Remembering Guy Butler, a scholar who brought literature to life

“We expect him to pass in the second class.”

How could Professor Butler know that? I mean, I hadn’t even finished writing exams! And when the results confirmed I’d received a lower second, I was convinced the game had been rigged. For years that single sentence was all I remembered from my valedictory testimonial.

Guy Butler was professor of both English and Speech & Drama, and as those were my two majors, I was destined to see a lot of him during my years at Rhodes University.

***

He made a late and untheatrical entrance and stood there catching his breath as he faced us first-year drama students expectantly clutching our brand-new copies of Brooks and Heilman’s Understanding Drama. He brushed his refractory quiff out of his eyes as he told us to turn to page 86 and asked who’d read the play. 

Although my familiarity with dramatic literature was decidedly limited, my first encounter with a mediaeval morality play convinced me that Everyman just had to be the most boring play in the canon. But Guy Butler obviously didn’t think so. There was a twinkle in his eye as he smiled enigmatically at what could only have been a distant and pleasurable memory.

I had no idea what a professor of drama ought to look like, but I’m sure I’d imagined something more flamboyant than this seemingly staid figure in a jacket and tie. 

He looked ancient – at least 50 – and unmistakably of my father’s generation, which meant he couldn’t possibly be interesting. I found it hard to imagine that he’d ever been young. 

Convention dictated that staff members address students as Mr or Miss and I felt rather grown up when a lecturer addressed me as Mr Akerman, but Prof Butler always called me Akerman. It irked me because I felt he regarded me as little more than an overgrown schoolboy.

I was vaguely aware that he’d written and published poetry. Posters of his plays – Take Root or Die and Cape Charade – adorned the foyer of the Rhodes Little Theatre. I was told they were about the 1820 Settlers. From the photos I’d seen of those Settlers, they seemed distinctly unglamorous dramatic material – men with gnarled faces and mutton-chop whiskers standing next to hatchet-faced harridans wearing bonnets. 

I was more drawn to iconoclastic playwrights on the international scene – the witty, anti-establishment tirades of John Osborne’s Jimmy Porter, Harold Pinter’s East Enders mumbling non sequiturs while they searched for the weasel under the cocktail cabinet and Samuel Beckett’s forlorn, music-hall tramps in the play where nothing happens, twice.

Although I knew I was born to play Hamlet, neither the play nor the part was on offer. In my second year, at the height of my antipathy towards organised religion, I was cast as the Reverend Young – a Wesleyan minister – in a new Guy Butler play titled Richard Gush of Salem. 

At the time, it escaped me that the play had been commissioned to commemorate the 150th anniversary of the arrival of the 1820 Settlers. I was more impressed by the fact that Capab (Cape Administration Performing Arts Board) had made three professional actors available to perform alongside staff members and students and that, during the September vacation, it would run for a week at the Labia Theatre in Cape Town.

In my third year, Prof directed A Midsummer Night’s Dream. 

This came less than a year after Peter Brook’s landmark staging of the play in Stratford-upon-Avon. People who’d seen the Brook production spoke about it as reverentially as pilgrims who’d seen the Virgin at Fatima in 1917, but Prof wasn’t impressed. Once again, Hamlet had eluded me and I had to settle for playing Lysander. 

I’d come a long way since reading Everyman and had even been to London, where I’d seen about 20 productions including Alan Bates as Hamlet and two shows with full-frontal nudity – Hair and Oh! Calcutta!

Although we knew nudity was a non-starter, we did ask Prof if – like in some London shows – we could make the occasional entrance through the auditorium instead of from the wings. He simply smiled that tolerant smile reserved for people who made stupid suggestions, told us to run the scene again, leaned back in the stalls with his eyes closed and listened to the beat of the iambic pentameters. 

Prof was not only one of South Africa’s pre-eminent Shakespearean scholars, he was also a champion of local writing in English. 

At his suggestion, the self-exiled William Plomer was invited to inaugurate the Wits conference on the future of South African literature in July 1956 and, thereafter, he continued to wage a long – and often lonely – campaign to have books by local writers prescribed at schools and universities. 

