Plomer, 'twas you who, though a boy in age,
                    Awoke a sleepy continent to rage,
                    Who dared alone to thrash a craven race
                    And hold a mirror to its dirty face.

(Roy Campbell: The Wayzgoose)

Roy Campbell was referring, in the rather grandiloquent style he often affected in his satires, to the effect on white South Africans of William Plomer's first novel, Turbott Wolfe. This paper will briefly examine the significance of Turbott Wolfe in the history of South African literature in English, and make an attempt to explain what conditions made it possible for so radically new a piece of writing to come from the pen of a youth of nineteen. Little work has been done on the background to this seminal novel, though critics as diverse as Cyril Connolly,¹ Ezekiel Mphahlele,² Nadine Gordimer³ and Walter Allen⁴ have analysed and praised it, and (with Plomer's long short story “Ula Masondo”) it is generally agreed to be a pioneering piece of writing of the first importance. My aim will be to examine elements of Plomer's early life and upbringing to uncover the influences that made it possible for him to write as he did in 1923 and 1924: to make clear, in fact, the biographical influences operating through a young man's writing to change the course of South African literature.

When Turbott Wolfe appeared in print early in 1926, it was greeted in South Africa with shock and rage, reactions that on their own would have been enough to announce it as something new of its kind. The long leading article which appeared in the main Durban newspaper, The Natal Advertiser (19 March 1926), was typical. Written by the editor Harold Wodson himself, and headed “A Nasty Book on a Nasty Subject”, it lamented the sad decline of South African letters in terms which now seem ludicrous:

Gone are the great days of Olive Schreiner, of Fitzpatrick's ‘Jock of the Bushveld’, of Rider Haggard's vivid and inspiring romances in which white men were white and the kafir was black, but a gentleman … From first to last the book [i.e. Turbott Wolfe] pictures rottenness; starting from the point where the white stranger with artistic leanings outrages the sentiments of his neighbours by filling his studio with native ‘models’, and treating them as though they were white people, and ending with the marriage of the royally beautiful Mabel van der Horst to the full-blooded native Zachary … Many thinking men have pondered the possibility of Africa going Eur-African [sic]; going coffee-coloured; and clever politicians like General Hertzog, when they take the vote from the pure native and give it to the bastard, are hastening on that day. What provokes a sense of nausea in the present volume is the unrelieved wretchedness of the entire picture.

The review may now seem unusually violent in its reaction, but it was in fact restrained given the unbridgeable gulf between Plomer's views and those of most of his audience, Wodson included.⁵ Sir Laurens van der Post, who was then a young and unknown journalist on the staff of the Advertiser, was subsequently to record that Wodson

summoned me one morning, threw a book at me as if it stung between his fingers and commanded, “Read that and tell me what the modern world is coming to! I have just written my leader about it.”

It was Turbott Wolfe of course … I was barely nineteen at the time. Yet I could not put Turbott Wolfe down until I had read it from cover to cover. This establishment of a difference between Wodson and me was never erased, though we remained friends until his death. Almost daily we quarrelled over the book …⁶

Plomer himself was to record that on at least two occasions, men had come to blows in the street over Turbott Wolfe.⁷

What was it about the novel which produced such a violent reaction in South Africa in 1926? The plain answer is that the book was seen as a considered attack on what was then known as “the colour bar”, and what would now be called apartheid. Few of the laws entrenching white supremacy in South Africa existed in the 1920s, and in Natal in particular there had been no legal colourbar since the British defeat of the Voortrekker Republic of Natal in 1843. In place of laws, however, were deeply ingrained prejudices, as effective as laws would have been in maintaining the separation of the races. These prejudices were reinforced by fear of the Zulus, the dominant tribe in Natal, and militarily by far the most formidable black group in southern Africa. Memories of the great Zulu Rebellion of 1906, in which whites had been slaughtered all over Natal, were far from dead. Even relatively cultured members of the white population regarded the blacks with a mixture of contempt and fear, an attitude which can be illustrated in the words of one of those who knew Plomer well in the 1920s, a then-popular Natal painter, Edward Roworth. Writing as late as 1959, in answer to a question on his views of Plomer's “negrophil and other liberal attitudes”, he responded,

I have the ordinary normal [sic] view of the relative values of Western (Classic) civilization and of barbarism. I dislike the attitude of so many of today's “intellectuals” of the Plomer type, who would exalt the savage at the expense of Western civilization.⁸

Even a brief summary of Plomer's novel reveals what it was that so enraged readers holding views of this kind.

