Kunapipi

Volume 4 Issue 2 Article 14

1982

Douglas Livingstone - Poet

Michael Chapman

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Chapman, Michael, Douglas Livingstone - Poet, Kunapipi, 4(2), 1982.
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Douglas Livingstone - Poet

Abstract
Douglas Livingstone is rightly regarded by many critics as the leading poet now writing in South Africa.
Yet, South Africa has been slow to recognize his poetic talent. (The first critical study of his work, Douglas
Livingstone: A Critical Study of his Poetry, was published by Ad. Donker, Johannesburg, in 1981.) In spite
of his being honoured with a D. Litt: from the University of Natal (Durban) in 1982, his poetry has been
more favourably received in England and America than in his own country. He has won international
awards from the British Society of Authors and at the Cheltenham Festival, yet in South Africa his only
poetry prize has been in a competition which he entered anonymously. His latest collection, The Anvil's
Undertone (Johannesburg: Ad. Donker, 1978), has been well received abroad: the London Magazine,
comment· ing on Livingstone's 'powerful evocation of a doomed South African dreamland', concludes that
there is 'no better poet writing on this continent in any language'.' But this collection, which (to quote
Richard Rive) 'must appeal to any serious student of South African literature', 2 was almost totally ignored
by reviewers in South African literary magazines.

This journal article is available in Kunapipi: https://ro.uow.edu.au/kunapipi/vol4/iss2/14

MICHAEL CHAPMAN

Douglas Livingstone - Poet

Douglas Livingstone is rightly regarded by many critics as the leading

poet now writing in South Africa. Yet, South Africa has been slow to
recognize his poetic talent. (The first critical study of his work, Douglas
Livingstone: A Critical Study of his Poetry, was published by Ad.
Donker, Johannesburg, in 1981.) In spite of his being honoured with a
D. Litt: from the University of Natal (Durban) in 1982, his poetry has
been more favourably received in England and America than in his own
country. He has won international awards from the British Society of
Authors and at the Cheltenham Festival, yet in South Africa his only
poetry prize has been in a competition which he entered anonymously.
His latest collection, The Anvil's Undertone (Johannesburg: Ad. Donker,
1978), has been well received abroad: the London Magazine, comment·
ing on Livingstone's 'powerful evocation of a doomed South African
dreamland', concludes that there is 'no better poet writing on this
continent in any language'.' But this collection, which (to quote Richard
2
Rive) 'must appeal to any serious student of South African literature',
was almost totally ignored by reviewers in South African literary
magazines.
It is argued that Livingstone is not a 'political' writer, and that in a
politically turbulent society, the writer who matters must be overtly
political. Certainly, it is both inevitable and justifiable that a good deal
of writing from South Africa should protest in a vigorous and direct way.

103
But reductive theories can so easily simplify the relationship between art
and historical pressures, while denying the individuality of the artist.
Livingstone's poetry, though it rarely offers a one-to-one relationship
between art and topical events, nevertheless em bodies the rigorous
stresses of cultural transition, particularly in southern Africa. His
methods of indirection ensure that his work is refreshingly free of both
genteel anguishings and the limited jargon of the public platform, those
recurrent weaknesses of South African literature since Pringle. Living-
stone captures individual experience and the temper of his times in
boldly imaginative ways - by his unmistakable newness of tone, rhythm
and imagery. The Times Literary Supplement has commented that he
brings southern Africa 'dangerously and aptly alive'.' This is true; yet it is
also true that he transcends the region. As I shall show, his subject is not
'Africa' in a narrow sense, but contemporary man.
Douglas Livingstone was born of Scottish parents in Kuala Lumpur,
Malaya, in 1932. At the age of ten he experienced at first hand the
Japanese invasion. He recalls: 'We moved down the country in fits and
starts machine-gunned and bombed in transit.'' And, after his father
had been taken prisoner-of-war, he left Malaya with his mother and
elder sister for Ceylon, and then the South Coast of Natal in South
Africa. After completing his schooling in 1951, he moved to what was
then Rhodesia where he trained as a bacteriologist, worked for a time in
Zambia, and then in 1964 returned to South Africa to take charge of
marine bacteriological research for a water·research institute in Durban.
Often asked about the apparent paradox that he is a scientist who is also
a poet, Livingstone has replied: 'Science is man's search for truth; poetry
5
combines a search and an interpretation. ' He regards poetry as the
minority art form, and sees it as constituting a greater challenge:

