Holding a Mirror

Early in 1925 there arrived at the Hogarth Press in London’s Tavistock Square a parcel, sent from Zululand, containing the manuscript of Turbott Wolfe, the first novel of an unknown writer named William Plomer. Leonard Woolf wrote back promptly, saying it looked ‘very interesting’ and that once Virginia, who was ill, had read it, he would write again. Plomer, living at a trading store in Entumeni, outside the forested hilltop town of Eshowe (named onomatopoeically in Zulu after the sound of wind in trees), was overjoyed. Two months later, Leonard wrote again, making an offer of publication, and weeks afterwards followed up with the news that Harcourt Brace & Co. in New York wanted to publish it too.

Decades later, while a young sub-editor on The Natal Witness, a liberal newspaper in Pietermaritzburg, then something of an English county town transplanted to Africa, I found among the Len Deightons and Wilbur Smiths in a local bookshop a handsome hardback copy of Turbott Wolfe, reprinted by the Johannesburg literary publisher Ad Donker and including essays by Roy Campbell, Laurens van der Post and Nadine Gordimer. Being bookish, I wondered why I hadn’t heard of the novel, particularly as I had spent my childhood and youth on a sugar-cane farm not far from Entumeni, only to discover that it had long been out of print. What I then began to read, as Leonard and Virginia Woolf had done half a century earlier, had been written hurriedly by lamplight, in hard pencil on thin paper, by a young man barely out of his teens, in his family’s wood-and-iron house beside their trading store. Entumeni becomes the fictional Ovuzane, and Zululand Lembuland, where noble Zulus, like the Msomi cousins and the enigmatic maiden Nhliziyombi, are oppressed by settlers with Dickensian names such as Bloodfield and Flesher. Telling the story in the manner of Conrad’s Marlow is the eponymous Turbott Wolfe, an artist and former trader, perhaps a genius, who while dying of a fever contracted in Africa lets his mind trawl back over his years in Zululand. Readers in Britain immediately detected a remarkable new voice, among them Desmond MacCarthy, the literary editor of the New Statesman, who became completely engrossed reading it on a train – he later said he hadn’t looked out of the window for three hours. American reviewers were similarly admiring, although the New York World cautioned, ‘Look elsewhere for your bedtime story.’ Many white South Africans, however, were incensed, dismissing Plomer’s paean to black dignity and beauty as nasty and pornographic, and the book was kept under lock and key in the Durban Public Library, where it shared a shelf with Rabelais, Boccaccio, The Origin of Species and various volumes on classical sculpture. Had Plomer let slip that not only was he racially colour-blind but homosexual too, the baying would have been deafening. Local newspapers and journals hastened to vilify the book, although three reviewers recognized its singular quality. One of the three, gratifyingly to me, was Desmond Young, then editor of The Natal Witness which decades later I would join, a Flanders veteran and later an acclaimed biographer of Rommel. Another of Turbott Wolfe’s champions was the poet Roy Campbell, the bohemian son of a Durban doctor and member of a prominent sugar-farming family, who had returned home to Natal from London after the triumphant reception of his long poem The Flaming Terrapin, and who was shortly to collaborate with Plomer and Laurens van der Post on a short-lived literary magazine, Voorslag (‘whiplash’ in Afrikaans). So energized was Campbell by Plomer’s assault on the smug settler establishment that he celebrated the young novelist in his satire The Wayzgoose:

Plomer, ’twas you who, though a boy in age, Awoke a sleepy continent to rage, Who dared alone to thrash a craven race And hold a mirror to its dirty face.

