July 1960[1]

Plettenberg Bay

On the way to Jan Smuts Airport for my flight to Port Elizabeth, we park the Jag at the entrance to the Rivonia Police Station. The parking lot is mostly unoccupied early on this chilly winter morning on the Highveld. My breath vaporizes as I hurry from the car into the front office. The desk constable’s acknowledgment of my presence is almost imperceptible as he continues to work on a large ledger while he slides a thin register, House Arrest Daily Record 1960, across the counter. Quickly I locate the most recently filled entry line, and below it write the date, 5th July, 1960, in the correct column, enter the time, and print, then sign my name. Half-smiling at the policeman I hasten away. He calls after me, “Totsiens, Mejuffrou Nicolson.”

On the plane I settle into the seat and exhale. My apprehension that I might be detained again recedes somewhat. I am tense and I close my eyes to try and relax but the nightmare images hover under the ajar lid of my sub-conscious mind waiting to spring loose like a clutch of demonic Jack-in-the-boxes. On their faces is the painted intent of shattering my sanity: Hennie van Niekerk’s menacing leer as he snarls, “Pervert! Whore!”; the wardresses grim demeanour; the other inmates nightmare screams of fear and despair and the names of loved ones; and Rosie staring at me in the Fort’s visiting room, her look of horror mingled with love as she whispers, “What have they done to you?” Eventually I manage to shut the lid of my mind to contain them, and momentarily suspend my fears. I succumb to the smooth ride at thirty thousand feet and doze.

Four hours later we are about to alight at Plettenberg Bay on the rudimentary sand strip bush runway in a cleared field. At the last moment a white horse gallops onto the landing strip, and swearing under his breath the pilot lifts the small plane that ferried me from Port Elizabeth, circles to his right, and prepares his approach once more. Someone has chased the horse and bumping and snorting like an animal itself the plane comes to a sudden halt.

The pilot turns to me, “Sorry about that. Can’t wait for 1962 when they say there will be a new runway here and a municipal airport building with at least some radio contact. All we have now is that old wind sock.”

“Can’t be a more beautiful site for an airport anywhere in the world…” Mythic Robberg transfixes me; at times in detention I was not sure if I would ever gaze at the promontory again. “Not with Robberg lying in front of you, like a sleeping leviathan.”

A Coloured man in a faded blue boiler suit trundles the steps to the plane, and the pilot helps me disembark.

“I need to refuel.”

“Thanks for the flight…”

Walking slowly towards the small Quonset hut that offers travellers shelter from the weather, but no other amenities, my eyes remain fixed on Robberg basking undisturbed, clad in an array of green shaded vegetation.

“Welcome home,” Bert Hall, the town official who administers the airport, greets me warmly. Picking up the car keys off his desk, I return his smile. The effects of my uneven prison haircut are slowly disappearing but they give my face a lopsided appearance. Bert is shocked; he sees my dull eyes, sallow pallor and lustreless hair. A few days later his wife quotes his words to me when we meet outside the village post office, “God only knows what those bastards did to her in there.”

But now he says, “Our Liv, come back to us. We are very happy you are here…”

I inquire as to news of his family. His son was my best friend growing up. “…Four grand children now…keeps us all busy.”

The pilot enters the hut to sign the logbook. “See you in a few weeks, Miss Nicolson. I have already radioed SAMI that you are safely here.”

At the doorway he grins, and makes a thumbs up sign. “Have a lovely holiday,” he shouts as he always does and disappears into the plane.

Tired from the day’s tension and travel, I retire early to the master bedroom and lie awake in the large bed; this is my refuge, this lovely old house, Milkwood, built by my grandfather almost sixty years ago when Plettenberg Bay was an isolated Eden. Before air service, and when I was a child, the journey was a three to four day adventure from the Highveld to the Eastern Cape over many mountain passes that were sand roads and dangerous to traverse; there are still no train tracks laid through forests and across gaping ravines. Thankfully in 1960 Plett remains a remote haven. The baby I was, the little girl, the gawky ten-year old, the rebellious adolescent, the young bride, are with me in the bed where perhaps my father, and certainly (I had figured the dates) I was conceived.

