Introduction to Perceval Gibbon’s Margaret Harding

Introduction to Perceval Gibbon’s Margaret Harding

By Pieter D. Williams

This Introduction is a pre-print of the version which appears in the 1983 edition, and differs in several respects from the final published piece. It is reproduced here from Pieter Williams’ handwritten manuscript. The original Part 1 of Williams’ manuscript consists of a lengthier and more detailed biographical account of Gibbon than in the version below. The original Part 1 is broadly similar to the text of ‘In search of Perceval Gibbon’ published elsewhere in this website, so I recommend reading ‘In search of Perceval Gibbon’ first. – GS

I

Margaret Harding is a remarkable book by a remarkable person. Its author, Perceval Gibbon, spent not more than six years in South Africa (1898-1903), yet, blessed with Welsh canniness and what Sydney Clouts in his poem ‘Africa’ has called ‘The full penetrant eye’, he saw through the surface appearance of colonial Africa at the turn of the century, and perceived some of its essence, its wholeness, its ‘ground beneath ground’. Once regarded as a misguided, ill-conceived novel about miscegenation and bad race relations, Margaret Harding has, as our attitudes and perspectives have changed, begun to attract more and more attention. The time is ripe for it to take its place as an important work dealing with major issues such as identity, identification, ethnicity, art, language, communication, the African encounter, initiation, alienation, the outsider, physical and metaphysical disease, concern, pity and love. It is about emergent Africa. The time is ripe, too, for Perceval Gibbon to take his place as a significant writer on Africa. Margaret Harding is prophetic, far in advance of its time. It not only analyzes colonial attitudes, but also anticipates post-colonial ones.

Reginald Percival (with an i) Gibbon was born at the town of Trelech, Carmarthenshire, Wales, on 4 November 1878. His father was the Rev. James Morgan Gibbon (1855-1932), Independent minister at Trelech (1875-80), Congregational minister at Swansea (1880-5), Highgate, London (1885-9), and Stamford Hill, London (1889-1932), and one-time chairman the Congregational Union. He was an author in his own right, and a powerful preacher. Perceval (who wrote his name with an e) was the eldest child; he had five sisters and a brother.

He attended schools in London, and the Moravian School at Königsfeld, Baden, Germany. His schooling completed, he joined the Merchant Navy, sailing in British, French and American ships. He then tried his hand at journalism In London. About eighteen months before the outbreak of the Anglo-Boer War (1899-1902) he arrived in South Africa, and did ‘outside staff’ work for various papers. During the war he was a correspondent in uniform for a syndicate of colonial papers. He was captured by the Boers, but escaped and resumed work as a war correspondent attached to one of the utility units. After the war Gibbon worked for the Natal Witness, the Rand Daily Mail and the Rhodesian Times. (While reporting for the Natal Witness, he was associated with another reporter-author, Douglas Blackburn (1857-1929), whose novel A Burgher Quixote (1902) is to be a companion volume in this series.) Then, making his way via Central and East Africa, Gibbon arrived back in London in 1904.

Before his return to London, Gibbon had completed. a volume of verse, African Items (1903). He was reporting for the Morning Leader in London, when the British Weekly started publishing his short stories. Then came a lucky break with Maga, the publisher Blackwood’s prestige publication which issued his Vrouw Grobelaar stories in serial form. Thereafter Blackwood published his novel Souls in Bondage (1904), The Vrouw Grobelaar’s Leading Cases (1905) in book form, and another novel Salvator (1908).

After this came a spell in New York as chief staff writer of McClure’s Magazine; an assignment for the Standard in St. Petersburg (Leningrad), Russia; and correspondent for the Daily News in Turkey (1912). The First World War found him attached to the British Intelligence Department; a civilian correspondent for the Daily Chronicle in Russia, Poland and Bulgaria (1914-16); subsequently for the same paper in Flanders (1916); a joint correspondent for the Daily Chronicle and the New York Times, later for the New York Times only, at the Italian front (1917); and finally a major in the Royal Marines writing dispatches at Zeebrugge (1917-18) and an official documentary The Triumph of the Royal Navy (1919). His life as a war correspondent, both in Africa and in Europe, was hazardous, colourful and exciting, and yielded some of his best journalistic writing.

Gibbon married in 1904, and during the years 1905-12 the Gibbons lived in London, then they moved to Trottiscliffe in Kent. Two daughters were born to this marriage. The composition of Salvator and Margaret Harding (1911) dates back to this period of his life. He was a close friend of Ford Madox Ford and Joseph Conrad: Salvator is dedicated to the former, Margaret Harding to the latter and his wife Jessie. He always maintained a wide circle of literary friends.

Gibbon continued to write articles and short stories, the latter being collected in The Adventures of Miss Gregory (1912), The Second-class Passenger (1913), Those Who Smiled (1920) and The Dark Places (1926).

Gibbon’s first marriage was not a lasting one. He remarried in 1920 and retired to Guernsey in the Channel Islands to write. Again, two daughters were born to the couple. ·On Saturday night, 30 May 1926, he fell ill, and died suddenly the next afternoon. We have no certainty about his projected writings, for many of his records and papers were lost during the Nazi occupation of the Channel Islands during the Second World War.

