Stories of a very great grandad
DANIEL Browde is a patient man. Or perhaps, a persistent one. The Relatively Public Life of Jules Browde was published this month, but the first interview he conducted with his grandfather, Jules Browde SC, the book’s ostensible subject, was 12 years ago. At the time, he was just “getting the stories down”, recording and transcribing the ofttold tales of a remarkable life — as a child in Yeoville in the 1920s, as a World War 2 soldier, and as a celebrated advocate and human rights campaigner in apartheid South Africa.
Daniel started to think of the stories as material for a conventional biography. “This idea, ‘now I’m writing a book’, came with a lot of weight. I’ve loved books all my life and always taken them seriously. There was this tension between my responsibilities, as I saw them. I wanted to honour my grandfather’s life and to make him happy, but I never wanted to compromise my own idea of what a worthwhile book should be.”
This proved an impossible task — at least the first time round. Browde experimented with structure, with voice, but never resolved the challenges. “I got so lost at one stage that when my computer broke and I lost six weeks of work, I didn’t even get upset,” he says.
The book that is now on shelves is a very different one from that early attempt. It interweaves Jules’s distinct stories, in his own words, with the framing narrative of Daniel’s own story. The book makes public the relatively private life of a young man juggling his own anxieties and writerly selfdoubt with his family’s expectations and his desire to please and represent his beloved grandfather. “I realised that I am a character in the story of his life, as we are all characters in each other’s lives,” he says.
Jules led a remarkable life. His stories are peopled by the likes of Mandela, Kentridge, Chaskalson, and provide a fascinating slice of history. There’s a satisfying mix of history and family, coincidence and humour, loss and triumph. But it is Daniel’s candid and reflective narrative, as much as the stories he first set out to record, that makes this such an engaging read.
The book’s novelistic style is direct and personal, with occasional restrained evidence of Daniel’s talent as a poet. “I knew I couldn’t just write poetry for 300 pages. The challenge was to choose just the right moments to try to be lyrical.”
Once he had found the book he wanted to write, he progressed more easily. “A lot of it was learning to wait for things to settle: my concerns with the text as much as my anxieties beyond it. I started to see that you never really go backwards. Once you give yourself a break and say that you don’t have to sort something out this afternoon, it begins to resolve on its own.”
Over breakfast, we mull Philip Roth’s oftquoted advice: “Write as if your parents are dead.”
“I couldn’t,” says Browde, firmly. “There is stuff I put in that I worried might hurt someone in my family, and there was some that I felt I could leave out and still honour the book. Someone else once said that if you’re not writing what scares you, you’re wasting your time. And I did that: I wrote what scared me. Somewhere between those two ideas I found what I needed to do.”
Without being hagiographic, at its heart this book is a true labour of love, the love of a child for his grandfather, of the young storyteller for the old storyteller. “My grandfather really was an overwhelmingly lovely person. He rarely spoke badly of people, or held onto slights. Yet he threw himself into action against what he thought was wrong, as he did in the courts against the apartheid state. Plus he had a real capacity for telling good stories, in which he frequently cast himself as a lucky man. He often said of himself, ‘What more could a man want from his life?’ ”
The stories we hold dear and repeat become their own artefacts, polished and fixed and familiar. Jules’s stories have that quality. Daniel writes of himself, “I am more of a dog’s-bone type of storyteller than your smooth-pebble man.” It is the combination and juxtaposition of these two storytellers that makes for an unusual and satisfying book.
Jules saw a late draft of the manuscript. It was not the conventional biography he had expected, even hoped for, but in the end, the old storyteller decided to trust the young storyteller, and in the days before he died, told him: “You really did a job, boy.” —