William Plomer’s scandalous novel Turbott Wolfe, published by Leonard and Virginia Woolf in 1926, was written when Plomer was only 21 and living in a Zulu reserve in South Africa. It was according to Nadine Gordimer ‘the only novel of poetic vision to come out of our country since Olive Schreiner’s The Story of an African Farm.’
William Plomer’s scandalous novel Turbott Wolfe, published by Leonard and Virginia Woolf in 1926, was written when Plomer was only 21 and living in a Zulu reserve in South Africa. It was according to Nadine Gordimer ‘the only novel of poetic vision to come out of our country since Olive Schreiner’s The Story of an African Farm.’ The book caused something of an outcry in South Africa with its provocative themes of miscegenation and interracial love. Predictably, it was widely condemned by the local press. But as Stephen Gray pointed out, there was no need for the apartheid government to censor it: Turbott Wolfe was simply left to go out of print.
Gray, it should be noted, did his best to keep the novel alive, republishing it in 1980. But to no avail. South Africa, with its tragically low number of active readers and its Scotch mist of cultural amnesia, let it fall from its hand into the neglected peri-urban landfill of forgetting. And as Prof. Gareth Cornwell wrote in an extended academic essay:
The “moment” of or for Turbott Wolfe has passed, and I cannot for the life of me imagine a future context for its rehabilitation. The novel is out of print and no longer taught at South African universities …Turbott Wolfe will vanish into the sinkhole of history – along with the rest, from the lilting cadences of Cry, the Beloved Country to the “essential gestures” of Nadine Gordimer.
This is sad stuff from a professor who has dedicated a considerable amount of time to Plomer’s ‘extraordinary’ first novel. But the claim that, as a white-male-colonial writer, Plomer does not fit into our current value systems, might not be far off the mark.
Plomer was born in South Africa in 1903. He was educated at both a public school in Britain and at St. John’s in Johannesburg. After leaving school he became a farmer, working in the Eastern Cape, but ended up running a trading post with his father in Enthumeni within a Zulu reserve in northern Natal.
But he was always set on becoming a writer. While working in Natal he became interested in the Zulu newspaper Ilanga Lase Natal, edited by the first president of the African National Congress, John Dube. Plomer began corresponding with Dube, who went on to publish Plomer’s first poems in 1924. As Plomer’s biographer, Peter F. Alexander, puts it, his first poem published in Ilanga ‘concerned the need for blacks and whites in South Africa to move towards one another.’ As the correspondence continued between the Plomer and Dube, he went down to meet Dube and stayed with him, finding, as he would recount, a fascinating thinker and conversationalist.
In the year after these poems were published, while on business trips down in Durban, Plomer also befriended the impulsive and provocative poet Roy Campbell. It was an unlikely friendship for the urbane Plomer to have made, but the writers shared three interests: a love of literature, a loathing for racism, and a desire to stir the South African pot. By the time they met, Campbell was 24 (two years older than Plomer), but he was already famous due to the glowing reception his poem The Flaming Terrapin received in both America and Europe.
In 1925 a wealthy sugar farmer by the name of Lewis Reynolds, who admired Campbell’s poetry, offered to put up the money to begin a literary magazine. Campbell then offered Plomer the position of sub-editor with an equal share of the £20 salary. The magazine Voorslag was born. However, Voorslag would soon run into issues. Its radical anti-racist editorial position, as well as its self-proclaimed ‘mocking’ and ‘blasphemous’ tone, rankled with Reynolds. Reynolds, who had political aspirations and who had been the private secretary of Jan Smuts during the Versailles conference, soon decided to cut its funding.
In the same year that Voorslag ended, Turbott Wolfe was published by Leonard and Virginia Woolf as part of their famous Hogarth Press imprint. Plomer had sent the manuscript to the Woolfs in 1924 with a jocular accounting double-entry-style note attached to it with ‘Assets’ and ‘Drawbacks’. Amongst those assets, Plomer claimed that the book had ‘a tendency towards satire’ and that ‘I am young’. In ‘drawbacks’ he stated ‘I have no typewriter. For this I lay before you my humblest apologies and my pencilled MS’. What he also considered a drawback was that ‘I am young’. Leonard Woolf replied by stating that he found the book ‘very interesting’ and then, in further correspondence, he stated that he and Virginia wished to publish it.
