‘A Taste of Whiplash’: The Fascinating Shambles of South Africa’s Modernist Magazine

Words: Cameron Luke Peters

“I would far sooner, even at the risk of ruining any artistic qualities that I possess, load my work with some moral purpose and direct all the knowledge I possess towards counteracting the evils of race-hatred and colour-hatred that cause so much misery out here.”

-  Roy Campbell, writing to an English friend in 1925.

South Africans, for the most part, are not intellectuals. To be fair, most nations don’t put a premium on any advanced form of either wit or wisdom. But not many, I might argue, have so shamelessly substituted sports and politics in the place of arts and culture. We’d often rather talk kak than colour-theory; rather head to the jol than show face at the genteel soiree. You can hardly blame us though. Pre-colonial life was a distracting struggle for survival, and the arrival of Europeans didn’t help things one bit. Indeed, the Struggle continues. A Luta Continua. As Miller & Sergeant write in their Survey of South African Poetry (1957), “Spacious and rugged as South Africa is, there [has been] little that [is] spacious or independent in its social or mental life. It has been homely but suspicious; hospitable but narrow in outlook. Surrounded by dangers and hazards of various kinds […] its communities have clung together and deliberately withstood any innovations.”

Roy & Mary Campbell (left), Jacob Kramer & Dolores Stock

Oof. That is a bit too harsh. But the great poet Ignatius Royston Dunnachie Campbell (1901-57), would have agreed. His home colony of Natal was, in his words, merely a ‘Grocers’ Paradise’. But Roy was, like me, a proud South African. And, again like me, he wanted to make his living as a high-minded writer. And so, between 1925 and 1926, in a royal flush of ego, earnestness and delusion, he set out to raise the bar of his country’s soul by making a magazine that would field the angst of the era at home rather than abroad. This was Voorslag - ‘Whiplash’ - a “sting [with which to strike] the mental hindquarters of the bovine citizenry of the Union.” And its three issues stand today as one of the most successful, if complete, failures in the history of literature.

It started with a bromance. In June 1925, Campbell was casting about for a kindred spirit in defiance of Durban society. A friend happened to mention a slim, courteous 21-year-old named William Plomer, who’d just finished the manuscript of his first, fearless novel. Campbell asked him out on a half-blind friend-date to the tea-room at Twine’s, an elegant beachfront hotel. (In his autobiography, Plomer claims he did the inviting). “After lunch, since it was low tide, they walked on the sand [...] and talked for several hours. Despite differences in background, temperament, and upbringing, they were attracted to each other at once [...]” What they liked about each other was that they both thought Art was the most important thing in life. They mirrored each other’s vitality and cunning self-regard. By speaking the truth, they felt they were in a privileged position to shake down the complacencies of their elders. Their experiences attested to a shared knack for serendipity. 

At this time, Campbell, though just 24, was already mildly famous. A DHS old-boy, he had been sent up to Oxford at 17 and then sent himself down again in a matter of months. He had drifted vaguely into the fabled literary bohemia of post-war London, made a lifelong commitment to alcoholism, and befriended the firebrand writer Wyndham Lewis and the living icon Aldous Huxley. He met the love of his life, Mary Garman, when she and her sister stalked him from the top of a double-decker bus in Tottenham Court Road: “We were quite intrigued, he was so good-looking, so foreign, who could he be?” Because he was couchsurfing at the time, the trio moved in together within a week or two of formally meeting. 

After Roy and Mary married, they moved to a stone cowshed on the Welsh coast miles from civilisation and lived for more than a year like proto-hippies “on a diet of homegrown vegetables, seabirds’ eggs, and game birds that Roy poached with a small shotgun.” In this time, they had their first daughter, Teresa, and Roy finished his first book of poems, The Flaming Terrapin. 

On the recommendation of T.E. Lawrence (literally Lawrence of Arabia), it was published by Jonathan Cape in 1924 and rightly became a short-lived sensation in the literary world. But Campbell only made about 50 Pounds from it. That was a lot at the time, but not enough to raise a family on. A little defeated, he took his wife and infant back to Durban to move in with his parents on Musgrave Road.

