Abstract
This article is the result of my interest in the role of the Bible and religion in Afrikaans literature, and in this case specifically in the work of Hennie Aucamp. Aucamp’s large oeuvre includes short stories, cabaret and song lyrics, as well as diaries and memoires. I focus on his short stories as they represent the indisputable peak of his writing career.
Hennie Aucamp’s parents, like mine, belonged to the first generation after the Anglo-Boer War. Both of us were born in the ‘30s of the 20th century. We inherited an Afrikaner culture in which the Bible and family devotions occupied a central place. The stories and language of the Bible, which has aptly been called “the Book behind the books”, have influenced literature, the visual arts, and the music in Protestant countries. Hennie Aucamp’s memoires published in his collection In die vroegte (2003) clearly shows his gratitude for what he learnt from his daily interaction with the farmers – of whom his father was one – while growing up on the farm Rust-mijn-ziel in the Stormberge. He honours them particularly for their knowledge of the Bible, which influenced his authorship.
Aucamp made his debut in 1963 with a thin volume of eight short stories. The text, Een somermiddag, suggests the blissful years of childhood that Aucamp’s alter ego, Wimpie, experienced as a farm boy. However, as a grown-up he describes these happy experiences with a deep awareness of that which complicated and affected this transitory phase of joy. Twice, a shadow of guilt falls over the adventures of Wimpie and his Xhosa friend, Tatties. One scorching summer afternoon, in the title story, they have to collect a cream can. They rest under a train bridge where they disturb a flock of swallows that has its nests there. Tatties takes some of the eggs from the nests. After Wimpie’s initial excitement about Tatties’s find, he realises that they are guilty of a wrongful deed. He describes it as “a great sin”, holds Tatties responsible, and wants to place the eggs back in the nests when Tatties informs him that swallows would not sit on eggs that had been handled by humans. Wimpie takes revenge on his own meanness by ripping the necklace that Tatties made from the shells of the unhatched eggs off Tatties’s neck and trampling it to pieces.
The tendency to accuse and hold someone else responsible for one’s deed is known from the Garden Story in Genesis. In “Die dood van die tortel” (“The death of the turtledove”) Wimpie does not accuse Tatties of that which his father had told him was sinful. Unlike in the episode with the eggs, Wimpie realises that, having been tempted by what was forbidden, he himself is responsible for his transgression. His father, when handing him the coveted rifle for his 12th birthday, had made it abundantly clear that shooting a dove is forbidden. He quoted the Bible that a dove was “a bird of the dear Lord himself”. He cannot resist the temptation. Wimpie is horrified by his deed. He gives Tatties the dead dove as a gift. Wimpie’s father catches him with the prey. Unbeknown to Wimpie, the dove becomes part of his supper. When he realises what soup he had feasted on, it both literally and figuratively leaves a bitter taste in his mouth.
After Aucamp’s debut, a previously unpublished short story of his with the title “Au claire de la lune” was included in the anthology with the title Windroos: verhale van 10 sestigers. This publication established Aucamp as an author during the time of the renewal movement in Afrikaans prose characterised by novels of André P. Brink and Etienne Leroux. Considering his age, Aucamp was an Afrikaans author of the 1960s, even though he was never deemed part of the radical renewal. In his introduction to Windroos, N.P. Van Wyk Louw describes the tradition from which the writers of the ‘60s had freed themselves as rural realism, Afrikaner romanticism, or the search for the aesthetic. Aucamp found no reason to follow them in this regard. The farm milieu and the misfortunes of the (Afrikaner) country people remained a constant theme in his oeuvre of short stories. In retrospect it becomes clear, though, that Aucamp most certainly was a renewer: he problematised the relationship between humanity and its environment, in particular also people in the countryside in their relationship to the country and farm.
“Au claire de la lune”,initially published in Windroos, was also included in Aucamp’s second volume of short stories titled Spitsuur. In it the main character, an unmarried young girl who falls pregnant, ends up in a complicated relationship with her typical Afrikaner community and becomes an outsider. Aucamp ironicises the church’s preoccupation with sexual sins. Rejected because of her pregnancy, the girl leaves for a place where she is unknown. She rejects Christianity, freeing herself from the doctrine of sin, guilt and redemption. Her character represents a turning point in Aucamp’s authorship: the boy in harmony with himself and his Calvinistic environment with his awareness of sin in “Een somermiddag” now develops into an author in the Romantic and Decadent tradition. The romantic archetypes in Aucamp’s work are marginal figures that are not controlled by church and community. Only the farmers of the Stormberge remain religious patriarchs, versed in Scripture.
Aucamp was aware of the self-referential nature of his stories. Fiction and reality often intersect in them, so that romantic archetypes in his work can frequently be associated with his person. He is identified as a Romanticist and Decadentist both by his reviewers and by him himself in his memoires, In die vroegte (2003). The context of Romanticism is in 19th-century England, France and Germany. Essentially, Romanticism represented the loss of faith that led to the endless search by the restless wanderer and the lost traveller. In the last story in Spitsuur, “My tante wat in Chelsea woon” (“My aunt who lives in Chelsea”), Aucamp, the young writer as first-person narrator, starts searching for experiences. In his travel essay “Voor die winter kom” (Hongerblom, 1972) he is the self-declared voyeur de la vie travelling through big cities in Northern Europe and observing marginal figures of society.
Aucamp’s songs and his cabaret texts are an integral and important part of his oeuvre. According to him, the decadent sense of life that characterises these texts is induced by the Bible, family devotions and, in particular, Ecclesiastes in the Old Testament. He also ascribes his love of the aphorism to Ecclesiastes and Proverbs. He writes how the terse, earthy and concrete witticisms of farmers from the Stormberge indicate that they could have been blood relations of the writers of Proverbs and Ecclesiastes.
The short, succinct entries in Kommerkrale (1989), his “ABC book of learning”, can barely be identified as belonging to a specific genre. Three of the short “contemplations” are about Jesus. They seem to have the form of a “parable” or “sermon”, but have neither gist nor meaning in common with Jesus’ parables or sermons. When Aucamp elucidates Jesus, he writes against the Biblical text. He presents Jesus as merely a human being. His humanising of Jesus bears no resemblance to the Biblical text.
The Bible and religion have strongly influenced the authorship of Hennie Aucamp. When read from a religious perspective, his first volume of short stories, Een somermiddag, gains in meaning. The Bible formed stories of enduring meaning and high literary quality in his short-story oeuvre. The earliest stimulus for the Decadent sense of life in his cabaret and song lyrics was provided by the Book of Proverbs. At the same time, verses from both wisdom books of the Old Testament, Ecclesiastes and Proverbs, were the inspiration for his aphorisms.
Hennie Aucamp’s prose, especially his stories about the connectedness of people to the environment and culture of the Stormberge, was influenced by the Bible. Aucamp’s break with Calvinism was, however, needed in order for his authorship to develop fully and to become so versatile. This created the space for his stories about Romantic and Decadent archetypes. Aucamp’s work was therefore not inspired only by the Bible, even though his mastery of the word is permanently influenced by the Bible. The Bible and religion might have been a richer source for his writing were it not for the fact that it was restricted to his youth as a member of a close-knit family on the farm, Rust-mijn-ziel in the Stormberge.
Keywords: Afrikaans short stories, Bible and literature, Decadentism, Hennie Aucamp, imagination, Lina Spies, religion and literature, Romanticism
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