21 June Meeting "Telling the Truth" talk by Tony Peake

Thanks to Bill Doherty for the following account of the Society's June meeting:      

Had that idiosyncratic sage of the baseball diamond, the late Yogi Berra, been in attendance at this meeting of the Lit. Soc. he would surely have been moved to repeat his famous aphorism “It’s déjà vu all over again!” as we welcomed another expatriate South African walking in the footsteps of Marion Molteno, Douglas Reid Skinner and Jonty Driver. Any suggestion of surfeit should be swiftly dispelled; these are not Eliot’s” hooded hordes swarming over endless plains” but rather acolytes of James Joyce’s Artist/Young Man, choosing exile “to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race.”
The evening’s “artificer” was Tony Peake who chose truth telling as the subject of his talk.and  elaborated on this theme primarily with reference to two of his books – “North Facing”(2017) and his authorised biography of Derek Jarman (1999). Jarman had been something of a local artistic celebrity after moving to Dungeness. No van der Merwe, Peake was born in 1951 to English parents who had emigrated after the Second World War and was brought up in a village near Pretoria. The speaker hinted that “North Facing” contained a strong autobiographical element as it recounts the experience of its principal protagonist, the 12 year old Paul Harvey, watching the 1962 Cuban missile crisis refracted through the prism of  apartheid-era South Africa, where the shades of Sharpeville still hovered in the wings. Warned that nuclear war would announce itself by obscuring the sun, Paul and his schoolfellows sought reassurance with behaviour common  to so many life forms – heliotropism – going out at dawn and dusk to see the sun rise and set. The novel explores identity – cultural, racial and sexual – and also has Paul as the adult narrator execute a belated atonement for the deeds of his youthful self. Craving acceptance by the dominant social unit in the class, du Toit’s gang, he lands the thoughtful, independent-minded schoolmaster, Spier, in serious trouble with Afrikaner officialdom in the person of du Toit’s father. Peake uses the adult Paul’s return journey as a way of reconnecting and concludes  that everyone suffered in South Africa, some more obviously than others. He endorsed the work of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and advised any aspiring writers to “write what you know”.   
After graduating from Rhodes University in South Africa, Tony was drawn to the still swinging London of the 70s where, married with two small children, he found life hectic and took time out to teach English in Ibiza While striving to produce a varied artistic output he was advised to try being a literary agent and his first client was Derek Jarman, at the time a forceful, Gay Rights activist and the” enfant terrible”  of avant-garde cinema, directing works with strong homoerotic overtones on subjects like Caravaggio and Edward II. Jarman tested HIV positive in 1987  and moved to the edgy” interzonal” setting of Prospect Cottage in Dungeness where he acquired an unexpected fame as a gardener, cajoling  unlikely flora from the inhospitable shingle and beating the metropolitan “gastro” scene to the wonders of sea kale by about 20 years. These years, before the advent of the anti-retrovirals, were punctuated by the death knells of friends succumbing to the ravages of AIDS and his own health steadily declined  before he died in 1995.  Tony completed the bulk of the biography in the four years after his subject’s  demise. Comparing and contrasting the writing of fiction and non-fiction our speaker felt that fiction was a more effective way to convey truth, likening it to a torch beam illuminating a dark cellar and allowing the reader to draw wider inferences from the obliquely presented information. The presentation was  embroidered with sensitively selected and delivered readings from both books.   
Tony Peake came across as a reflective craftsman keen to share the outcome of the exploration of his own and both his fictional and real life subjects’ multi-layered identities which he laid out for us like a series of matryoshka dolls which we studied carefully, remembering Yogi’s wise words “You can observe a lot by just watching.”