kagablog

II

When I returned from my studies in England, I started researching the project which has been occupying me for the past three years, and which is likely to occupy me for at least as long in the future: the life of Arnold van Wyk. Why exactly I turned to biography I cannot justify or explain. Some sort of inner compulsion drove me away from the fraught scholarly involvement with my past, intimately connected with Apartheid and the reckoning made with Apartheid by South African society. I now read the material I wrote during that period with a feeling of near revulsion, a circumstance which has led me to experience what seems like an insurmountable estrangement from my past academic work. I think that biography held out the promise of a more solid and neutral historical activity. An intellectual cliché, I know. Perhaps, taking my Calvinist bent into account, I could venture the description more ‘honest’. But more importantly, I think that I always realized – and this is a feeling to which my years of residency abroad lent depth and persistence – that once my individual demons had been confronted, I would still need to find my ‘home ground’, to invent a narrative of myself as a ‘member’ of some kind of ‘society’. I think that writing in Afrikaans about an Afrikaans composer, whose music, at first, I have to admit, did not move me intellectually or emotionally, held out the promise of constructing a narrative about the ordinary things that make up a culturally compatible past life in the present: the places, the memories of people, the books, the letters, the diaries and from the musical perspective the recordings, the reviews, the manuscripts, the sketches. Of course the choice of this particular life, the life of Arnold van Wyk, was not an arbitrary choice, but one which was similar to my own in crucial historical and personal respects, making him sympathetic to the tenor of my historical enquiry. Eventually my active involvement with my subject’s estate led to my not only embarking upon the project of researching and writing his biography, but also ordering his literary estate and compiling extensive catalogues thereof. I found myself in the dual role of archivist and biographer, of neutral observer and interpreter, of list maker and listless and somewhat desperate grappler with a history always bursting out of the narrative constraints I devise. And I am still having to negotiate this dual role as I speak here, as well as the anxieties and accumulative fatigue of a project that seems to grow larger and less manageable the more time and effort I devote to it.

It was during one of the morning sessions that I usually spend working on the piles of documents taking up ever more space in the Special Collections section of the J.S. Gericke Library in Stellenbosch, that I discovered a grey envelope with no letter included, containing five photographs. The envelope was in a plastic bag, among other photographs, and had recently been sent to Stellenbosch on permanent loan by the Nasionale Afrikaanse Letterkundige Museum en Navorsingsentrum (NALN) in Bloemfontein, where a large part of my subject’s literary estate had languished in boxes for many years. The envelope bore the date stamp of 1954 and was posted in Johannesburg to 38 Charles Street, Pretoria, the address of Harry and Freda Baron, where Arnold van Wyk was on holiday at the time. He often visited the Barons, whom he had met during his frequent holidays in De Rust in the Klein Karoo as a teenager in the early 1930s and who had played an important role in his development as a composer. The photographs are black and white images of different positions of a pianist’s hands – Arnold van Wyk’s hands, as it unsurprisingly turned out to be – on a Steinway grand piano. They were all taken from the right hand side, from a position slightly behind the pianist. One is taken from a point higher than the pianist’s own head, two from a vantage point one could assume almost level with the pianist’s head, and two from a lower vantage point, more level to the figure seated at the piano than behind him. The photographer, whose stamp appears on the envelope and at the back of each photograph, is Derik Worman from Johannesburg, and the respective photographs sent to my subject are clearly marked on the images as ‘Proofs/Proewe’.

I was oddly touched when I held these images in my hands, and sat at my overcrowded library desk for a very long time staring at them. It was clear that the hand positions, close together, had been chosen to show the hands to their best effect. It was also clear, the longer I looked at them, that the hands were depressing keys that had no logical, that is syntactical or linear, sense. The hands on the pictures were merely contracted or expanded to provide better angles, or indicate the size and reach of each hand. Thinking of the textures of much of Van Wyk’s piano music, it is clear that the physiology of these hands is a clear explanation for the nearly unplayable textures of this music. It also dawned on me that in order for the photographs to be taken in these musically illogical positions, the hands would have had to be extremely still, that is placed into position and kept there until the photograph had been taken.

