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ОглавлениеIngrid Jonker
Louise Viljoen
Ohio University Press Athens
Contents
Childhood and youth, 1933–1951
Early adulthood, marriage and motherhood, 1952–1958
Separation, divorce and a new relationship, 1959–1962
Prize-winning poet, 1963–1964
Last days, 1965
Afterlife
Acknowledgements
I gratefully acknowledge the help of the following people in writing this book:
Petrovna Metelerkamp for giving freely of information and advice;
Ann Torlesse and Cecilia Blight for their help in accessing material about Ingrid Jonker at NELM;
NELM for permission to reproduce photographs and literary materials held by them in the Cope Collection;
Lynne Fourie and Marina Brink for their help in accessing material about Ingrid Jonker in the Stellenbosch University Library;
Michael Cope for giving permission to quote from his father’s papers;
The Ingrid Jonker Trust for permission to quote from Ingrid Jonker’s poems and for the use of photographs;
André Brink and Antjie Krog for kind permission to use their translations of some of Ingrid Jonker’s poems from their collection entitled Black Butterflies (Cape Town, 2007);
Breyten Breytenbach for permission to quote from his poem ‘Ballade van ontroue bemindes’;
André Brink for talking to me about Ingrid Jonker;
Gerhard Geldenhuys for information about documents regarding Abraham and Ingrid Jonker in the Western Cape Archives and Office of the Master of the Supreme Court, Cape Town;
Joan-Mari Barendse for invaluable research assistance;
Chris van der Merwe for comments on and advice about the text;
Russell Martin for the careful editing of the text.
Every effort has been made to identify the copyright holders of the photographs reproduced in this book. Should there be any errors or omissions, we shall gladly rectify them in the next impression.
Louise Viljoen
2012
1
Writing Ingrid Jonker
‘There can never be a definitive biography, merely a version, an attempt, an essay which in time reveals how completely all such attempts bear the impress of the age in which it was written.’
– Eric Homberger & John Charmley, The troubled face of biography
The fascination with Ingrid Jonker
When Ingrid Jonker took her own life by walking into the sea at Three Anchor Bay in Cape Town on 19 July 1965 at the age of 31, she became the stuff of legend and rumour. Looking back on her legacy, one may wonder why this is so. The shortness of her life and the slenderness of her literary oeuvre seem out of all proportion to the biographical, critical and creative attention that has been devoted to her. Her collected writings can be contained within one compact volume. Apart from two volumes of poetry published in her lifetime and a volume published posthumously, she left only a few short stories, a play and a scattering of other texts.
To what should one ascribe her iconic status and the continuing fascination with her life and work? The answer to this probably lies in a combination of factors. There is no doubt that the easily sensationalised details of her life provide a provocative glimpse into a particularly turbulent period of Afrikaner and South African history. Her private history (a materially deprived childhood, a difficult relationship with her father, her frank and spontaneous sexuality, her unhappy love affairs, her suicide) coincided with major developments in public history. The 1950s saw a rapid escalation of apartheid laws to ensure the segregation of South African society and the early 1960s began dramatically with the shootings at Sharpeville, the banning of the ANC and PAC, South Africa’s withdrawal from the Commonwealth and the declaration of a Republic. Ingrid’s response to these and other events and her identification with the plight of the oppressed in South Africa brought her into conflict with her father, at that time a National Party politician, as well as with other authority figures of Afrikanerdom. As part of a bohemian circle of friends with liberal values in Cape Town, she identified herself with the ideal of a society in which freedom of speech and association was recognised. Her life was also closely intertwined with the work of the Sestigers, who were busy rewriting Afrikaner history and literature by opposing the political and literary establishment of the time.
Although hers was an eventful life that provides a window on the tensions of South Africa at a certain moment in its history, it would not have made the same impact but for her poetry. For her mentor, Uys Krige, her poetry was ‘the essential Ingrid stripped of her incompleteness, of the little human flaws and shortcomings we all share’.1An academic analysis of her poetry’s appeal would refer to its pure lyricism, its powerful almost surrealist imagery, its confident musicality, its sensitivity to all the nuances of her mother tongue and its ability to infuse the political with the personal. It is more difficult to discern why her best poems appeal to both poetry-lovers and poetry-avoiders alike. One of the answers may lie in the fact that she started writing poems when she was about six and her poetry, despite its increasing sophistication, never lost its almost childlike clarity and freshness. It may also be that readers feel the force of her urgency to communicate with others through her poetry, that they feel directly spoken to by her poems.
