The Economist - USA (2021-07-17)

74 Books & arts The Economist July 17th 2021

SouthAfricanfiction

The family plot

T

hepullofa houseandaninheritance

is an enduring preoccupation of fiction

in  English.  Think,  for  example,  of  Evelyn

Waugh’s  “Brideshead  Revisited”  or  “How­

ards End” by E.M. Forster. In his ninth nov­

el,  “The  Promise”,  Damon  Galgut,  whose

previous  book  was  about  Forster,  reworks

this venerable theme in the gripping, pro­

found tale of an unhappy white South Afri­

can family.

The Swarts live on a small farm on the

outskirts of Pretoria—“useless ground, full

of stones, you can do nothing with it. But it

belongs  to  our  family,  nobody  else,  and

there’s  power  in  that.”  The  story  opens  in

1986  on  the  day  of  Ma’s  funeral.  The  three

Swart  children,  Anton,  Astrid  and  Amor,

are  all  there.  Pa,  the  dead  woman’s  hus­

band, is resentful that his wife of decades

wanted to lie for all eternity in the Jewish

cemetery  of  her  birth  family  rather  than

alongside him. Meanwhile Amor is insist­

ing  that  she  overheard  her  dying  mother

extract a promise from Pa that the Swarts’

black  maid,  Salome,  would  be  given  the

deeds  to  her  cottage  (actually  more  of  a

shack) and the land on which it sits.

This promise, which most of the family

try  to  ignore  despite  Amor’s  best  efforts,

hangs  over  the  rest  of  the  book.  “Some­

times a chance is just a waste of time,” An­

ton  tells  her,  complaining  that  Salome’s

son  has  squandered  the  education  that

their  father  paid  for.  “Yes,  she  says.  But  a

promise is a promise.”

The  four  sections  each  focus  on  one

member  of  the  Swart  family  as  they  ap­

proach death. Pa is buried on the inspiring

day in 1995 when South Africa won the rug­

by  World  Cup  and  Nelson  Mandela  pre­

sented the trophy to the team’s white cap­

tain. By the last part it is 2018; Jacob Zuma

is resigning from office and South Africans

are increasingly dismayed by the direction

their country is taking. If, at the beginning,

apartheid­era laws meant Salome was not

allowed to own the land on which her cot­

tage  stands,  by  the  end  the  country  has

been  transformed,  and  new  threats  to  her

claim have emerged.

Mr  Galgut’s  arresting  style  makes  this

tale of tragedy and betrayal more than the

dirge it might have become in other hands.

The  story  is  told  in  the  third  person  but

skips  to  other  voices,  and  from  present

tensetopast,ofteninthesameparagraph,

withtheoccasionalasideaddresseddirect­

ly to the reader. Writing of Astrid, the

Swarts’ bulimic elder daughter, asocial

climberwhoishavinganaffairwithher

husband’sblackbusinesspartner,theau­

thorsays:“Hernew[Catholic]faith,which

sheexperiencesasakindofwaterproof

garmentshe’sbuttoneddownoverherself,

doesn’tstopheractingonherfearsandde­

sires, but itprovides away ofwashing

themoffafterwards.”

Thenovelevolvesintoa damningcom­

mentaryonSouth Africa’smany broken

promises;thedenouementwillmakeread­

ersfeeldesolate.YetMrGalgut’swry,wasp­

ishprosewillmakethemlaugh,too,even

asit leavesthemhooked.n

The Promise.By Damon Galgut. Europa

Editions; 256 pages; $25. Chatto & Windus;

£16.99

Oddcouples

The love song of J.

Maynard Keynes

H

e wasarenownedEnglisheconomist

with a history of affairs with men. She

was a Russian ballerina whose former par­

amours  included  a  Polish  count  and  Igor

Stravinsky. Yet when John Maynard Keynes

went,  night  after  night,  to  watch  Lydia

Lopokova perform with the Ballets Russes

in  London  in  1921,  they  fell  ecstatically  in

love. It was, Keynes wrote, “a dreadful busi­

ness”; he was “almost beyond rescue”.

Extracts from the letters in which their

pas de deuxplayed out were performed on

July  9th  by  Helena  Bonham  Carter  and

Tobias  Menzies,  both  recently  of  “The

Crown”.  The  venue  was  Charleston,  the

farmhouse in Sussex that was home to the

painters  Vanessa  Bell  and  Duncan  Grant,

which  they  turned  into  a  floor­to­ceiling

work  of  art.  It  became  a  retreat  for  other

members  of  the  Bloomsbury  Group,  in­

cluding Keynes (once Grant’s lover). Now a

museum, Charleston is hosting a season of

outdoor events; it asked Holly Dawson, an

in­house  researcher,  to  shape  the  letters

into a collage of the couple’s life together. 

Lopokova’s  writing,  reckons  Ms  Daw­

son,  “comes  straight  from  her  bones”  and

today  “goes  straight  to  our  bones”.  But  a

century  ago,  the  Bloomsbury  set  were

frightfully  snobbish  about  her.  Bell  ad­

vised Keynes that she would make “a very

expensive  wife”  and  was  “altogether  to  be

preferred  as  a  mistress”.  Virginia  Woolf

thought  she  had  “the  soul  of  a  squirrel”.

Their  disapproval  was  useless.  “I  kiss  you

and re­kiss you and pro­kiss you,” Keynes

declared, conjugating his desire. “I gobble

you”,  Lopokova  wrote,  “I  re­gobble  you”

and “gobble you from head to foot”.

It  wasn’t  all  “foxy  licks”,  though.  The

piece charts the relationship from infatua­

tion to dependence, around private obsta­

cles (she was already married), across sep­

arations (she away on tour, he at summits)

and  through  the  national  trauma  of  the

second world war (and, in 1941, Woolf’s sui­

cide).  Lopokova  dreamed  “that  you  and  I

were  soldiers  and  when  the  bullet  went

through  me  I  did  not  die”.  She  accompa­

nied Keynes to the Bretton Woods confer­

ence and swam naked in a fishpond.

Intimacy and power­broking are inter­

woven in Ms Dawson’s artful arrangement.

Power  also  ebbs  and  swirls  between  the

couple, as it can in long marriages. Keynes

was eminent and brilliant; Lopokova spoke

what he called “Lydian English”, sprinkled

with malapropisms. Yet he needed her, not

only to support his work and later his infir­

mity, but for her creativity and capacity for

joy. “Try to forget shares markets fortunes”,

she  told  him  in  1937,  “because  it  must

crumple the muscles of your heart.” 

A  former  ballerina  and  student  at  the

London School of Economics, Ms Dawson

was an ideal person to craft their story. In

clipped  upper­crust  diction,  Mr  Menzies

impersonated Keynes as halting wooer and

weary statesman. Ms Bonham Carter’s Rus­

sian  accent  and  comic  timing  were  deli­

cious.  On  a  bright,  blustery  evening  the

courtyard at Charleston, close to its statue­

strewn walled garden, was the perfect spot

for  their  funny,  moving  recital  (a  one­off,

but you can stream it online).

Across  the  fields  lies  Tilton,  the  house

that became Keynes’s and Lopokova’s own

country home. There, after he died in 1946,

she lived out the grief that is the last phase

of  love’s  cycle.  “Peoples  of  today  do  not

know  how  great  many  thingswerelovely

yesterday,”  she  lamented.  “But today  is

todayandyesterdayishistory.”n

F IRLE, SUSSEX

An intense, improbable romance

comes thrillingly to life

The supply and demand of desire

................................................................

“Lydia & Maynard: Love Letters” is available to

stream at Charleston.org.uk until the end of 2021