CHAPTER 1

LIFE-WRITING, LOVE-WRITING

André Brink’s late-adolescent life forms the main focus of this chapter, in particular his final school-year in 1952, when he began his journal, and following that, his university years in Potchefstroom. It was during Brink’s last year at Hoërskool Lydenburg that he embarked on a continuous narrative of his life, journalling about what he was doing and, crucially, what he was feeling. The inveterate writer would continue his copious self-reporting until the early 2000s, that is, for a period of over 50 years. Brink’s 1950s journals – in conjunction with statements he made in later years – point to key elements of his early psychic development. In dealing with such material, this chapter occasionally breaks the chronological mould, but then returns to its observation of the subject’s development over time.

Brink’s first journal launches what would eventually become a massive collection of personal ‘life-writing’. There are 43 separate journals of differing sizes, yielding a total of 980 000 words.1 Given that the average length of a published novel is about 90 000 words, Brink journalled the equivalent of 11 novels, almost half his entire fictional output (24 novels). He did all his journal-writing in a fluid hand with few corrections. The journals are therefore a major, previously unknown, element in Brink’s oeuvre. They begin with a youthful, elegant and easily legible script in 1952, progressing to what eventually became a hard-to-read scrawl in the final volume in 2004.

The inaugural dagboek (diary) in this mammoth series concentrated on two main areas: first, the keenly competitive 17-year-old André would record, in a precise and conscientious manner, notable details of his achievements in school and extramural activities, such as piano, running, and painting; then, once he had dealt with these intellectual, creative and physical pursuits, he would give himself over to matters of the heart, pouring out professions of love in lyrical prose. In general, he was keenly optimistic. From his earliest years, Brink displayed a bright, enthusiastic temperament that alternated with bouts of mostly private misery. He was susceptible to deep insecurity when things seemed to be going awry. Always, he displayed what Frederich Nietzsche called the ‘will to power’, or the realisation of one’s hopes and desires in the world. And what André Brink most wanted was to realise his ambitions, to succeed both in writing and in love.

For Brink, these two domains did not stand apart. As we shall see, the novelist and playwright often felt more secure – and more ‘real’ – when writing about actual experiences he had. What stands out, though, from the start of the existence of his narrated self, is how seamlessly life-writing meshes with love-writing in the case of André Brink. The journals, which by any measure constitute an exceptional record, compulsively develop into a libidinally charged account of Brink’s developing relationship with women, in whom he would find sustenance and a boundless source of excitement – though it was often more the idea, the anticipation, than the actual person that thrilled him. In his final school year, when he was just 17 years old, Brink would fixate on a girl he called ‘Martie’, but this beloved turned out to be something of a phantom. He would never actually meet her in the flesh, he changed her name to his own liking, and he was uncertain about not only her age, but her very appearance. Nevertheless, this did not stop Brink from enveloping ‘Martie’ in a cloud of lyricism. In the words of one of his later novelistic protagonists, Brink soon proved to be the kind of person who ‘very much need[ed] to be in love’.2 For him, the physical absence of the loved one was easily remedied by writing her into the shape he desired or imagined. In addition, the 17-year-old’s avowals of love were bolstered with borrowings from Romantic poets such as John Keats and Percy Bysshe Shelley. Brink’s tendency to ‘write up’ rather than ‘do’ love would continue through most of the 1950s. It was only when the young writer met Ingrid Jonker in the early 1960s that the actual doing would catch up, in an acceleration that beggars belief, despite considerations of his severe sexual repression up until then.

As indicated above, Brink’s journalling in the 1950s is foundational to the story that follows, so the more conventional biographical focus on the author’s early years will be slightly foreshortened here. Since Brink himself tells the story of his childhood in his memoir, A Fork in the Road,3 it may seem unnecessary to repeat such material in any great detail here. Nevertheless, a reprise of the author’s early childhood and upbringing, as told by Brink in his memoir and his journals, among other sources, is provided below.

André Philippus Brink was born on 29 May 1935 in Vrede in what was then the Orange Free State. He was the eldest of Aletta and Daniël Brink’s four children. As a magistrate, Daniël Brink was transferred from town to town in the Orange Free State, the northern Cape Province and the former Transvaal. André therefore grew up and attended school in a series of small South African towns: Vrede, Jagersfontein, Brits, Douglas, Sabie and Lydenburg. After he matriculated, his parents moved on to Bothaville and then finally to Potchefstroom, where they retired. Brink’s siblings are brother Johan (the youngest, a physicist), along with sisters Marita (a psychologist) and Elsabe, the second-eldest, known as the author Elsabe Steenberg, who died in 1998. Brink’s mother was a teacher, and both his parents read avidly, such that the novelist’s childhood was, as he recalls, ‘awash with books’; both parents ‘worshipped’ Shakespeare, and Brink’s mother also loved Dickens and the Brontës,4 despite the fact that as traditional Afrikaners the Brinks were not overly enamoured of English influences in South African history and politics more generally.5

Brink writes suggestively in A Fork in the Road about the violence, both hidden and outright, of small towns such as those where he grew up, revealing what he calls a ‘surplus of violence’.6 This ranges from harm that is ‘muted and obscure’ and ‘domestic in scope’, such as the local dominee (parson) beating up his wife behind closed doors, to incidents of severe and gratuitous interracial brutality.7 So thoroughgoing is the culture of hurt and harm that even canings by the principal at school led to pupils gathering behind the toilets to show off their injuries – and ‘anything less than blood was scoffed at’.8 Brink goes on to describe a girl called Elise, whose father was a police sergeant, leading him to a spot where they could crouch down to listen to the sound of blows being inflicted on youths who had been sentenced to physical punishment (by Brink’s father, who, he reports, never spoke about such things at home).

In such cases, the youth sentenced to a beating would be brought to the police station, which was on a corner of a large plot of land where the magistrate’s house was also situated. The youth was then taken into a corrugated-iron shed and stripped naked. Four policemen held him face-down on a narrow table. Ominously, a district surgeon was in attendance. After the beating, the door opened and the naked youth would stagger out, running this way and that, ‘like a decapitated chicken’. Brink recalls: ‘How [Elise] laughed – even though I think, in retrospect, that there was hysteria in that laughter, a touch of madness.’ In one such incident she ‘was so worked up that she actually lifted her blue dress, her eyes unnaturally and feverishly bright, to show me that she’d pee’d herself’.9

Violence, by all accounts, was a kind of social and individual grammar that one might parse in various ways. One of the most significant moments in Brink’s childhood relates to the role his father played in an incident of racial cruelty. Daniël Brink embodied the law: ‘He was the magistrate. He was second only to God. He knew all about Right and Wrong, about Good and Evil.’10 And yet, in a manner typical of childhoods spent in South Africa, right and wrong, and good and evil, soon became hard to distinguish from each other. One day, Brink recounts, a black man stumbled into their backyard, blood streaming from a gash in his head. The man was ‘reeling and staggering as if drunk’.11 He had been assaulted, and his face looked as if ‘it had been battered completely out of shape and then put through a mincer’. Brink had been practising hitting a tennis ball against a wall of the house. His father was out playing tennis, as he did on Saturdays. The mangled man fell to the ground and came to rest with his back against a wall, asking to speak with the ‘Baas’.

Brink crouched in front of the man and tried to talk to him, shaken to his core. But the real shock was his father’s reaction when he returned from tennis. The magistrate ignored the bleeding figure and went into the house as if nothing had happened. When his son came running after him, begging him to do something, Daniël Brink stiffly reminded André that it was Saturday. The hurt man should come back on Monday. A weeping André persisted, and his father promised to look into the matter once he had taken a shower. When the fresh and clean magistrate (‘second only to God’) eventually emerged, he quickly sized up the situation, saying to the bloodied supplicant: ‘You must go to the police. There is nothing I can do for you. It is not my work.’ The man replied: ‘I been to the police the first time. They beat me some more. So now I come to you.’ But the magistrate insisted: go to the police. And then he walked away, leaving the man, and his son, with no answer. Brink writes:

In at least two of my books I have written about this episode, hoping to exorcise the memory. But it is no use. It still haunts me … And I don’t think it is an exaggeration to say that the world has never been quite the same place as before. My father not quite the same man. Something shifted. The centre no longer held.12

Of course, this is a much older Brink writing, though one might also read this as an explanation of his tendency to paint lurid scenes of violence, especially in A Chain of Voices. Significantly, what the mature writer glosses over in his memoir, with its wide-ranging scope and impressionistic style, is just how long it would take the younger Brink to see, or fully articulate for himself, that the ‘centre no longer held’.13 Brink’s political awakening was in fact a very slow process, signs of which are, however, detectable during his university years at Potchefstroom, despite his fervent loyalty then to the volk (the Afrikaner people) and the Afrikaner cause. The real break would come as the staid 1950s turned into the volatile 1960s, but it was never going to be an easy or seamless process.

Brink does not absolve himself in his memoir from complicity in violence, although his own reported manifestations of aggressive behaviour occur in childhood games. In one example, young André ‘falls in love’ with an 11-year-old girl called Driekie, who happens to be the dominee’s daughter. Soon enough, he finds himself playing ‘school’ in the garage with her and his sister Elbie, who is in the same class as Driekie, and several other children. Brink, who estimates he was at the time ‘about thirteen’, plays the teacher. He discovers that his chief concern in this game is to dish out punishment with a ‘sturdy but supple green switch I had cut from a pepper tree’; he does this, he says, because it is the only way he can think of to ‘get close to Driekie’.14

Brink canes Elbie on the hand, hard enough to bring her to the verge of tears. Driekie is the next one to be summoned by teacher André for corporal punishment. She refuses to hold out her hand; also, she is ‘adamant that she would absolutely not bend over’, so Brink canes her on her ‘bare legs’. She then lets out a ‘thin reedy wail’, and the eager teacher aims another stroke at her thigh, but she ‘avoided it, kicked over the chair she had been sitting on, and scurried to the far side of the teacher’s table’, upon which an ‘undignified scuffle’ ensued.15 That, of course, was the end of André’s romantic prospects with Driekie. Many years later, from the perspective of a 74-year-old, Brink writes that he still feels unsettled by ‘the amount of unresolved violence there must have been in me at the time’, and how this was related to ‘the angry world that surrounded me’.16

It is tempting to suggest that the ‘unresolved violence’ in the 13-year-old Brink was related to early forms of erotic engagement, and to an inner desire to impose control on an intractable outer world. Much later in his life, at the age of 65, Brink would undergo psychotherapy, with his psychologist suggesting that his mother’s ‘abandoning’ or ‘forsaking’ of him for a period, owing to illness, when he was very young (baie klein), was ‘one of the roots of [Brink’s] problem’.17 The ‘problem’ thus acknowledged was manifest and complex, having to do with the writer’s relations with women and his recurring restlessness in this regard, but one of its chief elements was what Brink himself identified, in his notes on the psychotherapy sessions, as ‘my old, and all-conquering tendency: the fear of chaos, of losing control’.18 His therapist suggested that several ‘interruptions’ in Brink’s infancy had led to a foundational insecurity and a compulsive need to impose control; of special significance were his mother’s ‘forsaking’ of her son when he needed her most, and the sound of his father’s footsteps that once broke up a childhood lovemaking attempt, an episode that is dealt with below.

