HISTORY’S STEAMROLLER

ANTHONY Schneider was born in South Africa but left the country when he was a teenager and was educated in the US. He is a leadership coach and the author of the book Tony Soprano on Management. He has had short stories and essays published in McSweeney’s, Conjunctions and Details.

A Quiet Kind of Courage is his first novel. It tells the story of Henry Wegland, a former ANC activist now living in New York who encourages his grandson Saul to travel to South Africa to do research for a documentary he wants to make about his grandfather and people involved in the struggle.

Didn’t anyone tell you that it’s not popular in South Africa to write novels about the struggle?

The history stuff, aka the struggle stuff in my book — that grew by accretion. I didn’t start writing about that. I started writing about a guy in Liverpool who was a Jewish immigrant from Lithuania and he sort of led me into this. I needed him to have done certain things and there was only one war he could have fought in. It begins with this idea that I only came to quite late, of him being a man who plants bombs and there’s only one way he could be in South Africa planting bombs, so I went into that. I have to say though that the idea that South Africans shouldn’t be writing about apartheid, or the struggle, or whichever those two things are, is sort of bullshit.

How long did the book take to write?

On-and-off six years. For some of those years I didn’t think I was writing a novel. This was sort of bits and pieces — I had a kid coming [to South Africa] who was born [in the US] and was coming to visit so I morphed him a little bit into Henry’s grandson. It took a while for it to cohere and then I was following about six characters, then it turned into three, but it’s actually only two, so it wasn’t six years trying to write anything like the novel that’s emerged. Somewhere in the middle I came up with the structure and started playing around with different points of view and different characters.

Is Henry as a character typical of the generation of South Africans who were idealistic and wanted to do something, but had their ideals crushed as the regime became more authoritarian and cracked down on

opposition?

That’s why I have him, when his daughter-in-law says that he was at Mandela’s side and it’s like being there at the signing of the Declaration of Independence, he says, “Bullshit. It’s not at all.” He’s not quite sure of what he achieved. He’s one of the ones who fled early and he feels a little guilty because when the going got tough he got on a plane because he had the wherewithal to do that. That said — for this entire group who were idealistic and eager to do something, and then it took two decades for someone to pick up that mantle again — they achieved a lot and I don’t think we would be here if it wasn’t for them. I say it in the book — they were trying to move a mountain and they kind of did move a mountain, it was a major accomplishment.

You’ve used the names of real activists such as Joe Slovo and Rusty Bernstein. Why did you choose to do that instead of giving them fictional identities?

After a while I just couldn’t avoid it and I was so interested in those real types and I thought they were on stage so briefly so why not call Slovo, Slovo? The Bernsteins are there and Toni Strasburg [Rusty Bernstein’s daughter] did look at the book to see if things made sense. You can get things wrong. For example I was looking at photos of Rusty Bernstein and I sort of described him and she was like, “No, not quite right.”

Did you have a local or international audience in mind when you were writing the book, and what would you most like audiences to take away from the novel?

In the freedom of writing a book I was not imagining an audience at all, and funnily enough now that I’m talking to people who’ve read it, I think there’s a lot of history for the South Africans and maybe too little for the Americans. So it’s a book for neither or it’s a book for both. I think what I discovered halfway through writing this book is that it’s about the conflict between humans and history; about people running into these big historical forces and what that does to them. In a way, once I got onto that it made writing it easier, so I’m not sure if that’s what I want people to take away but I guess I kind of hope that they will see the larger currents going on.

A Quiet Kind of Courage is published by Penguin, Exclusive Books R175