From poet David
Farrell, writing in the South African paper, The Cape Argus,
3 June 2004
Used by permission of the author
DISPATCHES FROM THE HUMAN
HEART
" Installed, he grows in his chair
like a neat plant in a pot
sprouting wisdom and wisecracks.
"So rooted he seems
yet friends and lovers know
how joyously he dances." [1]
For all those writers who, like me, were fortunate
enough to have Lionel Abrahams teach them the steps and even catch them
when they slipped, these lines by Abrahams' wife Jane Fox, from her poem
'The Dancer', conjure the man and the writer in all his gaiety, passion,
commitment and supple creation.
I first met him in 1959, when I was a young poet overflowing with the
vainglory of a newfound wellspring. I was able to identify him as he
held forth to a cluster of student admirers on the steps near Wits Great
Hall, because I knew he was crippled by cerebral palsy and he was unmistakably
talking about his literary periodical, The Purple Renoster. I
didn't realise then that he was also, in fact, a dropout with, at some
stage, a dull day job, as I would later become in my turn; and irony
upon irony, he would finish bedecked with two literary doctorates in
recognition of his vital role in the life of South African writing. He knew instantly who I was, surprisingly. I had sent him some poems
of near-chaotic intensity and he had explained painstakingly why he
was rejecting them and why he wanted to see more. I had replied with
a bristle of quills, declaring unwillingness to compromise. I should
have been grateful, but that came later, as I began to hone my intensity
under his patient tutelage, and also to try to learn the hardest lesson
of all for a writer, a certain humility about the work. It also introduced me to his den in his parents' foursquare suburban
Kensington home, where visiting poets and others would help roneo pages
and collate the Renoster, his hard labour of love. And we would get
to swop poems and confide despairs and love affairs and, above all,
listen intent as he built words effortfully, great henges of insight. Bursting from his ratcheted frame was a huge, questing and playful
mind. Unbound entirely was a generous and powerful spirit that engaged
yours directly, could encompass and enlighten your woes with rarely
a word about his, could, indeed, caper with the joy of meaning discovered.
Lionel's complaints and discontents were mostly in defence
of meaning and against the casual ruin of language, the conduit that
connects us most surely as humans. Yet for this he slowly became regarded,
in the politically pinched spirit of apartheid's latter days - and the
interregnum for artistic expression after them - as a kind of curmudgeon,
one who wrote spirited and chiding letters to newspapers, who stood for
immutable values in a value-free climate. As he once said simply to me: "There
just are standards." But Lionel did not wear the armour of the crusty
conservative. He was woundingly honest about his occasional ill-considered
sally, and he held politics in disdain, even suspicion, as is proper
for poets, the "unacknowledged legislators" who work in the broad stream
of human fellow feeling. Later, when confined to a wheelchair, he was reduced finally to a
single typing finger as the years of physical damage took their toll.
Even this overtaxed digit was displayed with a grin to the visitor.
But God knows how much pain and frustration he endured to continue
writing, it seemed, indefatigably. Six books of poems, two novels -
The Celibacy of Felix Greenspan and the more recent The White Life
of Felix Greenspan (2002) - essays, criticism, letters to editors,
editorials in the Renoster and his later Sesame, a showcase for budding
writers. And book publishing ventures, such as Bateleur Press, in a
joint effort with the poet Patrick Cullinan. On top of all this, he singlehandedly wrestled Herman Charles Bosman's
posthumous literary heritage to the front of South African literary
consciousness. And at his writers' workshop, although I never attended
one, I know he displayed endless patience with even the most tiresome
and talent-bare self-parading, gave each aspirant his full and unblinking
attention - as he always had. And for some of us (for all I know, many of us), he was a well-lit,
comforting refuge from our personal storms. I know that I owe my survival
as a writer and as a human being to his calm insights, his counsel,
his constant reminder of irreducible things to live for: to create,
to tell the truth, to seek the meaning, however painful and difficult.
This is a moral debt I have only ever been able to pay with more poetry;
for Lionel, that seemed reward enough.
As for his coming and his going, his own lines (from 'Dying is
the Least of Death') provide an accurate testament:
It is not my self I wish remembered
when I'll have gone into the lesser death:
it is those things in which I have rejoiced
to find the human fact affirmed, mankind's
memorious possibilities proposed.
While those never old
and ever ancient Yeas survive,
I, brothered in tomorrow's generations,
have my continuance.
I believe that Lionel Abrahams' children, the young writers he nourished
all his literary life, will ensure this wish is granted. And the dancing
will never stop. - David Farrell *Jane Fox lines quoted from "A Writer in Stone" edited by Graeme
Friedman and Roy Blumenthal (David Philip 1998). *Lionel Abrahams lines from his collection "A Dead Tree Full of Live
Birds" (Snailpress/Hippogriff 1995). |