Another aspect of Brink’s ‘problem’, his inner shakiness, is strongly related to his father’s perceived status as ‘absent’ and unyielding,19 making Brink’s relationship with him prickly right up to the magistrate’s death. For example, soon after Brink turned 40 in 1975, he was invited by Bram Fischer’s daughters to deliver the oration at the anti-apartheid advocate’s funeral in Bloemfontein. Brink was all set to do this, but his father committed an act of emotional blackmail to prevent André from gracing Fischer’s funeral. Daniël Brink threatened to cancel a doctor’s appointment, perceived as critical to his failing health, unless his son declined the invitation – a ruse Brink says he was ‘never able to forgive’. In the end, friends of Brink took his oration to Bloemfontein, and he stayed away.20

Years later, in 1993, Brink would describe how, at a frail-care centre in Potchefstroom, he almost smothered his father to death with a pillow in an act of violent mercy. The once-magisterial Daniël Brink was by then 88 years old and trapped in a coma after a series of strokes. When his 58-year-old son came to visit him one day, he witnessed the spectacle of his once-proud father lying in his own excrement, insensible to the world: ‘Reduced to just a body. A soiled body. Not even a body, a wretched little bundle of bones covered by skin. Curled up like a foetus, wholly defenceless and miserable, moaning almost inaudibly as [the nurses] handled him with brusque efficiency.’21 Brink continues:

It was the indignity, more than anything else, that overwhelmed me. Even at times when we had found it hard to communicate, even when there were great distances between us, I had always been in awe of his gravity, his composure, his quiet dignity: the very fact of being unable to reach out and touch him, had always confirmed that he was someone special, someone literally set apart. And all that dignity had now been eroded, broken down to this pathetic little bundle of skin and bones, mercilessly exposed to the eyes of the world.

I still don’t know how it happened. But at a given moment I found myself standing over him with his pillow in my hands, preparing to push it down on his face. He might put up a struggle, brief and weak, I knew, but then he would succumb, and it would all be over. I could not bear it any longer. I was sure that if I were to ask him and he could respond, he would beg me to help him out of this into the peace of death.22

The reason Brink then gives for not smothering his father, is most revealing:

I think, now, that if our love had been straightforward and uncomplicated, I would probably have gone through with it. For his sake. To make it easier for him. To rid him of his pain and of the indignity. But if I had done it, it would also, at least to some extent, have been for myself. Because I could no longer take it. There might even have been bitterness in it. Resentment. Or shame. Perhaps, however preposterous it might seem, revenge. For what had not been accomplished between us. For what, between father and son, had not happened, had not been said. And all of these impulses made it impossible to go through with the deed.23

The fact that Brink still felt unresolved feelings about his father when he himself was nearly 60 years old, is suggestive; the trauma of separation from his mother when he was an infant, and his subsequent inability to reconcile with his father, marked him in significant ways.

Brink’s ever-growing attachment to his mother after her return from illness seems to have been deeply emotional. In an unpublished document, Brink writes as follows:

We had many spectacular fights in my childhood and youth – I probably have much more of my mother’s temperament than of my father’s: her impulsiveness and emotionality … her often reckless humour, her tendency to exaggerate and to lie, her love of the arts, be it music or literature or painting. But when we were not fighting, we could have frank and endless conversations. Even in my student years, when I was home on holiday, I would love creeping into her bed in the mornings to talk about absolutely everything that fascinated or interested or worried or challenged me, from Shakespeare to sex, from politics to poetry, from love to libraries…. I couldn’t stand her when she sulked, and loved her when she laughed; I got furious when she snapped at my father, and forgave her when she embraced him…. All in all, she was the home in which I sheltered, the hearth where I could warm myself, the wind that blew my cobwebs away, the sun I basked in, the womb that gave me life.24

It should hardly be surprising, in view of the above, that Brink’s many adventures with a great number of women replayed several of the elements in the description above: fights followed by reconciliations, with the reward of ‘endless conversations’; also, he was regularly given to conflicting or ambivalent feelings, ranging from dislike to adoration, fury to forgiveness. The extent to which Brink himself ‘exaggerated and lied’ is not clear – his existentialist commitment to naked honesty may have worked against any such tendency; Brink’s professed commitment to an ‘authorial standard of truth’, however, was perceived by some as theatrical, and therefore dubious.25 At the same time, it is clear from the journals that Brink clandestinely read many of his lovers’ private diaries and letters. Among these was Ingrid Jonker’s personal diary; the letters of his second wife, Salomi (which he opened and read before posting them for her, even censoring one); the personal writings of his fourth wife; and journal-writing by his long-term love, Hermione.

Such cloaked activity might be laid at the door of his self-confessed tendency to be a ‘control freak’, which term he approvingly referenced in relation to himself after a visit to a ‘psychologist, astrologist, [and] healer’ in 2002.26 His urge to control was, arguably, a primal response to the fear of not being able to secure his mother’s approval, which was generally withheld – he would tell his psychotherapist in 2000-2001 that she drove him relentlessly to perform at school (‘I could never study enough’), causing a ‘craving that I had to get her approval, always’.27 In his notes on the psychotherapy sessions, Brink observed that this abrasive dynamic with his mother caused a great deal of rancour (wrok), and that he transferred his overbearing need for female sanction to his wives, especially his fourth wife (whom I have called Marianne).28

Although Brink was alienated from his father, and despite emotionally ‘snuggling up’ with his unpredictable, labile mother, there was, in his youthful self, a powerful urge towards masculine control, as evident in his erotic caning of Driekie. In another example of this urge, Brink recalls how he once ‘murdered’ one of Elbie’s dolls, which he describes as a ‘real spoilt brat, with rosebud lips and blue eyes that opened and closed, and a silly simpering smile’.29 The doll’s name was Toetsie, and Brink ‘hated her’ with such a passion that she gave him nightmares (‘she would stalk my dreams’). Eventually he ‘decided to kill her’. He did this ‘by driving an iron stake through her painted throat’, after which he buried her ‘in a shallow grave’.30 In his 2001 journalling, Brink almost laconically characterises this as ‘very obvious incest’, as if ‘I had to get rid of a doll that, in a way, took “my” place, a “competitor”’.31 In the moment of ‘decapitation’32 and then burying the doll, he is, however, wracked with guilt and briefly turns to religion, attempting a sacrificial gesture – the placing of a ‘nicely shaped soapstone’ on an altar he constructs with twelve stones – but God remains silent; he confesses to his parents instead, and is given a good hiding. After that, he writes, he was ‘no longer plagued by God’.33

Whatever its psychic causes, the urge towards transgression – later to become cultural and political rebellion – appears to have been a core feature of Brink’s make-up. A particularly significant experience was an early episode involving magistrate Daniël Brink. This is one of the ‘interruptions’ referred to above, that carries much symbolic importance. Boy-Brink, who was at the time about ten years old, was frustrated by his friends’ refusal to tell him what the word vry meant. (Its rough equivalent is ‘smooch’, but it also connotes courtship and lovemaking.) Eventually, André’s playmate Maureen agreed to demonstrate its meaning. They migrated from the space behind the couch in her parents’ lounge, where they had both hidden during a game of hide-and-seek, to the bedroom in the Brink house that André shared with his sister, Elbie.34 Years later, Brink described the event thus:

And so I meekly followed her example in taking off my clothes. Nothing remarkable in itself. My sister and I had grown up together and shared all our baths. But at the same time it was amazingly, and delightfully, different: it was like that day in the garden when I’d first discovered the texture, the very differentness of words. The world had just been reinvented.

But that was only the beginning. For Maureen proceeded dutifully, and very meticulously, to show me, as she had promised. Not an altogether successful exercise, I’m afraid, as I was so overwhelmed by the discovery that I did not exactly rise to the occasion.35

There are key differences in the way Brink narrates the conclusion to this episode in his psychotherapy notes in the 2001 journal, on the one hand, and in his memoir, on the other – quite apart from a stylistic shift such as ‘not rising to the occasion’ to the journal’s more blunt ‘I couldn’t even get an erection’.36 Both versions are worth considering in some detail. In the journal, the important detail for Brink was that his sex lesson was interrupted when he and Maureen heard footsteps they recognised as his father’s. Brink claims that he cannot remember whether his father in fact caught them (betrap has a particularly harsh sound) naked and in the act or whether he and Maureen had managed to put their clothes on and escape. However, Brink does observe that the significance lies in the conjunction of a ‘forbidden episode’ with the ‘Arrival of the Father’, despite being wary of ‘simplify[ing] everything too easily in a Freudian way’.37 He likewise claims in his memoir that he cannot remember if his father had ‘caught [them] in the act if act it was’, but adds:

I cannot help thinking that the terrible feelings of guilt concerning all things sexual that obscured my whole youth cannot be explained simply by the devastations and corruptions of Calvinism but must have been caused by something very specific and traumatic that turned the unmitigated joy and wonder of that summer’s afternoon into a shameful memory. Whatever it was, it remained forever entangled with language, with the never-ending search for the meaning of words.

