Toxic love? Ingrid Jonker and André Brink

FABLED love or toxic passion?

Jonker was young, alcoholic, greatly gifted but unhappy. Her private life was ruinous; her hateful and rejecting cabinet minister father influenced her role as a needy, unsuitable mother. She brought joy but also despair – the end of Jack Cope’s marriage, from which his two little sons remained scarred. Brink was married (though not for long) when they launched their sweltering affair. Other lovers, more publicity-shy than Brink, were also tossed on the waves of her internal loneliness.

Did she take more than she gave? Probably not; but she needed too much for any single man to handle. She desired to marry Cope, older than her, who could not cope with her instability, though he tried and tried. Brink fled, in the end. He had to, to survive. She loved, and scarred. Is that why we fixate on the Jonker/Brink affair? To vicariously experience the passion without having to deal with the pain?

That Laurens van der Post, with jawdropping hypocrisy, accused Brink over Ingrid: “He did not honour her as a woman,” he wrote in his pseudo-posh English in the Helena Noguiera documentary Jonker (highly recommended).

“(His comments) came as a total surprise,” Brink told me at the time, 10 years ago, at his Rosebank house. He spoke slowly, gently, about Ingrid and the accusations. He was in his 20s during their affair, and gorgeous, but not that central to her despair.

He thought Van der Post wanted to accuse him and others of sexually exploiting Jonker – which is arguable – but that by doing so had revealed himself as part of the old patriarchal scheme, “placing women on a pedestal and thereby denying their place as fully of this world”. That attitude, believes Brink, “is as insulting as to turn her into a whore”. He added, perceptively: “So much happens below the level of consciousness.”

Brink went on to say of (one of his best books) The Rights of Desire, that it was his aim to “deromanticise” the woman at the centre of the cruel events.

Does Flame in the Snow do this? Surely it instead re-romanticises a passionate, searing episode in not only their lives, but those of many around them. And, as we lap it up – fair enough, for we, too, are flawed. Just don’t romanticise her anguish; she’s been punished enough.