You have to get down to the truth, connect the truth in oneself with one's pen. It is
very difficult to say exactly what you want to say, and you have to stay with it. It is a
skill you have to keep on working at. 6

Livingstone has so far published five books of poems and two award-
winning radio plays. His first collection, The Skull in the Mud (London:
Outposts Publications, 1960), is juvenilia; and Livingstone tells how,
after realizing 'the appalling nature' of the twelve short poems that
comprise the collection, he spent £25 buying up most of the available
7
copies, which he destroyed. His next collection, Sjambok, and other
poems from Africa (London: O.U.P., 1964), is significant in any dis-
cussion of a South African poetic tradition. Partly, it is significant
because, for the first time since Roy Campbell in the 1920s, South

104
African English poetry hears the thrill of poetic utterance; the poems
have that element of surprise so essential to poetry. Like Campbell,
Livingstone is able to vivify language, to present the familiar in its
unusual aspects. Here is his 'Vulture':

Slack neck with the pecked

skin thinly shaking, he
sidles aside, then stumps
his deliberate banker's
gait to the stinking meal.

Or, here is his 'She-Jackal':

Evilly panting and smiling, a jackal

stood near: razor ribs, warty shrivelled dugs,
hourglass loins and lean wire legs quivering;
the plump feeding ticks studding her bare flanks.

Livingstone's animals are a long way from the creatures to which we have
grown accustomed. His animal poems, which comment obliquely on
man in a tough, disillusioned landscape, have established him (together
with Lawrence and Hughes) as a poet who has forcefully re-imagined
animal life in ways relevant to a 20th-century world.
It is in fact Livingstone's ability to re·imagine motifs, situations, and
particularly traditional segments of southern African experience, into
original fictive forms that ultimately accounts for Sjambok 's importance
in South African poetry. While it is true that Campbell and Livingstone
have in common an ability to activate language, the two poets have very
different sensibilities. With Campbell we inhabit a heroic world which
has not yet experienced the fragmentation of the Renaissance ideal;
Livingstone, on the other hand, gives South African poetry a voice that is
thoroughly and naturally modem.
This shift of sensibility is evident when we compare the two poets'
respective responses to a particular motif in South Mrican literature:
that of Adamastor, the anthropomorphic spirit of the Cape of Storms,
who first appears in Camoens's Portuguese Renaissance epic, The
Lu.siads. In Camoens's poem Vasco da Gama, the epic hero, outwits
Adamastor, who is depicted as a gauche Mrican cousin of the sophis·
ticated Renaissance Europeans. Campbell, three hundred years later,
resurrects Adamastor from the rocky escarpment of the Cape. Reacting
against a late 19th-century South African 'tradition' of 'veld and vlei'
verse (that is, sentimental hymns to the mystery of the veld), Campbell
was attracted to Camoens's Renaissance flamboyance, and in Adamastor

105
he found a ready-made poetic symbol. Ignoring Adamastor's gaucherie,
Campbell injects this ponderous giant with heroic vitality, depicting him
as the Nemesis of the South African philistinism and stupidity which had
refused to recognize Campbell's own robust poetic talents. 'Rounding the
Cape' opens majestically:

The low sun whitens on the flying squalls,

Against the cliffs the long grey surge is rolled
Where Adamastor from his marble halls
Threatens the sons of Lusus as of old.