Those times, that day, remain in a secret place in my mind. A discovery of the magic of sex. And, through the telling, the magic of words.38

The journal’s emphasis on the interruption by the father, and the older Brink’s stress on a ‘secret place in my mind’ in which the ‘magic of sex’ is closely linked to the ‘magic of words’, make for an intriguing juxtaposition. Outside of this ‘magical’ area – in the unhappy ‘interruptions’ of the real world, that is – there is guilt and shame, and the Law of the Father in its various, forbidding guises. The novelist recalls a holiday episode at Strand when he was between 14 and 15 years old, where he spied on his sister Elbie, then aged 11 or 12, as she was getting dressed after a swim (he says he watched her ‘against the light’). With some surprise, he realised that, like other women, Elbie had pubic hair.39 Reflecting on this, a 65-year-old Brink describes the event as an ‘induction’, an ‘acknowledgement of sexuality’, and a ‘retrospectively shocking discovery of the loss of the “innocence” of a naked pubis (E[lbie]’s, Maureen’s…) The realisation that she is beginning to “slip out of my reach”?’ He sees the discovery as a ‘new “interruption”’, one that is ‘just as bad as my father’s arrival when Maureen and I were together’.40 Looking back, he describes all this as ‘an omen that every beginning – every “innocence” – is already an ending: the kind of malaise of the in-ev-i-ta-ble ending of relationships, loves’. He regards this cyclical process of ‘innocent’ or unsullied sexual love being foredoomed as ‘precisely the realisation I have been wrestling with my entire life’, despite also pondering whether this speculation isn’t perhaps a little overdone.41

It is not surprising that – spurred by therapy – Brink writes: ‘[O]ften, when travelling, or even in conversations with good friends, sooner or later I decide, almost in a panic, that it’s enough now, I must leave, I must return to my “study”, or hotel room’, wondering whether this is because ‘I feel threatened too much’.42 The study, or hotel room, equates to the ‘secret place’ in Brink’s mind, where language and sex can exercise their magic without interruption, and without the threat inherent in giving oneself over to the unpredictable, chaotic world of other people, not to mention its various laws and constraints. This essentially private, and mostly imaginary, space would become a lifelong refuge for Brink, a stronghold in which his journalling and fiction could establish a kind of fastness, a consolidation of his own, willed experience. By his own admission, outside of this space, he would wear an opaque ‘mask’, as he explains when he is just 17 years old:

This complicated character, then, is me; a person with a mask, but one who has become one with the mask to such an extent, and grown to identify with it so much, that I cannot live without it and sometimes do not know which is the mask and which the genuine me! Only those who are capable of dividing me in two, without separating the two parts; only those who can see through the mask and find me, without taking the mask off; only those who appreciate the genuine parts of me but who accept it along with the theatrical, know me; they are the only ones who understand me and only they can I call my friends.43

Brink goes on to confess that he is ‘lost between reality and illusion’ – an astute admission for one so youthful – and comments further that ‘whereas I can sometimes separate the two quite clearly, I often grope in the dark to work out which is which among the two parts of me, which is genuine and which pretence’.44 Brink would often wear social masks, and a lover’s mask, too; they concealed a complexity and ambivalence that his utterances often belied. Always, he was busy with a lifelong project of self-examination, stemming from a curiosity that was impatient with finite – or final – answers.

In another revealing admission, at age 35, he declares in a letter to an international model he had become intimate with in Rio de Janeiro (see Chapter 5): ‘Yes. I love you now,’ and then reflects directly afterwards that he is not in fact in love with the woman. His declaration forms part of an elaborate process he terms literarisering, or literarising, a coinage denoting sublimation into the literary realm, by which he ‘makes women unreachable in advance’.45 Again, this is a startlingly frank – and revealing – confession, illustrating the unusually candid self-reckoning that characterises the journals. In a separate instance, during his unsuccessful attempt to make Katinka Heyns his lover in 1969, he confessed to feeling uninvolved with women in general, such that his pursuit of prominent women such as Heyns had ‘almost become an aesthetic game’ in which ‘I direct my urges towards a fictive, self-created person and then project this image on the girl who, incidentally, is at hand’.46 There are many such entries, of which the above are important examples. While such self-analysis should not be taken at face value, the unusually perceptive Brink would often subject himself to a confessional lashing, and so his remarks merit some credence.

Brink’s literarising of women was clearly determined by his mother’s remorseless insistence that he should achieve success – as, indeed, suggested by Brink’s psychotherapist. Brink had, after all, himself confessed that he felt compelled to gain her approval, and that this rancorous dynamic was something he later projected onto his wives.47 Brink’s tendency to create conditions in which he made the women in his life ‘unreachable’ via literary sublimation, may have led to the ‘malaise of the in-ev-i-ta-ble ending of relationships, loves’, itself a response to his abiding sense that he could never quite do enough to gain his mother’s approval. It was as if he felt compelled to replay the drama of the mother-figure’s disappearance, and her reappearance, which betokened an elusive, anxiety-laden promise of reconnection, but only under strict conditions. The ongoing pursuit of her approval, his desire for it, with the accompanying anxiety and excitement, constituted a chronic closed circuit for Brink. This was where his inner drama played itself out – more urgently in the seeking than the achieving, with the drama of desire inevitably followed by let-down, or, worse, engulfment. In a related essay, Brink referred to the ‘creative-destructive’ role of women, and the suggestion of ‘most psychologists’ that the sexual act implies ‘both compassion and violence’:

The Freudian(?) [sic] approach is: the man, born of woman, returns to her to complete the circle. As the old saying goes: men try assiduously, throughout their lives, to crawl back into the place whence they once emerged. For them it is a victory and a defeat. She is a conquered possession … but in the process he becomes as much her victim as the spider that gets devoured by his female mate.48

As such, the sex act is a perpetual paradox that is replayed in an apparent effort to overcome the ‘defeat’ that follows ‘victory’, in an endless cycle.

Related to this was his retreat into a private space where he could exert control – the space of writing and imagining – and from which vantage he could idealise women, literally (or literarily) making then ‘unachievable in advance’. In a certain sense, his writing – with its memorialising ‘magic’ – was both a defence against his mother (keeping her at a distance by claiming his life as his own experiential domain), and a way of living up to her expectations by idealising the objects of his love. As his therapist would suggest all those years later, writing was perhaps a form of ‘exhibitionism’ for André.49 Similarly, the lure of this refuge explains why Brink ‘fell in love with his characters’, as he frequently admitted to doing.50 ‘How could I ever again keep life and fiction apart,’ he says about meeting Ingrid Jonker. ‘How could I prevent myself from attempting to turn my life into a series of stories, or to project imagined stories into events in my life?’ Replying in his memoir, he says: ‘[M]y only solution was to divide my own life into innumerable compartments – each friend, each acquaintance, each woman sealed off behind locked doors of memory and imagination from all others. It was the only way in which I could remain in control of my world.’51

In addition to memorialising his experiences, thereby consolidating their ‘reality’ and displaying fine, near-unreachable achievement, Brink also secreted talismanic tokens of his various forays. He kept ‘proof’ of his adventuring, almost like the spoils of war. The journals are full of newspaper clippings, photographs, and souvenirs such as Spanish bullfight and French theatre tickets, the most remarkable being curls of pubic hair that Karina Brink discovered in two white envelopes between the pages of the 1965 journal covering his break-up with Jonker. Karina also came across what appears to be a lock of Ingrid’s hair in one of Brink’s four copies of Rook en Oker (smoke and ochre), Jonker’s prizewinning second volume of poetry; this was during a visit by Professor Willie Burger to the Brink home while researching his introduction to Flame in the Snow.52 In his journal, Brink explains:

Why do I keep copies [of his letters to Ingrid]? Just because, right from the start [of their affair], I knew I was now beginning to ‘live’; and I am curious, also as an observer of myself. I want, later, to be able to go back over the nuances of all the events. And maybe, like all my searching for ‘proof’ – photos, the curl of pubic hair, poems – [the copies of the letters] are an attempt to prove, to myself; to overcome doubt about myself; to know.53

The desire to conquer self-doubt is also evident in Brink’s hankering after affirmation in the form of public attention, his self-declared ‘need’ for publicity:

In the moment of falling asleep, I did a little heartfelt examination, and felt some wonder, about my attitude towards the spotlight. For example, the fact that it has become a need for me nowadays to get publicity; that I enjoy it – and that I feel something is wrong if it DOES NOT come about that I get cornered at concerts or in the streets or shops by people wanting my signature. And that – God forbid! – I even like parties…as long as there are people there who recognise me etc. All of this suggests that I need ‘assurances from outside’ against an internal insecurity: that I am therefore not at all as ‘whole’ as I thought I was.54

As suggested above, much of this insecurity derived from what Brink’s psychologist perceived as breaks in foundational affirmations that made it impossible for him to gain a secure hold on his world as a child. Even in Brink’s experience of the more innocent joys of childhood, the laws governing the adult world would impinge on what might otherwise have been play, pure and simple. In several of his novels, Brink describes farm children of various races playing together, but it is generally a short-lived idyll. A good example is when brothers Barend and Nicolaas, along with the slave child Galant, play at the farm dam in Brink’s slave-novel, A Chain of Voices. There is genuine childhood camaraderie among the boys as they dig tunnels, raid birds’ nests, and cavort in muddy water. However, the moment inevitably comes when a socially conditioned consciousness of master-slave relations interferes, and the spell is broken.

