Grahamstown

Sunday, 21 April 1963

Delightful little creature,

I needed some neutral “in transit” days between the Cape and being back again, just to make the transition more gradual. After the week – and especially those three days – of change, I feel very averse to enduring, all over again, that old threat of a settled, “safe”, bourgeois life. Respectability. Predetermined reactions to predetermined stimuli. There are people for whom such an existence will never be a threat because they’re too free within themselves ever to get caught up in it; but I must constantly resist this opiate precisely because it would be so easy just to let it take me. During the week in the Cape you at least provided something of an antidote. Should I politely say “thank you”? That would make it too banal. Especially “our” night. [T.S.] Eliot’s line – “poetry can communicate before it is understood” – also applies, in a certain sense, to people who come together, freely, through sex. It is precisely an act of communion that, thank God, remains beyond words. I mean, what would I include in my little inventory – especially in the clear light of day?: a scent; memories of your hands, hair and breasts; your voice; tears; cynicism; game-playing; red wine; two double brandies; eyes: mocking, saying no, cursing, showing contempt, playing with me, saying yes, sweet and happy, or the-hell-in and huffy …! All of this gets one nowhere. Luckily, however, these things are just starting points. Memories and bodies are mere titles of long poems; and our “sleeping together” is a sort of holy Mass, in which transubstantiation is complete. (Is this perhaps the most pure religion for us non-believers? Otherwise, why exactly would a person say “Lord God in heaven”? – Giuseppe di Lampedusa’s loveliest girl character does in fact say “Gesùmaria!”)

Is a body itself capable of remembering? I think its recollection is better than unreliable “memory”. My body remembers yours. And it’s not because of those few strategic little pains or the mark on my shoulder. Also not – I hope! – because I have now become “part of your sorrow”; it’s more positive. The body’s memory, as opposed to the brain’s, is like imagery in the midst of matter-of-fact words.

Okay, go ahead and say: “What nonsense!” Or worse. I’m not busy with a Simone de Beauvoir dissertation here. I’m actually just busy saying in a roundabout way what I’ve already said: thank you.

Until such time as I get to see you again, I shall have to make do with your manuscript. (And please let me know when you think it’s time for it to be returned!) Luckily there is the unexpected prospect that my seeing you again might occur sooner than expected. Some or other study group in Stellenbosch has asked me to deliver three lectures there later this semester. Then I’ll be able to come and visit you on their account! This kind of lecturing gives me the shits. William Styron (have you read his Lie Down in Darkness?) said something like: “One thing I can’t stand is that a young writer, after having written one book, starts lecturing and giving pompous interviews on all sorts of subjects about which he knows nothing.” Long live Styron! But sometimes a collar is more precious than the dog that wears it.

Christ Almighty, and this morning a ceremonious telegram arrives here announcing that it pleases the South African Academy of “Art” and Science to award me with a “Eugène Marais Encouragement Prize for Drama”. Now that my hilarity at hearing this news has died down, I find myself in quite a pickle: first of all, I don’t have a clue (and neither, apparently, does anyone else) what kind of an animal this prize is; I don’t even know on what grounds it’s being awarded, or what it’s worth. And now? Must I reply: deposit the prize up your anus? Or should I accept it tongue-in-cheek because I could use a few extra rands and don’t in any case have too many illusions about my abilities as a dramatist? Or would that be “dishonest”? You see, I have long hoped that the Kakkademy would award me a Hertzog Prize one day so I can refuse it on the grounds that they’re incapable of making any decisions about literary merit. (Or would that be ridiculous?)

Meanwhile, my biggest task – and headache – right now is typing up Die Ambassadeur / Die Ongedurige Kind [The Ambassador / The Restless Child]. I want to finish it now – if there hadn’t been so many changes to add in the retyping process, I would have hired you as a professional typist. Now I’m sucking it all up myself – and there’s no use moaning about mistakes. I want you to meet Gillian and Nicolette. (Fortunately I know you won’t mince your words!) At least a fragment will be appearing in the second 60. But when will that be? Bartho [Smit] in fact sounded quite half-hearted about the journal’s financial prospects in his most recent letter. He’s arriving here in the next few days; I’ll be able to learn more at first hand then.

I saw Rob [Antonissen] this morning, and without my asking, he referred to your poems in 60 (which he seems only now to have read). He says he’s “very taken” with them. You’ve told me you don’t care much what critics say, but maybe this will warm your heart a little. You’ve been through enough wintery things as it is. I know we relate as free individuals, hold each other to nothing, and don’t commit each other to any bonds, but I do wish I could be with you; and help a bit. Not only to find a place to live and share every day’s finicky little tasks with you, but maybe also to save you from the thought that “the cure for loneliness is solitude”.

Please – for God’s sake, Ingrid – don’t do what you wanted to do in Jan [Rabie]’s house. No reasonable grounds exist for my being able – or willing – to persuade you otherwise. Maybe my insistence is based on purely selfish considerations. But don’t. You must still make things like “Begin Somer” [“Early Summer”], “Dood van ’n Maagd” [“On the Death of a Virgin”], “Bitterbessie Dagbreek” [“Bitter-Berry Daybreak”], “L’Art Poétique”, the series of “intimate conversations”; and we must once again make, together, what Afrikaans itself can’t: love.

The sun’s calling me outside (it’s already fully winter here); I want to go sit in the garden and read [Paul] Éluard, and Jonker.

Write, Ingrid. And allow me to do anything I possibly can to help. In whatever way.

Send my regards to Chris [Lombard], and thank him again. And write – for us – a poem about: “The memory of evening is like an apple”; find a way to relate it to Adam and Eve’s apple; when you’re done, eat the apple; and then ask: what now? You will know how. I’m not a poet.

With love,

André.

Monday, 29 April 1963

LETTER FLOWERS RECEIVED STOP THANK YOU FOR EVERYTHING AND FOR YOU ANSWER FOLLOWS LOVE = INGRID

Dept. of Afrikaans

Rhodes

Grahamstown

Tuesday, 30 April 1963

Ingrid, my dearest little child,

I know I probably “ought” not write yet again, but why would I pay any attention to “shoulds” and “should nots” when I’m talking to you? I was thinking about the fact that you’re moving out of your flat today, and that you probably have no refuge after Jan, so I’m sitting here feeling frustrated that mere physical distance makes it impossible to help. God, and it also won’t help for me to tell you that I’m thinking about you. What else have I done this week? I’ve been forcing myself to work, but in the quieter moments in between I’m busy with you; at night I remember you, and I lie awake feeling happy about you.

And – “oh, what nonsense!” you will say – but you have opened up something unsuspected in me and got me writing poetry! This is not a “high and compelling duty” – but perhaps a kind of emergency valve attesting to our few but precious little things, allowing them to endure. And I’m reckless enough to send you a few of these attempts – in the hope that you’ll also be reckless enough to tell me honestly if you think they’re rubbish. You would find it boring if I were to write above each of them, “For Ingrid”; but that’s how they were meant (“fire of my loins”!).

I’m busy typing up the book [Die Ambassadeur] – 200 pages done. The few days with you meant a lot for this work; much of it now suddenly seems prophetic! You must decide for yourself when, in ten days’ time, you are saddled with it.

But this isn’t a letter. I await yours first before I write another. This is just a note for the accompanying verses; a tiny effort to convince you that I want, especially in this current period, to be with you and nowhere else.

Until later, with love,

André.

Oh, what I wanted to say right from the start: thank you for your telegram, which arrived at a very depressing moment, and changed much for me.

1. As Ek Sê [When I Say]
2. Jong Digteres [Young Poet]
3. Ek Kan Sê [I Can Say]
4. Deur die Spieëlglas [Through the Looking Glass]
5. Slegs [?] [Only] [?]
6. Meisie [Girl]

Citadel Press

145 Bree Street

Cape Town

Wednesday, 1 May 1963

My dear André,

I started writing to you on Sunday, but after five interruptions I gave up and went for a walk up the mountain, then an ice-cold swim at Clifton, a warm bed and a drink, and in the meantime I’ve sent you a telegram. I want to thank you again for your lovely letter – so open and honest and innocent! I’m already looking forward to the next one! But first I have to scold you. Why did you accept the Eugène Marais Prize? André, André! That easily you must not compromise, and I’m not going to congratulate you on it. Are you also glad about the fuss over the “stance” of the writers? A whole lot of new names have been added, including Ina Rousseau. F.L. Alexander said that no artist with any self-respect would allow himself to be associated with the [Publications Control] Board. Did you see all of that? Also, the editorial in The Friend?

I’m glad you’ll soon be coming to Cape Town again – you must see my beautiful flat (with garden) in Green Point; such a cosy and intimate little home. At the moment I’m staying (till 15 May) in Jan and Marjorie’s [Jan Rabie and Marjorie Wallace] house. The two of them left for a holiday in Hangklip today. Everything still good, or same as usual. My friends still make me bitterly angry, and then I miss your calm protection. Chris is the same. Of course, he sends you his regards – last night we had a meal together at 191; he took me home at about eleven o’clock and I still had to pack … But tell me, when are the lectures?

Right now I’m writing from godforsaken Citadel Press, which dulls my imagination … I’ll write more from home tonight. I remember some of your questions: whether a body can remember? There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in our philosophy …

No, André, I would really like to see you one more time before, screaming and cursing like [J.] Slauerhoff, I leave this life.

I’m sorry that on the weekend you were there stuff like that had to hit me. But I’ve always had a surprising capacity to recover, and your friendship is healing and cleansing too.

Thank you for the news about Rob. I am of course happy that he liked some of my poems in 60. One can rely on his judgement and it looks as though a few new horizons have also opened up for him in the last while.

