No.68 - Marilyn Monroe, "The Misfits" and the animals

Pretty far down on my personal list of Items of Negligible Interest – somewhere just above trade stats for Argentinian tomatoes and junior school netball scores from Uttar Pradesh – is the life of Marilyn Monroe, trashy, glitzy and tragic a phenomenon though she is.

It was even a while before I recognised her when I accidentally got caught up in her final completed film, John Huston’s The Misfits (1961). I was intrigued by the way the light fell on Clark Gable’s rugged visage, a certain amusement in seeing so young an Eli Wallach, a certain stilted grace in that period’s acting style, so theatrical compared to today’s naturalistic mumbling. But most interesting to me was the prominent role of the animals.

In the film, Monroe plays the role of Roslyn Taber, a troubled but vivacious woman who goes to Reno, Nevada to get a quickie divorce, as one did; and ends up under the wing of Gay Langland (Gable), a somewhat ageing cowboy who hoicks her off to a half-built house in the Nevada desert which belongs to ex-Air Force pilot and widower Guido Racanelli (Wallach). Later they are joined by another dislocated individual, Perce Howland (Montgomery Clift). Each nursing amorous designs upon the suddenly liberated Roslyn, they embark on a last manly adventure, running down some of the few remaining wild mustangs  in the Nevada hills. Anything’s better than “wages”, apparently.

Much commentary has highlighted the way the film jibes with Monroe’s own well-known love of animals, which was less activist than adoring of pets – a basset, a parakeet, a seldom-ridden horse, and most famously a Maltese poodle, a gift from Frank Sinatra, which she named, because of the latter’s connection with that illustrious outfit, Mafia, or Maf. “Dogs never bite me,” Monroe is famously quoted as saying, “Just humans.” And again:  “I like animals. If you talk to a dog or a cat, it doesn't tell you to shut up.” When, as late as 1993, the film’s screenwriter, playwright Arthur Miller (The Crucible, Death of a Salesman), received a Classic Film Award for The Misfits, it was Monroe’s love of horses he spoke about. Perhaps a little like Monroe herself, Roslyn cares, feels others’ distress as her own, “hooked into the whole thing,” as Guido says; her “gift for life” alternately infuriates and allows the men to open up, but also makes her preternaturally vulnerable, belonging nowhere.

The Roslyn/Monroe congruence is unsurprising, given that the role was specifically written for Monroe by Miller, then her third husband. Miller had himself gone to Reno to divorce his previous wife, and met up with some of those ageing mustangers. He had also written a vignette, “Please Don’t Kill Anything”, in which a Monroe-like character runs along a beach, picking up fish rejected by the fishermen and throwing them back into the sea. Monroe certainly stimulated in Miller this animal-saving theme, which he incorporated into a short story, “The Misfits”, published in Esquire in 1957. The story was subtitled “Chicken feed: the last frontier of the quixotic cowboy”, because the mustangs were indeed destined for slaughtering and rendering into dog and chicken feed. The last mustangers are “unreconstructed originals”, as James Goode called them, “the last real men left on this earth”, the film character Isabelle Steers (Thelma Ritter) says – “and as unreliable as jack-rabbits.” They were as much misfits as the straggling horses, the remnants of great wild herds that by 1946 had been reduced to handfuls. This was the basis for the screenplay which Miller worked up with Huston, though there would be significant differences. (Also set in this period, incidentally, was another Miller story,  "The Bees", in which an upwardly-mobile house-owner battles to rid his home of bees, bombing them with DDT and sulphur dioxide; the mass poisoning was clearly a synecdoche of suburbia’s sprawling invasion of the natural world.)

Film critics have always been deeply divided about the quality of The Misfits – “a sparky but rather shallow story of emotional frailty”, Timeout opined; ecocritic Cheryll Glotfelty

considers it “an illuminating period piece, documenting the transition from a frontier to an urban West [and] a sensitive treatment of human ageing”. Most observers were as fascinated by its real-life back-stories: the already-crumbling Miller-Monroe marriage; her earlier miscarriage, her unreliability and rehab, and dissatisfaction with the rather dilly, patronising role Miller had penned for her; Huston’s alcoholism that put him to sleep in his director’s chair; tensions between Gable and Wallach. Most of all, the so-called “curse”: the fact that Gable was dead of a heart attack just 12 days after the film wrapped in November 1960, Monroe 18 months later of a barbiturates overdose, and Clift in 1965 aged only 46. (Wallach, in contrast, continued acting for decades, dying in 2014.) These prurient aspects overshadowed attention to the animal theme, though it has been pointed out that in its clear objection to animal cruelty the film was ahead of its time. There has also been some discussion about whether cruelty had been inflicted on the actual animals on set, especially in the climactic mustang-catching scenes, which I and many other viewers now find very hard to watch.

The mustangs have rightly preoccupied most studies. Their decimation has mostly been interpreted as symbolic or symptomatic of the waning of the legendary Old Wild West, overtaken by post-war disillusionment and mechanised modernity. The Misfits is an early anti-Western. Along with this goes the degradation of masculinity itself: the legendary rugged and weaponised self-sufficiency – which involves the unsentimental domination of land, animals and women alike – is becoming subordinated to impersonal machinery and effete gardening. Guido, for example, expresses his daring individualism and freedom in his rather creaky biplane, but in his one unguarded moment confesses to Roslyn that he’s haunted by the easy, depersonalised destruction of cities and people – and “puppydogs” –  he meted out as a bomber pilot.  Now he flies only to harry the last few mustangs to their ignominious end – and “Shame on you!” Isabelle Steers expostulates.

Less commented on have been the film’s other animal presences. There are the rodeo animals. Perce Howland enters the film as almost manically dislocated, dissolute, lost. With reckless drunkenness he tries to relive his glory days as a rodeo rider; he gets violently thrown by one bucking bronco, but despite his bruises takes on a raging bull. Though the emotionally demonstrative Roslyn seems at this stage more concerned for him than for the animals, the film pointedly has Guido show her (and the viewer) the painful straps which galvanise the animals into bucking frenzy in the first place. Those animals had to be hurting; and Perce’s foray into manhood is equally painfully unsuccessful. That’s why, it seems, he joins the mustanging expedition, for the sake of his battered self-image, not for the money.

In another telling scene Gay, trying in his way to adapt to a settled life commensurate with his age and times, finds that a rabbit has been nibbling his new lettuces: his response, in the frontiersman way, is to grab his shotgun, ready to hunt it down. Roslyn begs for the rabbit’s life; she’s happy to sacrifice a few lettuces, and “can’t bear to see anything killed”. He calls her “silly”; the argument rapidly spirals into one about mutual respect. There is a strong hint here and elsewhere that the subordination of women and animals go hand-in-hand. This brief but resonant and obviously symbolic episode serves as a precursor to Roslyn’s later response to the mustang-catching. Just before it Gay also mentions that some pilots like Guido are hired to kill eagles, because they take “so many lambs” – another instance of agricultural regimes overwhelming the wild.

