CHAPTER 1

LIFE-WRITING, LOVE-WRITING

André Brink's late-adolescent life forms the main focus of this chapter, in particular his final school-year in 1952, when he began his journal, and following that, his university years in Potchefstroom. It was during Brink's last year at Hoërskool Lydenburg that he embarked on a continuous narrative of his life, journalling about what he was doing and, crucially, what he was feeling. The inveterate writer would continue his copious self-reporting until the early 2000s, that is, for a period of over 50 years. Brink's 1950s journals - in conjunction with statements he made in later years - point to key elements of his early psychic development. In dealing with such material, this chapter occasionally breaks the chronological mould, but then returns to its observation of the subject's development over time.

Brink's first journal launches what would eventually become a massive collection of personal 'life-writing'. There are 43 separate journals of differing sizes, yielding a total of 980 000 words.1 Given that the average length of a published novel is about 90 000 words, Brink journalled the equivalent of 11 novels, almost half his entire fictional output (24 novels). He did all his journal-writing in a fluid hand with few corrections. The journals are therefore a major, previously unknown, element in Brink's oeuvre. They begin with a youthful, elegant and easily legible script in 1952, progressing to what eventually became a hard-to-read scrawl in the final volume in 2004.

The inaugural dagboek (diary) in this mammoth series concentrated on two main areas: first, the keenly competitive 17-year-old André would record, in a precise and conscientious manner, notable details of his achievements in school and extramural activities, such as piano, running, and painting; then, once he had dealt with these intellectual, creative and physical pursuits, he would give himself over to matters of the heart, pouring out professions of love in lyrical prose. In general, he was keenly optimistic. From his earliest years, Brink displayed a bright, enthusiastic temperament that alternated with bouts of mostly private misery. He was susceptible to deep insecurity when things seemed to be going awry. Always, he displayed what Frederich Nietzsche called the 'will to power', or the realisation of one's hopes and desires in the world. And what André Brink most wanted was to realise his ambitions, to succeed both in writing and in love.

For Brink, these two domains did not stand apart. As we shall see, the novelist and playwright often felt more secure - and more 'real' - when writing about actual experiences he had. What stands out, though, from the start of the existence of his narrated self, is how seamlessly life-writing meshes with love-writing in the case of André Brink. The journals, which by any measure constitute an exceptional record, compulsively develop into a libidinally charged account of Brink's developing relationship with women, in whom he would find sustenance and a boundless source of excitement - though it was often more the idea, the anticipation, than the actual person that thrilled him. In his final school year, when he was just 17 years old, Brink would fixate on a girl he called 'Martie', but this beloved turned out to be something of a phantom. He would never actually meet her in the flesh, he changed her name to his own liking, and he was uncertain about not only her age, but her very appearance. Nevertheless, this did not stop Brink from enveloping 'Martie' in a cloud of lyricism. In the words of one of his later novelistic protagonists, Brink soon proved to be the kind of person who 'very much need[ed] to be in love'.2 For him, the physical absence of the loved one was easily remedied by writing her into the shape he desired or imagined. In addition, the 17-year-old's avowals of love were bolstered with borrowings from Romantic poets such as John Keats and Percy Bysshe Shelley. Brink's tendency to 'write up' rather than 'do' love would continue through most of the 1950s. It was only when the young writer met Ingrid Jonker in the early 1960s that the actual doing would catch up, in an acceleration that beggars belief, despite considerations of his severe sexual repression up until then.

As indicated above, Brink's journalling in the 1950s is foundational to the story that follows, so the more conventional biographical focus on the author's early years will be slightly foreshortened here. Since Brink himself tells the story of his childhood in his memoir, A Fork in the Road,3 it may seem unnecessary to repeat such material in any great detail here. Nevertheless, a reprise of the author's early childhood and upbringing, as told by Brink in his memoir and his journals, among other sources, is provided below.

André Philippus Brink was born on 29 May 1935 in Vrede in what was then the Orange Free State. He was the eldest of Aletta and Daniël Brink's four children. As a magistrate, Daniël Brink was transferred from town to town in the Orange Free State, the northern Cape Province and the former Transvaal. André therefore grew up and attended school in a series of small South African towns: Vrede, Jagersfontein, Brits, Douglas, Sabie and Lydenburg. After he matriculated, his parents moved on to Bothaville and then finally to Potchefstroom, where they retired. Brink's siblings are brother Johan (the youngest, a physicist), along with sisters Marita (a psychologist) and Elsabe, the second-eldest, known as the author Elsabe Steenberg, who died in 1998. Brink's mother was a teacher, and both his parents read avidly, such that the novelist's childhood was, as he recalls, 'awash with books'; both parents 'worshipped' Shakespeare, and Brink's mother also loved Dickens and the Brontës,4 despite the fact that as traditional Afrikaners the Brinks were not overly enamoured of English influences in South African history and politics more generally.5

Brink writes suggestively in A Fork in the Road about the violence, both hidden and outright, of small towns such as those where he grew up, revealing what he calls a 'surplus of violence'.6 This ranges from harm that is 'muted and obscure' and 'domestic in scope', such as the local dominee (parson) beating up his wife behind closed doors, to incidents of severe and gratuitous interracial brutality.7 So thoroughgoing is the culture of hurt and harm that even canings by the principal at school led to pupils gathering behind the toilets to show off their injuries - and 'anything less than blood was scoffed at'.8 Brink goes on to describe a girl called Elise, whose father was a police sergeant, leading him to a spot where they could crouch down to listen to the sound of blows being inflicted on youths who had been sentenced to physical punishment (by Brink's father, who, he reports, never spoke about such things at home).

In such cases, the youth sentenced to a beating would be brought to the police station, which was on a corner of a large plot of land where the magistrate's house was also situated. The youth was then taken into a corrugated-iron shed and stripped naked. Four policemen held him face-down on a narrow table. Ominously, a district surgeon was in attendance. After the beating, the door opened and the naked youth would stagger out, running this way and that, 'like a decapitated chicken'. Brink recalls: 'How [Elise] laughed - even though I think, in retrospect, that there was hysteria in that laughter, a touch of madness.' In one such incident she 'was so worked up that she actually lifted her blue dress, her eyes unnaturally and feverishly bright, to show me that she'd pee'd herself'.9

Violence, by all accounts, was a kind of social and individual grammar that one might parse in various ways. One of the most significant moments in Brink's childhood relates to the role his father played in an incident of racial cruelty. Daniël Brink embodied the law: 'He was the magistrate. He was second only to God. He knew all about Right and Wrong, about Good and Evil.'10 And yet, in a manner typical of childhoods spent in South Africa, right and wrong, and good and evil, soon became hard to distinguish from each other. One day, Brink recounts, a black man stumbled into their backyard, blood streaming from a gash in his head. The man was 'reeling and staggering as if drunk'.11 He had been assaulted, and his face looked as if 'it had been battered completely out of shape and then put through a mincer'. Brink had been practising hitting a tennis ball against a wall of the house. His father was out playing tennis, as he did on Saturdays. The mangled man fell to the ground and came to rest with his back against a wall, asking to speak with the 'Baas'.

Brink crouched in front of the man and tried to talk to him, shaken to his core. But the real shock was his father's reaction when he returned from tennis. The magistrate ignored the bleeding figure and went into the house as if nothing had happened. When his son came running after him, begging him to do something, Daniël Brink stiffly reminded André that it was Saturday. The hurt man should come back on Monday. A weeping André persisted, and his...