Went and poured tea now. Still at work.

Just after you left, I heard from “reliable sources” that my former (always sounds like deceased) husband has no intention at all of returning Simone to me. I received a highly upsetting letter, wrote back to him immediately – no answer – and, just now, a registered letter in which I demand Simone back. I hope this mess turns out well and that he and I don’t have to see one another in court again.

I haven’t written a single word in the past two weeks with all these things. How is it going with Die Ongedurige Kind [The Restless Child] …? The poem is beautiful. You must please not call the book Die Ambassadeur. No one will buy it … it’s such a fusty old title. Die Ongedurige Kind is poetic and light and ephemeral … You’re welcome to send me the first chapters … I’ll also pick up any typing errors.

Oh yes, with regard to the people, the citizenry, you’re a little muddled in the way you speak. They are precisely not free, it is their bondage that grieves me and bores me into the abyss.

But apart from that, I bought myself a lovely new coat (Chris says it looks absolutely French) and I’m already beginning to pamper myself for the coming winter … went to sleep with Simone’s teddy bear last night, it’s so wonderfully warm and woolly, and yellow as a Bantry Bay summer.

Have you seen May’s Drum yet? I haven’t. I hope you get it in Grahamstown. It should be on sale somewhere today.

Do you know George Barker’s “News of the World: 3”?

… before

The serried battalions of lies and the organizations

of hate

Entirely encompass us

…

Lie one night in my arms and give me peace.

Write soon, you hear!

Love … Godspeed … gratitude,

Ingrid.

{Sorry about the typing – am perpetually in a hurry! What I said about the Marais Prize is not because I don’t believe in your talent as a playwright, you hear; also, I’ve again read Lobola vir die Lewe.}

Dept. of Afrikaans

Rhodes University

Grahamstown

Friday, 3 May 1963

Feather-fluff-girl,

While an apathetic U.E.D. [University Education Diploma] class sat and wrote a test (the best solution when one doesn’t feel like lecturing), I read your letter. God! Here I am, fretting about your accommodation problems and your other daily tribulations – and then your letter steals in and mocks me! Perhaps it was a bit bold of me to think (or to hope) that I could “know” you after getting to know you in a biblical sense! And then yesterday I also went and bought a copy of Drum and read your poem – which, like “Die Kind” [“The Child Who Was Shot Dead by Soldiers in Nyanga”], grows on me more and more. I read the note about you and looked at your picture, slotted in most tastefully amid Tennis Biscuits, Edblo mattresses, Powa Pills for Men, Sunbeam Polish and Mum. Theatre of the absurd without any words, this particular little combination; and in itself a commentary on the comédie humaine? But what I actually wanted to say about all this is the following: I sat and looked at the photo and didn’t recognise you; it was “the poet Ingrid Jonker”. And I read your own declamation or declaration (“sweet” – for a Mum-public?) and noticed, among other things, that you were born in Douglas where, Christ Almighty, I also lived for seven years; and realised all over again: what minuscule little piece of you do I really know? (I don’t even dare ask: which minuscule little piece do I even have? Can you, of all people, be “have-able”?) Which almost makes it a matter of necessity to come back to you and learn more about your beautiful land.

This is why it’s quite some consolation that the lectures in Stellenbosch have been arranged for earlier than I’d thought: the week beginning Monday 20 May. In 2½ weeks’ time. Things are still being ironed out right now. If they can see their way clear to paying at least half of my air ticket, I’ll be arriving in Cape Town on Friday the 17th, and leaving again the following Friday morning. The lectures themselves will keep me busy for just three days: Monday morning (“Experimental Novels”); Tuesday evening (“Novel and Taboo”); Wednesday afternoon (“Theatre of the Absurd”). Plus, somewhere in between, a small party. If it can be so arranged, I’ll need to be in Stellenbosch for only a minimum of the time. And Thursday, a public holiday, we’ll have all to ourselves. The only complication in this whole business is the back-and-forth travelling between Stellenbosch and Cape Town, for which the South African Railways and Harbours doesn’t really make modern provision.

Otherwise I’ll come down by car: in that case, it’ll be Sunday afternoon the 19th; and then I’ll stay until the following Sunday morning – leaving very early! Either way, I’ll let you know. That’s assuming you want me there, and have space for me.

I’m happy about your nice flat. Where you found the time to arrange that on top of everything else, I don’t know. Is it your own – just for you? And Simone’s? In the picture she looks just like her lovely, petite mother. And for me you will – once again – be a new “you”. I hope it won’t be necessary to go through all the misery of a court case. Is there any way I can help?

I must type-type-type; and try to keep my usual work going, too. Thank god I have no “social conscience” forcing me to pay back and forth visits to people I want nothing to do with, or to attend things I have no interest in. And so the MS is at least coming along, slowly; I think it will be done by next Wednesday. I know Die Ongedurige Kind is the nicer title. But first read the MS and see if it fits. That’s the main issue. Maybe you’ll come up with something completely different, a better suggestion.

We can talk about it when I’m there. In the meantime you can – and must – please mark up the MS wherever you find it necessary; please be merciless. (Not that I doubt you will.) You’ll in any case be the first to receive it. And it’s probably best that, if surgery is needed, it be deep and clean and quick. For me this is always the most bitter thing about a writing life: during the joy and sorrow of the process itself, and afterwards, you have the words all to yourself, virginal, completely untouched. But then the work calls out to the world; and the first set of eyes that looks upon it, whether approvingly or otherwise, disturbs that inviolate state. Or is this just that very old line that something magical cleaves to everything young and new?

I did not mean, in my first letter, that your average civilian, or the public, are themselves free. I myself have a phobia for the bourgeoisie; pattern-people. What I meant was simply this: some people (like me) find the masses a bigger threat than others do, because they have an inner tendency to go along with things, and to settle for a life of home and wife and child and servant … I find that, to remain free, I have to live in a continuous state of conscious rebellion against such a life. Others (you?) have within themselves so much freedom that they remain untouched despite living in a bourgeois environment. The masses don’t threaten them, they’re invulnerable. But I must also admit – and this is not to be sentimental, just honest – that, after you, I feel freer in relation to the world than ever before. Let me acknowledge, in addition: I have had only two singular experiences in my life that completely, and in an instant, scorched me open – the first was the birth of my son, Anton, seven months ago (or: the almost 24 hours that I had to be there, present but powerless, until a Caesarean put an end to it); and the second was: you. Maybe there was a third, though it wouldn’t have been a single experience, but a long series of events that rendered true Henry Miller’s words, “There is only one adventure, and that is inward, towards the self” – and this was Paris.

For me it’s hard to remember, and to believe, what came before Paris. A life of friendly, adventureless obedience to a pattern. Oh, I was constantly in a state of rebellion; in my second year already I was thrown out of the synagogue of the Christian Nationalists – but even this revolt was a kind of play with the pattern; properly breaking loose was something I would never really do. I still needed my religious opiate; I knew – unavoidably, after seven years at university – that I had been “accepted”. Nobody found it necessary any longer to judge anything I did on its own merits. It was done according to a particular public “image” that created a series of “achievements” in advance. A model boy. I even attended intervarsity along with a textbook from which I would study during breaks. My only real release was writing. But even that was conformist. God, the most daring image in anything I wrote before Paris was: “The crowing of a cock rips through morning’s mystical hymen.” And then – serves me right – even that was cut by the publisher! See? You read my palm correctly, little diviner-star. This sweet youth of mine: only now do I recognise and appreciate all those frustrated attempts at rebellion. And then came Paris. Nobody knew me. Nobody took me at face value. The fact that I existed meant precisely zero to the rest of the world. And so on. The congregation will find it written up in Lobola. That’s why [W.E.G. Louw]’s reaction was so adolescent (and maybe old Fransie [Malherbe] was not quite so wrong in this respect?).

Well, then: next thing I had to come home, after just two years – which was too short. It did give me the chance, though, to start dismantling everything I’d previously accepted. And I mean everything. But there wasn’t time to start something new; to seek and find a “new myth”, as Stephen [Etienne] Leroux would put it. For that reason, my first reaction back in SA was fairly hysterical. I wanted to write letters to newspapers about all the things that filled me with disgust; and just about everything did. Don Quixote and his windmills. [J.D.] Salinger’s young boy, in The Catcher in the Rye, who wants to remove all the dirty words from all the world’s lavatory walls – but finds that one can never actually do this. Even my reply in DH [Die Huisgenoot magazine] to Prof. Fransie [Malherbe] was a little along these lines: an attempt to hold forth against stupidity and pig-headedness. But does one achieve anything by doing that? Does one actually wipe out stupidity and ignorance? Or must one rather learn, not to “accept” that which is supposedly “mature” (in that case I don’t ever want to be mature), but to “live ironically” – with justness, a little pride, and much love.

And it was about this time that you, with your lovely blouse and your green slacks and your little feet and beautiful eyes, entered Jan’s house and said “hello”, setting everything in motion. You will understand: it’s not something for which one can say thank you. It’s a thank you that has to be lived.

The Eugène Marais Prize. I have a knack for doing the wrong thing. Bartho put it with such nice irony: “The day the Akademie awards you a prize, you must know that you’re on the wrong path.” But this is something I myself knew very soon after the publication of Caesar. And it is without the least shred of illusion that I’m accepting the thing. I won’t attempt to justify it. It’s done now, beyond the range of regret. All I’m allowed to be happy about is that it will bring me back to Stellenbosch on 29 June!

