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On Sunday 17 October 2021, Peter Wilhelm died in Cape Town at the age of 78. He was a poet with two collections to his name (White flowers, Falling into the sun); he was the author of five novels (The dark wood, Summer’s end (for children), The healing process, The mask of freedom (with a cover painting by his son, David), The whirlwind in the thorn tree); he was a writer of short stories collected in four volumes (LM and other stories, At the end of the war, Some place in Africa, The bayonet field – selected stories); he was the writer of a two-act play, Frame work; he was the editor, with James Polley, of Poetry South Africa (selected papers from the Poetry ’74 conference); he was a journalist and editor at Financial Mail and Leadership, and a lover of science fiction. He was a sardonic man, his expression one of wry amusement. He was exceptionally kind and gentle. Yet, his life was beset by alcoholism, and when that was not ravaging him, he had to contend with the medication he needed to get him through the days. And nights. It is no wonder his fictions were enacted on a darkling plain.
I have a memory of first encountering Peter as a Security Branch officer. It is a memory I cherish. It seems so typically Peter. And yet, it is a false memory. It is about something that happened at the Poetry ’74 conference at the University of Cape Town in 1974. In my recollection, he rushed out of the wings onto the stage where a lecture was being given to a packed auditorium. He looked the part: ferocious and bloody-minded. Actually, he was not alone. He was part of a four-man squad performing an act of guerrilla theatre. In short order, they dragged the lecturer, Walter Saunders, off the stage by “the scruff of the neck”, as The Argus reported. After these SB officers had abducted their victim, the audience was left in consternation, undecided what to do. Which is more or less how one feels at the end of a piece of Wilhelm fiction: unsettled, unsure, anxious and fearful of the future. Much of this had to do with Peter’s apocalyptic vision that was probably fed as much by science fiction as by what he called the “complex, fused metaphors of my dreams”, let alone medication and drink. Heaven knows why I have come to attribute that memory to Peter alone, but I can hear his quiet chuckle at my delusion.
My next encounter with Peter was his 1975 collection of stories, LM and other stories. He’d been in Mozambique on a journalistic assignment at the time of the Frelimo uprising in 1974. Here, suddenly, was a novella that was both fiction and non-fiction in one. This was front-line journalism as fiction. But then the rest of the collection exploded other boundaries as well, running rampant through mental breakdown, science fiction, historical recreation, fable, all rife with parody and surrealism.
Slowly, the books accumulated and the landscape darkened. Loneliness, disaffection, repression, the colonial past, apartheid, a future riven with conflict were constant themes in his work, and yet so too were love and compassion, particularly in The healing process. And, likewise, the word love keeps on inserting itself into his poetry:
All my love was what I had to give
All my love was what I had to live
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- From “And all my love”
In “44 lines for Lionel” [Abrahams], he ends with this stanza:
We are looking for a word that has already been said:
Not long, not short, captured at last in breath:
First breath, last breath, somewhere above –
We know it all, the word is love.
Peter was not one to talk about his work, and he seldom appeared at the literary festivals that are now commonplace, yet his preface to his first collection of poems set the tone for the way he would continue:
Consciously I am struggling to become human in Africa; but I have too often been up-ended in situations of violence and its corollary: despair. I attempt to move away from engulfment by these feelings. No fantastic landscape or alien culture of my childhood imaginings could be more fantastic or alien than my actual experience. To communicate this I use the tools of satire, surrealism, confession.
His books and his journalism were frequently honoured. He shared the Mofolo-Plomer Prize in 1976 with Mbulelo Mzamane, received a Thomas Pringle Award for reviews in 1982, and won the Sanlam Literary Award in 1995. For many years, he wrote a satirical column for Financial Mail and had the distinction of having the column commissioned (and decommissioned) by three successive editors: Ken Owen, Caroline Southey and Gasant Abarder. In 2015, it started appearing on Biznews.
After spending most of his working life in Johannesburg, he moved to Cape Town in the 1990s. To his family, condolences. The last word should be his:
Life is far too short, far too long;
a paradox there – the moment of vision seized
at culmination, something as puzzling as movement
in glass, the quick threads lustrous and encoded,
a glimpse of the way it is forever and endlessly:
and no sooner said than done, fading in the whirlpool.
And if that were it, requirement met,
there could be heart’s ease and a senatorial role;
but each dawn I must edge into light that stains,
stalk the cracked stones to twice hear the summons
and climb the toppling stairs and ask for help ...
There is no end until I write it myself.
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- From “A letter to my friends”
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