Livingstone - reacting specifically against Campbell - transforms

Adamstor into a characteristically modem figure, terrifying in his very
banality. In the poem 'Adam astor Resuscitated', Adamastor is a
ludicrous figure of retribution who, preoccupied with an unsuccessful
love affair, is allowed to sink ignominiously back into the scrub of the
South African veld. Whereas Campbell's is a world in which Time's pro-
gression is marked by the tides that roll majestically to shore, Living-
stone's Adamastor inhabits a universe in which Time is a' .BS repeater':

Memories of an atomic club dotting him one,

wrenched to be whirled from some pre- Nordic Yggdrasil -
if Time's a .38 repeater - he was done:
no rifling of his guts by knives impure,
self-consumption would be slower and more sure.

The old and the new are violently juxtaposed; chronological order seems
to have gone awry. The celebrated question of Pinter's that summarizes
the absurdist element in life is relevant: what's one thing got to do with
another?
The motif of Adamastor is also used by both Campbell and Living-
stone to depict their respective South African Adams, the white man's
archetypal new world hero. As in American and Australian poetry, the
South African Adam (as befits a frontier society) is a hunter. In Camp-
bell's poetry he is an individual standing alone, self-reliant and ready to
confront whatever awaits him; in Livingstone's work he has been trans-
formed into an Adam-after-the-Fall.
Campbell, for example, sets his new world hero in a highly romantic
hunter's paradise (as innocent in its way as the 19th -century pastoral idyll
against which he had reacted). In 'To a Pet Cobra' the exceptional
outdoor man (that is, Campbell himself) and nature share a magnificent
and ruthless power:

106
 Such venom give my hilted fangs the power,
Like drilling roots the dirty soil that spike,
To sting these rotted wastes into a flower.

Livingstone presents neither a pastoral idyll nor a hunter's paradise, but

a disenchanted African landscape in which Campbell's 'solar colours' (his
'scarlet flowers' and 'golden rays') have faded to tawny yellows and
greens. In 'The Killers' Livingstone's white hunter of the 1960s has been
domesticated; a packed lunch and a supply of beer are now essential to
the success of any outdoor venture:

You know how it is - fishing - your bare feet

in the warm mush of dead leaves near the edge
of the water, back against mossed tree bark
beer cooling in the river, and a wedge
of sandwich, wondering when to eat.

The colloquial idiom establishes the unheroic tone, while the high pro·
portion of monosyllabic words captures the clipped South African
manner of speaking. Like Campbell's Adam, Livingstone's Adam-after-
the-Fall also confronts the primordial energies of the snake. But there is
no synthesis. His actions are swift, barely rational; his limited sensibility
(that curse of the South African situation) is revealed in a crisis:

I got the shotgun and blew her head dean

... I had to shoot; I mean
that now her limp grey life lies understood.

In Sjambok, then, Livingstone parodies what has been referred to as the

South African justificatory myth of pastoralism and the virtue of inno-
cence: that is, the tendency of successive generations of South African
writers to romanticize pre-industrialism. His modem sensibility recog-
nizes that pastoral themes need to be re-imagined, if they are to have
relevance to a world in which it becomes increasingly difficult to return
to nature.
Livingstone's modernity, of course, implies more than a chronological
description; it is a matter of art and technique, a peculiar twist of vision
- a vision which (as I have suggested) embodies a sharp awareness of the
stresses of personal and cultural dissociation. The toughness and self-
contradictoriness of human experience seem to defy traditional philo-
sophical and moral systems; while science, instead of underpinning the
poet's world-view with rationalistic assurances, has undergone a

107
modernist phase of its own, its once solid premises subvened by such
concepts as relativity and indeterminacy. Livingstone's poetry exists in
the tension of romantic and scientific attitudes. On the one hand, there
is an element of bold experimentalism, indicating a desire to explore
experience in daring ways; on the other, there is an equally strong
appreciation of traditional form, implying the necessity of coping with a
deeply felt, often distressing, subject.
The poetic techniques employed have certain affinities with American
modernist techniques. Livingstone's rhythms are colloquial; the image is
hard, exact, a description of spatial form; the impact of the poetry is
instantaneous, not discursive; the syntax is the grammar of poetry, not of
prose. Like T.S. Eliot and more recently Roben Lowell, Livingstone
tends to translate his inner torment into a struggle with language. Eliot
has spoken of fragments shored up against his ruin; Livingstone has said
something similar about his own poetic practice:

Perhaps anistic responsibility is to get to know the nameless incubus within and
deliver it with form and shape ... to rid oneself of a maybe dangerous violence by
writinf it out - to tame oneself as it were ... A poem is an anefact, a constructed
thing.

