Cold Stone Jug - The Anniversary Edition. Herman Charles Bosman
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“the scaffold is the only construction that revolutions do not demolish”). Bosman seems not to have read Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s Notes from the House of the Dead (1860), about his four-year term in Siberia, although the Constance Garnett translation into English became available during his teens and on 7 March, 1930, Stephen Black in The Sjambok had attempted to revive interest in it by nominating it as one of his monthly Neglected Masterpieces. Yet Dostoyevsky set the trend in novelising the modern prison experience by using a faceless narrator reporting on the lives of his fellow convicts, unrepentant all (“Man is a creature that can get used to anything, and I think that that is the best definition of him”). Nor does Bosman seem to have made use of the Johannesburg Public Library’s copies of these other classics in the genre, which Ella Manson could readily have made available to him from the reference section: the historical novel on which the literature of sister-colony Australia was to be founded, Marcus Clarke’s For the Term of his Natural Life (1874), about the British Poe-reading Bohemian transported to the antipodes with a 16-inch sleeping space per convict on board; the early Victorians like Charles Reade who describe the inside of houses of correction; and the Irish nationalist leader, John Mitchel, whose Jail Journal (1854) includes an account of his year marooned on a prison ship in False Bay during that famous Anti-Convict Agitation.
However, two of JPL’s well-thumbed volumes did certainly have a bearing on the writing of Cold Stone Jug. The first one Bosman acknowledges having as part of his weekend reading (in his Pavement Patter column, “The Innocents Abroad”, Trek, November, 1948): a book recording “a brief time of recess from the daily grind”, Silvio Pellico’s Ten Years in Prison. But what Bosman had in hand was a now untraceable typescript of a translation of it into Afrikaans, which he was presumably to vet for publication. (JPL holds several editions of Pellico in English, with one into French, as well as the original Italian of 1831.) Once as famous as his contemporary, the Marquis de Sade, Pellico was the romantic poet and patriot sentenced to death for treason under the Austrian Occupation, whose sentence was commuted to fifteen years of gruelling servitude. A year after reading Pellico, Bosman had completed his own prison memoir.
The second influence, although there is only circumstantial evidence for this, is the work of one Jim Phelan, now also largely forgotten. Judging by the copies of Phelan’s various works held in JPL, there was quite a vogue for him in Johannesburg in the 1940s. Bernard Sachs, Bosman’s editor at The South African Opinion and Trek, remarks in the first of no less than four memorials he wrote of his old schoolmate and colleague that “Cold Stone Jug, a description of Bosman’s life in prison, is competent, but has been done as well by Jim Phelan and others” (Trek, November, 1951), as if the Phelan connection were common knowledge. Once Bosman was safely dead, of course Sachs was free to retell his early life-story as he saw it in a thinly veiled, rather tasteless novel which includes extensive quotations from the 1926 trial records (The Utmost Sail, 1955).
Phelan was born near Dublin in 1895; at the time Bosman would have read him, he was a bestselling author, famous for his recounting of his thirteen years spent from 1926 in Manchester Gaol, Maidstone, Dartmoor and Pankhurst Prison on the Isle of Wight, serving his term for murder. He too consoled himself with the writings of his fellow “healthy dead men”, Bunyan, Hugo, Wilde and Henry, and could turn a black epigram (“in the condemned cell the only statistic of importance is one’s weight (lbs.)”). In his Jail Journey of 1941 he remarks: “I do but record the strange things I saw in that country I visited.” He sets the precedent for recounting parts of his story in the secret language of that country, as Bosman would do as well.
Bosman was also conversant with how the Americans handled his subject matter. There was Ambrose Bierce’s exemplary horror story about an execution, “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” (collected in his In the Midst of Life in 1891), in which the Southern planter and spy caught by Union soldiers sabotaging the railway bridge over Alabama’s Owl Creek is trussed up over the raging stream with his neck “in the hemp.” Bosman’s other favourite, O. Henry, left at his death an unfinished story called “The Dream”, about a man awaiting execution.
