Novelist of South Africa1
The price of Diamonds is Dan Jacobson’s third novel. In another time, perhaps, or in another country, the consistently lavish praise heaped on Mr. Jacobson’s earlier works, The Trap and A Dance in the Sun, would have been enough to make the appearance of his third book a much awaited literary occasion. But he is, in this time of movements, trends, generations—when people get excited about new novels mostly in proportion to how much they reveal about the problems of our culture and what they predict about the moral and spiritual climate of our children—an intractably lone voice, and one that might seem too quiet to be heard above the beat and angry uproar. And then he writes about South Africa, a country which, for all its richness of political and social tension, seems to be rather far away from the center of our concerns. The New York Times Book Review, for instance, because The Price of Diamonds is about a crime and one of its leading characters a detective, saw fit to have the book reviewed by the man who runs the weekly column on mystery fiction. Once having been called a remarkable writer with a remarkable talent, Mr. Jacobson seems to present no further problems to his critics.
“Remarkable” is probably not the word for this work—it seems patronizing and improper when applied to a prose style so fixed and controlled and to a literary intention so concentrated, as do those other words for young writing, “promising” and “talented”—but Dan Jacobson is something better: a man whose character and intelligence grow into and out of one another, who has, in the service of that character and that intelligence, nothing left to learn about craft, and who says exactly what and as much as he means to say. These virtues (and put this way they do seem austere ones) are precisely the virtues needed in the management of Mr. Jacobson’s theme—which is, very crudely, the meaning of being an honorable man when to do so goes against the laws of the surrounding nature—and to convey the way he wants to look at things—which is with detachment and wisdom.
Mr. Jacobson was born and grew up in South Africa (he now lives in England), and South Africa is his subject and will probably continue to be so, under whatever name or location he gives it. For that country—which is a brilliantly concrete and specific place in his writing, full of landscapes, weathers, private languages—is also nothing less than the very special and pointed vision he has of the problem of being human. In no other country in the world, perhaps, do the conditions of everyday life make such an unending assault on the self-image of the man with a Western conscience as they do in Mr. Jacobson’s homeland. This assault on the self-image comes not merely from the fact that South African white society oppresses and terrorizes black men—an individual, as individual, can at least partially dissociate himself from the cruelty practiced by those around him, can even find it fertile ground for cultivating a feeling of heroism or righteousness. The problem that pursues Dan Jacobson through his books and stories grows out of the peculiar mixture of a life that is genuinely comfortable, pleasant, desirable even, set squarely on the foundations of another kind of life almost inconceivable in its squalor and dislocation and suffering. To the outsider haunted by the record of white exploitation of the blacks, the situation in South Africa offers the relief of being potentially explosive. To Mr. Jacobson, it is the chastening experience of having lived, and lived well, and aspired to live better, by a system of crying injustice. Such an experience gives the problem of human decency its true proportion and keeps it alive and glowing. In A Dance in the Sun the narrator remembers:
Time passed in the garden, in the stoep, in the back-yard, while we trudged to school or idled holidays away on our bicycles, and shyness and silence gave way to talk and stories of pleasures that were so distant from us that we knew they could never be ours, of griefs so great and distant that we could not understand how this person who had borne them should be standing in front of us with a spade or a broom in his hand, talking evenly, as if the earth had not swallowed up his mother’s body, as if the farmer who had beaten him so that he could still show us the scars on his arms and shoulders were not still alive and perhaps doing the same thing to another. And already there stirred within us the first uneasy strivings toward guilt and pity that were later to hunt us and shame us in our own country.
To the boy looking back, the bicycles and back yards, the gardens (and they hint to us of pleasant suburban streets lined with big and comfortable homes) are as real as the stories of the once beaten and scarred kaffir. Together they make up the truth of his childhood; and neither can be remembered without instantly bringing to mind the other.
In the problem of reconciling the two memories and giving each its due, Mr. Jacobson has found his vision and his statement: that man cannot aggrandize the proportions of his own small nature, cannot finally be altered, by the knowledge of evil. This is the kind of statement that comes to no conclusion, but can only be the basis for a continual exploration. For the purposes of his exploration Mr. Jacobson has needed the discipline of a tightly, perfectly rounded incident or set of incidents—in the three novels thus far they have centered around crimes—to keep what he has to say from getting turned on its head. He has had to set up his story with elaborate promises of a neat denouement; for when a conclusion is made inevitable in this way, by such things as the motion of the plot and suspense, the author’s refusal to draw it can be understood as the real point he is making, instead of as his failure to make a point at all.