Modernism makes its impact on Livingstone not superficially as an

aesthetic theory (although he is obviously influenced by early 20th·
century innovators); rather, his modernist strategies are dictated funda-
mentally by his own perceptions of psychological and historical discon-
tinuity. In the poem 'Iscariot', for example, the Judas motif is wrenched
into service of a sceptical 20th ·century world. Much that is modern has
entered Judas's feelings. His imagination has been dissected by 'splitting
reason', and, unable to appreciate the nature of Christ's sacrifice, he is
left alienated and alone. It is not Livingstone's purpose to show Judas's
eventual suicide. Instead, the poem celebrates a terrible courage, which
manifests itself in Judas's determination to exist in a universe that offers
him no consolation:

I'll choose Eanh as my rack.

Last; for prayer: my lips will spit a terse
goddam - those oddly flat and nailing vowels.

This idea of existential struggle recurs in Livingstone's poetry and consti-

tutes a positive principle in a world in which human and spiritual values
seem fractured.
Moreover, Livingstone's extraordinary artistic vitality - his creation

108
of striking fictions - in itself attests to an affirmation of life. In 'Storm·
shelter', for instance, the poet evokes on the immediate level an Mrican
storm, but an initial reading already alerts one to descriptions of peculiar
power. Images flash past the eye, while alliteratively awkward words
elicit from the reader muscular participation. One is drawn both
mentally and physically into a strange world, where the elements of the
African bush emerge as symbols of violence and existential struggle:

Under the baobab tree, treaded

death, stroked in by the musty cats,
scratches silver on fleshy earth.
Threaded flame has unstitched and sundered
hollow thickets of bearded branches
blanched by a milk·wired ivy. Choleric
thunder staggers raging overhead.

'Choleric thunder' - this last psychologically-orientated image intro-

duces the human drama. A lone figure attempts to find relief from the
clash of elements that mirrors his torment. From the eye of the storm we
hear a very human voice - a person like ourselves, who is painfully
aware that the old sayings, the trusted systems, cannot account for his
utter isolation:

'Never stand under trees in a storm.'

Old saws have an ancient rhythm
in them; but these dry, far from bold
norms, and maxims are scalpel severed
by the sharp, needle·thin lightning,
frightening reason behind the eye,
slivered into lank abstract forms.

Here is the central paradox of Livingstone's vision: a striving for order,

for 'reason', and the recognition that it may be inadequate to account for
the instinctual side of man's psyche - the painful awareness that
synthesis of man and Nature may be destined to remain illusory. It is the
dilemma of imaginative man under the dispensation of science. For
modern man, stripped of his 'old saws' and their 'ancient rhythms', there
remains but the determination to survive. Although 'steel spears ... rattle
their points ... maiming invisibly', and 'shafts reel/ through the streaked
Impi from Nowhere',

There is only one thing to do -

wheel, stamping, into that brittle rain.