No one I’ve read so far has explored the role of the dog, Gay’s rangy and enthusiastic Pointer, named (I think) Dooley. Dooley is Gay’s constant companion, his “friend”; Roslyn connects with the dog even before she meets Gay himself. When the group camps out in the moonlit desert, it’s Roslyn who notices that the dog is trembling violently and panting. He got “a whiff of the horses”, Gay guesses. When Roslyn leans down to comfort him, Dooley uncharacteristically snaps at her. It’s not the horses he’s afraid of, Guido asserts, “it’s us.” The dog identifies with the wild animals, knows what’s going to happen, and is “scared he’s gonna end up dead, too.” This is the point at which Roslyn learns the true fate of the mustangs, initiating a crucial discussion on kindness, the changed world, the place of death, the excuses for killing. The dog reappears, panting and moaning: “Shame on you, you old fool,” Gay tells him, “You be quiet now.” Emotion is to be denied. As the capture gets under way, the dog is tethered to the parked plane, sidelined, much as Roslyn is. After the whole event, a joyous reunion between Roslyn and Dooley presages the final hint of a reconciliatory, if uncertain future.

So the film advances to its climactic mustanging episodes. Guido asserts that there might be 15 or so mustangs up in the hills; the others are dubious that they’ll be worth it, but they go for it anyway. If this is meant to be a manly reprise of the Old West, it’s compromised from the start: it’s heavy on technology. First Guido locates from the air a small mustang group – a stallion, four mares and a colt – then uses the biplane to harry them down onto the wide desert flats. There the men, Roslyn and dog aboard, chase the mustangs down in a truck, roping them and weighing them to exhaustion with dragging tyres. The mustangs don’t stand a chance.

Two scenes I find especially rivetting and affecting. In one, the colt, who will not leave the side of its mother, is seen pawing desperately at the flanks of the roped, exhausted and fallen mare. This is close to the note on which Miller’s original story ended:

 Toward evening the wind came up, and they backed into it and faced the mountains from which they had come. From time to time the stallion caught the smell of the pastures up there, and he started to walk toward the vaulted fields in which he had grazed; but the tire bent his neck around. … The cold of night raised the colt onto its legs, and it stood next to the mare for warmth and the other horses closed their eyes and slept. The colt settled again on the hard ground and lay under the mare. … When the first pink glow of another morning lit the sky the colt stood up, and as it had always done at dawn it walked waywardly for water. The mare shifted and her bone hoofs ticked the clay. The colt turned its head and returned to her and stood at her side with vacant eye, its nostrils sniffing the warming air.

The Esquire story thus ends dispiritingly, the horses awaiting their inevitable fate. The film ends differently. The second affecting scene is the turning-point: Roslyn runs away across the sands, and from a distance, the vast desert and distant hills behind her, screams and screams her distress: “Murderers!” she yells, “You’re murderers! Liars! You’re only happy when something dies!” It’s a genuinely hair-raising moment. Though Guido tries to disparage this outburst as just the usual woman being “crazy”, Perse responds to her sentiments, and begins to cut the mustangs free of the tyres they are roped to. “Go home!” Roslyn cries out to the mustangs from the truck cab, “Go!” Gay, incensed, then embarks on perhaps the only genuinely masculine effort in the film: he runs and catches up with the stallion, hanging onto the remaining length of rope round its neck through an exhausting and appalling duel. Roslyn, trying to intervene, is herself hurled to the ground. Though some shots are obviously studio-staged, others seem all too real: indeed, the effort Gable expended on this fight was later blamed for his heart-attack. Gay triumphs in the end, wrestling the sweating stallion to the ground, and lashing it to the truck bumper. Then, however, Roslyn’s “sentimentality” prevails even over him; having, presumably, proven his manhood in the traditional manner, he cuts the stallion loose again. Whether with conscious or unconscious symbolism, though, the rope remains around the stallion’s neck, trailing behind him as he runs.

Though for Marilyn Monroe’s sake (and Hollywood’s) Miller ended the film on this liberatory note, it strikes one now as just a little tinny. Though some protective legislation for mustangs took effect in the 1950s, their day was already well and truly over – another sad instance of the crushing advance of human civilisation, the very world of spiritless work these predatory cowboys hate.

******

No.67 - Cycling into Zimbabwean history: a slightly mad journey

The slightly mad journey described here occurred in 1991; the account may have been printed in an obscure Harare broadsheet, the Northern News, maybe in early 1992, but I have no record of that, so venture to resuscitate it here.

IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF MAPONDERA

The early white settlers called him a murderer and a nuisance and a mercenary and a cannibal. Later, black liberation fighters would hail him as a kind of proto-nationalist hero and protector of the poor. In his 1893 novel, Solomon Mutswairo called him “the last and greatest fighter of his country against Cecil Rhodes’ squatters”.

Even as new, often contradictory evidence comes to light, Mapondera remains controversial. But his career in Zimbabwe’s north-eastern districts, from the 1840s to 1904, is astonishingly well-documented.  His tracks are pretty clear.

In his footsteps, very crudely, my friend David and I decided to follow – on bicycles. It was altogether the wrong season to cycle anywhere, over Christmas: very hot, very wet. We also had to do it too quickly, either for comfort or to locate and visit Mapondera’s old haunts with any real precision.

But we did it anyway.

We began where Mapondera ended, both literally and symbolically: Harare. Here he was finally imprisoned and died; and here also his name is enshrined on the facade of the High Court building on Samora Machel Avenue. When he was captured and brought here, so the legend goes, his broken chimurenga spirit possessed him for one last time and he flew about the heads of his terrified captors, before floundering back to earth and final humiliation.

But David and I set out rather in search of the living countryside, the present setting of a once very real, violent and chequered life.

***

[All photos courtesy D G Roux]

DAY ONE

Clear day, soft morning light through Harare’s northern suburbs, early joggers on the Mazowe road. The flat tarmac, cleaving rich red farmland and the research stations, makes for relaxed progress, long shadows mimicking us as we pedal. We stop once near Maryvale to watch a heron hunting through a vlei, take a slug of water in the warming day, and press on down the winding exhilaration of the Golden Stairs. Mazowe Dam on the right, firefinches along the road by the Rowing Club, wagtails in the gorge beneath the high wall. None of the famous oranges at the store: off season.

There has long been citrus at Mazowe: Frederick Courtney Selous wrote of finding lemons here in the 1870s, left maybe by Portuguese wanderers a century before. Though the village originally served goldmines – the map is littered with the crossed picks of mine-sites – citrus took over after the early 1900s when Robert McIlwaine and others started up the Mazoe Syndicate, and built the first citrus factory in 1930.

