On Graham Pechey’s In a Province: Studies in the Writing of South Africa, with an Appendix by Laura Pechey

Abstract

This introduction to the life and work of Graham Pechey outlines and assesses his career as a literary critic and theorist, tracing his early attraction to Marxism, the importance of Mikhail Bakhtin to his developing interests, his engagement with South African culture and politics, his embrace of Christianity, and his later fascination with the minutiae of the English language in its literary uses. A biographical note is appended.

Keywords:

• Graham Pechey
• South African literature
• apartheid
• Mikhail Bakhtin
• Christianity
• English language

At his death in 2016, the literary critic and theorist Graham Pechey left uncompleted a projected volume of essays on South African literature and culture, bringing together works published over several decades. Laura Pechey, his daughter, undertook to bring it to fruition, and solicited my help, which I was very happy to give. My friendship with Pechey had extended over fifty years, in both South Africa and the UK, and my admiration for his scholarship and intellectual adventurousness remained undimmed throughout.

Pechey chose the title In a Province: Studies in the Writing of South Africa, explaining it as follows:

It was twice used by South African writers in the 1930s: by Laurens van der Post for the title of a novel; and by F. T. Prince for a highly enigmatic poem. I chose it as the title for this volume in order to suggest that South Africa is most rewardingly seen in its provinciality – its peculiar history as an imperial outpost that took shape in a post-abolition context in the nineteenth century, at first with a degree of flux and informality, later (from 1910) as a centralised state under minority rule. The subtitle plays deliberately upon the ambiguity of the genitive, individually attributable ‘South African writing’ being seen at once in the context of a broader collective composition of the whole social order and as itself a major shaper and constituent of that context.

The phrase also occurs in the text Pechey chose as an epigraph:

If thou seest the oppression of the poor, and violent perverting of judgement and justice in a province, marvel not at the matter: for he that is higher than the highest regardeth; and there be higher than they. (Ecclesiastes, v.8)

Laura and I kept our editing to a minimum, though the project was not without its textual and bibliographical challenges. The volume was published in 2022 by Liverpool University Press. What follows is a version of the Introduction. (A list of chapter titles is given in Note 1.)¹

 … 

Although his intellectual interests, reflected in his teaching, lecturing, and publications, ranged widely, and although he spent the larger part of his life in Britain, Pechey maintained a lively interest in the culture and politics of the country in which he was born and educated. Growing up among the darkening shadows of apartheid, he found in Marxist thought a strong basis for activism as well as a resource for his literary studies; at the same time, he received a training in close reading at the University of Natal that provided a complement to his attentiveness to the broader political contexts of literary production.

While he was pursuing a doctorate on William Blake at Cambridge University, the appearance of a Russian work of literary theory and criticism in English translation had a profound effect on his intellectual development: Mikhail Bakhtin’s Rabelais and His World. Although his initial interest stemmed in part from a belief that Bakhtin represented a rapprochement between Marxism and formalism, what turned out to be more important was the Russian writer’s combination of close attention to the verbal texture of literary works with a profound understanding of the historical, social, and linguistic context in which they are produced and read, a combination Pechey found hugely appealing.

Translations of Bakhtin’s other major works did not begin to appear until the 1980s, resulting in a wave of interest in Anglophone literature departments, but Pechey was well ahead of his time, drawing on Bakhtin’s notion of ‘carnivalized’ writing, for instance, in an essay on Blake’s Marriage of Heaven and Hell in 1979 (52–76). The number of entries for Bakhtin in the index of In a Province is no accident: for the remainder of his career, Pechey made fruitful use of Bakhtin’s literary and cultural thought, bringing together many of his characteristically insightful and forcefully argued essays in his thought-provoking book, Mikhail Bakhtin: The World in the Word (2007).

Pechey’s later work betrays the marks of a new interest and commitment: Christianity. (He was not the first to follow a path from Marx to Christ.)² Bakhtin continued to prove a valuable intellectual resource, now as the thinker of the ‘great time’ who offered a conduit to the spiritual values of Russian Orthodoxy.³ The High Anglicanism towards which the older Pechey was drawn does not figure greatly in his writing on South Africa, though the associated impatience with many of the daily preoccupations of the twenty-first century world does manifest itself from time to time. Even as a young South African communist, Pechey cultivated the bearing and speech of an English country gentleman; it might be said that his intellectual being finally caught up with his outward style.