At the time I didn’t see the point. I was convinced that all South African writing – well, besides Athol Fugard and, perhaps, Herman Charles Bosman – was mediocre. I’d heard a Marxist Politics lecturer pronounce that Alan Paton’s Cry, the Beloved Country was marred by Anglican sentimentality – a judgement I uncritically embraced – and, although I hadn’t read it, I couldn’t imagine that The Story of an African Farm was in the same league as Wuthering Heights.

I was convinced Prof was a dyed-in-the-wool conservative – not only in his artistic tastes, but probably politically as well. But the way he ran the English Department contradicted that assumption. He seemed quite prepared to appoint staff whose approach to teaching and taste in literature was almost diametrically opposed to his own. Having said that, he made it abundantly clear where he stood. His Christian beliefs provided the lens through which he viewed the world and interpreted art.

When I returned from my visit to London, I smuggled in Bertrand Russell’s banned Why I Am Not a Christian and it became my new Gospel. 

I also liked the idea of Existentialism – although no one could ever explain it to me – and the plays the critic Martin Enslin had grouped together as the Theatre of the Absurd. Having grown up in apartheid South Africa, the meaninglessness of existence resonated with me. Prof didn’t buy into that and I remember him becoming apoplectic if anyone mentioned Beckett having been awarded the 1969 Nobel Prize in Literature.

Brook’s inspiration for his A Midsummer Night’s Dream came from his interaction with the Polish academic Jan Kott, whose Shakespeare Our Contemporary was published by Methuen in 1965. 

In the preface he wrote for the English translation, Brook drew parallels between autocratic Elizabethan England and the authoritarian police state of Soviet-controlled Poland. 

In a third-year essay, I cavalierly swept aside any possibility of Christian redemption in King Lear, embraced Kott’s apocalyptic worldview and supported my argument with a quotation from a chapter titled “King Lear, or Endgame”. Kott’s audacity in drawing parallels between Shakespeare and Beckett elicited an acerbic comment in red ballpoint – “Typical Kott rot!”

During the Michaelmas vacation in my third year, I received a letter from the English Department. I opened it and read with growing amazement that Prof had invited me to do Honours the following year. 

I was flattered, although possibly more amazed than flattered. I’d already set my sights on the Director’s Course at the Old Vic Theatre School in Bristol but had been told that a BA stood for Bugger All and that I’d need an Honours degree to qualify for a postgraduate course in the UK. The relatively new Drama Department didn’t offer Honours and, as I felt disinclined to change universities, I took what was on offer.

A perk of being a postgraduate was attending colloquia at High Corner. I vividly recall two of Prof’s guests that year. One was Richard Rive, who was doing doctoral research on Olive Schreiner in Oxford. His radio play Make Like Slaves had just won a BBC competition, and we listened to it while watching the reel-to-reel tape recorder. 

The other was the poet Uys Krige. He’d just completed a new Afrikaans translation of King Lear and told us how he’d approached the task. He said he first tackled the great speech that begins “Howl, howl, howl, howl! O you are men of stones”. Once he’d got that right, he said, it gave him the confidence he needed to complete the task.

The only drama on offer in English Honours was in a module called Elizabethans. So for six months Prof shared his passion for Shakespeare and his contemporaries and I never once quoted Kott in an essay. Honours consisted of several modules: Literary Criticism was mandatory, but others were electives. I’d never heard of Wole Soyinka or Chinua Achebe but seeing Olive Schreiner on the reading list persuaded me to give Africans a wide berth and, instead, I elected to do Americans. Studying The Great Gatsby seemed infinitely sexier than The Story of an African Farm. 

But electing specific modules turned out to be a curate’s egg. I took Moderns because I wanted to study Joseph Conrad; the downside was Henry James was also a modernist. There were just so many other things I’d rather have done than read the 650 pages of The Golden Bowl. But there was a price to pay for not putting in the work on Henry James. 

So are your sights set on RADA (Royal Academy of Dramatic Art)?

They don’t offer a director’s course.

I see.

I hope to get accepted by the Bristol Old Vic.

Oh yes, very good. I visited the school in 1960.

But there are only four places on the course.

And if you don’t get in?

I’ll try some others.