The protagonist of the novel, Turbott Wolfe, is a cultured man who arrives in South Africa from England and takes up residence in Zululand, thinly disguised as “Lembuland” in the novel. Here he runs a trading store, and gets to know and like his black customers, some of whom he entertains in his studio while he paints them or transcribes the music they play to him. This behaviour attracts the strong disapproval of Wolfe's white neighbours, who are depicted as almost uniformly depraved and brutal, and in reaction to whom he helps to found a society, Young Africa, to work against race prejudice in South Africa: the society's chief practical activity is the encouraging of mixed-race marriages with the idea of producing a South Africa in which the race problem would have been settled by miscegenation. It is made plain that Wolfe is not wholly disinterested in working with Young Africa, since earlier in the novel he had been in love with a Zulu woman who had rejected him.

It becomes plain that Wolfe is not the only founder of Young Africa hoping to use the society for personal ends when a beautiful white woman, Mabel van der Horst, whom Wolfe himself is deeply attracted to, marries a Zulu, Zachary Msomi, and Wolfe is intensely jealous: his own buried prejudices are brought to the surface by this event, and he realizes that he cannot support in practice what he has preached in theory. When another of Wolfe's fellow-organisers of Young Africa turns out to have been a Communist trying to use the organization to further the interests of Moscow in South Africa, and when the Colonial authorities begin to clamp down on Wolfe himself, he decides to leave Africa, and by the end of the novel he is dying, bitterly disillusioned, in England.

The ironies of the novel were missed by its first readers, who saw it as a full-blooded attack on race-relations in South Africa; they fastened on its picture of corrupt missionaries, depraved white men, randy white women and noble blacks, and they criticised its author with all the anger of those who see the fabric of their society under attack. These attacks helped to spread the reputation of Turbott Wolfe, and probably increased its influence on other South African writers; certainly the book became widely influential. It helped to open up what became one of the two main themes of all English South African writing from that day to this: love across the racial divide. Novels which have followed in the wake of Turbott Wolfe include Doris Lessing's The Grass is Singing (1950), Alan Paton's Too Late the Phalarope (1953), Dan Jacobson's The Evidence of Love (1959) and Nadine Gordimer's Occasion for Loving (1963), as well as the first novel in Afrikaans to be banned in South Africa, André Brink's Kennis van die Aand (published in English under the title Looking on Darkness).

The other major theme in South African literature in English also can be traced to Plomer's writing in the 1920s: his long story “Ula Masondo” (1926) analyses the baleful influence of western civilisation on a tribal African, a theme which has been pursued in literally dozens of South African novels since. The best known of these is probably Alan Paton's Cry the Beloved Country (1948), but their number, in both English and Afrikaans, is very large, and it would include Peter Abrams' Mine Boy (1946) and Frans Venter's Swart Pelgrim [‘Black Pilgrim’] (1959). Plomer himself was to remark with justifiable satisfaction, in 1963, that he had been the first to exploit the two great human situations from which so much “South African fiction has sprung—the story of mutual sexual attraction between persons of the two different races, and the story of the innocent, indigenous African who is corrupted by the white man's big city.”⁹

If Plomer's writing at this period does constitute a major breakthrough in South African literature, a question naturally arises: what was it about Plomer and his circumstances that made the breakthrough, which had eluded so many others before him, possible? Writers such as Thomas Pringle had responded to the South African landscape; Olive Schreiner and Pauline Smith had vividly depicted the sufferings of whites (especially women) in South Africa; but for all of them, even including Schreiner, Africans, who always formed the greater part of the population, appeared almost invisible. As Laurens van der Post was to remark, Africans played no more part in the work of Schreiner than the working class does in the novels of Jane Austen.¹⁰ Sarah Gertrude Millin's novels include some African characters, but they are two-dimensional, none of them engaging a reader's interest. Rider Haggard was one of the first to write about Africans, with Sir Percy Fitzpatrick following in his tracks, but for the most part these men (both British expatriates) romanticize Africans as Plomer seldom does; for him blacks are not exotic splashes of local colour, but human beings like any others, and this perhaps was what irritated the Natal readers of 1926 most.