It is therefore not surprising that it was her poetry, more specifically the poem ‘Die kind’ (translated into English as ‘The child’), that brought her to the attention of South Africa and the larger world when Nelson Mandela read it at the opening of South Africa’s first democratic parliament on 24 May 1994. Without doubt, Mandela’s reference to Ingrid Jonker contributed hugely to the revival of interest in her person and her work. Although she always had a strong following in Afrikaans literary circles,2journalists started digging up the details of her life in the week after Mandela’s speech and a new revised edition of her collected works was published before the year was out. In the years that followed new English translations of her work appeared and several documentary films were produced. The first biographical works about her life also started to see the light. A short and gripping biography by the Dutch novelist Henk van Woerden was included in Ik herhaal je (2000), a volume that included Gerrit Komrij’s translations of Jonker’s poetry into Dutch. The first attempt at a comprehensive overview of her life was Petrovna Metelerkamp’s Ingrid Jonker: Beeld van ’n digterslewe (2003). Rather than a conventional biography, this impressive book consisted of a collection of documents about Ingrid Jonker’s life, with the hand of the biographer only visible in the selection and ordering of the material as well as in short interlinking pieces. More information about Ingrid Jonker’s life came to light in 2006 when the clinical psychologist L.M. van der Merwe published a series of interviews conducted with people who were close to her for his doctoral thesis in psychology twelve years after her death, in Gesprekke oor Ingrid Jonker [Conversations about Ingrid Jonker]. In addition to two Afrikaans plays about her life – Ingrid Jonker: Opdrag (created by Jana Cilliers in cooperation with the writer Ryk Hattingh in 1997) and Altyd Jonker (written and produced by Saartjie Botha in 2006) – her life was captured in the 2011 film Black Butterflies by the Dutch director Paula van der Oest, starring Carice van Houten as Ingrid Jonker.
Such is the fascination with Ingrid Jonker that André Brink has spoken of an ‘industry’ that has sprung up around her death.3It is a fascination that shows no sign of abating.
Writing Ingrid Jonker
In using the materials available to reconstruct Ingrid Jonker’s life and interpret her work, we must remember that no document is inert or innocent. Letters, diaries, and biographical and autobiographical writings are never neutral representations of reality. They often constitute deliberate acts of self-creation, self-justification or even self-promotion that have to be reckoned with. Moreover, private documents often make use of rhetorical strategies or coded languages that are difficult to interpret. For the biographer, therefore, the task at hand is not simply a matter of decoding the available documents, but rather of cautiously interpreting them. The same goes for information gleaned from interviews conducted with people who knew Ingrid Jonker. Their memories are necessarily determined by the nature of their relationship with her and by their subjective interpretation of events. We also know that memories of the past are subject to complex processes of editing and erasure; nor are they free of self-interest and self-preservation. One could argue that the many photographs of Ingrid Jonker speak unambiguously to the viewer, that they are impervious to the passage of time and the erosion of memory. We should, however, heed Susan Sontag’s warning that ‘photography makes us feel that the world is more available than it really is’.4Photographs do not escape the mediatedness that the use of language inevitably entails.
Any biographical endeavour is also fraught with ethical questions. When reading documents like letters and diaries, it is difficult for the biographer to escape the feeling that she is invading another’s private space. When writing about someone’s private life and intimate thoughts, it is almost inevitable that the biographer should wonder what the limits of such revelations are. It is precisely this aspect of biography that has led critics to use the tropes of thievery, voyeurism, invasion and violation. On the other hand the right to privacy is not self-evident. Paul John Eakin observes in ‘Mapping the ethics of life writing’: ‘Because we live our lives in relation to others, our privacies are largely shared, making it hard to demarcate where one life leaves off and another begins.’ For Eakin, life writing, indeed life itself, is messier than traditional ethical models suggest. As he says, it is not easy to argue that one owns the facts of one’s life, as Ted Hughes claimed in the face of the relentless biographers of his wife Sylvia Plath. Eakin identifies respect for the autobiographical subject as the basic guideline when writing either a biography or an autobiography.5
This will be an important guideline in my own attempt to reconstruct Ingrid Jonker’s life and evaluate her work. For this reason I will not attempt to describe those parts of her life for which we have no information (a strategy perfectly acceptable in a novelised life). This brief introduction to her life and work, set against the background of her time and place, will also try to resist the temptation to romanticise a life lived in difficult circumstances or read it in terms of a single grand narrative that predetermined all the events in her life, be it political or psychoanalytical. Although I will discuss some of her literary texts and speculate about the connection between the writer’s life and her writings, my attempts will be guided by the understanding that poems and stories originate from a complex interplay between fact and fiction and are sometimes pure fiction. This biography will engage with those details available in order to arrive at yet another understanding of the phenomenon Ingrid Jonker. It also builds on the work of those who have come before, thus taking its place as one of an ongoing series of interpretations of her life which will become more nuanced as further information becomes available. As such it is, inevitably, part of the ‘industry’ around Jonker.
2
Childhood and youth, 1933–1951
The child in me died quietly
neglected, blind and quite unspoilt.
– Ingrid Jonker, ‘Puberty’ from Black butterflies
The beginning
The beginning was inauspicious. Ingrid Jonker was born on 19 September 1933 on a farm near Douglas in the Northern Cape where her mother Beatrice was staying with her parents, Fanie and Annie Cilliers. Beatrice had left her husband Abraham Jonker when he accused her of carrying a child that was not his. Neighbours in the Cape Town suburb of Vredehoek where the Jonkers lived told of marital tensions and frequent arguments between Abraham and his wife, after which she often fled the house with her firstborn, Anna.6Beatrice’s hurt at her husband’s accusations must have run deep. A letter, dated 16 November 1933, shows her firmly rejecting Abraham’s plea that she return to him.7The early 1930s were difficult times in South Africa. The economic depression as well as a severe drought brought great financial hardship, unemployment and poverty for many people. Although Ingrid’s grandfather Fanie had been a relatively prosperous farmer in the Boland, he also fell on hard times. A memoir by his son, the physicist A.C. (Andries) Cilliers, tells us that Ingrid’s grandfather bought a farm in the Douglas district, in all probability the one where Ingrid was born, in partnership with two of his sons in 1926. But depression and drought as well as the financial burden of caring for their divorced sister Beatrice and her two children forced them to sell the farm at a loss by 1934.8Thereafter, the small extended family, consisting of grandparents Fanie and Annie, daughter Beatrice and granddaughters Anna and Ingrid, lived on a succession of farms in the region9 before moving to Durbanville, then still a village on the outskirts of Cape Town, in 1937.