Nicolaas writes his name on a patch of clay near the dam, showing off his learning. Galant is mightily impressed, and asks Nicolaas to teach him to write, but elder brother Barend says: ‘Why bother? He’s only a slave-boy.’55 A similar scene of childhood friendship is described in Rumours of Rain, in which a lonely Afrikaner boy, Martin Mynhardt, explains what life was like before entering a troubled adult world where he might feel compelled to justify the unjustifiable:

Like many young Afrikaners of my generation I grew up on a farm. Like them, I was lonely in many respects … In the southern Free State where we lived the farms were large and far apart. Except for the neighbouring children who attended the farm school with me, my only constant companions were the Black children of our farm. There was one especially whom I still regard as a dear friend … For years we were, when I was not at school, always in each other’s company. We roamed the farm together, we hunted meerkats and hares, raided birds’ nests, modelled clay oxen and swam together; often I ate putu porridge with his family, from an iron pot in front of their red-clay hut. And never can I remember that the colour of our skins affected our fun or our quarrels or our close friendship in any way.56

Although Brink himself did not grow up on a farm, he attests that between his 11th and 16th year, when his father was stationed in Douglas ‘in the arid north-west of the Cape Province’, he ‘spent many weekends and holidays on the farms of friends’.57 (Incidentally, Douglas is also where Brink’s future lover, Ingrid Jonker, was born.58) Brink was undoubtedly writing from first-hand experience in describing childhood moments of peace and friendship that were free of racial antagonism.

However, these childhood experiences also featured disturbing elements, such as the ‘Dwarf who lived in a hole’ on one of the farms he visited: ‘It seemed that for long periods [the Dwarf] would mysteriously disappear, only to resurface at unexpected moments.’59 One day, Brink encounters the mysterious little man: ‘The Dwarf … was indeed very small, barely a metre tall, but he was very black. One of the last remnants, I was told, of the nearly extinct Koranna tribe.’ Brink goes on:

At first I was scared of the little man. He was unspeakably filthy, and smelled of death and dead things. The hole in which he lived, and which he used to cover with an old sheet of corrugated iron, was littered with bones and peels and dirty tufts of sheep’s wool and patches of snake skin and little pouches stuffed with god knows what. The black labourers on the farm gave him a wide berth and were, I learned, horribly cruel to him. The whites also treated him with suspicion, and [young André’s friend] Theuns approvingly told me that at irregular intervals, without any particular reason, his father would go into the veld and thrash the little man with a sjambok more violently than the occasion could possibly have warranted.60

This encounter with a graphic, frightening form of otherness seems a turning point for the young Brink; he is ‘fascinated no end’ by the so-called dwarf and compulsively returns to the hole. Eventually, he finds himself listening to strange stories told by the little man:

[The hole] was always covered with the iron sheet when I approached. But he seemed uncannily to sense my approach, and as soon as I came within a few metres, the sheet would be pushed away by a small, gnarled black hand with long, yellow, horny nails. With a hideous smile of welcome, and without any preamble or warning, he would plunge into the telling of a story that I could barely follow – because not only did he tell it in a frightful mix of Afrikaans and, I suppose, the Koranna language, but he also suffered from some speech impediment.61

Reflecting upon this, the older Brink contends: ‘[M]y memory of the Dwarf must have prefigured Cupido Cockroach in my mind when I came across his story almost half a century later and started plotting Praying Mantis.’62 Crucially, Brink’s encounter with this radical otherness had the unique effect of leading him towards, rather than away from, intercultural communication.

Though Brink’s writing displays a unique childhood talent, his treatment of otherness followed well-trodden colonial stereotypes, including exotic scenes of sexual adventure. At age 12, he made his first attempt at writing a novel – one that dealt with ‘the blood-curdling adventures of four children on holiday among cannibals and wild animals in Nigeria’. This 77-page effort was followed by a work of 315 typed pages dealing with the lost civilisation of Atlantis and its rediscovery in the ‘jungles of the Congo’. The teenaged Brink sent the manuscript to a publisher, who rejected it, commenting that the erotic scenes involving Arno, leader of the South African expedition, and Menore, seductive queen of Atlantis, were ‘too erotic’.63 Quite apart from an ability to imagine the unknown, two durable characteristics emerge here: the ability to produce a substantial amount of text with apparent ease, and a focus on erotic writing.

As suggested earlier, the act of writing about love all too often eclipsed the real thing. In writing, Brink could elevate his desire to heights of lyricism; desire – often frustrated – was the force that generated huge amounts of text. Such self-writing began in earnest in April 1952, when Brink embarked on what would become a multi-volume journalling process during his matric year at Hoërskool Lydenburg in what was then the Eastern Transvaal.

His first journal reveals a talented boy whose wide range of interests and many skills are reflected in the seven distinctions he gained, the best matriculation result in the Transvaal Education Department for the year 1952. The first of the exercise books containing his journal-writing bears the handwritten title ‘Rahja – Skaduwee van die Boeddha’ (shadow of the Buddha).64 Though similar to the title of another of his early novel-writing attempts, ‘Rajah, Lord of the Highlands’,65 the journal opens more prosaically: on Tuesday 22 April 1952, a teacher nicknamed ‘Oosie’ subjected the matric class to a biology test that turned out to be harder than expected. Elsewhere in this first entry Brink reports that he has completed a painting he describes as ‘’n meid met sonsondergang in – vermoedelik – Betsjoeanaland’ (‘a black woman with sunset in – presumably – Bechuanaland’);66 he also notes that he ran a mile in a time of six minutes and ten seconds; that he had seized upon a new idea for a short story; and that he needed to study for a science test to be administered by a teacher nicknamed ‘Fritsie’.67 But the real heart of this journal entry – and, one suspects, young Brink’s reason for beginning the journal – is the arrival of a pen-pal letter. It encloses a snapshot – a kiekie – of a 12-year-old girl. The photo becomes a kind of love-object for Brink over a prolonged period. By his own admission, he falls ‘in love’ with the kiekie. This is the beginning of the ‘Martie’ story alluded to earlier.

Despite noting that the ‘handwriting was somewhat childish’ and that it contained misspellings and ‘hopeless syntax’, Brink experiences a rush of excitement. The photograph overwhelms his distaste for the girl’s jejune, error-laden writing: ‘But the kiekie made the difference. Never before has a girl enchanted me so. She is beautiful and painfully attractive.’ Wryly, he admits: ‘Not even Yvonne, Jeanne or Sarie influenced me to this extent … Each time I look at the snapshot my doubt over her intellectual capacities etc. disappears.’68

Though the girl’s name is Margaret Ludwig, Brink decides: ‘I am going to call her Martie or Marie’ – and so henceforth she becomes ‘Martie’.69 From this point on, for the next six months or so, the saga of ‘Martie’ becomes an animating force that is little short of obsessive. The journalling about the phantom-girl is, by turns, lyrical, contemplative, rapturous, self-absorbed, confessional and calculating. ‘Martie’, together with Brink’s rendering of her in the journal, signals the start of a pattern that persists in the author’s life, eventually developing into more complex forms of expression. Principally, it has to do with the love-desire-writing braid of Brink’s life and career, constituting a golden thread.

The letter and photo arrive in April 1952, just a few weeks before the young man’s birthday on 29 May, when he turns 17. It is a small black-and-white print, about 4 cm by 3 cm. The kiekie, taken from a distance of about 2 m, shows a dark-haired girl standing outside the front door of a house. Her somewhat curious posture can be explained only by assuming that she is posing, or hamming it up for the camera. Her body bent slightly forward and sideways, with her arms outspread like wings, she looks as if she is about to fly off. Her flowing dress hides her upper body, as does the angle of her arms. She looks at the camera with a rather provocative smile, as if to say, ‘I’m not shy!’

The enraptured Brink, seized by the apparent beauty of the girl, puts the picture down somewhere, and when he cannot immediately find it again he is thrown into a morbid crisis, searching high and low for the matchbox-sized snapshot. Striding out into the veld to ‘gain some clarity’,70 he comes to a gradual realisation: ‘I was in love with the picture, not the girl with all her implications. I decided to reason clearly while it remained missing.’71 (Notably, Brink emphasises the word kiekie or ‘snapshot’.)

Still, his romantic heart strains against clear thinking. The reference to ‘implications’ reveals that the young Brink is already foreshadowing a sense of the complexity of women and, possibly, their shortcomings. His heart seems to win the day here, as it will many times later in his life, too: ‘Should I one day make her my choice,’ he enthuses, ‘how enjoyable might it be to introduce her to all that delights me!’ Nevertheless, he resorts to a series of pithy phrases, neatly sequenced with colons and semi-colons, in an apparent attempt to curb his passion and maintain decorum:

But I would still want to have intelligent conversation: imagine if she didn’t rate too highly when it comes to intellect; or if she didn’t have a strong sense of religion; or if she opposed me in the political arena? These are all little things that I’d have to take into consideration and that I’d neglect if I were simply to keep looking at the picture.72

Such clarity, however, is short-lived. ‘But if [the picture] is lost for good I shall be so endlessly sorry; it was so lovely; so beautiful, that on days when I felt low, just looking at it would make me feel strong. Even if it were just to remind me of a handful of days during which I felt elation, it would be enough. I must go looking for it again.’73

The exalted, if self-absorbed, conception of ‘elation’, suggests the sublimation of his sexual response to the picture, as well as the illusory nature of this romantic love, directed as it is towards an object in which the female figure creates an illusion of grace and beauty. Indeed, it later turns out that she has lied about her age, and that she is in fact in Standard 5 (Grade 7) rather than Standard 7 (Grade 9), and is therefore about 12 years old.74 There is a sense in the journal, too, of being mired in a thoroughly patriarchal culture: a few days later, the schoolboy notes that he has prepared his speech for ‘Saturday’s debate’ on the topic ‘men contribute more to the life of the volk than women’.75 Apart from unwitting complicity in a patriarchal set-up, the critical pattern here is the fetishisation of the beloved via an aesthetic object, which amounts to a transmutation. In substituting real human contact with aesthetically charged writing, Brink was able to retreat to a private locus – and without this psychic stronghold and refuge, his writing could not have emerged.

In the early 1970s, despite his belief ‘in the abstract in the ideal of huma­nism’, Brink acknowledges: ‘I can never really be involved with other people’:

[F]or the most part, people repel me. It’s not quite misanthropy (sometimes maybe even that?) – just an incapacity really to deal with others; I just can’t ‘handle’ people; I get overwhelmed by their reality. The only way to get a hold on such a reality (even if it’s just temporary) is through writing. Outside of that: complete and utter loneliness.76

This admission might seem odd, since Brink was widely known for his kindness to others, and for his polite, gracious manner as a ‘bon vivant’.77 Yet his acknowledgement relates to deeper forms of engagement. Brink’s manners and public image were part of the ‘mask’ mentioned previously, behind which he took cover from the outside world.