In the morning seated in the warm kitchen and drinking steaming mugs of tea, I stare appreciatively at the winter garden sloping on the hillside where shy loeries call and respond  “kwok-kwok-kwok” in the red-berry bushes. The telephone jangles in the country stillness but I do not want to talk to anyone yet from my life in Johannesburg, my family know I am safe. A key is turned in the kitchen door lock and Blossom’s dark brown, weathered face with wisps of grey hair escaping from under her colourful doek peers around the door.

“Ahi, Missie Liv, you are here. You are home.” She grins toothlessly.

Feeling a rush of affection sweep over me like a low tide wave on Robberg beach, my instinct is to leap to my feet and hug the bent over figure, Blossom, a feature of Milkwood, a stanchion. But the gesture will embarrass the older woman and instead I rise to shake her hand. Blossom bobs a subtle curtsy. Gesturing for her to pour a cup of tea, I anticipate her demurral. We fall into a familiar patter.

“Ten past nine, I knew you would be at the kitchen door. So the railway bus was on time?” Blossom nods, still staring at me as if she can scarcely believe I am in the room. “Still stops at The Crags?”

“Missie Liv?”

“Yes…”

“I say this only one time…your mother told me you were in trouble…I pray for you every night…now I see that you suffer. They are bad, bad people…but now I cook all your favourite foods…put some meat on those bones…” Blossom shakes her head, “Ahi, so sorry. So sorry. May Jesus …”

Rising again and interrupting the old woman, I clasp one of her hands in both of mine. “I’ll be OK. Some Plett air, some walks on Robberg beach, some food from my Nana…” There are tears at the corner of Blossom’s rheumy eyes. “Don’t cry, don’t cry… I’ve cried enough for us both.”

Not sure when last I read a novel that has so annoyed and intrigued me as the one I read last night and this morning, The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes which is the winner of the 2011 Man Booker Prize. What were the judges thinking? This is a 2011 feeble old man’s version of the 1960’s John Osborne “angry young man”. But, sadly, no ranting against the establishment here, this is but a shadow. The pompous, smug and so un-self aware protagonist (whom you want to give a kick up the derriere) sidles through the narrow backwater of his British, middle class, suburban life in self-congratulatory sloth, proud of the fact the life never happens to him; while with his passive-aggressive non-actions, his negative withdrawal from an emotional life, he poisons those few people with whom he interacts.

Maybe you have to be British to appreciate fully this one. For me, I prefer my old men to be like King Lear tearing at the very fabric of the heavens who have conspired against his hubris.

Yes, you are correct, there are redemptive tidbits on his journey to remorse. Remorse! What a pathetic state to journey towards. Good grief, where are the Toni Morrison’s of the world who present the highest aspirations and desires of the human heart and the lowest carnal instincts? where are the writers and books that teach and tease and torture our souls? Yes, there are platitudinous attempts at philosophical gravitas here but all they succeed in doing is to seem out of place.

Modern editors, we are told, want no description, only one voice–first person–prose stripped of adverbs and adjectives, Barnes certainly delivered. Thankfully he only wrote one hundred and sixty three pages for this one. He may aspire to write like J.M. Coetzee, but I know Coetzee’s work and Barnes (here at least)  is no Coetzee.

A version of this article appeared in print on October 17, 2011, on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: Amazon Signing Up Authors, Writing Publishers Out of Deal

The title words of today’s post are by Anglo-American poet T.S. Eliot in his famous Four Quartets. Last weekend on a glorious fall day I was in our nation’s capital. The area around the mall is indeed living proof of Eliot’s idea that “Time past and time future are contained in time present” — this is expressed in modern coinage as “being in the moment” and in other literary references as “the eternal moment.” Yes, indeed, the past lives on and the dream will never die…

Washington Memorial 10.8.11

©Janet Levine 2011

MLK, Jnr. Memorial 10.8.11

©Janet Levine, 2011

Last year I wrote a post called Brave New World of Publishing and many readers have asked for a follow up. So here it is, although I admit I am more confused than ever. The debate has become increasingly hotter and the cross-currents of opinions make the waters ever murkier.