Durbanville
Ingrid spent her childhood years in a succession of houses, flats, boarding houses and rooms, something which would set a pattern for the rest of her life. In Durbanville the family lived in their grandfather’s house, remembered by Anna as ‘the house with the pepper-tree’. The memoir of Fanie’s son paints him as a high-spirited but also somewhat reckless man. His two granddaughters would remember him with great fondness, both referring to his exuberance as well as the jokes and laughter surrounding him despite his being bed-ridden with rheumatoid arthritis.10Information about this phase in Ingrid’s life comes to us from a biographical sketch she wrote for Die Vaderland11 and the first chapters of a memoir written by her sister Anna.12From these accounts it emerges that the years they spent in Durbanville were on the whole happy and free. Although not wealthy, they were part of a caring family; their mother and grandmother indulged them by taking part in their children’s games and they could share in their grandfather’s boisterous good humour. They roamed about freely in the rural atmosphere of Durbanville and the surrounding veld, where Ingrid was once attacked by a swarm of bees. They often visited relations in grand houses and on prosperous farms in the Paarl district. To the great consternation of their aunts, their mother allowed them to swim naked at family picnics – Ingrid once almost drowned in the Berg River. She was the more delicate of the two children, retaining a ‘weak chest’ after a bout of whooping cough.
It was also in Durbanville, Anna remembered, that Ingrid was christened at the age of three or four at an unconventional ceremony in the garden. Anna admitted to being jealous of Ingrid in her pretty little white dress and to watching the proceedings from a hiding-place in the neighbouring garden, an admission which also tells us something about the relationship between the sisters. The name Ingrid was frowned upon by the relations because it was not a family name, but her mother didn’t pay any attention to their criticism. Their grandparents’ attitude towards the church was unconventional for the time and community of which they were part. Grandfather Fanie was not a churchgoer and could even be suspected of religious indifference, his son conceded in his memoir, sometimes treating the dignified ministers of the Dutch Reformed Church with witty insouciance.13Grandmother Annie was a devout woman who later in life preferred to preach to coloured people or attend the Apostolic Church, because they were ‘so lively and jolly’, Ingrid later wrote.14Although she was never religious in the conventional sense of the word, Ingrid would retain the childlike and enduring faith in Jesus learnt from her grandmother for the rest of her life.
The Strand and Gordon’s Bay
The death of their grandfather Fanie in 1938 brought an end to the relatively carefree life in Durbanville. With their grandfather gone, Ingrid and her sister Anna were now part of a household of women. In a sense they had two mothers: because of their mother’s ill health, their grandmother Annie increasingly had to fulfil the role of mother and primary caretaker for the two girls. Their grandfather’s death also left the small household financially destitute. They could not stay on in the house in Durbanville and had to move to the Strand in 1940. Their grandmother Annie’s state pension was supplemented with small allowances from her sons A.C. and Jacob. Because of her health Beatrice could only work intermittently; there was a short stint with the SABC in Cape Town as well as office jobs in Stellenbosch and the Strand. Their father also sent them money;15the divorce order stipulated that he should pay £5 per year towards the support of his children.16Although circumstances were difficult, Anna remembered that the two children were excited about their move to the Strand. They looked forward to living in a little house by the sea and being able to swim every day. To some extent their expectations were fulfilled. Even though they had to move from one house to another in the Strand and Gordon’s Bay over the next few years, they both remembered the devotion with which their grandmother cared for them and their freedom to explore the sea, the veld and books. Although still young – Ingrid started kindergarten in July 1940 and Anna was put in Standard One in the Strand Primary School – their mother and grandmother allowed them greater freedom and mobility than was usual for the time. During their stay in Gordon’s Bay they often wandered off into a pine forest on their way to school, to sit and read their books. Once they stayed away from school for so long that the teacher thought the family had moved again. Here, they were also allowed to keep small animals and continued exploring the veld and beach. They picked fruit from plants in the veld, gathered shellfish from the rock pools, played with tadpoles in the stream behind their house and buried small objects they called ‘secrets’ in the ground. It is not surprising that Gordon’s Bay is one of the spaces that would later gain symbolic importance in Ingrid’s poetry.
