A piercing talent
Distinguished South African novelist Justin Cartwright has died at the age of 73
The last time I saw Justin Cartwright was in 2015. I had been in London and he invited me and my husband to Oxford to visit his old college, Trinity, of which he had been made a Fellow. I had interviewed him many times over the years and we had become friends. At the Open Book Festival in Cape Town earlier that year we hung out in between panel discussions, Justin on the hunt for the best cup of coffee, over which he would pour out anecdotes and literary gossip. Dryly funny and acutely observant, he was great company.
Justin was proud of his fellowship and of his stately old college, and he was an enthusiastic tour guide, showing us the Bridge of Sighs and the Bodleian Library, exclaiming about the vast corridors of books stored under the town’s streets, relating bits of history. It was as if, more than 40 years after he was admitted to the university, he still couldn’t believe his good fortune. In his book, This Secret Garden: Oxford
Revisited, he quotes from Philip Larkin’s Poem about
Oxford: “The old place still holds us”. “The old place still holds me,” wrote Justin.
Over lunch on the High Street he talked of the Oxford philosopher and political theorist Isaiah Berlin, who he greatly admired for his classic liberalism. Justin was raised in a liberal home, first in Cape Town, where he was born, and then in Johannesburg, where his father, AP (Paddy) Cartwright, was the editor of the Rand Daily Mail. He took a strong anti-apartheid line and was routinely threatened. Once the security police delivered a dead dog to his office.
Justin’s mother, Nancy, was said to be a great beauty but was, by his account, a difficult woman. In a moving tribute he wrote for the Guardian, he told of his remorse at having deserted her: “I realised at last that I had never entered fully into her life; for 30 years I saw her only sporadically. My neglect will haunt me forever.”
Justin was sent away to board at Bishops in Cape Town, and then attended Wits University before heading to Oxford on a Rhodes Scholarship. He studied English, switched to a PPE (politics, philosophy and economics) degree and then a bachelor of letters. After university he worked in advertising and his sharp copy for campaigns, such as one for dog food, quickly won awards.
He was restless, though, and moved into documentary-making and even directed a comic softporn film called Rosie Dixon, Night Nurse, something he still chuckled about many years later. He went on to manage election broadcasts for the Liberal Party and the SDP-Liberal Alliance, and was rewarded with an MBE for this work.
Justin had published several thrillers when he decided to write “something more literary”, and his first attempt, Interior, was published to great acclaim in 1988. He followed it with a dozen more superb novels and three works of nonfiction. He perfected a laconic, knowing style, with sly observations, thin as acupuncture needles, that shot through paragraphs like acid. In Lion Heart, for instance, a character says, “My father had no evidence, but he trusted his intuition. People who take drugs often do. To them much is revealed through close, leisurely selfexamination.” From Other People’s Money: “It’s not fashionable to be unconditionally happy. You have to have suffered and then got your life back on track, in this way enjoying a certain amount of selfadmiration, which passes for happiness.”
Awards and prizes piled up. He won a Commonwealth Writers Prize and was shortlisted for the Booker award with In Every Face I Meet. White
Lightning was shortlisted for the 2002 Whitbread Novel Award and he won that prize for Leading the
Cheers. The Promise of Happiness won the 2005 Hawthornden Prize and the Sunday Times Fiction Prize, while Masai Dreaming took the M-Net Book Prize in 1994. Other People’s Money was the winner of the Spears Novel of the Year in 2011.
He was prolific, writing reviews for publications like the Spectator and the Guardian, working mostly at the same desk in the London Library, getting down 600 to 1,000 words a day in longhand. His settings and stories varied widely, from the Cornwall of The
Promise of Happiness , where a fracturing family awaits the return of their daughter who had been jailed in the US for art theft, to a high-school reunion in small-town Michigan in Leading the Cheers. He set several novels in Africa: Masai Dreaming in Kenya and White Lightning, Up Against The Night and In
Every Face I Meet in SA, in which he wrestled, with varying success, with the post-apartheid era. Lion
Heart traces the footsteps of the Crusaders in Jerusalem, while To Heaven By Water and Other
People’s Money blithely skewered the zeitgeist of contemporary England.
If there was any central theme to Justin’s books it was the dysfunctional family, but he wrapped the premise in wit and insight, creating stories and characters that lingered.
He was devoted to his wife Penny and their two sons, Rufus and Serge, to whom he dedicated many books.
He dedicated his last book, Up Against the Night, to his great friend the publisher Jonathan Ball, with whom he and Penny would frequently stay in the Cape.
“Our friendship was cemented by many lunches, dinners and breakfasts here in SA and in London,” says Ball. “He was a well-known member of that great city’s literary circles.”
Ball says he will remember Justin “with deep affection and with great respect. His wry humour, his cultivated table talk, his singular brilliance as a novelist and his mischievous outlook. He had at his command a breathtaking array of allusions from both classical and contemporary literature with which he peppered and spiced his conversation, but always deploying them appropriately, as he wore his prodigious learning lightly. Most of it the result of his voracious reading. I will miss him greatly.”
Last year Justin was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease. It is unutterably cruel that a man who lived by words should, in the end, lose them. He had so many more stories to write.
It is unutterably cruel that a man who lived by words should, in the end, lose them