Absolution (6 page)

‘Yesterday, I was beginning to ask you about “Black Tongue”.’

‘Yes.’ She still looks down, turning the pages of her diary.

‘You write movingly about the effects of censorship on writers. I wonder if you could speak at a more personal level, about the ways in which the possibility of censorship affected your own writing?’

Her lips part and she blows out a stream of air. Adjusting the diary so that it is square on the desk, she turns the pages, but I think I see her glancing peripherally at the garden, where a man is pruning an already compact-looking bush whose name I don’t know, though I can recognize it as some kind of indigenous shrub. Such plants should make me feel at home, but their musky, wild animal smell always catches me by surprise, like a mugging.

‘I would have thought that the essay could be read either personally or impersonally – relevant either to all writers who find themselves working under the threat of censorship, or just one particular writer,’ she says, punctuating the sentence with a distracted cough that I’m beginning to recognize as one of her conversational tics – the cough, the snort, the involuntary throat-clearing.

‘Are you inviting me to read it that way?’ I hesitate in asking a question like this; I know she resists being asked to interpret her own words. A colleague of mine once wrote to ask Clare what she meant by a particular passage in one of the novels that referred obliquely to Sophocles. She responded politely but firmly, ‘The
sentence says
…’ and quoted the line verbatim without further comment. The text spoke the meaning, and she could or would do nothing to explain it.

‘It would be ridiculous not to read it that way, given what I have just said.’

‘You argue that institutionalized censorship tends to empower individuals with “unsubtle minds” and that the ideal censor, if censorship
must
be practised, would be someone like yourself – reflective, academic, widely read, a rationalist, someone with an objective mind.’ Her eyes flicker briefly up to mine, as if to say,
Don’t even try, flattery is futile
. She puts away the diary and begins shuffling papers on her desk, moving them from one pile
to another. It’s a game to show me that I’m unimportant, that her mind needs more to occupy it than my facile questioning.

‘I don’t think those are quite my words, but yes, broadly, that was my argument,’ she finally says, giving me another quick glance before looking down again, absorbed by a pile of recycled envelopes.

‘The problem, you say, is that people like you would never choose to be a censor, because there could be no more painful work than being forced to read works – books, magazines, articles, poems – not of your own choice. And one would think, also, that it would be anathema to a writer – particularly one like yourself – to have to ferret out offensive works and bar their publication.’

‘If one could ever agree on a universal standard of offence.’ A little cough again, clearing the throat, and a surprising, girlish toss of the hair, another peek at the gardener and a tight pursing of the lips. She opens the window, calls out to the man in words I don’t understand. They’re full of politeness, and a smile that looks genuine spreads across her face as she bows her head. The gardener responds, smiles (not so genuinely, I think), bows his own head and leaves the shrub alone.

‘It’s the wrong season for that. If you prune it in spring it won’t flower,’ she mutters to herself, and returns to my question. ‘It was Milton’s argument – reading unchosen works. “He who is made to judge … upon the birth, or death of books … had need to be a man above the common measure, both studious, learned, and judicious.” But for such a man – or woman, we should certainly wish to say – “there cannot be a more tedious and unpleasing Journey-work … than to be made the perpetual reader of unchosen books,” or something like that. It has always seemed a logical and worthy argument, to me at least. I think I credited him.’

(Later, I check the transcript of the interview against Milton’s text and am impressed by her memory for quotation.)

‘And Milton argues that censors are typically “ignorant” and “imperious”. Would you say that was true of those who worked
as censors in this country under the old government?’ It’s an unsubtle question and I wish I hadn’t asked it, or had found a different way to phrase it.