Meanwhile there is something else on its way, too, which you will find equally unappealing: Sempre Diritto, an Italian travel journal. I have only just been through the proofs; Bartho has promised to have it out by my birthday on the 29th. This one is literally just my diary during the journey. And I’m beginning to realise more and more: people say things in a diary that are personally valuable as a result of associations, but which decidedly don’t make interesting reading for others. Unless it’s in the nature of [W. Somerset] Maugham or others’ “Writer’s Notebook”, but that’s a different kettle of fish. I told Bartho at the time I felt sceptical about the whole business, but he insisted it be published. Now it’s coming out, and I’ll have to play father to it. {So be it, then.}

(“Play father”? Remember. It might sound crazy: but I would love to make a little daughter!)

I’m sending you another verse or two. (“Dearest auntie, I bring you some roses.”) Laugh if you like. All that remains for me now, following [Friedrich] Schiller, is to write an “Ode to Joy”. {I wrote to Bartho asking him if he might be interested in a little volume. That is to say: if I can be convinced that it shouldn’t, like Caesar, etc. etc., actually have remained unpublished.}

My love to you. And send my regards to Simone’s teddy bear, which I’m currently more jealous of than Chris! (But send him my regards, too.) And a kiss for the “little garden of Eros”.

André.

PS: I think I’ll send you the section of the book that has already been typed. The rest next week. Okay?

My Wilder Kind [My Wild Child]

Die Uiltjie [Little Owl]

Hy Het met Goeie Bedoeling Gesê [He Said, with Good Intentions]

Selfs Heiliges [Even Saints]

Sunday, 5 May 1963

André, my dear little heart,

I write you quite a lot more than I actually post – an old habit. Thank you for your letter of Tuesday, which you “shouldn’t have” written! I hope you will never again feel that you “should” this or that with me – I particularly like your open, honest, spontaneous reactions. And so your letter was actually a delightful surprise and I let a mistake through on the front page of the Strydkreet. But I told the foreman it was actually only 50% my fault, which confused him a little until I could think of a better excuse.

Guess what? My child arrived by plane yesterday and she is now sleeping nice and warm in the next room. She’s grown to be so cute and when I can’t bring myself to reprimand, I just have to laugh, especially when she calls me “little mommy”! I’m sitting here now at Jan’s table where we read Richard Rive’s letter, do you remember? Last night, with Richard – sorry – thought for a moment about Richard’s letter and wondered why I wasn’t intuitively “warned”! Last night I had a meal with Dan [Daniel] Kunene, such a civilised soul with an impressive kind of dignity and a quick mind. He is a lecturer in African languages at the University of Cape Town and at the moment head of the faculty. I am eager to introduce you to him when (when?) you come down to Cape Town. He is also the translator of the African poems in the Penguin edition of South African poetry. Trying to go overseas for a year for a study tour, but what a mess … it’s almost impossible for him to leave the country because of all the suspicion …

Did my last letter depress you terribly? I am not a prose writer – but, as you say, there are a few things in life for which, thank God, no words are necessary. I’d also love to speak to you, but heaven knows, not with words on a piece of paper. Also want to tell you about my new poem based on the Dutch hex-text “You put a spell on me, magician …” then the poem moves in a kind of a dream atmosphere, I mow everything down and stand naked, all alone and happy, until the “spell” is broken and I must go “back to my blood relations / back to my kin / back to the pre-birth-death / where I belong” [“terug na my bloedverwante / terug na my naasbestaandes / terug na die voorgeboort-e-like dood / waar ek hoort”].

André, you speak about renouncing things, is this an indication that they are being lost already, because “what is actual is actual only for one time / and only for one place / I rejoice that things are as they are and I renounce the blessed face …” Allowing something to endure, will you find a charm for that, Magician? Child, I feel frustrated and so I went off to look for your little portrait in Die Huisgenoot so that I could, at the very least, see how your “declared” face looks … it is rare to discover someone so suddenly and completely, and afterwards the physical distance as you call it, which everything now rests upon and where it happens …! In the meantime, I swim in the ice-cold water of Clifton and I work, and I receive, it seems, hundreds of people ... and sleep so terribly much!

The poems you sent me are once again proof of your astonishing receptiveness and high emotional tempo – which is of course absolutely essential to the whole complex organisation of an artist’s tools. What this poem still lacks is the technical expertise, which will come later (if you kept it up and I know you should and now you must keep it up). Poetry lies just under the surface of your highly lyrical prose in Lobola and Caesar. I’m looking greatly forward to Die Ongedurige Kind, you will in no way burden me with it, I await its arrival with joy, to which I also have a right. To get back to the poems … Most of them are successful, “Through the Looking Glass” and especially “the earth” that drifts away “like a dandelion seed” [“die aarde wat soos ’n sydisselsaadjie” wegdryf]. (The two people I showed the poems to in confidence – Freda Linde and Chris – both said almost without hesitation in the same words, although they didn’t see the poems as successful as a whole: “But there’s no doubt; he’s our man.” I also like “Meisie” [“Girl”] from: “you: you play with the sky” and especially “little Midas-child / under your fingers / everything becomes poetry …”

Also “come and sleep with me” and some of the words that play like naughty children in dark rooms.

I hope you will continue, long, very long, after the original inspiration has dwindled … Send me everything you write, and when we are together again, I would like to examine everything, line by line, also because I, I already know this, can learn so much from you.

But now I’m not writing another word. Soon you’ll believe that I am in love with you! But call me one night (when you get this letter).

Fixed time and Personal. Then I will hear your voice and see whether this is true!

Until then, darling,

Ingrid.

PS: What is your second name? IJ.

Grahamstown

Monday, 6 May 1963

Dear Ingrid,

Perhaps you know what it feels like to have typed up a book of 341 pages? I’d rather be with you to share it. Meanwhile, all I can do is send you the last bunch of pages and start chewing my nails, hoping it won’t be too much of a trial for you. Please don’t keep me in the dark for too long (but you should also not neglect more important things for my sake!).

I would like it especially if you could look out for certain things:

a)The consciously heavy, semi-official style of Part One – which gradually dissolves during heartfelt talk as Keyter pulls himself out, against his better judgement, from behind his mask: is this perhaps too “heavy”? Do the first 10 pages make too hard a read?

b)The adaptation of Dante: the Inferno in para. 2 of the section entitled “Ambassador”; the Paradiso, no more than synoptically in the visit to the Champs-Élysées on 322 et. seq.; and Canto {26 of the Purgatorio} in the conclusion – is this once again a case of a “poster comparison”, or is it unobtrusive enough here?

c)Are all the episodes in the section “Ambassador” necessary? (I have some doubt especially about the visit to the fashion boutique.) Otherwise: anything you can put your finger on.

I worked myself half to death to finish the job by today. In the process, my weekend went down the drain. But maybe this was a good thing: on weekends I suffer too much longing. Meanwhile, life here is not without its own crises. I feel a need to get away, go sit somewhere and think, sort things out and seek answers to many questions.

Write to me. I await your letters. And please send me the title of that lovely anthology of modern American poetry; I must get a copy. Thank you for the beautiful quotation the other day (“Before the battalions …”).

And love,

André.

Citadel Press

145 Bree Street

Cape Town

Tuesday, 7 May 1963

André, my fiery, rebellious thing!

What on earth does your remark about my modest little journalistic article specially written for Drum mean? You call it “a note, a declamation etc!” Of course, I didn’t write the captions – I’d be more precise if I had to do anything like that! I did indeed give them the photo … and why don’t you recognise me? Because my hair is done up? You frighten me with that “I’ll have to get to know you anew” or something like that. I hope you aren’t disappointed! And above all, do not make me “a thing with one face … Like water held in the hands would spill me / Otherwise kill me …”

Just back from work – received your letter and poems last night – thank you for everything – and also for the MS, which is lying here on the table next to me. The house is untidy; I am terribly tired. May I tell you what a “normal” day is like for me – wake at 6.30, rush to feed Simone, get dressed, both of us – wait for the bus – five drive past, all full – catch one, drop her at nursery school – wait for another bus – another five drive past, all full, clock in at eight o’clock and read non-stop for ten hours. Back, fetch Simone, another bus, home, a drink, and then quite busy again till ten, eleven or twelve o’clock. Child, one could go mad from it! And on top of that, someone tried to steal my poor purse on the bus – got it back from him, then the conductor asked what was going on, everyone making a noise, I said I simply fell against the man, got off, tired, amused, and yet … it’s probably part of life!

And did you get my other letter? And was it at least better received?

We must go and see Douglas again, I left there when I was about three and can only remember a little. There’s a river, isn’t there? I have a photo of us children, naked, on the riverbank and I have a swallow’s nest in my hand.

I’m very happy to hear you’re coming down soon; let me know if it’ll be the 17th or the 19th – there’s a complication in terms of my flat – I can only move in after the 25th. From the 15th I want to go to a boarding house here in Green Point – near the nursery school – I can reserve a place for you there too. Good heavens, André, I just had to find time to look for a flat – I’m convinced that your concern about it and about me was an inspiration to get such a lovely place – besides, I plan to entertain you there! And on top of that I managed to get my little daughter back! And of course you can help, you already help through your at times almost physical nearness, all your books, letters, poems, thoughts.

Now it’s time again for Simone’s bath and the whole evening’s organisation, before I can continue to write calmly.

11:30: Do you see how long it takes to get little children into bed and to chat and eat with Erik Laubser Laubscher and Claude [Bouscharain]. Darling, hello – have since Sunday, I think, picked up some or other infection and already have a rising fever which I must take (if they will allow me at the Press) to my Dr Katz. Congratulations on your Italian volume – was at Uys [Krige]’s last night to fetch your letter – then told him about it and almost killed myself laughing – he was so wonderfully indignant because his travel sketches have been lying around for twenty years waiting to be published – I actually laughed at both of you then – your wonderful drive and his … fear?

