"These are the Victoria Falls, whose noisy gushing/ Attracts a noisy and a gushing crowd;/ They rush from every country in the world to gape/ At this cascade that is the usual shape." That is the opening stanza of Victoria Falls by the South African novelist, short-story writer and poet William Plomer, writes Brian Maye.
When I read the poem in an anthology recently, I immediately became interested in the man. He was born 100 years ago next Wednesday, which I thought very adjacent, as a Sean O'Casey character might say.
I became more interested in Plomer when I learned how much ahead of his time he was. He had contempt for the racial discrimination he saw all around him in his native South Africa, and this anger was reflected in his first novel, Turbott Wolfe, which was published in 1925. It told the story of a love affair between a black man and a white woman. One critic has said the book gave a sharp corrective to most people's view of the British dominion of South Africa. Inevitably, neither the novel nor its author proved very popular with the white population there as a result.
William Charles Franklyn Plomer (1903-1973) was born in Pietersburg in the northern Transvaal, where his father was a civil servant. He went to an Anglican school, St John's College, in Johannesburg and was then sent to England where he spent three miserable years at a small private school in Kent and one happier year at Rugby.
Instead of continuing his education back in South Africa, he became a farmer and then a trader, using the experience he had gained at these jobs to good effect in his first novel mentioned above. He became friendly with two other rebel white South African writers, Roy Campbell and Laurens van der Post, and together they launched a radical literary journal, Voorslag (Whiplash), in 1927. It lasted only a year but it gave the three men another platform from which to criticise their country's system of government. The authorities' attempts to muzzle their writing caused the three to withdraw angrily from publishing the periodical.
Other works published by Plomer directly about South Africa are the collection of three short novels and seven short stories entitled I Speak of Africa, which came out in 1927, and a biography of the British imperialist Cecil Rhodes, which gave acute insights into the man. It was published in 1933.
Plomer left South Africa after the demise of Voorslag and, after spending two years teaching in Japan, he made England his permanent home. Leonard and Virginia Woolf's Hogarth Press had published Turbott Wolfe and through them he gained entrance into London literary society.
Eventually he counted among his friends such well-known literary figures as E.M. Forster, the Sitwells and W.H. Auden, as well as the Woolfs. Also, as principal reader to the publisher Jonathan Cape in the 1930s, he brought to the fore such talented writers as Arthur Koestler, Ted Hughes, Stevie Smith, John Betjeman, Vladimir Nabokov and Ian Fleming.
Plomer was a notably versatile writer. Paper Houses (1929), The Child of Queen Victoria (1933), Curious Relations (1945) and Four Countries (1949) are collections of short stories. Sado (1931), The Case is Altered (1932), The Invaders (1934) and Museum Pieces (1952) are further novels from his pen. He also published Collected Poems (1960), an autobiography called Double Lives (1943) and At Home: Memoirs (1958). On top of all this, he wrote the libretti of four Benjamin Britten operas: Gloriana (1953), Curfew River (1964), The Burning Fiery Furnace (1966) and The Prodigal Son (1968).
He produced 10 volumes of verse in all and was awarded the Queen's Gold Medal for poetry in 1963. W.H. Auden, one of the most prominent poets of the 20th century, was certainly influenced by his poetry, especially by his ballads.
As an adult, Plomer had to come to terms with his homosexuality. In his published autobiographies, he did not refer to the issue at all but privately he admitted that it was central to his life and work. In his fiction and poetry, there are no overt references to his homosexuality, but he always felt himself an outsider and was attracted to other outsiders. In the literary circles he moved in in London were a number of homosexuals, some discreet and reluctant, such as Forster, others
overt and flamboyant, such as Christopher Isherwood.
Plomer's work undoubtedly deserves to be better known. With Campbell, he is the foremost South African writer of his generation. He is witty, sardonic and unsentimental, and his expression is polished, refined and stylish.
Most of all, what comes through is his understanding and tolerance of other people. His writing never becomes didactic; humour and intelligence inform it.
Victoria Falls, with which I began, is a satirical look at the hordes of tourists, especially of the loud American variety, attracted by the waterfall of the title. When asked about the majority population of Africa, our tourist answers: "'The natives? Well, they're black, and live in such quaint kraals./ They're dusty, too! The great thing is to see the Falls."
Such attitudes are still around. It was greatly to William Plomer's credit that he fought them so early and for so long.