It is in the circumstances and background of Plomer's life that the explanation for his startling advances in the fictional treatment of Africans may be found. He had been born in Pietersburg in 1903, the first son of English parents. His father, Charles Plomer, had been sent out to Africa originally to expiate having got into debt, and after involving himself briefly in the Boer War, when he was captured as one of Jameson's futile Raiders, he had married in England in June 1901 and had then taken a post in the Department of Native Affairs in the British administration that replaced the defeated Boer government of the Transvaal.

Plomer's first memories then were of the heat and light of the northern Transvaal. At the age of five he was taken to England after the death from diphtheria of a younger brother, and spent the first three years of his schooling at English schools. In 1911 he returned to South Africa with his mother and spent three years at the famous St. John's College in Johannesburg, run by the liberal and enlightened Community of the Resurrection. From his father, whose own work among the Africans had given him a powerful liking and respect for them, Plomer learned not to despise blacks; from his mother, a highly intelligent and witty woman with a keen eye for the inflated and ridiculous, he had learnt not to take self-important whites at their own estimation. During the First World War Plomer was returned to England, where he attended Rugby for a year, and he was back in South Africa by 1919 to finish his schooling in Johannesburg.

This divided home and educational background meant that although Plomer knew and understood Africa well, he was not wholly of Africa, looking at it instead with the detached and critical eye of one who was at least as much English as South African. His mother's dislike of the country undoubtedly increased this tendency in him to distance himself from his African surroundings. There was, in his mother's influence on him, a tendency to look down on white South Africans as colonials lacking in culture, breeding or manners. Many passages in his early writing attest to this snobbery,¹¹ which had the valuable side-effect of making him inclined to question the values of white South Africa. When he finished school in 1920, he elected to become an apprentice farmer, though his parents had offered to send him to Oxford, and he spent a year learning sheep-farming in the harsh climate of the Stormberg near Molteno in the eastern Cape. In 1922 he joined his father in running a farm and trading store at Entumeni near Eshowe in Zululand, a venture which proved both financially successful and artistically fruitful, for it was during this period that Plomer wrote Turbott Wolfe, beginning it at the age of 19 and finishing it two years later. In Zululand Plomer learned to speak Zulu, and developed a strong sympathy for the Africans, a sympathy unquestionably increased by his sexual attraction to individual Zulus, both male and female. He seems to have resisted this attraction partly because, as he puts it in his autobiography,

A feeling of guilt might arise, on the part of a white, from knowing that, presuming on his status, he was exercising, with impunity, some sort of droit de seigneur. … Nevertheless, my strong flow of feeling had to shape something, if only a protest.¹²

The miscegenation theme of Turbott Wolfe was therefore deeply felt by its creator.

There were other influences on Plomer, acting both before and after he began life in Zululand. One of the friendships he made in Johannesburg during his second period there, in 1919, was with the painter, Edward (Teddy) Wolfe, who as his name might suggest provided much of the inspiration for the character Turbott Wolfe.¹³ In his first volume of autobiography, in which he deals with this period, Plomer strangely omitted to mention Teddy Wolfe at all; only in his last years, when he recast the book, for what proved to be posthumous publication, did Plomer write of Wolfe that

He was as good a friend to me as a nomad who brings one dates and water in a desert. His work and his talk and the vivid environment which, like a bower-bird, he had created for himself, refreshed my eyes and spirit and easily lured me away from the tennis parties and coming-out dances. At one time he went to live in a vacant barrack of a compound on a gold mine, the machinery of which thundered in the background as he showed me his drawings. These had caught in flowing lines the shapely sadness and exiled vigour of naked black miners.¹⁴

