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By K.M. Dersley |
| Reading J.D.F Jones's Storyteller: The Many Lives of Laurens van der Post, it seems that a lot of what Laurens (as he's called throughout) wrote about the Bushmen, especially in relation to himself, was actually a load of dreamed-up bullshit and exaggeration. Most of the rest was apparently cribbed from three or four collections of Bushman folklore put together in South Africa in the early 1900s. None of the hints, allegations and denunciations contained in the book struck me as particularly convincing though. They read like the quibbles of a cataloguer and checker of facts who has lost sight of the grand sweep of energy and personality through the life of one of the more fascinating spirits of the 20th century. (Similar treatment was accorded another Lawrence, T.E., whose life and death have their cataloguers and cavillers busily annotating and comparing the records he left in army and air force annals and other places.) Where Jones's arguments were convincing they weren't exactly damning, anyway. For instance, while imprisoned by the Japanese after being surrounded and captured in Java, van der Post apparently claimed the rank of Lieutenant-Colonel instead of Captain, hoping for better treatment as a higher rank. Also, after the war he didn't return to Britain for a year or two partly because questions were sure to be asked about his 'promotion in the field' for which the only evidence was his own say-so. Captain or Lieutenant-Colonel, the difference is a piddling one to the layman. And good on van der Post if in a time of war and confusion he managed by cool and judicious lying to improve his position and chances of survival. It wasn't as if he was out to save his own skin at the expense of others. On the contrary all his old comrades loved the man and gave him full credit for boosting morale and wangling extra supplies out of local tradesmen who dealt with the camp. He took his 'bashings' from the Japanese the same as the others and was close to being executed more than once. Also there seems to be some doubt about his old 'half Bushman' nurse Klara. Apparently Laurens never even mentioned her until he had made his TV films about the Kalahari, sold plenty of books and been accepted as an expert on the 'first man of Africa'. None of it put me off the literary works in question. I went straight to my set of van der Post and started rereading Venture to the Interior. I have it in the Reprint Society edition, with a custom-made dust jacket. The book isn't worth twenty pence, but it's a treasured item in the little library we've got here. (I saw the First Edition on an eBay auction starting at a couple of dollars. It had a torn dust jacket with the 'heraldic zebras.' I didn't bother to put a bid in though, I'm quite satisfied with the copy in hand. I have what I have, America.) It's a marvellous and engrossing read. There's the amazing section where he's just going up Mount Mlanje with the foresters and they witness an aerial fight between a vulture and an eagle. The eagle is beaten off, defeated, and Laurens takes this as a message from the gods--an auspice of trouble on the road ahead. It could almost be an episode out of one of Castaneda's don Juan books. In context it is very effective. I daresay it did really happen too. (Jones says old Nyasa hands laughed when the book first came out because van der Post exaggerated the inaccessibility and perilousness of the places he was visiting. The locals were practically using the mountain gorges for picnic parties, it seems.) Venture to the Interior was published to great acclaim and healthy sales in 1952 but it must have really come into its own in the '60s when 'cosmic consciousness' was becoming hipper every day... Incidentally, back in 1952 the Queen Mother singled the book out as the first thing, after the death of her husband, that made her wish to go on living. Even if they were outright fantasies these books of his would still exist as valuable documents if only for the fact that they are permeated with a canny sense of the great social and racial imbalances in the Africa of that time. The consequences of these we can see now in Zimbabwe and all over. Van der Post knew in his water back in the 1920s and '30s that the white "Imperialist" attitude with its almost incidental downgrading of the blacks and coloureds couldn't stand forever against the inevitable progress of a sort of moral natural selection that seems to be a law of life. Laurens wrote novels as well as this travelogue and its successors Lost World of the Kalahari and Heart of the Hunter. But surely it's accepted that to write even a travel book you're allowed a bit of licence and exaggeration. Plus the fact, it's amazing how much Jones CANNOT dispute. If he'd been able to say van der Post never set foot out of Aldeburgh we'd have a better bone to gnaw on. The books remain--as does the reputation of a war hero, traveller and a compulsive and compelling writer. If he was a bit of a rogue as well, where's the surprise in that? |
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