II

Margaret Harding opens with a powerful evocation of the African veld on a Karoo farm, as powerful as Olive Schreiner’s The Story of an African Farm. It is late afternoon; the sheep are leaving their fold. They are watched by Paul du Preez, a youth of 17. He stands half-way between ‘the little farm-house with its out-buildings’ and the dam – two significant places in the novel. The former, symbolic of white Afrikaner-English habitation in Africa, is the scene of several crucial conflicts between Boer, Briton and Black. The latter is a meeting-place of the elements earth, water, sun and air, and, in the decisive episode in the middle of the book (chapter 10), a meeting-place of three cultures, Germanic, African and English, of black and white, of male and female, a trysting·place. A symbol of art.

The third significant locale is ‘the house that reared its steep roof within eyeshot of the farm’, a tuberculosis Sanatorium run by a degenerate, drunken English doctor Eustace Jakes, and his wife Hester. The Sanatorium houses the physically and spiritually derelict and diseased of Europe, including Margaret Harding. The patients are physically diseased, their keepers spiritually so – Margaret Harding abounds with such ironic inversions. As the The Story of an African Farm is about the quest for knowledge, Margaret Harding is about the quest for healing, health and wholeness.

Paul du Preez, who has a stern, taciturn Calvinist Afrikaner father, Christian, and a merry, loquacious English mother, Vivie, is neither child nor adult, having the innocence of the former, the wisdom of the latter, the soul of an artist – a sculptor in the making. Besides being an artist, a mediator and a visionary, Paul’s functional role is that of supporter and friend of both the central figures in the book.

The fourth locale is the country town Fereira, remembered in a fairly lengthy flash-back by Christian du Preez. Like Cape Town and London, also remembered in flash-backs by other characters, Fereira doesn’t feature in the central action but it represents the greater urban world, a ‘focus of life’ (p. 134) outside the small rural world of farm, house, dam and Sanatorium. The greater world impinges upon the smaller, but does not change its prejudices; indeed, the prejudices of the greater world are isolated and brought into sharp focus in the smaller.

Connecting this microcosm with the outside world is the main cross-country railway line, with its small nameless railway halt. This represents the fifth setting, the place where both Margaret the English woman and Kamis the Kafir enter the scene. It has the significance of a ‘threshold’, its train ‘a swift brief visitor’ to and from ‘strange, distant cities, … freighted with the romance of far travel’ (p. 12).

Then finally there is the African landscape, the Great Karoo, that abuts on farm, Sanatorium, railway, station, town and kraal – a pervasive presence, an active protagonist in the plot. Any salient work on Africa must come to terms with this presence. Gibbon is one of the few Britons of his time to write perceptively about the African landscape, and with imaginative sympathy about its peoples and their problems. But however perceptive he is, he nevertheless sees Africa through European eyes, and in terms of his British consciousness, his British and German training.

The initial evocation of the African landscape sets the somewhat melancholy tone of the novel – in spite of its spritely wit, subdued humour and delicate ironies- and gives clues to Gibbon’s European orientation (p. 1):

… nothing interrupted the suave level of the miles stretching forth, like a sluggish sea, to the skyline. In its sunset mood, its barren brown, the universal tint into which its poor scrub faded and was lost to the eye, was touched to warmth and softened; it was a wilderness with a soul.

An analysis of the settings in the novel proves interesting as regards shift of scene and structural balance. Although there are many shifts of scene, sometimes almost a scuttling from one place to another, Margaret Harding is not a novel of travel, concerned with journeying for its own sake. The microcosm of Sanatorium-farm-veld remains a constant stage for the action. And in spite of Gibbon’s acceptance of the Karoo as vast, it is not a ‘panoramic’ novel, but rather a domestic one, not picturesque but scenic. Only one of the salient scenes takes place on the open veld; four take place within the shelter of the dam wall; one at the station; one just outside the Sanatorium. All the rest take place either inside or close to the farmhouse, or at the Sanatorium. The Sanatorium is by far the most important locale. Conceptually the microcosm is a confined space, an island surrounded, and, as such, bears meaningful comparison with the island books of any literature. Chronological time and calendar time, which drive people in the ‘outside’ world, are of little account in this isolated setting, to which Gibbon doesn’t give a seasonal schedule.

As Paul du Preez stands in a reverie, he is accosted by an old black man, a shepherd. He has seen a ‘mad Kafir’. It might interest readers to know that the word ‘Kafir’, also ‘Kaffir’ or ‘Caffre’, first appears in written English in 1801, and was originally the Arabic word for infidel, unbeliever, non-Muslim. It was later applied to non-Muslim blacks, and arrived in South Africa with this meaning. As race attitudes in South Africa developed, ‘Kafir’ came to be a derogatory term, like ‘nigger’ in India and the U.S.A. (which word, incidentally, also features in its derogatory sense in Margaret Harding), butGibbon uses ‘Kafir’ in a neutral way, simply to mean a black person. At the time Gibbon was writing, the term was often confined to the meaning of Xhosa, as opposed for example to Zulu.

The old shepherd’s tale is couched in colourful poetic terms and tones. It does suggest a Bantu poetic tradition, but not the tonal cadences, overtones and idiom of a black language, as, say, Sol Plaatje does in Mhudi (1930). Similarly, Gibbon’s Afrikaners, particularly Paul’s father, do not speak in a way that suggests the tonal patterns of Afrikaans as, say, H. C. Bosman’s Oom Schalk Lourens does. The odd mahli, skellum, Allemachtag, kopje and dassie do not lend internal authenticity to the diction. Gibbon may make a few errors of fact, vocabulary, tone and register – evidence of his having been a visitor to Africa – but he firmly grasps the notion that the African reality is a multilingual one.