It was Wolfe, I believe, who opened Plomer's eyes to the possibility that Africans could be central elements in a successful artistic composition; what Wolfe did with paint, Plomer could do with words. Wolfe's interest in the naked miners stemmed in part from the fact that he was homosexual; in this also Plomer perhaps found Wolfe an inspiration. The degree to which Wolfe was original and daring in the context of South Africa of the period is demonstrated by the fact that the fashionable portraitist Edward Roworth was only with great difficulty persuaded to paint two Ndebele girls in 1925, apparently the first Africans he ever depicted, and though he thought the work highly successful, he never had the courage to show it.¹⁵

Plomer was, then, inclined to look at Africans with fresh and interested eyes, and to see them as grist to the writer's mill; when he took up residence at Entumeni and found himself in constant contact with Zulus, whose language he soon learned, he was in a good position to treat them in fiction as they had never been treated before. His interest in the Zulus showed itself in several ways: in his encouraging his Zulu assistant, Lucas Makoba, to write detailed notes on the position of the Zulu people; and more importantly, in his taking the trouble to get to know the remarkable Zulu educator, writer and editor, John Dube, who founded the best-known of Zulu papers, Ilanga lase Natal, and who published the first of Plomer's poems to appear in print.¹⁶ Dube was also extremely active politically, and had been a founder member of the African National Congress. The Ohlange Institute, which he had founded, produced Chief Albert Luthuli, the Nobel Peace Prize winner. Plomer first corresponded with Dube, and was then invited to visit him at Ohlange, spending an evening talking with Dube, who impressed him as kind, fatherly, and “serious without being ever dull or pompous”.¹⁷ Dube also took him to visit a Tolstoyan settlement founded by Gandhi in his African days, and still in 1923 run by Gandhi's son, Manilal. This contact with highly educated and enquiring African and Asian minds impressed Plomer the more strongly by contrast with the ill-educated and sometimes boorish whites who were his neighbours. These influences helped to develop in him a perception of blacks which was radically different from that of many white Natalians.

This perception shows in the delicate and sympathetic portraits of the African characters in the novel. Repeatedly one notices their complete unity with the landscape in which they move, and often this unity is stressed by the contrasting way in which whites seem scarcely to notice the physical presence of the land. The effect is highly successful in a passage describing one of the whites ploughing, a passage which incidentally exemplifies the extraordinary, poetic beauty of much of the writing in the novel. (The white man's name is Soper).

There were two ploughs being drawn by teams of oxen round and round a small field near the house: Soper was following them, sowing broadcast. There was a harrow following him, to cover the seed. I could hear the natives calling out ceaselessly to the oxen. They were cracking their whips with a distinguished air. They went gracefully over the rough ground with their noble well-matched oxen, but Soper was stamping up and down: I could see his awkward bow-legs. He was thrusting his hand into a bag at his side, and throwing the seed angrily left, right, left, right. I saw it rise away from his hand in fountainous jets and fans as he went—left, right, left, right. Overhead, there were very distant clouds, smooth and placid in a milky sky. The shadows grew longer. The ploughs continued to turn over slick deep layers of wet red earth, redder than ever in the last sunlight when the rocky hills, obscured, were taking on a chill violent with the cold. But Soper was still stamping up and down in his beautiful sodden field.¹⁸

The nobility of the Africans, plain even at a distance in such a scene as this, and brought out by Plomer's use of adjectives such as “distinguished”, “graceful”, “noble”, is even more obvious when Plomer deals with individuals, as when, for instance, Wolfe unexpectedly meets the Zulu woman he loves but has never declared himself to. It is one of the first multi-racial love scenes in South African literature, and it is handled with complete assurance.

“Greeting,” she said.

“Greeting,” I answered. “Where are you going?”

“I am just going.”

These words were a formula, but my heart was in torment, and I could hardly keep my hands and lips from hers.

On a sudden impulse I took a gold pin that I wore in my tie, and pinned it to her clothing, where it gleamed in the sun.

“There you are,” I said. “There's a present for you.”

“Are you giving it?” she asked incredulously.

“It is yours.”

She was alarmed at being favoured by a man she had come to know as Chastity, and exclaimed softly:

“O, white men!”

