Don Maclennan (1967) OBITUARY 1
Poet and playwright Maclennan dies at 79
Grahamstown’s much-loved poet, Rhodes English professor Don Maclennan, has died.
Don, as he was simply known to his many friends and fans, died in Port Elizabeth on Monday night at the age of 79.
After a decade of struggling with motor-neuron disease, the rock-climbing poet suffered a stroke in January. His son, senior South African Press Association Journalist Ben Maclennan, said his father died “relatively peacefully” with his wife Shirley nearby.
Maclennan’s mind was not affected by the stroke, and he had continued “discussing poetry with friends and listening to poetry right up to the end”.
This was despite loss of movement, a very limited ability to communicate and a good deal of pain.
Maclennan also called for his latest poems, a meditation on death and the meaning of life titled Rehearsal, to be read to him by his close friend, poet and Rhodes English lecturer Dan Wylie.
Many of Maclennan’s works were published commercially and in his later years, privately.
“He kept on putting out slim volumes year after year,” said his son Ben.
A few years ago he won the national Sanlam Poetry Prize.
Friends described his work as raunchy, with some despair, full of love, lean, frank, unpretentious but richly compressed.
Maclennan wrote a number of plays, several of which were performed. He also acted in a number of Guy Butler’s plays.
Maclennan was born in the UK. After lecturing at Wits University and the University of Cape Town, he came to Rhodes in 1966 where he taught English for over 40 years.
He is survived by his wife and their children Ben, Joe, David, and Susan.
CAPE ARGUS (City Late) 12 Feb 2009 Page 9
OBITUARY 2
Don Maclennan - in memoriam by Dan Wylie
Don Maclennan died this week, the best beloved of teachers and critically most neglected of playwrights and poets. No one who encountered Don during the more than three decades of his teaching career at Rhodes University is likely to forget the piercing appraisal of his blue eyes, the penetration of his questions, or the incisiveness of his opinions. No budding poet - or, for that matter, lover - who consulted him came away without startling insights.
Don was born in 1929, and grew up in London and the Transvaal. He studied philosophy at Edinburgh, married American-born Shirley, and taught at Wits before moving to Grahamstown. He will be well remembered in Grahamstown’s townships for promoting theatre; his own plays are fine but now almost forgotten. He claimed that he had written half a dozen novels but destroyed them “with a huge sense of relief and satisfaction”. Only one fiction piece, A Short History of Madness in the Eastern Cape, survives with any prominence. Though he published some critical material early in his academic career, he eventually largely eschewed the pretensions of academic publishing. His favoured medium became the short, pithy talk, rich with original aphorisms on the value of story and poem, and laden with quotations from his favourite writers.
And of course poetry. Don published or printed some twenty volumes of poetry, some of the finest this country has ever produced. That he is so critically neglected is astounding, perhaps partly because he studiously despised politics. Also, he increasingly self-published rather than pursue commercial publication.
His poems became increasingly spare and lapidary in his later life, increasingly concerned with his approaching death. Though sometimes disturbing, they above all celebrated the simple fact of being alive, being in love, being sensuous. He was the master of the marriage of the simple, resonant image with the philosophical statement. In this he often resembled some of his favourite poets, the Greeks, such as Seferis, Ritsos and Elytis. There is probably no poetry in the national oeuvre more thoughtfully authentic than his.
It is tragically ironic that this great walker and rock-climber first had the use of his legs robbed by motor-neuron disease, and finally that this profound communicator should in his last week’s lose his voice to a stroke. Yet after retirement he courageously continued to teach undergraduate tutorials, doing what he loved most, until the end of 2008. And just two days before he died he was still considering and polishing yet another slim collection of poems, entitled Dress Rehearsal, the last in an astonishing late flowering of productivity,
One of those poems considers, almost prophetically, the plight of his sister, bed-ridden and dying in a hospital. She wakes and whispers, “This is not a dress rehearsal”. Nothing in Don’s rich life was a dress rehearsal for anything else: every moment was lived for itself.
Don Maclennan’s passing leaves all of us who care about literature both enriched and, now, deeply bereft. He leaves his wife, four children, and several grandchildren, and more saddened students of all ages than one could count.
