Shaping the world one word at a time

“So, Kevin, do you also want to be a writer like your dad?”

I was asked this question countless times as a child and I would always answer politely: “No, I don’t think so.”

Even from a young age, being a writer never really appealed to me. But even if I had wanted to enter the world of literature, my first attempts at storytelling left a lot to be desired. Towards the end of 1987, our entire flock of first graders went on a school picnic as an end-of-year treat. Shortly after I returned home Katzo called home to do her customary daily check-in to ensure that I had arrived safely.

“Hey, Kevso, how was your picnic today?”

“Hello, Mummy. It was very lekker. But you know what happened? Two girls drowned!”

I could hear my mother’s sudden gasp on the other end of the line, as she opened her box of Courtleigh and lit a cigarette in anticipation of hearing the tragic details.

“Oh my God, Kevs — what happened?”

“These two girls in my class, Janice and Michelle, went too deep into the pool. But they both OK now.”

“Huh?”

“Ja, they were coughing up water and now they’re fine.”

The sound of my mother exhaling on the other end of the phone signalled her relief. Evidently, I didn’t appreciate that a drowning concludes as a fatality.

Not long after my misleading tale of the near drowning, I fleetingly considered the idea of becoming a writer. I recall wanting to follow in my father’s footsteps at the age of seven, shortly after I started grade 2. I could barely spell or string a coherent sentence together, but then I had a conversation with my father which changed my outlook — briefly — on being an author. “Daddy, how much money do you make writing books?” I asked one afternoon as he sat on the couch reading a newspaper.

“Not that much, Kevs. Being a writer is hard work and it doesn’t always pay very well. It depends on how many books you sell. You get royalties for the number of books you sell.”

“What’s royalties?”

“Well, each time your book is sold you get a portion of the price. Maybe about one rand, maybe a bit more.”

I was aghast. “So little?!”

“Remember, the more books you sell, the more money you can make. It all adds up.”

“So what did you get for A Message in the Wind?” I asked, referring to his teenage novel.

“All together about R14,000. Part of that money we used as a deposit to buy the house we’re living in.”

Now that sounded a whole lot more promising. Fourteen thousand rand was a small fortune in 1988. There would be no way I would let such an opportunity pass me by. I was sold.

“Yoh, Daddy! OK, I think I’m also gonna write a book so I can also get R14,000.”

“Go for it, Kevs!” The wry smile on his face was a sign of encouragement but also a sign of his amusement at my ambitious declaration.

Within a few seconds I started writing a story about two friends stranded on an island and deciding to build a boat to get back home. The text was devoid of any punctuation as one sentence simply spilt into the next. It was probably a sign of my lack of appreciation for grammar as well as my excited ambition to get my best-selling novel completed in record time.

My motivation evaporated after a page and a half. My novel was inspired by my recent viewing of Jaws, but the killer shark hadn’t even made an appearance yet by the time I aborted the whole enterprise. My father must have been so taken by my amusing attempt at emulating his success that he kept my short script among his personal files because I stumbled upon it as an adult.

Two years on from my initial literary ambitions, I was in grade 4 when each pupil in my class was required to write an English essay for the midyear exams. My spelling and grammar had vastly improved and I remember the topic well: “What I want to be when I grow up”. I wrote a short essay about my ambition to become a medical doctor because that was the flavour of the day. I carefully made out a case for me wanting to save the lives of needy patients, ending my little story with the admittedly tacky quote: “Remember, I care about you!”

I received 27 marks out of a possible 30 for my work — that’s exactly 90%.  It was an exceptional effort, if I say so myself, but I wasn’t happy. Not at all. I didn’t understand how I managed to have three marks deducted from my essay when it didn’t contain so much as a spelling error. This prompted me to seek counsel with a professional writer, and who better than Chris van Wyk. I asked my father why I hadn’t been awarded full marks for my essay, considering the absence of spelling and grammatical errors. His answer was that it was very difficult to craft a perfect piece of writing and that there were many elements that made writing good or bad. At nine years of age I didn’t buy his explanation, but as I grew older and began to read more I slowly started to appreciate the subtle nuances of storytelling, figuring out the broad range of factors that made a story good or not so good.

No assessment of my father’s storytelling journey would be complete without mentioning one of his favourite mediums of telling stories: film. My father’s love of films was naturally handed down to both Karl and me. At the age of six I got my first dose of the cinema when my father took me to watch He-Man defeat the evil Skeletor in Masters of the Universe. As the credits rolled, my father punched his right hand in the air and triumphantly shouted “Masters of the Universe!” to my utter embarrassment and a few giggles from the people sitting around us. My father laughed out loud while I tried to pull his outstretched arm down, whispering “Nooo, Daddy!” through clenched teeth.