On publication, the book received very positive reviews in both the UK and the USA. It was variously stated in the US to be ‘volcanic’, ‘the best novel of the year’ and ‘a work of genius’. However, in South Africa a more hostile reception awaited. Harold Wodson’s review in the Natal Advisor stated, under the headline ‘A Nasty Book on a Nasty Subject’, that ‘what provokes a sense of nausea in the present volume is the unrelieved wretchedness of the entire picture.’
With Turbott Wolfe and Voorslag loathed locally, Plomer soon realised there were few prospects for developing a writing career in the infertile literary lands of his birth. He also had begun to realise he was homosexual and that there was little prospect of living peacefully in an intolerant South African society. Plomer left South Africa in 1926, returning only once very briefly in 1956 as a mature man of letters. As he stated in his autobiography: ‘I could not imagine living there in a state of tension that I should only find endurable if bent on martyrdom or at least victimisation.’
With no wish to be victimised or martyred, Plomer was also never comfortable with the idea that he was truly South African. As he remarked once: ‘simply because a cat has her kittens in an oven does not make them biscuits.’ Like many twentieth-century thinkers, Plomer was not convinced about reified notions of identity. He was always happiest existing in the grey, shadowy, and inconclusive margins. Even if these were the rather large margins occupied by those dropouts, cranks, liberals, homosexuals, communists, and Catholic reactionaries who made up the British art and literary establishment in the mid-twentieth century. But Plomer did, in some manners, become as English as Heinz baked beans.
One thing that can be said to be South African, however, is the setting and themes of Turbott Wolfe. The work addresses the idea of miscegenation and the dilemma of a white man falling in love with a black woman (or as Plomer’s biographer suggested, a black male, fictionally dressed as a woman). The book is wholly and unblinkingly interested in its social present – South Africa of the 1920s – without sentimentality or phoney political posturing.
Perhaps most confusing, in a South African context, is that Turbott Wolfe lacks ideological commitment and a clear message. Plomer was no ‘fellow traveller’. If his life and writing was marked by anything, it was an ironic distance from ideology. This was mingled with a dose of personal self-doubt and a little sexual and relational confusion.
These elements of Plomer’s life, his understanding of the confusing political and personal soup we all find ourselves in, are marked out in Turbot Wolfe. To be sure, irony, satire and political and personal inconsistency, which Turbot Wolfe exudes with every phrase, have never been popular in a South African literary or political context. All writers and artists should be, as the French put it, engagé. Their work must be signposted, their worldview pronounced. Many South African critics have gaped at Turbott Wolfe, at this half-fish-half-canine-like novel, demanding that only the fish or only the wolf be ideologically revealed. Theorists can only provide the fishing tackle or the choke-chain to cope with the book’s ironic distance. Turbott Wolfe has often been reduced by critics to a singular ideological pronouncement that reflects Plomer’s supposed ‘world view’.
In a country that has put great literary weight on two forms of artistic discourse, that of political commitment and that of materialism, Turbott Wolfe is hermeneutically confusing. Many critics have tried to force it and its author to speak from an ideological position. But to ask this of the novel is simply to request the wolf to live in water. Plomer, unlike so many South Africans, had no interest in ideology or for that matter materialism. His houses and flats in the UK were said to be Spartanly furnished, even the books he read were sold or given away after reading. His first act in any house he moved into was said to be the ripping out the telephone line and placing that noisome ringing box in the rubbish bin.
But this is not to say that Plomer’s brilliant first novel is not about politics or materialism – it would hardly be a South African novel if it wasn’t. The book certainly is about South Africa’s racist, almost Orwellian, bureaucracy and the type of society that supports it.
The story of Turbott Wolfe begins with the visit of a character called ‘William Plomer’ to his friend Turbott Wolfe, who is dying of an unnamed African disease in a tawdry English seaside town. The novel starts with the comic scene of the fatally diseased Wolfe telling Plomer of the art of salesmanship. ‘[I]f you want to be a success in trade, in art, in politics, in life itself,’ Wolfe says, ‘you must never give people what they want. Give them what you want them to want. Then you are safe.’ Here, as in much of the novel, Plomer’s words are sodden with irony.
