LIONEL ABRAHAMS

Lionel Abrahams: A Study in Fortitude

by

Bernard Sachs

Let’s get it straight---Lionel is a spastic. It takes him about ten times more energy and deliberation to use his physical faculties than you and me. And there is no psychological element that is the extra burden for those who are physically impeded. This is, of course, “imponderable”---according to the dictionary, “cannot be weighed”---which means that it weighs a hell of a lot. Lionel was much worse at one time. Up to the age of eleven, he could only walk on his knees. “I wore out the uppers of my boots first,” was his wry comment. But he has since then made good progress. To borrow from Herman Melville---at birth Lionel experienced that thing in the catalogue of human sorrow known as ruin. I have no qualms in writing about Lionel’s physical handicaps, as one might well have, for he is in a way unique. More than any person I know or read about, he has completely transcended his overwhelming impediments. So much so, that I no longer observe them when he is in my presence. The crucifixion of the flesh has in this instance resulted in a transfiguration.

How did the great ones down the ages react as they found themselves confronted in the lists with a rigorous Fate? “Oh, earth, thou beholdest my wrong,” cried out Prometheus defiantly, when the wrathful Jove chained him to a crag and the vultures began picking his liver. And before Job reached out to reconcilement, he too, pointed his finger defiantly at the heavens where Jehovah reigns supreme, and declaimed: “Withdraw they hand from me: and let not thy dread make me afraid. Then call thou, and I will answer: or let me speak, and answer thou me. How many transgressions and my sins. Wherefore hidest thou thy face, and holdest me for thine enemy? . . . Let me take his sword away from me. Then would I speak, and not fear him; but it is not so with me.”

In one way or another, we are all of us, great and small, in the lists of Fate. How did Lionel react to misfortune bordering on disaster? There is no note of defiance in his manner. Neither has he surrendered to self-pity. He has chosen the median line between the two, and he has maintained his poise with admirable constancy during these ten years of his thirty that I have been privileged to know him. “You have thought fit to deprive me of my physical faculties,” Lionel at one point of his life must have said to Fate. “Well and good, I shall leave all that behind once and for all. For where the physical ends, the spirit begins. From now on the spirit will be my métier and my domain.” And in the domain of the spirit, limbs are not as important as wings, which Lionel is able to use with consummate skill to lift him to the heights.

Talking of his early years, Lionel told me that he received his schooling until the age of 16 at the Hope Convalescent and the Hope Training Home. “ I was never much good at sport,” he added with a smile. This is, of course, straight Heine, who, when visited by Theopile Gautier while he lay in Paris on his “mattress grave”, said in the course of the talk---“I have been confined to my sick bed these few eight years.” An ironic twist of the lip---yes. But no defiance. Lionel fought and won a glorious victory, and he has no looked back since---here is a segment out of the Eroica Symphony.

As the Hope Training Home takes you only to Standard Eight, Lionel completed his matric at Damelin College. After that, he went to the Witwatersrand University, where he had a most distinguished academic career. He obtained five first-class passes in his course of ten subjects. In English he had a clear record of distinctions right through. For his lecture notes he had to rely largely on his memory, as it is only with a very great effort that he can accomplish a child-like scrawl. The typewriter, with its simple mechanical operations, has been a tremendous aid to him. True, he has to aim his keys---and sometimes misses. But how his mind infallibly aims. Lionel is a considerable literary critic by any standard. His 10,000-word essay on the poet Roy Campbell, which appeared in the University magazine Theoria, is a splendid achievement in every way, and must rank high in contemporary literary criticism. He is also a short story writer of promise. In the Witwatersrand University Arts Festival Competition, he won the Short Story Award three times running. Seventeen of his short stories have appeared in print, and a selection of his work in this medium is at the moment being considered by an overseas publisher. Amongst his other activities, he edits a literary magazine The Purple Renoster, which affords an outlet for a growing body of young South African talent.   South Africa is already much indebted to this worthy tiller of virgin soil. Lionel is well qualified to be a literary critic, for he is widely read, a skilled writer himself with a perceptive mind and, perhaps most important of all, ruthlessly honest. Without fail, I submit my literary work, such as it is, to his keen, analytical mind. There is no end to the trouble he will take to be helpful.

Lionel owes a great deal, more than he can put into words, to that brilliant writer, the late Herman Bosman, whom Roy Campbell in a broadcast talk from the Durban studio some years ago described as the only literary genius South Africa has produced. “Before I met Bosman,” says Lionel, “I was artistically and aesthetically in the midst of unrelieved obscurity.”

Yes, Bosman provided him, in quite abundant measure, with the divine Promethean light. He brought to this tutorial work all the devotion and compassion that resided in his troubled soul, for he immediately recognized that here is a fine aesthetic potential that has to be cultivated. Lionel acknowledged the debt by collating, editing and having published aDassie edition of Bosman’s essays, under the title of A Cask of Jerepigo, which he prefaced with a brilliant study ofb the author. He is at the moment sifting out a considerable body of Bosman’s unpublished manuscripts, so as to present to the public more of the rich creative harvest of this many-faceted writer. And for good measure, Lionel is full of humour, gaiet and charm as any set of Johannesburgers in hot pursuit of joie vivre.

Well, something like a saint that emerged from this effort of mine at portraiture. I stand by it. A few of my critics have told me that I am inclined to romanticize the personalities which have appeared here. I should say, on reflection, that my personal error is about an amplitude of 30%---15%, enhancement of virtues and 15% dilution of shortcomings. But there has been no such adjustment in the case of Lionel. For saintliness is essentially an absolute, which has nothing to do with percentages---you cannot tamper with it, like a grocer with his scale. Ask anyone who has been in Lionel’s presence, if you don’t believe me. Look at his portrait adorning this essay---the divine in him comes right through the poor inking.

There is a story about Sigmund Freud that bears on what I have written. Somebody was telling him of the fate that had befallen one of his old friends, a Swedish professor. The professor was in the middle of writing a book when he had a stroke which left him completely paralysed---limbs, speech and all---able only to move his eyes. However, he went on with his work, dictating the book to a secretary by a device. He spelt out each word by directing his eyes from one letter to another of an alphabet painted on the wall opposite his bed. “Don’t you think it was a supreme example of courage?” the man who told the story asked Freud. “Of course I don’t,” said the psychologist, “what else could he have done?” These words were not lightly spoken. For Freud himself went on probing the human soul, even when for years an excruciating mouth cancer was tearing at him, rendering him largely invalid, till it tore him away from the world.

Oh mankind, at once so degraded and divine!

Literary critics have said that characters drawn too pure and too flawless, like Prince Myshkin from The Idiot, are so ghostly luminous that they are not fully alive. I have been assiduously looking for flaws in Lionel, but I just have to give up. Oh, yes, I have discovered one flaw---a very grievous one. So grievous, that I don’t really like having him around---in his presence one feels so small. It only remains to be said that, without the devotion and understanding of his parents Lionel’s struggle to win through would have been even more arduous.