109
 Such a commitment to bare survival could be extremely bleak; yet,
'Stormshelter' has considerable vibrancy. Finally, this poem insists unex·
pectedly on yet a further dimension of meaning: its linguistic dexterity is,
in itself, a kind of celebration of the 'poetic' view of experience; even as
we read of an inability to create, we participate in an act of imaginative
enlargement. As Frank Kermode has said: 'Fictions are especially
necessary in the modem world ... They enable man to confer organ·
ization and form on the temporal structure, and they grow very intricate
because we know so desolately that as and is are not really one.''
The character of Livingstone's poetry is in marked contrast to the
character of black South African poetry of the last decade. Broadly
speaking, Soweto poetry cultivates immediacy; Livingstone, on the other
hand, attempts to cultivate more than immediacy, to embody language
in a situation larger than the present. His variety of styles, his use of
personae, and his critical re·imaginings of the past are means of over·
coming the problem of a wider communication in a world that seems to
have lost faith in traditional terms of reference.
Yet, Livingstone and a Soweto poet such as Oswald Mtshali are linked
in interesting ways. 1970 saw the publication of Livingstone's next
important collection, Eyes Closed Against the Sun (O.U.P., London),
and, soon afterwards, Mtshali's Sounds of a Cowhide Drum, both books
containing predominantly urban poems. Although William Plomer, in
the 1920s, had looked briefly at a tawdry Rand townscape, South African
poets prior to 1970 had generally favoured the veld to the town as a
source of imagery. Livingstone's and Mtshali's collections signal the
beginning of an increasing urbanization of South African English poetry,
and it is indicative of the South African racial situation that the two poets
present not only very different visions of urban life, but also two 'cities'
which are mutually exclusive.
Livingstone, who in the interim had settled in Durban, concentrates
on the white inhabitants - the whores, hoboes and lonely flat·dwellers
- of a big seaport; his black man is superficially drawn. Mtshali, for his
part, presents unimaginative caricatures of whites, yet offers a
memorable gallery of township types. Neither poet attempts to face the
difficult challenge of a racially diverse environment. In his latest collec·
tion (The Anvil's Undertone), however, Livingstone does successfully
evoke an urban landscape in which blacks, whites and Indians emerge as
credible human beings, but in Eyes Closed Against the Sun he ignores
urban racial tensions. In fact, he at times seems more interested in
matters of technique than in the problems of his city inhabitants, and
there are a number of sketches of urban observation which, while vivid

110
and celebratory of artistic individuation, are distinctly limited in their
weight of experience.
But the more significant poems are acutely preoccupied with the
human situation, and - as is the case with Soweto poetry too - life is
pictured as a struggle. For Mtshali, life is a struggle in community, with
survival related directly to subsistence living and oppressive laws. living·
stone, operating from within the parameters of white urban society,
presents private modes of experience.In 'Did', for instance, the struggle
to exist involves the anxieties of city loneliness:

Did, after overtipping the waiter,

leave his name, his phone-number
on a bar-chit, and straitly
under these, the single word lonely.
A girl called him selling service
before the street lamps could flower,
and he went round with ice,
a bottle and did drink, listening to her
icebreaking chatter, her teeth
meeting like tongs in small pairs;
did watch her acquisitive
nose with its sadly desperate quiver.

Isolation, the inability to find relationship, is the common experience

of Livingstone's city dwellers. Yet, while ugliness is not shirked, the void
in Eyes Closed Against the Sun is not as dark as it was in Sjambok.
Perhaps during these years life in Durban seemed somewhat kinder to the
poet than it had in Rhodesia. Whatever the reason, Livingstone extends
his emotional range. Gentleness, compassion, humour (qualities which in
the earlier collection were choked by the coarse growth of the African
bush) largely account for the success of poems such as the much anthol·
ogized 'Gentling a Wildcat', 'To a Chinese Lady' and 'Steel Giraffes'. In
the tender lyric, 'Steel Giraffes', the poet is in love, and the 'unromantic'
South Mrican industrial townscape seems transformed. The Durban
skyline, perhaps even the African animal world beyond, tactfully
acknowledges the wonder of human affection:

There are, probably. somewhere

arms as petal-slight as hers;
there are probably somewhere,
wrists as slim;
quite probably, someone has
hands as slender-leafed as hers;
the fingers, probably
bare of rings, as thin.

Hl··
 Certainly, there is nowhere
such a dolour
of funnels, mastings, yards,
filaments of dusk ringing shrouds
woven through the word goodbye,
riveted steel giraffes
tactfully looking elsewhere,
necks very still to the sky.