What moved me in these images, I think, was not the undoubted elegance of the hands as they appear suspended in a seemingly natural state in the habitat of the keyboard, or their composed positions, their oddly disembodied air and iconographic, de-socialized quality, but the fact that my subject, whom I had got to know quite well over the course of the last three years, was prepared for these photographs to be taken. Almost involuntarily I recalled an apocryphal story of how, when Arnold van Wyk had died, a musicological colleague and Beethoven scholar had tried to get access to the body to have a death mask made in the style of the Beethoven mask by the painter Joseph Danhauser. The suggestion was indignantly rejected by the close friend of the composer, I believe because the feeling was – rightly so, if I take into account what I have learned from my subject over the years – that he would have found the idea revolting. Due to liver failure, Van Wyk’s face had also become uncharacteristically bloated in his final days. Of course, I cannot vouch for the accuracy of this story.

The reason for agreeing to the photographs, whatever their purpose, could not be vainglory or pretensions of fame. By the way, the actual purpose of their existence later proved to be a cover page for ‘Die SAUK Weekblad, Jaargang 2 Nr. 22, 20-26 Feb. 1954’, where a single, blown-up photograph appears with the following description on the inside of the cover: ‘This striking photograph of the composer Arnold Van Wyk’s hands was taken when he recently performed with the SABC-orchestra in Johannesburg’. On a copy of this cover page included in a letter to Howard Ferguson dated 26 April 1954, Van Wyk had written ‘Fame at last! The Starfish send love to Falstaff Gorsebush’. ‘Starfish’ was the affectionate nickname Myra Hess had given Van Wyk’s hands when they became good friends during his war-time stay in London (1938-1946), and ‘Falstaff’ and ‘Gorsebush’ were two (seldomly combined) nicknames Van Wyk used to refer to Howard Ferguson. ‘Long awaited fame’ aside then, it is undeniable that the photographs signify the kind of Romantic – with a capital ‘R’ – adulation of an individual as something special, perhaps even genius, that the Beethoven death mask also communicates to us 180 years after it was made. I think that the subject of Arnold van Wyk’s Romanticism is convincingly ushered in by these photographs. I have said before that there was a congruence between the ideologies underlying Apartheid and the idea of Western art music as a medium of expression for white South African composers, but I think that a case could also be made for a more specific consonance between the kind of Romantic that Arnold van Wyk was and the basic tenets of white superiority. The area of greatest consonance is, I believe, the typically Romantic preoccupation with the unique, the peculiar, the idiosyncratic and the fostering of diversity. Certainly Van Wyk’s music can be said to embody a strange mixture of the ideals of beauty characterizing the early nineteenth-century musical aesthetic and the philosophical-prophetic Weltanschauungsmusik of the latter part of the century: a tension between the delicate and beautiful on the one hand and the meaningfully new and original on the other.

Even though Van Wyk was not a political animal, as all who knew him testify, he did have the occasional brush with politics. One such occasion was reported in the Somerset Budget of 29 July 1959 under the title: ‘A bomb thrown at S.A. culture’:

Cape Town – The Afrikaans composer Arnold van Wyk has thrown a bombshell into the annual conference of the Suid-Afrikaanse Akademie at Stellenbosch. He said in the Stellenbosch newspaper Eikestad Nuus that a Nationalist M.P. had asked him ‘to end his perversity and compose boeremusiek.’ Mr. Van Wyk said that as composer of serious music he lived in a cultural desert among his own people.

Referring to Afrikaans audiences at the ‘Wonder of Afrikaans’ festivities in the Cape Town City Hall, he said Afrikaners reacted only to speeches and popular ditties. Serious music meant nothing to them. Mr. Van Wyk said Silas Marner, the first full-length opera by a South African composer (John Joubert) will be staged in Britain – not South Africa. (The Festival of Union Committee concerned with the selection of music rejected the opera as unsuitable.) ‘Now that our Akademie is 50 years old and the Union will soon reach its half-century, it is a suitable time to say that the South African composer lives in a desert,’ says Van Wyk. The little oases are ‘even scarcer than those for the painter and author.’

