BOOKS

Sunbeams of insight

Colin Welch

A WALK WITH A WHITE BUSHMAN by Laurens van der Post

Chatto & Windus, £12.95

It is easy to make fun of Sir Laurens. It might even be justified or necessary if his guru influence on the Prince of Wales were overwhelming or nefarious. He is certainly a man who seeks influence, could be ridiculed as self-important, officious, thrusting, interfering. 'I happen to have friends now all over the world who tend to be in positions of power, and I don't hesitate to use these friendships . . . If I feel something is important I ring them up and say, "Look, about so and so, this is your old friend speaking, may I sug- gest . . ." "I thought I must see Malraux . . . to help anonymously.' UDI was de- clared in Rhodesia: 'in the most expensive cables I have ever sent, (I) begged all my friends in the Wilson government not to take the issue to the United Nations — but in vain.' Alas, may I add? Sir Laurens is not always wrong.

It is easy also to make fun of his style, which is often though not always opaque and verbose to a degree — a fault which may have been aggravated by the way in which this book was conceived and deli- vered — long tape-recorded answers to questions posed by a hero-worshipping acolyte. The physical drudgery of writing is a great check to prolixity. Henry James's famous style change has been attributed to his switch from writing it all out to dictating to a 'lady typewriter'. In communicating with others (and with animals, Sir Laurens characteristically adds) primitive peoples pay particular attention to look, tone, bearing and voice: 'we in the West tend to let words play an excessive role'. And how! Sir Laurens may be in other respects, as he claims, a bushman, a primitive person; but certainly not in this.

Another fact which may have affected Sir Laurens's style is his lack, as he puts it here, of 'a first language'. It deprived him of the power to write his own poetry, 'a loss that hurts to this day', and may have cost him something in clarity and concision — not always foremost, incidentally, among the tremendous qualities of his own guru, Jung.

Sir Laurens was terrified by what he saw arising in Hitler's Germany and by what it aroused in him, 'deep profound mytholo- gical forces'. 'It was like watching an enormous storm coming towards you, blackening out the sky — thunder and lightning flashing.' In this passage from a lost book, I noted resemblances to Sir Laurens's own manifestations; dark im- penetrable swirling fogs of words, broken at times by sunbeams of insight, black storm clouds piling up, punctuated by lightning flashes which momentarily illu- minate for us vast tracts of unfamiliar landscape.

These shafts and flashes are by no means rare, but we have to wait for them. Patience is required, and the humility to recognise and profit by them — two qualities especially rare in those narrowly urban and rationalistic Western minds which are anathema to Sir Laurens. He despises or rather pities in them their historical amnesia and their predilection for shortcuts and instant Utopias; their predilections for sciences, political and social, which are no sciences and which stir up bloody mayhem in societies not stable enough to tolerate their poisons; for the rotting corpse of socialism and for revolu- tion; for exporting democracy, as if it were a machine which will work anywhere, to places where freedom is at once destroyed by the ballot box; for exporting thus cruel turmoil; for ovine collectivism and pacif- ism; not least at this time for immoral, irreligious and unconstructive 'solutions' to South Africa's tragic problems, solutions which spring in Sir Laurens's view from hate, malice, envy and from the projection onto others of our own guilt and sense of failure. He sees as sick indeed the society which strives to make another sick society sicker.

How the urban rationalist will scoff at Sir Lauren's belief that our problems are our most precious possession, the raw material of salvation. To destroy South Africa would be indeed to remove, to solve her problems; it would also be to remove her chance of redemption, which can only come from within. It would also be to destroy a society fascinatingly varied and idiosyncratic, full of good and possibilities as well as evil and despair. It is not Sir Laurens's purpose to whitewash South Africa: he hates apartheid in all its forms. But the value of what is now in mortal danger emerges from his pages unbidden.

Urban rationalists will find much else to cackle at in Sir Laurens: the owls which hoot when Jung and the anthropologist Bleek die; the ominous presence of the pianchette; mysterious white birds; the five-part chorale with which African frogs thank God for all creation (`there is no symphony, nothing I have ever heard, which could surpass the ecstasy . . the sheer utterness (sic) of the music going on that night'); the bushman tales, so inac- cessible to those subject to 'the cold arrogant despotism of reason'; the myste- rious facility with which Sir Laurens seems to see the invisible and hear the inaudible — though the more percipient of the blind and deaf must concede that the senses claimed by others are not all hallucination or deception. And did not Coleridge re- gard perpetual incredulity as merely the obverse of perpetual credulity, and of no more value? Would he have laughed at Sir Laurens?

The rationalists will smile perhaps at Sir Laurens's rather sentimental account of how his friend, the poet Roy Campbell, got into the bull-ring to tease the bull and, being slightly drunk, fell dangerously. The bull charged furiously. The crowd gasped. Suddenly the bull stopped, lowered its head and gently licked Campbell's face. Campbell stood up slowly and walked away in tears, never to enter the ring again. Very moving, comments Sir Laurens's interlocutor; Sir Laurens agrees. Yet even I irreverently wonder if the bull smelt the booze and licked because it liked it? In all his exploration of the kingdom of animals, has Sir Laurens never come across one that was partial to a wee drop?