Chris’s appreciation for what was good storytelling was not a skill he acquired overnight, however. My father would tell us how amused he was when he read his own work from many years before. He could tell how his storytelling had matured over time and, even in his later years as a writer, he still considered himself far from perfect. I once said to him: “Daddy, do you think you could win the Nobel Prize for literature some day?”

He had a chuckle at that, but was evidently flattered. “I doubt that very much, Kevs, because there are many writers who are far better than I am. If you look at Nadine’s work, for example, she writes like an absolute tigress. There are many good writers out there, but there is a select group of writers who are truly special.” The Nadine he was referring to was Nadine Gordimer, a good friend of my father who happened to have won literature’s ultimate accolade in 1991.

My father knew his place among the broader literary community and he was acutely aware of his main aim — getting people to read. He succinctly summed up his awareness of a writer’s role in the world in a radio interview he gave in 1995, when he was asked about South African literature in particular:

“Writers are not just writing so that you can sit back with a book; they are writing so that you can think about South Africa, so that you can think about the world. That is what we writers do, we write so that we can shape the world. It sounds like an enormous, majestic notion but that is what people involved in culture do. They write to challenge people; to make them see what the world looked like before and how it’s going to look in the future.”

Q&A with Kevin van Wyk

Could you explain the meaning behind the title, Irascible Genius, in one sentence?

When I first stumbled upon the phrase about 15 years ago, I had to look up what the adjective meant and, when I did, I felt it perfectly described my dad, Chris.

Why did you feel that now was the time to share your memoir?

The memoir did not come about because I wanted to share my memoir per se, however, it was more of a response to the deaths of my parents at relatively young ages. Their deaths galvanised in me a yearning to tell stories about them which they had left untold — particularly in my father’s case, of course. After my parents died I did not know exactly how to go about this until late 2019 when I started typing out a few anecdotes of the memories I had of them. It took me about three years to complete the draft manuscript to an extent that I was reasonably happy that I could send it to a publisher. As things turned out, the book is being published almost 10 years since my father left us, and seven since my mom’s passing. I am hoping that the pages are a fitting tribute to a remarkable couple. 

What do you think your dad would’ve said about your memoir?

I believe that he would be beaming with pride that I have taken the leap to articulate my thoughts and pen a memoir. At the same time, he would probably be just as surprised — but definitely pleasantly surprised. I had not given him many indications that I would want to write, so the prospect of me writing a memoir paying tribute to my parents would have given him immense joy which is exactly what I felt when writing it.

It was as if I could hear the sounds in the air, smell the burnt grass in the veld opposite our home or taste my mother’s mutton curry as if I was eating it right there and then. That is the magic of memory

In Eggs to Lay, Chickens to Hatch, Chris van Wyk described writing a memoir “like travelling into your own past. Unlike science fiction, you can’t change the past. But, like science fiction, it does have its own magic.” What has writing a memoir been like for you?

That descriptor could not be more apt. I am an nostalgic person which probably explains why I remember so many of the seminal and even mundane moments of my life. When I wrote about a particular event my mind would delve so deeply into the event that, for a moment, I would sometimes feel as if I was reliving the event all over again. It was as if I could hear the sounds in the air, smell the burnt grass in the veld opposite our home or taste my mother’s mutton curry as if I was eating it right there and then. That is the magic of memory because it’s what our entire existence is made up of, and the more we can recall, the more fulfilled our lives have been — in my humble view anyway. That experience was certainly magical for me and which is why I agree with my father’s observation.

What did a Sunday in the Van Wyk household look like growing up?

My father was the first person awake because his first mission was to go and buy the Sunday newspapers. While my father was increasing his blood pressure with the latest tales of despair, my mother, Karl and I would sometimes attend Sunday morning mass at Riverlea’s St Maria Goretti Catholic Church. Sunday lunch was obviously an important family occasion which saw the family gather around the dining room table which Karl and I had set with military precision. Looking back all these years later, our Sunday lunches was always littered with conversations and stories. The golden oldies playing on the radio in the background was often the catalyst of the discussions at the lunch table as Karl and I quizzed our parents on whether they could recall the songs being played from their youth — inevitably they knew every single one! Our discussions would veer in many different directions with laughter being the common denominator in most of the stories we shared as a family. After lunch Karl and I would share the dishwashing while my parents would relax on their bed with the newspapers in preparation for their inevitable afternoon nap.