The shepherd tells how he was dozing at his fire in the veld one night when he heard ‘a voice coming nearer that sang a curious music’. The singer, a Kafir, ‘a strong young man’, was wearing ‘clothes and boots’. He came to the fire, and ‘spoke … with his slow, soft voice in his language of the mad … it sounded like English.’ But there was nothing insubstantial about the shilling coin that the Kafir threw into the shepherd’s lap in exchange for the hunk of bread hetook. When Paul examines the shilling, he finds that ‘the magic of madness and the stolid massiveness of Queen Victoria’s effigy [are] not easy to reconcile’. The Great White Queen, Gibbon implies, has her worshippers not only in Kensington, but also in the Karoo. Ironically, Paul will toss a shilling with the same effigy on it to a villainous tramp who will check its validity. Although commercial enterprise and materialism do not directly invade the rural microcosm, characters will toss about hush money and conscience money with equal deadly purpose and apparent abandon. But the most significant observations in the shepherd’s tale, dramatizing the lack of communication across language barriers, the fate of the outsider and the cultural hybrid, are those I have put in italics (p. 4):

… he was not one of us: he stood, with his head on one side, smiling down, while I began to feel fear and ill-ease … he … took a piece [of bread] as large as this fist. He seemed to ask for it, but I could not understand him. Then he laughed, and tossed something into my lap, and turned again to the night …

After dismissing the old shepherd, Paul repairs to his retreat at the foot of the dam wall – an isolated, protected, fecund, consoling place, somehow able to focus the flux of the world outside into meaningful symbols, to give balance and sanity to it. This is Gibbon at his best: compact, concise, poetic, dramatic, with a careful selection of significant detail.

One of these significant details is ‘mask’, a theme that runs through the book with greater frequency even than ‘money’. Gibbon mercilessly strips masks from the faces of his characters, then paints them warts and all. Many a character is shown to be one who ‘wears a mask and his face grows to fit it’ (George Orwell).

The epigraph to Margaret Harding is a stornello from Browning’s poem ‘Fra Lippo Lippi’ in Men and Women (1855).

Flower o’ the peach,
Death for us all, and his own life for each.

The poem is a key to Gibbon’s artistic credo, and needs to be read for a deeper understanding of this novel, Stornelli are three-line flower-songs (but Browning allows only two), containing a love-theme, sung by the peasants of Tuscany at their work. These stornelli are interspersed throughout the poem. Lippo Lippi voices the credo of realism. Two lines of the poem are especially relevant; if we substitute ‘person’ for ‘monk’, we see Gibbon’s intention:

First, every sort of monk, the black and white,
I draw them, fat and lean.

The stornello Gibbon quotes as his epigraph is the last of a series: ‘Flower o’ the broom … quince … thyme … rose … clove … pine … peach.’ Each flower has its characteristic aroma and significance. Like ‘Fra Lippo Lippi’, Margaret Harding is an exploration of the mediums and techniques of art, of the relationship of art to life and life to art, and of the artist’s location and role in society – in Africa as well as Europe.

There are five characters in Margaret Harding who dabble in the graphic and plastic arts. Three of them are young men: Paul, the South African farmer’s son, not nurtured in art but with the eye and mind, the inner urge of an artist, tries to bring order and coherence into the bewildering flux of sense-impressions with which Africa assails him, tries to embody the soul of Africa in heads of clay. The second, a South African doctor, Kamis, who has had training in clay-modelling and anatomy, has the technical know-how and dexterity, but lacks the inner conviction. The third, a consumptive English ex-army officer, Ford, with no training and no artist’s eye, mind or hand, tries unsuccessfully to paint his impressions of Africa, as therapy in an effort to stave off the fear of death. Margaret, with more than a superficial knowledge of art, and with an artist’s eye and mind, channels her artistic impulses into the art of living, of being useful to others, and of appreciating others’ artistic efforts. In sharp contrast to these ‘artists’, who are processing the actual substance of their African initiation and experience, is Amy Hollier, Margaret’s fellow art student in London, who lives out her hollow trivial existence ‘in her brown-papered room, with the Rossetti prints on the wall and the Helleu etching above the mantel’ (p. 87), untouched by momentous events, least of all by those being enacted in the Karoo microcosm.

Similarly, the ‘loose-backed, much-handled novels from the doctor’s inelastic stock of literature’ (p. 99) lie face down between Margaret and Ford. These British books, like Jakes’s medical tomes (p. 39), have little significance in Africa. Letters, and newspapers, ‘real’ communication between ‘real’ people, are far more important. However, Gibbon does not go to the extreme of making his heroine throw these useless books out of the window, as Olive Schreiner does!

Thus, Gibbon examines different kinds of art, and gives his approval to the visionary kinds, tutored and untutored, that make contact with life in the raw. Paul takes the ‘raw’ lump of clay on which he has secretly been working from its hiding-place below a vine. ‘His back to the veld’, isolated from the world, Paul is a primitive, an innocent, as he squats at his stone table in his open-air studio. His tribute to Africa, his symbol of the spirit of Africa, is a black man’s head (see p. 6):

… he had been feeling, darkly, gropingly, for the brutal angle of the brows that should brood like a cloud over the whole countenance. It had evaded him and baffled him; he knew how it should be, but when the time had come for him to leave it for the night, the brows still cocked themselves in a suggestion of imbecility which was heart-breaking … the chaos of the featureless face below the smooth head fronted him.

