Books Column: Waking up strange after encounters with my literary heroes

Against conventional advice, I’ve met many of my heroes – literary heroes, that is. By the dozen, in fact: enough to fill the pages of a bestiary, and what a haphazard assortment of semi-mythical creatures that would make.

I learnt quickly that they’re ordinary folk, one’s literary heroes, lacking horns, but all the while sharing a quality that took me a long time to put my finger on. I now explain it like this: a stranger lives inside each of them, in a kind of emergency situation that is barely tolerable. The status of this stranger may change over time – outrage at its presence can become grudging acknowledgment, or even something akin to friendship – but the emergency itself, the fact of the stranger, never abates.

My pet theory is that this uneasy cohabitation leads to a quality of personality that helps drive the writer to pre-eminence – alongside, of course, their glittering work. A person produces a certain vibration when a stranger dwells within. Others pick up on it.

By contrast, I’ve also known writers aplenty whose internal guest rooms for strangers are empty – and what’s interesting about them is that their books, well crafted though they might be, suffer steeper odds against achieving acclaim. 

Finally, there are the writers who attempt to invent their strangers, conjure the presence of another to fill their forlorn inner chambers, but this mainly leads to a whiff of mould, of something painted over, a grim mark that the ideas and the work might, in the end, be rot. 

Back to my heroes, the possessed – or perhaps “possessed” is the wrong word, better would be “the attended”, by an attendant who never leaves. You see, when you share a personal moment with one, sometimes the stranger who is also present during that moment has an effect on you. After the meeting, perhaps followed by a drink alone and a restless night, you yourself wake up strange.

I once shared a private taxi with Mzwakhe Mbuli. I had been frittering away the time with small talk when the car turned on to Beach Road in Sea Point – we were headed to the SABC’s recording studio there. The Atlantic sparkled beyond the Promenade, and I uttered some triviality about an administrative problem I faced. The poet looked at me wearily, like I was his last remaining fool to suffer, then said a single word that was so warmly given it has rung in my ears like a distant ship horn in the fog ever since. “Overcome!” he commanded. I’ve woken up strange a thousand times to this sound.

I was invited to lunch with Arundhati Roy in Joburg’s northern suburbs, during one of her book tours. As our small party discovered, she can speak merrily and at length on any subject – a brilliant raconteuse as well as a brilliant writer. She and I walked through the restaurant together, and she produced a few giddily unrepeatable truths about life on planet Earth that caused a glowing 3-D blueprint to bloom in my mind, for seeing the world anew, in all its moral dimensionality. It was a staggering revelation, especially considering she was giggling the entire time. How strange it made me feel – how often I’ve woken to the ghostly memory of that floating blueprint.

I was allowed to lurk in eTV’s Cape Town studios when Edward Said came in for an interview. I left strange, not because of anything he said to me, but because he mentioned the name of my then-partner, who worked at the station, on screen as I watched – shifting in his seat, waiting for the interview to start, looking for someone to assist him. It seemed to me a moment that one should put in a jar like a lightning bug. Occasionally I wake up strange, remembering the light in the jar.

Sometimes the presence of the stranger leaps up at me from a book, whether I have met its author or not. This happened long ago with Peter Handke, the Austrian novelist and playwright who received the Nobel Prize in 2019. Notable is that, before the Swedish Academy made its decision, he had for more than a decade prior been known as a Bosnian genocide revisionist. (He spoke at Slobodan Milošević’s funeral, for pity’s sake!) A literary hero first, though, for me.

The book of his that made me wake up strange, The Left-Handed Woman, reappeared in my study recently, as I unpacked it from another box taken out of storage. There it lay on the cold floor, kicked cravenly into the “maybe” pile: the work of a future denialist. But also: the mind that crafted an image (in translation) that I have carted around for 30 years, in relation to moments of emotional distress. The woman in the story, having just watched her ex drive away, “went to the coat rack beside the door and thrust her head in among the coats”. Reading that phrase for the first time changed me for good. I’m pleased never to have come near its author and his stranger, though.

Amos Oz, VS Naipaul and Philip Roth also came out of the box, with their immaculate images and phrases, which have turned me strange at various points over the years. If I had the opportunity, would I meet them, and brush against the strangers they bore along? Probably. Damn.

There: in my bestiary, writers – and their strangers – may be found for everyone to loathe and love, including me.

Jacques Derrida, the final boss of writers, was not in the box, but that does not pose a problem: I met him in Cape Town in 1998. Add him to the bestiary. He’d arrived to give a lecture on forgiveness, and typically his conclusion tied us into Gordian knots. Forgiveness achieves its highest purpose, he observed, when the acts being forgiven are unforgivable. I spoke to him briefly, snapped his photo, then replayed his lecture in my mind for hours. Talk about waking up strange, after hearing that. His words ring down the years to the present moment, calling us to pull our heads out from among the coats.

I wonder if many of the others I’ve noted here would go for that, though. I’m unsure. The strangers within seem to move in other directions. Perhaps I should sleep on it, and wake to see if estrangement is indeed our fate, or if there’s any scope left for turning sympathetically strange, yet again. DM

Ben Williams is the Publisher of The Johannesburg Review of Books.