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Laurens van der Post (1906-1996) |
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South African writer, journalist, conservationist, and strong opposer of apartheid. Van der Post's works are a fascinating mixture of adventure, philosophical speculation, and mytho-poetic interpretation of the African people and landscape. From the 1950s, van der Post was known for his advocacy of the Kalahari Desert and the culture of the Bushmen. Although van der Post in general developed his novels from his own experiences, his autobiographical books were not very conscientious with the facts and literal truth. "Fiction has its own truth," he once said, and went into inventing imaginary stories of his own life. "For this dream of being awake suddenly was more urgent that the condition of actually being awake. He felt like an explorer who had at last walked into the true unknown and found that the treasure of discovery was the realisation that true awareness needs not only the fact, but also the dream of the fact: these are the two vital ends to the journey between." (from The Face Beside the Fire by Laurens van der Post, The Hogarth Press, 1953, pp. 191-192) Lourens Jan van der Post was born in Philippolis, in the British Orange River Colony. His father, Christiaan Willem Hendrik van der Post, was born in Holland, but when he was three, his family moved to South Africa. There in 1885 he married Johanna Lubbe, who could trace her family roots back to the early settlers in South Africa. After her death, he married her sister, Maria-Magdalena, 'Lammie.' Christiaan Willem Hendrik became a successful law agent and at one time chairman of the Orange Free State Repuclic Volksraad. Lourens (Louwtjie) was his father's 13th child. Van
der Post entered in 1918 Grey College in Bloemfontein, one of the
leading schools in the country. But it was a great shock to him, to
find "that I was being educated into something which destroyed the
sense of common humanity I had shared with the black people." ('van der Post, Laurens,' in World Authors 1950-1970, edited by
John Wakeman, 1975, p. 1474) So it's no surprise that Van der Post participated in the famous boycott of the school meals, for which the boys were beaten. (Teller of Many Tales: The Lives of Laurens van der Post by J. D. F. Jones, Carroll & Graf, 2002, p. 110) Upon leaving school van der Post went to Durban, where he worked as a reporter on the Natal Advertiser. With the poet Roy Campbell and William Plomer, whose novel about multi-racial marriage caused a storm in white South Africa, he edited the magazine Voorslag. In 1926 he traveled with Plomer to Japan, where he spent some weeks. In 1928 van der Post went to England, staying there about
fifteen months. In 1929 he married in Bridport Marjorie Wendt, the
daughter of the founder and conductor of the Cape Town
Orchestra. After returning to South Africa, van der
Post became leader writer for the Cape Times. "For the
time being Marjorie and I are living in the most dire poverty that
exists," he confessed in his journal. (Teller of Many Tales, p. 141) While in
Cape Town van der Post spent his time in the company of
young Bohemians and intellectuals, who opposed General Hertzog and the
"white South African" policy. His article, 'South Africa in the Melting
Pot', published in The Realist,
crystallized his pessimistic view of the
racial situation in the country: the white South African don't want
equality. "He has never intended that the native should ever reach a
higher state of civilization than that necessary to make him a good
servant . . . " (Teller of Many Tales, p. 135) Van der Post prophesied that the
future of South Africa will neither black or
white but brown. In 1931 van der Post sailed back to London, but during the following years he traveled several times between Africa and Europe. In a Province (1934), his first novel, published by the Hogarth Press, attracted the attention of such critics as Compton Mackenzie and Herbert Read. The work was not a commercial success, and did not help van der Post in his financial needs. Possibly with the help of Lilian Bowes Lyon, he bought in 1934 a farm in Gloucestershire. Lilian was his neighbor and a novelist writing under the pseudonym D.J. Cotman. The daily routines of his farm took much of van der Post's writing time. He was also drinking heavily. During the Second World War van der Post served as an
Intelligence Officer with the British Army in the Middle and Far East.