Yet by as late as 1947 it seems that our ‘Herman Malan’ had so successfully made himself over as ‘Herman Charles Bosman’ that his criminal past no longer existed for him. Consider this excerpt (from his Indaba column that July), written in his new chaffing manner, appropriate to the sort of ephemeral bantering in which he excelled. Is there any detail here to give away the fact that the reformed Bosman really knew what he was talking about?
[What] struck me in connection with the difference between Cape Town and Johannesburg relates to all the talk that is going on locally about the projected closing down of the Roeland Street Gaol. I am, naturally, not acquainted with Roeland Street Gaol: I am a Johannesburg man. But it would appear that this far-famed Cape Town prison has got just as much character, individuality, squalor, disagreeableness and romance as, say, the Johannesburg Fort. Now, it is when one places the Fort in juxtaposition to Roeland Street that it would seem (to the person inside trying to look out) that Cape Town is not, after all, a thousand miles from Johannesburg…
Incidentally, it would be interesting to know why it is that certain prisons have developed a definite individuality, so that the sound of their names means something: Dartmoor, Sing-Sing, Alcatraz, San Quentin, the Breakwater. About these names there is a solid and eminently satisfactory grimness. Whereas, the names of lots of other prisons – and the world is full of prisons – evoke, by comparison, hardly any kind of emotional response.
Next to Roeland Street and The Fort, Pretoria Prison sounds colourless and insipid, almost just like being inside. And I wonder why that is. After all, has the Pretoria Gaol not got just as thick walls and just as heavy bars and just as small window-apertures? – and are the warders not just as brutal and burly and the convicts as debased and sullen and hang-dog looking as their fellows in Roeland Street? And yet look at the difference in the sound of these two gaols in respect of tone, shuddery reaction and general showiness.
Anyway, I think it is a pity that prisons with so much individuality and tradition as The Fort and Roeland Street must go. But the authorities will no doubt try and replace them with gaols just as good. (And succeed.)
His friends of the late 1940s, Gordon and Yvonne Vorster, used to recount that when Cold Stone Jug first came out they were completely taken aback: they had not known anything of the author’s shady past. They knew that it had been his habit regularly to retire into a room the size of a toilet, with a table and chair and with a goodly supply of typing paper, and to emerge from there cordially enough when his daily stint was done. This cubbyhole of his was no ordinary retreat: adjacent to the lift shaft of His Majesty’s Buildings in Eloff Street, it had once served as the walk-in safe of The South African Jewish Times. Its editor, Leon Feldberg, had provided him with the requisite keys to lock himself in and even had a small window knocked into the wall. Claustrophobic, reliving his captivity, there Bosman used to write until all his drafts were complete. Not wanting to pry, the Vorsters had never quizzed him about the contents of the work. Even his wife of the time, their confidante Helena, admitted that she was shocked by Cold Stone Jug, albeit pleased that he had been able to face those ghosts and write them out, she hoped once and for all.
The reception accorded Cold Stone Jug in the Johannesburg English-language press at first was edgy. Bosman’s friend and champion, Mary Morison Webster, the Georgian lady poet who could set the trend for the nation on The Sunday Times, sat this one out. For weeks Bosman had to watch the space other competing volumes in the bookshops were accorded: Madeleine Masson’s new biography of Lady Anne Barnard; the entire page two filled week after week with excerpts from Winston Churchill’s war memoirs; how members of Mrs Mackie-Niven’s safari party had at last traced the huge wild fig-tree just over the Mozambique border where her father’s immortal dog, Jock of the Bushveld, lay buried.
In the event, The Star led. Its brief review in its weekly space on 31 January, 1949, was entitled “Tale of Prison Life.” This was alongside a longer column devoted to the problems the erstwhile prison reformer Alan Paton was having answering his continuing fanmail over Cry, the Beloved Country, and the news that the satire about the stock exchange, Kaffirs are Lively, by Bosman’s colleague on Trek, Oliver Walker, was still doing well. The record run of Leonard Schach’s production of The Glass Menagerie was also cause for affirmative