Well, here’s the testimonial you asked for.

Thanks, Prof.

Best of luck, Akerman.

***

While studying in the UK, my curiosity got the better of my disdainful attitude towards South African literature and I read The Story of an African Farm. 

That was a mistake. It touched a raw nerve, precipitated chronic homesickness and made me a Stranger to Europe. Had he known, I’m sure it would have brought a knowing smile to Prof’s lips. 

In 1975, I relocated to Amsterdam. Although I came to admire the work of several Dutch writers, I became increasingly focused on South African literature. JM Coetzee had recently made his sensational debut with Dusklands and, before long, he and Nadine Gordimer were awarded the prestigious Booker Prize. Vernie February – academic and poet – was exiled in the Netherlands and, usually over a couple of beers, he’d give me some pointers. 

Have you read Turbott Wolfe? 

No, who wrote that?

William Plomer.

You think they’ll have a copy in the South African library?

Of course, but ask for the 1965 edition.

Why?

Laurens van der Post’s Introduction. Read that and you’ll learn a lot.

Initially I did source these books from the Zuid-Afrikahuis library on the Keizersgracht. Although this institute had a complex and controversial relationship with the South African government, it just happened to be the only South African library that stocked all the books banned by the apartheid regime. 

It became less accessible after January 1984 when a radical grouping – possibly the Revolutionary Anti-Racist Action, aka RaRa – attacked the library and threw many rare books into the canal. After that I opened an account with Clarke’s Bookshop in Cape Town.

By then I’d also written and staged Somewhere on the Border. Initially, with only one play to my name, I wasn’t sure if that entitled me to call myself a writer. When I got over that, I certainly didn’t consider myself a Dutch writer, even if I had written my play in Amsterdam. In the woke parlance of today, I identified as a South African writer. 

In 1983 I posted a copy of my play to Athol Fugard, but it never arrived. A few months later, the Cape Times reported that the play had been banned “as a publication”, although it could be performed if what the Directorate of Publications had found offensive was deleted. 

In 1986 a group of actors based in Bloemfontein staged the play at the National Arts Festival – without expunging what was deemed offensive. I may have been vaguely aware that Prof was the moving spirit behind this festival, although when I was subsequently approached by NELM (the National English Literary Museum, now Amazwi) asking if they could purchase a copy of the play, I didn’t realise that too had been his brainchild.

Before the RaRa attack on the South African library, I’d borrowed Peter Alexander’s Roy Campbell: a Critical Biography. I’d encountered some of Campbell’s poetry at prep school and at Rhodes I’d also attended a guest lecture during which Alan Paton spoke about his preparations for writing Campbell’s biography, a task he later handed over to Peter Alexander. 

In England I’d read Campbell’s Light on a Dark Horse, his often-improbable autobiography, in which he reinforced his he-man image with stories of dangling his wife out of the window of their Soho apartment by her ankles to teach her who wore the trousers in their marriage. So it came as quite a surprise to read that Mary had had an affair that had almost destroyed their marriage – and that her lesbian lover was Vita Sackville-West. 

That planted the seed of an idea for a play that I’d write several years later.

Peter Alexander told another story that intrigued me. In January 1955, Roy Campbell – then resident in Portugal – was in London to see doctors. 

Prof, who also just happened to be in London, wanted to meet the great poet and thank him in person for the favourable review he’d given his debut volume of poetry, Stranger to Europe. 

Campbell suggested a pre-prandial drink at his local pub and, inevitably, they remained there until closing time and never got round to lunch. The way Prof described this meeting to Alexander gave me my first glimpse of him as a younger man. 

In Prof’s telling of the story Roy Campbell called him Butler. By then I’d read many stories by and about Campbell and in none of them had I ever come across him using somebody’s surname as a familiar form of address. 

In Athol Fugard’s Dedication to Olive Schreiner and After – essays on Southern African literature in honour of Guy Butler – he recalls sending a poem to Prof in 1957 and receiving the comment: “Fugard, this needs more work!” That’s when it occurred to me that it was a British public-school thing that Prof must have picked up at Oxford and that it was a form of friendly rather than condescending address.