Their mother’s illness cast a shadow over this relatively carefree time. During their first year in the Strand, Beatrice suffered a nervous breakdown and had to be hospitalised in Valkenburg psychiatric hospital in Cape Town. This traumatic experience greatly affected Ingrid and strengthened her bond with her grandmother, who was the only person to whom she could talk about it. In these circumstances their grandmother came to play an increasingly important role in their lives, caring for them as best she could within her limited means. Their meals often consisted of bread, soup or fish-heads and the children had to use a battered handbag of their grandmother’s as a satchel for their schoolbooks. Grandmother Annie was the one who fostered Ingrid’s talent as a writer by reading the poems Ingrid wrote from the age of six to the coloured congregations she preached to on Sundays.
Not long after her nervous breakdown Beatrice was diagnosed with cancer. When she was hospitalised in Somerset West her children tried to visit her as often as possible, either taking the bus or walking all the way from the Strand. Arriving at the hospital, they usually clambered on to her bed and were given food and cold drinks by the nurses. Despite the illness they were still able to share a bond of female confidentiality with their mother, telling her things about boyfriends and growing up that they could not mention to their devout grandmother. Ingrid would later write a short story, ‘Eerste liefde’ [First love], in which she expressed a young adolescent’s desperate need to tell her uncomprehending grandmother about the first awakenings of love and desire. When Beatrice was later moved to Groote Schuur and then to the Conradie Hospital in Cape Town, they could not visit her as often. After spending almost two years in hospital, Beatrice died on 6 August 1944.17The bare facts of this narrative no doubt conceal great heartbreak and suffering for the grandmother and two children. Ingrid recalled her mother with great tenderness in the poem ‘Ladybird’:18
Glans oker
en ’n lig breek
uit die see.
In die agterplaas
êrens tussen die wasgoed
en ’n boom vol granate
jou lag en die oggend
skielik en klein
soos ’n liewenheersbesie
geval op my hand
[Gleaming ochre
and a light breaks
from the sea.
In the back yard
somewhere between the washing
and a pomegranate tree
your laugh and the morning
sudden and small
like a ladybird
fallen on my hand]
She wrote elsewhere: ‘My moeder, sterwend, was so sonnig soos ’n liewenheersbesie, so vol geheime, so verrassend, so teer …’ [My mother, dying, was as sunny as a ladybird, so full of secrets, so surprising, so tender …].19
Ingrid’s early years, spent in the company of her mother and grandmother, had a profound influence on the rest of her life. Theirs was a home that gave the two girls tender and loving care but also exposed them to the suffering brought about by nervous disorder, illness and death. It was also an unconventional upbringing that allowed them to some degree the freedom to move outside the constraints of Afrikaner society of the day. Although their grandmother upheld strict religious values, their mother did not keep them on a tight rein. They could read what they liked, they were not as housebound as most children then and they treated people of other races with less of the prejudice and condescension usual at the time. They had little contact with their well-off relations, who seemed to lead more regulated and ordered lives. Their cousins in Stellenbosch lived in a house that was almost too neat and organised for them, while their rich aunt Joey Malan, who lived in Constantia, regarded them as ‘wilde, ongetemde kinders’ [wild, untamed children], according to Anna’s unfinished memoir.
Beatrice’s death brought an end to Ingrid’s life within the intimacy of the maternal family. After the death of their mother in August, the two girls stayed on with their grandmother until their father Abraham came to fetch them in December 1944 and took them to live with him in Cape Town. The loss of two mothers within such a short space of time must have had an incalculable effect on the young Ingrid. A studio portrait, taken shortly before they left for Cape Town, shows Ouma Annie with her two granddaughters. Her face is wizened with age and her eyes deep-set; she is soberly attired in a black dress with a white crocheted collar. In contrast we see the freshness and youth of her two granddaughters. Dark-haired Anna on her right is 13 years old and on the brink of puberty; the blonde Ingrid on the other side is 11 and her wide smile is guileless, if somewhat posed. The photograph’s pronounced contrast between youth and age emphasises rather than obscures the closeness between the old woman and the children. Surreptitiously Anna wrote their father a letter to say that they would prefer to stay with their grandmother and go to one of the local schools because they did not have clothes that were grand enough for Cape Town. But the letter had no effect and they had to leave their grandmother behind when Abraham fetched them. Although Ouma Annie died only in 1956 or 1957,20the children rarely saw her after that painful farewell during which Ingrid tried to hold on to her grandmother’s hand as long as possible.
Cape Town
In the years before their mother’s death, the two children’s contact with their father had been minimal. After his divorce from Beatrice there was a short-lived second marriage to one Barbara Gill before Abraham Jonker married Lulu Brewis, a writer of children’s books, in 1941. Anna Jonker remembered that he once came to fetch her to spend a weekend with him while they were still living in Durbanville. Although he brought Ingrid a red top on that occasion, he did not acknowledge her presence at all.21Because their father’s house was not large enough to accommodate the two girls, Anna and Ingrid were put into lodgings in central Cape Town and attended a nearby school for the first six months of 1945.22They were fetched on Sundays to spend time with him and, after he bought a larger house in Plumstead, they went to live with him and his new family, wife Lulu and their two young children, Koos and Suzanne.