Of course, many critics have leapt to the dull and repetitious conclusion that Wolfe’s disease shows a clear authorial prejudice against Africa. That is, critics claim, Wolfe has in some way been infected by Africa itself. And perhaps, to be fair, this is the case. But if there is a disease in Africa, in the novel it is wholly held in the white colonial community. It is the whites of the novel who are described as ugly, morally corrupt, and contaminated. And if Africa is looked on poorly at times, it is England that is described as ‘dingy’ and ‘dismal’, and Wolfe’s living arrangements in England as ‘grotesque’.
To be sure there is ‘othering’ in the novel. Black people, on the whole, are quite clearly described in another register to whites. Their culture, appearances, decency, nobility, and strangeness are regularly noted and alluded to. But they also appear as fully developed characters, intelligent, and cultured. What is more, Wolfe falls – although only Platonically – in love with Nhliziyombi and he joins a society called Young Africa, which promotes miscegenation. Of course, by the end of the book, he is clearly not convinced by the idea of ‘Euroafrica’ which the society promotes, nor by the marriage of a white woman to a black man.
Certainly the novel’s ‘message’ never suggests that all will soon be well in Africa. Nor that Wolfe and his fellow members of Young Africa can create a new world and form a new perfectly functioning society. Wolfe’s experiences, like those of Marlow in Heart of Darkness (a book that clearly heavily influenced Plomer), are ‘inconclusive’.
In mentioning the often-noted influence of Joseph Conrad on Turbott Wolfe, it should be said that the book is far from being Conradian in its pitch, tone or style. Plomer was of a generation and of a class whose contribution to literature, certainly within a British context, was one of satire and irony, and one that never offered hope. George Orwell, Evelyn Waugh and Anthony Powell (not to mention Plomer) were all part of the same group of public-school boys who produced sardonic reproductions of the social environments they grew up in. Of those three, Plomer’s early life was closest to Orwell’s. But his wit and humour was nearer to that of Waugh’s cuttingly brilliant early comic satires. One can hardly read certain passages in Turbott Wolfe without thinking of Waugh. And, like Waugh, Plomer saves his most biting passages for his peers – in Plomer’s case, his fellow white colonials.
A Mr Bloodfield (a very Waugh-like piece of nomenclature) is described arriving at Wolfe’s trading post in Lembuland like this:
A stinking motor-car drew up at the very door. I had to go out into the dazzling sunlight. There was an ugly fellow with a female. Neither of them seemed to have any manners or any brains. I had to ask his name. It was Bloodfield. I managed to get from him the information that he was a farmer at Ovuyzanyana.
Wolfe’s ironic, comic disdain and distance continue through much of the book. His description of the missionaries and their history in Africa and with Africans is representative of his tone and general attitude:
The missionaries brought them the sacrament, but I could give you more than one instance where they brought them syphilis too.
Critics have used Wolfe’s personal doubts about life in Africa and its future as a method of interpreting the political and ideological position of the novel and its author. But this would certainly be a critical error. Firstly, it ignores the tone of Wolfe’s voice, which is too conceited to be trusted in its pronouncements. Secondly, it falls into the lazy critical position of conflating the author with the character. As Albert Camus once put it:
you can also write about incest without having necessarily hurled yourself on your unfortunate sister; and I have nowhere read that Sophocles ever thought of killing his father and dishonouring his mother.
Wolfe is precisely not William Plomer, the story itself denies this. Wolfe, after all, narrates his tale of Africa to a fictional character called ‘William Plomer’. And as such Wolfe’s voice is not the final authorial word. Plomer’s opinions in the novel itself, remain entirely unstated and unknowable. The novel is not, as David Brown once suggested, ‘bound by the parameters of his [Plomer’s] world view’, although they are to a certain extent bound by Wolfe’s – there is a difference.
It is here where Plomer is closest to another of his English contemporaries, the novelist Anthony Powell and his A Dance to the Music of Time. The thoughts and opinions of the narrator are kept at a distance. Just what Plomer’s opinions are, is not the point. Plomer, like Nick Jenkins of A Dance, is simply a sounding board. He is the listener, not a speaker. He is simply the messenger of a contrarian English voice in Africa, that of Turbott Wolfe’s.
