A tribute by Malcolm Hacksley
In 1962 André Brink was in his twenties, a lecturer at Rhodes University in Grahamstown. I was a first-year student from a country town in the far Northern Transvaal. Merely because I spoke Afrikaans with some fluency, I opted for a single course in Afrikaans-Nederlands and found myself attending his classes. It was a casual choice which was to alter the course of my life: I went on to do Honours in the department!
For what André Brink did was to teach – no: to demonstrate – how literary works have structure, and how their structure was a vehicle for conveying understandings of what life itself was all about. I was not aware that he had written or published anything himself (though he had), so there was no element of egotism or showing off in his lectures. Instead, they were packed full and running over with acurate information , acute analysis and – above all – stimulating insights into the writer’s craft.
All his lectures were delivered rapidly and with a combination of infectious enthusiasm and confident authority: here was an acdemic who was not only familiar with his own subject but had already read widely across the entire spectrum of European and English writing. His literary judgement was something you felt you could trust. The ideas he introduced in his lectures were intensely challenging, ‘mind-blowing’ even, but he paid his students the compliment of assuming that we were intelligent enough to grasp them. He taught us to see beyond the surface of literary works – single poems, short stories, novels, plays – into layers of meaning, often by analysing the author’s technique.
Having a teacher as intellectually uncompromising as Brink was an awesome privilege, but he wore our awe lightly, treating us rather as friends. A party at his house, surrounded by his growing collection of modern paintings, was always fun, largely because of his skill in recounting witty anecdotes – many of them of the Oom Kootjie Emmer kind: brief, earthy, and laugh-out-loud funny. André’s observations and descriptions of human foibles were without malice or superciliousness. He simply enjoyed the absurditiesa inherent in human life and was able to share his delight. That was perhaps one of his greatest strengths as a writer: Homo erat et nihil humanum ei alienum erat.
Despite the vast contrasts in our gifts and abilities, in his company I never felt dimished. For me, knowing him was always an enrichment.
In his final speech, delivered last week in Belgium, he spoke of the writer’s task as “finding a path through the shadows towards the light, however faint”. Now that he himself has passed through the shadows, may light perpetual shine upon him.