'Steel Giraffes' was reprinted in Livingstone's next collection, A Rosary

of Bone (David Philip, Cape Town, 1975). This slim volume is unique in
South African poetry for its intelligent, adult treatment of sexual love.
The poet's stylistic versatility is evident in poems of celebration, loss,
humour and ribaldry. His models are the 17th ·century love poems of
Donne and Marvell; but Livingstone exploits, to his own purpose, the
Metaphysical tactics of scientific allusion, paradox, pun and hilarious
comparison. Whereas Donne, in 'Love's Progress', wittily compares
sexual conquest to a voyage of exploration through the waters of the
northern hemisphere, Livingstone's early European navigator, Sir
Tongue, charts southern zones:

I adjure thee, Sir Tongue: Be Finn. Be Indiscrete.

Cast off. Your journey start from her slightest Toes.
Set Sail upon the Creases of her Feet,

Down over Chin & Throat to Armpits you'll be sent,

& up those Sun-Tipped Capes from whence a Country· View
Spreads below. Coast down to her soft Belly's Dent.

Here, you may pause to ease your Rig and Sails.

Cruise in widening Circles until intervenes
That Continent's sweet Harbour from the South·West Gales.

Drop Anchor in this most redolent of Coves,

& taste for yourself Nectarines, Tangerines,
Pineapples, Grapes, Avocadoes, Paw-Paws, Cloves.

('Giovanni Jacopo Meditates: on an early European Navigator')

This is an amusing variation of the archetypal Cape journey, which has

provided an organizing metaphor for successive South African writers.
As the poet Robert Dederick said at the time: 'Livingstone has added a
dash of colour to the prevailing grey earnestness of the contemporary
. I scene. ·"
poeuca

ll2
 A Rosary of Bone does not so much examine the nature of human
relations as new ways of expressing the emotion of love. The poems offer
a dramatic expression of the outward, demonstrative aspects of feeling .
.There is scepticism, affirmation, raciness, and underlying seriousness
that is never solemn. The poet discovers that love may offer man
moments of synthesis, its failure leads to isolation and despair.
In Livingstone's latest collection, The Anvil's Undertone, the mood
has darkened considerably. Human relations have failed, or been cut
short by death, while the increasing urgency of the South African socio·
political situation over the last decade has influenced the overall tone.
The poetry shows continuing stylistic evolution to accommodate the shift
towards a greater intransigence. At times, the diction is austere; at other
times, the search for new images ~ for new fictive worlds ~ takes one
into areas of 20th·century scientific pursuit, witchcraft and nightmare.
As in Sjambok, there is a turning outwards to the realized events, the
symbolic images, of southern African society.
We journey to KwaZulu ~ underdeveloped, poverty·stricken ~ where

Umsinsz' trees hold

up wasp·wasted ribcages bare but for
rags of bloodstained flowers ...
('August Zulu')

to the undeserved luxury of white suburbia, where the Town Tembu

does the two cars, the garden,

the floors, the windows, the swimming pool.
There are many empty bottles and full
ashtrays ...
('Town Tembu')

to a contrasting Durban townscape, where Peter Govender, busdriver

and fisherman, discovers that contempt for death is his only freedom:

Sometime busdriver
s
of Shiva Pride, The Off· Course Tote,
The Venus Trap and The Khyber Pass Express.

Old duels for fares:

The South Coast road - all we could get;
my left hand conning the wheel. ..
('Sonatina of Peter Govender, Beached')

113
to a village blacksmith shop, caught in the colours of the mind:

Horseshoes, blades, shares and lives: all shaped

to the hoarse roar and crack of flame,
by the clang of metallic chords,
hammer-song, the anvil's undertone;
nailed to one post of jackal's skull.
('Mpondo's Smithy, Transkei')

The Anvil's Undertone represents a forceful distillation of individual

and social pressures, upon which Livingstone has imposed his distinctive
signature. In a world in which bush massacres and gruesome deaths in
detention have almost become the common experience, he seems to say
that absurdity, nightmare, is the present-day South Mrican reality.
Thus, the animal motif begins to assume hallucinatory shapes. In 'Under
Capricorn' an African goat rises from a roadcutting, a frightening
manifestation of man's shadow world:

Fecund, fornicatory
hairy flanks tun-tight; yellow
mad intelligent eyes bright
under quick horns ...