Busy reading your France sketches and find them highly readable – not sure when I’ll get to Oupa en Ouma se Boererate [Grandpa and Grandma’s Traditional Remedies] – or are you cross with me again?

The one I like most (now speaking about your poems) is “Even Saints” so far … a lot … maybe because my own feelings connect so closely to it … “small forgettable futile signs” … It screams to high heaven! If only it wasn’t that way, Magician! Don’t you know, some nights I pace up and down, raging, crazy from loneliness … precisely because of the small forgettable futile signs …! (Still, you must be careful of the influence of [N.P.] Van Wyk Louw!) (Sometimes it looks as if my whole life is made of exclamation marks – there are so many ways one can use them – mockery, irony, teasing, lies, happiness …! Etc. Etc.) I especially also like: “the way in which your little dove breasts nestled / in my hands.”

André! Good night, until the day after tomorrow? Or when will you write again? I still want to tell you so, so much more, when we are alone and without damning blue words on paper between us – they look so banal, so crass, so unaccounted for.

Love, darling,

Ingrid.

Grahamstown

Wednesday, 8 May 1963

Lovely, much needed Ingrid,

Forgive the technicolour-effect of the bladdy typewriter ribbon; it’s unintended, and should not be used as a Rorschach test. Typing has actually been a kind of last resort today. You should see the pile of scored and scribbled paper I’ve already produced this morning. Anton, meanwhile, has begun chomping the things, licking and devouring them – little understanding how incriminating is the corpus delicti he’s chewing over! But I find I no longer manage to say, with a ballpoint pen, what I want to say (in so far as I ever get to say what I want to say!). For that reason, please excuse my recourse to typing. A rose will smell as sweet in any print, to mix my metaphors. (At least I’m in good company: keeping in mind Abel [J.] Coetzee’s mug of sour milk!)

Thank you for your letter: for you, behind the letter (a very unliterary approach!) and for all the gladness the letter awakened in me (a very psychologistic approach!). All the more because it arrived here in the midst of the day’s ordinary, unavoidable, chronological things: a student’s precious “appreciation” of “Oom Gert Vertel” [“Uncle Gert’s Stories”]; buying meat, along with yet another comment about getting a piece pasella; making sure the gardener is doing what he’s supposed to be doing (something he knows much better than I, who alas am by no means a “boer in heart and spirit”, failing to tune in to agricultural radio shows); marking essays; forgetting to put petrol in the car.

I wanted to sit down and write back immediately. But letters and words are becoming more fraudulent by the day. I can’t remember ever experiencing the insufficiency of words as agonisingly as in the past while. (But the more I despair about the gulf between what I want to say and what I do say, the more luminous and precious your words-on-paper become. “Little Midas-Child …”?!) Perhaps, also, it’s wrong to try saying things; one should just say them. As Henry James once said: Do not describe what is happening: Let it happen!

But writers are of course mad, sick beings who will not rest just knowing things – sometimes deliciously, at full throttle; they must go and contaminate the experience with words, too, say it. One wants to signify the synaesthetic sensation.

{Or is it a case of: How can I know what I want to say until I see what I’ve said?}

(In service of an invisible fellow person? Nonsense. One doesn’t think about fellow people when one writes.) One should learn to make peace with the meditative experience of a thing itself, in and of the moment, far beyond reason and reasoning. The unquestioning happiness with which we lay together at six on our Sunday morning, for example, you in your white pyjamas with their open little fly. Outside of this kind of knowing one another in the essence of being (and it happens so seldom), everything else is incidental: a mere accumulation of givens; statistics (birth dates; youth; all the little segments of a person’s “history”; all one’s judgements and prejudices and opinions). These are at most mere symptoms of a deeper life. How sad – scandalous, actually – that such superficial things so often act as replacements; that for the masses it even confuses the issue of sex – which is in fact the only pure meeting place where the whole I-as-I encounters the whole you-as-you. (A result of civilisation? – Henry Miller said: “To be civilised is to have complicated needs; and a man, when he is fullblown, should need nothing” … i.e.: nothing but this essence-of-life itself.)

I’m happy about Simone. I look forward to seeing her. One of my biggest yearnings in life has always been to have a daughter. The Stellenbosch business has now been arranged in such a way that I’ll be coming down by car; so, expect me at about four on the afternoon of Sunday (the 19th … still ten days away!). If I don’t come alone, there will be other complications, but nothing insoluble (in that case I’ll still stay with you at least from Wednesday evening until Friday morning). I think, however, that I’ll come alone. For several reasons, it’s become necessary for me to get out again, go somewhere; I need space in which to add things up and see if I still come out as myself. I will in any case let you know in good time what the final decision is.

Phone you? Have you any idea how often I’ve walked up to the telephone? But what holds me back is knowing all too well that few things on god’s earth are more frustrating than a telephone conversation. (“How are things going?” “Is the weather there also good?” “What did you do today?” “I’m working my fingers to the bone.” “I miss you.” “Have you written anything since last time?” Three minutes go by. Or six, nine or twelve, as the case may be.) And as our telephone is situated in the middle of the house, everywhere audible, such a conversation will be limited to precisely those things in which we have no interest. But that doesn’t mean I won’t maybe phone you, on impulse! Will you, by the way, have a phone in your new flat?

And so you had to use the little Huisgenoot photo (that same loathsome, know-it-all picture) to supplement your memory? Like I have to rely on the picture in Drum: in itself it’s actually very pretty – I wasn’t trying to be “rude” the last time, I promise! It’s just so unsatisfying. Luckily I sometimes see you again, at night – your smile or your being unhappy – and then I can lie half-awake and reminisce. But I think I’ll bring my own bundle of apparatus along with me this time (photography’s actually one of my favourite occupations), and see if I can improve on the Drum picture. Will you model for me?

Please send me the whole of your magician poem. The incantation effect of the repetitions “back to … back to …” is excellent. Meanwhile, I dip into your little pile of papers all the time. The cyclicality of “Bitterbessie Dagbreek”, where the echo in the poem itself becomes an echo, grows ever more charming to me. I know there are even better poems in the collection, but my favourite remains “Begin Somer”. (Its only dull spot is the phrase “people like ants” which, among the novel, clear imprints of the other “images” – they’re actually more concrete than images – doesn’t radiate quite enough.)

Went to see The Quiet American [Graham Greene] on Monday evening; and I’m now rereading the novel – disappointing. He now lacks the subtlety of works like The Heart of the Matter and The Power and the Glory.

Thank you for your candid comments about the first few poems. Now that a little distance has come, I am beginning to feel that they don’t have sufficient substance; a little thin. Here and there some nice lines. But poetry? No, my Ingrid, I’m not a poet. You are. I also don’t know whether I shall continue. (“I won’t be rhyming for very long / my words are too few / and there’s too much / still waiting in the queue”.) It’s not something I can predict in advance. It must either happen – or not.

I’m sending one or two more; but I will only know with any certainty whether I’m likely to carry on after the Cape trip. Is it “original inspiration that might wane” that you’re talking about? I know it might; everything might; must, perhaps. But that’s for later. For now, what is, is. And that’s more than “inspiration”! I really don’t know what to think any more; and I don’t know how to continue. You’ve said to me repeatedly you have no faith in promises; and you yourself have experienced the proof of this all too often, and all too bitterly. I don’t want to contribute to it as well. But if I say that I love you, then it’s true – now. All I know is that it’s been a long time since I’ve experienced such a state of clarity as in recent times; and it’s not just the quietude of autumn, either.

My reaction to the seemingly endless labour on the novel seems to have caught up with me in the last two days only. (I got the idea end Nov. – it split off from a different book I was about to get working on –; began writing end Jan.; finished mid-March; then revised; and retyped.) And the reaction is: profound, heartfelt depression. Like a great vacuum coming down over me. You’re like a little shoot in the dark, quite unprotected. Something has run its course; come loose from you. Is this the way it felt when Simone was born and was no longer inside you, not part of you any more? Or was that different? All I know is that I won’t be writing anything in a hurry – not such a long thing. It’s too unbearable; it overextends one. Maybe poetry is different: each in its own right a rounded-off piece of feeling and experience. A drop of water rather than a drainpipe.

Speaking of sewage brings me – naturally – to Abel Coetzee. (Have you demanded your money from him yet? You must.) I see the Sunday Times is once more splashing out the fact that he might become the chief bigwig of the Kakkademy. Bill [W.A. de Klerk] told me in his most confidential (!) manner about the interview and the implications of Abel’s presence (in the waiting room, not at the interview, I deduced) – but it was all presented as such a big secret that I had to blink twice. Is this another of [Maish] Levin’s loathsome (but in its own way inimitable!) stunts? Or did Bill or someone else talk out of turn? Meanwhile I feel very happy about the additional names. We did achieve something. It stands, and it’s undeniable. Now we must engage in our work ever more in the manner of acte de défi.

I’m counting the days until Rook en Oker [Smoke and Ochre] appears. If it appears too soon before my arrival, rather keep it there with you – otherwise I might miss it in the post. Lobola’s second imprint should be out this week; with a new ending. I await it with greater equanimity and je m’en foutisme about the reception than before. W.E.G. L[ouw] is apparently going to write a notice, again. Making the most of his little talent.