In The Trap, the farmer Van Schoor discovers that he has been betrayed by his “good boy,” the kaffir Willem. Van Schoor had been comfortably pleased with himself for his absolute faith in the black man—he had even, without investigating further, accepted Willem’s story of a homosexual attack and fired another much-needed hand—only to find Willem in the hands of the police for stealing his sheep. Van Schoor pounds his fists into Willem’s smashed and bleeding face; he is purged by his rage at truth. But afterward Willem’s partner in crime, the white man who with Willem had been stealing from the farmer and who had been the one to betray Willem to the police, sits down at Van Schoor’s table to have a cup of coffee with him. It is with this cup of coffee, not the “truth,” that the book ends.
In A Dance in the Sun the narrator and his companion pledge themselves, through the operation of pity and conscience, to bear witness for the kaffir Joseph and against the white man Fletcher—which would have meant in fact to accuse Fletcher of kidnapping or murder. But Joseph has unearthed the truth about the crime Fletcher committed against him and his family, and has asked the boys to support him, not to bring Fletcher before the law but only to blackmail him into taking Joseph back into his household. The boys go off to finish their holiday “smarting under the treatment we had just received, and the knowledge of how we had exposed ourselves to it . . .” and Fletcher is left dancing like a madman at the knowledge that for the whole life before him there would be Joseph’s subservience and Joseph’s victory over him.
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Both the earlier books are about relations between black men and white men. Both take place on farms in the middle of the veld, with its hard cracked earth, its thorn trees and its furious sunlight—the perfect landscape for the promise of finality and on the other hand irresolution. Diamonds, which has moved into town (the veld is there only underneath the scrubby bushes and lawns of civilization and waiting silently all around the outskirts), represents a kind of relaxation into comedy and an abstraction of the author’s problem. In the town, called Lyndhurst, things become more complicated. The town is a place of back yards and gardens and of the middle classes. In the town, for instance, there are Jews and there are businesses and there is Legemco, a branch of the South African diamond monopoly. Lyndhurst is a place built, literally, on diamond mines; and diamonds breed crime—not social crime but crime for profit—so there is an underworld. But if things there are more complicated, they are also more abstract and can even be terribly funny; diamonds are after all dirty little stones that come out of the ground; the economy of Lyndhurst is founded on some laws called the Illegal Diamond Buying Laws, which have nothing to do with human values but are only a construct of the diamond monopoly, itself a construction, for maintaining high diamond values; and the question of a man’s relation to some dirty little stones and the laws that protect them is really more like a question of his relation to himself, a very abstract question indeed.
Diamonds is the story of how Manfred Gottlieb, husband to Riva, partner to Fink (“Fink and Gottlieb—Manufacturers’ Representatives”), father to Irvine (off in Johannesburg learning to be a doctor) accidentally comes into possession of a few illegal diamonds and of how he holds onto them, not to get rich with, but in order to enact a fantasy of heroic law-breaking and mastery. His fantasy primarily involves his partner, Fink: Fink the rebel, the radical, the lone wolf, who for years had been shouting his program for the destruction of the diamond interests and his threats that he, Fink, would personally fly in the face of Legemco one of these days. In the dialogue of their long partnership, Fink had become to Gottlieb the voice of the world “out there,” a world that promised wonders in which he could not believe and then reproached him for his timidity and lack of faith. (“Fink, you are a kind of socialist.” “Gottlieb, you are a slave. With a slave’s mind.”) When the diamonds are left with him, Gottlieb believes they are intended for Fink—that his partner has finally acted on his threats—and that by hiding them away he will with one act become superior to I.D.B., to Fink, to the whole, wide, beckoning, threatening world:
‘But I meant to test you by showing you these diamonds,’ Gottlieb then permitted Fink to say: ‘and here I find you have been even more severely tested than I planned, and Gottlieb, you are unruffled. How did you manage it?’ ‘I have my reserves, Fink.’ ‘I can see that you have reserves of iron, Gottlieb,’ Fink was then encouraged to say. ‘Thank you, Fink—but please—don’t embarrass me with such praises.’ And with these last imagined words of his own in his ears, Gottlieb fell asleep.