William Plomer, on the other hand, was the archetypal confirmed bachelor. Although mildly blue-blooded, his paternal grandfather was a British Army colonel who’d gambled away 3,000,000 Pounds in today’s money and set a bad example for Plomer’s father, Charles, who’d come to Cape Town for the climate and then staggered his way across the subcontinent from failed business to failed profession before being swept up in the Boer War. Settling as a civil servant, Charles raised his young family between the UK and a dozen towns in SA before giving up his desk-job to run a colonial trading station in Zululand, near Entumeni. One can hardly imagine a childhood more steeped in empire. 

But William was not a mere product of his time:

I [...] had been tenderly cared for in infancy by Africans, and as I grew up was conscious not only of feeling protective towards them but of warm admiration and affection for them. I wanted to be with them and to get to know them as fellow-beings. I would gladly have spent weeks or months living, working, and playing with Africans, and could easily have adapted myself to unfamiliar or uncomfortable ways of living. […] [M]y strong flow of feeling had to shape something, if only a protest. The shape it took was on paper.

That shape, Turbott Wolfe, was the first depiction of an interracial romance in any South African novel. He started writing it when he was 17, and Virginia Woolf helped publish it by the time he was 22. It’s easy to see what Roy saw in him. More than a collaborator though, he wanted a housemate.

Although Roy sincerely idolised his father, living with him again brought out his brattiest side. He was condescending towards Sam Campbell’s bourgeois values whilst expecting him to fully subsidise his budding career and his new family. Ignoring the hints, “[h]e passed most of his first six months in Durban [...] as if on holiday, lazing, taking trips on whalers, riding his brother’s horses inexpertly and fishing.” Belatedly, he, Mary and Teresa moved into a family bungalow on the other side of the Umhlanga River and Roy conceded to reality, snapping up freelance gig-work as a journalist and lecturer. But he still kept his eye out for a patron. Soon enough, he found a literary sugar daddy.

Bay Esplanade, Durban

This was Lewis Reynolds, son of Sir Frank Reynolds, the sugar baron of the South Coast, and yet another golden child of an Old Durban Family. He’d already distinguished himself as a kind of South African Medici, and one of his court painters, Edward Roworth, described Campbell’s bended-knee appeal thusly:

[He] talked of his desperate poverty and what a mental strain it was to have himself, his wife and child entirely supported by his mother and that unless he could get away and have a place of his own it was utterly impossible to do a line of work and that he had written nothing since he came to Durban. Lewis and I were seriously perturbed by all this… 

Reynolds then, to his eternal credit and regret, not only put up the Campbells in a beach cottage on his estate in Umdoni Park, but entrusted Roy with one of his brightest ideas. South Africa was only 15 years old at the time, and there had never really existed an arts publication that spoke for the nation as such. Campbell could steer it into being and Reynolds would pay for it all.

The problem was that the two men had strikingly different ideas of what such a publication would be. Reynolds was apparently all for the avant-garde and shaking up the arts, but he was still - very obviously - a paid-up member of the establishment. Campbell was a punk (or as much of a punk as you could be in the Roaring Twenties). In this, he was incredibly close to his friend Wyndham Lewis, the aspiring fascist and editor of BLAST magazine, one of Voorslag’s predecessors. As he gushed:

To think as Lewis does is to cause a panic in the camp of the stereotyped revolutionaries-by-habit. As Lewis’s work becomes more widely known it exerts a growing influence in crippling the activities of the collective revolutionary-simpleton, and in laying the foundations of a new order of thought.

It might be hard to imagine, but modernist ‘little magazines’ could occasionally serve something of the same function then as certain political podcasts do today. They were insurgent, alternative media - self-proclaimed antidotes to the bullshit of nostalgia, liberal platitudes and the mainstream. The poems of T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, not to mention James Joyce’s Ulysses, would never have become icons of the modern age if it weren’t for small publishers at periodicals like The Dial, Adelphi and The Little Review mucking about with bad taste. However, this new dawn of free expression worked in the US, UK and France precisely because the old order was so well-set that its cracks could be made clear for all to see. What would a hatchet-job look like in the teenage Union of South Africa? 