Such a tendency towards creating a separate, safe realm that he could control and enjoy, undisturbed by outside events, is accentuated in early descriptions such as that relating to ‘Martie’, and again in the 1950s, with a girl called Esther. In both, the sequestering of himself, and his writing about love, as against actual events, creates a separation between mind and world, or between thinking and acting, that must eventually be confronted. In both cases, the results are unfortunate, if not downright comical. And yet the young Brink remains relatively unaffected, often seizing upon the comedy, or the pathos, of the situation itself as something worth writing about. It is as if his ‘incapacity really to deal with others’, and his sense that the only way to ‘get a hold on [the reality of others] … is through writing’, means that he can cope with romantic failure far better than most, remaining curiously uninvolved – outside of his writing, that is.

This paradoxical process is foreshadowed at an early point in the ‘Martie’ story. He begins by writing: ‘I can brood and dream about her, idealise her…in her my highest expectations are brought to fruition and my holiest emotions brought into motion.’78 Then, just a few days later, he contradicts this outright: ‘Tonight I am once again the cold realist who can find nothing new to say about Martie.’79 What is striking is the comment that his state of ‘cold’ realism issues from the fact that he can find nothing new to say about Martie, thereby confirming the suspicion that his love for Martie is crucially dependent on his ability to transform her into an ongoing script that plays out in his imagination.

In the real world outside of writing, as he confesses, he ‘unfortunately succumbed to m.’ – i.e. masturbation. But he immediately ‘repents’, saying: ‘If only I could break the habit!’80 Masturbation is, of course, a transgression of the strict Calvinist code according to which he was raised, and Brink deals with his guilt by immediately evoking a ‘higher’ manifestation of his love for Martie, which, he says, has now transmuted into a ‘calm love – a stream of beauty that calmly flows on, flows on’. Unsurprisingly, the road from the dreaded ‘m’ to the transmogrifying tranquillity of a ‘stream of beauty’ leads straight to poetry, to Edgar Allan Poe and Keats, in fact: ‘When I stare out of the window, then the lines of Edgar Allan Poe dream inside me: “Deep in the darkness peering, / Long I stood there, wondering, fearing,/Doubting, dreaming dreams no mortal ever dared to dream before…”’. ‘Otherwise,’ he continues, ‘the sweet notes of Keats’s nightingale make their lament: “My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains my sense.”’81 The boy rhapsodises:

I dream about these words, think about them, and am very quickly filled with their beauty. At times, I rejoice with Wordsworth or Shelley, such as in ‘The Solitary Reaper’ or ‘Ode to a Skylark’. The pure clarity of Keats’s ‘Evening by the Sea’ vibrates within me once more…I am saturated with poetry, filled with those great sounds – and all these heroic outpourings of the heart are woven around the laughing figure of my sun-fairy: ‘Earth has not anything to show more fair….’ (even if the context is not the one Wordsworth intended!)82

The fact that this barely 17-year-old boy from the platteland (his father was at the time a magistrate in Sabie) can so readily quote from Wordsworth’s poem, ‘Composed Upon Westminster Bridge, September 3, 1802’, and fully understand in what manner he is repurposing this ode to London, is little short of amazing. Brink’s affinity with the Romantic poets is not surprising, given that movement’s preoccupation with people’s inner worlds, its idealisation of women and children, and its celebration of nature and beauty.

What is starkly evident in Brink’s formation at this point, as suggested above, is the high degree of sublimation he enacts in his journalling. Sublimation is understood as the process by which libidinal desire is transformed into more socially acceptable forms such as artistic and cultural expression; in Brink, one can see how the pressure to conform – to be an exemplary young Calvinist man – acts partly as the motor of this process, the other motivation being his desire to gain parental approval, especially that of his mother. This explains to some extent why the erotic energy behind the youth’s recourse to masturbation is experienced after the fact as a moral failure that must be stopped short and redirected into forms such as poetry, which he interlaces with his journal-writing. Notable too is the fact that he associates masturbation with looking at the picture of Martie, saying at one point that he ‘may not look at the snapshot again as a result of m.’ and he ‘hopes he is done with it once and for all’.83 The strange power of pictures, and photography more generally, would come to play a major part in the novelist’s life, as will become evident in later chapters.

Despite Brink’s spurts of love-writing, both in his letters to Martie and in his journal, the 12-year-old girl herself eventually loses interest. Martie’s letters tail off and then come to an abrupt halt. This may well be because Brink, in his last letter before she stopped writing back, had written to ask her ‘officially’ to become his girlfriend. Further, he urged her ‘to make the proposed order with a photographer right away’, presumably to have a picture taken for him. Then, he sternly warned her, with regard to a landsdiens or veld school planned for the next school holiday, to resist any advances by young men wishing to vry.84 Did this prove too much? Probably, for not only was Brink jealously warning Martie against other boys, he was also asking her for a commitment, cemented with a studio portrait. For a 12-year-old pubescent schoolgirl, a professional photography session may well have been a threatening prospect. The fear of exposure might also explain her curious posture in the kiekie, perhaps concealing budding breasts. Whatever the case, she ceases to write, and Brink’s regular rhetorical flourishes convincing himself that he is indeed in love now turn into elaborate expressions of pain and anxiety.

Despite a series of unsuccessful phone calls to Martie’s school hostel, indicating that she is avoiding him, Brink refuses to give up. (He narrates these calls in dramatic form, using dialogue and stage directions, once again showing remarkable – and precocious – creativity.) In a separate phone conversation a few days after his first series of ‘tickey box’ calls from a public phone booth, young André has an argument with the matron of Martie’s school hostel, which results in a confession: ‘if I could have wrung this pushy virago’s neck I would have done it with sadistic pleasure.’85 Martie eventually releases him from his torture when she replies in the negative to further letters from André, including one addressed to her father in which Brink demands from him ‘where matters stand’ – with the admission: ‘I’m getting completely reckless!’86 In her rather trite response, Martie deflates André’s passion by saying that she ‘no longer wants to write … there is no particular reason’. She is returning his picture and she’d like hers back, too.87 Brink, however, is determined to round things off with a flourish. He writes to Margaret Ludwig as follows:

Martie,

This is the end, then.

Thank you very, very, very much for your lovely friendship and for our correspondence. I will always think of it as one of the most delightful periods in my life.

I will not be returning your picture: I want to keep it as a memento.

Farewell, my young girlfriend (if I may call you that for just one last time) and try to remember that I loved you purely and beautifully…and still do, even if it was, perhaps, a youthful love.

Farewell….!

André.88

After copying this letter into his journal, Brink asks himself: ‘Sentimental-melodramatic? But I feel so sincerely melancholic…this is truly the end of a fine piece of life.…’89 Remarkably, this ‘fine piece of life’, this ‘pure and beautiful love’, yielded little more than letter-writing, snapshot-gazing, and journalling. What seems important for Brink, however, is that he has recorded the episode, making it real, so that it becomes a chapter in his own life. One might speculate about the pleasures of sublimation, but when these are the only yield, and the young man at the centre of it seems not to find it peculiar that his great love was something of a chimera, with little reciprocation, then we are dealing with an interesting personality indeed. The yield of writing, together with the idea of love, make this a kind of love-writing – the true bounty of this singular event. The aestheticised notion of love is replaceable, while people are less so.

A few months later, Brink would ruminate on how ‘fatal it is to feel everything rumbling inside me and not have anyone to share it with’. In this meditation on relationships he continued: ‘Maybe it is for this reason that my “love” can never be lasting – I am always searching, dissatisfied and yet content…for what? I live every moment separately, as if each is a world apart.’ Significantly, he adds: ‘I worry about the lack of follow-through [daadkrag] in the world…but at the same time I fear there is too little dreaming – all of which just proves my double personality once again.’90 These words would prove prophetic. Predictably, his love is in quotation marks: it ‘can never be lasting’ because he is ‘always searching, dissatisfied’. Also, he compartmentalises and seals off different parts of his life from each other (‘I live every moment separately, as if each is a world apart’); this was something several women would later discover to their dismay as he alternated, loving one, loving another, each being sufficient for him, each separate – for him, but not necessarily for the woman concerned.

An exemplary Afrikaner youth, Brink’s cultural, political and religious views were largely conventional. He had grown up as a churchgoer and commenced 1953 by taking on Sunday-school classes in the Dutch Reformed church in Sabie.91 He agreed to prepare three print-ready ‘long speeches … for dominee’,92 who almost certainly benefited from Brink’s skills. He also typed out Elbie’s manuscript, ‘Herfs’ (autumn), which she dedicated to him, as he notes with pride.93

That same year, Brink enrols at Potchefstroom University for Christian Higher Education, since renamed Potchefstroom Campus of North-West University. There, Brink submits to the ontgroening (initiation) programme, whose sadistic and homophobic overtones prove too much for a fellow first-year student, who poisons himself, while two others run away to escape the bullying and humiliation.94 In passing, Brink notes that he has been exempted from the physical exercise aspect of ontgroening on the same grounds as his exemption from military service95 – but whatever this medical condition may have been, it is not revealed; indeed, it is possible that the Brink family doctor in Sabie intervened to prevent the exceptional young man from having to delay his education for the sake of military service.

