Revival and/or Retrieval? A Reading of Corinne Sandwith’s World of Letters

Abstract

The continuing crisis and militarism of the capitalist world order in the first decades of the twenty-first century recall in certain respects the lead-up to the Second World War. The relevance of the South African alternative press of the 1930s to the politics and culture life of our society post-1994 makes Corinne Sandwith’s just and committed account in World of Letters as much a revival as a retrieval of vigorous debate in what may be a public sphere threatened with shrinkage.

Keywords:

• Marxism
• literary criticism
• South African literature and politics
• Dora Taylor

Notes on Contributor

Tony Voss was educated at Rhodes University and the University of Washington, Seattle. He retired from the service of the University of Natal in 1995, since then he has been living in Sydney. He is now a research associate of the University of Kwazulu-Natal.

Notes

1. The title was appropriated by the Transvaal College of Education for Asiatics between 1964 and 1971. The TLSA journal has also been published from Genadendal (NLSA).

2. Otherwise unacknowledged page references are to Sandwith 2014.

3. In the contrast between Taylor’s (1928) verse and prose is there a tension between “immanence” and “transcendence” (in Adorno’s terms which Sandwith cites at page 258)? The poems in Some Scottish Verse are post-Romantic, naturistic, deistic (“A Handful of Dust”, “The Blackbird”, “Autumn”, “Sonnet”), like the extract from Tristan and Iseult, the long poem otherwise unpublished, which forms an epigraph to Rage of Life.

4. Apart from some European writers, this included U.S. names such as Howard Fast, Jack London, Clifford Odets, Upton Sinclair, John Steinbeck and Richard Wright. The syllabus re-appears among the reading of some post-1960 Robben Island prisoners (Desai 2012).

5. Something of the post-1960 shift is registered in David Johnson’s account of South African little magazines between 1950 and 1970, which refers to “Jack Cope’s Contrast” (Johnson 2012: 829) in a sequence of titles identified possessively with their founders.

6. The spirit recurs in, for example, Mathatha Tsedu’s “Forced Landing” of 1980 (Tsedu 1980).

7. In my more limited reading, I find connections with World of Letters in Bonner (2011), Johnson (2013), Landau (2011), van der Walt (2004) and Zug (2007).

8. Among the WSWS’s South African correspondents are G T Maqhubela and Thabo Seseane.

9. See also <Zabalaza.net>. Anarchism has a distinct if intermittent history in South Africa. In the 1880s, Henry Glasse, a translator of Kropotkin (Kropotkin 1886, 1887), settled in Port Elizabeth. Glasse was also (or later) a Spiritualist (Glasse 1909). See also Glasse (1901, 1902), and van der Walt (2004).