Once we were sisters
Sheila Kohler
Publisher: Penguin Random House
ISBN: 9780143129295
Faced with others’ pain, we close doors, as on a child’s tantrums: it’s for their good, we assure ourselves. Or we distract: hospital visitors proffering the minutiae of our colds and coughs at the amputee’s bedside. Self-regard is inevitable.
Sheila Kohler’s tender, searing autobiographical memoir is emotionally and technically intelligent, shaped by a sense of the dangers of self-regard. Her primary focus is the 1950s relationship between two sisters, four years apart, at home. This was a “vast”, walled Dunkeld, Johannesburg, property: a children’s paradise of pool, fish ponds, tennis court, golf course, orchard, gardens and “acres of wild veld”.
Some three decades later, in 1979, Maxine, the elder, died in a car crash after a party; the driver, her husband, Carl, survived. Sheila believes this was murder; the underlying action of the memoir has several elements: commemoration and healing; it is also a quest to understand the past as present experience in writing and reading. This is the mode of reverie; the connection to “reverence” and “revere” is implicit. Sheila’s writing engages the reader in fusing past and present.
The narrative thus eschews the elegiac: nostalgia – the word derives from the Greek words for “home” and “pain”. It immobilised Lot’s wife. Thus, Kohler uses the present tense; past and present are the now of writing and reading.
Freud defined remembering as a necessary step towards forgetting – or letting go, as the wimpy jargon has it. (Wouldn’t it be nice if the ravening beasts of memory would obligingly depart?) And, the dead sister and the conviction that she was murdered are integrated in Sheila’s own personality and life now.
Sheila uses the resonant term “absent presences”, which suggests the still point in a hurricane’s swirling of memories − of family, childhood and growing up, marriages, children, return visits, travels and travail.
The sisters grew up in the 1950s. Fathers of that class, like Mr Kohler (of German extraction), worked and tended to be unavailable to children; mothers tended to be idle. (In my prep school class, a decade later, mine was the only mother with a working career; accordingly, other boys believed we were very poor.) Mr Kohler had founded and ran a profitable paper-manufacturing business. He was 20 years older than his wife; when the girls were in junior school, he died of heart disease (a typical fate of men in that class). And, as typically, the mother inherited the millions, and servants parented.
The mother, whose origins seem obscure (the couple met in Kimberley), was preoccupied with forms of self-gratification, and she presided over a court of avaricious sisters. She is depicted cooing solicitously at Carl’s hospital bedside, forbidding Sheila to investigate the death.
Maxine married an outsider, Carl, an anglicised Afrikaner from Ermelo, who trained as a heart surgeon in South Africa and abroad, and practised successfully. They would have six children. To Sheila, Carl remained a louring, violent and resentful presence: he used his children to regulate his wife; he physically abused the family; on occasion, he had the maidservants pin Maxine down so he could beat her. The line by the playwright, Auguste Villiers de l'Isle-Adam, comes to mind: “Living? Our servants will do it for us.”
In 1956, aged 17 and after high school, Sheila left South Africa to travel and study in Europe, notably in fields customarily in women’s domain: art, languages and literature. At that time, Coriolanus’s “There is a world elsewhere” was a given that successive forms of identity politics would preclude.
Travel, education and flight are motifs of the narrative. The sisters met in Europe and later the United States, renewing their relationship, but leaving Sheila with anguish and guilt, and some fear for Maxine in her abusive marriage. Sheila’s own feckless, womanising husband was as abusive, in his way, as Carl. The sisters chose men who were unavailable, financially dependent and sexually ambivalent: a toxic mix. Sheila describes how, later, Maxine found Carl in physical intimacy with a man. She informed his father, an act of desperation and shock as dangerous as dousing flames with petrol.
A constant in Sheila’s mind was Maxine, before her wedding, describing an anonymous phone call, where the woman begged her to safeguard herself and not marry Carl.
The ominous husbands in the memoir contrast with the portrait of the silent, forbearing and compassionate manservant, John, who consistently cared for the sisters in childhood and after. The portrait conforms to a colonial literary type, Umhlopogaas, the noble, savage character of Rider Haggard’s Nadia the lily and Alan Quatermain1.
The private schools, the travel, properties bought in Italy and France, the pursuit of new languages and study presuppose wealth: it was a given, like water for goldfish. The remark of an Irish literary critic, Mary Colum, to Ernest Hemingway, is relevant: “I think you’ll find the only difference between the rich and other people is that the rich have more money.”
The scale is indicated by the father’s legacy to the mother − the equivalent of today’s R110 million ($8,5 million). After the mother’s death, her own sisters, the wicked aunts – whom Sheila, classically self-educated, called the Furies – inherited it.
Both sisters chose damaged, thus dangerous, men, and both had many children – both emblems of hope and faith, and liabilities. Family life here is shadowed over time. Sheila suggests that her writing is ultimately a source of healing. It had two phases: in stories and novels, she fictionalises the past, sometimes reordering it with the obsessive whirling quality of a dog seeking a comfortable position in a basket. The memoir faces the past as it was, casting aside the necessary subterfuges of fiction: she writes her own story in the first person, the present suffused by the past.
The style is rich. Being brief, clear and perfectly cadenced, sentences have a rich penumbra of suggestiveness.
The memoir is arranged as brief, unchronological chapters in which, broadly, descents to the dark past and ascents to bright present clarity alternate: they blur. An admirably crafted prose style uses perfectly cadenced paired sentences; penumbrae of dread and recovery shimmer about them.
Sheila describes her return after Maxine’s death:
This is a world where appearances, above all, count, where sorrow is not expressed. We are all pretending that all is for the best in the best of worlds, even a tragedy of this kind. We are expected to go on bravely without complaint or voicing what we feel in our hearts.
My aunt has other motives for wanting to separate me from my mother. She wants my mother’s money for herself and her daughter. She wants her peace of mind.
And her last view of her sister:
She stands in the sunshine, and the wind whips her blond curls across her high forehead, and the light sleeves of her cream sundress beat against her smooth young arms like little wings.
In the first, that punning “peace of mind” has the deadly, economical suggestiveness of good poetry. “Beat” in the second is similarly ominous.
For decades after the murder, as a writer of fiction living in the United States, Sheila mined, refined and altered the personal: she thus edited memory, or replaced it – an assertion of authorial power and authority over personal memory. She describes reinventing characters and their relationships. In different ways, and to different degrees, this is what writers do – memory is, after all, the mother of the Muses. It may encase and bury the pain, or transform and absorb it. Fiction can indeed displace memories.
In Sheila’s case, personal pain and hauntings may have been immune to literary treatment. Perhaps time’s passage enabled nonfictional address. Or, Carl’s death and the children coming to adulthood allowed the memoir to be published. It is dedicated to the adult children.
1 The name, according to Stephen Coan in his 2001 edited version of Haggard’s Diary of an African Journey (1914), published by UKZN Press, is a corruption of Mhlophekazi.
The post Once we were sisters by Sheila Kohler: a book review appeared first on LitNet.