In the end Gottlieb commits a crime, though not the crime he had thought himself prepared to commit (from which he is saved by seeing an enactment of its consequences, as it were, beforehand) and Gottlieb and Fink become reconciled to one another and to their respective lives. This story, with every one of its strands pulled into place and tied neatly, is just as inconclusive as its predecessors. That is, the two men end up where they started—except they no longer have the illusion that such things as diamonds afford them the possibility of heroic action—and the life to which they become reconciled is a life still caught in the same tangle of comforts and fears, of getting along, and getting along well, while at the same time being dependent on a “system” that constantly threatens their sense of their own reality. The diamonds are indeed disposed of forever, but the dust they raise as they roll down the side of a great empty pit is the dust of South Africa.
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Mr. Jacobson is a man who keeps his temper and his perceptions cool. He is a master at creating the “small” book, in which each and every detail must contribute to a strict accounting for the flow of events or the behavior of the characters but still have a convincing existence of its own. In Diamonds, for instance, the relations of Gottlieb to his wife and son and Fink to his daughters are dealt with and described only insofar as they are absolutely necessary to an understanding of the predicament of the two men and to furthering the process of the plot. And yet the author has managed to create a whole live world of family that we can see easily for its vividness and recognize easily for its rightness. Even the names of the children (Irvine, Althea, etc.) become the clue to a story of humble, ambitious fathers who push their sons and daughters beyond themselves and are then left behind to nurse the fear of being abandoned. In order to sharpen the meaning of the problem represented by his main characters, Mr. Jacobson has made them Jews: people not quite alien to the earth that gives forth the precious stones, but who cannot possess it either. (As Manfred Gottlieb wanders through Lyndhurst on his nightly excursions to the underworld, the town is his home, yet he calls its inhabitants “these people.”) But quite apart from their symbolic function, Gottlieb and Fink and Riva and their children are more accurately Jewish and more meaningfully Jewish than any other Jewish characters I know of in contemporary fiction. No particular point is made of their being Jews, they do not have to discuss it, the author does not have to mention its relevance to their situation or their feelings; they just exist in the way they must. To make every single element in a work of fiction serve its exact purpose, as Mr. Jacobson does, and yet to make of each something that has its own reality, that exists, that persuades, that moves, all by itself—this is art of a very high order.
Still—with the proof of the pudding on one’s very tongue—it is difficult not to feel that the unfailing detachment, precision, and self-control of all Mr. Jacobson’s work (particularly this book, since it is the most “relaxed”) point to something more than the operation of his literary intelligence. In the whole of his writing there is not a single gratuitous detail—thrown in for love or even just because it has occurred to him—not a gesture, not a response that does not have its exactly defined place in the whole. And obversely, not one thing any of his characters ever does or says is done or said without being carefully accounted for and predicted, not only by the kind of person he is made to be but by something explicitly referred to in his history. Diamonds is a book almost frightening in this regard. It cannot be that Mr. Jacobson is incapable of making mistakes; the kind of irony with which he touches his material is as capable of mistakes as is passion. The truth of the matter is that Mr. Jacobson works almost as much by a principle of evading the “wrong” objects and perceptions as by finding the right ones. The principle of evasion is for him an honorable, not a cowardly, one, and one that must cost him a great deal of anguish and self-effacement; for clearly what he is pushing away, excluding, at every moment he writes is the chaos he does not yet feel adequate to—the chaos of things gratuitously ugly and mean, and of the feelings in himself for which he has no respect. He does not permit himself, or his characters, the rage that might contradict his ironic, humane intelligence. At the end of Diamonds the perpetually angry Fink says to Gottlieb: “When all around us there is nothing in the world except what we make, Fink was busy making such jokes and such tricks. . . . That is why I tell you, Gottlieb, I am a man to be forgiven, not a man that you should ask forgiveness from.”
But the gentleness of Diamonds is deceptive. There is a kind of fury in the close arrangement of the writing which comes not from the knowledge that “there is nothing in the world except what we make” but from the sense, the South Africa-born sense, that there is much too much in the world we have not made and can do nothing about. This sense, too, is part of Mr. Jacobson’s vision, the part, if he let it, that could spur him to move beyond the limits he sets for himself to be a writer of “big” books—and a major novelist.
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1 A review of The Price of Diamonds, by Dan Jacobson, Knopf, 207 pp. (paperback), $1.45.