A tribute for Athol Fugard at sixty

For the record, Harold Athol Lannigan Fugard was born in Middelburg, Cape Province, on 11 June 1932. In the forty or so years he has been writing, he has produced twenty-one plays (two unpublished), four film scripts, and two novels (one of which he dumped into a lagoon at Fiji). Quite apart from the plays he has directed or acted in, this adds up to a formidable life's work. Poeta nascitur, non fit: you cannot make a silk purse from a sow's ear. The elusive thing variously called temperament, personality, disposition, gift, may be developed or nurtured, but it cannot be created. As Aristotle says in the Poetics: "The greatest thing by far is to have a command of metaphor. This alone cannot be imparted by another; it is the mark of genius" (104; XXII.ix). We should be grateful that educators, social engineers, politicians, and reformers are not able to figure out the source of creativity. They may destroy it, as they did in the cases of Ernest Bloch, Issac Babel, and a host of others, but they cannot make it. That is our hope, our light, our redemption. For in that creative source, as untouchable as the sun, lies the mysterious gift of story. Reading Fugard's Notebooks, or listening to his personal recollections, does not really clarify how everything began. I have to warn myself not to come up with a post hoc propter hoc sort of explanation of his achievements. His wife, Sheila, recalls a highly strung, sensitive young Fugard who, on walking along the beach with her, was plunged into existential gloom and was "suffering tremendously because the tide was going out" (Gussow 61). Eight years later Fugard explained his feelings about time this way: It goes back to what I think is man's central dilemma: the fact that life dies. The span can literally be measured. . . . I know nothing about hereafters. I've not been able to escape being fascinated, depressed, appalled, challenged by the fact that one life is so much, and that is your chance to do it. And the passing of those seconds . . . it's death knocking at the door. (Wilhelm 112-13) I have known Athol Fugard as a friend for over twenty-five years. During that period, I think, his acute paranoia about time has mellowed into something richer and more generous. Now, instead of causing him to feel deeply threatened, time itself allows him to feel and understand the astonishing beauty and sadness of the world and its people. Like Pizzaro in Peter Shaffer's play The Royal Hunt of the Sun, he can say: Everything we feel is made of Time. All the beauties of life are shaped by it. Imagine a fixed sunset: the last note of a song that hung an hour, or a kiss for half of it. Try and halt a moment in our lives and it becomes maggoty at once. (64) In Fugard's early plays characters are often working against time. Throughout The Blood Knot, for example, an alarm clock is vociferously present. In People Are Living There the senile grandfather clock has to be kicked when it wants to strike more than seventeen. Characters often report on themselves, saying what sort of day they have had. Often they raise the question of the odds against ever getting themselves and their lives together again, or making a fresh start in life. Here are some examples from Nongogo: QUEENY: . . . You're stuck with it [your life] . . . him, me . . . Blackie . . . There's somebody else who wouldn't mind taking it apart and putting it together again, with a few improvements. But where do you start? JOHNNY: . . . sometimes I get the crazy idea that a man can change the world he lives in. Hell! You can't even change yourself. . . . I wanted to start today more than anything else in my life. I thought I'd been given my chance to start from the beginning. (79, 109, 112) Nowadays, I think, Fugard sees our situation much as Nikos Kazantzakis put it in The Saviors of God: "We come from a dark abyss, we end in a dark abyss, and we call the luminous interval life" (43). …