For more than fifty years, André Philippus Brink – or André Brink, as he is known internationally – was one of South Africa’s most talented, prolific and challenging authors. Brink, who died in February 2015 at age 79, was a born-and-bred Afrikaner who embodied some of the best qualities of a people WA de Klerk once called the ‘puritans in Africa’1 Thrifty, hardworking and prolific, Brink was also cultivated and genial. He had excellent manners, a legendary sense of humour, and he carried himself gracefully. During the apartheid era, Brink played the role of dissident with distinction, despite enduring harassment from the Security Branch (SB) of the police, also known as the Special Branch. This is an author who wrote 24 novels and scores of other works, including plays, nonfiction, translations, literary and art criticism, and journalism. He came close to winning the Nobel Prize for Literature in both 1982 and 1991, when he was at the peak of an international career, with his novels translated into over 30 languages; the same appears to have been the case in 1999.2 Brink was compared to writers such as Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Gabriel García Márquez and Peter Carey. He had the distinction of being the first Afrikaans novelist whose work was banned outright by the apartheid government – the case in point being Kennis van die Aand (Looking on Darkness). The novel exposed his own people – who developed existing segregation laws, going so far as to legislate discrimination – as hypocrites whose leaders spoke the language of ‘separate but equal’ even as their Security Branch tortured and killed political dissidents.3 Brink’s battles with censorship were integral to the reputation he developed as an internationally respected author who wrote in two languages, using both art and argument to challenge racial oppression. He did this fearlessly, and at some cost, over many years.
Like all biographies, this is a narrative that has a certain shape in the way it arranges the material under its purview. Since it is simply not possible to write an account of an individual life that is both complete and exhaustive, all biography – and autobiography – is fated to be an approximation. If the biographer is fortunate enough to find a thread to follow in unravelling the ‘real’, a pattern, or a set of patterns, may emerge, suggestive of a larger, though essentially elusive, human life.
Writing a biographical narrative of an author such as André Brink is even more intricate because this is a writer who kept detailed journals over a period of 52 years, starting in his final year of school, in 1952. If these handwritten journals were published as separate books, they would come close to filling an average-sized bookshelf. The biographer’s task is to sort the wheat from the chaff, and to uncover significant patterns, themes and events. Moreover, the biographer reads ‘ego documents’ (such as journals and diaries) both analytically and sceptically, ‘against’ the known facts, within the appropriate social and intellectual context, and in relation to other accounts, too.
The Brink journals read with fluency and fluidity, and although Brink at times resorts to a telegrammatic style, using his own shorthand, there is nothing careless or clumsy about his writing. Unusually, the journals employ fictional techniques such as dialogue, foreshadowing, flashbacks, and the arrangement of events in a temporal frame. So, for example, Brink will often begin a journal entry by stating that much has happened in the days or weeks since he last reported, then hint at its content; the first-person voice acts as a guide, providing details of scene and setting, as well as dialogue and commentary. Moments of self-reflection are often profoundly revelatory, even confessional. Brink’s widely acknowledged photographic memory, together with his remarkable ability to produce instant, well-rounded prose, means that the capture of his own life as it unfolds is often compelling; the journals create a kind of ‘master narrative’ with which the biographer wrestles, or contends.
In his commitment to recording his experiences of the outside world, Brink does not spare himself. He will often undercut himself, showing a complexity of thought that diverges into multiple and contradictory directions as he argues or debates with himself. It is as if he concedes that no one mind can grasp the whole truth of any matter in a single thrust, or otherwise he is simply unable – or unwilling – to pin things down, including uncomfortable truths. Crucially, though, Brink is less concerned with how he ‘reads’, as he writes, than he is about playing out, in writing, a comprehensive set of possibilities. Although he appears to be journalling for himself, there are subtle indications of an awareness of other eyes – possibly those of posterity – falling upon his pages. A case in point is an entry in his 2002 journal, in which he assures a lover that he has already begun blacking out certain material in his journal ‘to prove to you that I won’t ever betray you, not even after my death’.4 This comes after the lover herself apparently raised the possibility that ‘something might happen’ to Brink and compromising material may then surface in his ‘papers’.5 Posterity looms large in the minds of both, perhaps, signalling an awareness of Brink’s global standing: there is the assumption that Brink’s ‘papers’ will be posthumously scrutinised by scholars and researchers.
