The mother of South African poetry
David Wright
WILLIAM PLOMER: A BIOGRAPHY by Peter Alexander
OUP, £25, pp.397
In 1926 two young South Africans in a Durban coffee-shop heard an Afrikaner lady bawling, 'I won't have niggers in this place! Get out!' The `niggers' in question were a couple of journalists from a passen- ger cargo-boat whose mission was to open a trade link between Japan and South Africa. Having intervened on behalf of the Japanese gentlemen, their rescuers were invited back to the ship to meet its captain, who was on the look-out for means to break down the colour prejudice that was the obstacle between the two countries. The penniless young South Africans seemed to him to fill the bill. Taking a chance, the captain offered them a free passage to Japan. He could not have picked two better men in the whole of South Africa for the purpose of interpret- ing Japan to the West. One of them was Laurens van der Post, and the other was William Plomer.
At the age of 23, William Plomer had already achieved fame in England and notoriety in South Africa with his novel Turbots Wolfe — according to a local paper 'a nasty book on a nasty subject' (the marriage of a white woman to a black man), but in the opinion of his biographer a work which earns Plomer the title of 'father of South African prose'. With another remarkable young man, Roy Campbell, Plomer and van der Post had collaborated to produce the first South African little review, Voorslag, believing there was a chance they might change the intellectual climate of the country, and seeing themselves as forerunners of the new Africa that was to emerge when white attitudes changed. 'Nor is it possible yet to say that they were wrong.'
It was the accident of birth in a remote dorp in the Transvaal backveld that made Plomer a South African. Educated partly at preparatory and public schools in Eng- land, and partly at my old school in Johannesburg, in 1926 Plomer left South Africa for good, except for a brief visit 30 years later. He never felt he belonged anywhere. He was even uncertain of his sexuality, though by the time he left Japan he had become a practising homosexual. Yet this did not prevent him, in later life,
from twice contemplating marriage. His parents were English-born upper-middle- class — the father a bit of a vagabond scion of a military family, who nonetheless man- aged to avoid fighting in the Boer War and in the First War. The father had no sympathy with his son's early ambition to be a painter, but first apprenticed him to a farmer in the Eastern Cape, then took him on as partner to open a native trading store in the wilds of Zululand — experiences which afforded Plomer material and in- spiration for Turban Wolfe and his short stories.
The turning-point of Plomer's life was his meeting with the poet Roy Campbell a friendship of opposites, immensely fruit- ful for both, like that of Wordsworth and Coleridge; though like theirs succeeded by estrangement. As a poet, Plomer never approached the heights attained by Camp- bell at his best; equally, he never plumbed the depths to which Campbell often sank. Plomer was a lightweight, but a champion in that class — his forte was detached incisive comedy, to which he brought an accurate eye and ear. Betjeman and Au- den were his peers, rather than Pound or Eliot. In parenthesis, there was at one time a debate whether Campbell or Plomer was the true father of South African poetry. An Irish publisher, after thought, delivered this verdict: 'Roy Campbell was the father, 'William Plomer was the mother'.
While living in the backveld, Plomer had corresponded with Harold Monro of the Poetry Bookshop, who offered encourage- ment but would not publish; then with Virginia and Leonard Woolf, who owned the prestigious Hogarth Press, which printed his first novel. Returning to Eng- land in 1929, Plomer visited the Woolfs, whose approval secured him entry to the literary establishment of those days. 'A little rigid, I fear, and too much of a gentleman', was Virginia Woolf s verdict: and she was right. Henceforth, his career was that of a respectably successful man of letters, though till the end of his life he remained a comparatively poor man. On good terms with the Bloomsberries, he became friends with E. M. Forster, Stephen Spender, the Sitwells and John Lehmann; wrote two or three good novels, an autobiography, and much delightful verse; served as a reader to Jonathan Cape, whom he persuaded to publish Stevie Smith ('a tame kestrel dressed for a First Communion in a French village' as he described her); Arthur Koestler, the Kil- vert Diaries, and Ian Fleming — under whom he worked for Naval Intelligence during the war, and whose influence prob- ably saved Plainer from being prosecuted for soliciting; and finally, he composed librettos for successful operas by Benjamin Britten, including Gloriana.
As Scott Fitzgerald once remarked, 'There isn't a good biography of a good novelist. There couldn't be. He is too many people.' Plomer was a humorous, kindly, but intensely private man. Few guessed (I certainly didn't) that he was homosexual. It was a side of himself that he kept hidden under the rigid mask of an English gentle- man. His biographer claims that 'it was his sexual torment that in large part explains why Plomer wrote as he did, and . . . why he did not write more.' That is as may be. At any rate Mr Alexander has been inde- fatigable in lifting the mask, informing us how Plomer had 'always been attracted to those whom he considered his social in- feriors, whether Zulus or his Japanese pupils', though not because, as Stephen Spender is quoted as saying, 'Sex with the working class had political connotations. It was a way in which people with left-wing sympathies could feel they were really getting in contact with the working class.' Being largely apolitical, Plomer was free from this particular hypocrisy. But the detailed catalogue of his sexual adventur- ings as displayed by Mr Alexander is a depressing one.
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