Here is a European innocent creating an old Adam from African clay. This moment matches another when a white woman, also an outcast, will stretch out a hand, touch the black Kamis, and say ‘You poor devil!’ (p. 206). And another, when a white prostitute, pitied and cared for by the doctor Kamis, will wave her hand at him, and he will wave back, and call her ‘poor devil’ (p. 80). And yet another, when Margaret, watching a train of manacled black prisoners being herded along like cattle, will be the only onlooker to utter ‘a sharp exclamation of distress’ (p. 90).

But one is struck by Paul’s (and Gibbon’s) ambivalent feelings towards the black physiognomy: fascination and awe, yet also repugnance and revulsion for the black face. Gibbon senses his attitude is illogical and prejudiced, but throughout the book he will refer to black features in these terms. His eye, conditioned by his European culture to see as definitive the Greek ideal of Praxiteles in white marble, and the thousand and one variations of this in European art of many centuries, feels initially repelled by black colour and feature, especially when these are coupled with the long-standing Hebraic-Christian ethic whose imagery couples ‘purity’ and ‘good’ with ‘white’, and ‘impurity’ and ‘bad’ with ‘black’. When Paul and Margaret meet Kamis face to face, Gibbon makes both of them react in the same way (p. 72):

To Margaret then, as to Paul in his first encounter with him at the station, there was a shock in the pitiful gross negro face that went with the pleasant cultivated voice.

Paul then proceeds to model the face further. Here Gibbon writes with authority about the modeller’s, the sculptor’s, art, as he does elsewhere in Margaret Harding about painting. But soon an African gourd-drum summons Paul to the farmhouse. Here we meet Paul’s mother and Mrs. Hester Jakes, representative of two kinds of English women, as Margaret will be of a third. (Mrs. du Preez, born Vivie Sinclair, was once a vivacious music-hall actress. Twice at later stages in the narrative Gibbon will go to great lengths to justify her relationship with her husband, but it is one of the few features of the novel that I find unconvincing, given Christian du Preez’s Afrikaner Calvinist rural orientation, and Vivie’s English liberal urban one.) From the three-cornered conversation that ensues between Paul, his mother and Mrs. Jakes, we learn about the central figure, Margaret Harding. She is 26, from a ‘good’ family in fashionable Kensington, London, and at a stage of tuberculosis not too advanced for cure. Paul agrees to fetch her from the station.

Chapter 2 depicts the railway halt. We meet a Cape Mounted Policeman, a jack-booted military monster who regards the whole world as a prison parade ground for his sole use. This man is nameless, but Gibbon surely intends us to regard him as a forerunner of Sub-Inspector Van Zyl. Van Zyl convincingly plays his part as a dramatic catalyst, unofficial prosecutor, judge, jury and executioner appointed by public opinion, besides carrying out his official function as keeper of law and order. Somewhat later in the novel we have this startling comment on Van Zyl’s psychology and identity. Kamis is speaking (p. 156):

… he’s got a Kafir mind. He was born among them and nursed by them; he speaks as a Kafir, understands as a Kafir, and thinks as a Kafir, and he’ll never become a European and put away Kafir things. They’ve made him, and at best he’s an ambassador for the Kafirs among the whites.

Where Gibbon’s characterization of Van Zyl seems false, is that he speaks like a British regimental sergeant-major, and not in the vernacular of his place and culture. But Van Zyl’s real significance is that he is a vestige of the colonial hunter. He and his mounted men, no longer able to hunt game, herd prisoners like cattle. He transfers the aggressive, predatory hunter’s mentality to his human relationships, and tries to assert the psychological supremacy his horse has conferred on him. And Christian du Preez is also for a time cast in the role of a hunter, when he relates his experiences of commando raids against Kafirs; when he threatens to shoot down a tramp; when he sallies forth on an armed man-hunt. The frontier may have disappeared, Gibbon seems to say, but the frontier hunter lives on.

At the railway halt we also meet for the first time ‘the mad creature of the shepherd’s tale’ (p. 15), Kamis the Kafir, at once a quasi-messianic figure and a pariah. His father, a tribal chief, had been hanged by the Cape authorities, as a punitive measure, when Kamis was 6; a guardian appointed by the British government cared for him and supervised his education in Britain – Christian later fleshes out with factual detail the old shepherd’s hazy, folklorish tale. Now a qualified doctor, Kamis has returned to serve his people.

Al the time of Gibbon’s writing, ‘easy English from the mouth of a Kafir’ (p. 15) must have seemed like a linguistic miracle. The Rev. Tiyo Soga (1829-71), whose father was a Xhosa chief killed by colonial troops, and who graduated from Glasgow University, might well have been Gibbon’s exemplar for Kamis, if it was not the Rev. Walter Rubusana (1858-1916), a Congregational minister from East London, who helped with the revision of the Xhosa Bible and was in London in 1905 for that purpose. Gibbon’s father was, as we know, a prominent Congregationalist. There are features in a newspaper report of Rubusana (Daily Chronicle, London, reprinted in the Rand Daily Mail, 18 October 1905) that coincide with Gibbon’s description of Kamis.

Kamis fulfils his dramatic and symbolic functions well enough. On several crucial occasions he just happens to be in a strategic position at the psychological moment (pp. 15, 68, 110, 200). He is a mythological figure; a sophisticated young man in contrast to the simple old shepherd; an aesthetic and technical tutor, artistic mentor to Paul; a competent doctor, man of science, in contrast to the derelict Jakes; a psychological Aunt Sally for Van Zyl’s aggression and hatred; an object of scorn for Mrs. Jakes; a deus ex machina to save Vivie du Preez; a moral instructor and a reproach to Christian; a soul-mate for Margaret; and finally, an instrument and agent for Gibbon’s explorations of language, art, ethnicity, race relations, the African experience, society, the outsider, the human condition.