I don’t have all that much time to relax after Die Ambassadeur: now I must get going with translation again to earn R300 before 31 May, otherwise I might have to go into liquidation. I am always bankrupt. This time it’s all those “respectable” things like property tax and insurance premiums and stuff that has got the better of me. It makes me MAD that one should be so trapped in the mere struggle to keep one’s head above water; it’s humiliating, actually. But just listen to me, complaining like this! You have to endure all those days at the Citadel. For me, it’s an unbearable thought. Particularly you. And the Citadel! Please don’t work yourself to death. Look after yourself. And be happy.

With love,

André.

Ek is Een v/Jou Minnaars [I Am One of Your Lovers]

Jy’s Nooit Gedoop Nie [You Were Never Baptised]

Proefleser [Proofreader]

Nooi Hom [Invite Him]

{The P. stands – against my will and lifelong protest – for the sturdy name Philippus. And with that, the worst has been said between us! (Or do you still have a Petronella or a Fransiena somewhere?)}

{Oh my God, you should come and lie here with me on the grass in our enormous garden. One can smell the sun.}

Citadel Press

145 Bree Street

Cape Town

Thursday, 9 May 1963

My dear André,

So, what happened to you last night? I understand you called earlier but at the moment it’s quite a thing to reach the house … probably difficult for you in the evening? After the last part of your MS yesterday and your note I wanted more than ever to chat to you and perhaps explain what looks to you “incomprehensible” and “cool”. Or is that in the past now? Thank you, dear heart, for your telegram today – yes – I know maybe what you’re talking about but not actually what you mean. You’ll have to educate me! Will you? I’m still reading your Pot-Pourri, which I am thoroughly enjoying – I’m now near “nothing for a sixpence” – and have not started the new MS yet – don’t be disappointed – the weekend lies ahead and I can go through it at leisure, something I’m looking forward to greatly – just because it’s also a part of you.

And thank you very much for the assignment – and yet it connects – I mean the “restlessness”, to a trusted friend’s heated remark today, which has left me in a state of dismayed shock! It was so unexpected, and we weren’t talking about the topic at all – “Loyal!” she says. “You’ve never been loyal to anyone in your life!” Now I wonder whether this is true, and if it is indeed true, is it a terrible attack on my integrity as a person and a writer? What does it actually mean? I didn’t wait for an explanation, but left immediately, without saying goodbye to her, and went for a cup of tea in a café … “This above all: to thine own self be true …”

And I honestly try to be that, seeking, investigating, experiencing, analysing, but scared to death especially for people I may learn to love or whom I already love. Touchiness? Selfishness? Fear of isolation, or actually just a fight for self-preservation and contact?

So if I sometimes sound remote, may I tell you that this is already grounded in a feeling of responsibility towards you, in a certain sense “loyalty” too? That I also consider your family life; that I don’t want to deny you, as a writer, any disappointment (!) and that as a person, I still want to protect you against it … (?) Does that make any sense?

You know, my little heart, this poem “Even Saints” is the most successful one so far. Already told you: the end resembles Van Wyk Louw too much: I want to suggest that you limit it and work around these lines:

Even saints

Must leave behind signs to be remembered

Etc. but more poetic: Then:

but you are remembered only by my body

And:

the way in which your little dove breasts nestled

in my hands;

and your virginal still sweet sleep with me afterwards.

But now that you are gone

And I your only archive

Who will rely on the word …

… small futile forgettable signs …

One could cry, reading that line – I also agree with you and [Lawrence] Durrell: “Love is a form of metaphysical enquiry.” No, child, I feel that this poem already has a hold on your unconscious, that it is planted squarely in your imagination; just shorter, sharper, more patience, darling, the “patience that can carry so much” and of which you (true or not?) do not have much!

Chris came here last night, a little sick, a little gloomy, and sends his regards and looks forward to your arrival. We’ll have to organise a party immediately. I hope you’ll give me a date.

Do you perhaps know David Lytton – [C. Louis] Leipoldt’s cousin? A Place Apart or The Paradise People or The Goddamn White Man? He once said to me: “Never pretend what you don’t feel or overestimate what you do feel.” And now I feel so unsure again, and I wish you’d come back: “And I wished that he would come back, my snake … I felt so honoured.” D.H. Lawrence: “Snake”. Or, as my ouma would say: Ecc. 1. v. 13. But now I’m going to “bath immediately” and get into bed with your sketches, and try to believe … in myself, in something … in you?

Love, darling,

Ingrid.

PS: Which American collection do you want: the big Modern American Poetry or the smaller paperback New American Poetry 1945–1960?

Your letter, 3 May: Try to come by car – the flat is my own, yes, and Simone’s; I have an aversion to people knowing all my business! I don’t think you, especially, need to have a fear of the bourgeoisie – although it’s a healthy fear; break loose – about the “single experiences” the two of us will chat – about the stupidity and idiocy – Uys said “it’s the century of the glorification of the asinine” – André, I’m not answering your letter curtly now, trust me. I read your letters often and often again – if I say I appreciate everything it sounds weak and it actually says nothing – with poems I will always help and support and encourage you – how do you manage in any case to do everything that you do?

You say, “dearest auntie I bring you roses”, to which, in the first place, I object emphatically – at the moment I am still your little girl – in the second place – I hope I do indeed have a sense of humour, but this sentence is inappropriate as it exists in terms of earnestness and honesty and beauty – as is the case with you.

Are we going to Paris together one day?

Ingrid.

PS: What is the crisis? IJ.

PPS: Just thought: “How long will it take / moment of reality / without the insanity / and in touch with the dream?”

IJonker.

Grahamstown

Friday, 10 May 1963

Lovely, beloved dear,

Just a note to set your mind at ease. (Heavens, it seems each time one has to say again afterwards what one actually wanted to say in the first place! The purest commentary yet on human communication is surely to be found in Hamlet’s “Words, words, words”!) Therefore: please don’t imagine for a moment that I wanted to run you down about your piece in Drum! It was meant with a twinkle in the eye. And the photo is indeed lovely. (I said this yesterday, too.) All I meant in my comment about the “strange” you, was this: I suddenly realised how exceedingly much more of you there was, is, than the little fragment that’s “mine”. I was therefore speaking precisely about your “infinite variety”, or trying to do so. (God, it was this, among other things, that so disturbed me for a while that night at Chris’s place: the astonishing way in which you are so different in every moment, so deliciously different!) My only reason for dismay is: I would so very much like to understand and know all of you and – ? – have it as my own? But that’s impossible, simply because I have met you only now, instead of 28 years ago. Or rather 27 years and 11½ months ago, when I first saw the light of day (or the dark? I no longer remember). Once again, purely “physical” reasons, thus.

Ag no, no, man, Ingrid! The flat only on the 25th? I am totally shocked. I was hoping so much – but very well, then. I keep learning the lesson: don’t count your chickens before they hatch. In that case, please would you book a place for me at your boarding house, near to you. Otherwise we can go and stay at Lanzerac in St’bosch for a few days (e.g. from Wednesday through to Thursday, a holiday) and the weekend. But I think I should phone and see what you say, tomorrow, from the university if possible (though it’s a little side connection there – several phones all over the building using the same number). Last night I had a call booked because I was meant to be alone in the house – but then plans changed and I quickly had to cancel the call. With a gnashing of teeth.

This accursed pen-and-paper business. I want to be with you. Talk. And – then stop talking and be with you.

Don’t be ill. Did you go see the doctor after all? What was it in the end? You’re far too precious to be overcome by illness.

Thank you, also, for the vignette of you, or the lot of you, at the river in Douglas, naked, and the swallow’s nest. Perhaps we can do something as bourgeois as look at all your photos when I’m there.

I must go and mark more essays now, with a head that’s fit to burst. Since January I haven’t had a single day without sinus – except for those few days in the Cape. Allergic to the climate. Etc. Perhaps it’s mere hypochondria.

Lonely little thing: just ten days; by the time you get this letter: only a week. We have much to say and still more to do, to be.

My record player has come back after months at the electrical shop. That’s why I felt compelled to send the telegram this morning. There is indeed still Brahms, and many other things that make me mad with joy. I just had to send news about the Sanctus, because last night I closed my study door and sat alone in the dark, listening, with a glass of wine, and with memories for which you, despite your best intentions, were responsible.

And then that also had to come to an end because it was Anton’s bath time. He and I always bath together in the big tub; I wish you were able to see this. It’s the highlight of his day. But afterwards I’m exhausted. I want to help you put Simone to bed. Or is she very particular about strange men?!

And this was supposed to be a “note”, did I say? A hell of a mixed bag, I fear. And maybe I’ve said a whole lot of stuff that I’ll have to explain later, again! I don’t want to explain things any more. I want, once more, to “climb down your little rock pool and find the anemone”.

Love,

André.

Friday, 10 May 1963

My dear André,

Thank you for today’s letter – tried to read it between all the work and sent Anne out a few times for all kinds of trivial little things; this afternoon a lovely rain started in Cape Town and now it is pouring out there and everything is cosy inside: Simonetta over there, drawing, and talking to herself – I’ve just finished Jan’s mail and I’m drinking a glass of red wine. Child, your letter has something of a threat – so much “our house” and “our garden” and “maybe I won’t come alone” – the days when you “will stay with me” I will be working in any case …! The “cock that crows” is of course also a denial (!) and that’s also why it doesn’t flow and I think you know why:

En al ons dade, al ons denke selfs,

Bind ons lewensgang aan bande …

Quote from “Bonds” by Abr[aham] H. Jonker … You don’t know if the “inspiration” can, will or must fade. It’s all very logical and honest, but Lord! And it looks as if everything depends on your “Cape Town detour”. And it scares me. I hate it when people expect something of me that I may not be, and I hate having to put on an act to ensure their approval (love?). And perhaps on top of it all you think I am “clever” or learned – I’ve got a 2nd class matric and that’s all. Afrikaans Lower, because I was at an English school that I hated; and besides, the circumstances at home were anything but good: but there was at least the Child Life!