Born in 1903 in Pietersburg, a town in the northern Transvaal, Plomer was technically a South African, but he preferred to see himself as a ‘native’ of the country rather than as a full-blown citizen. Whenever challenged, he would riposte: ‘I once had a cat that had kittens in an oven, but nobody mistook them for cakes.’ His hyphenated Anglo-South African identity was muddied further when his schooldays at St John’s College in Johannesburg were interrupted by a year-long stint in England at Rugby. Thereafter his father, who unlike his mother was enamoured of Africa, sent him to a farm with the Brontë-esque name of Marsh Moor, on the dusty highlands of the north-eastern Cape, to learn about sheep farming from the Pope family. It was during his year with the Popes that the artistic apprentice, who was clearly unsuited to farming, met several individuals whom he later, while trading with his parents in Entumeni, turned into fictional characters. Among these was an itinerant Scottish black-smith, William Dunbar Macdowall, big-boned and big-hearted and refreshingly free of racial prejudice, who in became the exemplary Frank d’Elvadere. Others included the Horsehams, an elderly English-born Anglican priest and his wife in the town of Molteno, who even in the African heat always had a fire burning in the grate, and who in conversation contradicted each other comically; they, together with their quirks, became the Fotheringhays. Marsh Moor’s owner, Fred Pope, a conservative Anglophile with whom Plomer had a complicated though mutually respectful relationship appears as Soper, a farmer heartily disliked in the Ovuzane district because he is more industrious and successful than his neighbours. Combine all these characters in a colonial setting and you have the plot of Turbott Wolfe, which is essentially a shadow play of Plomer’s experiences in rural Zululand. Towards the end of the story, various Africans and settlers, seeking a more equitable society, form an association named Young Africa, but it comes to nothing. If all this sounds thin, and if Turbott Wolfe does have its immaturities, Plomer’s clean, clear prose has an exhilarating energy. From the very start, like MacCarthy I was spellbound by the masterful writing, even if the master was barely 20 years old. Years later, while puzzling over the impact of Turbott Wolfe, Laurens van der Post recalled from his youth that when captured baboons were handed mirrors, each became convinced that the image confronting it was another baboon rather than a reflection of itself. Agitatedly peering behind the mirror, each sought the threatening ‘other’ and, on repeatedly finding nothing, grew vengeful and smashed its mirror into pieces. Such behaviour, van der Post realized, explained Turbott Wolfe’s stormy reception in South Africa. Indeed, why else in the story would white farmers who themselves had black concubines be so righteously incensed when Mabel van der Horst, a strapping settler Amazon in the mould of Joan Hunter Dunn, deter-minedly marries the man she loves, the Zulu intellectual Zachary Msomi? Worn down by life, Turbott Wolfe announces that he is going to sell his trading store and leave Zululand. When his assistant Caleb asks him what he plans to do next, he replies: ‘I have just enough money to go and live quietly in England. I shall live in London. I shall dress neatly and inconspicuously, but with distinction.’ And that of course is what Plomer himself would eventually do. First, though, he moved to Sezela, on the coast south of Durban, where he collaborated with Campbell and van der Post on Voorslag. Then he caught a ship to Japan where on Campbell’s recommend Mirroration Edmund Blunden, then visiting Professor of English at Tokyo’s Imperial University, found him a job as an English tutor. Plomer settled eventually in London, as he had predicted, becoming a reader at Jonathan Cape and a linchpin of the literary establishment, and counting among his friends the Woolfs, Elizabeth Bowen, E. M. Forster and W. H. Auden. Determined never to write for money or to follow fashion, over the years Plomer quietly accumulated a distinguished corpus of novels, poems, short stories, librettos, biographies and volumes of autobiography, each characteristically elegantly crafted. He also edited the diaries of Francis Kilvert, bringing a forgotten Victorian clergyman vividly back to life. Among the submissions crossing his desk at Jonathan Cape, Plomer also ‘discovered’ the poet Derek Walcott, later a Nobel laureate, and ushered into print the then unknown writers Arthur Koestler, Alan Paton, Stevie Smith and John Fowles. And when the manuscript of Under the Volcano, sent by Malcolm Lowry, then living in a squatter shack in Dollarton, British Columbia, reached Cape’s London offices, it was Plomer’s meticulous response that prompted Lowry’s lengthy validation, itself a literary curiosity. But Plomer’s most notable act of literary midwifery, in the public’s eyes at least, was bringing James Bond into the world. Years earlier, having read Turbott Wolfe while a schoolboy at Eton, Ian Fleming had sent Plomer a fan letter, and during the Second World War they worked together in Naval Intelligence. Unsure of his writing ability, Fleming distrusted intellectuals but felt immediately at ease with the courteous and considerate Plomer. So when, in 1951 at ‘Goldeneye’, his holiday home in Jamaica, Fleming wrote a thriller, it was to his friend that he tentatively presented it. Plomer knew at once that it was a sure-fire money-spinner but had difficulty convincing his colleagues. Disliking thrillers, Jonathan Cape himself had to be persuaded to read it, but eventually Casino Royale was born. Jonathan Cape the company became the Bond books’ publisher, even if its co-founder and namesake never read another one of them. In thanks, Fleming dedicated Goldfinger ‘To my gentle Reader William Plomer’.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 58 © John Conyngham 2018