This cultural conservatism which saw Pechey attracted to the later T S Eliot also showed itself in his rejection of the type of ‘political’ or ‘suspicious’ reading of literature whose heyday coincided with these writings on South Africa. He writes in his draft of a proposal for this volume:

I take a critical stand throughout against the circumscription of literature by the horizon of the ephemeral-political, wherever this perversion may be found, and against the habit of theoretical omniscience and omni-competence which plagues much ‘postcolonial criticism.’ Close reading is accordingly a marked feature above all of the more textually focused studies.

Pechey would have been in strong sympathy with the various critiques recently mounted against ‘symptomatic readings’ of literary works aiming to expose their ideological errors or subordinating a concern with the words of the text to historical contextualisation.⁴ But this is not to say that he moved from a concern with the place of literature in the wider world of social and political realities to an exclusive focus on the words; although his attention to lexical entities could border on the self-parodic (does the name ‘Limpopo’ really call up Dante’s reference to the river Po?), his writing constantly adhered to the principle enunciated in the subtitle of his Bakhtin book, ‘The World in the Word.’

 … 

South Africa’s history from 1981 to 2006, the years during which the chapters of this book were first published or given as talks, was a remarkable one that attracted attention throughout the world. The once-solid bastions of apartheid began crumbling in the 1980s, until, in the early 1990s, a transfer of political power that had once seemed impossible took place – not without violence and bloodshed, but on nothing like the scale that most would have predicted. After the democratic elections of 1994 and the triumph of the African National Congress (ANC) and its leader, Nelson Mandela, South Africa became, for a time, a shining example to the world. Not surprisingly, the name of the first South African president occurs several times in these essays as a marker of hope in the country’s future. Mandela’s successor from 1999, Thabo Mbeki, could not sustain the nation’s exemplary status, but it was not until the kleptocratic presidency of Jacob Zuma (2009–2018) that Mandela’s legacy was entirely undermined. Pechey did not live to see Zuma ousted by Cyril Ramaphosa and the tentative beginnings of a fight back against a political and economic system that had become deeply compromised by corruption and greed, a development he would certainly have welcomed, though no doubt with some measured scepticism as well.

These political developments, and their very real social and economic effects on groups and individuals, constitute the background to Pechey’s engagements with South African culture during the period of their composition. His was a significant voice in the impassioned debates about the role and importance of culture during these years, whether contesting the subservience of cultural production to political needs or assessing the new opportunities for writers after the end of apartheid. But his analyses reach much further back: to the encounters between European missionaries and indigenous intellectuals in the nineteenth century, the legacy of the Anglo-Boer War of 1899–1902 in securing British domination and strengthening Afrikaner nationalism, the rise of anti-racist movements from the founding of the ANC in 1912 to the Freedom Charter of 1955 and beyond, the institution of an apartheid state in 1948, and the all-out battle for a democratic, non-racial state in the 1970s and 1980s.

Pechey’s interest was above all in writing in English during these earlier upheavals (although one of the chapters of his collection considers two Afrikaans writers), particular attention being given to the remarkable achievements of Olive Schreiner in the late nineteenth century and the finely crafted poetry of William Plomer and Roy Campbell in the earlier part of the twentieth century. A focus on English did not exclude black writers, most of whom chose it as their medium of literary expression, from Sol T Plaatje’s 1919 novel Mhudi to Njabulo S Ndebele’s groundbreaking collection of short stories, Fools (1983). A story from Bessie Head’s The Collector of Treasures (1977) also caught his attention. Of less account to Pechey were the novels written more explicitly as endorsements of the anti-apartheid struggle, such as Miriam Tlali’s Amandla (1980), Sipho Sepamla’s A Ride on the Whirlwind (1981), and Mongane Wally Serote’s To Every Birth Its Blood (1981). Among more recent writers, Pechey especially valued the work of J M Coetzee, whose exploration of South Africa’s history and culture as simultaneously part of the African continent, European colonial dominion, and the contemporary global experience matched his own.

Each of the three parts of In a Province presents essays in the order of their first publication or delivery as a lecture, providing a narrative that traces the shifts in both South Africa’s evolving history and Pechey’s evolving critical and political outlook. Part One is made up of essays analysing the cultural dimension of the country’s turbulent passage through time as it unfolded from the release of Mandela from prison in 1990 to the final year of his globally admired presidency, 1998. Pechey described these chapters as follows:

The five chapters of Part One take the form of ‘categorical cross-sections’ through the terrain of South African modernity and its characteristic writing. Linking them is the contention that ‘South Africa’ and ‘literature’ are the names of significant challenges to the single and linear story that modernity tells itself, and to its facile geography of ‘centre’ and ‘periphery.’

