Nearly four months have passed since the first interview. My work on Clare’s papers is as complete as it can be for now, and anyway, she tells me there’s nothing more she’s willing to share. The personal correspondence that I’d hoped to see hasn’t and won’t appear. I leave next week for Johannesburg.
‘We could have a final series of conversations, if you like,’ she tells me today. ‘Not that I mean to suggest finality. You may contact me in future, if the need arises, but since you are here, why don’t we cover anything you may have been holding back. I am not easily offended. I’ve begun to think you rather hide your lamp under a bushel. You are cleverer than you like people to think. There is something both endearing and unnerving in that. Why don’t you kick off that bushel these last few days? Ask me the unaskable. Give truth the reins.’
I have to stifle a laugh. It seems such an unlikely, even absurd thing to say after everything she’s said in the past, what with all the hostility at the beginning, when even the most basic question seemed exactly that: unaskable. I think — how can I help but think? — that she’s already guessed the questions I have to ask, what this whole project is really all about, assuming she has any idea who I am. It’s like being allowed to ask your mother anything about herself, and finding that a million questions suddenly spring to mind, each one even less possible to formulate than the last, even when you’ve been given permission.
The weather has grown warmer and we take the opportunity to sit in the garden. I return to some earlier points, clarifying questions of authorial intention, which she bridles against — ‘You are poisoning me,’ she complains — and larger thematic links, details about her family, her childhood, her relationship with her sister, which she is more willing to discuss than at our first meeting. She seems to brighten, in fact, when I mention her dead sibling.
After three days of this kind of discussion she again loses patience.
‘You are still hiding under that bushel. I have dared you to join me, but you go on screening yourself. Come out into the daylight. I am inviting you. Stop prevaricating. Neither was any thing kept secret, but that it should come abroad,’ she says, and I know I should be able to recognize that — a quote from which of her books? ‘Listen Sam,’ she says, now more like a mother than ever, ‘you won’t know whether I’ll refuse until you ask, and you know me well enough by now to know that I will refuse if I don’t wish to answer. I won’t bear you a grudge for any question you choose to ask. This is what you are here for after all, darling.’
I don’t imagine the darling. It makes me shiver. Marie suddenly interrupts with a plate of biscuits and a pot of tea. She says nothing and leaves as quickly as she came.
I try to pull my thoughts back into focus, but the flutter of courage I felt at darling has gone. Of course I have two questions in mind: the askable question and what remains the unaskable one. So I go with the former, and know I’ll regret it.
‘There is something else.’ The trick is to set up the question in such a way that I don’t deceive, and don’t present myself as being ignorant of the answer, which I already know, so that when the question comes she won’t feel betrayed. I don’t want to corner her; I just need to see how she answers. ‘In the first few meetings — I can’t remember which now — we spoke about the process of writing under the threat of censorship.’
Her face draws to a point. She has something else entirely on her mind. I’m disappointing her again.
‘Yes. I remember that conversation.’
‘You mentioned a few cases of writers who had worked for the Publications Control Board as advisory readers.’
‘Yes. Some were true believers. Others naively thought they were defending literature from within a hostile system.’
‘Did you know any of them personally?’
‘I knew them as colleagues of a sort, yes, as fellow writers do. But they were not close friends. Why don’t you come to your point?’
‘When it became known that I was going to write your biography, lots of people sent me letters offering anecdotes about you. Most of them I ignored, because most were, frankly, libellous, never backed up with any evidence. Someone, however, and I don’t know who, because he or she acted anonymously, sent me a photocopy of a document,’ I say, handing her a folder. ‘I’ve been to the State Archives to look for the original, but files from the period have been lost. I was hoping you might be able to tell me if this is genuine or not.’
‘I think I know what I am going to find inside.’ She opens the green flaps and removes a slim stack of photocopied pages, stapled together, bearing her initial and surname at the top of the first page. There’s nothing to prove she actually wrote it; some enemy might have wanted to put her name to the advisory report that argues in the most legalistic style on what grounds a novel, summarized and analyzed in the pages therein, might be banned under the country’s old publication control laws. She skims the pages and sets the report to one side.
‘It’s genuine,’ she says, the corners of her mouth turning up. ‘That’s my handwriting, my signature, my words throughout. You want me to offer some kind of defence for my actions, but I won’t. I will say only that I did it as a challenge to the system, believing I might be able to subvert it from within, or prove that there was nothing high-minded about its aims. Then one day, they simply stopped using me, and no more books were sent in my direction; notably, it happened after I wrote this very report — coincidence or not, I don’t know, nor do I care. If you were to read all the reports I wrote, of which there were perhaps twenty over a period of two years in the early 1970s, this one, the one you have, is the only one that advocated banning, and I argued for banning on strictly legal grounds, as you can see. Whoever kept the report knew what they were about, or at least they thought they did. I assumed I had the only surviving copy. The author was totally unknown, and the book, Cape Town Nights, was quite obviously written with the express purpose of challenging the publication control laws; it was obscene, blasphemous, and openly ridiculed the government and the police, all of which were forbidden. The small press that risked publishing it made a habit of these sorts of crude attempts at challenging the system. It had a certain futile nobility. In every other case, the books upon which I reported were ultimately made available to the public without change or emendation, as far as I know.’
‘And the author of the book you reported against?’
She smiles and shakes her head. ‘You already know her.’ Having been unable to trace the author of the banned novel, which was embargoed and nearly all the copies apparently destroyed, never to be republished, never published abroad, I’d assumed the man, for the author was a man, Charles Holz, was dead.
‘You banned your own book?’
‘I thought perhaps you would be sympathetic, since you are, like I was, an intellectual — or a kind of intellectual — trying to survive in a time of madness.’ She smiles for a moment only and then purses her lips together, sticking them out, as if to kiss. ‘What will you do now? Will you tell the world that the woman who argues so fiercely against censorship collaborated with the censors, became one of them, and worked against herself? Do, if you wish. I won’t stop you. I cannot. It will change no one’s mind. If you present it fairly, as I know you will, being yourself of a highly legalistic frame of mind, then those who hate me will go on hating me, and those who do not hate me will merely think this new information adds to my complexity. It is a shame that this is all you could come up with, this impotent little squib. I thought you had caught the real scent. I was sure you knew,’ she says.