Kamis seems to me a theoretical construct, not a fictional personage. He lacks authenticity and solid identity. Gibbon sometimes casts him in the role of a black schlemiel, the Jewish ‘unlucky bungler’. This may be part of Gibbon’s intention: to present a denatured, deracinated black. Not without reason Gibbon’s artistic surrogate, Paul, finds himself unable to shape a negro head. He demonstrates one of the main problems of the colonial experience: the white’s inability to understand the black, either in the black’s own frame of reference, Africa, or in his inherited frame of reference, Europe.

But Kamis is more than a mere figure-head and plot-manipulator. The old shepherd makes much of his singing, and Gibbon much of the musical quality of his voice. Kamis is the wandering minstrel of The Mikado (1885), ‘a thing of shreds and patches’. He also fits the part of the wandering American ‘nigger minstrel’, a transplant from tribal Africa. He has cultural links with the French troubadour, the German minnesänger and the Anglo-Saxon scop. His adoration of Margaret has medieval overtones, and his kissing her hand with bared head (p. 83) is a truly troubadour gesture. The perverted version of Burns’s troubadour song, part of which, ‘My love is like a black, black rose’, is sung to Margaret and Kamis (p. 161), taken in conjunction with the stornello epigraph, establishes Gibbon’s comic and satiric purpose. Moreover, Kamis is a parody imbongi, the black African equivalent of a scop, the King’s praise-singer; a king in exile, singing his own praises! Instead of receiving money for his songs (and his good works), he gives it away.

Kamis may not convince as a character, but his significance as a cultural hybrid is succinctly explained by Brian Street in his study The Savage in Literature (1975, p. 111):

Characters who crossed the racial, national and environmental boundaries were important to the Victorians because they helped define those boundaries … Victorians were suspicious, not only of biological hybrids but of cultural hybrids who had inherited one background but tried to adopt another. These characters, the white man in Africa and the black man in European clothes, present a dilemma which is central to Victorian conceptions of race and culture, and popular writers devote a considerable amount of space to them.

Perhaps Kamis’s insubstantiality as a character is also a matter of technique. The main action is seen through Margaret’s consciousness, and to a lesser extent through Paul’s, Mrs. Jakes’s and Ford’s. Kamis is treated dramatically, theatrically, as an objective spectacle, not novelistically, through subjective encounter. We know about him mainly from hearsay and from what he tells Margaret. Those currents, under-currents, cross-currents, eddies, whirls and still waters of thought, feeling and perception that constitute fictional consciousness (the ‘stream of consciousness’ – as a novelistic technique still belonged to the future), the portrayal of an inner world together with the claims of an outer world, that dynamic interaction of inner and outer being that makes Margaret, Paul and Mrs. Jakes credible characters is almost entirely missing in the portrayal of Kamis. The former group tend to be dynamic, developing, internalized characters; Kamis is a static, externalized one. Witness, for instance, Gibbon’s ambivalent, partly stereotype, partly individual treatment of Kamis in the important scene when the tramp has revealed himself as an eavesdropper on the most private of conversations and transactions (p. 162). He depicts Kamis as an amalgam of ‘beastly savage’, ‘noble savage’ and ‘benighted savage’, but also suggests some individuality.

The consciousness of characters other than Margaret is focused mainly on a cause or a problem: Paul’s on his art, Mrs. Jakes’s on shielding her husband, Ford’s on his tuberculosis, Samson’s on deportment, Jakes’s on drowning his sorrows, Van Zyl’s on catching law-breaking Kafirs, Christian’s on his farm and his wife’s fidelity, Bailey’s on money, Kamis’s on his identity. Gibbon uses each consciousness for a close-up view of a particular aspect of his novel. Margaret’s consciousness has a comprehensiveness, an ‘ultimate concern’ about the coil of events and their moral implications, and through her ‘intenser consciousness’[efn_note]Henry James, The Spoils of Poynton (1897), chapter 1.[/efn_note]· we ‘seek a reflexion of the little drama’, that unfolds in the Karoo microcosm.

Gibbon first allows us to see Margaret through the eyes of ‘the inveterate picture-seeker’, Paul; she is illumined by ‘soft, meagre light, and framed in the varnished wood of the [train carriage] window’. She has ‘a pale face, with that delicacy and lustre of pallor which make rose-tints seem over-robust’ (p. 20). Throughout the novel Gibbon emphasizes her paleness, her ethereal, almost mystical appearance, her rose-like quality, and the aura of light that surrounds her. He goes to great lengths to make her the epitome of Anglo-Saxon beauty, grace and femininity, the Rose of England, the princess of fairy-tale. She is the embodiment of what Vivie once seemed to have been to the young Christian du Preez (p, 136): ‘… brave and gay at once, delicate and tender, touching him with the sense of her strength and courage, while her femininity made all the male in him surge into power’.

Margaret shares some of Kamis’s insubstantiality. Her background is impressionistically sketched. We have full background histories of Kamis, the Du Preez and the Jakes couples, but very little of Margaret’s. She arrives on theKaroo scene replete with intelligence, sensitivity and a mature scale of values.