Mazowe village skulks off the main road among the trees. Beneath huge jacarandas is the moss-greened monument to Blakiston and Routledge, the two youngsters elevated, in the manner of all nascent political powers, to heroic status for little more than getting themselves rather futilely killed in the 1897 Chimurenga. This countryside is full of such mementoes of that rebellion. We divert a short way along the old Fort Road to the hilltop site of Fort Mazoe, from which operations were initially coordinated against Mbuya Nehanda and Kaguvi. Nothing here now except the remnant of a ditch, a thatched shelter for a display of historical accounts and glassed-in photographs; settlers with their pinned-up hats and bandoliers and walrus moustaches; Nehanda and Kaguvi before their execution, a sad, haunted-looking pair whose spirits hovered for seventy years to inspire the second, more successful Chimurenga.

On the way back to the village the rear wheel of Dave’s mountain-bike seizes. We strip it down to find the inside of the bearing housing shredded into flakes. Nothing for it but for him to hitch back to Harare for a replacement. Cursing cheap Taiwanese junk, we pile his gear onto my racing bike (dubbed Mercury, after the god of travellers), and push to the hotel, and he sets off, armed with his wheel. I start to read Newman’s Birds from cover to cover, doze, watch the people who ebb and flow from the veranda: rough-handed agriculturalists, government officials, a lonely farmer who nurses a beer for two hours without removing his baseball cap, a horde of sweaty brittle Danes from a Zambian aid project.

Seven and a half hours later, Dave returns, Isak’s Cycles having generously given him preferential treatment. We retrace our tracks to pitch our Little Red Tent at the rowing club, the rowers’ chant and oar-clank drifting over the water until dark.

We’ve covered the terrific distance of 40 kilometres.

***

My primary source for this historical sections.

Just north of Mazowe, to the south of Chiweshe communal land and in the lee of Nyota Mountain, is the country of Negomo: Mapondera’s original homeland. Negomo’s chiefly name still adorns our map: his people came there, as the stories tell it, around the late 18th century from the semi-mythical territory of Guruuswa (“upriver”), and claimed descent from the great Changamire. Maybe links still existed with the north in the 1830s, as Mapondera said he was born on the Zambezi River.

It was a turbulent time then of internecine strife, foreign invaders. Alternate trade and conflict were carried on with the Portuguese – vazungu­ – along the Zambezi, particularly in gold (gold panning is still today devastating large sections of the lower Mazowe river, alongside Umfurudzi). One Magumu is said to have won the present Negomo lands; after the death of Magumu’s adventurous successor Chiwodza, credited with killing a magician in Dande, the Negomo dynasty split and the chieftainship erratically circulated between brothers. One of Chiwodza’s sons strangled another, a third committed suicide. When Mapondera was born, Chiwodza’s grandson, the “quiet man” Dandera, held sway – but little power that was, at a time when Zwangendaba’s Ngoni madzviti were foraging disruptively northwards on their way from Natal to Malawi.

Dendara was succeeded by Gorejana, maybe Mapondera’s father (even Mapondera’s grandchildren debate this) and a renowned settler of disputes. Mapondera seems to have inherited some of this ability, though it’s arguable whether he didn’t provoke more conflicts than he solved. Little is known of his childhood, but certainly he distinguished himself in resisting Ndebele raiders who scattered through this area in the 1860s, and in sundry Shona civil wars over land, stolen grain, a robbed woman. Either in conquest or arbitration, Mapondera won himself some 25 wives over the years.

In 1884, Mapondera met his first white man, a Montagu Kerr, who was following in the tracks of Selous. Three years later, the great white hunter himself met the Shona chief. Selous extracted (or they concocted together) a fraudulent concession, apparently designed to forestall the encroachments of equally mercenary Portuguese “warlords”, who were making a concerted effort to take over Zimbabwe’s central plateau even as they squabbled among themselves.  By 1891, whites were making more serious incursions from the south into the Mazowe valley; clashes occurred over labour and tax; missionaries arrived in Nyota; in 1892 a white trader was murdered. The build-up in tension was steady until the outbreak of widespread rebellion in 1896.

But by then Mapondera had gone, heading north-west – as we did.

***

DAY TWO

For the second time we cross through the gap in the Iron Mask range, past Concession’s ranked grain silos, turning off towards Mvurwi. The day heats up rapidly. Mapondera’s Nyota (Thirst) mountain faint in the east. The turnoff to the Howard Institute, the Salvation Army school and successor to the first mission in Chiweshe, which in 1891 included maybe Zimbabwe’s first black missionary. Acres of citrus trees, tiny oranges peeping.

We both suffer in the heat, welcome the stop to watch a Longcrested eagle on a telephone pole, its self-assured stance, that fierce crest of black feathers, white windows on its wings as it flies. Dave labours particularly: he’s carrying more gear on his sturdy mountain-bike, suffers more road-friction from its fat tyres, more wind-resistance from his upright posture. He drinks vast quantities of water, and I rib him about it; I find that when on the move more than a mouthful makes my stomach turn and legs go leaden.

We stop at a store for cool drinks, craving ice and sugar. Reggae music blasts numbingly from scratchy speakers. People stare; boys convulse in laughter. We are a sight: Dave in sandals, straw hat, multicoloured shorts, intellectual’s glasses, long muscular arms gripping those spacious handlebars; me in boots and binos, Indiana Jones hat, purple panniers. All the way we suffer from this intense self-consciousness.

Mvurwi’s granite koppies sail into view, ghostly overturned galleons, well before lunch. We collapse on grass on the curving main street, chat to a South African couple and their Zimbabwean daughter: “You’re going to Gooroovy? Why the hell would anyone want to go to Gooroovy?” We’ll die in the Valley, we’re told. But we’ll head for Guruve anyway, as soon as we’ve got over feeling like the “heap of pieces” the name Mvurwi means. Once called Dawsons, the village became Umvukwes in 1935.

We drop in on an acquaintance; his kind, bluff landlady entertains, allows us to shower in humid pre-storm heat. Clean, we launch into a skyscape of riotous, steely storm-cloud, dark sheaves of approaching rain thundering through Gertrude Page country: this 1930s novelist’s grave at Omeath is just a few kilometres south as we turn towards Guruve.

A cool, magnificent tailwind lifts us over the Great Dyke at Mupingi Pass: a protected area and the northernmost crossing of the 530-kilometre serpentinite mass, the world’s longest, 2,500 million years old. If there are any of the Dyke’s 20 endemic plant species along this route, we don’t notice, the storm-wind hurtling us down the Pass’s exhilarating loops, making nearly 30 kilometres an hour. We stop momentarily for more wanter, race on in the dusk through the bleak flatlands of Guruve communal lands, scattering stones and chickens, finally turning aside to pitch the Little Red Tent near the headwaters of the Dande River.

***

A mere 20 kilometres downstream of us, in late 1894, Mapondera came to rest with 50 followers, on the rugged edge of the Zambezi escarpment.

Why did he flee his homeland at Nyota, where he had lived for nearly 50 years? Probably many reasons. There was drought in 1893-4; a lot of people had to move. There was the conflict with the new white raiders (they could hardly be called a government yet), especially after the killing of the trader Henry Austin and the arrest of his killer, Rwanga. The notorious Native Commissioner Kenny was stretching his tax-collecting tentacles into the Mazowe valleys.