As this statement suggests, Pechey’s aim in these essays was an ambitious one: not only to give an account of South African writing in this period in its relation to the unfolding political changes, but to use this account to contest some of the hierarchies dominating the cultural analysis of modernity on the global scene: culture seen as merely an epiphenomenon of material history, modernity regarded as radiating only from the metropolitan centre to the colonial peripheries, and English treated as a homogeneous language superior to creolised varieties in the colonies.

Three of the essays bear the term ‘post-apartheid’ in their titles, and all of them explore the new possibilities and restrictions arising out of the end of state-sponsored racism, an end already in sight in 1990, when the earliest one was delivered as a lecture in Oxford. But they also have a retrospective dimension: to provide a powerfully argued reconsideration of the standard history of South Africa’s political and cultural history (regarded as a single history) from the Anglo-Boer War to the successes of Afrikaner nationalism.

Pechey was very conscious of his Englishness, and of the possible objections to his focus on English-language writing; as a result, he subjects the history and situation of the language as it developed in South Africa to careful scrutiny. The ‘South Africanness’ of South African English – its borrowings from its neighbour languages, its reforging in the crucible of colonial imposition and anti-colonial resistance, its exploitation by speakers and writers other than white colonial descendants such as himself – redeems it for him; English is as much the language of the resistance as it is the language of mastery (exemplified, for instance, in the Freedom Charter). As he put it in his proposal for a collection of his essays: ‘A strong motif throughout the volume is the specificity of English as a medium of conversion and acculturation which issues in a “transculturation”, a creolisation of consciousness, from which even the colonising community is not exempt.’ His own style is highly distinctive, modelled on an earlier critical language even when engaging with the most up-to-date of philosophical or historical arguments; the result is a subtle, sinuous, and sometimes strenuous passage through an extensive intellectual landscape.

That culture played a central and not a marginal role in the transition is a recurrent theme in these essays, but at the same time Pechey resists the notion, espoused by the ANC during its opposition to apartheid, that it must be seen as ‘a weapon in the struggle.’ The artist’s freedom to explore paths not directly leading to political change was powerfully championed by Ndebele, a writer with whom Pechey was strongly in sympathy, and for whose collected essays he contributed an introduction.⁵ Ndebele is also the main inspiration for the argument of another chapter, which, from the vantage point of 1996, looks back at the cultural productions of the years of the transition, from Ndebele’s Fools (first published in 1983) and his complementary essay, ‘The Rediscovery of the Ordinary’ (1986) to Coetzee’s 1994 novel, The Master of Petersburg.

A story of particular importance to Pechey, to which he refers in two of the chapters of Part One, is Ndebele’s ‘The Prophetess’ (1983: 30–52). He values it both as an instance of the exploration of the ‘ordinary’ rather than the ‘spectacular’ in South African life and as a story that memorably blends the modern and rational with the pre-modern and the miraculous.

The importance to Pechey of Bakhtin’s book on Rabelais (1968) emerges with particular clarity: he argues that ‘the new writing of the old imperial margins will need to think of itself as Bakhtin's grotesque body: that is, as a body at home in the category of the other, overcoming the boundaries between bodies themselves and between bodies and the world, transgressing its own limits in all directions.’ This cultural hybridisation – evident in the encounter between nineteenth-century missionaries and indigenous populations as much as in the separatist churches and performance subcultures of the present – does not, for Pechey, simply constitute a contrast to a homogeneous metropolitan culture; on the contrary, it helps us understand that such hybridity is just as fundamental to the European culture from which, in part, it derives its substance.

By 1998, Pechey’s growing interest in the role of Christianity in South Africa’s cultural and political history led to the writing of an essay giving a central place to the thought of Richard (Rick) Turner, whose willingness to include radical Christian ideas as a contribution to the work of the resistance and as a means to limit the hegemonic discursive power of Marxism had a peculiarly South African flavour. (Murdered by the state in 1978, Turner was not given the opportunity to develop his ideas any further.) Resisting a linear history from the rise of Black Consciousness to the victory of the ANC, Pechey sees the importance of the 1970s as lying in the evolution of a new political discourse, one of openness and heteroglossia (Bakhtin again proving a valuable resource). For Pechey, two writers in particular exemplify this discourse, and carry Turner’s thinking and values into fiction, though in different ways: Ndebele and Coetzee. For one thing, they are linked to Frankfurt Critical Theory, Ndebele to Benjamin and Coetzee to Adorno, and both to Herbert Marcuse. Post-apartheid reason, named in the chapter’s title, is also post-apartheid imagination.

