Cold Stone Jug - The Anniversary Edition. Herman Charles Bosman
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of her sprightly memoir of their tour together to Rhodesia long before.
The Cold Stone Jug review is unsigned and concludes:
There are many unpleasant and grotesque subjects offered for the reader’s contemplation. The subject matter of criminal character and prison atmosphere have been truthfully recorded. But in this generation we have become familiar with grim themes. The quality that lifts this book out of such a context is its humour, objectivity and a style that is full of nuances of meaning, implications that slide into the mind in the by-going. This may not be everyone’s book, but it is an interesting one.
Over the following weeks The Star kept listing Cold Stone Jug as a ‘Book in Demand (non-fiction).’ Yet, as if to neutralise any bad reports on prisons, on 26 February it devoted a full page to the new British system of prison farm-labour, “From Pentonville to a Prison without Bars.” This included a detailed report of the new spirit in which the High Commissioner, Mr Goodenough, voluntarily gave his talk to those inmates left in Pentonville; his topic was Southern Rhodesia’s progress towards dominion status. The occasion was concluded with Goodenough’s favourite wild animal stories.
Three weeks later Charles Eglington came out with the lead review in The Rand Daily Mail (“Prison Walls” on 19 February). Doubtless distressed by its lurid pulp fiction cover, Eglington found the work full of “unfortunate blemishes”: repetitive, aimlessly rambling and gratuitously sordid. He concluded rather cussedly that, in his view, Bosman seemed “not to want to evoke compassion in the reader and that the humour is so often, if not cruel, then callous.”
On the next day The Sunday Times at last noticed the work, though it also kept its distance. The reviewer, identified only as ‘S’, conceded it was:
true to life and well written.
The characters are well-drawn and living, and if they seem all to be touched with the same primitive rawness, it is probably not to be wondered at when the walls and bars of a prison carry their own inevitable and characteristic prison smell in spite of all the scrubbing. The book is vital and interesting but tough, like its subject.
The space opposite was devoted to major coverage of yet another book devoted to soil erosion in the Karoo.
In the March, 1949, number of Trek another of his colleagues there, Joseph Sachs, attempted to grapple with “this sinister drama of human degradation”, noting that such material was hardly the occasion for the usual literary moralising. But halfway through he simply gives up, resorting to lengthy quotation without further comment.
The first printing of Cold Stone Jug did well nevertheless, selling out within seven months. With reprinting it continued to sell: for July-December, 1949, Bosman’s royalties were 16/2; for January-June, 1950, £2/6/9; for the rest of the year, £1/5/2; and for the first half of 1951, again £2/6/9…
But the climb of Cold Stone Jug to some status in the critical hierarchy was slow. In 1951 the official organ of the Mineworkers’ Union, the weekly bilingual paper Die Mynwerker/The Mineworker, launched its literary supplement called Excelsior, which serialised complete books. Bosman had the gratification of seeing his Cold Stone Jug “unconditionally declared a masterpiece” and relaunched there on 15 June; between episodes 18 and 19 he unexpectedly died, and Excelsior carried a heartfelt obituary for a fellow worker. The serialisation continued to its bitter end on 1 February, 1952.
In his survey of fiction in English from Union to 1960 (in the PEN Annual of that year), Edgar Bernstein did place Bosman in “a class of his own”, describing Cold Stone Jug admiringly as an “autobiographical novel” (“I know of few stories which plumb deeper into the emotions of prisoners”). A decade later, in an article in the New Statesman (on 23 January, 1971) focusing on that other Afrikaner son of the soil, Eugène Marais, Doris Lessing digressed to include Bosman:
Marais was a solitary, but one of a scattered band of South Africans bred out of the veld, self-hewn, in advance of their time – and paying heavily for it. Schreiner was one, always fighting, always ill; Bosman another, the journalist and short-story writer who wrote the saddest of all prison books, Cold Stone Jug. His account of how hundreds of prisoners howled like dogs or hyenas through their bars at the full moon – everyone, warders too, pretending afterwards that it had never happened – has the same ring to it as Marais’s description of the baboons screaming out their helplessness through the night after leopards had carried off one of their troop.