But Mapondera had avoided friction with the whites himself: he just raided his neighbours. As one described it: “About 3 days ago Mapondera’s men came to my kraal. Mapondera was there himself with a great many of his men. They said they had come for cattle from us. We had no cattle of theirs. They came and took all our cattle – about 14 cattle – and killed a boy and a girl. The boy was stabbed by an assegai and the girl was a little girl they caught hold of her and dashed her against a piece of wood. ... They took away my wife and her two children. My wife and my children.”

So it was probably Mapondera’s neighbours who pushed him out, despite his prominent position.  Here on the Dande’s steep hills, he was beyond the reach of British, Portuguese and vengeful Shona alike. This northern curve of the Dyke, the Horseshoe, had always been a place of refuge for Nagomo’s people; it was here that Chiwodze had killed his magician and returned to power.

Mapondera would never return to power in Nyota. He was left alone until 1900; the 1896-7 chimurenga entirely passed him by. But in April 1900 he fatally drew attention to himself by raiding in his old home ground, too close to Mazowe to be ignored, and again in June by attacking, for no known reason, one Mavuri. One of Mapondera’s own daughters tried to warn Mavuri, but too late: Mapondera shot him through the thighs, and both the traitorous daughter and the wounded Mavuri prudently fled to the white camp at Chinhoyi’s.

The result, of course, was a punitive patrol. Twenty whites under Gilson set out on what would be called “The Chastisement of Mapondera”. However, Mapondera ambushed them just west of where Dave and I were camped, and they were scattered, with one man killed. So, equally inevitably, a bigger force was despatched. A hundred and eighty men attacked Mapondera’s base on 5 July; four of Mapondera’s men were killed. More importantly, his crops and villages were destroyed, his family and followers dispersed.

Mapondera had to move his people again.

***

DAY THREE

The peaks of the Horseshoe – smoky, sheer-sided Mavurwe among them – close in on Dave and I as we negotiate the dirt farm roads. This is where Dave’s mountain bike scores over my bony, frail 10-speed.

We skirt Guruve township – some stores still bear the pre-independence name, Sipolilo – thus unfortunately missing the famous Tengenenge sculpture workshop. The Tengenenge river flows from the Dyke to the Dande, the source of the gleaming serpentine they coax those world-renowned sculptures from.

We tether our bikes near the tobacco barns of Penrose Farm, asking permission to walk to Tingwa Raphia Palm Reserve, one of two small designated preserves in an area known generally as the Palm Block. A hot 4-kilometre tramp across the northernmost curve of the Horseshoe’s great question-mark, through maize fields and uapaca woodland, chittering woodhoopoes and Amethyst starlings, unidentifiable raptors screaming on the high thermals. Somewhere to the east, a mountain beckons with its name: Incognito.

The raphia palms (Raphia farinefera), the last insular remnants of a once popular tribe, cluster along the narrow head of the Mavare stream as it flows through vlei north-west into Mavuradonha: towering, creaking fronds fanning from layered bases – the longest leaves in the plant kingdom, up to 18 metres tall. Returning, we find ancient rock paintings in the lee of an outcrop: magical flaking renditions of energetic hunters, waterbuck, giraffe – some, strangely, upside-down (dead?) – maybe 10,000 years old.

Press on, tough farm roads, alternately sandy and rocky; onto a short stretch of tar north of Guruve, then dirt again. Horrible, this bit: recently graded, with a treacherous sheath of loose stones; Mercury slides and rattles and fishtails, and I dread the blowout that doesn’t come.

Almost last light: Bakasa Business Centre, perched on the lip of the Zambezi escarpment: RMS trucks and buses grinding up from the valley, music, lemonades (all we can buy in a time of shortages), beer-cradling youngsters on holiday crowding us with friendly questions: Are you on a race? Who is sponsoring you? Who are you raising money for? They can’t believe it is just for fun (is it?), have heard only vaguely of Mapondera.

Valleys fall away on every side; habitation everywhere. In my halting Shona I ask to pitch Little Red Tent on a flat spot near some huts. Little girls gather with badzas to clear the stones for us, awestruck by the “piccanini kaya”, sleeping-bags (“Brunkets!”), sadza being cooked on a meths stove. And I sleep out, pasted with repellent, listening to the bushbabies cawing in the donga, the sky weighted and bouyed at once with its wheeling stars.

***

Mapondera needed to plant a new season’s crops, rebuild villages before the rains. He was caught between British and Portuguese tribute-collectors. In the Dande there was talk of further rebellion against the new white overlords, with rumours that many of the whites had left to fight a big war against the vabunhu, the Boers, far to the south.

Mapondera was less keen to fight than to find security, food, the means to hold his diminished people together. It was an desperate move to go into the Zambezi Valley, with its tsetse fly, its heat, its poor Kalahari sands. But in July 1900 another white patrol caught up with him; he escaped, and dropped, somewhere in the vicinity of Bakasa, over the escarpment to a point on the Musengezi River.

He returned once to Dande to recover some of his belongings, and shot in the leg a youth who turned obstinate. It was his last appearance in that traditional haven.

***

DAY FOUR

Like Mapondera, we drop precipitately from Bakasa to the valley floor, 600 metres down treacherously loose hairpins. Dave positively enjoys it on that muscular bike of his; I nurse complaining Mercury over the rocks and avalanching pebbles; more than once the machine despairs and throws its wheels in the air and sends me leaping.

That liberating floodplain comes intermittently into view round the wooded corners, blurring into mysterious, unreachable blues towards Kanyemba and Cabora Bassa, where Portuguese gangsters once traded and slaved and lived the violent, polygamous lives of minor potentates.

Shoulders aching and paintwork scratched, we arrive at the Fly Gate (extra wide, to admit exceptionally large flies?), a store without drinks, mangoes on pole-and-thatch stalls. We head west along the foot of the escarpment, trying to make as much distance as possible before the heat hits us. We stop for tea beneath a thorn tree, not far from Mutota’s Ruins, a schist oval structure, possibly connected with the Mwenemutapa imperial complex, pottery dating it to around the 15th-17th centuries (this is book-learning: we don’t actually find the ruin ourselves, far too much effort in the growing heat).

After crossing the Musengezi, not far upstream from where Mapondera settled, we find a steel-and-concrete blessing: a roadside borehole. A laughing man pumps the long handle while we duck and writhe in its pulsing stream, the nearest we’ve had to a wash since Mvurwi. Finally, dripping and sapped, but having made some decent progress on well-kept gravel, we reach Muzarabani shops and irrigation scheme. No electricity, no ice’n’sugar. We buy biscuits and exorbitantly expensive oranges, crash for a few hours under a pair of corpulent baobabs, refreshing ourselves in the irrigation sprinklers.  A snazzily-dressed young lady in scarlet shoes and straw boater comes across to chat, wrinkling her face in utter amazement: “From Harare! And back again? My God, you must know how much I hate cycling!”