Anna and Ingrid each gave different accounts of their time in this house. According to Anna they were given a nice room with a balcony. She also remembered that though her father worked hard he made time for them when he could, reading them poetry and teaching Ingrid to waltz around the dining-room table.23Ingrid, on the other hand, later told Jack Cope and Laurens van der Post that they had to sit apart from the rest of the family at the dinner table and eat the food given to the servants.24Although it is difficult to gauge where the line between truth and fiction lies in these accounts, life with their stepmother Lulu was not easy for the two young girls. Although Lulu was kind to the girls when they were still boarding in Cape Town, things changed once they went to live with the family in Plumstead. In an interview, Anna once painted a dark picture of emotional deprivation and misunderstanding.25The two young girls’ self-confidence was constantly undermined by snide remarks and there was little understanding for their physical needs as young girls entering puberty. André Brink remembered that Ingrid recounted tales – with some exaggeration, he felt – in which Lulu lived up to the harsh stereotype of the fairytale stepmother.26Other friends also spoke of Ingrid’s hostility towards her stepmother.27Although there was no love lost between the two girls and their stepmother, they had a good relationship with their much younger step-siblings, Koos and Suzanne. This is borne out by snapshots dating from this time which show the two sisters on the beach with Koos and Suzanne as well as other children. Although the photographs suggest that they were at least partly able to live out their love of the sea, the presence of rather severe-looking nannies in the pictures hints at a different life-style in Abraham and Lulu’s house: more affluent, but also more structured, supervised and regulated. Outsiders observed that the relationship between Lulu and her stepdaughters was affected by the great difference between them. The children were used to wandering around on their own and expressing themselves freely; their stepmother wanted to exercise control and make them conform to strict middle-class values.28Their father seems to have been either powerless to intervene or too distracted by the demands of his career to take notice.
Who was this father who would influence Ingrid’s life so profoundly? Abraham Jonker was a well-educated man who studied at the University of Stellenbosch from 1923 to 1930. Here he met the music student Beatrice Cilliers, whom he married in 1930. At Stellenbosch he obtained a bachelor’s degree, majoring in Ancient Greek and Dutch, a master’s degree in Ancient Greek and a diploma in theology (the last to please his parents rather than for his own sake). After two more years of studying law, he became an organiser for General Hertzog’s National Party, before embarking on a career in journalism and working for publications like Die Burger, Die Huisgenoot, Die Jongspan and Die Suiderstem. He also had literary aspirations and published several novels and volumes of short stories, from the early 1930s onwards. The critical response to his literary work remained lukewarm, perhaps because his preference for the European-inspired ‘Nuwe Saaklikheid’ (‘Modern Objectivity’) was very different from the confessional mode newly popular in Afrikaans literature at the time. Because of the sombre worldview reflected in his writing, Ingrid Jonker’s Dutch biographer Henk van Woerden typecast him as a secular Calvinist and described him as an aloof, panic-stricken puritan.29Although Abraham Jonker has been portrayed as the archetypal apartheid politician in the minds of those who know of the political tension that existed between him and his daughter, he had a chequered political career. In the election that brought D.F. Malan’s National Party into power in 1948, he won a seat in parliament as a member of General Smuts’s United Party. Together with other dissidents he formed the Conservative Party in 1954, but crossed the floor in 1956 to join the National Party.30Many of his contemporaries spoke of him as a political opportunist and turncoat.31Whether Abraham Jonker’s changing political views were the result of careerism or inner conviction, they would later bring him into open confrontation with his daughter.
While living with their father and stepmother in Plumstead, Ingrid and her sister attended the English-medium Wynberg Girls’ School. Ingrid was still in primary school when she started here in 1945, and she completed her matric in 1951. School reports indicate that she was a reasonably well-behaved girl (‘Conduct: Fairly good and improved lately’) and average student (‘This is quite a creditable record’), who preferred to devote her energy to those subjects that really interested her. Writing seems to have been the one thing she cared about passionately. It was her teachers, rather than her literary-minded father, who recognised and encouraged her gift for writing.32Ingrid remembered that their headmistress, Miss Currie, reprimanded her for writing poems that satirised the schoolteachers, but was also the first person to declare that her young pupil had talent, even though she was undisciplined and disobedient.33Only a handful of Ingrid’s schoolgirl poems survive.
Writing poems and stories seems to have been a way of creating a safe space for herself. In an article for Drum magazine in May 1963, Ingrid said of her childhood: ‘I found a way of making my own happiness and I suppose that was the beginning of my poetry.’ In a letter to André Brink she wrote: ‘Miskien is digterwees maar ’n speelwêreld, nooit heeltemal die “diepe erns” nie, maar vir my safe soos Jesus’ [Maybe being a poet is a play world, never completely serious, but for me safe as Jesus].34Apart from creating a place to which she could retreat and in which she could feel at home, writing also helped her gain self-confidence. Sending her poems to magazines and being paid for them was a means of achieving some independence and a sense of self-worth. An autobiographical short story ‘’n Daad van geloof’ [An act of faith], written shortly before her death, confirms this. It tells how a little girl decides to sell her poems to buy herself a satchel and so help ease the burden on her grandmother who had to care for her. Several poems and stories appeared in the children’s magazine Die Jongspan in 1947 when she was 14.35
It seems that Ingrid was set on a literary career from early on. In 1949, when she was only 16, she submitted a volume of poems to Nasionale Boekhandel titled Na die somer [After the summer]. It was not accepted but she was invited by the publisher’s reader, D.J. Opperman, to discuss her poems with him. As Opperman was one of the foremost Afrikaans poets of the day and a hugely influential figure in the Afrikaans literary world, Ingrid was nervous about meeting him but was encouraged by the fact that he took her seriously and gave her good advice.36On two occasions in 1951 she again sent him poems on which he commented, inviting her to send more. Some of these poems (for instance ‘Skrik’ and ‘Keuse’) include veiled hints at romantic longing and an awakening sexuality, often reined in by feelings of religious guilt. It is difficult to reconstruct the inner life of the adolescent Ingrid on the basis of these poems, because the expression of feeling in them is still guarded, hemmed in by schoolgirl decorum and the writerly rhetoric of a previous generation of Afrikaans poets.