A short summary of the chatter by “experts” in the publishing trade  is that the Big Six publishers are generally behind the curve and have underestimated the vast impact of e-books on their business models. Literary agents are in danger of becoming redundant as hundreds of thousands of writers now self publish (usually) e-books and flood the market already saturated with too many books. Agents who survive are retooling themselves into author’s guides in the self-publishing process.

Writer’s find the least difficult part of the process is the actual writing. Once they decide to self-publish they become a one-man  publishing house designing a cover, writing their own copy, formatting the manuscript, placing it with online e-book sellers (by-passing brick and mortar stores who are quickly going bust in the same way as the mom and pop grocery store disappeared twenty years ago as Walmart took over the grocery market.) Then for the writer comes the hardest (and often the most expensive part) promotion and selling. A handful of authors strike it rich on the Internet. But they are the ones who make the headlines while hundreds and thousands of their fellow writers do not sell even one copy to the general public. The writers buy copies of their own books to give as house gifts to family and friends.

On the other hand, writers who self publish retain the rights to their work, have a greater part of the profits if the book succeeds, are independent and no longer on the receiving end of impersonal rejection letters from agents. For those writers who successfully woo an agent it can be years before the agent finds a publisher and more years before the publisher publishes one’s book. Whereas you can complete a self-publishing project in six weeks once you are satisfied that the manuscript is ready for publication. You can  have a page on amazon.com before most agents will have read and responded to your query letter!

All this leads to a company like Amazon reporting a few months back that for the first time they sold more e-books than paper this past year. Great! Yes, great for Amazon who get to sell a gazillion books on their Kindles, not so good for the hundreds of thousands of self published writers who maybe get to sell three each of those books. We would all have scored big time if we had bought shares in Amazon fifteen years ago.

But the dream never dies. I have four published books, three by traditional publishers and one self-published. I see merits in both paths to publication, especially now that more and more publishing professionals agree that e-books are a stepping stone and not a red flag to agents. Currently I am working on another novel. This is the third year for this novel as I only have time to write in the summer. I know all of the above facts and as I read more and more about the current state of the world of publishing, I ask myself: am I crazy? Yet, I am working on a story I believe must be told. I love my two protagonists. I gain enormous pleasure from the process of seeing my words and ideas falling into place on the computer screen. I am nowhere near having a complete manuscript. Given that I am not sure what route I’ll take to seek publication (if ever) perhaps it is a good thing that I have months, even years, to go.

This week I find myself in the north-east kingdom of Vermont at a retreat center near St. Johnsbury. Over the almost thirty years since I came to this country with my American born husband and South African born children, I have stayed every several years somewhere in the Green Mountain state. Together with the Pacific northwest I find it to be the most beautiful and, dare I use the word, spiritual, of all the states in our presently troubled Union. Lush shades of green everywhere and from here, now, where I look from my porch when I raise my head from my laptop, I see a valley of grasses and bushes, a line of magnificent trees, tops of mountains and a blue sky traversed by slowly moving cloud galleons. Yesterday on a short walk across the fields (beware of ticks) I saw a groundhog, a woodchuck, and a doe. Nothing remarkable, except they were not scared, they did not run off until I could almost touch them, and that is unusual. The perfectly sculptured doe stared back at me with queenly curiosity. Even the monarch butterfly stayed motionless so I could take a photograph, as well as a black, white and blue beauty called The White Admiral.

My retreat cabin measures seven by nine feet, scarcely room to fit a single bed. It has many small shelves, a desk that folds away and drawers under the bed. It reminds of a small yacht cabin carefully designed to make use of all the space. I have electricity and an internet connection but no plumbing. The outdoor privy, thirty feet from the cabin, opens to the fields and the sky, the world is mine. This is like camping in a thin wooden and not a canvas shell (or whatever the modern hi-tech tent material is called).

Essentially I am here to write, and delighted to have this time and this space. It is so important for me to immerse myself in my rewriting, to come to know my characters and their story, as if they are here with me.

Yet like Transcendentalist Thoreau, who after a session in his cabin or a walk in the woods at Walden Pond, would return home to Concord for lunch; I enjoy going to the main house to take my meals with the hard-working and friendly staff. We have a young chef who creates wholesome and delicious vegetarian meals from the center's own garden. I trust the concoction of my own fiction will be as easy on the reading palate and as digestible as hers.

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