MEMOIR: CARLO GÉBLERreviews A Fork in the Road: A MemoirBy André Brink, Harvill Secker, 438pp. £17.99
ANDRÉ BRINK HAS devoted much of his adult life to writing about the dismal experience of black and white South Africans before and during apartheid. Now he’s written a memoir about his life before and during the time he wrote his books.
Brink’s parents were Afrikaner Nationalists and fervent supporters of Verwoerd and apartheid: they were also enthusiastic readers and passed a love of literature on to their son. Brink’s mother kept the home while his father worked as a magistrate: the job required a move every couple of years and Brink grew up in a series of dusty towns in the South African interior.
At seven, Brink encountered English for the first time at school: it excited him and (uncharacteristically for a native Afrikaans speaker) he became absolutely and completely bilingual. After matriculation, he studied literature at the University of Potchefstroom, then went to Paris (1959-1961) where he did post-graduate studies, and, thanks to the influence of South African exiles he met in that city, and against the background of Sharpeville, where, in March 1960, South African police killed 56 protestors, he began to question his Afrikaner beliefs.
Post-Paris and newly married, he took a job at the liberal and anglophone Grahamstown University (he stayed 30 years), fathered two children, and embarked on a tempestuous affair with Ingrid Jonker, the Afrikaans Sylvia Plath: this relationship, that lasted until her suicide in 1965 (though they were no longer lovers by this time), increased further the distance between Brink and Afrikaner thinking and, even more importantly, helped catalyse a revolution in the way he wrote. Two further forays to Paris, a short one in 1966 and a much longer one in 1968 (he witnessed the May riots), convinced Brink that rather than go into exile he must go home and write novels that told the ugly truth about apartheid.
Over the years that followed, despite endless troubles with the censors, harassment by the police and the secret services, violent disagreements with his father and sister Elsabe Steenberg (the hugely popular South African writer of novels for young readers), and the hatred of the Afrikaner majority, he persisted.
He wrote over 20 books, forged links with African National Congress members, and (which few who wrote in Afrikaans could boast) he acquired a large black readership, including Nelson Mandela. And he knows this because after his release Mandela had Brink to tea and told Brink his books sustained him in jail. Not many writers have had the pleasure of endorsement by an actual living saint.
The memoir writer setting out to write about a life as vivid as this one faces two problems: the first is what to do about those people that don’t want to be in his memoir. Brink’s father and sister were dead when Brink composed this so he was free to write about his estrangement from them; but what of his first and second wives, the mothers of his four children?
Brink’s solution is absolute omerta; he tells us their names (Estelle and Alta) but little else, (though he’s rather more forthcoming about his third, the current Mrs Brink; she gets the final chapter).
Some will see Brink’s discretion as self-serving because it enables him to dodge his marital infidelities, but I don’t. His private life is not ours and I’d also have to say that whilst he may be silent about others he is the opposite on the subject of André Brink.
Brink’s other, second problem was chronology; when he looked back he didn’t see a tidy timely sequence: he saw events that, though far apart in time, were jammed together in his mind because that way they made his story. The dilemma that faced Brink was this: did he make his narrative chronological and reader-friendly or, did he allow the material its associative autonomy?
Wisely, Brink decided on the latter and in the book he organises his material thematically. This makes the book a tough read; there are huge leaps in time and, moreover, as a reader you have to hold a lot in your head in order to make sense of everything: on the plus side, though, what you get because he’s replicated his very thinking processes is Brink without spin, Brink as he is, Brink the rugby-mad, highly sexed, greedy, venal, gullible, thin-skinned, tenderhearted, fully paid-up member of the awkward squad who believes his duty is to stand against tyranny regardless of the tyrant’s colour. Few memoirs communicate such a strong sense of the writer’s character as this one does.
For most of his working life Brink worked to destroy minority rule and, following South Africa’s elections in 1994, he had the lovely pleasure of seeing his work come to fruition and being proved right: he’d always said black majority rule must come; now it had.
Alas, as Brink describes in the depressing penultimate chapter, over the last few years, because of the policies and practices of the ANC, South Africa has become corrupt, violent, xenophobic, sclerotic and racist. And it’s not, as the ANC spins it, a matter of a few rotten apples: no, says Brink, “the entire regime . . . has lost its way” and the ANC like Verwoerd’s National Party before it, “must [now] be branded an enemy of the people”.
To make a statement this strong will lose him friends and make him enemies too. Brink, however, has no qualms; he’s always told truth to power (just as the writer he admires more than any other, Albert Camus, always did) and he sees no reason to stop now. Brink’s a brave man, oh yes, and this is an extraordinary book because it combines, uniquely, angry forensic polemic with writing of the highest order.
- Carlo Gébler is a writer; he is also the current royal literary fund fellow at Queen's University, Belfast