He participated in the Abyssinian campaign of 1940-41. Though van der
Post knew nothing of camels, he led a camel caravan to the mountains,
where he met the Emperor Haile Selassie (or so the story goes). He was then sent to Java,
where he was soon taken prisoner by the Japanese. Like his
fellow-prisoners, he suffered from malnutrition and was
beaten, but did not start to hate his guards. They let him run the camp "farm", but van der Post's idea of
rearing pigs turned into a disaster, because the Japanese didn't provide enough
food the animals. More
successful was his vegetable garden. In Yet
Being Someone Other (1982) van der Post tells how he was saved
several times by his "inner voice" or "the other voice" in him, which
actually took command of him. Compared to other POWs, he had a crucial advantage – he could
speak some Japanese. Van der Post returned to his camp experiences in the novel A Bar of Shadow (1954) and The Seed and the Sower (1963), a collection of stories. Later the Japanese film director Nagisa Oshima based his film Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence (1982) on the stories set in a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp. In the central roles are two rock stars, David Bowie and Ryuichi Sakamoto, who composed the score. Bowie plays a British officer, whose personal integrity and individualism threatens the authority of the commandant of the camp. Van der Post's alter ego in the stories was John Lawrence. Oshima's own idea was to create homosexual tensions between the characters. The war ended in August 1945, but when the other POWs left,
van der Post remained behind for some years. He worked as a military
attaché in Batavia, leaving Java at the end of May 1947. He visited
briefly South Africa and after divorcing Marjorie, he married the
writer Ingaret Giffard. They had met in 1936 on a German passenger
liner called the Watussi. Ingaret was married, van der Post became a friend of her husband. Just before marrying her, he
became engaged to Fleur Kohler-Baker, the daughter of a prominent
farmer and businessman. They also met on a ship. She was seventeen and
the engagement was private. Van der Post sent her love letters and
poems, and it was a shock to Fleur, when van der Post decided to leave
her. Some years later on a ship van der Post seduced a fourteen-year-old South African girl, who was traveling to London to start her ballet studies. Their affair continued for over a year, and in 1954 she gave birth to his child. In 1966 van der Post met in Zurich Frances Baruch, a thirty-year-old sculptor, who became his companion during the following decades. At that time van der Post was sixty but he continued to have other affairs. With Frances he traveled in India, South Africa, America and Europe. In 1949 Van der Post met Carl Jung in
Zurich. He lectured at the Zurich Institute two years later, and again
in 1954. Jung does not mention van der Post in the autobiography Memories,
Dreams, Reflections (1963), but in his own book, Jung and
the Story of Our Time (1975), van der Post portrays the famous
Swiss psychoanalyst as his close friend. "I remember how keen his
attention became," van der Post wrote, "when I told him how difficult
it had been to get the Bushmen concerned to tell me their stories. I
was as always at that moment amazed by his capacity for listening when
he himself was constantly almost bursting at the seams with things to
say." (Ibid., Pantheon Books, 1975, p. 123) Van der Post emphasized that he was never Jung's patient. During his captivity in Java, his psychic strength helped him, but he also had mythomaniac tendencies – not an exceptional trait in a writer. He was, as J.D.F. Jones writes in his biography of van der Post, Teller of Many Tales, a "compulsive liar." (Ibid., p. 359) According to van der Post, Jung once said that he had found "habitual liars and intellectuals" most difficult to heal. However, readers loved van der Post's suggestive and eloquent style. He had a unique talent of drawing his audience into the world he had created, and giving to his tales a deeper, yet often undefined meaning. In the early 1950s, van der Post made several journeys to Central Africa. He worked also as a freelance journalist. In 1949 he was commissioned by the Colonial Development Corporation (CDC) to "assess the livestock capacities of the uninhabited Nyika and Mlanje plateaux of Nyasaland." (Teller of Many Tales, p. 172) During the journey one of the members, a young forester, drowned. His death became material for van der Post’s travel book, Venture to the Interior (1952), which took much of its structure from Joseph Conrad's famous work, Heart of Darkness. Another source of influence was possibly H. Rider Haggard, who was one of Jung's favorite writers. The Lost World of Kalahari (1958) and The Heart of The Hunter (1961) brought international attention to the Kalahari and the Bushmen. Van der Post's expedition to the Kalahari in 1955 produced a six-part BBC series, which made an immense impact all round the word. The series made van der Post a television personality. He was also considered an authority on Bushman folklore and culture. "I was compelled towards the Bushmen," he said, "like someone who walks in his sleep, obedient to a dream of finding in the dark what the day has denied him." (Teller of Many Tales, p. 231) When he traveled in the Soviet Union in the early 1960s, he occasionally compared the Russians with Africans. Although van der Post did not hide his detestation of the Soviet system, his openness to other cultures is evident also in his account of the journey, first published in the magazine Holiday, and then in book form. The Face Beside the Fire (1953), van der Post's second
novel, was described as "pretentiously silly" in The Spectator. The anti-communist
Flamingo Feather (1955) was an international bestseller. It
dealt with a Soviet
conspiracy, as explained to the reader, about "a self-contained
military base and training depot for the 'Takwena army which was going
to liberate Southern Africa on the great day of the final
disintegration of its white capitalist and debased bourgeois world." (Ibid., p. 227) Alfred Hitchcock was set to direct the film version of the novel for
Paramount. Unrealistically, he hoped that Grace Kelly could be lured
out of her
Monaco retirement, to act with James Stewart on an average budget
Hollywood production.