With an appreciation like that, Cold Stone Jug may at last be seen as having come into its own.
When contemporary scholars attempt to describe the now substantial sub-section of South African writing designated as ‘prison literature’, Cold Stone Jug is usually mentioned as the foundational text. But we approach Bosman’s 1920s across the divide of the apartheid period, overlaid with new meanings for even the basic terms of punishment. The transitional moment is hard to pinpoint. But, for example, there is Hannah Stanton in her account, “Pretoria Central Gaol, 1960” (in Africa South in Exile, October-December, 1960), where she records that after the declaration of the State of Emergency of 30 March, 1960, she was detained there with some 1 900 others, without any charge or access to her co-workers at the Anglican Tumelong Mission in Pretoria’s Lady Selborne, before being deported as a British citizen. Her description of the prison routines might have come directly out of the pages of Bosman, even though the nature of the offence has changed, together with attitudes towards it. She is no longer a ‘criminal’: she is a ‘political’, with all that that has come to mean.
In a review-article in the October, 1975, issue of The Journal of Southern African Studies C. J. Driver was the first to link Cold Stone Jug to the new school of prison writers (including Albie Sachs, Daniel Mdluli aka D. M. Zwelonke and others). Neil Rusch (in an article in the Speak of Autumn, 1979) tries devotedly to use Cold Stone Jug as his key text in recounting what he terms the subsequent Prison Reform Crusade to lift restrictions on reporting of prison conditions within the new gulag of the apartheid state. Sheila Roberts (in Ariel of April, 1985) is one of the first to isolate ‘prison literature’ as a distinct category of South African culture. Situating Cold Stone Jug as its origin, she deals with the poetry of Dennis Brutus (Letters to Martha), Breyten Breytenbach and Jeremy Cronin (Inside), commenting rather unsurprisingly on the sameness of the experience expressed (prison is prison, as she remarks). Cronin himself in 1985, by contrast, wrote about how uncomfortable he felt being lumped together with the unregenerate lag. By the time of the article on writing from South African prisons by Anthony D. Cavaluzzi (carried in the Wasafiri of October, 1990), this sub-set in the literature has become widely known as typical of a new African experience of oppression, that of the ‘exile within.’
In a paper delivered at the Association of University English Teachers of Southern Africa conference held in Stellenbosch in July, 1990 (and published in the ninth English Academy Review), Mitzi Andersen suggested that Cold Stone Jug, being organised like a novel, was in fact considerably fictionalised. Pointing to Bernard Sachs’s evidence, she showed the originals of some of its characters to have been substantially altered – one Ronald Stewart, a British actor who once he was out never shaved, became ‘Slangvel’; an Andrew MacGregor was turned into the backveld schoolmaster, ‘Huysmans’, but in real life had actually married his under-age poppet, Kate, before eventually murdering her; ‘Tex Fraser’ was really nicknamed the Yank before he was released from the nick; the long monologue at the end of Chapter 2 was the speciality of a certain Jeff, who at last escaped the indeterminate sentence to reunite and party with Bosman in the back room of The Sjambok printing works. Another attempt to pin down the exact genre of Cold Stone Jug is Henrietta Mondry’s (in the Journal of Literary Studies of June, 1992), and in the English Academy Review of the same year Margaret Lenta persuasively argues off those who have disqualified Cold Stone Jug from being a major South African creative achievement because of its mixed-genre nature.
Then David Schalkwyk (in Research in African Literatures of Spring, 1994) takes Roberts’s grouping further, including many other writers who have endured prison to leave an account of it (Ruth First, Mongane Serote, Molefe Pheto in And Night Fell, Hugh Lewin) in various based-on-fact ways. As for Bosman, their interest lies in their canny use of irony as a coping device; a grand school of surviving, indeed. More recently