Mid-afternoon: back up the escarpment, thankful for the tarmac of the Alfa Trail. Push, ride; push, ride. It’s exhausting, dispiriting to see the road loop back and forth above us. Dave, tractor-treads and Mister Tuffies anti-thorn strip inside his tyres notwithstanding, picks up a slow puncture, keeps stopping to pump, grows irritable and despondent.  (I’ve been there, buddy.) Elephant dung on the road; no elephants. At last, after three hours of backbreaking climbing, we arrive at the campsite at Mavuradonha, absolutely empty. Even the manager’s away. Up goes the LRT; down go the weary heads.

I wonder if we’re the only crazy coots ever to have cycled down and up the Zambezi Escarpment, by two different routes, on the same summer day.

***

Mapondera, like us, was not long on the Musengezi – a few months. He was too close to the Portuguese warlord Fonseca for a start, and by October 1900 he had moved bodily eastwards, 150 kilometres onto the lower Ruya – well inside Mozambique and just north of that sharp north-eastern corner of Zimbabwe enticingly called Baobab Beacon – but there Dave and I can’t follow.

It was a pretty horrendous place to live. Mapondera put down new crops in the local transhumance style, but the soils were poor, rains inadequate. Between plantings, raiding was endemic. Mapondera was implicated in some raids, including the killing of a white trader in late 1900, but many of the tales were probably spread by Mapondera’s slanderous rivals. But every man had a gun; Portuguese slaving threatened every woman; British raiders, claiming suddenly to rule the whole area and demanding tax, erratically came, were resisted, and went away again.

Mapondera sandwiched himself between two tough local chiefs, Chiuti and Chioko, who, along with Chimanda and Pfungwe on the upper Mazowe, continued to offer spirited resistance to the incursions of Native Commissioners Taberer and Kenny, who had set up an advance base at Pfura (Mount Darwin).

For his part, Mapondera’s own experiences rankled. He had more or less consistently avoided conflict with the whites; those few he had met personally, he had treated hospitably. They in return had repeatedly attacked him under some misguided judiciary impulse which compelled them to control affairs which had never had anything to do with them. As a result, Mapondera had been reduced to shiftlessness and virtual destitution.

But he was by no means finished yet.

Our route, going clockwise.

***

DAY FIVE

We relax at the Mavuradonha campsite for the morning. I wander about, watching birds, a pair of Wahlberg’s eagles harassing baboons on the hill. David repairs his puncture; our steeds are groomed and fed, their wheels relaxed in the air.

After lunch we leave into a forbidding prospect of storm. After yesterday I have no energy for the initial hill, barely appreciate the cold witch-brooms of rain that sweep the Tingwa and Musengezi valleys to the west, vagrant patches of sun on the Mulingura Hills. Almost invisible beyond, the eastern slopes of the Horseshoe. We turn east towards Mount Darwin, afternoon sun burning our shoulders. Magnificent downslope into the farmlands, exhilaration reluctant to brake, youths shouting hoarsely from the banks, whether encouraging or abusive is impossible to say.

Slow climb again; I feel drained, irritated that Dave isn’t hanging back for me. We stop at one store in search of that self-renewing grail of Ice’n’Sugar; about thirty people are already there, an unlit stuffy cavern, another thirty curious children crush in behind us: the dark crowding and sudden lack of air overwhelm us and we flee, buying nothing. Another store along the road offers celebratory music, friendly poring over our maps by sundry young men, cold LemonTwists. Darkness overtakes us thirty kilometres short of Mount Darwin; the LRT goes up on tussocky burnt grass against a swarming termite-mound, rain-clouds threatening again, scotching fantasies of a friendly farmhouse: “What, camp? No. no, come in, have a drink, have a bath, roast chicken, a nice bed!”

Ho ho. We wriggle and toss in the confines of the hot tent, tussocks nudging our spines, ants running over our feet; we’re trying to find a miracle in the fact that we haven’t been rained on once yet.

***

By Februrary 1901, the disgruntled Mapondera was ready for a major assault on the white outpost at Mount Darwin – the only such deliberate attack of his career. For weeks messengers had shuttled back and forth across the north-west region, gathering soldiers and carriers. Chiutsi joined in, as did groups from Pfungwe, Chitange, Makuni, Chipara; Manyozi and Chimbangu from further west, from Mkote and Nyombwe to the south.  Some never joined at all: Chioko had already aligned himself with Kenny; others deserted when the crunch came; others still arrived too late. On Mapondera’s line of march, only Chimanda, 70 kilometres east of Darwin, failed to supply some sort of support. In the end, he had maybe 600 men with him.

On 15 February, a hundred of Mapondera’s men attacked Chimanda’s villages. Though beaten off, possibly because the powder for their muzzle-loaders got wet in the rain, they forced Chimanda to flee, and later captured him. Mapondera then secured his flanks on the flooded Mazowe and Ruya rivers with incoming recruits, and camped with his full force for several days on the small stream of the Matitima, only 40 kilometres away from Kenny’s base at Darwin.

The delay was fatal.

On the night of 1 March, a force of eight whites and a hundred African supporters moved out of Darwin. They swung too far north initially, only realising their mistake when they bumped into some recruits hurrying south to join Mapondera on the Matitima. Turning south, the white column quite accidentally surprised Mapondera from behind. Foolishly, they split in two: one half was taken in the flank by Mapondera’s men, who committed themselves in full faith in Mapondera’s nyambe medicine-tail, by which he had promised to turn enemy bullets to water.

The fighting was fierce, and the white force was saved from annihilation only by the timely arrival of its other half. Among other casualties, Chiutsi was shot in the stomach, and died later. Like two boys daunted by each other’s ferocity, both forces then backed off the field.

Mapondera had failed in his apparent objective of killing Kenny and driving the whites from the Mount Darwin area, and had lost the necessary momentum to continue. His supporters, who had anyway joined for a muddle of motives – territory, loot, vengeance, loyalty, taxation – scattered back to their homes. Mapondera regrouped at Chimanda’s, badly mauled, losing a son drowned in the Mazowe on the way.

For all the effort, he had left himself even worse off than before.

***

DAY SIX

Christmas Day. It was both hot and wet in the night. Light drizzle in the morning. Not far to Mount Darwin, originally named Pfura (rhinoceros), and renamed after the evolutionary theorist by F C Selous. We roll into its main street, enormously wide, as if still to take in turning ox-trains, a gravelled straight with spaced, high-fronted shops, looped with electricity wires, verandas, for all the world like a Wild West town, with cycles for horses.

The atmosphere here is really strange. Everywhere else we’ve felt either warmed by people’s spontaneous greetings, or uncomfortable under uncomprehending and shameless stares, or claustrophobic in tightly gathered curious crowds. But here we merit only the casual glance, the polite nod. People just go about their business as if they have itinerant cyclists coming through every day of the week. It’s at once liberating and prickly.

It’s Dave’s turn to feel ennervated. Leaving him and all my gear in Darwin, I attempt a 40-kilometre sprint to Mapondera’s battlefield at Matitima, out on the Rushinga road. A tailwind helps, a faint rain refreshes, and I revel, I have to admit, in the solitude. Dave and I are close friends – but still I feel something special in travelling alone.