However, the authorities in South Africa were not very cooperative, the
climate was too hot for Hitchcock, and production costs were too much
with all of the
remote locations and extras. Hitchcock dropped the project for Vertigo. Perhaps for political reasons, Finnish publishers did not touch Flamingo Feather, but Venture to the Interior and The Face Beside the Fire were translated into Finnish. In the 1960s times had changed and the Soviet Embassy did not protest, when Gummerus published van der Post's Journey into Russia in Finnish. Penguin books kept Flamingo Feather in print until the collapse of the U.S.S.R. In van der Post's works, Africa emerged as a place where one
could experience something of the oneness of being. In his youth as a
journalist, van der Post had written of the everyday problems of South
Africa, but from the 1950s on, his visionary, romantic view started to
gain the upper hand with regard to the affairs of the continent. His
thought of the "dark aspect" of the white man and "the unlived darker
brother" within the black man, owed all to Carl Jung's idea of "the
shadow" and his concepts of the animus and anima. Hemingway's masculine
Africa was far from van der Post's "mother's country" –
feminine, unconscious, constantly in conflict with his European
heritage, masculine and conscious.
"I believe that the greatest of all the mirrors of our age is Africa," he
wrote in The Dark Eye in Africa.
"We all, East and West and bewildered twentieth-century man, stare into
it as if hypnotized, but, like the baboons, we do not see and recognize
in it the reflection of out own hidden selves." (Ibid., William Morrow & Co., 1955, pp. 82-83) Van der Post was a friend of Alan Paton, the writer of Cry the Beloved Country (1948) and helped to fund his Liberal Party causes. From the 1960s he started to suspect that the South African Special Branch had something to do with the loss of letters to his sisters and to Paton. Van der Post's assumption was not groundless – the Bureau for State Security (BOSS) had a file on him. Margaret Thatcher, the Conservative Party leader, who was appointed Prime Minister in 1979, received from van der Post several long letters dealing with Africa. His closeness to the Prime Minister astonished the Foreign Office officials. Van der Post's friendship with Prince Charles gave rise to jokes – he was called "Charles's Guru." Before his death, van der Post witnessed the fall of the apartheid system. In the power struggle he supported the Zulu leader Chief Mangosuthu Buthelezi, not Nelson Mandela and the ANC. Laurens van der Post died in London on December 16, 1996. His ashes were buried in Philippolis in South Africa. For further reading: 'In a Province, by Laurens van der Post' by Martha Gruening, in The New Republic (April 10, 1935); Laurens van der Post by Frederick I Capenter (1969); 'van der Post, Laurens,' in World Authors 1950-1970, edited by John Wakeman (1975); A Walk With A White Bushman: Laurens van der Post in Conversation with Jean-Marc Pottiez (1986); The Rock Rabbit and the Rainbow - Laurens van der Post among Friends, edited by Robert Hinshaw (1997); Teller of Many Tales: The Lives of Laurens van der Post by J.D.F. Jones (2001); Lammie: Mother of Laurens van der Post by Hélène de Kok (2005); Anima and Africa: Jungian Essays on Psyche, Land, and Literature by Matthew A. Fike (2017) Selected works:
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