In 1990 I returned to South Africa after an absence of 17 years and was invited to be an adjudicator of student drama at the National Arts Festival. 

One evening I attended a dinner at the 1820 Settler Monument – another initiative Prof played no small part in realising – and found myself sitting opposite the man himself. I was sitting next to his wife and, as I knew they had two adopted children, I told Jean how I’d just met my birth mother for the first time. Then I noticed Prof smiling at me.

So you’re based overseas, Akerman?

In Amsterdam.

Like it?

Well, it’s not home.

Yes, I’m sure –

I read about the liquid lunch you had with Roy Campbell in The Catherine Wheel.

Where was that?

Peter Alexander’s biography.

Oh yes, of course. Actually, I’ve written a longer account of that meeting.

Where’s that?

In the last volume of my autobiography.

Oh, sorry, but I haven’t read it.

It’s only coming out next year.

What’s the title?

A Local Habitation.

I’ll look out for it. I’ve been collecting material on Campbell since 1988.

Why’s that?

I want to write a play.

About Campbell?

Yes. 

Well, while you’re here visit NELM. We have quite a few Campbell manuscripts.

One of the offerings at the Main Festival was a play called Demea – by none other than Guy Butler. I was intrigued to see this transposition of the Medea story to 19th-century South Africa. 

It was overlong and I felt the classical story became somewhat smothered by an overlay of South African folk theatre, but it was heartening to see actors from so many ethnic backgrounds doing a play that went beyond protest theatre. 

In my notebook I wrote, “I think it points the way to the kind of theatre this country needs in the future. […] The best scenes were two-handers. Butler doesn’t write special or revealing dialogue, but he can handle an argument. At times the play was deeply moving.”

I wondered why he’d decided to write another play 20 years after Richard Gush of Salem and then discovered Demea predated that play. It was written in 1959 in response to what he referred to in his Author’s Note as “the idealistic Verwoerdian mania” of those times. 

Because of the racist laws the play set out to critique, he’d had to wait 30 years for a production.

My student perception of Prof as politically conservative was clearly uninformed. I was vaguely aware that shortly after I’d left South Africa, the term Butlerism was coined by Mike Kirkwood to denote “a colonial mindset masquerading as liberal humanism” and, at the time, I’d probably have supported the charge. 

However, I’d now come to find more-Marxist-than-thou political posturing unhelpful and increasingly tiresome. If his Christianity informed his politics, the same could be said of Albert Luthuli, Beyers Naudé, Desmond Tutu and Trevor Huddleston.

I recently decided I ought to become better acquainted with Prof’s dramatic output. In 1947, the National Theatre Organisation (NTO) was established as the first subsidised professional theatre in the country.

In 1950 a national playwriting competition was announced as part of the upcoming tricentennial celebrations of the landing of Jan van Riebeeck. Guy Butler entered a play called The Dam just before the closing deadline and was pleasantly surprised when he was informed in 1951 that he’d won the coveted prize, which included an NTO production of his play and the considerable sum of £500.

The play is not a celebration of Van Riebeeck and was dedicated to Huddleston and the priests of the Church of Christ the King in Sophiatown. This was at a time when Huddleston and Nelson Mandela were campaigning side-by-side against apartheid policies being implemented by Malan’s government.

There was no great tradition of South African playwrighting for him to draw on. Stephen Black – Love and the Hyphen (1908) and Helena’s Hope, Ltd. (1910) – is widely regarded as our first professional dramatist. There was nothing much after him and, as his satirical plays were unlikely to have inspired Prof, it’s understandable why he – as an Oxford graduate – looked to Britain for his role models.

Christopher Fry and TS Eliot’s verse dramas were in vogue and it’s unsurprising that Prof, whose poetry had already been published in magazines, should be drawn to this form of drama. 

Although this can’t be said of Shakespeare’s plays – most of which were written in iambic pentameter – most modern verse dramas seem rather thin on character psychology. As people don’t speak verse, these dramas can come across as stagey and stilted. Having said that, he created a strong protagonist, a strong antagonist and powerful dramatic arguments – even if the ending feels inconclusive.

