Storyteller: the Lives of Laurens van der Post
JDF Jones
John Murray £25, pp515
'Perhaps one of the saddest things in life is the recurrent illusion of human beings that they can improve on the truth,' wrote Laurens van der Post in his 1982 book, Yet Being Someone Other. Well, he ought to have known, having energetically elaborated, if not downright fabricated, many of the salient details of his own life story.
By van der Post's own reckoning then, this comprehensive biography should paint the picture of an ultimately pathetic man, but it doesn't quite work out like that. Somehow the drive, combined with the imagination of this explorer and adventurer - while never exactly inspiring the readers' admiration - must at least be acknowledged. Together, they propelled him into some extraordinary situations and then compelled him to write. It is impossible for a life to be judged truly 'sad' when it has encompassed such extraordinary contrasts of time and place, however difficult it is to sort the fact from the fiction.
JDF Jones's officially sanctioned biography, the first to tackle the man who eventually became a confidant of Margaret Thatcher and a godfather to Prince William, is probably best read by those people who are least likely to pick it up in the bookshop. It may look like a worthy study of an esteemed establishment figure but it actually contains some ugly insights into how that social status was achieved. The idea that only devotees of van der Post's mystical works, or of Prince Charles's derivative philosophy, will end up buying Jones's book is annoying. Those who were always a little suspicious of van der Post are the ones who will get most out of this exposé.
Van der Post was born in 1906 in the Orange Free State and was the tenth of 13 children, most of whom survived with him into old age. His mother, known as Lammie, was a strong matriarch who even attempted to organise the life of her young son, Louwkie, from afar while he worked in London as a journalist. Jones chooses to take up the story a little later, during the war, when van der Post began to shape the story of the man he wanted to become.
It's clear that the version of his military history that van der Post peddled over the years bears no relation to archived facts. He once claimed he had volunteered to join a prestigious British regiment, one that had captured first his grandfather, then his father, in earlier African campaigns. It wasn't true. In fact he had enlisted in the comparatively dreary Military Police in Acton in 1940.
By this time, the young van der Post was conducting an affair with a married woman called Ingaret Gifford, his own wife and young son having been conveniently shipped back out to South Africa. To be fair, the affair wasn't a fly-by-night fling: his love for Ingaret proved longlasting, and in 1949 they married.
Much more damagingly, documents uncovered by Jones have confirmed allegations that van der Post had had a secret child after an affair with a 14-year-old girl. In 1996, just three days after the author's death, a woman called Cari Mostert came forward to claim she was the writer's illegitimate daughter and that her under-age mother had been seduced during a boat trip to England. The tryst seems to have taken place five years after van der Post's second marriage while the girl was travelling to London to train as a ballet dancer. Jones's research has shown the writer did, however, make financial provision for the baby, arranging by deed of covenant to support her until she was 18.
Jones pulls few punches. He is happy to praise his subject as a consummate storyteller but consistently casts doubt upon the legend he created. 'The closer we get to Laurens's detail,' he writes, 'the more we become perplexed by the growing suspicion that Laurens wasn't all that he said he was.' We learn that Klara, the Bushman nanny whom Laurens repeatedly claimed had looked after him, was in fact an amalgam of several women. It also turns out that this international expert on the Kalahari desert had spent far less time there than he made out.
So how did van der Post pull it off, and for such a long period? The answer seems to be that he rigidly compartmentalised his life and made sure that he kept tight control over the fantasies he wove. Through charm and force of personality he gained access to key historical players and used each of them to step into his next sphere of influence. In this way he moved between entirely disparate worlds.
In early life his mentor and friend was the founding father of analytical psychology Carl Gustav Jung. Later he became close to Sir James Goldsmith and to the Zulu chief Mangosuthu Buthelezi, while in the period leading up to his death, at the age of 90 in a Chelsea penthouse, he was best known as a valued adviser to Margaret Thatcher. When she came to power in 1979 he commented: 'For the first time since the war, I, personally, feel that Britain is being governed again.'
It is not van der Post's fault that he has been revered as a modern-day saint. There are few subjects, after all, who could not be knocked down once set up so high. But Jones cannot forgive van der Post for fictionalising his own history. This, he believes, was a betrayal that will permanently undermine the writer's inspirational works.
