Fugard - Cousins: a Memoir

COUSINS

Books by Athol Fugard available from TCG

Blood Knot and Other Plays

A Lesson from Aloes

Marigolds in August and The Guest

(Two screenplays by Athol Fugard and Ross Devenish)

My Children! My Africa!

Notebooks: 19601977

Playland and A Place with the Pigs

The Road to Mecca

Statements

Valley Song

Also Available:

Truths the Hand Can Touch: The Theatre of Athol Fugard

by Russell Vandenbroucke

COUSINS

A Memoir

ATHOL FUGARD

Theatre Communications Group
1997

Copyright 1994, 1997 by Athol Fugard

Cousins: A Memoir is published by Theatre Communications Group, Inc., 355 Lexington Ave., New York, NY 100170217.

All rights reserved. Except for brief passages quoted in newspaper, magazine, radio or television reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying or recording, or by an information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

Professionals and amateurs are hereby warned that this material, being fully protected under the Copyright Laws of the United States of America and all other countries of the Berne and Universal Copyright Conventions, is subject to a royalty. All rights including, but not limited to, professional, amateur, recording, motion picture, recitation, lecturing, public reading, radio and television broadcasting, and the rights of translation into foreign languages are expressly reserved. Particular emphasis is placed on the question of readings and all uses of this book by educational institutions, permission for which must be secured from the authors representative: Beth Blickers, William Morris Agency, 1350 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10019, (212) 586-5100.

Cousins: A Memoir was published in South Africa by Witwatersrand University Press, 1 Jan Smuts Avenue, Johannesburg, 2001 South Africa, and is reprinted with permission.

Many thanks to Glenda Swart in collecting the photographs used in this book.

Excerpts: The Children of Snchez by Oscar Lewis, copyright 1961 by Oscar Lewis, published by Random House, New York; Netsilik Eskimo quote is from the preface to Eskimo Poems from Canada and Greenland by Knud Johan Victor Rasmussen, translated by Tom Lowenstein, copyright 1973 by Tom Lowenstein, published by University of Pittsburgh Press, Pittsburgh; translation of Cavafys The City is from The Penguin Book of Greek Verse, edited and translated by Constantine A. Trypanis, copyright 1971 by Constantine A. Trypanis, Penguin Books, London; Light on the Ancient Worlds introduction is by Frithjof Schuon, translated by Lord Northbourne, copyright 1965 by Lord Northbourne, Perennial Books, London; The Messingkauf Dialogues by Bertolt Brecht, translated by John Willet, copyright 1965 by John Willet, Methuen, London.

Fugard, Athol.

Cousins : a memoir / Athol Fugard.

ISBN 978-1-55936-734-9

1. Fugard, AtholChildhood and youth. 2. Dramatists, South African20th centuryBiography. 3. Port Elizabeth (South Africa)Social life and customs. 4. CousinsSouth AfricaBiography.

I. Title.

PR9369.3.F3Z464 1997

822dc21 976241

CIP

Book design and typography by Wesley B. Tanner / Passim Editions

First TCG printing, September 1997

COUSINS

Contents

I remember my childhood as a time of secrets.

You always made the announcement that you had a secret in that taunting sing-song voice reserved for very special challenges in the school playground. Ive got a secret! Ive got a secret! I cant remember any toy or plaything being as precious as that wonderfully mysterious something I know which you only dared to share with your very, very best friend, and even then only in whispers in a dark corner after blood oaths of continued secrecy. The hushed reverence in which we wrapped and unwrapped our precious secrets revealed a recognition of their subtle power over our lives. Young as we are when we first start having them and locking them away inside ourselves, they are nevertheless a very serious business; they will exert a profound influence in determining the sort of man or woman we will grow up to be. I believe this to be particularly true of writers and their writing which is, after all, essentially a trade in secrets. It is certainly so in my case. In one way or another, and in a variety of disguises, everything I have written has been an attempt to share secrets with you, either as the reader you are at this moment or as a past audience member at one of my plays. This little memoir is yet another attempt at sharing, and these secrets are possibly the best kept of all those Ive ever had. I make that claim for it because if it hadnt been for a chance reunion in Cape Town with one of my cousins, whom I hadnt seen for forty years, I doubt whether I would even have known I had it.

I must be careful though not to raise false expectations in you. It was hidden away for so long not because it was the biggest and best, the most shocking of them allit is in fact only average as secrets gobut simply in order to protect a very delicate dynamic in my writing from premature and crude examination, particularly my own.

Secrets have an ambiguous nature, however, and as important as it is to lock them away safely, so also is the compulsion to share them. A very necessary skill for a writer is the ability to judge when that moment has come. I know it is time now to share this one, which is the story of my relationship with two cousinsJohnnie and Garthand the major role they played in my evolution as a writer. It is in any case not true that secrets are safe in the grave. Unlike our bones, they are not biodegradable. They can be dug up intact long after everything has gone the way of dust unto dust. The vast unearthing of secrets by the scholarship of contemporary biography is ample proof of that.

One thing more. At any one moment in our lives we are all in the middle of a multiplicity of stories, all of them being spun out at the same time and woven together to form its fabric. Cousins is only one of the many threads that went in this fashion into the making of my childhood. Thus, for example, in the years covered by this story of my two cousins, I was also living out the story of my relationship with Sam and Willie, which I tried to tell in fictional terms in Master Haroldand the boys. Those two beautiful men hardly figure, however, in the pages that follow. Similarly, there is only a hint of what are unquestionably the biggest and best of the stories of my childhood: those about my mother and father. I am not yet up to telling them.

Athol Fugard

November 1993

Sneeuberg Lodge

New Bethesda

Family Photo: The author at age seven (bottom, far left) with his extended family in Port Elizabeth, South Africa.

The authors mother is in the middle row, second from the right; her sister Ann is second from the left; his father is in the top row behind the authors grandmother; Cousin Johnny is sitting in the middle of the bottom step; the authors brother Royal is sitting on the far right of the bottom step; and between Royal and Johnny is the authors sister Glenda.