I think your second name is nice. André Philipus. Brink? Is that Dutch or maybe German? We on the other hand are from Java. Our family name is Adolph Jacobus Jonker, and the first guy with this name was a Javanese slave, who today, of course, would not qualify as a white or as a human.

In any case, my dear heart, I would die if I had to live in a house like that with a garden and insurance. I tried it in Johannesburg’s suburbia, until we departed, raging, for Hillbrow’s slums.

My next address (I am apparently terribly “elusive”, especially to creditors) I’ll call through to you, if needs be. It will be third class at best – the boarding house, because, like you, I am always bankrupt and don’t care much for “filthy lucre”, if it weren’t for my child, I probably would never “work” – because, as you say, it is, to put it nicely, at the very least degrading to be bound to this sort of existence.

When do you actually sleep? Seems to me you keep writing and teaching and reading, and going out, and then sometimes you lie awake at night too!

And now, must I find you accommodation with me for the week, or will it be a hell of a lot of sneaking around, which I have an aversion to?! Don’t worry, I’m actually in an excellent mood, have been all day.

Now I’ll make us some food and have a bath, and then I’m expecting people. Will write to you again tomorrow – if I don’t – I might become “Dear Ingrid” – more businesslike than my publisher, from whom I heard, by the way, that my little volume is appearing this month – goodnight, darling.

Babsie (that’s my family nickname). That was when my father was still UP [United Party].

PS: Anne says your photo in Die Huisgenoot is nice. But she doesn’t like the one in Pot-Pourri, she says it looks like a girl. (While I’ve been writing to you, Simone came and stood behind me and combed my hair – now she’s got a cup of water here and it’s wet – excuse the drops if they land here.)

Your poem “You Were Never Baptised” (how’d you know that?), at least I was baptised at five years of age, is good: especially

never a wedding dress

but naked dressed in light …

Do you know what [D.J.] Opperman said about “Begin Somer”: “insignificant” and “could perhaps be accepted as a small visual sketch”. Are you also so “visual”? I am. Till tomorrow … I.

Ek wil nie meer alleen slaap nie

Ek wil nie meer alleen wakker word nie

Sonder om die lig en die lewe

Opslag te herken.

(Éluard)

Good night! I. Jo.

Sunday night, 12 May 1963, 11 pm

Can also never sleep. (Just wanted to tell you how much I appreciated your phone call yesterday morning – what did we actually say?) I went to look at a boarding house here in Green Point this evening – the R10 per week – double room (for me and Simone!) with eavesdropping old people everywhere – lots of annexes and “small sitting rooms” and a suspicious middle-aged woman who said she might have to put my cousin in a room inside the building … when I asked whether she had a single room near mine for my country cousin!!! Child, I’m really going to enjoy myself! Florals everywhere, little cupboards, and washbasins and washstands – as if these are the chief desire of humankind … doilies and little ornaments and vulgar furniture …

Had a lovely day with Uys – read about forty pages of your MS which I don’t want to say anything about quite yet: must see how it develops, you know how it is.

Look forward to your promised letter tomorrow. Look after mine nicely, will you, there’s no getting away from it.

Find that terrible!

Sweet dreams. Till later.

Jo.

PS: That’s my new name at the Press. Derived from Jonker and especially for you and the Press. I love changing my name and will be duty-bound to marry –

J.

PPS: Will you let me know soon where and how and from when you want a place?

I Jonker.

Grahamstown

Saturday, 11 May 1963

God, my dearest Ingrid,

Nowadays futility is calculable in small doses of three minutes each. And I can’t even claim that I didn’t know this in advance. It wasn’t the phoning itself that frustrated me so mightily, but mainly the fact that I could hear almost nothing you said. And, time and time again, the little bits that I did hear – precisely because I heard it out of context – sounded vaguely upsetting. Something “not proper” in connection with the boarding house. Something to do with being angry or afraid about a letter. Etcetera.

So then I rushed off to the university to get the anticipated letter. Nothing! And immediately after the confrontation with my empty postbox I had to deliver two lectures. (At least I compensated for my misery by finding a minor pretext in [C. Louis] Leipoldt to recite your “Die Kind” and discuss it with the third-year students! Good for them, too. In this way they get something lovely and I get some relief.) After this I had to go and buy meat, milk, and vegetables. Only then could I sit down to write. Committed about eight letters to paper; threw them all away, and had something to eat; now I can talk to you more calmly.

Ingrid dear: don’t seek out bogeymen in my letters! I’m sure I didn’t ever say I have to learn to know you “all over again”. At the most – and this is surely forgivable – I said I wanted to learn more about you. Never stop drinking from your fountain.

As far as my coming down alone is concerned: there’s nothing to be afraid of. It will happen that way. Let’s rather not talk about it in disembodied words, or about the future. Let’s wait until we’re together again and everything’s clear; rather that than one-dimensional words on paper or words in the mouthpiece of a telephone.

Just to confirm the arrangements: as I understand it, you’ll be booking accommodation for me, too, together with you, from Sunday to Sunday; send me the address (please also leave it with Jan). I should be there between three and five in the afternoon, I hope (leaving here Saturday afternoon and staying over somewhere). Is it impossible to get the flat earlier? In any case, insist on the 25th – the Saturday; then I can at least help you move, and wet the roof with you.

I’m glad to hear you’re no longer ill. I felt quite trapped this week after you wrote to say you weren’t feeling well. Look after yourself.

If my calculations are correct, you would have known by this week whether your little search in the wardrobe that night had the desired (?) outcome. Poor me, I got such a roasting about it that night; so I now deserve to know, at least!

I heard from Bartho yesterday that he’s quite eager to see a volume of my poems. (I sent him two or three.) But in the past I’ve too often been overeager to publish, and now I’m sitting with a long row of books that should rather have remained in the bottom drawer; I don’t want to make the same mistake again. Luckily, this time I can rely on you. Perhaps it will become a practically valuable thing between us over time: that one of us remains clear while the other is hot-headed.

Child of love, here I sit again, putting words on paper! All the while, I want to be with you. Do you know John Donne’s “The Ecstacy”? – even in that austere, loquacious time they sometimes came up with beautiful lines. He talks about bodies in love:

They are ours, though they are not we, we are

The intelligences, they the sphere.

We owe them thanks, because they thus,

Did us, to us, at first convey.

Lobola has appeared for a second time – and they actually went and set the title page in capital letters again instead of using lower case, as I requested. One always has to cut back on expectations and ideals – right down to the smallest things. The past few weeks have delivered their full measure of disenchantment. Except for one big difference: you, the neverending you.

Dearest, dearest creature, just one more week.

André.

Sunday.

Strange – it’s a new discovery every time! – how in the final analysis one is influenced, in fact determined, in one’s reactions by physical things such as time and distance. Today, just because a lovely sleep and a happy Sunday morning lies between now and yesterday, I can hardly understand why that silly phone call frustrated me so! Everything seems so certain and “undoubtable”, as our ministers would say. I hope your Sunday morning was similar. I slept late, with a quiet sun after last night’s unexpected thunderstorm. Anton tumbling around on the double bed like a washing machine, clambering and playing. Then slowly getting dressed – and driving for twenty miles through beautiful countryside where the aloes are just beginning to flame. Return, nibble at Sunday papers; make food. (I love playing chef! As long as I can do it when I want to.) And while it’s all cooking up, I can sit here and converse with you, my little penny from heaven.

I look forward to the lovely open road next week, because you’ll be waiting for me at the other end. Do you know what part of me remembers you the most, in the nicest way? Not my ears or eyes or mouth, but my hands. Actually more than just my hands, but everything that can experience you in a tactile way. Every day at dusk I take an hour to myself and walk along a hilly pathway, taking pleasure in my memories.

From the sublime to the more normal – I remembered with a shock that I didn’t give you (and Lena [Oelofse]) money for the calls I made from your flat. Must be about R3 altogether. I wanted to send it along with my first letter, but it just seemed too banal to include a cheque. I’ll bring it with me. And forgive the lapse! I didn’t mean to sponge.

Just today I began a translation that I must finish off this week if I want to get my cheque from John Malherbe: a children’s book about archaeological activities in Egypt (Leonard Cottrell). Quite interesting, although I could surely spend my time more “fruitfully”. Meanwhile I’ve read [William] Golding’s Lord of the Flies: a terrifying, special novel. Do you know it? Starts deceptively – a group of boys who find themselves alone on an island. Then they develop into a primitive community that gradually disintegrates for fear of the Unknown. And, if you think about it, it’s the primitive being with whom we have the greatest affinity – rather than a Greek or Roman or Renaissance man or whatever.

I am glad you like Pot-Pourri – a little. Weglouw[W.E.G. Louw]’s wife [Rosa Nepgen] gave me a regular tongue-lashing about it last time around. But I have a soft spot for it, for non-literary reasons. It’s in any case just reportage. One can’t, and doesn’t want to, always be in a state of high tension when “creating”.

I am so afraid you won’t like the novel! Precisely because it’s so important to me that you do!

Meanwhile I have dug out Ontvlugting. There are more good things in there than a lot of people think. And I suddenly found myself wondering: Freda [Linde] is surely also going to make one of those HAUM records with you? Maybe we can “wangle” it in such a way that both of ours come out together – I’ve only just done my recording. Ask her.

Now there’s really no choice: I must stop writing (and wasting your time?).

With love,

André.