Take Root or Die is more of a pageant than a play and is populated by many historical characters who came out as 1820 Settlers. There are many set speeches and characters narrate rather than convey information through dramatic confrontation. 

In that sense, it’s similar to Cape Charade. The protagonist of this play is Andrew Geddes Bain – remembered for the mountain passes that bear his name – and his creation is Kaatjie Kekkelbek, who appears as a character in one of the earliest pieces of writing for the South African stage. The action of the play coincides with the visit of a Russian naval expedition in Simon’s Town. One of the characters who interacts with Bain is the official historian Ivan Goncharov who’d publish his novel Oblomov six years later. The ingredients are promising, but it is more history lesson than play.

When it was first staged, some critics claimed Richard Gush of Salem was his best play. On rereading it 55 years later, I found many of the minor characters – including the Reverend Young – little more than thumbnail sketches. And yet the dramatic confrontation between Gush and his antagonist, in which he defends his pacifist stance in the face of menacing Xhosa warriors, is deeply affecting. He clearly drew inspiration from his own father’s Quakerism.

But it is his second play, The Dove Returns, that moved me most. It’s set during and shortly after the South African War (1899–1902). The characters and the dramatic arguments are strongly presented and many passages brought tears to my eyes. 

And yet in 1955 when Prof went to see an NTO rehearsal in Pretoria, he was so disappointed and alarmed by what they were doing to his text that he never went back and didn’t attend opening night. Sadly that experience must have shaken his faith in what I consider his best play.

His plays are about many things, but a recurring theme that resonates with me is a sense of belonging, of characters feeling they belong to Africa. And, although Demea had to wait 30 years to be staged because of the ethnic diversity of its cast, The Dam, The Dove Returns and Cape Charade all featured coloured characters. 

They were not there for decorative purposes; their stories and their points of view were integral to what the plays have to say. It was possible to stage these plays because coloured characters were played by white actors, a convention that – initially because apartheid legislation prohibited mixed casts and later because of the scarcity of professional, coloured actors – continued in Fugard plays into the 1970s.

Prof’s involvement in the theatre began at Oxford, continued during his years at Wits and gained momentum at Rhodes. He’d worked as a stage manager, employed his carpentry skills in set construction and then produced (i.e. directed) productions. He was determined to get a proper theatre for Rhodes – which he eventually did – and, starting with an open-air production of Julius Caesar in 1951, staged a play almost every year. 

One of his great triumphs, in collaboration with the Music Department, was his 1963 production of Everyman. Tony Voss played the eponymous protagonist and – on a recent visit from Australia where he now lives – he told me they also performed at mission schools during their tour of the Eastern Cape and when Death made his appearance, some members of the audience ran out screaming. So perhaps that accounts for Prof’s enigmatic smile when he lectured us on the play. 

I felt I owed it to him – and, possibly, to myself – to reassess Everyman, so I re-read the play 56 years after it stunned me into a state of catatonic boredom. 

The authors of Understanding Drama neglected to mention something I discovered while living in the Netherlands: Everyman is a Dutch play. Elckerlijc was written circa 1495 and was translated into English a decade later. There is much in the play that is of (historical) interest and I find nothing to fault in the moral argument it advances. Having said that, I don’t think I’d queue up to buy a ticket – unless the production had been directed by a theatre magician like Peter Brook.

***

On one level Dark Outsider – the title I’d chosen for my play about the exiled Campbell – was a debate I was having with myself about my own exile, and I wanted to be at home when I wrote it. In May 1991 I returned for an extended period. I spent the first six weeks in Johannesburg, where I read everything by and about him, making copious notes and plotting the outline. 

When I re-read Peter Alexander’s account of Prof’s meeting with Campbell in London, I remembered our conversation in Grahamstown (now Makhanda) the previous year, walked up to the Rosebank Library and took out their copy of A Local Habitation. The book contains much of interest besides his bibulous encounter with his poetic hero, which he poignantly characterised as two South African exiles weeping into their beers beside the waters of Babylon.

His book also reminded me that Prof was born and bred in Cradock. That provided an unexpected connection as I’d recently discovered that’s where some of my biological antecedents had lived. My maternal great-grandfather was buried there and my grandfather – Edward Farnham – was born there in 1867, the year the 12-year-old Olive Schreiner went to live in Cradock and received her first years of formal schooling. 