After passing matric in 1951 it was clear Ingrid wanted to leave home. Anna remembered that she came from Johannesburg, where she was working at the time, to help Ingrid negotiate with their father about her leaving. After the children told him that there was ‘space in the house but no place in the heart’ for them, he agreed that Ingrid could move out. Anna then helped her set herself up in a boarding house in the centre of Cape Town.37In this way Ingrid left behind yet another of the many homes she would occupy during the course of her life.
3
Early adulthood, marriage and motherhood, 1952–1958
‘It was still the time of believing in yourself and your own creativity and how you were going to change the whole world before you’re thirty and committing suicide afterwards, dying happily ever after’.
– Nico Hagen in Ingrid Jonker: Her lives and time
Office-worker
That Ingrid did not get the opportunity to attend university is a recurrent theme in many of her friends’ recollections of her. Most of them blamed her father for depriving her of the opportunity. Others attributed it to the influence of Ingrid’s stepmother Lulu.38Abraham Jonker did support Ingrid financially while she attended a secretarial course in Cape Town in 1952, the year after she matriculated. This enabled her to become financially independent and support herself. She held a series of jobs as secretary, proofreader, translator and bookshop assistant in the years that followed, working for firms like the publisher Kennis, Citadel Press, HAUM Publishers, Culemborg Publishers, Nasionale Boekhandel and the Cape Divisional Council. She also helped Louis Hiemstra while he was revising the Tweetalige woordeboek [Bilingual Dictionary].39Her employers’ impressions of her varied. While she was highly commended by Hiemstra as a proofreader, Cor Pama found her a muddle-headed and ineffective bookshop assistant. Many people remembered her dedication as a proofreader, but she often felt frustrated and unfulfilled in the jobs she held.
Although she had to become a working woman to provide for herself, Ingrid remained dedicated to the vocation of poet which she had set for herself as a schoolgirl. ‘I became an office worker, but the real thing I lived for was to write,’ she professed in the article for Drum. She continued sending her poems for publication in a variety of popular magazines like Die Huisgenoot, Naweekpos and Rooi Rose40 as well as the literary journal Standpunte. It was clear that her poems were gradually becoming more sophisticated and accomplished. During this time Ingrid also pursued other artistic interests. She took lessons with the Spanish sculptor Florencio Cuairan, and attended classes in elocution and drama. It comes as no surprise that, when one listens to tape recordings of her reading her own poetry, what impresses one is the clarity of her diction and articulation. Her voice is that of a cultured woman, calm and confident. Although she gave the impression of being vulnerable and defenceless, there must also have been a measure of resilience and determination in her character to have enabled her to overcome the deprivation of her early years and develop artistically and socially after she left her father’s house. Jack Cope would voice the same sentiment in a letter he wrote to Uys Krige in May 1959, when he said that her friends did not always ‘make allowances for her basic strength and perseverance’.41There are other contradictions in the photographs dating from this time. Some of them portray her as a pert office-worker with a high-collared dress or neat blouse behind a typewriter. Other snapshots show her as a young bohemienne in shorts with tanned legs and a cigarette between her fingers. In an interview conducted a few years later she admitted to smoking 30 cigarettes a day, adding that she did not eat much because she thought food was boring.42
There is a tendency to define Ingrid in terms of her relationships with men and to forget her friendships and relationships with women. During these first years of her adult life she built up a wide circle of both male and female friends. Her male friends included the actor Jannie Gildenhuys and Ernst Eloff, who are shown in photographs with her. She shared a number of flats with woman friends with whom she kept up a correspondence in later years. Lena Oelofse was one of her first flatmates, and later Jean (Bambi) du Preez. Several other names would crop up in the years that followed: Bonnie Davidtsz, Marie Swart, Marie Prinsloo, Margo Holt, Hélène Roos and Elmie Watson. There were also close, possibly intimate, friendships with the writers Berta Smit (her supervisor at Citadel Press to whom she showed and read her poems) and Freda Linde (who worked for the publishers HAUM and John Malherbe). Ingrid formed strong bonds as well with older women like the artist Marjorie Wallace, who became something of a mother figure for her, and the encyclopaedist Juliana Bouws, whose friendship provided her with invaluable emotional support. In 1954, three years after she left school, she met her future husband Piet Venter at a party in Sea Point.