Brink’s phenomenal powers of recall facilitate detailed reporting, giving the journals a high reliability score, both in their range of coverage and the depth of personal revelations they contain. In many cases, Brink dramatises the ambivalence he feels about certain matters – most conspicuously the women in his life. In the actual moment of journalling, his need was to wrestle with his own, unedited, conflicting impulses. His tendency was to reflect on situations and motivations, possibilities and opportunities. I have attempted to retain the narrative texture – the inconclusiveness and circularity – of Brink’s life-in-writing, as it happened. Life in the raw does not have the economy of narrative. And so I have allowed the journalled-life-as-it-was-lived, in some cases, to reveal its whorled, unorganised shape, or shapelessness.
In the moment of journalling, whether in the heat of anticipation and desire, or the chill of doubt or anxiety, Brink’s prime concern seems to have been to explore and convey the truth of his thoughts and feelings. The journal was his ultimate place of safety, the blank page his most trusted redoubt. It was the place where he might prove to himself that he was indeed the persona he projected in his doings, consolidating and confirming his experiences. Similar to Edna O’Brien’s version of James Joyce, who ‘committed his most secret impulses to paper both as testament and liberation’, Brink boldly wrote his own truth about himself and those around him, and, like Joyce, he made no attempt to destroy this testament, though he had ample opportunity to do so.6
An example of the self-reckoning one finds in Brink’s journalling is an entry relating to the frustration he felt with Hermione Harris, his now-willing, now-unwilling sweetheart in the mid-1960s, during a holiday with Breyten and Yolande Breytenbach in Ponta do Ouro, Mozambique. Brink describes his ‘furious outburst’ amid trying travelling conditions and Hermione’s alleged sexual withdrawal from him:
[T]his viciousness in me is something I have seen before, especially with Ingrid, and in each case, it’s when I begin to fear we’re no longer pulling together. The world is just too hard for two people who aren’t fully at one. And when that happens, I turn it into a perverse kind of test: OK, so you want to hold yourself back? In that case, I’ll show you I can be so bitter that you won’t dare to be fond of me (my own, touchy self-defence). I’ll behave in a cutting & cruel manner; but if you see only destructiveness in this, you’ll be making a big mistake; if you see how the destructiveness is born of fearful, injured love, then we might make it through the swamp. This perverse sadism in me can become completely destructive.7
Here, Brink anatomises one of his more dubious character traits, excoriating himself, although such admissions were, paradoxically, one of his strengths. Generally, his descriptions are doubtlessly skewed by various factors, not least his desire to present himself to himself – and ultimately to others – in a positive light. Indeed, he tended to veer between castigating and congratulating himself, and so his narratives about himself, more generally, might best be read with some caution. In addition, Brink’s extensive and detailed descriptions of sex tend to emphasise his ‘mastery’ over women; this form of writing seems almost compulsive in his diary entries, although his self-assurance became noticeably shaky in the early 2000s, when the journalling tailed off, and finally came to an end in 2004. The repeated assertions of sexual mastery raise difficult questions, both about Brink’s character and the reliability of his journal-writing.
And yet the journals remain an alluring source because this was the only place where Brink, for the most part, stripped away the social masks he invariably donned, behind which a more complex, less self-assured, and to some extent embattled personality lay.
When, in 2015, I first conceived of writing a biography of André Brink, I foresaw a work that would concentrate more specifically on the formal aspects of Brink’s narrative style. However, after Brink’s widow, Karina Szczurek, allowed me access to the journals, and I sat with them for several months, it seemed especially important to write a book that revealed Brink’s most urgent concerns, based on his own record of self-apprehension. What I did was to follow, where possible, the journals’ most obvious, and most urgently expressed, self-storying, thereby feeding into what has always been a major genre in South African literature, namely life writing. Readers could then discern the critical emphases, and where these lay for Brink himself as he wrote up his own experiences. I have also attempted to prise open the accompanying literary works, mediating their meaning, range, reception and more general significance.
