The Complete Voorkamer Stories
HC Bosman
Edited by Craig MacKenzie
Human & Rousseau
Hell-raising heckler from Kuils River. Thrice married. Delusions of grandeur. Blasphemous and insulting. Went by different names. Killed a man, went to death row. Madcap carouser when he wasn’t in court. Could be a gangster.
Instead, was a writer. If there was ever an argument against the death penalty, this would serve as a case in point.
Because, yes, Herman Charles Bosman was all of these, but he was also a literary prodigy, an expert satirist and, even though he’s been dead for 60 years, is arguably the funniest and undoubtedly the most prolific, as well as controversial, South African short story writer.
The exasperatingly politically correct will take issue with me: Bosman was a white Afrikaner with a recalcitrant nature given to elitism in thought, a sin he could have expiated through egalitarian writing if his characters weren’t so racist, as well as an attention to detail that would humble a botanist, all the while pointing up the liver spots of society, not to mention his own beauty spots, with excruciating sardonicism.
Discussing here my favourites or anyone else’s would be impossible, so numerous are they, but who can forget the opening lines of Mafeking Road: “When people ask me – as they often do – how it is that I can tell the best stories of anybody in the Transvaal (Oom Schalk Lourens said, modestly), then I explain to them that I just learn through observing the way that the world has with men and women. When I say this, they nod their heads wisely, and say that they understand, and I nod my head wisely also, and that seems to satisfy them. But the thing I say to them is a lie, of course.
“For it is not the story that counts. What matters is the way you tell it. The important thing to know is to know just at what moment you must knock your pipe out on your veldskoen, and at what stage of the story you must start talking about the school committee at Drogevlei. Another necessary thing is to know what part of the story to leave out.
“And you can never learn these things.”
Indeed. There can be little doubt that he had himself in mind in this particular passage, and there was no need to rub it in, but that’s HC for you. And it was Oom Schalk Lourens, ever the wiseacre on the habitués of the Groot Marico and the crafting of shaggy-dog stories.
And, herein lies the difference between the Oom Schalk series and the Jurie Steyn series: the former is earlier Bosman and told in first person by Schalk in the context of the Anglo-Boer War; in the latter, the narrator also holds forth in first person, but he lives in post-war Drogevlei and his identity is never revealed.
The geography of Bosman’s sketches is deliberately hazy and, while the towns exist, it would be a mistake to believe they are placed exactly where Bosman has us believe.
It is safe to say, however, that we are looking at present-day North-West, and closer to Gabarone than to Pretoria, which accounts for the Bushmen who weave through the farms of the Marico and into Bosman’s tales (although he never refers to the then Bechuanaland).
This brings into the foreground the most sticky aspect of the narratives: Bosman makes use of the name for black people of which we shall not speak.
This bone of contention has been ceaselessly debated (and still is) by scholars of literature, culture, philosophy, you name it.
Some consider it irony, some pure racism, some as having a different connotation in the 1920s, and still others consider it to be a problem inasmuch as readers cannot sufficiently separate the character from the author.
I don’t know what to think; only that I flinch at every instance and I am wracked by guilt for enjoying any Bosman at all (and, I know I am not alone in this).
If I were black, I would take extreme offence and likely toss his oeuvre on to a bonfire. I cannot be objective enough to see historical racism and sexism as a mere aspect of study.
Many editors have simply omitted these references, as would I, but would it be indulgent to adapt someone else’s blueprint, and would it not ultimately be a lacuna?
And this is the crucible: The Complete Voorkamer Stories, due next month, is entirely unexpurgated by editor Craig MacKenzie.
There are many Bosman short story collections, and the point of this one may not be immediately obvious.
MacKenzie edited these stories before (along with 10 of Bosman’s other books), especially for the Anniversary Edition in 2005.
They were published in their original sequence for the first time, but in two volumes – Idle Talk and Homecomings.
However, The Complete Voorkamer Stories, also in their original order, not to mention wording, is the only publication so far to do so in their entirety.
For those who don’t own the two former collections, this one is convenient, and for Bosman junkies it’s a collector’s item.
The 2 000-word pieces that constitute the Voorkamer stories, 80 in all, were originally written to a weekly deadline for Johannesburg’s The Forum in 1950, just 18 months before Bosman’s untimely demise by heart failure after one of his infamous waggish parties.
He was 46.
In his early 20s, he spent four years in jail for killing his step-brother – supposedly an accident and almost definitely a myth – during which time he wrote nothing and only produced the “unimpassioned chronicle” Cold Stone Jug, a strange and sublime kitty-corner of a story about jail, 20 years later.
He spent several more years throwing parties, marrying and divorcing animists, and traipsing Europe, so one wonders just how he managed an output rivalling Shakespeare in 20 years’ less time.
Uncannily, the last piece he wrote, published a week after his death, is entitled Homecoming.
l Verbaan is a journalist and fiction editor. - Cape Times