She awakens the intense aesthetic appreciation of Paul, the idealized worship of Ford and the gentlemanly gallantry of Samson and Christian. At a more mundane level, she awakens the garrulous conviviality of Vivie, the intense jealousy of Mrs. Jakes, the medical curiosity and interest of Jakes, the animal passions of Van Zyl and his troopers, and the inquisitiveness and contempt of Fat Mary.

Margaret’s directness, sometimes bordering on tactlessness and naivety, springs from a solid sense of identity, independence and justice that the British imperial ethos conferred on its members. She is more than a stereotype ‘woman of purpose and character’, since she is not free from the doubts that trouble fictional characters later in the century. Her loyalty and forbearance, tenacity of purpose and courage match those qualities in Hester Jakes, but transcend them, for they are not self-centred. She joins a long line of British women, actual and fictional, who refuse to bow to public opinion and external pressure as they champion the cause of moral principle and justice, and support the oppressed and the underdog. Emily Hobhouse was in South Africa during and after the Anglo-Boer War, ministering to Boer women and children in concentration camps, at a time when Gibbon was a war correspondent, and reporter. Like Margaret, she was physically frail, but a force to be reckoned with, stronger than the military men who tried to oppose her mission of mercy. Margaret’s relationship with Kamis has its roots primarily in that Hobhousian sense of mercy, her recognition of him as a person, her feeling of pity (a much-repeated word in the novel) for his plight, and her outraged sense of justice for the privations he has needlessly had to suffer. She exemplifies the feminist of her day -the suffragette movement was in full swing during the early years of the century, and Gibbon’s sister Muriel, who later became a journalist, barrister and politician, may have suggested something of Margaret to her brother. And indeed, Gibbon had adequate opportunity for studying the female psyche at close quarters in the persons of his mother, aunts, five sisters, wife and two daughters, before he came to write Margaret Harding.

Gibbon realized that a woman of sterling quality, a living sacrifice, so to speak, seemed to be necessary to act as a buffer and a bridge between the ‘damned’ and the ‘saved’, no matter who made the classification. He realized too, that ‘female’ qualities of heart were necessary to bridge the gaps in personal relationships, rather than the ‘male’ qualities of head, and that life demands the mature exercise of one’s predominantly ‘male’ or ‘female’ qualities, as well as a skilful blending and balance of both masculine and feminine attributes (as in Margaret, Kamis, and to a lesser degree Paul and Ford), not the excessive, immature deployment of one or two (as Van Zyl and his troopers,  and perhaps Christian and Samson, show with their aggressive masculinity; as Hester Jakes and Vivie do with their utter dependency on a male).

Gibbon is careful to avoid a purely sexual element in the Kamis-Margaret relationship. At no time is there any suggestion that Margaret has overtly erotic emotions as far as Kamis is concerned, nor he for her. On the two occasions when Kamis kisses Margaret’s hand, he does so in troubadour fashion. The ‘theatrical’ levels and gestures of the second scene clearly reflect attitude and intention. The relevant passage (p. 161) deserves close reading. It portrays a gesture of friendship offered and accepted, a ritual of reconciliation, divested of fierce erotic overtones. It is a fine stroke to let the reader ‘see’ for himself the hand-kissing scenes and to provide a textual witness.

That the witness should wilfully choose to misconstrue the action is no fault of Gibbon’s! The harm and hurt come from misrepresentation – the carnal construction that the witness chooses to put on it for the sake of personal gain, a construction which British society (represented by Mrs. Jakes, Ford and Samson), South African society (represented by Van Zyl and his troopers, Fat Mary and the anonymous writer of the ‘smear letter’) believe. They want to believe because the Victorian attitude of regarding a woman mainly as a sex-object, and inherited guilt, have coupled promiscuous sex with black-white relationships. The possibilities and potentialities of non-sexual relationships across the colour line are automatically excluded. Gibbon has deftly exposed the workings of certain kinds of colour prejudice.

In Margaret Harding the love between a TB-patient recovering her health on an African farm, and a black man repatriated back to South Africa after the finest education in England, symbolizes a deeper quest for identification, on the White character’s part, with black Africa than had appeared possible to Schreiner, and it heralds a series of novels which analyze the precise and tragic compromises that colour-bar society forces on individuals from both sides of the track.[efn_note]Stephen Gray, Southern African Literature: An Introduction (1979).[/efn_note]

Gibbon is no fanciful idealist. He realizes not only the social dangers with which the relationship of Margaret and Kamis is fraught, but also the personal human ones. When Kamis sends Margaret a bouquet of aloes via Fat Mary, Gibbon neither veils its sexual ‘potential’, nor, by implication, that of Margaret and Kamis’s clandestine relationship (p. 88):

From the great front door emerged to the daylight the solid rotundity of Fat Mary, billowing forth on flat bare feet, and carrying in her hand a bunch of the long crimson plumes of the aloe, that spiky free-lance of the veld which flaunts its red cockade above the abomination of desolation.

The farewell that Margaret and Kamis take of each other at the end of the book re-enacts before a critical Mother Grundy audience their first fumbling attempts at closer identification. Paul du Preez, the Afrikaner-English hybrid, unimpeded by sexual considerations, has already achieved that identification through art. The medical context in which Margaret and Kamis seek this closer identification serves to emphasize the themes of healing, health and wholeness at a physical as well as a metaphysical level. It is as a doctor to his own people, healing them of a European disease, that Kamis will eventually try to recreate his lost identity.

