Affair that inspired the best in Brink
Ingrid Jonker’s illicit relationship with author had profound liberating influence on him and his works, writes Ampie Muller
INGRID Jonker has, during the past 50 years, become an icon for a number of reasons: her antiestablishment political views (as expressed in her poems) and for the passion and tragedy of her tumultuous love life.
The crowning glory of her fame came when Nelson Mandela quoted her in his inaugural address when he read her poem, Childs hot dead by soldiers at Nyanga.
He said: “She was both a poet and a South African. She was both an Afrikaner and an African. She was both an artist and a human being. In the night of despair she celebrated hope. Confronted by death she asserted the beauty of life.”
Ingrid and André Brink met on April 18, 1963, at a social gathering in Cape Town. Brink recalls in ForkintheRoad: “It was in the late afternoon of a blue and golden late summer’s day, Thursday 18 April, that Ingrid walked into my ordered existence and turned it upside down. Until that moment I was ensconced in an ultimately predictable life as husband and father, lecturer in literature and afterwards, what? A world in which nothing would be sure and safe again, and in which everything, from the most private to the public, from love to politics, was to be exposed to risk and uncertainty and danger.”
Jonker was a single mother, struggling just to survive. The only work she could get was as a proof reader, working under difficult circumstances (she called it the “grey pit”); she thought it soul-destroying.
In FlameintheSnow, Brink reveals his incredible work rate. Not only preparing and delivering his lectures, typing his new novel, TheAmbassador, writing long love letters to Jonker and translating about 6 000 words a week from French and English for extra income, including, from time to time, sending money to Jonker.
She accepted his money, but made it clear she refused to be possessed by anyone. She had already liberated herself from the political and societal demands of the world around her, while Brink was still struggling to free himself from his “bourgeoisie existence”. His experience of her permissiveness and her refusal to be bound, even by their relationship, had a profoundly liberating influence on him and his work.
Her letters show an immediacy, a being-in-touch with reality, in a way that he will never quite manage. The letters refer not only to their love affair, but the world they lived in – political, tense, censored.
But there are questions about these extremely private letters. Why did Brink not only keep her letters; but make copies of his own letters to her? How spontaneous were his, if he thought they might become public at some stage? Would she have written them in their frankness, if she had known what would become of them? Perhaps so, for she was relatively fearless, but also vulnerable.
Brink appears in his letters as a loving, generous individual with an almost insatiable appetite for almost everything – books, music, food, sex, knowledge. The striking nature of the differences, as well as their not always smooth passion for one another creates an undoubted energy.
Compelling reading.