Mozart to bully still more buffoonery out of them.

For all his intellectual radicalism, Bernard Sachs is no anarchist. Look into his office at any time, no matter how much pressure he is working under, and you will find no stray papers lying on his desk, no random notes in his pockets, no mislaid manuscripts in his drawer. Mentally and physically, he is a tidy person, and you will never have to go looking for him in the waste paper basket. His wife is quartermaster and paymaster in all their undertakings, because he can’t be bothered with figures. I can vouch for it as being absolutely correct, that he has never been inside the bank where he has his account, or even set eyes on the manager. He knows that it is somewhere in Hillbrow---“If I went up to the teller and asked for a pound, he would ring up the police.” He has written out a cheque---and would not know how to do it without assistance. And there is one other thing Bernard has never done. A student of politics at its most intricate, he has never in all his life been inside a polling both. Even his mother voted once---for Hessel Kroomer in the 1921 Municipal elections. And she had to be assisted, because she could not read or write.

So much for Sachs at work. At play, he is a demon. He simply loves a party. Quicker than he can say Raskolnikov, ot you can pour a double brandy, you’ll see him throwing Captain Ahab straight into the jaws of Moby Dick, and go rockin’ and rollin’ with the Witchdoctor until you call the cops in, or the brandy gives out. God help you if you take refuge in a corner. He comes at you like one of Disney’s dainty ballerinas from Fantasia, and you find yourself propelled by a spirit that moves from within, and a yank on the arm that moves from without, to participate in the revelry, which will keep you up till daybreak, and him in bed till midday next day. He once told me that he would not exchange the whole Houghton Estate for one of these parties in his flat in Hillbrow. Strangely, enough, between parties Bernard is strictly teetotal---“Drink helps me to establish a sort of ‘withness’ with people”---says Ben, who is naturally inhibited.   

The subject of Bernard and his relationship to E. S. (Solly), his brother, could form the basis of a full-length novel---with the counterpoint of the romantic and the realist as the dominant theme. At a party one night, Bernard was jocularly resentful of the way he was being introduced as Solly’s brother.

“How do they know me in Capetown?” he said, turning to Alf, a Capetonian who was visiting Johannesburg.

Alf, who is not lacking in a sense of humour, replied: “In Capetown they know you as Solly Sach’s ex-wife’s brother-in law.”

Solly and Benny have often clashed. Both very resourceful, it has been a case of Greek meeting Greek.

“How do you measure up to Solly in combat?” I once asked Bernard.

“In a short skirmish, I can give him cards and spades,” he replied. “But in a war of attrition, I wouldn’t have a hope. But then who would?”

That brings me to another facet of Bernard’s temperament. In the years I have been with him on the same paper, I have seen others show tell-tale signs, one way or another, that they are getting older. But in no way has Time Left its mark on the scanty forelocks Sachs possessed when I came here. Perhaps humour, tinctured with a philosophic cynicism, is his elixir. Like the tree which bows before the storm, he seems to be weathering better than most of us. Alive at every aspect of change in his surroundings---and some have been nuclear in recent times---he seems to be able to withdraw from the stage and watch from the wings. He has forsaken politics for good. There are times when I envy him. On the other hand, I am not sure whether this detachment is as satisfying as he claims it to be.  Even id he were wholly dedicated to the art of writing, I believe he would find the tools of his craft getting a bit rusty in an ivory tower, away from it all. Read such pieces as “End Street Park,” “Capetown” and the “1922 Strike” and you will see what I mean. It may ven be that Bernard Sachs turns out to be a significant chronicler of our time.

 

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