Such a model youth is Brink that Huisgenoot magazine sends a reporter to Potchefstroom to interview him for a feature on bright young Afrikaner youths. ‘It’s wonderful, wonderful, wonderful!’ Brink enthuses in his journal on the day of the visit. ‘The Huisgenoot man was here – coincidentally one of the fellows who’d previously rejected some of my short stories! I had to tell them all about myself – study methods, hobbies, eccentricities etc. etc.’96 After that, Brink writes, the Huisgenoot people took pictures, including one of him seated at the piano, another of him studying in his usual way while lying down, and a third where he’s ‘just standing’. Clearly pleased, Brink records that ‘Slim Kinders van SA’ (‘Smart Children of SA’) will appear at the end of March – and, what’s more, Huisgenoot will be giving him two photographs as a bonus. Ever alert to opportunity, Brink pulls out a short story, which the magazine interviewer agrees to evaluate and return to him.97

On the political front, Prime Minister DF Malan has won an outright parliamentary majority,98 just five years after the National Party’s first victory at the polls. Dr Malan stops at Potchefstroom on his way to Pretoria during his ‘victory ride’ from Cape Town.99 As a first-year student, Brink witnesses this event, which he describes in his journal:

Today Dr Malan passed by here [Potchefstroom] on his way to Pretoria, where his victory ride from Cape Town will be crowned with an enormous celebration – Here on the station, more than 2000 people gathered and when the train steamed in, ‘Die Stem’ echoed around. Doctor, mevrou, Marietjie and Dr Dönges made their appearance, occupying the little stage, where Doctor said a few powerful words. To see him was the pinnacle!100

The fired-up Brink decides to start making a book of political clippings. ‘And maybe one day I’ll go into politics, see what [Dr Malan’s] eyes witnessed.’101 What is deeply ironic is that Brink would indeed ‘go into politics’, except that he would do so in a manner he could not have imagined as he stood there on the station platform in Potchefstroom on 22 April 1953. Brink would, within the next 15 years, come to ‘see’, or appreciate, the very opposite of the resurgent supremacy signalled by Dr Malan on his ‘little stage’. The emerging writer would begin to ‘see’ and become aware of the suffering that came with being ‘non-white’ in an apartheid South Africa under successive National Party administrations.

Despite Brink’s political naivete at this point in his life, signs began to emerge of a slow yet steady inner shift. Near the end of March 1954, for example, he journals about an Afrikaanse Studentebond meeting on the ‘race question’. When he talks to family friend Mr Higgo about the matter, the latter opines that ‘the trouble began when the non-whites began getting education’. In response, Brink writes:

Very well – but that is not the reason. It’s simply that those who are educated have eyes to see what abuses there are. (Oh yes, we do much good – but we also do more harm in this matter than we are ready to acknowledge.) Our duty, then, is to make sure there is nothing to take up arms against.102

Even as such ‘liberal’ tendencies began to emerge in Brink’s thinking, he remained, for most of the 1950s, locked in a heartfelt loyalty to the National Party. This was a kind of cultural belonging to which he clung, despite a growing sense that things were not quite right. At one point in 1954, he journalled about a comment made by a fellow student that he, André Brink, was ‘an outspoken liberal’. In response, he declared that he was indeed a ‘liberal’, but only in the widest possible sense of this term, and not in the ‘narrow and pejorative sense’.103 What he did know, he added, was that ‘we’ (i.e. white South Africans, Afrikaners especially) ‘see matters with shut eyes’. He continued:

I know what threatens us. Do I not see it on a daily basis? Our small group of whites, isolated here, and divided against each other. It cannot continue like this. Life simply doesn’t work like that. And what right do we have to ask God to keep us apart? He himself makes no distinction between races or persons. Even so, it all remains very painful. Our whole South African background leads us to see the matter so wrongly. How can we now ask for fusion?104

Given the fact that he was a mere 19 years old at this point, this was an astute summing-up of the situation. What is especially noteworthy is that, despite his sense that by any higher, or divine, standard, apartheid was wrong, he could not shake off a certain horror of ‘fusion’ (samesmelting). This distaste for racial ‘fusing’ or blending was especially acute when it came to sexual relations. At this stage, he found the thought ‘galling’ that his new idealised love-object, Esther – whose story is told below – might one day ‘fuse’ with a black man:

It [fusion] will probably come – despite our prayers for a different outcome. But how can we accept it? Just thinking about the idea that one day there might be children like Esther who will have non-white men…No, Lord, not that! It’s so galling. Nobody wants that. But will we be able to prevent it? I will continue to believe – that’s all I can really do. Believe – also for Esther’s sake. Oh, how I love her!105

Brink viewed his concern for a clearly impossible quest – keeping the races apart – as a matter of quasi-religious faith. It was a faith in the white volk and in what he saw, in 1954, as its perfect embodiment: ethereal, innocent, pubescent Esther, who was untouchable. If Brink had any inkling, at this stage, of what was in store for him over the next two decades, he would have been overcome with shock. This was the same man who, twenty years later, would publish Kennis van die Aand (Looking on Darkness), a novel that dramatises, in tragic fashion, the downfall of a forbidden but exalted love affair between a white woman and a man classified Coloured – himself the result of racial ‘fusion’. Compared with his 19-year-old self, who expressed horror at the prospect of a white girl being ‘contaminated’, the 38-year-old who published Kennis van die Aand in 1973 is barely recognisable. The profundity of this change shows just how far the youthful André had to go before he could embrace his own ‘change of tongue’106 – a complete repudiation of the influences that had formed him.

Brink’s preoccupations as an undergraduate at Potchefstroom University were, for the most part, more literary than political, although political issues were always in the back of his mind: as a much older man, he would tell journalist Maureen Isaacson that a lecture in Potchefstroom in the 1950s by African nationalist ZK Matthews was a turning point in the life of a former self whom he describes as ‘a young racist man’.107

This young man, then, though politically aware, was at the time mostly focused on his own future as a writer, in his uniquely elevated sense. An opening statement in his journal entry for 1 January 1953 – which would be his first year at university – was that his matric year made him ‘ripe for literature’; he added that he was learning to appreciate the work of WA de Klerk, and building on De Klerk’s philosophy of life, which he had referred to a month or two before in winning the school debating trophy.108 De Klerk was an early mentor for Brink, who would develop a strong relationship with the historical novelist, playwright, and travel writer. In the second half of the 1950s, when Brink was a postgraduate student, he often kept company with De Klerk and his wife, Ena, at their farm ‘Saffier’ near Paarl. ‘I had spent some summer holidays on his farm in the Western Province, helping his farmhands to labour in the vineyards and orchards – in exchange for long conversations in the evenings, after the day’s work, a leisurely swim in the dam, and a sumptuous supper.’109 This friendship eventually soured as a result of Brink’s affair with Ingrid Jonker, but not before Brink took some good lessons from the writer. Apart from Brink’s usual diet of literary reading, which he described in 1956 (at age 21) as ‘two Shakespeares a day at times, purely because [I] enjoy it’,110 he ventured into the philosophy of Heidegger and Sartre, noting about Heidegger that ‘all Dasein is existence’ and describing Sartre’s extended essay ‘Existentialism is a Humanism’ as a ‘bleak image of a humanity that has lost its way’.111 In 1958, he would read Colin Wilson’s The Outsider and Arnold Toynbee’s A Study of History under De Klerk’s mentorship.112

From his early days at university, Brink displayed all the signs of a developing artist. In his very first journal entry for 1953, for example, he declares that his three exhibitions of landscape paintings in the previous year (at venues such as the Nelspruit Show) earned him the grand sum of £100; he has, moreover, been ‘devoting serious attention to writing short stories for various magazines, but without success’.113 He weathers the rejections fairly well, but now wants to make a quantum leap: ‘Today I’ll post a letter to the Transafrika Korrespondensiekollege114 about a course in short story writing, which I now want to study intensively, so that I can put my writing talent to use to help with university costs.’115

He starts writing short stories with great passion, and he studies the Transafrika lectures ‘with full attention’.116 Soon enough, the college begins evaluating his stories, mostly finding them excellent. His short-story submissions to magazines, however, regularly come back, declined by editors at Huisgenoot, Rooi Rose, Die Brandwag, and the like, who nevertheless offer encouraging comments. Brink, though, needs little egging on. He is incapable of not writing – that much soon becomes clear from his journal. For example, on 20 March 1954, he notes: ‘I have so little time – and here inside themes await me, almost fully worked out!’117 The next day he reports:

Tonight I ‘received’ two themes – one of them yet another youth story. Strange how happy this kind of story makes me – it’s like this with all of them, as if a light starts glowing in my insides. In this way, I give expression to my longing for love…I feel happy, with a bright sense of elation. I will continue feeling this way until I have written the story, and even afterwards. The theme for this one is still very vague – but it will develop. In the meantime, there are others that have grown riper.118

Meanwhile, he continued working diligently through the Transafrika course and began to see significant success in having stories accepted, beginning in all seriousness in late 1953 and stretching into 1954, his second year at Potchefstroom University, when he was 19. In March 1954, for example, Rooi Rose accepted his story ‘Tuiste vir Jantjie’ (a home for Jantjie), while Huisgenoot took ‘Liebesträume’. He wanted to develop the latter story into a novel, ‘probably first as a serial story for DB’ (presumably Die Brandwag).119 Transafrika, in a sense, acted as a critical reader of his stories, which he sent as assignments but also submitted to magazines and journals. So, for example, Transafrika commented negatively on ‘Die Eindelose Pad’ (the endless road) – a story, Brink mentions, that was still enjoying the attention of Tydskrif vir Letterkunde.120 Indeed, a few weeks later the influential CM van den Heever of Tydskrif vir Letterkunde accepted the story, describing it as ‘particularly good’.121 Brink was jubilant when Rooi Rose accepted ‘Nimf van Sonbaai’ (nymph of Sun Bay) for publication – a story he described as his ‘best to date’.122 His journal entries during the course of 1954 are punctuated with hoots of joy as his stories begin to find favour – and start earning this thrifty student some money: Die Brandwag accepted a story set in Paris in March;123 later in the same month the magazine took another two stories;124 by now, Brink was on his way, especially with Die Brandwag. On 7 April 1954 he notes that, with Die Brandwag again saying yes to a duo of stories, he has reached a tally of 20 pieces accepted for publication – in a period of roughly six months. He plans to throw a party to celebrate this milestone.125 That April, the Johannesburg daily, Die Transvaler, appointed Brink as its ‘university correspondent’.126 Soon thereafter he found himself reporting on the Afrikaanse Studentebond congress in Potchefstroom, having visited the Afrikaanse Pers offices in Auckland Park, Johannesburg, where, among others, he met the fiction editor of Die Brandwag. During this visit, Brink was introduced to the process of mass printing and the working world of seasoned journalists and editors.127

At around this time, too, he began an internal dialogue about the quality and value of the kind of stories he was writing. In a journal entry on 12 March 1954, he reports that something is ‘stirring’ inside him. He describes this as ‘a protest against the stories I am writing – stories that are without a deeper and greater meaning than the “tale” itself; light little works that have to make an impact on their own and not because of a more lasting “something”.’ Showing notable ambition, the 19-year-old then remarks:

Perhaps it is necessary that I first write some of these stories so as to grow to the point where I might be spiritually capable of creating more convincing, larger stories. I don’t mind creating these light works every now and then – it’s refreshing. But I don’t want to continue like this. I want to create something that is more lasting, more than just little stories. I don’t want to commercialise art – I must create art, as pure as possible, in keeping with the ‘Art pour l’art’ motto [sic].128

And write ‘larger’, ‘more lasting’ stories, he certainly did.

