Free-Lancers and Literary Biography in South Africa (review)

In this collection of biographical essays on South African authors Stephen Gray has taken literary biography in a new direction. What stands at the center of his texts is the search or the pursuit of the subject. The descriptions of this pursuit often focus on the practical work that Gray as a literary biographer undertakes while collecting information about some of the free-lancers of South African writing. The pieces in this collection vary greatly from the long informative essays on Douglas Blackburn, Stephen Black, Sipho Sepamla, and Richard Rive to shorter reviews, tributes, or obituaries on Bessie Head, Etienne Leroux, and Mary Renault. Other authors included are Charles Maclean, Beatrice Hastings, and Edward Wolfe.

The focus on the pursuit rather than on the life makes this primarily a volume on literary biography, on the practical difficulties and the obstacles encountered by the biographer. In the first chapter on Charles Maclean, a nineteenth-century travel writer who wrote about Natal and the Eastern Caribbean island of St. Lucia, Gray gives a vivid account of his visit to St. Lucia, including the struggle for a visa and the comments of taxi drivers. Interwoven with this account of the traveling biographer we are given but brief snippets of information about Charles Maclean.

This discrepancy between the detailed account of the search and the scarce information about the biographical subject is problematic in view of the stated motive of this collection of essays. Gray wants to "rectify the injustice that figures I admire and emulate should have become relatively forgotten, their works seldom read, their strivings unknown to my uncaring contemporaries" (x). Another important aim is to correct false and misleading information about these authors. But rather than presenting us with the "corrected" life, the discussion often focuses on particular issues where previous biographers have been mistaken or on the ordeals biographers go through.

This approach should not be taken as a theoretical investigation of the issues involved in the construction and reconstruction of human subjectivity. It problematizes the straightforward description of a life from a practical rather than a theoretical perspective. In most cases Gray is concerned with correcting details and providing anecdotal information about South African literary life. The different pieces thus become important contributions to a discussion about a particular writer's life rather than a source of information. This rather peculiar approach needs to be placed in the larger and very complex context of memory and life writing in postapartheid South Africa. As Gray puts it: "Uncomplicated nostalgia has to us become inhibited, even taboo. How the appalling past has phased into our liberated future is not a puzzle any but the brave would tackle" (xii).