She’s silent, stills her hands, draws her head up, looks at me for a second only and then out the window. Something’s been mis-communicated. The gardener is back at the already compact bush, cutting again. Clare opens the window, calls out to him with a lengthy preamble, bows of the head, and what I take to be a questioning reply from him, an uncertainty about her earlier direction, or uncertainty about its wisdom. She replies, more forceful, hurried, and then the shears are on the grass and the gardener has trudged off across the lawn to an unseen part of the garden. I look at my notes and hear her head move, the window close; glancing up I find her eyes fixed on my face with a sadness that surprises me.

‘There is no mystery, really, about who served on the Publications Control Board, as it was called. There were, as you no doubt know, even some cases of writers who worked as advisory readers – minor poets and novelists – as well as a number of academics, a fair number. Perhaps that – the academics, I mean – is not so surprising. But there are periods for which almost no reports survive, so we may never know entirely who served the Board, who was complicit. The writers who worked as censors were not, as one might rather perversely hope, compelled to do so, coerced into the activity and the role of censor, but because they believed in the rightness of what was being done, or else believed they might make the process a little less philistine, hoping to subvert the system from within. Their reports make for depressing reading. As a definition of the common (meaning the
usual
) type of censor – let us say, for the sake of argument, that it includes those people whose complicity may have remained secret – I would not disagree with Milton’s statement.’

I’m transfixed by her speaking voice, by the shapes her mouth makes, the sharp planes of her face and the fine geometry around her eyes. At the conference in Amsterdam I almost didn’t meet
her, thinking it would be better for us not to do so. I told myself that I feared the person could never match the words on the page, that I was afraid she would disappoint, that I would never achieve the kind of intimacy I desired – or not intimacy but rapport, a friendliness possible only between equals. Aside from her brittleness, she is, I’m beginning to think, exactly the person her works suggest. There is no disappointment in that respect.

There was and is a greater fear. I packaged it up with old tape and tied it with fraying string. I did a bad job of it. I can feel it trying to escape.

The gardener comes back for the shears, leaving the already compact bush alone for now. I see Clare watching him, trying to pretend a hadeda ibis has caught her attention. It’s clear this is a ruse, either for my benefit or the gardener’s. She has no interest in the hadeda or any other bird, except a bird she might conjure in her imagination. The hadeda here and now is an excuse for her to look interested in one thing to deflect my attention from her interest in – or call it irritation with – the gardener.

It feels strange to think of Clare as ‘Clare’, to think of her not by her last name, Wald, which is the shorthand I’ve tended to use when talking about her with Sarah or with colleagues and students. Until these interviews began, in my mind she was her surname, a name acquired through a marriage that has now ended.
Wald
meaning ‘forest’, ‘woods’, ‘wood’ or simply ‘timber’. The surname has made me think of her and her work in this way – a forest of timbers that might be put to some practical use. Out of the forest emerges the person I’ve created in my head: half-ogre, half-mother, denying and giving, bad breast and good breast, framed by wood or woods. I try to find my place again in the list of questions I’ve prepared, questions that now seem rude, reductive, too peremptory, too simplistic and ungenerous in what they appear to assume.

‘In the years after the first democratic elections,’ I begin, ‘there was a programme of amnesty. Many applications were made,
many people were granted amnesty for serious violent acts – ostensibly “legal” under the old government, because enacted by, and ordered by the government itself, but clearly violations of human rights, and quite obviously illegal by the standards of the country’s new constitution – but I can find no evidence that anyone submitted a claim of amnesty for having worked as a censor or for the censors.’

‘No?’ Clare says, her face blank. ‘I suppose they did not see their work as violent. Violence is the key, doing violence physically to someone. So much of the testimony, you know, it hinges on personal experiences of violence. Inability to publish a book, that’s relatively minor compared to what has happened to so many.’ Her eyes are tired, looking not at me, but again at the gardener, who has returned to the vicinity of the already compact bush to bully a neighbouring protea into a different shape. She makes no effort now to pretend anything else preoccupies her.

‘Even though the act of banning a book, or banning its author, might have had serious – one might even argue
mortal –
implications for the livelihood and life of the author and that author’s friends and family?’ I ask.