Within a few months of meeting, Campbell had invited Plomer to move in with his family so they could build the magazine together. To quote Peter Alexander:

It was a delightful existence, almost exactly what Campbell had dreamed of. Every morning a basket of fresh milk, fruit, and vegetables was sent down to them from the Reynolds’ great house, Lynton Hall [a mansion built for Louis Botha, the first prime minister, to retire to], together with frequent gifts of venison, which their Zulu servant cooked. [T]hey worked and planned for their magazine, writing feverishly when the mood took them, or talking animatedly for hours on the verandah, while the surf crashed and boomed on the beach.

Plomer was deeply inspired by Campbell’s mythos and vitality, while Campbell was softened and sensitised by Plomer’s politics. Together they wrote nearly all the articles in the first issue, which they got away with by deploying female pseudonyms where appropriate: Campbell masqueraded as ‘Mary Ann Hughes’ while Plomer was less convincing as ‘Pamela Willmore’. The other contributors were Roworth, who submitted a semi-plagiarised essay on Cezanne, a then-unknown J.H. Pierneef, who did the cover, and the former Prime Minister Jan Smuts, who was prevailed upon by Reynolds [who had worked as his travelling secretary] to lend the magazine some immediate notoriety by penning a half-baked meditation on the objective existence of Beauty. (The equivalent today perhaps would be Thabo Mbeki introducing an avant-garde spin-off of this magazine).

Laurens van der Post

Before publication though, the same canny instinct that had drawn Plomer and Campbell to each other soon drew them to one more young bright spark - Laurens van der Post. A few decades on he would be a dear friend and mentor to a young Prince Charles, as well as the most famous writer in the world on Bushman folklore, but when the duo first became a trio he was an 18-year-old kid journalist at the Natal Advertiser.  “[Alt]hough he was intensely reserved and tongue-tied [after Plomer introduced him], Campbell recognized him immediately as a fellow artist. ‘You’re one of us,’ he told Van der Post: Come along.” He was appointed the magazine’s ‘Afrikaans Editor’, and thus Voorslag made an immediate tidbit of history by becoming the first prominent multilingual publication in South Africa.  What did Campbell and Plomer do with the first issue of their unique carte blanche? They vented. They yapped. Campbell took the chance to review T.S. Eliot’s recent work, calling his verses “unpleasant, like dry, clotted blood.” Then he shared a poem called ‘The Albatross’ which referred to other South African writers in these mocking terms:

To sleep or cackle, grouped in homely rings,

I left them roosting warm in their own dung,

And while they fattened there, with homeless wings

The great harp of the hurricanes I strung…

Plomer was not so braggadocious but no less pointed, contributing an essay on ‘Dr. Leyd and the Colour Question’ in which he declared: It will be necessary to recognize every man’s human qualities as a contribution to the building up of an indestructible future, to judge every man by the colour of his soul and not by the colour of his skin. Otherwise the coloured races of the world will rise and take by force what is denied them now by a comparatively few muddle-headed money-grubbers.

For anyone with eyes to read, this first issue smacked of an expensive vanity project. But at least the vanity was mostly justified.

“Literate South Africa was somewhat puzzled by Voorslag,” Plomer later remembered. “The tone of the press was on the whole respectful, bewildered and slightly cautious.” The magazine had been promoted in advance as a project meant to ‘uplift’ the general public, but it had started its life by implicitly putting them down. The second issue, published in June 1926, proved this was not a false impression. In ‘Fetish Worship in South Africa’, Campbell declaims, a little madly:

When the white people came out here they gave the native the Bible and the native in exchange gave the white man a great black fetish to worship. It is this fetish that rules the country - Colour prejudice.

Nothing offends like the truth. It should come as no surprise then that Reynolds soon found himself  having to excuse his beneficiaries to his friends. And then the readers’ letters section took on a more irate tone. A Mr.Erich Mayer, for one, claimed that Campbell and Plomer “understood neither the ‘true mentality, character and aims’ of [Afrikaner] leaders [...], nor the ‘true psychology’ of the natives, and that their mistaken views, if published, would do considerable harm to all the peoples of the country.”