Have I asked you yet – or was it during your drug-coma?! – if you know these lines by [J.H.] Leopold? –

O nachten van gedragene extasen

en diep gedronkene versadiging,

als elk met zijn geluk te rade ging

en van alleenzijn langzaam wij genazen.

Grahamstown

Monday night, 13 May 1963

Dearest little girl,

I’m very tired tonight. Spent the whole day fiddling with the Stellenbosch lectures – which are still far from done – and then did another shift of translation. It’s such soulless work. And even though the book is in English, it’s still the kind of style that translates very laboriously. I’ll take French any day. But if one has no choice in the matter, complaining won’t help. I simply need the money. And in the meantime I must prepare a lecture for my second-year class tomorrow.

Amid all this, however, one lovely thing happened today. I received a letter, seven pages long, which I stood and read in the Common Room among all the learned, qualified gentlemen drinking their tea, “an island entire of myself”. Just a missive from a light-haired girl with whom I am in love. Her name is Ingrid. It’s a pretty name, isn’t it? But she’s even more lovely than her name. And even though she kept on saying “Hm-hm, Chris, no Chris”, she did allow me to see how lovely she is. And then one night, in the hours after midnight, actually – but you won’t in any case believe me. Besides, one isn’t allowed to write such things, because there’s a Publications and Entertainments Act.

There were some other good moments too: the education department will be making a special appointment from July for someone to teach the diploma students grammar – and then it’ll finally be off my back. (It was always my greatest hell, even though it’s only been two periods a week this year.) In addition, our department’s going to get a typist and Rob said I can give her all my manuscripts for typing if I like. Thirdly, we had to decide on prescribed books for next year. Because I’m the one who deals with prose, Rob said that I couldn’t myself include Lobola – but he then offered to take over some of my lectures so that he can discuss it.

Usually I prescribe the third-year poetry volumes during the course of the year. I’m very tempted to find a place for Rook en Oker this year. Do you realise that as far as poetic form and character are concerned, it’s actually completely new in Afrikaans? I’m so impressed with you, and proud – as if it’s my own achievement!

Girl, what on earth do you mean by “loyalty”, or: “not being loyal”? I don’t know who said that to you. But either she doesn’t really know you, or she doesn’t know what “loyal” really implies. If it means that you must always “protect” someone you love, or a friend, or an acquaintance, because you don’t want to hurt them by being honest – then you should never be loyal. I said to you on our first night already (what does “first” or “second” or “third” night mean to us? – it was one moment that made three days timeless) that above all you are honest, and free. You must stay that way. But not in loneliness. I want – even though it must frequently be on paper only, from a distance – to wrap myself up in you: not to smother you, but to protect, and to shield you from the Southeaster.

For this reason you should also not be afraid that you, in the true words that you quoted from Lytton, will “pretend what you don’t feel or overestimate what you do feel”. Your honesty will not allow it. Just remember: one can also “underestimate”! And it’s just as wrong to underestimate a feeling or experience as to exaggerate it. I know how precious this lucid angoisse is with which I’ve been living over the past three weeks. (And you?) I know, too, that you won’t allow me to live in a state of illusion out of pity or consideration if things are no longer what they used to be – just as little as I would do this to you.

I can very well understand your hesitation after the many hurts you’ve suffered. “To love is to give a hostage to fate” goes one facile maxim which, like all sayings, announces a truth but also oversimplifies it. But getting hurt happens so often because one creates a particular image of, or for, the future, as if this trajectory, this “one day” is the most important thing of all. It is not. This is what seduces people into being false to each other, making promises for a “one day” over which they have no control. And that’s why what I offer – God, it’s very little, I know, but it’s so precious to me – is now. It’s not the fatalism of hedonism or whatever “ism”, maybe not even realism. But isn’t this, in the final analysis, all that we, as humans, can be certain about? And it’s a “now” that actually makes time less important. It might be days, or weeks, or years, or “for ever and ever”.

Why am I even writing this? You know it just as well as I do, don’t you? And isn’t that which we do have, can have (and, I hope, will have next week), not on its own wonderful enough? Precisely: wonder-ful, “in the shape of a wonder”. As people, we are an insect race upon the surface of the earth, my little Ingrid; we have so little; and we have little about which to feel proud. But what we do have – God, how beautiful it is. “There is only one thing that matters,” goes a quotation I remember vaguely, “and that is being together”.

Good night, my Ingrid. And allow me to do in my thoughts what the whole of me would like very much to do tonight.

Tuesday morning.

What does one do when a first-year comes and asks: “Sir, I have to go to class in a minute, but can you please tell me quickly: what is existentialism?”!

That, however, is more or less how my day began.

I held this letter back, in case the “severe”(?) letter you spoke about on the phone arrived this morning. But my postbox was quite empty. Miserere mei!

Meanwhile, yesterday’s lovely, lustrous letter is more than enough to keep me going.

I hope your work today isn’t as claustrophobic as usual. I’m living within such an open, free happiness today that it wouldn’t be right for you to feel alone or depressed.

Love to you, my fleet-footed child,

André.

Wednesday, 15 May 1963

THANK YOU FOR LETTER DUNCE PHONE ME TONIGHT LOOKING FORWARD TO SUNDAY LOVE = INGRID

Wednesday, 15 May 1963

Lovely little thing,

Your funny, moody, dearest jumbled-letter arrived today, at last. Thank you! From the inaudible telephone conversation, I’d expected much worse. And your fears, in any case, are unfounded. First of all, I’m coming alone, as you already know (and I do hope your backveld cousin’s room is close to yours). Secondly, the poem about the red rooster has nothing to do with us. I wanted mainly to protest against the fact that the church as an institution renders a life of passion powerless. Third: now you’re lashing me because I say “inspiration” might wane – while my words were simply an answer to your reference to “one day when the original inspiration has waned”: and I also said: it’s a lot more than “inspiration”. And it doesn’t all depend on my “Cape detour”: all I said was that this visit may determine whether or not I will continue writing poetry.

Beloved little minx, I don’t come to you because I expect certain things from you or because I’ve formed a certain image of you and want to “test” you! I come unquestioningly, because I love you, and because I want to leave it to the visit itself to determine what will happen. Satisfied?

The suspicious old aunties must just not undermine our plans. But that, in itself, might become quite a fun little game!

I don’t agree about my second name (which you spell incorrectly each time). “Brink” is actually Danish, apparently; but my original ancestor Andries came from Germany, somewhere around 1730. How, no one knows. All that’s known is that he was in fact here and took a wife and began his contribution to population growth. I like to imagine he was a stowaway who came hidden in a vat – and then sneaked out at night in his striped shirt and big bare feet, stealing an enormous joint of ham or a tin of rusks and a pitcher of water.

I feel a bit bleary-eyed this morning: had to get up four times last night for Anton, who sometimes absolutely refuses to sleep at night; then I had a class at eight. In the meantime I need to finish preparing the St’bosch lectures. The most important one, at least, is complete – for Tuesday evening. By the way, would you be able to drive with me to St’bosch on Tuesday after work? There might be a party afterwards. Then we can return together afterwards. Or do you have an aversion to such hoity-toity stuff? We can discuss this in one of the floral lounges, or in our single room, or in Simone’s double room. (So there!)

Rob will tell me tomorrow what he thinks about the book. Meanwhile, your silence – even though I know it isn’t intended as such – is ominous!

After our lovely autumn weather it began to get miserable today, with little gusts of wind, dry leaves, and occasional rain. It hems me in. I want to hit the road and come to your little spot of sun.

By the way – and please forgive the fact that this letter is jumping around so much – do you know this lovely poem by Erich Fried (“Traum vom Tod”)?:

Traum

Traum aus der Nacht

Traum aus der Nacht vor dem Tod

Traum aus der Nacht vor dem Tod einer Welt

einer Welt aus Angst vor dem Traum

Angst

Angst vor dem Traum

Angst einer Welt vor dem Traum

Angst einer Welt vor dem Traum vom Tod

vor dem Traum vom Tod aus der Nacht.

Talking about poems: do I still need to say what I think of Opperman’s opinion about “Begin Somer”? Opperman also rejected [Peter] Blum’s Enklaves van die Lig [Enclaves of Light] at one point. You’re in very good company! In his best work O. is brilliant, and he’s apparently an excellent lecturer. But as a critic I’ve never had much time for him.

“Visual sketch”? God! Eyes are becoming ever more important for artists. The most modern French novelists are above all concerned with eyes. For me, one of the nicest compliments on Lobola was when someone said it was overwhelmingly visual. And it’s one of the purest qualities of your work.

Padmini – that’s your name. It’s a Lotus girl. Or, if you will: it’s one of your names because naturally you should have many. Do you know the lovely start to Lolita? –

Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three stops down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta.

She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing four feet ten in one sock. She was Lola in slacks. She was Dolly at school. She was Dolores on the dotted line. But in my arms she was always Lolita.

And, whether you like it or not, your “central” name, for me, is “Ingrid”. Because, in the irrational manner of such things, I have always felt it to be a most beautiful name; it has a certain strangeness to it, a sense of distance that invites one always to want to find out more.

I’ll rather send this letter to Uys – because if it arrives there on Saturday, you’ll only get it on Monday. And then, soon after, I’ll also be arriving. As I’ve already said, I ask for nothing, demand nothing, set no conditions. I simply want to be with you. Because, little Padmini, I love you.

André.

Grahamstown

Thursday morning, 16 May 1963

Deeply loved Ingrid-Babsie-Jo!