 … 

In the second part of In a Province, Pechey turns to closer examinations of particular writers and writings, continuing the exploration of South African culture in relation to its changing politics. He describes it thus:

Part Two brings the reader’s attention to bear on the works of three great South African writers, namely Olive Schreiner, Njabulo Ndebele, and J. M. Coetzee, and through their co-location illustrates empirically the underground connection between the pre- and the post-colonial that is a motif in the preceding ‘overviews,’ post-apartheid having there been defined as a species of the genus ‘post-colonial.’ It also focuses on newer fiction by Karel Schoeman and Dalene Matthee published in the late 1980s and early 1990s. These chapters carry the emphases of the earlier writers into an appraisal of the emerging fiction of the late-apartheid years.

The earliest essay in the collection – written in 1981 and winner of the Thomas Pringle award for journal articles in 1984 – is an analysis of Schreiner’s The Story of an African Farm (1973 [1883]) that moves very deliberately from the text to the context, from an astute consideration of plot, structure and character (Bakhtinian grotesque bodily images being once more in evidence) to the significance of the period in which the novel is set, just before South Africa entered the industrial era. In adopting this approach, Pechey is strongly resisting literary criticism, including Marxist criticism, that begins with the historical context and then uses it to read the work. However, he does not, as he will do in his later essays, bring his reading to bear on the current situation in South Africa.

Ten years later, we find Pechey departing from his favoured terrain of English writing (and the question of English, and the English, in South Africa) and taking up instead two Afrikaans novels (in English translation). Karel Schoeman was one of the most highly regarded of novelists – and historians – writing in Afrikaans, and Another Country one of his most successful novels. Dalene Matthee was a more popular novelist, best known for her four ‘Forest Novels,’ of which The Mulberry Forest was one. Pechey takes the opportunity to explore the question of Afrikaans, and Afrikanerdom, finding in these novels’ celebration of marginality exactly the quality that, in contrast to the grand schemes of Afrikaner nationalism, has a contribution to make to the country’s wellbeing. (The Christian Pechey even sees in this willing marginalisation a kind of martyrdom.) He also takes the opportunity, once more, to inveigh against those who choose to use culture as a political tool.

Njabulo Ndebele, as well as being a point of reference in several other chapters, becomes the centre of attention in another chapter. Pechey, writing as South Africa moved towards its first democratic elections in 1994, offers a nuanced appraisal of the role of Ndebele’s critical essays in the anti-apartheid struggle of the 1980s. Eschewing the tactical simplifications of much of the resistance literature of the period, Ndebele’s discourse – even in that period – was in effect a post-apartheid one, ‘drawing its strength,’ as Pechey puts it, ‘from the integrity of living communities and with the confidence of a thoroughly indigenised intellectual tradition.’ Pechey is willing to retrieve an adjective from an earlier time in stating that, in searching for a knowledge rooted in the local and popular and yet at the same time wholly modern, Ndebele achieves wisdom.

As the millennium draws to a close, we find Pechey returning to another of his lodestars, Olive Schreiner, with a reading of the short story ‘The Woman’s Rose’ (1986 [1890–1891]: 61–65). The story is set explicitly after the discovery of diamonds began to change the country irrevocably; it relates Schreiner’s feminist thinking to her colonial experience and registers her hope that a better future lies ahead for South Africa (a future that, Pechey notes mordantly, never arrived). Part of Pechey’s argument is that even a tiny work of literature like this one has a bearing on current events, if read with the appropriate attention and attitude. Pechey’s own concern at the direction in which South Africa was moving in 1999 is clear as the essay ends, even as he warns against the temptation to become prophets of doom.

Finally, Pechey focuses his full attention on a novel by J. M. Coetzee, the one that has brought him more international acclaim than any other before or since: Disgrace (1999). He resists any temptation to read the novel as a simple reflection of the social ills of early twenty-first century South Africa; instead, he emphasises its invitation to the reader to ‘see obliquely and prismatically.’ He situates the events less in a single country than in Africa, noting how often the name of the continent appears in the pages of the novel. We can sense in this essay Pechey’s growing fascination with the lexical dimension of texts, a fascination shared with the character he is discussing, the central consciousness of Disgrace, David Lurie; Coetzee’s own lexical scrupulousness has never been so lovingly attended to. The words that Pechey ends with, however, are monosyllables heavy with meaning: love and grace.

