‘My first book was roundly rejected’
One of South Africa’s best loved authors, Wilbur Smith, recounts his literary rise
THE elegant silver-grey sedan parked alongside two large pots of orchids in Wilbur Smith’s Bishopscourt driveway sports a registration plate that says a lot about its owner.
“Taita” is a fitting signature for the multi-millionaire novelist, and a name his upwards-of-130million readers worldwide – and speakers of no fewer than 26 languages – are doubtless intimate with.
Taita, a highly skilled eunuch slave who rises from serfdom to influence the dynastic fortunes of the Pharaonic era, returns to the bookshelves this month in Pharaoh, the sixth of Smith’s Egypt series, which began with River God in 1994.
Taita is also, as it happens, the author’s “alter-ego”, he said in an interview at his Cape Town home this week.
The skilful Egyptian is “up there with all of them” as one of his favourite characters, a figure who “intrigues me because he knows everything, he knows the world flat”.
It is, of course, a world of Smith’s making, one of the many magicked settings of more than three dozen wildly popular stories that have earned him hundreds of millions of rands, and a great deal of attention – some of it unwanted, as “the legendary best-selling author” in the meaningful phrase on the latest book’s cover.
His own account of the genesis of Taita – in two telling responses to readers on a BBC website in 2009 – reveals something of the magicmaker himself.
“I was sitting in the Temple of Karnak on the Nile as the sun was going down,” he wrote, “and I was all alone, and the great Hypostyle Hall was full of shadows and ghosts of the past, and suddenly I heard this little voice saying ‘my name is Taita, write my story’… and if you believe that you’ll believe anything!”
Lower down, he writes, altogether less playfully: “I think one of the most poignant things is unrequited love and loneliness. So I had to have a man (Taita) who was very interesting and attractive to females, but who was unable to carry through his love for them because he was emasculated. A lot of people seem to empathise with the feeling I was trying to portray.”
On the face of it, neither emasculation nor unrequited love have been problems for the novelist in his chequered life – but his story-telling has tapped with great effect into the urges and dreams of several generations of readers.
The conjurer himself comes across as a deceptively, though likeably, uncomplicated man, slightly boyish still – a feat at 83, an age belied by his appreciably younger looks and chatty informality – who is content to declare himself not accomplished enough to warrant anything like the “ultimate conceit” of an autobiography in his twilight years.
He is happiest to dwell on the prospect of yet another yarn – “my favourite is always the one I am going to write next” – and to enjoy the fruits of an almost mind-bogglingly lucrative career.
“Why should people be fascinated by someone who sits in a room and makes up stories? The stories might be good, but he’s just a writer,” said Smith.
Still, for all its repetition over the years, the transformation of ranch owner’s son Wilbur Addison Smith, born in 1933 at Broken Hill (now Kabwe) in what was then colonial Rhodesia, into a sensationally successful writer remains fascinating.
Educated at Michaelhouse in then Natal and at Rhodes University, Smith was working as an accountant in the Rhodesian revenue service when he turned his hand to fiction, starting with short stories.
His first stab at a novel, They First Make Mad, was roundly rejected.
His life seemed to be falling apart, his wife had left him and he was living alone in a caravan in the Bvumba Mountains in the Eastern Highlands which he’d begged his father to let him use.
On the strength of an encouraging word from his first, if disappointed, agent, he took up his pen again.
“I wrote about my own father and my darling mother,” he later recalled. “I wove into the story chunks of early African history. I wrote about black people and white. I wrote about hunting and gold mining and carousing and women. I wrote about love and loving and hating. In short, I wrote about all the things I knew well and loved better… I even came up with a catching title, When the Lion Feeds.”
It took off, and the unimagined income gave him three clear years to get cracking on a writing career in which he defiantly cleaved to the convention of “stories with a beginning, middle and end”. Readers grew to love him.
Though he confessed he didn’t like dwelling on his enduring popularity, “in case it goes away”, he was no less conscious of Gary Player’s wisdom that “the harder you work, the luckier you get”.
In time, fame earned him familiarity with the equally famous – chats about the perils of skiing after 60 with former Formula One champion Jackie Stewart, or good-natured fishing rivalry with US film and TV star Lee Marvin.
There have been wryly comic interludes, too.
“Flying back from Canada once, I was going through my new book, checking that everything was right, when a stranger across the aisle leaned over. ‘Excuse me,’ he said, ‘is that Wilbur Smith’s book?’ I said it was. He asked if I was a fan. I said, yes, I love his work. And he said, ‘Good. He’s a friend of mine. I’ll tell him’.”
Smith is, it’s fair to say, disenchanted by at least some of the effects of wealth and fame, not least the prurient interest in the abyssal schisms in his own family: he divorced his first two wives, and is estranged from his children by them, sons Shaun and Lawrence, and daughter Christian.
His sometimes steely statements about them over the years have tended to portray him as a hardhearted father, though, doubtless, public judgment of private affairs is seldom informed. Today, it troubles him no longer.
“It did in the beginning,” he said, “but not any more. I have just switched off to that. Life is too short to worry about it.”
He added: “As soon as there’s a whiff of money it turns (people) into ravening beasts. But I don’t even think about it any more.”
His third marriage – to writer Danielle Thomas, also born at Broken Hill – was a lasting and professionally engaging bond, which ended in 1999 after nearly three decades when she died of cancer.
The last years of their marriage were devastating, he recalled. But, within a year of Danielle’s death, a chance encounter in a London bookshop brought him together with Mokhiniso “Niso” Rakhimova, a native of Tajikistan, 39 years younger than he.
She was eyeing the titles of rivals – he said he couldn’t remember if it was Dan Brown or John Grisham, but that that didn’t really matter.
“Both of them were a no-no… I just took her to where she should be (his own books) if she was coming aboard, and I was already sure in my mind she was.”
They were married in May 2000, an event that “brought me back to life again”.
Niso now played a key role in his affairs, managing the Wilbur Smith Facebook page, and the Wilbur and Niso Smith Foundation to encourage and reward hopeful young action writers, and in convincing him to begin a co-authorship programme with a team of talented writers to keep the titles coming.
At the start of the interview, Niso appeared to ask if she could sit in for a bit – this directed at her husband – “just to listen to you … and correct you?”
Smith laughed: “She is serious!” As you got older “the memory sort of goes”.
He was certainly conscious of his age, he said, “but I feel as though I am good to finish the course, however long it might be”.
And life was a bit quieter these days. He had given up hunting, and Scotch, “which I used to like, but suddenly realised I was liking too much”, but still enjoyed good wine and good food.
For all his immense wealth, he described himself as “quite abstemious”.
Money, he felt, mattered only to the extent that it was the “fuel of life” but, after that, “it piles up, and buys nice wine, nice clothes, nice motor cars”.
“It’s not really the money that gives you pleasure, but that people are buying your books, and saying how much they enjoy them. That’s the solid pleasure.”
It reminds him of the intoxicating experience of his first book’s success in 1964.
“I still can’t get over it,” he said.