First volume, Ontvlugting
The publication of Ingrid’s first volume of poems, Ontvlugting [Escape], in June 1956 was the culmination of her desire to be a published poet. Although her debut volume attracted the attention of the important critics of the time, their reviews mostly emphasised its adolescent youthfulness and thematic ‘slimness’. While Ontvlugting may be limited in its formal and thematic scope, it was clearly the product of a self-conscious poet who took her work seriously. It suggested that Ingrid Jonker was not just an intuitive poet whose poems came effortlessly, but someone who carefully crafted and revised her work. Although the volume is technically still somewhat awkward because of its over-use of rhyming couplets, most of the poems demonstrate sensitivity for the texture and musicality of words as well as their semantic potential. Uys Krige would later refer to her ‘skulpfyn oor’ (ear as finely tuned as a sea-shell).
The title poem sets the tone for the rest of the volume as well as for the Ingrid Jonker oeuvre, introducing the contexts, themes and images that would occur again and again in her work. Following after the Afrikaans is a translation by André Brink and Antjie Krog.
Ontvlugting
Uit hierdie Valkenburg het ek ontvlug
en dink my nou in Gordonsbaai terug:
Ek speel met paddavisse in ’n stroom
en kerf swastikas in ’n rooikransboom
Ek is die hond wat op die strande draf
en dom-allenig teen die aandwind blaf
Ek is die seevoël wat verhongerd daal
en dooie nagte opdis as ’n maal
Die god wat jou geskep het uit die wind
sodat my smart in jou volmaaktheid vind:
My lyk lê uitgespoel in wier en gras
op al die plekke waar ons eenmaal was.
Escape
From this Valkenburg have I run away
and in my thoughts return to Gordon’s Bay:
I play with tadpoles swimming free
carve swastikas in a red-krantz tree
I am the dog that slinks from beach to beach
barks dumb-alone against the evening breeze
I am the gull that swoops in famished flights
to serve up meals of long-dead nights
The god who shaped you from the wind and dew
to find fulfilment of my pain in you:
Washed out my body lies in weed and grass
in all the places where we once did pass.
Although one must remember that poems are fictional constructs, the two spaces mentioned in the first lines of this poem have a particular resonance in Ingrid Jonker’s life. Valkenburg is the psychiatric hospital to which her mother was committed after a breakdown; Gordon’s Bay is the seaside town where she spent part of her youth with her mother, grandmother and sister. The speaker begins by referring to the fact that she is confined in ‘this Valkenburg’ and that she escapes from this space associated with mental illness by returning to her memories of Gordon’s Bay. Although biographical information suggests that Ingrid remembered Gordon’s Bay as a place where she felt happy and secure despite her family’s poverty, the poem implies that this space already contains the germ of future unhappiness, isolation and death. When the speaker thinks herself back in Gordon’s Bay, the images of herself that come up are those of someone carving swastikas in a tree-trunk, a lonely dog on the beach, a hungry seagull and a god who creates in order to ‘fulfil’ pain. The poem’s final lines present yet another image that confirms the sombre content of the childhood paradise, that of the speaker’s corpse washed up on the beach in all the places she had visited in the past. These lines are among the best-known and most resonant in Afrikaans literature, because of the eerie precision with which they predicted Ingrid Jonker’s suicide by drowning. Many have said that they constituted a prophecy which she could not escape fulfilling. In his review of the volume, Rob Antonissen wrote that he found much of the volume ‘facile’, but that the poems also had a ‘curt matter-of-factness’ which provokes the reader. This is certainly true of the poem ‘Ontvlugting’, which presents us with the first of a series of disturbing images of the self in the volume, that of the lonely dog, the hungry gull, the capricious creator, the washed-up corpse.
Even at this early stage many of the poems in the volume reflect on love’s disillusions rather than its joys, love’s failure rather than its fulfilment. They ponder resignation, dependence, the duplicitous mirror-play of reality and illusion, sorrow, farewell and the loss of innocence. An interesting feature of some of the poems is the way in which different male figures are folded into one, that of the lover, the father and God or Christ, as in the poems ‘Offerande’ [Sacrifice] and ‘Jy het vir my gesterf’ [You have died for me]. The volume also gives an indication of the poet’s ability to imagine herself, chameleon-like, in the bodies of others and to take on different voices. A few poems contain the germ of rebellion against the bourgeois values of society as well as a sensitivity to the injustices of the political situation in South Africa, especially ‘Die blommeverkoopster’ [The flower-seller], written from the perspective of a coloured woman in love with a white man.
While the poet is able to imagine herself in the bodies and situations of others in this volume, her poetry also reveals an indisputably female consciousness. It is important to note that Ingrid Jonker’s small body of poetry, starting with the volume Ontvlugting, infused the largely male domain of Afrikaans poetry with a female thematic and lexicon. The only other strong female poets active in the Afrikaans literary tradition by the time Ingrid Jonker made her debut were Elisabeth Eybers, Olga Kirsch, Ina Rousseau and Sheila Cussons. In the poem ‘Ontnugtering’ [Disillusionment], written after a visit to Johannesburg in 1955, the speaker refers to the fact that she wanted to deceive the world by presenting herself as a doll (a toy as well as a feminine or sexual object). But the truth has come out: she is a ‘verwronge digter’ [misshapen poet] who knows she will be mocked by the world but defiantly invites it to do so. The poem reflects an awareness of the creative woman’s tenuous position in society: the doll-like woman is acceptable, the misshapen poetess is not. The journalist Dot van der Merwe’s article about the publication of Ontvlugting in Die Burger on 23 June 1956 proved the point by referring to Ingrid as the daughter of the MP Abraham Jonker and mentioning the fact that her fiancé Piet Venter found some of the poems in the volume too revealing.