At one point Sir Laurens keeps a bizarre `appointment' with a rhinoceros. He walked over, alone and unarmed. The rhino turned towards him and lowered his head almost to the ground as if about to charge. To preserve the animal's dignity, Sir Laurens halted a few feet away, and stood there for two or three minutes. He thought 'with great emotion how beautiful he was, how lovely was his marble head and so, quickening all over, I explored for the first time every idiom of his antique being . . . dignified, honourable and ex- ceedingly lovely.' What the rhinoceros thought is not recorded, beyond the fact that 'there was something in him that wanted a meeting too'. Sir Laurens is not normally so sparing in his exploitation of the anthropomorphic fallacy, if such it is. So the odd couple stood there, like ill- assorted guests at a party which isn't going too well, till the rhino turned away. In the truck a game ranger, who had once been grievously tossed by a rhino, was under- standably violently sick, though Sir Laurens assured him that there was never any question of the rhino charging.

This weird and solemn encounter occurs near the beginning. Many rationalists will lay the book aside at this point, with an incredulous snigger — not my kind of stuff, I'm afraid, old man. A pity, really, because on the very next page, for instance, Sir Laurens is talking perfectly lucidly and sensibly about 'the smell of things to come', about 'intuition, on which man's capacity for creation depends'. He muses on the old saying 'look before you leap. Wait till you can see, then leap. But then perhaps you never leap. Intuition is (perhaps 'guides' or 'inspires' would be better than 'is') 'the leap forward to creation when all other senses fail and would arrest it.'

All the great scientists, Sir Laurens says, were people who followed an intuition: Einstein's theory of relativity was formed nearly a hundred years before it could be proved.' Was it? But is not Sir Laurens right anyway to suggest that, while the act of creation may happen like a lightning flash, it may long have been building up there in the dark? And is he not right again to regard as 'a preposterous illusion' the idea 'that we must know rationally, in advance, where we are going'?

In truth it is a very narrow blinkered intelligence which will not, if it struggles on through these pages, find in them not only much that is obscure or apparently dotty but much that is vividly interesting about people and peoples that Sir Laurens has known — about D. H. Lawrence, the Bloomsberries, Plomer, Campbell, Mount- batten, Botha, Smuts and Mrs Thatcher, on whom he is peculiarly and percipiently sympathetic; about Jung, of course, a merry hospitable fellow, so it seems, who made Sir Laurens laugh more than anyone else ever did (no jokes are cited save one about a witch-doctor who, questioned by Jung about 'great dreams', sadly re- sponded that 'we don't have great dreams any more — the district commissioner has them for us'); about the Jews and Israel (its creation an injustice, its destruction another); about the South Africans and about the Japanese who took him prisoner, on whom he writes with the warm kindness and understanding which seem accessible only to those who have suffered at their hands. Rest assured that in the face of human beings and events Sir Laurens's stylistic defects dissolve like morning mists in the sun.

Receptive minds will also find much profound, idiosyncratic and benign wis- dom. Oh yes, benign indeed. If Prince Charles needs a Pobedonostsev, he could have a worse one than Sir Laurens. Love of animals, said Cyril Connolly, is the honey of the misanthrope. Sir Laurens refutes him by placing love of animals firmly within the salutary context of a religious reverence for all forms of created life, including us, in all its infinite variety, by an abiding consciousness that 'what you do to another human being you do to yourself. Agreed, he does not revere socialists; but that is precisely because he sees them as hostile to what he most values — freedom and individuality.

Some of the reservations I have about his teachings arise at points where I suspect him untrue to himself. Respectful of the past, is he not too trusting about the new? `What is knocking at the door should be invited in.' Why should it be, till we have examined its credentials? He quotes with approval Jung: 'two thousand years of Christianity have to be replaced with its equivalent', another religion . . . Thus do people talk who are about to trade in a car! He whiffles vaguely about the need for world birth control, forgetful of his own contempt for rationalistic planning based on extrapolated statistics and of his own reverence for created life. Surely this last should extend to life of which the creation is prevented or aborted; and surely govern- ments should govern wisely and respectful- ly those whom God entrusts to their charge, rather than striving arbitrarily and vainly to simplify the task by reducing the numbers?

`When people talk of rehabilitating the inner cities', Sir Laurens blusters, 'my answer is: pull them to the ground and make parks and fields out of them.' Has Prince Charles heard this advice? There are signs he has. If so, he should remember what Sir Laurens has uncharacteristically forgotten or is blind to: how beautiful parts of these inner cities are or were, how powerfully they speak for those who in pride created them, how piteously some of the parts already destroyed are missed by those who loved and lived in them, how precious in consequence is what little of value remains.

It is a selective heart which reveres the Bushman but not, say, the Brummie. Sir Laurens rightly has a special respect for those who, figuratively, were with him at Marathon. A visit to Sandhurst chapel would remind him that the Brummies were at Marathon too. Why wreck the city they died to guard?