In the sphere of love, however, Brink’s strivings are less successful, as he once again surrenders to a phantom love, this time for 13-year-old Esther Swart, who begins Standard 6 (Grade 8) as Brink enters his second year at university. The love saga in relation to Esther is akin to the Martie affair in that it is never fulfilled or requited, and once again proves to be an exercise in sublimation. It is also an infatuation with an impossibly young love-object, making the prospect of intimate contact with her all but impossible, not to mention inappropriate. But the difference this time is that Brink does in fact get to meet the girl, experiencing some physical proximity with her. His strategy this time around is to delay declaring his love, so as not to scare her off, and to win her confidence as a friend. In the end, after much strenuous effort, this plan – hatched with his university friend Christie Roode129 – also fails.

Why does Brink, surrounded as he is by female students of his own age, fall for a junior high-school girl in Sabie? The answer may partially lie in Brink’s single recorded attempt to woo a fellow student during his first year at university, one Marieta du Plessis from Gobabis in today’s Namibia. Marieta was, however, not interested in Brink.130 Keenly stung, he felt inclined to draw back into his shell, his ‘secret space’ or refuge: writing about being in love, romanticising an absent female ideal, and striving for something higher than the all-too-real and messy business of emotional and sexual engagement with adult women on campus. In a journal entry early during his first year, he confessed that he ‘longs for someone to pour out my heart to’, and wondered whether he shouldn’t write to Martie again: ‘Perhaps I should go back inside that cloud-dream of young love – where there is no pain and no fear, just the wonder of your new passion.…’131 He did in fact write to Martie, but tore the letter up afterwards, with a ‘final decision’ that ‘what’s past is past’.132

The origin of Brink’s infatuation with Esther is obscure. He seems to have met her during the year-end holidays in 1953, when he was at home with his family in Sabie. Once back in Potchefstroom the following year, Brink begins to mention his ‘love for Esther’. On 16 February 1954, he closes an entry by saying, ‘[a]long with all of this, I still love Esther, but I force myself into acceptance. And in a few years’ time, who knows!’133 What he forces himself to accept is that she is so young, and so unavailable for ‘love’, that he dares not communicate his feelings to her, let alone act on them. Thereafter, journal entries are regularly rounded off with references to Esther, for example on 18 February, 21 February and 3 March 1954.134 The last entry records the completion of a short story written in the first person, ‘My klein nooientjie’ (my little girlfriend), which, he says, is a confession about his love for Esther: ‘[R]ight now she’s still just a phantom, but I shall never forget that fire – and when I see her again it’ll flare up, that much I do feel.’135

The story appeared in Die Brandwag as ‘Dan droom ek maar’ (then I simply dream).136 It depicts a 24-year-old teacher who falls in love with one of his pupils, a 15-year-old girl called Linda. Out of respect for the girl’s innocence, the teacher is unable to act on this love, and this ‘sacrifice’ infuses the story with a feeling of melancholia. It is, moreover, the only way out for the author, given the fact that the teacher character would otherwise be guilty of sexually manipulating an under-age schoolgirl. Even so, the story remains fairly risqué, given the narrator’s subliminally sexual descriptions of the schoolgirl character, who by Brink’s own admission is a stand-in for Esther. Towards the end of the story, the teacher and the girl find themselves strolling off to one side during a school picnic. Just as the teacher thinks to himself, ‘I am in love with her. Is there any point in disputing it?’,137 the following occurs:

‘Just look at those blackberries!’ [Linda] exclaimed, suddenly recalling me from my reverie. Without further ado, she grabbed at some alluring little berries, putting them into her mouth.

In that moment, all the silent feeling in me opened up like a water flower. She was irresistible in her little blue dress, with those coquettish ribbons in her plaits and a red streak across her cheek where the berries had stained it.138

The blackberries with their sensual blood-red juice, the red streak across her fair skin – these barely disguised erotic projections are a foreshadowing of the sexual consummation that the teacher-figure desires but dare not achieve. Driven by his passion, the teacher places his hands upon Linda’s shoulders and swings her around, calling out her name as he does so, to which she replies in consternation: ‘Meneer?’ Thus reminded of his status and responsibility – ‘Sir?’ – the teacher immediately pulls back:

There was consternation in her expression, confusion in her lovely blue eyes. She was facing something she did not know because she was still unable to understand perfect love.

Something higher than my passion compelled me to let my hands fall from her. I forced a smile and gave some or other explanation. As soon as I could manage it, I wandered off alone and sat down at a distance from the others while the pain dammed up inside me.139

Since this story is, as Brink says, a ‘confession’ of his love for Esther, it tells us much about the situation he has now chosen for himself. Esther’s innocence renders her untouchable. Brink is clearly not yet ready for the messy business of adult love. He does not cope well with not getting his way with girls his own age and is probably still smarting after his brush with Marieta. In addition, he is in all likelihood nervous and lacking in confidence around women his own age. He admits to making no attempt to find a campus girlfriend, claiming that this is because ‘in my heart I still love Esther’.140

When he goes home at the end of May 1954, he catches a glimpse of Esther at the station in Sabie, and when, a few weeks later, they travel on the same train back to Pretoria, he tries to break the ice by entering her carriage just as the train arrives in the capital, gallantly carrying her bags.141 During the July vacation in Sabie, he devises a plot to lure Esther to his parents’ home. He and Christie Roode will start baking a cake at the Brink family residence, and then phone Esther’s home, asking the unsuspecting girl to come over to help. The plan flops – the fate of the cake is less certain – but Brink is ecstatic as he has at least managed to talk to Esther on the phone. This is despite the fact that she shows little enthusiasm for the confection, answering his eager entreaties curtly and saying she would first have to ask her ‘mammie’ about the request,142 a response that seems to be a clear evasion. On another occasion, Brink bumps into Esther and her younger brother in a Sabie street. She does not reply when Brink asks whether he can accompany her, and instead mutely begins to speed-walk away from him: ‘We walked – extremely fast. I had to struggle to keep up.’143 Undaunted, Brink later reflects:

Now I am happy right down to my soul. If the afternoon left one impression it is my new, intense awareness of the child in her. Now, once again, I know this for certain. Esther is still thoroughly and purely a child. It is absolutely forbidden to give her any sense of what I feel – because it will damage the purity in her. And God forbid that!144

Brink vows to keep a distance and to seek friendship only – but he also persistently strains to close the gap. His infatuation with ‘purity’ and his near-worship of the ‘child’ in women would recur in the second half of the 1960s, when he began to put together an art photography book, Portret van die Vrou as ’n Meisie (portrait of the woman as a girl), which showed nude teenagers in country settings – a project that very nearly landed him in serious trouble (see Chapter 4), although he would continue to take nude and semi-nude photographs of his lovers for much of his life. In Sabie, he had already seemed – whether deliberately, or half-consciously – to be creating an insoluble dilemma for himself: ‘purity’ could be worshipped but not touched, so he was able to remain in the zone of sublimated love without interference from or interruption by the outside world. He even draws his mother into his Esther preoccupation, confiding in her about the situation, so that she can use her influence in the social circles of Sabie.145

Over the next few months, Brink would go to quite fantastic lengths to see Esther, who was at the time a pupil at Afrikaanse Meisies Hoërskool in Pretoria. Single-handedly, he arranged a Pretoria performance of a student play in which he had the leading role.146 Brink organised the event – at great effort, phoning all over Pretoria to invite schools, book the hall, etc. – and made tickets available for Esther, which in the end she did not take up. He suffered grave disappointment at this, eventually weeping ‘like a baby’ in a backstage storeroom.147 In A Fork in the Road, Brink expands on the scene, describing how his friend Christie Roode sits at a dusty old upright piano in the deserted room and plays Chopin’s third Ballade, while he weeps copious tears. In another incident, again at the train station in Pretoria, he goes too far, pushing himself into Esther’s small circle of friends and hanging around too obviously. In so doing, he merely succeeds in embarrassing them both.148 She seems to regard him merely as a nuisance, and Brink confesses to feeling emotionally shattered: ‘It was so deeply sore here inside of me.’149 Even though his friend Bet tells him, ‘[Y]ou’re simply making a fool of yourself, André Brink’,150 he stubbornly persists.