Diane Wood Middlebrook, author of Anne Sexton: A Biography, says of her book: ‘In the art of biography … there is an arrogance on the part of the living, thinking they can give the total view of a person’s life. I wanted to present Sexton in her own complicated terms.’8 Brink’s journals, a delicate, detailed capture of an extraordinary life, comprise almost daily reflections on his personal experiences. The intimate revelations that result from this writing underpin my own narrative, guiding it in its exploration of Brink’s extremes of self-validation and self-critique. The writing process has required judicious selection of material from the journals, on the basis of patterns that appeared to emerge. I have tried not to overshadow the voice of the journals, allowing André Brink himself to be heard, as never before, as the story of his inner life evolves over half a century or so. In that sense, this book mediates Brink’s own interpretations of himself, or what he thought he was actually about. Of course, as an engaged reader-writer, it is impossible not to form opinions and occasionally to comment, if only to add cultural and scholarly context. When comments of an evaluative nature are made, they are done so tentatively, as mere suggestions. My goal throughout has been to gain an informed understanding of André Brink and his works, an influential author who was also a complex, and self-complicating, individual. To quote Middlebrook again: ‘What the biographer owes the subject is very like what the psychoanalyst owes the analysand upon encounter with hidden material: not judgment, but insight.’9
Brink’s heretofore ‘hidden hoard’, his journals, contain much in the way of philosophical and literary reflection, anecdote, political thought, progress reports on writing projects, and news re daily events. However, there can be no doubt that the most intense and exhilarating – indeed, exhilarated – writing is to be found in Brink’s love-and-sex entries. Both the tone and the seriousness of their content tend, for the most part, to elevate their telling to the status of noteworthy biographical detail, though some of the especially explicit sex descriptions have been redacted for reasons of prudence and tact. Very often, though, Brink’s descriptions of his erotic experiences demonstrate key tendencies in his self-modelling and illustrate the intermeshing of his journalling with his novel-writing. A critic writing in the esteemed London Literary Review in the early 2000s described one of Brink’s novels as ‘a porn video of memories played by an old man clinging to the last vestiges of virility’ – and Brink himself as a ‘pudendologist’.10 Brink’s risqué descriptions are possibly the most frequently criticised element in his novels, and they find a clear correlative in his journalling, where sexual love is an abiding preoccupation – a lifelong love song.
Reading the journals alongside the novels reveals a complex set of common concerns, quite apart from the personal pleasure Brink seems to experience in journalling about his sexual exploits. Most significantly, Brink coins the term ‘literarisering’ (‘literarising’) to convey the manner in which his writing – in both his journals and his novels – re-envisions and recreates the women he loves, unencumbered and untainted by banal, mundane concerns. This notion is key to an understanding of both his life and his work. Throughout Brink’s adult life, the promise of sexual love was his lodestar. He found a lifelong credo in Lawrence Durrell’s assertion that ‘love is a form of metaphysical enquiry’ – and it infuses his own writing in all its forms. This biography examines the delicate dance of Brink’s journalling, his life, and his writing, in a respectful recognition of the relationship between all three. In this sense, the biography may be said to complete the circle in our understanding of a complex writer and his work.
In February 1957, when young Brink was reading a book about existentialism and making notes on the philosophy of Martin Heidegger, Jean-Paul Sartre and Gabriel Marcel, he paraphrased Marcel as follows: ‘Love is the opening of one human to another and, as such, it provides access to the greater love of God. In love, humans transcend themselves.’11 This notion would become a leitmotif for Brink. Ten years later, having embraced existentialism, and while suffering a bout of depression, he would write: ‘Nee, wat, in the end the matter of love is still my domain.’12 His own stripping away of religion meant that human, sexual love was all he had left as a core philosophy. More pertinently, he came to base his entire sense of existence on an elevated conception of sexual union, in which he found a form of transcendence. On a day-to-day level, his need to live via love was such that he could not bear to be alone, neither in time (in many cases, not even for a single evening) nor in space (he needed always to be with the woman he loved, in conversational and sexual proximity).
In addition, his own sexual questing, from Ingrid Jonker onwards, was largely a rebellion against the law of the Calvinist fathers. As such, and as transformed into transgressive storytelling in his early novels in particular, Brink’s writing broke the shackles of traditional Afrikaans literature and was acutely meaningful to a new generation of readers and writers. Marita van der Vyver, for example, would, after Brink’s death, recall how amazed she was when, as a young woman, she read the ‘naughty passages’ in The Ambassador (1963), realising that it was possible to ‘write like this in Afrikaans’.13 Many might say that Brink helped to liberate an entire generation, providing models for personal and political behaviour that defied Calvinism and complicity with apartheid ideology.