What is particularly interesting, though, is the way in which Livingstone

has adapted the animal motif to reflect the haunted imagination of the
urban man. In 'The Zoo Mfair' the white hunter, who a decade earlier
had taken his packed sandwiches to the bush, has now donned his city
suit. Experiencing a new urban alienation, he is fascinated by a tiger in
the city zoo, and one night enters its cage:

For perhaps one second he felt it, face buried in rank

eat's fur: the sleepy response. Then the rasped purr
meshed with metallic springs. The barelling flanks
pumped an outraged blast from alien vaults of power.

They found him on the floor early next morning, his head
a split and viscid watermelon; loosely the wet tufts
of combed brains spilled, his smile quiet through the red;
beside him, for warmth, the cosy sprawl of his love.

The powerful, often gruesome, imagery evokes a scene of indiscriminate

destruction. The urban man expresses his humanity, his desire for a
passion, in a bizarre way, which only seems to suggest the full extent of
his isolation.

114
 Finally, Livingstone has accepted, in his own way, the recent challenge
of Soweto poetry's 'open' or 'naked' forms. In 'Dust' he achieves an idiom
which is hard, keenly·edged like metal, and perfectly equipped to
express a vision of existence that has become implacable. The South
African townscape is a battleground; a white man finds the corpse of a
black labourer in the gutter:

The bundle in the gutter had its skull

cracked open by a kierie.
The blunt end of a sharpened bicycle
spoke grew a solitary ·
silver war-plume from the nape of his neck.
I turned him gently. He'd thinned to a wreck.

It was my friend Mketwa. He was dead.

Young Mac the Knife, I'd called him,
without much originality. Red
oozed where they'd overhauled him.
An illegal five-inch switchblade, his 'best'
possession, was stuck sideways in his chest.

This deeply·felt incident convinces the reader that Mketwa's life and
death are tragic - a waste of human potential. Herein lies the real
indictment of a restrictive social system.
Livingstone, then, creates the dramatic event which is set solidly in its
background; there is economy and coherence in his projection of a
variety of subject·matter. As is probably inevitable in a boldly adven·
turous poet, his experimental verve does at times overreach itself; at
other times, a self·conscious aesthetic formalism militates against deeper
insights into the human condition. In his best poetry, however, the
relationship between human and aesthetic components is complex and
dynamic. The Anvil's Undertone is deeply committed to southern Africa,
yet it is successful at suggesting, too, that peculiarly regional anxieties
have their echoes and counterparts elsewhere.
Refreshingly - particularly in the context of South African literature
- Livingstone does not offer moral prescriptions. What he does is to
write with compassion and originality about aspects of being alive in
difficult times. In a world of total economics and politics - distrustful of
the autonomous imagination - Livingstone has attempted to modify his
reader's sensibility by affirming the value of the imaginative life.

115
 NOTES

1. London Magazine, 18 (8), November 1978, 61.

2. Talking of Books, English Programme, S.A.B.C .. 25 May 1978.
3. 19 November 1964.
4. 'Leaving School', London Magazine, 6 (7), October 1966, 55.
5. 'Douglas Livingstone, Poet', The Darly News (Durban), 7 January 1978.
6. Ibid.
7. Letter to the author, 21 March 1978.
8. 'Ten Comments on a Questionnaire', London Magazine, 4 (8). November 1964, 33.
9. The Sense of an Ending, New York, 1967, 40.
10. Talking of Books, 10 October 1975.

Douglas Livingstone. Photo: Monica Fairhull

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