 … 

The minutiae of the English language, and, in particular, its deployment in poetry (including South African poetry), became more and more an object of fascination for Pechey, and many of his later essays scrutinise the workings of poetic language with a fastidiousness that is scarcely matched in contemporary literary criticism.⁶ His own account of this shift is as follows:

The chapters of Part Three reflect very clearly the ‘liberation’ of perspective that came with liberation in the formal-political sense in 1994, as the imperatives of ‘struggle’ receded and neglected areas of our literature presented themselves for recovery, including questions of poetic diction, the use of sound and syntax, and the distinctive character of South African English.

Pechey also became very interested in writers who had, like himself, left South Africa to make homes for themselves in far-flung places, among them Roy Campbell, who was born in Durban in 1901 and lived mostly in England, Spain and Portugal; William Plomer, who was born in Pietersburg in 1903 and moved (via Japan) to England; and F. T. Prince, who was born in Kimberley in 1912 and lived for the greater part of his life in Southampton. Another important transnational figure was Thomas Pringle, a Scot who spent the years 1820–1826 in the Cape and who is regarded as the founder of South African poetry in English. Pringle and Plomer feature importantly in an analysis of moments in literary works at which an image crystallising a conception of the continent of Africa appears, from the Lusiads of Luís Vaz de Camõens to the novels of Coetzee and Nadine Gordimer. In this discussion, a concern for linguistic detail is married to an investigation of the evolving understanding of Africa as represented by its writers.

The theme of emigration is the topic of another chapter in two ways: Pechey’s focus is again on poets who emigrated from South Africa – Campbell and Prince – and within their poetry, their use of distinctively South African words. His interest is partly in which words travel and which don’t, and what this means for the presence of South Africa in the global imagination. Finally, Pechey subjects samples of Campbell’s verse to minute scrutiny at the level of language, clearly enjoying the poet’s verbal inventiveness and his bursts of Bakhtinian carnivalesque wordplay. While many would find in Campbell’s diction (and subject-matter) a willed blindness to what was happening in European and American poetry in the 1920s and after, Pechey – whose own diction suggests a deliberate rejection of fashionable modes in literary criticism – had come to admire this turning back of the clock. Pechey’s sympathy with the newly emerging currents in literary studies in the early third millennium is evident; as he himself says in this essay, ‘as it frees itself from the grip of grand theory, literary criticism in the twenty-first century could do with more attentiveness to verbal particulars.’ What he is out of sympathy with are ‘political’ readings; one senses that a younger Pechey might not have found it so easy to gloss over what he calls here Campbell’s ‘highly dubious political choices,’ or to insist that ‘Campbell was, like any true artist, resolutely (and laudably) post-political in the best of his art.’

The trajectory of Pechey’s engagements with South Africa, from bold accounts of the country’s historical evolution and wide-ranging assessments of its multifaceted cultural panorama to a concern with the possibilities of verbal play in the writing of its poets, is striking, but it should not be allowed to mask the significant continuities. The refusal to allow the literary to be dominated by the political, the sensitivity to the skilful deployment of language in literary works, and the fidelity to the struggle for social justice remain constant throughout his career. And, as all the essays collected here show, whatever the larger argument Pechey may be pursuing, there are delights and insights awaiting the reader at every turn in his finely tuned and precisely aimed sentences.

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Derek Attridge

Derek Attridge is Emeritus Professor in the Department of English and Related Literature at the University of York. His many books include, as author, J M Coetzee and the Ethics of Reading: Literature in the Event and, as co-editor, Writing South Africa: Literature, Apartheid, and Democracy 1970–1995, The Cambridge History of South African Literature, and Zoë Wicomb & the Translocal: Writing Scotland & South Africa.

Laura Pechey studied English at the University of KwaZulu-Natal before completing her English degree at the University of Leeds and a PhD on animals in nineteenth- and twentieth-century South African writing at the University of Cambridge.

