This book, BIRTHMARK by Stephen Clingman, is a delicate balancing act seeking the colours between the starkness of black and white, writes Leon de Kock.
At one point in Birthmark, Stephen Clingman describes himself as “this he that was I, this I that was he”, signalling the gap between experience and narration.
Good memoirs necessarily engage in a play of closeness and distance: narrative perspective alternates between looking out from inside a relatively untroubled child’s view, and looking back again with the more knowing gaze of the adult.
How these proportions of perspective are handled determines the tenor of a memoir: too honeyed a view will lack the acidity of ironic distance, although too much vinegar takes away the sweetness of memory.
Clingman’s voice is distinguished by a quality of composed equipoise. He is a Vivaldi rather than a Shostakovich, and his prose is gently probing in a meditative and thoughtful manner. It makes for enjoyable reading.
Like Coetzee in both Boyhood and Youth, Clingman uses the present tense continuous, and the third person, to describe himself. Unlike Coetzee, however, he also uses a first-person voice, which he mixes into the narration almost unnoticeably.
Clingman reserves the third person for the dispassionate, dry backward gaze that Coetzee made almost obligatory for writers who came after him, but his first-person voice introduces something that one doesn’t often find in Coetzee: a tone that is affectionate towards and generously accepting of the “I that was he”.
Like Jacob Dlamini in Native Nostalgia, Clingman refuses the more standard version of life under apartheid as uniformly one thing or another, in stark chiaroscuro. Instead, he allows earlier versions of himself the full range of his once untroubled joys, recreating in the process a remarkably pungent description of white boyhood in Johannesburg in the 1960s.
A shift from the intimate to the ineluctable
It is a time that is replete with the deft deflections of leg-glance shots in school cricket, inside-left soccer wizardry (later to become a political stance), and the miracle of an aquamarine pool at the Oyster Box hotel in Umhlanga, to name a few examples. The rendering of a near-perfect Southern African world in pre-puberty life on the Highveld is hauntingly evocative.
Clingman’s is a measured writing style that readers of his other works, among them the standard-setting critical study, The Novels of Nadine Gordimer: History From the Inside, and Bram Fischer: Afrikaner Revolutionary, will readily recognise.
Such genial probing is a quality of thoughtfulness that is woven into being, behind the scenes, despite its placid appearance. This process is analogous to the strenuous effort needed, behind the eyes, to make the world appear in stereo. And so the mark, the injury, produces the artist, a writer whose quest is to rebalance what enters the sensorium as formless data into a poised vision.
In Clingman’s case, one can only celebrate the reconstituted work of literary art so produced for its subtle, balanced finish, and for the way it recodes familiar terrain as strange and terribly beautiful.
For full review by Leon de Kock see Mail & Guardian