Then she ran down the path, checkered with shadows. Nor did she look back.¹⁹

In spite of the fact that the girl draws attention to the racial differences between them, she is herself perceived by Wolfe and the reader, not as a black woman, but simply as a woman, alluring and with a paradoxical worldly innocence. No-one in South African literature had written of a black woman in this way before Plomer made it possible with this finely-realized scene. Yet his real interest did not lie in black women. Turbott Wolfe does not contain any overtly homosexual love-scenes. It does, however, contain a central and most interesting character, the white heroine Mabel van der Horst, who falls in love with an African, as Turbott Wolfe does, but who unlike him has the courage to marry. Mabel is superficially based on one of Plomer's acquaintances, Marjorie Hunter, but she is described in terms which make it subtly clear that there is much about her that is unlike other women. The male characters in the novel, white and black alike, are fascinated by her partly because of her beauty, but partly because her behaviour seems to them so extraordinary.

She is tall, narrow-hipped and broad-shouldered,²⁰ perhaps the result of the exercise she takes, galloping about the countryside astride a horse. Her most striking features, to Wolfe, are “her fine legs and buttocks, and a royal back”.²¹ She has an angularity of feature and an awkward bearing.²² She smokes cigarettes with an unaffected ease. She talks in a way that seems to the men strange,²³ a hearty, straight-from-the-shoulder, hard-swearing delivery: “What are we doing here? What the devil is all the mystery about, you bleeding parson?” she asks the uneasy missionary Friston when he has persuaded her to come into a romantic grove with him so that he can propose to her.²⁴ Having fallen in love with the Zulu Zachary Msomi (who is at first sight mistaken for a woman by Wolfe²⁵) she pursues him aggresively, goes to bed with him and demands that he marry her. In short, though no critic at the time or since has noticed it, she is designed by Plomer to be seen as devoid of the “feminine” characteristics expected at this period of any woman in literature or in life. She is very like her creator in a dress, and she made it possible for him to turn his fantasies of intimacy with the handsome Zulus into literature. One of the few South African critics whose judgement on Turbott Wolfe Plomer was to accept wrote of the novel that it was one “of shattered perspectives and perverse stimuli, of lascivious gods and outer darkness”. Plomer agreed.²⁶ The triumph of Turbott Wolfe lay in the fact that Plomer had found a vehicle which allowed him to yoke his intense sexual frustration together with a protest at South Africa's racial situation, to link an inner with an outer struggle. This was what gave the novel the force of a scream, and has kept it in print consistently since its first publication.²⁷ Nothing more clearly illustrates the difference between Turbott Wolfe's view of Africans and that of most of the other white characters, than Wolfe's recounting of this scene. Nothing more clearly shows the difference between Plomer's views and those of most of his white neighbours.

This difference is most clearly seen in the novel when the mean-minded Soper, on whose farm Wolfe spends some weeks, gives vent to one of the most extreme anti-black speeches in the novel, in criticising a new missionary:

They say he's got a lot of tomfool ideas about the niggers. Love one another, you see, and all that sort of bloody nonsense. Native gentlemen—our black brothers! Man, it makes me sick, that kind of thing does. Hell, they're no better than animals.²⁸

A similar attitude is expressed at one stage early in the novel when Turbott Wolfe is visited by a neighbouring farmer named Bloodfield, who finds Wolfe transcribing the music of a group of Zulus whom he is entertaining in his house. Bloodfield's exclamation of astonishment and rage when he sees the Africans sitting in Wolfe's studio, “Surely you don't have these blooming niggers in here?”²⁹ is echoed by contemporary reviews of the book, which remarked in exasperation that the protagonist of the novel had filled his studio with native models, and treated them “as though they were white people”.³⁰ While he might at times have oversimplified his portrait of the blacks, Plomer was not exaggerating the reactions of the whites.

This point is worth making, because the novel today is in danger of being read as something of a caricature of Natal attitudes, or at best, as a literary exaggeration of the Dickensian type. Plomer's use of names like Flesher and Bloodfield for the rapacious whites strengthens the tendency to see the novel in terms of Dickensian overstatement. Yet there is plenty of evidence that most of the characters in the novel were based firmly on individuals Plomer had known during his period of farming in the Stormberg, and his days in Zululand. One of the strongest pieces of evidence is Plomer's personal copy of the first edition of the novel, preserved today in the rich Plomer collection of Durham University Library. Plomer annotated this copy with manuscript notes identifying the originals of many of the most unlikely-seeming characters in the novel; the nature of the notes suggests that he did so for his parents' amusement, since only they are likely to have known many of the originals.

