Books in Brief: End Papers

End Papers, by Breyton Breytenbach (Farrar, 270 pp., $16.95)

Breyton Breytenbach is a South African novelist (Mouroir) and memoirist (The True Confessions of an Albino Terrorist} now in exile in Europe. The present volume is a potpourri of essays, notebook jottings, letters, aphorisms, items that he seems to consider poems, and other miscellany. The real subject of all this is less South Africa, which of course he hates, than his pervasive disgust with just about everything. The rhetoric of loathing has become one of the clichés of twentieth-century literature; you are supposed to understand that the writer is such a sensitive fellow that the rudeness of reality disgusts him. But you have to prove your sensitivity by writing well, and Breytenbach cannot even begin to bring this off. He is not a sensitive soul but a poseur, trying to play catch-up ball with Celine. Here heisina 1982 press conference at de Gaulle airport: “Then you and the lady were piloted to a reception area, the doors were thrown open, and in barged the squawking journalists, stretching their scrawny necks, shaking their heavy wings into place, cleaning their strong hooked beaks on the microphones.” He is disgusted that the French intellectuals have “swung right,” that “there was no more student activism,” and that “the Social Democrats in power ultimately had preciously little in common with Socialism.” (Poor bourgeois Mitterrand, unable to rise to the purity of “Socialism.”) But, give him credit, Breytenbach does get around. In 1984 he receives the Hertzog Prize and writes to accept it. Just listen to this prose: “I have just now learned that the Hertzog Literary Award for this year has been given to Henriette Grove and myself. I should like to express my gratitude to the jury members who, so it would seem, weighed up my work—and I want to insist that I accept their decision as having been arrived at through personal literary penchants.” His ventures into political analysis are equally disastrous: “The Third World, whose only vested interest for so long has been physical survival and whose vested interest for the present and future must be the freedom of real independence and the freedom to forge revolutionary cultures from old fertilizer and new seed, must take its rightly place on the world scene.” Of course, Breytenbach strikes the usual cliché poses about nuclear weapons: “To concretize this realization you must even without having to go into opposition, pull the plug from the ruling classes’ bath of holy water.” Breytenbach has a low opinion of freedom as we actually experience it in Western society: “Freedom of expression in bourgeois societies where the writer is at best considered to be an entertainer, is a hollow concept.” (Yeats? Eliot? Mann?) We come upon something called “Notes . . . Toward a Strategy for Revolution in South Africa,” and here’s the Breytenbach Program: “I move from the premise that our ultimate objective is a Socialist South Africa and that that society, when one can envisage a ‘new man’ who can come into being only once his social environment has been transformed by Socialist economic structures, that society which will abolish exploitation and discrimination, can be constructed only after a taking of power by those who genuinely represent the workers and the peasants.” Breytenbach can’t write. He can’t think. I don’t blame the South Africans for wanting him out of the neighborhood, but what excuse is there for Farrar, Straus & Giroux? Jeffrey Hart

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Jeffrey Hart

Jeffrey Hart is a contributor to National Review.

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End Papers, by Breyton Breytenbach (Farrar, 270 pp., $16.95)

Breyton Breytenbach is a South African novelist (Mouroir) and memoirist (The True Confessions of an Albino Terrorist} now in exile in Europe. The present volume is a potpourri of essays, notebook jottings, letters, aphorisms, items that he seems to consider poems, and other miscellany. The real subject of all this is less South Africa, which of course he hates, than his pervasive disgust with just about everything. The rhetoric of loathing has become one of the clichés of twentieth-century literature; you are supposed to understand that the writer is such a sensitive fellow that the rudeness of reality disgusts him. But you have to prove your sensitivity by writing well, and Breytenbach cannot even begin to bring this off. He is not a sensitive soul but a poseur, trying to play catch-up ball with Celine. Here heisina 1982 press conference at de Gaulle airport: “Then you and the lady were piloted to a reception area, the doors were thrown open, and in barged the squawking journalists, stretching their scrawny necks, shaking their heavy wings into place, cleaning their strong hooked beaks on the microphones.” He is disgusted that the French intellectuals have “swung right,” that “there was no more student activism,” and that “the Social Democrats in power ultimately had preciously little in common with Socialism.” (Poor bourgeois Mitterrand, unable to rise to the purity of “Socialism.”) But, give him credit, Breytenbach does get around. In 1984 he receives the Hertzog Prize and writes to accept it. Just listen to this prose: “I have just now learned that the Hertzog Literary Award for this year has been given to Henriette Grove and myself. I should like to express my gratitude to the jury members who, so it would seem, weighed up my work—and I want to insist that I accept their decision as having been arrived at through personal literary penchants.” His ventures into political analysis are equally disastrous: “The Third World, whose only vested interest for so long has been physical survival and whose vested interest for the present and future must be the freedom of real independence and the freedom to forge revolutionary cultures from old fertilizer and new seed, must take its rightly place on the world scene.” Of course, Breytenbach strikes the usual cliché poses about nuclear weapons: “To concretize this realization you must even without having to go into opposition, pull the plug from the ruling classes’ bath of holy water.” Breytenbach has a low opinion of freedom as we actually experience it in Western society: “Freedom of expression in bourgeois societies where the writer is at best considered to be an entertainer, is a hollow concept.” (Yeats? Eliot? Mann?) We come upon something called “Notes . . . Toward a Strategy for Revolution in South Africa,” and here’s the Breytenbach Program: “I move from the premise that our ultimate objective is a Socialist South Africa and that that society, when one can envisage a ‘new man’ who can come into being only once his social environment has been transformed by Socialist economic structures, that society which will abolish exploitation and discrimination, can be constructed only after a taking of power by those who genuinely represent the workers and the peasants.” Breytenbach can’t write. He can’t think. I don’t blame the South Africans for wanting him out of the neighborhood, but what excuse is there for Farrar, Straus & Giroux? Jeffrey Hart