He continues in this manner for a full year, stoking the fires of his passion in his journal writing and hatching far-fetched plans simply to catch a glimpse of Esther. Not three months after the teenager speed-walked away from him, he again tries to join her in a Sabie street – but this time she makes a break for it and runs away as he looks on in apparent disbelief.151 The rejection fails to deter Brink. He admits that Esther’s act of fleeing hurt him deeply but says it was all so ‘comical’ that ‘even I had to smile’.152 When his father is transferred from Sabie to Bothaville in the former Orange Free State, young Brink takes leave of Esther’s family, hovering in the living room as Esther herself takes refuge in the bathroom and refuses to come out.153 Again, though he describes the acute hurt he feels at such rebuffs, he is simply unable – or unwilling – to abandon his grand passion, in spite of the fact that his mother has by now joined the chorus of friends advising him to let it go.154 Decades later, in 2017, a former lover made the claim: ‘André never really took “no” for an answer.’155

As 1954 draws to a close, circumstances eventually settle the matter, with the move to Bothaville neutralising the romantic youth’s thirst for the unattainable Esther.156 Brink remains confident throughout his ordeals of love, and he almost always manages, in his journals at least, to find a worldly-wise voice to restore ‘balance’. His temperament – in the face of what appears a hopeless situation – remains buoyant. If it is true that he lives most intensely in his writing, then the disappointments of quotidian life might be regarded as a lesser problem. Certainly, his literary career during this period gets off to a solid start. He takes Esther’s rejections so well – despite his avowals of pain – that one cannot but wonder whether, at some level, he enjoys, or needs, these states of painful longing. Even when he does acknowledge feeling low, he quickly recovers. For example, after his vain pursuit in the Sabie street, when Esther made a dash for it, he writes:

This afternoon at the waterfall I just couldn’t pull myself out of the rut I was in. It all just felt so very flat. I was in love with a young girl – and she didn’t want me. Now I’m sitting here on my rock. It’s so awfully mundane. The very worst is that it doesn’t hurt me at all. I don’t feel mournful, rebellious, miserable, sad, or disappointed. I feel neither glad nor jolly. I don’t even feel bitter. Just empty, thoroughly empty, and very, very cynical. It’s a terrible way to feel. I don’t wish it to be thus. But this is how it is.157

A main complaint here is that the outcome is so ‘mundane’ (alledaags), as if the greatest disappointment of all is that the story of his love fell flat despite his many efforts to keep it running. Brink’s sanguine temperament does not permit even this profound state of emptiness to endure. It is as if he nurtures hopelessness, since it inspires his writing. In the event, despite everything now looking ‘so thoroughly futile’, he quickly turns away from despondency by resorting to the consolations of art: ‘But perhaps I should accept it thus, as in my most recent short story’ – from which he now quotes (in English): ‘Deep within her she felt, and knew, that, despite all this tumult, something, something would endure….’ He then refers to another of his stories, ‘Die Eensames’ (the lonely ones), finding there something beyond hurt, something of ‘greater value and deeper meaning’. And thus he writes himself into a steadfast mood: ‘[D]espite everything, I still believe that I love Esther.’158

By March 1955, however, just a few months later, the 20-year-old Brink has found a new woman to admire: a fellow student, Lenie de Beer. At first, she welcomes his friendship,159 but Lenie, too, comes to find the intensity of his attentions unwelcome and he is compelled, once more, to accept defeat. This at a time when his growing short-story earnings have enabled him to buy a typewriter for £40,160 and he is occupied with steering his brainchild, the Estrarte Letterkundige Vereniging – a literary society named after Esther – through various committee stages.161

As before, the more Brink succeeds in his studies, his writing, and related activities, the less successful he is in matters of love (though this would change dramatically from the 1960s onwards). He finishes Eindelose Weë (endless roads),162 a novel published by Tafelberg in 1960 though dated 1955 by Brink at its conclusion. In addition, he successfully proposes various motions in the Estrarte committee processes, proving to be adept at such business, and receives an invitation from novelist CM van den Heever to join the Afrikaanse Skrywerskring.163

In the second half of the 1950s, when he is in his early 20s, Brink reads for two Masters degrees: the first is in English literature while the second focuses on Afrikaans and Dutch literature. For the latter, he writes a dissertation on Shakespeare’s tragedies in relation to NP van Wyk Louw’s verse drama Germanicus; for his Masters in English he writes a thesis that is ahead of its time, dealing with South African English poets, including Guy Butler, Thomas Pringle and Francis Carey Slater. In his spare time, he also completes a teacher’s diploma and sits for second- and third-year French exams.164

At the end of 1955, a very successful literary year, Brink and a group of fellow students travel to Europe for a tour of several countries. In yet another bitterly disappointing love saga during this trip, the object of his adoration, Jeannette Emmarentia Swanepoel, persistently evades his attentions in favour of his best friend, Christie Roode. In all these cases, what is painfully obvious to the reader (and to those around Brink) is that he struggles to reconcile his feverish imaginings with the worldly art of romantic persuasion. He is especially bad at taking hints. In spite of repeated brush-offs by both Lenie and Jeannette, for example – cues that are obvious even from Brink’s own journal entries – he refuses to relent until absolutely necessary, and only after many humiliations. It is as if, for Brink, the force of his own longings and literary sublimations, where his love burns so fiercely, will – indeed must – bend the real world of love to his benefit, as if art must trump life. But he fails in love, and at the end of July 1955, Brink declares that he is ‘also finished with this journal’. If he does resume journalling, he declares, ‘it will be directed at the life I observe with a view to my writing’, adding that ‘little confessions of love are now a thing of the past’.165

By now, it is as if Brink has exhausted the capacity of journal writing to deal with romantic predicaments, and therefore transposes this into his imaginative writing. Between July 1955 and March 1956, when he starts a new journal entitled ‘Gedagtes’ (Thoughts), he appears to have entered into a relationship with his future wife, Estelle Naudé, who makes her appearance in Brink’s journal-writing almost incidentally, and in the midst of more general observations. Estelle herself does not recall the date of the meeting, except to say that it was at a fancy-dress party.166 From 1956 onwards, there is little in his journal and correspondence about love or even about Estelle, apart from details of their eventual marriage on 3 October 1959. In 1962, Brink would report somewhat laconically to writer-friend Chris Barnard that he had ‘picked [Estelle] up in Potch’.167 It is unlikely that he means this in an insulting sense, but he certainly seems not to have regarded this encounter in Potch as a romantic event. After Estelle comes into Brink’s life, it is as if the matter of love has been settled for the time being. As will become clear, this would happen in many of his other relationships, too: the heat of passion would often evaporate just as the all-too-real person settled into his life and the quest fell away. His lifelong friend, Christie Roode, comments as follows:

What I remember about André and Estelle’s meeting of each other was that it was somewhat different from the romantic, esoteric, ‘stars-in-his-eyes’ escapades of the other loves. His going out with the girl who studied botany seemed to happen in the background, almost unnoticed. He also never formally introduced her to me, nor did he sing her praises as he did with his earlier ‘relationships’. The next thing I knew they were together and he came to visit me less and less after 10 pm on Sundays. It felt to me almost as if he was acting apologetically because Estelle (and I say this with the greatest care and respect) wasn’t the dazzlingly beautiful, princess-like girl such as those whose praises he had sung in the past. 168

Indeed, as suggested above, in the second half of the 1950s, the kind of love-talk that animated the earlier journals of that decade migrates into the register of fiction. This is a pattern that would persist for much of Brink’s life. The moment he settled into a stable relationship, his love-writing would shift from self-storying in his journal to imaginative stories for public consumption, and then back again when he unsettled his marriages – or his marriages became unsettled – in the face of new love.

In keeping with the switch signalled by Estelle’s arrival, much of his imaginative writing in the second half of the 1950s features forbidden love in which the figure of virginal beauty functions as a kind of threshold beyond which his protagonists cannot pass. On the one hand, it is as if Brink is already pushing, perhaps unconsciously, against the barriers that social mores have put in place around love and sex. Recall the kiekie of Martie, with its playful, seductive pose, its promise and allure – this ran counter to conventional images of the modest, unsmiling vrou who bears the burden of her volk, her people’s culture and history. Brink’s response to that photograph may signal an early, unconscious rebellion. On the other hand, such a nascent rebellion meshed perfectly with his own seeming preoccupation with very young women in a zone where he could impose and retain control. (At age 65, in his therapy notes, Brink would admit to having a lifelong attraction to ‘Lolitas’.169) So, whether it was ‘self-storying’ love-writing, such as with Martie and Esther, or fictional storying, such as Brink’s tale about the 24-year-old teacher in love with a 15-year-old pupil, the central preoccupation remained much the same.

There is, in Eindelose Weë, a similar figure, Karolien, girlfriend of the young writer Chris, whose short stories are frequently rejected by magazines but who persists in his writing nonetheless. Karolien is described as wearing ‘a blue chequered dress’, with ‘dark hair in a ponytail tied with a ribbon at the back’; she has ‘brown, almond eyes’ and an alluring scent, along with ‘radiant enthusiasm about every small thing’.170 The most extended treatment of these unattainable, beautiful child-women – prefigurations, perhaps, of what was for him the ultimate Lolita, Ingrid Jonker – can be found in Brink’s first published work of fiction, the novella Die Meul teen die Hang (the mill on the hillside). Published in 1958, but written in 1957,171 this 80-page fictional work is, in Brink’s own description, ‘a rather heavy-handed account of a cripple arriving in a small village in the Eastern Transvaal, who is ostracised by the community, befriends a little girl who comes to his sawmill every day and [is] then killed by an electric saw’.172 (It is the girl who so dies.) What this description in its concision doesn’t quite capture is the fact that the friendship between the mill-owner, Jan Venter, and the 9-year-old girl, Marina, is charged with a sense of forbidden but chaste child-love. She has ‘light hair and joyous, impossibly blue eyes’.173 Jan and Marina establish a powerful but taboo bond, and the rest of the story enacts the drama of authentic love that is misconstrued by society and leads to the persecution of the misunderstood but valiant protagonist. The novella speaks to Brink’s growing desire for an exalted yet outlawed form of love – becoming, though not quite yet – sexual. Such love was definitely not available to him within the limits of conventional morality, and outside of writing.174 One way or another, Brink was on course to breach such limits, despite his entirely ordinary marriage to Estelle on 3 October 1959. When he encountered Ingrid Jonker in the early 1960s, he would blend his instinct for limit-breaking with a newly discovered ‘religion’ of sexual love. This was already hinted at in 1952 when he wrote about kiekie-girl Martie: ‘in her … my most holy emotions [are] roused’.175

In the meantime, though, newlywed André and his rather proper wife have set out for Paris: Brink begins a new journal on 27 October 1959 by observing ‘[i]t’s a small Paris room; fifth floor, 66 rue Pierre Charron’, where he and Estelle have come to stay in a building with a ‘primitive elevator’.176 In France, the 24-year-old Brink will take on doctoral studies at the Sorbonne that he will never complete, mainly because he has other, more important things to learn and do.