Given the above, and in view of the fact that Brink has bequeathed to posterity his detailed memoir, A Fork in the Road, this book does not try to retell the more familiar, conventional Brink story. Instead, this biography comprises largely a selection and mediation of details from Brink’s journals – often relating to lacunae in his memoir, namely, his five marriages and his various affairs – in order to construct a kind of ‘inside story’ of an extraordinary and highly influential South African life. Brink holds nothing back, writing with confidence and candour, and at times regret and self-doubt, about his life and the women he loved. As suggested above, this is self-writing that often shows him in a less-than-shimmering light – Brink is not performing or monumentalising a self here for public consumption, as he did to some extent in A Fork in the Road. Instead, he is trying, in the immediate aftermath of experience, and in the heat of conflict, or desire, to work out for himself who and what he is as an individual.
When, for whatever reason, the journals fall silent – during the 1990s, and again in the post-2000 period – I have relied more heavily on conventional biographical methods and materials such as interviews, press clippings, letters, reviews and critical readings of published work. Always, I aim to trace the major events in Brink’s career as a writer, his public life, and the life of the country to which he was so dedicated – taking a critical stand firstly against the South Africa of his volksvaders, and later the postapartheid ‘New South Africa’ of its liberators. I have devoted almost three full chapters to events in the 1960s, while other important phases in his life receive, for the most part, single-chapter treatment. It was during the 1960s that Brink’s journal writing was most dense and full, and this was also the time – running into the 1970s – when the author, who described himself as a ‘suitor, romantic, troubador’,14 made his early explorations in a lifelong quest for sexual-romantic freedom and fulfilment.
The first two 1960s chapters (‘Ingrid Jonker and the Early 1960s: The Word Become Flesh’, and ‘From Angoisse to Anguish’) cover the Ingrid Jonker story and its aftermath, which Brink narrates in a highly detailed manner, revealing content that was previously obscure, not even appearing in the correspondence published as Flame in the Snow. Those letters mostly fall silent around actual details – the inside story – of what transpired when the lovers spent time together, since their communications occurred after the event; the details of what in fact occurred were taken as read. In the letters, too, Brink is mostly performing his love for Jonker, often with a literary flourish. In the journal, however, he is talking to himself about just how conflicted he feels, how difficult things are, and how bad he feels about it all. Of course, he also writes about how good things are, reporting with relish on the sex he enjoys with Ingrid, mentioning, for example, their landmark ‘fiftieth fuck’.
Brink believed, with Camus, that the only way to deal with an unfree world is to make one’s very existence an act of rebellion. The novelist lived his life in the spirit of Camus, yoking together a sense of iconoclastic freedom – primarily, political and sexual licence – with the questing, yet vulnerable, adventurousness of Don Quixote, another of his literary heroes. Brink’s life and his books seem to flow through one another, as his fictional characters replay, or foreshadow, actual experience. His complex career comprises a kind of life/writing braid, one that The Love Song of André P Brink seeks to unravel and re-weave.
A note on the use of tenses in this book: when Brink was writing Die Ambassadeur (The Ambassador), which first appeared in 1963, he initially planned to entitle it ‘Teenwoordige Tyd Onvoltooid’ (literally ‘present tense incomplete’, i.e. the historical present tense).15 Brink’s ‘present tense incomplete’ captures the underlying sense in The Ambassador – and, more generally, in Brink’s existentialist credo – that the only thing one ever possesses entirely is the present moment, always contingent and without any assurance of completion or arrival, whether religious or otherwise. Brink was in the process of developing his own, secular ‘religion’ of sex, but the most that such a ‘faith’ could offer was a fleeting sense of transcendence. The present tense is therefore more than just a mode of writing for Brink, it is an approximation of the living moment in its most intense, meaningful – and ephemeral – form. In his journals, Brink makes consistent use of the historical present tense (historiese teenwoordige tyd), and for the sake of immediacy, and to convey the urgency of his journalling, the present tense is used here wherever Brink speaks directly to the reader via his journal. When the narrative arc so demands, The Love Song of André P Brink switches to the past tense, though it re-enters the historical present as Brink resumes the drama of his ‘present tense incomplete’ existence in his journalling.
Finally, regarding the identity of persons in Brink’s life, pseudonyms are used in cases where it is necessary to protect privacy. His widow is referred to as Karina Brink, though as a writer she is known as Karina Magdalena Szczurek or Karina M Szczurek. This biography has relied on the generosity of many whose own stories have added truth and texture to the life of André P Brink, voices that are interwoven with the writer’s own.