Forgotten Treasures: A Symposium

“More than forty years ago a boy of nineteen working in a country store in Zululand began to write a novel. He finished it when he was 21 and sent it to Leonard and Virginia Woolf, who published it in 1926. ‘Turbott Wolfe’ was the work of an angry young man, but it was no tantrum; events have shown his voice to be prophetic, echoing louder and louder from legislation to bloodshed, down the years. The boy of 19 understood what the world, from Alabama to Johannesburg, has come to realize only recently: that the impact of Western materialism on Africa was not a one-way process. In the words of one of his characters--’Native question indeed. . . .’ It isn’t a question. It’s an answer.”

I wrote the above in 1965, and during the years since then, while the century has approached its end, the prophesy has been fulfilled--not only for Africa, but for the “native” populations of many countries. The 19-year-old was William Plomer, an Englishman born in South Africa, who lived there as a child, went back as a young man, lived and wrote in Japan, became a wonderful poet at home in England. The novel is recounted Conrad-style, as a narrative told to Plomer by Turbott Wolfe dying in old age. Its obvious autobiographical elements become revelatory, in passion, satire, as Wolfe experiences the colonial world in microcosm: from behind the counter of a general store. Everything is vividly there, larger than the compass of the scene, marvelously recognizable but not one-dimensional: the sanctimonious priest, the well-meaning missionary, the home-grown coarseness of the settler convinced of his God-given superiority to the local population, even the beginnings of a liberation movement in the person of a young woman afire with her discovery of communism. And there is Wolfe’s iconoclastic assault on the Western conception of beauty in his vision of it as exemplified in a black peasant girl. The novel is a unique attack on vulgarity, personal, social, political--everywhere you care to place its lens. Plomer, aged, remained Plomer under a gentle and courtly exterior. Asked why he hadn’t written more than a handful of books, he once answered: “Literature has its battery hens; I was a wilder fowl.” And that’s what he is to me.