Within a month, Reynolds felt obliged to agree. He wanted to run for parliament in his father’s old seat and he’d already spent 1000 Pounds on a magazine that hadn’t stopped biting his hand. On a Sunday Morning in July, he, Roworth and their publisher Maurice Webb came to Sezela to stage an intervention.

They asked Campbell to walk with them to the beach so that they could talk to him alone. While Mary and Van der Post watched from a distance, they sat down on a sand dune, Campbell squatting on his haunches like a Zulu, bearded and truculent.

In brief, they asked him to cool down the rhetoric. He told them to go to hell. When the third issue of the magazine came out a few weeks later, it opened with a kiss-off: “I have much pleasure in announcing my resignation from “Voorslag”. Roy Campbell.”

The Durban Club

Reynolds’ demands were met. The magazine muddled on for 8 more issues, before dying a deservedly lame death. In truth though, Campbell’s heart had been lost from the project since March, when his father had suddenly died from sleeping-sickness, leaving their divides uncrossed. He also hadn’t confronted the undeniable fact that he was a romantic loskop, profoundly unsuited to the thankless admin work of putting out a regular product. Moreover, his anger at South African attitudes had morphed into a distaste for South Africans themselves. Plomer remembers him saying in the midst of their collaboration, “[t]he whole of this country has an acid smell and all the white people have khaki faces.” Surprisingly though, Van der Post and Plomer managed to emigrate first. A chance encounter with a Japanese sea-captain led them both to snatch up a dual posting for foreign reporters in Tokyo, and they summarily left Port Natal aboard the Canada Maru on the 2nd of September, 1926, leaving Campbell to his endless sturm und drang. Roy would leave by December, dragging his family back to England, then France, then Spain. None of the three writers would live in South Africa again. 

Ocean Beach, Durban

For such a brief run of pages, Voorslag has spawned a century of afterlives. As he was rounding the Cape, Campbell himself wrote to Plomer suggesting they re-invent their creation as a new beast -  ‘Boomslang’. But this was purely wishful thinking. Their politics and personalities would diverge to the point of irreconcilable differences, and Campbell would torch his connections to the South African literary world by writing his most celebrated poem, ‘The Wayzgoose’, which survives today as a manifesto for South African self-mockery. As more than one critic has noted, it is especially sad that all three of the presiding spirits of the magazine, who briefly shared a revolutionary vision for South African letters and wore their South African-ness on their sleeves for the rest of their lives, left the country before their mid-twenties to join the middling diaspora and have their genius recognised in other countries. (There are more than a few friends I mourn for after the same fashion).

Perhaps it’s not worth the tears or the speculation. The poet NP van Wyk Louw directly claimed Voorslag’s influence on the Dertigers - the first wave of modern writers in Afrikaans. Likewise, Campbell would later become a close mentor to the poet Uys Krige, who would himself become a mentor and confidante to Ingrid Jonker, Breyten Breytenbach and Jack Cope. Moreover, the example Voorslag set of a collaboration of individual young writers publicly standing up to South Africa’s racial doctrines through artful anger and fearless, tragic satire signalled a reformation of our creativity. You can hear echoes of it in Cry, the Beloved Country, the Drum Generation, Nadine Gordimer, Andre Brink, Mongane Wally Serote, the Black Consciousness Poets, Life & Times of Michael K., all the way down to Maneo Mohale and Koleka Putuma today. And the very idea of a uniquely broad, multilingual South African magazine has survived through Ons Klyntji, Prufrock and New Contrast. 

As Plomer himself wrote:

Campbell and I do seem to have been the forerunners we felt ourselves to be in those days. Forerunners of what? Of a stronger consciousness of the functions, status, durability, and influence of imaginative literature than had (for obvious reasons) been previously conspicuous in South Africa - in English-speaking South Africa at least; and forerunners of fine and various and courageous efforts made by South African writers to apply themselves to the hidden forces in the heart as well as to the patent conflicts and complexities of their country.

The sting left a mark after all.