This article first appeared in THE WEEKENDER

Saturday 9th August 2008

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Herman Charles Bosman won’t go away. He may be less popular with certain politically correct educationists who can’t detect the irony in his use of the ‘k-word’, but he remains one of the greatest writers South Africa has produced.

Those who acknowledge his literary talent do so mostly by invoking his Groot Marico stories. Indeed, precisely because they were prescribed for so long on high school and university curricula – and because of Patrick Mynhardt’s vivid stage impersonation of Oom Schalk Lourens, the bumbling narrator of so many of those stories – the Bosman we have inherited is the Bosman of Mafeking Road and A Bekkersdal Marathon, of the ‘stoep’ and the ‘voorkamer’, of the pipe and the peach brandy.

That represents only a small portion, however, of this enigmatic writer’s output. In David Butler’s one-man show, A Touch of Madness (which Butler first performed some five years ago to great acclaim, and which is currently running at the Market Theatre until 24th August), we meet a different Bosman.

Here we have Bosman the flâneur, walking idly through the streets of early twentieth-century Johannesburg, observing its shifting urban geography and encountering its curious characters.

Here we have Bosman the maudlin drunk, lurching from a frenzy of energetic lyricism to melancholia and wry commentary on his personal misfortune.

Here we have Bosman the dagga-smoking surrealist, sketching tales about cannibalism or imitating the dark fantasies of Edgar Allan Poe.

Here we have Bosman the modern Africanist, declaring that mine dumps are no less authentic an expression of Africa than the pyramids, and that cities like Jo’burg are as much a manifestation of the African spirit as the landscapes of the Kalahari.

Here we have Bosman the brazen literary critic, dismissing Shakespeare for the limited imagination he displays in his tragic plays.

Here we have Bosman the sentimentalist, revisiting his school days with nostalgia or penning love poetry in rhyming couplets.

Of course, the love life – rather, the love lives – of Herman Charles Bosman would take more than a few thousand words, or a few hours on stage, to recount. The third and happiest of Bosman’s three marriages, to Helena Stegmann, only lasted from 1944 to his death in 1951. The second, to Ella Manson, was marked by bohemian excess and unforgivable fraud (while in Europe, they faked his death and borrowed money from his family for the ‘funeral’). Bosman hardly saw his first wife, Vera Sawyer, because her mother would not let her leave Johannesburg for the bushveld when Bosman took up his teaching post in the Marico.

A Touch of Madness glosses over these troubled unions, and doesn’t mention some of the darker episodes in Bosman’s life – when he was an accomplice to conman Aegidius Jean Blignaut, for instance. But to expect the play to provide a thorough account of Bosman’s life would be to misunderstand the form; it is not an attempt at biography in the conventional sense. Rather, it takes Bosman at his own word, adapting a range of his non-fictional texts (along with a small dose of fiction) to embody the voice that, collectively, they contain.

In this process of adaptation, director Nicky Rebelo demonstrates appreciable literary acuity – he and Butler not only capture the tenor of Bosman’s writing, but manage to intersperse passages of their own creation that match the shifting tones of Bosman’s autobiographical persona. These interpolations are necessary, partly because Bosman was deliberately ambiguous when writing about his own experiences, and partly because (as is always the case with memoir) he is not necessarily to be believed.

Take, for instance, one of the defining moments in Bosman’s life – when, during one of his visits to Johannesburg, he killed his step-brother with a hunting rifle. We have the version of the ‘accident’ that Bosman gave in his own defence at his trial; we have Cold Stone Jug, which describes his subsequent experience as a prisoner for four years; and we have any amount of conjecture about what actually happened, and why. Rebelo and Butler allow Bosman to remain opaque in this sense, frustrating the desire of those who “prod ... trying to speculate why I pulled the trigger”.

Such speculation is spurred on by Bosman’s tempestuous family life, both as a child and as an adult. Was he the offspring of an incestuous relationship between his mother and her brother – or did he, at any rate, fear that he was? If so, is this what fuelled his mania, his obsession with being an outcast, his lapses into profound existential despair?

Or did he exaggerate these tendencies because he felt that they were essential traits of the archetypal artist? A Touch of Madness lends particular emphasis to this element in Bosman’s writing (the idea that the true poet lives poetry over and above merely writing the stuff), evincing Bosman’s over-identification with Orpheus, “the first poet” – persecuted, a “madman”, a “magician”. Perhaps this vision of self engendered his suffering; perhaps it was redeeming.

Butler’s performance is attuned to both of these possibilities, as well as to the ways in which Bosman’s fine sense of humour balanced his occasional disdain for human beings with a strongly humanist streak.