Through Chesa small-scale farming area (formerly Purchase Area, the white government’s tool in synthesising a compliant black rural middle class), the plots becoming more sparsely worked the further I get from Darwin, giving way to more woodland. Orange-throated longclaws startle and drop into the grass, bolt-upright and alert like mongooses.

A few kilometres short of Matitima rain and wind strengthen. I get to a rise where I think I’m overlooking the battle area through grey walls of rain and time; rolling woodland, wink of a tiny dam through the msasas, Ndorohwe Hill up ahead, the rising ground of Umfurudzi Safari Area not far to the south. This then is where Mapondera’s career climaxed, though not quite ended. Impossible to discern more detail now; I turn back, tiring rapidly in a strong headwind, until a truck stops and I accept a ride, cold in the rain, to rejoin Dave.

For much of the afternoon we shelter on a veranda. Children peep round corners and shrink back when we wave at them. A young unemployed man, beer-bottle clutched firmly by the throat, shuttles back and forth from the hotel: “This government is rubbish! The people are suffering.  The prices go up! We should have white people in the government. They know how to organise.” It’s hard to tell how drunk or genuine he is.

At last, we detect, with some effort, a slight slackening in the rain. Let’s go for it. We mount our rearing stallions and hit the road south.  The rain falls harder.  And harder. The headwind all but halts us in our tracks. We battle on in raincoats (psychological value only) through drenched passes, putting away our specs as worse than useless, hoping for that mythical farmhouse, fretting about the gathering darkness.  Soaked by rain from above and wheel-spray from beneath, we finally cross Huck’s Drift and hole up on the veranda of a store. Drunken youths roar with laughter from a bus-shelter; Dave makes the fateful and inevitable discovery that even Karrimor panniers aren’t watertight in an African thunderstorm.  We cook in the dark. But we’re more dry than wet; we welcome even this unyielding concrete and the company of two men who stay on all through the lightning-riven night, guarding their store against Christmas-Day thieves.

***

Those thieves, I surmise, are the modern equivalent of Mapondera’s raiders. Having reaped little or no food that season, Mapondera reverted after Matitima to his customary habits of avoiding conflict with the whites and plundering his Shona neighbours.  But the whites weren’t going to let him go so easily. Apart from his depredations on other Shona, Mapondera was endangering their gold trade between Mazowe and Tete in Mozambique, and beginning to skirmish with the nearest Portuguese trader, Martini.

On 25 June 1901 Mapondera was ambushed at a beer-party by a force of over a hundred British, but with his usual cunning escaped. He raided northwards, while his son Gotora, in alliance with other local chiefs, marauded south beyond the Nyadiri river and plundered a white gold-panners’ camp. They gained little, since only the poorest of whites would venture so far north, but it was more than enough to provoke the despatch of another white force in January 1902, this one consisting of over 400 men, including some 280 carriers. Mapondera’s men sniped at the force for nine days running, but could do nothing to prevent the year’s new crops from being entirely destroyed.

That spelt final disaster. Some of Mapondera’s people surrendered to Taberer. The despairing Mapondera himself made a humiliating move he would not have contemplated just a month before – he gave himself into the hands of the Portuguese at Cachomba on the Zambezi.

There, Mapondera was permitted to plant a new crop, but the Portuguese weren’t going to give it to him for nothing. They were just then renewing their efforts to infiltrate the plateau region, and in 1902 hired Mapondera to lead a long-distance raid on Makombe of Barwe, a hundred kilometres due east of where Dave and I slept on Christmas night. The incursion was beaten off; either Mapondera was captured by Makombe, or he escaped and went underground, for nothing was heard of him for another eight months.

When he resurfaces in the records in mid 1903, he is running south again. In Nyota, old Negomo had died; his people were offering considerable passive resistance to the whites; the Negomo succession was wide open. For the last time, we cross Mapondera’s tracks as he finally returns to his original homeland.

***

DAY SEVEN

Turning south to follow Mapondera home, we find Boxing Day cool, faintly drizzly in patches, with a steady tailwind. Dave seems to have found his cycling legs: where heading north he had generally lagged, now it’s all I can do to keep up with the beggar. We hurtle through Madziwa communal land, over the beautiful turns of the Shashi Pass, across the muddy flood of the Mazowe river, making excellent time despite the steady climb of 500 metres from Darwin to Bindura. We stop for lunch in this extensive mining town (originally named Kimberley Reefs after the 1901 goldmine, now host to Trojan, Zimbabwe’s largest nickel producer). For the first time in a decade, I have this absurd craving for cheese and bully-beef on white bread, washed down with cold milk.

Replete, and having had a conversation with a Shona farmer about the situation in Romania (of which we’ve heard nothing for a week), we press on in alternate sun and shade, the hills of Mapondera’s Nyota reappearing, ice-blue and glittering with their granite tips, on our right.

And our journey ends, as unexpectedly, though with a rather more satisfying kind of ignominy, as Mapondera’s, in Mazowe.

Here, we cruise up to the hotel, intending to trough out in Ice, Sugar, and Chips, and to camp again before tackling the Golden Stairs in the morning. But we meet an acquaintance of mine. He has a Land-Rover. An empty Land-Rover. Going to Harare. We throw up our hands. After the last 500 kilometres, what’s another 40? Pride dissolves in the prospect of hot showers, spongy chairs, clean beds with real sheets.

As we motor that final stretch, I think of Mapondera’s end.

He had not come back to Nyota to vie for the chieftainship, nor to join the resistance against the whites. Instead, he passed through to Mazowe itself and gave himself up to the subordinate of his long-standing foe Taberer, M D Fynn.

Over this road, pretty much, he would have been carried to his final abode, Salisbury Jail. He was photographed after his surrender: shackled, enormously gaunt, worn, still faintly defiant with the flat glaucoma’d eyes photographs gave people in those days. He was tried but, strangely, insufficient evidence could be accumulated to execute him. Instead, he was given seven years’ imprisonment. At his age, the judge noted, it was tantamount to a life sentence. Still, Mapondera danced as sentence was pronounced.

He lived for barely a year after that. The circumstances were strange. The prison record says he was putting on weight. His family asserts that he died on hunger strike, saying, “Though I may serve that sentence and go out of gaol, what am I going to do, the chieftainship has gone, the country has gone.”

*****

No 66 - "The Sand-grouse"

THE SAND-GROUSE

My father was dying.

The sun was also dropping in the west, off to my left as I drove up the Great North Road. The tawny grasses were turning to russet in that mid-afternoon light. I had been driving all day, my eyes were scratchy with distance and dust.

I was looking forward to a coffee stop at the Capricorn Monument, its defaced obelisk needling the bouldery ridge north of Polokwane. I always stopped there on my drives to and from Zimbabwe, I liked its elevation and its dishevelled solitude. Now, though, I wondered if stopping would feel disloyal:  I should keep racing on, in case I didn’t get there in time. But I would have to pause and recharge somewhere.

