J.D.F. Jones: Teller of Many Tales: The Lives of Laurens van der Post (Groot-Brittannië, 2001): 448 blz: Uitgeverij Carroll & Graf
Laurens van der Post (1906-1996) was een Zuid-Afrikaanse schrijver die gedurende de laatste 40 jaar van zijn leven wereldberoemd was in de Engelstalige wereld, veel beroemdheden als vrienden had en die gold als een wereldwijde autoriteit op het gebied van Zuid-Afrika en in het bijzonder de Bosjesmannen en de psychotherapie volgens en de persoon van Carl Gustav Jung, die door Laurens werd beschouwd als de meest geniale persoon die hij ooit had ontmoet.
Laurens
van der Post was volgens iedereen een knappe en zeer innemende en
charmante man die een geweldige verhalenverteller was. Hij kon voor een
klein of een groot publiek urenlang verhalen vertellen zonder dat hij
enige notities had gemaakt en wist zijn toehoorders van begin tot eind
te boeien. Iedereen hield van Laurens van der Post. Wat men niet wist
was dat Laurens van der Post zijn verhalen over zijn eigen leven mooier
maakte dan ze waren, zijn eigen rol ophemelde en de rol van anderen
kleineerde. Zijn biograaf heeft als een ware detective onderzocht in
hoeverre de verhalen die Laurens van der Post vertelde in zijn boeken
overeenstemden met de feitelijke waarheid. Het nogal onthutsende
resultaat is dat Laurens vrijwel zijn hele levensverhaal gelogen heeft.
In
"Teller of Many Tales" komen heel veel passages voor waarin Laurens
iets verteld heeft, waarbij zijn biograaf tot de conclusie komt dat, wat hij verteld heeft,
onwaar is, of juister gezegd gelogen. In feite was Laurens van der Post
de Zuid-Afrikaanse Boudewijn Büch, die ook een pathetische leugenaar
was, al heeft Eva Rovers, de biografe van Büch daar veel minder de
nadruk op gelegd dan Jones, de biograaf van Laurens van der Post.
Citaten:
- How did an Africaner lad of no apparent distinction, the near-youngest son of a large, respectable but not particularly notable Afrikaans-speaking family in the South African interior, emerge to be an international figure, a best-selling writer, an adviser to a British Prime Minister, counsellor to the future King of England and godfather to his heir, recognised authority on both the Bushmen and the great Swiss psychologist C.G. Jung, patron of the environment movement, and an inspiration to countless men and women around the world?
- As a detective, I have had to trace the origins and provenance of Laurens' stories about his life. As this book will make clear, he was a master fabricator. His stories, often a complex web of truth and lies, were tailored for different audiences. His books, at least until the final years, were carefully constructed and relatively watertight, his broadcasts and newspaper interviews less so. His correspondence and private conversations (which occasionally surface in diaries and memoirs) often boasted fantastic mutations of the actual truth.
-
Laurens' later written descriptions of this period are highly
imaginative. For instance, he says that his Philippolis household
frequently entertained the South African political leaders of the day,
including the country's most famous statesman, General Smuts: the
household affairs, minutely recorded in the archives, show no such
visits.
-
In Laurens' life there is an unending confusion between the fact and
the fiction which is sometimes impossible to disentangle. From an early
age Laurens slipped easily from literal truth to what he saw as
imaginative truth. The important key is this: whenever he amended the
literal truth, whether in his books or in his conversation, he
invariable did it to promote himself - to position himself at the centre. ... Laurens would always be the Hero of his tale.
- I remember as a boy of 14 writing in my diary, "I shall live my life as if it belongs not only to me but to all those who might come to love me."
- In Venture tot the interior we find for the first time one of Laurens' constant themes: "We live not only our individual life but, whether we like it or not, also the life of our time."
De 46-jarige Laurens van der Post werd door haar ouders met wie hij bevriend was, gevraagd de 14-jarige Bonny te begeleiden op een bootreis van Zuid-Afrika naar Engeland:
- The result was that Laurens seduced Bonny on the ship and continued to sleep with her for more than a year in London. ...
One day, now fifteen, she told him that she had missed a period - she still didn't understand what that meant. She was utterly innocent, her mother had told of birds and bees, but amazingly she had not grasped that love might lead to pregnancy. "I can't handle this," said Laurens. Two days later she was on the boat back to South Africa. She never heard from him again.
Bonny says that she now thinks that Laurens was "sick" and that "he knew how to pick his victims."
Laurens vertelde over een bezoek aan de Kalahari woestijn:
-
"... There were snakes as I had never imagined them, sometimes hanging
down from the topmost branches of trees and pecking viciously at the
heads of my bearers as they sat on top of the truck ..." (This last
image is derided by other travellers to the region.)
-
Professionals, preparing to devote years rather than days to their
Bushman studies, soon realised that Laurens was generalising about a far
more diverse and complex society than he ever guessed. He talked and
wrote of "the Bushmen". Successors agreed that there was nothing so
simple. To the new professionals, a sequence of fleeting visits into the
desert, a slight familiarity with rock paintings and a brief camp-site a
mile away from one Bushman clan, was not an adequate foundation for
five books, a television series and a lifetime of lecturing.