Most of my Irish ancestors had left before the Butlers settled in Cradock, and Prof was three years old when Olive Schreiner was reinterred just outside the little town. 

When Prof was eight or nine, Mary Butler – his journalist aunt who’d attended the reinterment on 13 August 1921 – took him up Buffelskop. Standing at her ironstone sarcophagus made a profound impression on the young Guy. I imagine this moment as the epiphany from which he emerged destined to be a champion of South African writing. 

It took four years for Dark Outsider to find its way onto a stage. I directed it for Pact (Performing Arts Council of the Transvaal) and the production was presented at the Main Festival in Grahamstown. 

On the Saturday night, Guy and Jean Butler came up to me after the performance. They were smiling.

Marvellous, Akerman. 

Thank you … Guy.

Bloody marvellous.

It was lovely, Anthony.

Thank you, Jean.

Come around for coffee tomorrow morning.

Coffee?

You remember where we live, don’t you? 

Of course, I do.

Bloody marvellous.

Guy seemed frail, but as he and Jean wandered off, I felt I’d just been upgraded from a second class to a first. Dark Outsider had opened to good reviews and I’d received compliments from many quarters, but somehow it was special coming from Guy. 

I felt like a son who’d finally won his father’s approval. On Sunday morning I arrived at High Corner at the appointed time.

Come in, come in.

Milk and sugar, Anthony?

I think he might prefer a whisky.

Whisky?

Or is it too early for you?

No, no, I’ll have a whisky.

Bloody marvellous.

If you don’t mind, I’m sticking with coffee, Guy.

And Akerman and I will have whisky.

Just a single!

You captured the characters perfectly. And I was bowled over by the casting. The performances were bloody marvellous. It was exactly how I knew them.

Did you ever meet Vita Sackville-West?

No, she’s the only one I never met. But Mary, Van der Post, Plomer, Uys...

He’s the only one I ever met.

Uys?

Yes.

Where was that?

Here. In this room. During one of the colloquia you organised when I was doing Honours.

What year was that, Akerman?

1972.

Let me just write that down. I’m seventy-seven now and if I don’t write things down, I don’t remember. What years were you at Rhodes?

1969 to 1972.

Let me just write that down.

When you met Roy Campbell in The Catherine Wheel –

Yes, we got pretty woozy. Another whisky?

Thank you.

You said Campbell gave you his recipe for bobotie.

How do you know that?

It’s in A Local Habitation.

Oh yes, he said, “Butler, I’m going to give you something imperishable that you can enjoy for the rest of your life.” I took out my notebook and pencil, thinking he was going to tell me a great universal truth. “What is it, Mr Campbell?” He put down his beer glass and said, “My recipe for bobotie”.

And you lost the notebook.

How do you know?

It’s also in your book.

Of course, but four years later I was touring the United States on a Carnegie Travelling Fellowship and we had dinner with Professor Heilman in Seattle.

Was he the same Heilman who co-authored Understanding Drama?

Yes, that’s right. Anyway, his wife served this delicious bobotie. She said she’d been given the recipe by a touring South African poet called Roy Campbell. Here you are – I think I poured you a double. 

It looks more like a treble. 

Anyway, Jean got the recipe from Mrs Heilman.

I most certainly did!

I’m glad you put it in your book, because I’ve used it ever since.

Really? You know, when Rhodes awarded Van der Post an honorary doctorate, Jean served that bobotie at lunch.

And he said it was the best bobotie he’d ever tasted.

She offered him the recipe.

But he said he didn’t cook. 

Another whisky?

I haven’t finished this one yet.

You know, Akerman, I admire people who try to live from their writing.

It’s precarious, Guy.

I suppose I’d have used what talent I have more, if I hadn’t been in the university. 

I still have the testimonial Guy handed to me in November 1972. 

Although I must have read it all the way through at the time, after reading I was expected to pass in the second class my bruised ego obviously blotted out the rest. 

What he went on to write was generous and almost embarrassingly complimentary – and, for all those years, I was the one at fault for misjudging him. DM