This same article put into circulation the story of Abraham Jonker’s ungenerous reaction when presented with the volume. He was reported to have said that he hoped there was something between the covers of the book and that he would look at it later, fully expecting her to have shamed him with its content.43Whether he really made this remark or not, it is true that the relationship between literary fathers and their literary daughters is always a potentially fraught one. There certainly seems to have been room for complex reciprocal feelings of admiration and envy in this case. Abraham Jonker was a published writer, even though he achieved only a modest reputation in the Afrikaans literary canon. According to friends, Ingrid was in awe of her father (she referred to him as a ‘writer of note’ in an early autobiographical piece) and desperately wanted him to acknowledge her work. On the other hand, it is possible that he felt threatened by the talent of his rebellious daughter. This may have been the reason why he treated her in the off-hand, casual way which dismayed her friends. Berta Smit observed that Ingrid was always a little self-conscious and unsure of herself in his presence, as if she felt inferior towards him.44Their relationship became more and more complex as their political views started to differ.
A new circle of friends and the university on the beach
Publication of her first volume of poetry provided Ingrid with entry into an exciting, new world. This happened as the result of her introduction to the writer Jan Rabie, who worked for the SABC and conducted an interview with her for radio in 1956. She soon became close friends with Jan and his wife, the painter Marjorie Wallace, who shared a house in Green Point with the painters Erik Laubscher and his wife Claude Bouscharain. Ingrid would later develop a crush on Jan, which was not reciprocated. He referred to her as Ingrid Muisvoet [Ingrid Mousefoot] because of her light little footsteps and the chaos she left in her wake.45Ingrid was taken up in the Rabies’ large circle of friends, which included Uys Krige, Jack Cope, Adam Small, Richard Rive, Peter Clarke, Breyten Breytenbach, James Matthews, Kenny Parker, Piet Philander, Gillian Jewell, Harry Bloom and Albie Sachs.46Meeting these people broadened her literary horizons by exposing her to the work of a range of writers she had not known before. She began to read the work of Spanish, Dutch, American, French and Italian poets and came to know the writing of Federico Garcia Lorca, Pablo Neruda, Paul Éluard, Sybren Polet, Gerrit Achterberg, Lucebert, Dylan Thomas and e.e. cummings (one of whose poems she later translated into Afrikaans). Some of these writers she came to know through Uys Krige’s translations of poems in Spanish, French and Italian.
Among the group of friends, she felt a special affinity for Uys Krige, who soon became her mentor. He read her poems with a sharply critical eye, advising her to revise her work constantly. Krige was so stern a reader that she referred to him as ‘the Iceman’,47a play on the name Uys and Eugene O’Neill’s play The iceman cometh. He was the one who encouraged her the most, even though he would tick her off about certain lines and sometimes laugh at her, she later said in a radio interview about her career as a poet.48It was Krige who introduced her to the work of surrealist poets like Éluard, whose work he translated into Afrikaans, leading her to experiment with free verse and abandon the formal rigidity of her first volume.
Ingrid’s introduction to this ‘bohemian’ circle of friends also proved to be a political education. Through her contact with Jan Rabie and his friends, she became part of a social circle that was indifferent to the colour bar imposed by apartheid politics. Many of her new friends were ‘coloured’ in the racial taxonomy of the day: Richard Rive, Kenny Parker, Peter Clarke, Adam Small and Piet Philander. Although she was to a large extent free of racial prejudice (or ‘racial feelings’, as she later phrased it in the Drum article) because of the unconventional way in which she spent her early childhood, she told Peter Clarke that social interaction with people of other races was something new for her.49She became close friends with Richard Rive, whom she often visited; he remembers in his autobiography Writing black that they drove around Cape Town on a scooter, pretending to be brother and sister because Marjorie Wallace said they looked alike and she felt motherly towards both of them.50
Another meeting place during these years was the Clifton bungalow ‘Sea Girt’ which Uys Krige shared with the writer Jack Cope from September 1958 until 1968.51Uys and Jack had known each other since the late 1940s and bought this house together after Jack’s wife Lesley left him and moved to White River in April 1958 with their sons Raymond and Michael.52Jack and Uys even had the dubious honour of becoming known as the ‘Clifton Mafia’,53for having to write letters of refusal to aspiring writers in their capacity as editors of the literary journal Contrast, set up by Jack and others in 1960.54Ingrid met Jack in August 1957 when he returned the key of Ingrid and her husband Piet’s flat on behalf of Uys Krige, who had stayed there for a while.55Many people’s memories of Ingrid are framed by Clifton and several photographs show her on Clifton beach, first with Piet, later with Marjorie, Jan, Uys, Jack and other friends. Marjorie remembered her as always laughing, tanned, barefoot, in and out of the sea, kicking a ball on the beach with Jan, Jack and Uys.56