As it happened, I had to stop sooner than I anticipated. I had no time even to take my foot off the pedal as two large birds exploded out of the long grass of the verge. One swerved safely away, but the second slammed into my bakkie’s radiator grille. It jammed there, I could see a wing fluttering in the rush of air above the curve of the bonnet.

I hate hitting birds; swearing and already remorseful, I found a place to pull over, put on my hat and went round to the front of the vehicle. The air was dead still, heated almost to blood temperature; the Capricorn ridge was visible a couple of kilometres to the north.

It was a sand-grouse, I guessed as I eased its still-warm body from between the cracked ribs of the plastic grille. It was so beautiful, the cooling feathers so exquisitely patterned in subtle fawns and reds, dark barring and pale freckles. Heavy at heart, I laid its limpness gently down amongst the grasses and tiny flowers and ants, away from the hard road, there where it would be gradually broken down and absorbed back into the hidden materia of the swirling world.

I crouched there a while longer, wondering about the other grouse, the one that had evaded death. I wondered if sand-grouse mated  for life, whether it would grieve for its mysteriously disappeared mate, or whether it would quickly forget and just fly onward, calling.

I straightened up only when I heard a vehicle draw up behind mine and toot its horn. Not a policeman wondering what the hell I was doing there – a civilian car, someone looking for directions, perhaps. The passenger-side window was sliding down as I approached. A new-model RAV, iridescent blue: an up-and-coming pretentious Somebody, I was guessing as I stooped to look inside.

There was only one person, the driver – a large woman resplendent in a dress of shimmering gold with purple trim, a matching doek massed on her head, sparkling wrist-bangles offsetting the dark gloss of polished skin. Seriously up-and-coming.

“Hi,” I said, “What’s up?”

“I am sorry to disturb you,” she said rather formally, and then just stopped, her hands still on the wheel. Her speech was accented but precise, but I thought her cheeks were shaking slightly; I wondered if she was ill, or about to have a heart-attack, though she could not be older than her mid-forties.

“That’s okay,” I said, “are you lost?”

“No, no. I – I was driving from Johannesburg, from Soweto. I went there to identify my son’s body. He was stabbed in Soweto.” She went on in a rush:  “I got this far and I suddenly just had to talk to someone, and I saw you stopped here, and I just thought to myself, I can talk to this man.”

I momentarily considered the deep irony in this, here and now in contemporary South Africa – that an evidently rich and perhaps highly connected black woman should choose a stranger – and not so much just a stranger, but a stranger who must have looked like the archetypal Boer: white bakkie, broad-brimmed leather hat, grizzled beard and pinkish skin, khaki shirt and shorts, agricultural boots.

But here I was, starting to make noises of commiseration which seemed in my own ears muffled, impossible to make sound sincere, while she gripped the steering-wheel and began to wail hoarsely, “Why my first-born, why me, why, he is my last, I ask God, why me?” She sobbed for a bit and, in tears myself, I found tissues in her glove-box. She extended a hand vaguely in my direction; I took it in mine and held it while she sniffed, and when we had mopped up a little and regained some control, I began to ask her questions, not so much about her son, but whatever seemed to keep her talking and distracted. Gradually, in fragments and loops, her story emerged.

She was the wife of a powerful provincial Chief who, in the way of such things in this country, had not only garnered considerable clout under customary law, but had cornered extensive business interests – hence her ostentatious, power-woman outfit and vehicle. He had given her three sons. One had died very young of some unspecified medical complication; the middle one had been killed in his teens in a car accident, through no fault of his own, not far from where we now sat. And now her eldest, still in his twenties, had been murdered in some grimy bar brawl in Soweto. No wonder she was wondering why she had been singled out for such appalling loss.

Her husband the chief had not gone with her to identify the body. In fact, he had long abandoned her to her own devices, blaming her for his sons’ deaths, her affections displaced by two new, younger wives. So she had branched out on her own, shamelessly using his money and status to get herself a degree in tourism management, thence to work with the provincial tourism authority – and indeed there were bundles of brochures on the passenger seat below our clasped hands. More, she was also headmistress of a junior school, attached to which was an orphanage she had founded.

She was, in short, an extraordinary person, and beneath the ravages of her recent loss I could feel her driven energy, her pragmatic intelligence, her compassion.

Yet all her wealth and influence, her personal power and initiative, could not shield her from the savagery of the ordinary and the arbitrary – the domestic strife and the accumulated, inexplicable losses.

“Why me?” she cried again. “I pray to God to give me a reason, but I cannot get any answer.”

And I had no answer for her, beyond my own belief in a universe ruled not by an inscrutable god, but simply by variable degrees of systemic chaos. We are all as vulnerable to mischance as the sand-grouse subsiding into the grass behind me, always hoping that order will prevail, always to be astonished by the mindless irruption of the unpredictable, like the cancer that was ravaging my father’s body and mind.

I didn’t voice any of that, just softly kneaded the lady’s pudgy hand until she had talked herself out and felt ready to drive on.

My back had grown hot with sun and stiff with leaning through the car window.

“You are a kind man,” she said, “I knew when I saw you there I could talk with you. Jesus has sent you to me.”

I didn’t learn her name. I left her my card, not expecting her to make contact again.

I somehow didn’t feel like stopping at the Capricorn monument after that, but pressed on into the reddening evening light, hoping I would get through the border in decent time, and perhaps even reach my father before he died.

*****

No.65 - Restoring Sydney Clouts, defending poetry

Sydney WHO??

Exactly.

How is it that a poet whom J M Coetzee himself called the “purest poetic talent" of his generation has become quite comprehensively forgotten? Some of you might have encountered in your school anthology one or two of his more accessible poems like “Dawn Hippo” or the beautiful love-poem “The Sleeper”.  Otherwise, even in university literary circles the poetry of Sydney Clouts is almost completely ignored.

Is this fair? Maybe he deserves to be lost. After all, he is dead – rather a disadvantage in our age of obsessing with the new and the instantaneous. He was also white – which these days can be a serious disqualification for being taken, well, seriously. Add to that being male – bad, bad, original sin – and he’s done for. There’s more: Clouts was Jewish, which threatens to condemn him to a minority interest; and he lived and wrote in an insignificant coastal dorp named Cape Town.  Who would be interested?

One anonymous publishers’ reader seemed positively offended that I should even attempt a book-length study of Clouts's poetry, informing the publisher that it would be “politically and intellectually” inappropriate and inadvisable to publish it. (They didn’t.) This of course just spurred me on, and I’ve adopted the comment as my main advertising slogan. After all, isn’t that what we academics are for: to ferret out the unusual, stand up for the neglected, challenge the orthodoxies of the day, open readers’ minds up to the strange and unfamiliar?