I have already mentioned some of Christian du Preez’s characteristics and roles. The transformation he undergoes in chapters 13 and 18 shows novelistic skill of a high order. Gibbon believes that even such rigid natures as Christian’s are amenable to change, and can overcome the negative effects of adverse cultural conditioning. Christian’s deeper humanity eventually asserts itself, and he, too, comes to experience closer identification with Kamis across the colour line. Gibbon is optimistic about him: he is resilient, healthy of limb, and lives to fight another day. His son Paul carries this optimism a stage further: he has already overcome his father’s inherited prejudices. Gibbon is a lot kinder to Christian than he is to his own countrymen.

The undersized, small-minded Boy Bailey is one of Gibbon’s most finely realized characters. His name suggests his immaturity and his theatrical style (Barnum and Bailey’s Circus was world-famous towards the end of the last century). Bailey is a verbal, mental and moral trapeze-artist. He claims to be a ‘gentleman’ (a key-word in the colonial context), though he is not. He contrasts sharply in appearance and demeanour with other characters in Margaret Harding who are called that: Van Zyl, Kamis, Samson. ‘Decay rather than hardship marked the whole figure of the man’ (p. 122). He wears borrowed clothes and a false face – a British misfit in Africa. He is the villain of the piece, the manipulator.

The two male patients at the Sanatorium Ford and Samson need little introduction. Theirs is mainly a supportive or a commentative role for the main thematic thrust of the story, depending on the particular stage of prejudice at which we find them. Their conversation in chapter 12 underscores conventional colonial attitudes towards race relations, and exposes some of the British myths, stereotypes and distortions about Africa. That they, dying men, upholders of Victorian middle-class morality, should have the last words of the novel, is a twist, a reversal typical of Gibbon, and not without its wry humour. They will probably die in Africa, incompatible diseased transplants from Europe that Africa will reject. Everything in the end is not ‘a11 right’ (p. 317), as Samson so fondly believes; nothing has changed.

Margaret will live; she will recover her health in Switzerland, though there will be an ‘abysmal gulf’ between her and Africa. But she will be vouchsafed a longer existence than her allotted span in the minds and hearts of those who have read about her. Gibbon endorses her attitudes and actions, yet he implies that the Africa of 1910 was not then ready to receive the likes of her. Is it ready now? What sort of fate awaits the Margaret Hardings of our own day?

III

Where is Margaret Harding located as regards the mainstreams of British, European, and southern African literary context? What are the position and significance of Gibbon as a southern African writer?

Two British influences which Gibbon’s daughter and critic Ward Muir have pointed to are Robert Louis Stevenson and Rudyard Kipling. The obvious links with Stevenson are adventure, thrillers, travel, a manuscript Gibbon found at McClure’s and his special interest in disease – tuberculosis and alcoholism in Margaret Harding, alcoholism in Souls in Bondage, malaria and plague in The Adventures of Miss Gregory, (1911). Kipling, an inveterate traveller like both Stevenson and Gibbon, first visited South Africa in 1891, the year in which his novel The Light that Failed appeared. It deals with themes Gibbon is to take up in Margaret Harding: the artist and society. Like Gibbon, Kipling was directly involved in the Anglo-Boer War as a correspondent (1900), then as editor of The Friend in Bloemfontein (1900-1902), while Gibbon was reporting for The Natal Witness in Pietermaritzburg. It is probable that Gibbon and Kipling met, if not in South Africa, then in England. Gibbon shared Stevenson’s and Kipling’s taste for the foreign, the exotic. More important was the attitude Gibbon shared with the older Kipling regarding the British Empire. Their natural concern for the arrogant colonizing Briton or the imperial colonial ‘carrying the White man’s burden’, is implicit in Margaret Harding as it is in ‘Recessional’.

For frantic boast and foolish word –
Thy mercy on Thy people, Lord

It was on this issue, his ‘misrepresentation’ of the colonial that F.C. Slater takes Gibbon to task in his review of Margaret Harding! Gibbon, like Kipling, is a serious critic of what J.P.L. Snyman has called ‘The comfort of Victorian supremacy or … gay Edwardian disregard of unpleasant realities’.

There are several South African works before Margaret Harding that deal with similar themes, though whether Gibbon had read them, and whether they influenced him in any way, is an open question. Olive Schreiner’s The Story of an African Farm (1883) is an obvious precursor. There is also an affinity with Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights and George Eliot’s Middlemarch. Gibbon joins these women in questioning accepted beliefs and affirming the rights of women; Margaret is a spiritual successor to Lyndall, Catherine and Dorothea. The ploy of using nature as an active protagonist comes to Gibbon through Hardy and Schreiner, though the special connotation he gives to the Karoo as a pervading presence is uniquely his own. Several novels before Margaret Harding explore Boer-British relations, for instance Blackburn’s (A Burgher Quixote (1902) and Moor’s Marina de la Rey (1903). Several deal with the ‘colour question’, for instance Howarth’s Jan: An Afrikaner (1897) and Gouldsbury’s The Tree of Bitter Fruit (1910). The former focuses on miscegenation, the latter on cultural casualty. Gouldsbury’s Mkonto, son of a chief, with an overseas education, finds himself allergic to his own people, whereas Gibbon’s Kamis displays no such rejection symptoms – rather, they initially reject him. Gibbon’s view is more positive, less polemical. The tactful way in which Gibbon treats the inflammatory subject of miscegenation, by making it only a hearsay possibility, sets Margaret Harding’s methods apart from the brutality of Howarth’s book, and, later, the crude vitality of Plomer’s Turbott Wolfe (1925), the painful psychological probing to which Paton will resort in Too Late the Phalarope (1953) and the shifting planes of reality in Coetzee’s

