memoirs, 1933–77 ❧ 39
I had advanced with my suggestion that she might like to leave, the audience
burst into applause. This was unexpected, but just a little gratifying. I then
resumed the program as planned, and it was only at intermission that things
went completely out of control.
My green room was a small cubby hole with a door opening only off
the stage, and into it burst an individual who identifi ed himself as Mr. P.
[Lewis Sowden], while demanding an explanation of my conduct. This I
felt in no way obliged to give, and, furious at the invasion of my privacy, I
ordered him out. But he stood so that I had to open the door and shove
him through it. By then we were grappling on stage in full view of the audi-
ence! To the intense delight of onlookers, he was then bodily removed by
a couple of ushers. Later, I learned that he was drama critic for the Rand
Daily Mail, a thoroughly unexpected bonus! What was even funnier was the
behavior of those persons who came to see me after I had played the rest
of the program, and who desperately tried to act as if nothing at all untow-
ard had happened. By prearrangement, the Fishers then spirited me off
into a waiting taxi and headed off journalists all this morning until I safely
departed for the calm turbulence of Victoria Falls.
The Fishers have been forwarding me the newspaper accounts of my last
evening in Johannesburg. They make very good reading, even if mostly
rather fi ctionalized. There are even cartoons. One shows a couple of bruisers
lined up at a ticket window and inquiring: “We’d like to book for the harpsi-
chord concert. When does the main bout go on?” From London, I get a let-
ter asking, “Dear Ralph, what have you been doing?” and enclosing another
cartoon of a man showing a newspaper with the headline “Harpsichord Man
Fights Critic on Stage” to a journalist companion on a crutch and a wooden
leg who is replying, “He’s lucky—remember the fracas I had with Schultz and
his musical saw!”
Brazzaville
Unlike Leopoldville across the river, with its luxury hotel, its boulevards,
and shops selling European antiquities, Brazzaville looks shabby and
down-at-the-heels.
Dakar
I have long since learned on newly arriving in any African town to make
directly for the marketplaces, and this is what I did here. I had heard that the
Senegalese are notoriously handsome, tall, and well-proportioned, but their
women in billowing gowns and starched white headdresses move with all the
majesty of full-rigged sailing ships.
This was my last sojourn in black Africa and the end of my fi rst contact
with a series of cultures that had almost no traditions based on written his-
tory or on habits of thought dominated by the distortions that literacy inevi-
tably brings with it. I became aware of domains of sensibility to which we only
KKirkpatrick.indd 39irkpatrick.indd 39 2/8/2017 9:56:45 AM 2 / 8 / 2017 9 : 56 : 45 AM
rick simeone
(Rick Simeone)
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