That Van Wyk was not entirely indifferent to matters pertaining to politics and music, is clear from two broadcasts he did for the Afrikaans Service of the BBC from London on Friday 25 May 1945 and 1 June 1945 respectively. Entitled ‘The Music of the Future’, Van Wyk spoke about the responsibility of the creative artist in the battle for self preservation in the light of the imperative for reconstruction and healing (‘to prevent humanity from destroying itself’) in the wake of the Second World War:

Now, I know that artists today – or those of them who matter in my opinion – are not in touch with normal people; and there are moments when Mozart against machine guns is about as effective as a kleilat against tanks – nevertheless it remains a fact that the creative artist has a mighty weapon with which to join battle – regardless of what the disbelievers might say. It was Einstein (if I remember correctly) who said: ‘How can we despair of humanity when we remember that Mozart was human?’ And here I can also recount Sir Thomas Beecham’s strong faith – the faith that the world’s many problems could be solved by simply forcing every soul to listen – for half an hour every day – to the works of Mozart.

Clapping the natives in irons to enforce a strict diet of divertimenti is hardly a programme with which to ignite the African uhuru, I concede, but it is also too generally humanistic and universal a vision to be easily incorporated into a narrow Afrikaner nationalist, at times fascist, ideology. According to Nicol Viljoen, erstwhile student and life-long friend of Van Wyk, Arnold was the kind of person who got on extremely well with all people on a personal level, but who was extremely naïve politically and largely oblivious to the injustices of Apartheid that surrounded him. Viljoen never heard him speak negatively of the National Party’s leaders, and is convinced that he would have voted for the National Party as the political structure that could maintain the kind of order he felt was necessary to guarantee the space for great music to act as a ‘civilizing force’ for the advancement of the whole of society – the vision he formulated in his two BBC broadcasts. I have become convinced that Viljoen is wrong about this. Van Wyk had little patience or sympathy for Afrikaner Nationalism, his attitude to Nationalism being shaped in war-ravaged London. Scathing remarks about the National Party government abound in his correspondence to his life-long friend Freda Baron, who, as a Jew forced to flee with her family from the rural anti-semitism of De Rust, was a safe ear for Van Wyk’s criticisms. In one such a letter from London, Van Wyk writes:

I wish it could be possible for you to stay on at De Rust, but nothing would please me more than to hear that you have managed to escape to another place where there is more tolerance & less pig-headed Nationalism. We are having a thoroughly unpleasant time in London, but I don’t think I’d very readily exchange the dangers of present-day London for the ‘serenity’ of De Rust for instance. As a matter of fact, I do not feel that I want to come back to South Africa at all now. At least people in England have enough sense to recognize a serious threat to freedom & to do all in their power to neutralize that threat. But when a responsible body of churchmen like the Synod of the O.F.S. D.R.C. [Orange Free State Dutch Reformed Church] declares that Hitler is fighting for Christianity & a Minister profanes his cloth & pitilessly exposes the quality of his mind by saying that Mein Kampf ought to be regarded as the Bible of South Africans and read as such, I feel stifled and outraged. It is no exaggeration to say that after reading some of the Nationalist S. African papers, my first impulse is to go and have a Lysol bath!!

More evidence of a strong antipathy with regard to the Afrikaner political establishment is found in a letter of 29 May 1961, when Van Wyk writes to Freda Baron about the impending declaration of a Republic:

I haven’t much to complain of, either, always excepting the terrible times we live in and that we are only two days from our glorious republic … Anyway, there is nothing I can do but carry on: nothing that is except saying a word here and there to shake complacent Nats. But it is like talking to a wall. Anton [Hartman] expects a period of ‘ongekende bloei’ – an unfortunate word, since as you know, it can also mean bleading.

However, the more public criticisms expressed by Van Wyk in documents and letters against the government or government structures are related to the meagre opportunities and inadequate support for South African composers and do not involve direct political comment. In a letter to a certain Mrs Field, President of the South African Federation of Business and Professional Women, Van Wyk writes on 25 February 1957:

The State has thusfar (sic) not spent one single farthing to help a SA composer to get a work printed. If it has, it must be in some indirect way: for instance, an organisation which receives State support may have, on occasion, used some of the money to help with printing. But I know of no instances. It is safe to say, I think, that as far as the State is concerned, the South African composer just does not exist.

