‘I don’t think those are quite my words, but yes, broadly, that was my argument,’ she finally says, giving me another quick glance before looking down again, absorbed by a pile of recycled envelopes.
‘The problem, you say, is that people like you would never choose to be a censor, because there could be no more painful work than being forced to read works — books, magazines, articles, poems — not of your own choice. And one would think, also, that it would be anathema to a writer — particularly one like yourself — to have to ferret out offensive works and bar their publication.’
‘If one could ever agree on a universal standard of offence.’ A little cough again, clearing the throat, and a surprising, girlish toss of the hair, another peek at the gardener and a tight pursing of the lips. She opens the window, calls out to the man in words I don’t understand. They’re full of politeness, and a smile that looks genuine spreads across her face as she bows her head. The gardener responds, smiles (not so genuinely, I think), bows his own head and leaves the shrub alone.
‘It’s the wrong season for that. If you prune it in spring it won’t flower,’ she mutters to herself, and returns to my question. ‘It was Milton’s argument — reading unchosen works. “He who is made to judge … upon the birth, or death of books … had need to be a man above the common measure, both studious, learned, and judicious.” But for such a man — or woman, we should certainly wish to say — “there cannot be a more tedious and unpleasing Journey-work … than to be made the perpetual reader of unchosen books,” or something like that. It has always seemed a logical and worthy argument, to me at least. I think I credited him.’
(Later, I check the transcript of the interview against Milton’s text and am impressed by her memory for quotation.)
‘And Milton argues that censors are typically “ignorant” and “imperious”. Would you say that was true of those who worked as censors in this country under the old government?’ It’s an unsubtle question and I wish I hadn’t asked it, or had found a different way to phrase it.
She’s silent, stills her hands, draws her head up, looks at me for a second only and then out the window. Something’s been mis-communicated. The gardener is back at the already compact bush, cutting again. Clare opens the window, calls out to him with a lengthy preamble, bows of the head, and what I take to be a questioning reply from him, an uncertainty about her earlier direction, or uncertainty about its wisdom. She replies, more forceful, hurried, and then the shears are on the grass and the gardener has trudged off across the lawn to an unseen part of the garden. I look at my notes and hear her head move, the window close; glancing up I find her eyes fixed on my face with a sadness that surprises me.
‘There is no mystery, really, about who served on the Publications Control Board, as it was called. There were, as you no doubt know, even some cases of writers who worked as advisory readers — minor poets and novelists — as well as a number of academics, a fair number. Perhaps that — the academics, I mean — is not so surprising. But there are periods for which almost no reports survive, so we may never know entirely who served the Board, who was complicit. The writers who worked as censors were not, as one might rather perversely hope, compelled to do so, coerced into the activity and the role of censor, but because they believed in the rightness of what was being done, or else believed they might make the process a little less philistine, hoping to subvert the system from within. Their reports make for depressing reading. As a definition of the common (meaning the usual) type of censor — let us say, for the sake of argument, that it includes those people whose complicity may have remained secret — I would not disagree with Milton’s statement.’
I’m transfixed by her speaking voice, by the shapes her mouth makes, the sharp planes of her face and the fine geometry around her eyes. At the conference in Amsterdam I almost didn’t meet her, thinking it would be better for us not to do so. I told myself that I feared the person could never match the words on the page, that I was afraid she would disappoint, that I would never achieve the kind of intimacy I desired — or not intimacy but rapport, a friendliness possible only between equals. Aside from her brittleness, she is, I’m beginning to think, exactly the person her works suggest. There is no disappointment in that respect.
There was and is a greater fear. I packaged it up with old tape and tied it with fraying string. I did a bad job of it. I can feel it trying to escape.
The gardener comes back for the shears, leaving the already compact bush alone for now. I see Clare watching him, trying to pretend a hadeda ibis has caught her attention. It’s clear this is a ruse, either for my benefit or the gardener’s. She has no interest in the hadeda or any other bird, except a bird she might conjure in her imagination. The hadeda here and now is an excuse for her to look interested in one thing to deflect my attention from her interest in — or call it irritation with — the gardener.
It feels strange to think of Clare as ‘Clare’, to think of her not by her last name, Wald, which is the shorthand I’ve tended to use when talking about her with Sarah or with colleagues and students. Until these interviews began, in my mind she was her surname, a name acquired through a marriage that has now ended. Wald meaning ‘forest’, ‘woods’, ‘wood’ or simply ‘timber’. The surname has made me think of her and her work in this way — a forest of timbers that might be put to some practical use. Out of the forest emerges the person I’ve created in my head: half-ogre, half-mother, denying and giving, bad breast and good breast, framed by wood or woods. I try to find my place again in the list of questions I’ve prepared, questions that now seem rude, reductive, too peremptory, too simplistic and ungenerous in what they appear to assume.
‘In the years after the first democratic elections,’ I begin, ‘there was a programme of amnesty. Many applications were made, many people were granted amnesty for serious violent acts — ostensibly “legal” under the old government, because enacted by, and ordered by the government itself, but clearly violations of human rights, and quite obviously illegal by the standards of the country’s new constitution — but I can find no evidence that anyone submitted a claim of amnesty for having worked as a censor or for the censors.’
‘No?’ Clare says, her face blank. ‘I suppose they did not see their work as violent. Violence is the key, doing violence physically to someone. So much of the testimony, you know, it hinges on personal experiences of violence. Inability to publish a book, that’s relatively minor compared to what has happened to so many.’ Her eyes are tired, looking not at me, but again at the gardener, who has returned to the vicinity of the already compact bush to bully a neighbouring protea into a different shape. She makes no effort now to pretend anything else preoccupies her.
‘Even though the act of banning a book, or banning its author, might have had serious — one might even argue mortal — implications for the livelihood and life of the author and that author’s friends and family?’ I ask.
‘Yes. It is strange, as you say. I don’t have an answer.’
‘Perhaps no censors came forward because they trusted that their identities would remain secret.’
‘More likely they thought that no one would care, given the violence of so many other atrocities,’ she says, for the first time today looking directly at me for more than a brief moment. ‘I don’t know that anyone would have regarded the banning of a book as a gross violation of human rights. Which is not to say that one shouldn’t think of censorship in that way, as that serious. But we are speaking of degrees of violation …’