‘Yes. It is strange, as you say. I don’t have an answer.’

‘Perhaps no censors came forward because they trusted that their identities would remain secret.’

‘More likely they thought that no one would care, given the violence of so many other atrocities,’ she says, for the first time today looking directly at me for more than a brief moment. ‘I don’t know that anyone would have regarded the banning of a book as a gross violation of human rights. Which is not to say that one shouldn’t think of censorship in that way, as that serious. But we are speaking of degrees of violation …’

‘Were your own books ever threatened with censorship?’

‘Threatened in what sense? If you are asking whether the censors ever came to me and said, “We will ban this book unless you delete x, y, or z,” then no. No one ever did any such
thing. It didn’t quite work in that way, although I know that the censors reviewed several of my books and in one case there was an import ban until they could read the text in question and conclude it offered nothing that might threaten to destabilize the country. I have seen the reports. They’re quite amusing in their way – amusing and depressing and strangely, perversely, flattering. Woe to the writer who is flattered by the praise of a censor. But this is beside the point, really,’ she says, pulling her body into focus again, ‘because, as I say in “Black Tongue”, any writer working under the threat of state censorship, no matter how general, how diffused, is effectively threatened at all times. It is back to the battered wife syndrome. Worse, even, because as a writer living under the old government, I – and doubtless many other writers in the same or similar positions – found that the censor infected my consciousness, like a worm. It lived in the brain, and ate around in the skull, living side by side with me, inside me, occupying the same mental space. I was always aware of the worm. It exerted a kind of psychic pressure that I experienced physiologically, right here in the sinuses, between and behind the eyes, and in the frontal lobe, pressing against the brow. It was toxic, excreting hallucinatory chemicals that twisted my thoughts. I became obsessed by its very presence: the heart raced, the brain erupted, trying to purge itself of the worm; I have often thought it was like a brain storm – but not in the sense you Americans mean, not a storm of ideas, but a literal electrical storm, raging inside the skull, trying to strike down the worm with a fatal bolt. When I went outside, out in public, I was embarrassed, horrified and disgusted lest anyone should guess that the worm had infected me – as if such infection could be seen on the face and betray the fact that I had become host to the terrors of the censor. The terror suggests – or the afflicted writer fears it suggests – a kind of guilty conscience that betrays guilty acts, and this makes the infection all the worse. One begins to scrutinize every word written, every phrase, trying to
detect meanings hidden even to the mind of the writer, and this is the source of real madness. A friend of mine, a fellow writer, has described his own mental relationship with the censor as that of a tree (he, the writer) being embraced by a strangle-vine. One thinks of the love-vine,
Cassytha filiformis
, leafless and tangled, overtaking an entire tree, smothering but not killing it. For me the love-vine is too external a metaphor. In my case, the censor was a bodily invader, always with me, entirely with
in
me, internally bloodsucking. I knew what the censor would look for in my words, and the kind of mind that would undertake the looking; it would see suggestion where there might only be document, though my work could never be accused of being documentary, perhaps because I knew what attitude the censor would take to the documentary form, to journalistic writing. My own evasion of social documentary is itself a symptom of the illness that
is
the relationship with the censor. If one looks at the writers who were banned and the books found “undesirable”, a great many fall into the social realist school, representing in fairly unmediated terms the state of this country in the period of its emergency. And while our censorship was often arbitrary and inconsistent and changed its targets over the decades, it was no less malign and wide-reaching for all that. I spent decades writing in such a way as to avoid having my books banned. I wrote books, effectively, which the censors could not understand, because they lacked the intelligence to read beyond the surface, and the surface itself was almost opaque to them, darkness etched in darkness. Is that the confession you were hoping to extract – that I consciously wrote evasively, to remain in print? I did. I don’t consider it a crime. I consider it a means of survival, a coping mechanism, in the language of pop psychology, and one at which I seem to have excelled.’