In our current phase of intensive decolonisation and the steady Africanisation of our literature syllabus, it’s now teaching Dickens, Eliot (whether George or T S) or Sydney Clouts that can appear most strange, culturally challenging, and unorthodox (not to say ‘conservative’ or even ‘retrograde’). The politics of all this is generally ugly, opportunistic and intellectually shallow, apparently calculated to demolish individualistic appreciation of literature itself. I wrote a critical study of Clouts simply because I loved his poetry from the first time I read it. Writing about it has been the most intellectually challenging and personally satisfying extended project I have ever done. It’s hard to say exactly why I loved it – only that it scintillated and intrigued, and if I felt poetically stuck myself, just reading some Clouts would get me going again.

Sydney Clouts was born in Cape Town in 1926, went to SACS and UCT, and married Marge Leftwich (who still lives in England and has been wonderfully supportive of this whim of mine). 'Work' was never central to his being, though he trained and was employed as a librarian in London, because all he wanted to do was write poetry. He was a poet’s poet, devoted to the craft in a rigorously unself-centred way. Despite this dedication, or because of it, he published astonishingly little – just one slender volume, entitled One Life. (It did win both the Olive Schreiner and Ingrid Jonker poetry prizes.) Deeply unhappy with the unfolding of apartheid, despite a relatively cosy suburban existence, Sydney, Marge and their three sons left for England in 1961. The move eviscerated Sydney’s poetic confidence, and though he produced literally hundreds of pages of drafts, he published very little more before he died of cancer, aged just 56. Even his Collected Poems, posthumously compiled by Marge and his twin brother Cyril in 1984, amounts to a mere 120 pages.

Not that either a slender oeuvre or neglect in one’s lifetime necessarily condemns one to obscurity forever. In our era of instant self-publishing, internet access and blogging, it’s easy to forget that John Donne’s poetry circulated only amongst his friends in handwritten copies; William Blake was considered a nutter who had to etch and print his own works; and were it not for Rupert Brookes’ rescue job the world would never have seen the mind-bending poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins – all poets who eventually had incalculable influence on global literatures in English. And T S Eliot’s Collected Poems is only a couple of dozen pages longer than Clouts’s, also enjoying massive influence despite their ferocious level of difficulty.

Politics, awkward timing and personal reticence all contributed to Clouts’s marginalisation, but just as responsible was the perceived difficulty of his poetry. Like Eliot – and like many other contemporaneous Modernists whom Clouts read and loved – Pablo Neruda, Eugenio Montale, Osip Mandelstam, Roy Campbell, William Carlos Williams, Wallace Stevens – the poems make stern demands on the reader’s imagination. There are few obvious narrative lines, no logical arguments. Lines can leap inexplicably from one image to another; vivid elements and sensuous tesserae are compressed together as if under extreme heat. Take these lines from “The Feeding of the Doves”:

Clouts visiting rural Transkei, 1956

Doves beleaguered me,

            turtledoves, ringdoves.

            Nuts and breadcrumbs I had,

            and a thought taking wings,

            of the pensive diet

            digested on eaves

            of the city, on windowsills

            glancing seaward.

An ordinary scene develops increasing compaction and interconnection, until doves and food and poet’s thoughts all seem to become part of each other – an ecology. But whatever this might ‘mean’ is only hinted at, never directly stated. Even Clouts’s best friends and staunchest supporters admit that they don’t always know what’s ‘going on’ in the poems, but they sense unspoken richness beneath the surfaces. His mother Feodora, on receiving her copy of One Life, said it as well as anyone: “I know that One Life is something good, honest and deep in meaning. Of course this implies that I shall have to read many of the poems again & again until I begin to have glimmerings of their ‘intimate lightning’.”

Despite his modernist techniques, Clouts was often regarded as a Romantic nature-poet – a label he vigorously rebutted. Nevertheless, it was partly Clouts’s repeated invocation of trees, birds, rock, mountain, weather that – being a peripatetic mountain-forest dweller myself – attracted me to him. Cape Town city itself might as well have been a beachfront dorp for all that it’s mentioned; it was the surrounding coastlines and weathers that energised the poetry. This opened Clouts up to accusations of promoting some sort of primitivist Noble Savage state, and of ignoring the tortured contemporary politics of the intensifying apartheid regime. Though understandable, neither accusation is entirely accurate or fair. It’s a mistake to assume that a writer thrusts every aspect of life and thought into poems, or that a person can be adequately psycho-analysed through them – especially one like Clouts who strove to excise himself from the poetry. Drafts, letters, collections of clippings show that he was knowledgeable and gravely concerned about those politics and their terrible impact on the majority and the poor.  And his poem “Professor Gulf” is an acidic allegorical portrayal of Hendrik Verwoerd. My own impression is that his ‘nature’ poetry was less an escape from than a conscious riposte to apartheid’s grimy oppressions; he saw humans as enveloped in far greater and more fundamental ecological systems – indeed, he was ahead of his time in this increasingly relevant insight. In the midst of distress, he searched out articles of beauty – a move easy to dismiss as diversionary, but which is in its own way courageous and dignifying, affirming a humane relation to the world which is just as important  as political freedoms.  Take his intimate observations of a simple beach walk:

I breathed the first shivers of daylight

on lowtide lagoonbed grasses,

shallow ledges of slime in the seawind.

I went between spouting crabholes,

tottering oilgreen spindles that roved on the waterfilm;

over systems of sharp red,

mauve and brightblue

speckles of aragonite, like blown seeds:

Shelley’s dome transformed into fertile splinters.

Life breaks life and stores the concise fragments.

It’s nature-appreciative, to be sure, but there is also a hint of violent dynamics: “life breaks life” into “fragments” – but it also “stores” those shards for our paradoxical delectation. Pay careful, caring attention to all of life’s minutiae, is Clouts’s consistent call.

This is not to deny that, as a person of his race, class and resources, he was no public revolutionary, was relatively sheltered, and could emigrate when he felt the need, where most could not. Clouts was, of course, not the only writer to choose or be forced into exile in the 1960s. I’ve just read our colleague Andrea Thorpe’s new essay in English in Africa on Peter Abrahams, who was in London at the same time as Clouts, though I’m not sure they ever met. Abrahams’s work has been equally neglected by critics and academics, despite his politically kosher colour and ideological affiliations. This points to a wider syndrome: the critical neglect of poetry generally in South Africa. Deeply considered studies and biographies, beyond specialist journal articles and some unpublished theses, are few and far between. This applies to poets of every stripe, creed, language and political persuasion, not only DWMs. Moreover, poetry is generally poorly taught in schools, if at all; the bulk of our university students, apparently terrified or disdainful, avoid it if they can; and even postgraduates are much more likely to study fiction or jazzy new digital forms. So, while some poetic expressions flourish in various quarters, the traffic between poets and critics, which ought to be vigorous, voluminous and ultimately beneficial to poetry itself, is lacking.

If so few people read poetry, and hardly any of those have read Sydney Clouts, I don’t know who is likely to read a dense and substantial study of him! But I must remain optimistic, and hope that this book is the beginning of a tsunami of poetic-critical popularity. Or at least that this one poet can be rescued from obscurity, revealed once more like the flash of a bolt of “intimate lightning”.

***

Dan Wylie’s book  Intimate Lightning: Sydney Clouts, poet is published by UNISA Press.

*****