One might have thought that things would have changed under the stewardship and patronage of Van Wyk’s friend and Broederbond member Anton Hartman at the SABC from 1961 on. But little more than a year before he died on 27 May 1983, Van Wyk wrote a letter to Mrs Jacobs of the SABC, in which he said:

I (and, I can assure you, all South African composers) feel convinced that the SABC and especially SATV are not really interested in us and that it is meaningless to try to change the situation. And should there be sense in trying again, I am bitterly upset that I have to devote precious time and energy at this late stage of my life to the unpleasant necessity of writing this (very difficult) letter. The strongest feeling that I have at the moment is that I wish to inform you that I should in future choose to have nothing to do with the SABC – especially because the disparagement and humiliation that one has to endure from the Corporation is not worth the few stale crumbs it throws one. Or let my put it like this: if I look back to the near half-century that I have had dealings with the SABC, I see more unpleasantness and disparagement than anything else. In the last ten years things have worsened, and in the last four years especially the SABC has made abundantly clear what it thinks of me. I now feel very strongly that I never really managed to be successful at the SABC, that I will never be able to be successful there and that I don’t want to try, because if I look at some of the people that enjoy your favour I feel rather proud that I am not one of them.

Naturally one need not take Van Wyk’s word for the treatment supposedly meted out to him, which many today would feel was quite royal. Also, the last sentence of his letter to Jacobs could suggest patronage of a political kind and a certain resentfulness that he was excluded from this. Certainly the idea that an artist could work within Apartheid structures, and even perpetuate Apartheid thinking while believing himself to stand outside such structures, is not inconceivable. Certainly, if one looks at the more private hands of Arnold van Wyk the composer (not the public display of the performer), it becomes more difficult to theorize his detachment from the society he lived in. ‘One need only look at Matthew Arnold or Carlyle,’ writes Edward Said, ‘to see the use that was made of culture to camouflage and disguise the inhumane goings-on in the colonies (specifically India, Ireland and Jamaica in Arnold’s case, as he droned on about culture and sweetness and light). Said continues:

while empire was never straightforward, and entailed suffering on all sides, it required an abiding consent among its English adherents. And that consent was always based on the subordination of the native and the colony to the English, individually and collectively. No undertaking as far-flung as the British Empire … could have been sustained without the willing and perhaps often implicit approval of the English ‘senso commune’.

By replacing the ‘British Empire’ with ‘Apartheid South Africa’, it is not difficult to recognize that ‘consent’ and ‘implicit approval’ can be connected to that agency holding the pen, forming the notes. Having said this, the facile notion of some latter-day propagandists of the existence of a comfortable and mutually profitable relationship between the ‘Apartheid regime’ and ‘white composers’ in general, is hereby qualified to an extent. More research into this murky area is palpably needed.
However, even if it is historically more or less true that Arnold van Wyk was not a willing participant in the projects or ideologies of Afrikaner Nationalism, particularly Apartheid, and that his Romantic eschewing of hierarchy and class distinction, his egalitarianism and his formalist abhorrence of art in service of language and by implication politics could be construed as markers of an anti-establishment position, we should be careful to note that the exact opposite is in fact more probable. When Van Wyk made statements about the philistinism of his own people, as he did when that Nationalist MP berated him for his musical perversity with the advice to start composing boeremusiek, this criticism was of course absorbed by the establishment as the paradoxical affirmation of a centuries-old Western conception of the artist as a lonely and idiosyncratic genius. As Leonard Meyer wrote about the nineteenth-century artist: ‘Artists wanted to be different and special, and their claims to singularity were supported both by the mysteries of musical creation and by the mythic opposition of the Philistines. Yet even as they scorned and mocked the middle class, the artists of the nineteenth century created for it, representing subjects, symbolizing beliefs, and advocating values consonant with those of the elite egalitarians.’ And there is little doubt that Arnold van Wyk was in many respects a nineteenth-century composer in the twentieth century in a colonial society embracing many nineteenth-century values, not the least of which was of course a virulent nationalism. So perhaps my musicological colleague did not, after all, have the wrong end of the stick when he tried (and failed) to preserve in plaster Arnoldus Christiaan Vlok Van Wyk’s sad features for posterity.