Among the principal characters, according to these notes, the white goddess Mabel van der Horst, whose marriage to Zachary Msomi precipitates the crisis in the novel, was based as I have said on Marjorie Hunter, a young woman who acted as housekeeper for a family named Stretton (Dunford in the novel), and whom Plomer had known and admired while working on the Popes' farm in the Stormberg. Wolfe's black assistant, Caleb Msomi, was based upon Lucas Makoba, the Zulu who helped the Plomers set up the trading store at Entumeni (‘Ovuzane’ in the novel). Zachary Msomi in the novel was Zephaniah Makoba, cousin of Lucas, in actuality. The Hlanzeni Mission, which with the missionary Karl Nordalsgaard plays an important part in the novel, was Entumeni Mission, founded by Bishop Schroeder (Klodquist in the novel) and run by a Norwegian named Astrup; Nordalsgaard's housekeeper, named as Rosa Grundso in the novel, was Anna Steenberg in life. Nordalsgaard's illegitimate son, Olaf Shaw, was based on Louis Elliot, illegitimate son of Astrup. Even such details as Astrup's having been a Knight of the Order of St. Olav is preserved in the novel, when Nordalsgaard is represented as wearing “the Order of St. Valborg”.

The unlikely-sounding Bloodfield was based on an unattractive neighbour of the Plomers in Entumeni, a man named Essery; Flesher in the novel was based on another neighbour, a corrupt English settler named Ward. Even relatively minor characters in the novel had their originals: the Reverend Justinian Fotheringhay was based upon Rev. Heathcote, an Anglican priest the Plomers knew in Natal; the colourful old Yorkshireman Frank d'Elvadere was based on a wandering Scots blacksmith, William Dunbar Macdowall, whom Plomer had met and been much taken with on the Popes' farm.³¹ The Popes became the Soper family in the novel. Cossie van Honk, the repulsive prostitute of “Aucampstroom” (the nearest town to Ovuzane in the novel), had an original in a Mrs. Venter, a Natal prostitute and midwife. The sinister Schwerdt, who carries on a mysterious traffic in unnamed, illegal and nauseating objects in the novel, was based on Ingeborg Faye, a Norwegian farmer near Entumeni.

The details are worth stressing because they demonstrate how closely Plomer based his novel on the reality of South Africa as he had seen it. The plot, the arrangement of characters, and above all the central themes of the novel were his; but the characterisation and description of Natal society was taken almost entirely from life rather than from his imagination. This makes the novel a peculiarly valuable document, not just as a seminal work of literature, but as a memorial of and protest against a social system which has endured far longer than Plomer believed it would, but which is now rapidly being swept away. If it is true that those who forget history are doomed to repeat it, Turbott Wolfe may have an important function in historical as well as literary terms.

Among the elements to emerge from an examination of the background to the composition of this central South African novel is the realization that Plomer's first novel was given its shape by such unlikely-seeming biographical accidents as his richly divided upbringing, his consequent snobbery, his sexual inversion and frustration, and his overriding sense of being an outsider in South Africa. None of its first readers was aware of the fact, but in protesting against the colour bar in South Africa, Plomer was strongly motivated by his need to protest against the limitations of his existence and makeup. In this Turbott Wolfe proves to be an extremely interesting refutation of Yeats's famous dictum that “the personality of the writer affects his work no more than the personality of the dancer affects the dance”.

Notes

1. In The Modern Movement: A Discussion of 100 Key Books from England, France and America (1880-1950), (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1965), Connolly lists Turbott Wolfe as one of the “key books” of modern literature.

2. In The African Image, (London: Faber & Faber, 1962), p. 124, Mphahlele praises Plomer's black characters as having “a third dimension, as it were, unlike the two-dimensional characters in [Gertrude Millin's] God's Stepchildren, who are but creatures of fate”.