It’s the crack of dawn and I’m sitting here writing to you. I.e. not yet nine o’clock. In fact, I sat myself down last night already to do so, but the thought of words on paper gave me cold feet after our quarter-hour on the phone. Thank you, my little child. (And then I still forgot to ask you who the “dunce” in your telegram refers to!)

I’m sorry you’re somewhat overwhelmed by people until you move in, tomorrow, with the ancients. I hope you don’t end up sleeping uncomfortably. You work so hard that you should at least get some rest at night.

I think I’ll just send the money in cash so you won’t have to deal with the problems of depositing and cashing a cheque etc. Don’t pay the old padrona the whole week’s fee (unless of course she insists on it) – just give her a deposit. Because if we do decide on a different course of action, as both of us more or less agreed last night – from Wednesday through to the weekend – it won’t be necessary to commit ourselves in advance. Before you get me wrong (!): I have nothing against the boarding house but if you have the day off on Thursday, it might be a lovely little escape for us if I could find us a place somewhere in St’bosch – or near the sea, outside Cape Town itself. Then I could bring you back in time for work on Friday and drop Simone (the French would say: Sisi) at her nursery school. If the weather’s good we must drive around, just for the hell of it, and get you some fresh air for a change. Ag man, I’m so looking forward to seeing you.

For this reason I’m sorry that you’ve now been burdened with worries about me – re gossip etc. Don’t let it upset you. God, my dear thing, there’s nothing that restricts one as much as other people’s opinions. I promise to be discreet. But I never want you to think we have no choice but to spend our time together like furtive crooks. Our lasting moment is too pure and valuable for that.

A weak little winter sun has made an appearance today but it’s still very cold. You must come with me, one day, and get a taste of Paris’s crystal-clear, brittle winter air. I’m glad you’re finding Pot-Pourri pleasant company – even if it means lying awake at night to read. One of my friends, who was reading it in hospital a while ago, had to stop because one of his stitches apparently popped out. (Now maybe your judgement of Die Koffer [The Suitcase], the one-hander based on ’n Reël Is ’n Reël [A Rule Is a Rule], will be less damning.)

Please regard this as just another of my “notes” – I have to dash off to the bank now if I want to get to Rob’s in time for feedback on my book; then, two classes – and only after that, breakfast. And finish typing the remaining half of a St’bosch lecture. Also, work on translating that book; it now seems I won’t be able to finish it off this week. And finish reading [Alain] Robbe-Grillet’s Voyeur (magnificent piece of work). Never a dull moment. But as you can see: not the kind of life in which much “happens” – except in one’s inner reactions, and these are subjective; to remain healthy, they need external nourishment. For this reason you mean what you do to me; and that’s why my little Cape escape is like an intake of air, a chunk of life that’s more than mere “existence”.

Till Sunday, darling,

André.

Grahamstown,

Monday, 27 May 1963

My darling little thing,

Dare I think about the fact that – and in what way – I was still with you yesterday afternoon this time (three-thirty)? Although I have “proof” enough (!), it makes no difference to the ache of longing. The drive yesterday afternoon wasn’t too bad, I was full of your presence and I couldn’t really believe I was “on my way”. This fact only hit me – very suddenly – when I arrived in Albertina last night at eight and discovered I was the only guest in the hotel. It wasn’t a Franschhoek kind of quiet – where there were at least some crickets outside, and your voice, or your deliciously sweet breathing in the crook of my arm; this was the absence of sound or life, pure and simple. There was only one solution – switch off the lights at nine and go to sleep. (Didn’t even take a bath, as I was reluctant to rid myself of your secrets.) And you? Did you sit and translate? Answer Simone’s questions? Skip supper and then get hungry for chocolate or bananas? Or was Chris there? I hope so.

This morning I hit the road at six. Despite the long sleep, I became so drowsy that for a while I had to stop every ten or twenty miles and do a quick jog or swing my arms around, just to shake off the tiredness and the sleepiness. But even so I was home by one. And then, with great dedication, I opened the Beckett and transplanted your beautiful little curl, along with the other strands of hair, into your big American book.

(My dearest, dearest thing, I can never say thank you enough for this book, not only because it’s so lovely in its own right but even more so because I know just how much it meant to you. It is the most precious gift I have ever received.)

I don’t yet want to begin “processing” our week together. At the moment I just want to feel completely happy, irrational, with everything still unsorted in my subconscious – words, sensory impressions, the look in your eyes, the movements of your delightful little body, your voice, promises, little games, tears, and all manner of “secrets”. This much I have never had. (Poor old Jan Cilliers [Jan F.E. Celliers] … he will never know what hit him.)

My god, girl, the two poems I brought back with me yesterday are among the very best in Rook en Oker. I’ve only just booked a call to Bartho to find out exactly when our books are appearing. I should have come to visit in early June after all – then we could have thrown a big party in your neat little flat.

And talking of that: as I arrived home I encountered a letter from the Akademie with news that, at first glance, took me by surprise. They’ve decided not to make the prize-giving coincide with the AGM, and so I no longer “have to” come to St’bosch on 29 June. But I quickly decided I would come down in any case – because by then I’ll have to finalise things with Koos [Human] about the MS. Perhaps the visit will be a week or so later than we first thought, but in that case there’s a good chance I might be able to stay a few days longer. Okay, loveliest being?

(Damn! The exchange just phoned to say the call will only come through at five-thirty, and by then Bartho’s no longer in his office. I’ll try again tomorrow.)

And now, will you have to deal with buses and things again from today on? Did you eventually find a nanny for Simone? Please take good care of our girl. She’s a cute little thing.

Lovely little tortoise, my head’s bursting. I must go take some pills and sit down so I can think about you. And about a time when we can be together; prise ourselves loose from constant bondage to time and haste; be peaceful – both of us writing, reading, conversing, or just being together in the many wonderful ways that will be open to us.

I’m sending you the only photo I have available. Looks a little sad, but beggars can’t be choosers. Hopefully I’ll be able to get the other ones within a week or two. Meanwhile, I await the little swallow’s nest and anything else you can dig up. The past week’s shots must first go off to Port Elizabeth for developing – but I’ll be sending some of them before too long. The one or two “personal” pictures among them I’ll develop myself, along with Christie [Roode], when I go to Potch in two or three weeks’ time. I should get the colour photos back in about two weeks.

Meanwhile … you probably know the enchanting letter that Mellors writes at the end of Lady Chatterley’s Lover:

You can’t insure against the future, except by really believing in the best bit of you, and in the power beyond it. So I believe in the little flame between us. For me now, it’s the only thing in the world … It’s my Pentecost, the forked flame between me and you … And if I can’t put my arms round you, yet I’ve got something of you. We fucked a flame into being. But it’s a delicate thing, and takes patience and the long pause.

So I love chastity now, because it is the peace that comes of fucking. I love being chaste now. And when the real spring comes, when the drawing together comes, then we can fuck the little flame brilliant and yellow, brilliant. But not now, not yet! Now is the time to be chaste, it is so good to be chaste, like a river of cool water in my soul.

Thank you, thank you, darling. For your fire and your quiet, your restlessness and your rest, for your maturity and for the child that lives inside you.

I’m sending a little kiss for my naked little purse.

And I love you.

André.

Monday, 27 May 1963

My André,

I had a genuine longing this afternoon to walk in the Gardens, as all good (female) Afrikaans writers have done before. Went and lay flat on my back on one of the lawns in the winter sun and I can’t describe to you the feeling of happiness, consciousness and revelation that possessed me – as if for 28 (?) years I was kept small and bright and intact against all the attacks and all the compromises I had to ward off – that there was a meaning in it (maybe temporary? But still!) and that I am so glad now – the feeling that a virginal bride should have! And I thought about your generosity and I really would not have been surprised if you were next to me and asked me for a cigarette. Unfortunately neither a person nor life itself is that simple … Thank you for your telegram, my love … Anne nodded approvingly when she read over my shoulder … “Saved by grace …” So where did you sleep and was it horrible? What time did you arrive in the Athens of the North?

The doctor visited yesterday afternoon – Simone is in tip-top health and I could take her to school (my/our landlady, by the way, is very kind and was accommodating when I told her Simone was sick, etc.). Funny, hey? She almost died laughing. Then she said she would look after Simone. It ended up not being necessary – we left in the drab dawn – laughing and stumbling – and the old “dame” at the school said this afternoon I only have to pay for one week – so I paid for her for 1½.

Simone told the people here in the small sitting room: Fee fo … fum … I smell the blood of an Englishman … They asked her whether she knows what an Englishman is and she said: “Yes, Jack [Cope] …” This child!

So, Chris came yesterday afternoon – we sat in the sitting room and had tea with all the old people: then went and bought a chocolate cake on this dreary day; sliced some of it and ate but I couldn’t tell him … didn’t want to … maybe later. He sends his regards. We chatted about you and later I read your lecture again and also some of Die Ambassadeur. Had a bath, slept … for ten solid hours.

I pick up not a book and see not a thing, but everything speaks to me even for e.g. “die huis waar Hans en Grietjie by die heks / voorloping argloos en luilekker woon”. But I miss you, blindly too.

Love darling,

I.

Good night. Just got back from Jan and company – do the thing you dream – he, especially, hints and teases – also as if I am a man-eater – but friendly, actually – hot from running, had to go back in my blue pyjamas (with a jersey over them) to fetch my coat, which I’d left behind.

… die bloed gestort op ons mooiste oomblikke,

Die bloed van die vrygewigheid,

Dra jou met verrukking.

…

ek het jou lief om te sing

Van die geheim waar die liefde my skep en homself bevry.

Jy is rein, jy is nog reiner as ekself.

I get out of the unholy bath and now all the “secrets” are definitely gone!

I.