The dark outsider of SA literature
Play about him to making a poignant pilgrimage to his grave in a remote cemetery on a Portuguese hillside
bell – turbulence in affairs of the heart.
I was experiencing emotional upheavals on another front as well. I’d just traced my birth mother in Cape Town and she was prepared to meet me. But there was one small problem. I’d become a Dutch citizen and, two years earlier, had been denied a visa for South Africa.
Even if I couldn’t go back to South Africa, I hoped my play might find its way there. I based this expectation on the controversial success my play Somewhere on the Border had enjoyed back home in 1986/87.
My notebook reveals that in January 1990 I was trying to wrestle the Campbell material into some kind of dramatic shape, which suggests I hadn’t expected FW de Klerk to make any surprising announcement on 10 February. He did, and that changed all my plans. After Nelson Mandela walked out of prison, I immediately applied for, and was granted, a visa. I’d still hoped to get something down on paper before going home. I didn’t, as there were too many distractions.
Finding a title
But I did accomplish one thing. The British playwright Howard Brenton kept telling me I needed to find my title. I eventually found it in one of Campbell’s poems.
In 1939, reviewing Flowering Rifle, Campbell’s unreadable paean to the Spanish junta, Spender labelled him a talking bronco. Campbell embraced the insult as a compliment and wrote a poem called Talking Bronco in which he took aim at Macspaunday. He wrote, “So History looks the winner in the mouth / Though but a dark outsider from the South”. So there it was: Dark Outsider.
When Campbell disembarked in Durban in April 1943, it had been 16 years since he’d set foot in his homeland. When I landed at Louis Botha Airport, I’d been away for 17 years. Being at home again, surrounded by family and friends, was a profoundly emotional experience. I was also reunited with my birth mother, as well as biological siblings and cousins.
But I hadn’t forgotten Roy Campbell. Although my parents had subdivided their property, the old stone gatepost where I’d dry-gulched my friends while playing cowboys and crooks was still there. That’s where I like to think I saw Campbell on his way to Botha’s Hill. In later life, Paton also lived in
Botha’s Hill and that’s where, in 1974, he opened his front door and scowled – as was his wont – at a young Peter Alexander.
Alexander was a South African postgraduate doing research on Campbell for his Cambridge PHD. Although Alexander had gone to Botha’s Hill to gain oracular insights, he couldn’t have anticipated what happened next. After Paton had taken his measure of the “sober and serious young man”, he asked him if he’d like to take over from him and write the Campbell book.
Twenty years later, when Alexander published his biography of Paton, he wrote, “I was so overwhelmed I could hardly speak, though neither he nor I could foresee that he had changed the course of my life decisively.”
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In December 1924, Campbell made a heroic return to Durban as the archetypal local-boy-makes-good. Campbell had completed a book-length poem entitled The Flaming Terrapin. TE Lawrence (yes, Lawrence of Arabia) loved it and sent it to Jonathan Cape urging him to publish it, which he did in May 1924. Campbell woke up one morning to discover he was famous.
Unlike today, 100 years ago a poet could be a celebrity. But even then – unless you were Rudyard Kipling – writing poetry wasn’t going to pay the bills.
Campbell eventually found a benefactor – Lewis Reynolds, the wealthy son of a sugar baron – who admired The Flaming Terrapin and set them up in a cottage on the beach at Sezela. There they lived a carefree life, and Mary later told Alexander she thought they were probably the world’s first hippies.
In 1925, Campbell met the young William Plomer, who’d just completed his first novel while working behind the counter in his father’s trading store in Entumeni. Campbell greatly admired Turbott Wolfe – which had at its centre a racially mixed marriage – and when Reynolds agreed to finance a literary magazine, Campbell persuaded Plomer to join them at Sezela. The magazine was called Voorslag.
The appearance of Turbott Wolfe in March 1926 was greeted with howls of indignation in Natal, where the consensus was that it was “just not cricket”.
Given that Campbell and Plomer wanted to use the magazine to “sting the mental hindquarters of the bovine citizenry of the Union”, it’s unsurprising they didn’t last long as editors.
Although it wasn’t exactly a New Year’s resolution, at the beginning of 1991 I’d made up my mind about two things: I’d spend six months in South Africa, and while I was there, I’d write Dark Outsider. Although I felt ready to start work on the play, I’d been putting off the one thing I knew I still had to do: visit Campbell’s grave in Portugal.
Time was running out. I’d never been to Portugal and didn’t feel like going there on my own. Besides, I was flying to Johannesburg on 28 March – and on 22 February my newly found sister Jean arrived to stay with me en route to a gap year in the US. So it just wasn’t going to happen.
I treasured the quality time Jean and I spent together in Amsterdam. After she’d decided to extend her stay by two weeks, I asked her if she’d like to spend a long weekend in Portugal.
On our first day, we explored Lisbon’s city centre, then took the ferry across the Tagus to Cacilhas to savour the bacalhau and plan the next day’s expedition. We had to catch the train to Sintra and, from there, a bus to São Pedro, where Campbell had been buried in a hillside cemetery on 27 April 1957.
We eventually found his grave close to the main gate. A simple stone cross stands at the head of a granite slab on which his name and dates are carved – as well as the single word: Poet. Below that, added 22 years later after her death, were the words “and his beloved wife Mary”. I was here, finally.