3. In an important article, “The Novel and the Nation in South Africa”, in African Writers on African Writing, (ed. G. D. Killam, London: Heinemann, 1973), p. 47, Gordimer justly remarks that “Turbott Wolfe with its talk of African nationalism and its view of Africa as a black man's country would seem the sort of novel of South African life far more likely to be written now than in the 1920's”.

4. In Tradition and Dream: The English and American Novel from the Twenties to Our Time, (London: Dent, 1964), p. 198.

5. Other contemporary reviews were much less kind than Wodson's; one anonymous and vitriolic notice of the novel, in The South African Nation, (3 April 1926) was headed, simply enough, “Garbage”, and lived up to its title.

6. Introduction to re-issue of Turbott Wolfe (London: Hogarth Press, 1965), p. 19 [Hereafter referred to as Turbott Wolfe.]

7. The Autobiography of William Plomer, (London: Jonathan Cape, 1975), p. 170 [Hereafter referred to as Autobiography].

8. Questionnaire submitted to Roworth by Prof. Gardner of Natal University, January 1959. National English Language Museum, Grahamstown, Roy Campbell Collection.

9. Conversation with My Younger Self, (Ewelme, 1960, privately printed) p. 19.

10. Introduction to the 1965 edition of Turbott Wolfe, p. 31.

11. Examples would include the sweeping generalisations with which he describes his mother's attitude to the white women in Pietersberg in 1903: “Finding them ill-mannered and untrustworthy, she did not choose to live on terms of intimacy with them,” Double Lives (London: Jonathan Cape, 1943), p. 82, and Turbott Wolfe's reactions to Bloodfield and his sister-in-law when he first meets them: “There was an ugly fellow with a female. Neither of them seemed to have any manners or any brains … They were not only ill-mannered: they were gauche.” (p. 69, 1965 reprint).

12. Autobiography, p. 166.

13. This at least is the view of Sir Laurens van der Post: interview with the writer, Aldeburgh, 29 October 1983.

14. Autobiography, p. 132.

15. “I think he [Roworth] was pleased with the result, but so ashamed of it that hardly anyone ever saw it. He took it to his next ‘exhibition’ at Lezard's auction rooms in Fox Street, Johannesburg, but was, I think relieved when Ernest Lezard advised him against showing it.” Statement by Roger Castle, CR, to Professor W. H. Gardner of Natal University, 31 May 1959. NELM Roy Campbell Collection. The painting was reproduced by Castle, who eventually bought it, in the South African Pictorial, 25 April 1925, p. 11.

16. They appeared on 14 March 1924 under the title “Three Folk Poems”, and Plomer signed them “PQR”. He added a note: “It is my hope that these simple verses may help to serve an early movement towards our own literature. A national literature can only be built up of many parts, and with infinite pains, but if we can plainly express now some of the true feelings of our people, however simple, we may be able to lay a foundation. Here I attempt to give you the intense Christian joy of the newly-converted.” It is significant that, given the readership of Ilanga lase Natal, Plomer was writing as if he were a Zulu, (“our own literature … our people”), identifying himself with the emergence of black consciousness.

17. Autobiography, p. 165.

18. Turbott Wolfe, pp. 164-5.

19. Turbott Wolfe, pp. 94-5.

20. Turbott Wolfe, p. 191.

21. Turbott Wolfe, p. 193.

22. Turbott Wolfe, p. 136.

23. Friston remarks of her, “I have never been jarred in the least by her extraordinary way of talking. It seems part of her”, Turbott Wolfe, p. 175.

24. Turbott Wolfe, p. 175.

25. Turbott Wolfe, p. 116.

26. Double Lives, pp. 161-2.

27. It has been recently reprinted as part of O.U.P.'s Modern Classics series.

28. Turbott Wolfe, p. 149.

29. Turbott Wolfe, p. 70.

30. The Natal Advertiser, 19 March 1926.

31. There exist two detailed sketches of Macdowall (whom Plomer describes, though without naming him, in Double Lives, p. 132 and Autobiography, p. 144) among the Plomer drawings kept by Fred Pope, and now preserved in the National English Language Museum in Grahamstown.