In the Heart of the Country (1978). Several other authors have dealt with these themes from differing vantage-points: Millin in God’s Stepchildren (1924) reviews the misery following a century of miscegenation; Mphahlele relates his experiences as a latter-day Kamis in Down Second Avenue (1959); Rive humorously writes about his outsider experiences in Emergency (1970). Gibbon’s Karoo colonials may be more diversified and engaging than the austere simple people of Pauline Smith’s The Beadle (1926), but they cannot be said to attain the grotesque horror and absurdity of Jacobson’s characters in A Dance in the Sun (1956).[efn_note]For a more comprehensive account, readers should consult works such as J. P. L. Snyman, The South African Novel in English (1952), Alan Lennox-Short, English and South Africa (nd), Stephen Gray, Southern African Literature: An Introduction (1979), and Sarah Christie, Geoffrey Hutchings and Don Maclennan, Perspectives on South African Fiction (1980).[/efn_note]

I have indicated some of the levels at which Margaret Harding may be read. Obviously, each person will read it in his own way, and find other resonances, concords and discords. What I have tried to show is that Margaret Harding is anything but a superficial propagandistic book; it has deeper structures waiting to be probed and explored. From whatever vantage-point we choose to look at it, however we use it as a sounding-board for deeper resonances, we have to bear in mind that it is a product of a crucial period in African history, the colonial period, and so it can serve as a cipher through which we can trace back and derive images of an African reality, imperfect and distorted though they must be. Gibbon’s main literary output falls within the crucial colonial period of South Africa’s literary and political history that is marked off by the Anglo-Boer War at one end and the First World War and the socio-political upheavals that followed in its wake at the other. It is also the period that saw the emergence of intense national feelings and of peculiarly South African Afrikaans, Bantu-Ianguage and English literatures, epitomized by such works as Celliers’s Martjie (1911) and Malherbe’s Die Meulenaar(1926); by Mofolo’s Chaka (completed 1912, published 1925) and Plaatje’s Mhudi (completed 1917, published 1930); by Campbell’s The Flaming Terrapin (1924) and Slater’s The Karoo (1924). Gibbon himself was sensitive to these movements but could not fit himself wholly into either the British or the South African literary worlds – his origins, training, tendencies and experiences made him an international rather than a national, local author. He was, like Thomas Pringle, a Briton by accident of birth, on whom South Africa made such a marked impression that he could call it his ‘Foster-Mother-land’: it provided the substance as well as well as the inspiration for some of his best writing.

Margaret Harding doesn’t present problems of text and context as in, say, Wole Soyinka’s The Inheritors (1965), for the context isn’t foreign to a present-day South African, Briton, American, Australian or New Zealander. What Gibbon wrote about in 1910 of his perceptions during the period 1899 to 1902 in South Africa, viz, negative attitudes of white Anglo-Saxons and Germanic peoples or their descendants towards Black and Coloured people, is still with us in South Africa and the United Kingdom towards Asian, African and West Indian immigrants, in the United States and Canada towards Black and indigenous peoples, in Australia towards Aborigines, and New Zealand towards Maoris, though perhaps not in such virulent form, or as unquestioningly as Gibbon presents it. Its reverse, negative attitudes of Black and Coloured peoples towards whites, is also operative in many countries of the world. It seems to be a universal problem of our human condition.

Gibbon was not prejudiced against Englishmen, Colonials, Afrikaners or Xhosas in particular, for after he had left South Africa in 1904, he had written about its manifestations in Portuguese East Africa and England (Salvator) and was later he was to write with equal perception and penetration about negative racial attitudes he found in other parts of Africa, in the Middle East, in Germany and in Russia (The Dark Places).

Gibbon’s three African novels had a mixed reception, some contemporary reviewers heralding them as ‘works of art’, ‘first-rate stories’ and the like, others condemning them as ‘indifferent’ and ‘disappointing’. All his reviewers agree, however, that there is a progression towards excellence from Souls in Bondage through Salvator to Margaret Harding. The impact Margaret Harding made was marked; its evaluation depended on which side of middle-class morality and the ‘colour question’ the reviewer stood. F.C. Slater, for instance, while recognizing Margaret Harding’s literary merits, speaks with the arrogant voice of British imperialism and not with the discerning one of a literary critic when he says in his S.A. Bookman review (April 2012):

Mr. Gibbon appears to be an advocate of mixed marriages … knowing the native better, they [white South Africans] are better able to judge what is good for him.

Gibbon did not write another African novel after Margaret Harding. Perhaps the market for African material was not favourable. My own guess is that he had exhausted his African capital in writing Margaret Harding (Pauline Smith, we remember, twice came back to South Africa to replenish her capital.)

I believe that the lack of attention paid to Gibbon’s work arises from his awkward position between two worlds, the African and the European, or rather, specifically, the southern African and the British. Neither world has been fully aware of or overmuch interested in the other in a literary sense. Gibbon has suffered the fate, in our era of intense nationalisms, of so many world-burghers and outsiders: not sufficiently understood by his own kin or by those who encountered him abroad.

The fact that Gibbon’s work has for many years now not been available has also, to some extent, militated against a true assessment of his writing. The publishers are to be congratulated on making available a crucial novel from a crucial period of southern African literary and political history. The text of Margaret Harding, together with the perspectives on Gibbon’s life and times in this Introduction, will, I trust, help to instate Gibbon to his rightful place in the southern African and British literary traditions.

U.O.F.S. Bloemfontein

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