Notes

1 Contents:

Part One: South African Literature in Transition: 1990–1991

1.	‘Cultural Struggle’ and the Narratives of South African Freedom, 15–24
2.	Post-Apartheid Narratives, 25–50
3.	The Post-Apartheid Sublime: Rediscovering the Extraordinary, 51–72
4.	Carnal Knowledge: Reading the Body of South African Writing, 73–90
5.	Post-Apartheid Reason: Critical Theory in South Africa, 91–110

Part Two: Fiction Before and After Apartheid

6.	The Story of an African Farm: Colonial History and the Discontinuous Text, 113–28
7.	Antithetical Anti-Heroes: Uses of the Past in Schoeman and Matthee, 129–38
8.	The Criticism of Njabulo S. Ndebele, 139–54
9.	‘The Woman’s Rose’: Olive Schreiner, the Short Story, and Grand History, 155–68
10.	Coetzee’s Purgatorial Africa: The Case of Disgrace, 169–80

Part Three: The Language of South African Poetry

11.	‘A complex and violent revelation’: Epiphanies of Africa in South African Literature, 183–204
12.	Roy Campbell, F T Prince, and the Lexicon of Emigration, 205–216
13.	Periphrases, Portmanteaux, and Plurals: Aspects of Roy Campbell’s Poetic Diction, 217–34

2 Pechey liked to say that he had moved from one Welshman to another – from Raymond Williams to Rowan Williams.

3 See Bakhtin (1968) and Bakhtin (1986).

4 See, for instance, Felski (2015), North (2017), and Anker and Felski (2017).

5 See Pechey’s ‘Introduction’ to Ndebele (1994): 1–16. Another eminent South African who made a similar argument was Albie Sachs, in a well-known paper titled ‘Preparing Ourselves for Freedom’, first presented at a 1989 in-house seminar held by the ANC (in which Sachs played a leading role). See De Kok and Press (1990): 19–29; reprinted in Attridge and Jolly (1998): 239–48. Pechey mentions this paper approvingly in his 1990 lecture, though by 1994 he was more sceptical of what he saw as Sachs’s adherence to the Marxist base-superstructure model: ‘“culture” for him means, quite simply, the ineluctably symbolic dimension of the “infrastructure”’ (2022: 144).

6 For further examples of this fascination, not focusing on South African poetry, see Pechey (2005a, 2005b and 2005c), Pechey (2012) and Pechey (2016).

Appendix: Biographical note by Laura Pechey

Graham Keith Pechey, 1940–2016

Born in 1940 in Durban, Graham Pechey had a typical privileged white South African childhood. He came, however, to join the growing ranks of South Africans who saw the country through an increasingly critical lens while studying English in Pietermaritzburg at the then University of Natal, and later teaching at the Durban campus. In 1961, Pechey left the Liberal Party for the radical Congress of Democrats, which was allied with the African National Congress (ANC), a decision that friends marked as courageous.

Moving to the UK in 1965, he lived in Cambridge with fellow South Africans Christopher Ballantine, Derek Attridge and Nola Clendinning; the latter two both former students of his. Their house in Grantchester Meadows was frequented by many other expatriate South Africans, and it was in this house that Clendinning discovered her vocation as an artist. Pechey worked on and off between 1967 and 1972 on a doctorate on the Romantic poet William Blake at Jesus College, University of Cambridge, a project which did not come to fruition. On his way to begin a lectureship at the University of Zambia in 1970, a visit from the South African security police left him passport-less and stranded in South Africa for a year, unable to take up the post.

In 1973, Pechey joined the developing English department at Hatfield Polytechnic (which later became the University of Hertfordshire), where he taught for 27 years. He was a much-loved lecturer, illuminating rather than obfuscating texts, who took teaching in many ways more seriously than research, an uncommon attitude in the competitive world of modern academia. Pechey’s teaching and scholarship explored English poetry, South African literature, Marxist literary theory and the work of Russian philosopher and literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin.

Pechey and Clendinning moved to St Albans in 1979, and married and had a daughter Laura in the following year. Clendinning – who had herself left a PhD on the sixteenth-century poet John Donne undone – became a miniaturist and later an icon painter. She was a member of the Hilliard Society of Miniaturists, Royal Miniature Society and Royal Society of Women Artists, and exhibited in Cambridge, London and St Albans. A self-taught artist, Clendinning found inspiration in world religions, history and art, especially that of Africa, India, the Medieval period and the Middle Ages.

Throughout the 1980s, Pechey talked of returning to South Africa and continued periodically to apply for lectureships in southern Africa; however, he didn’t take up the posts he was offered. In 1983, he received the English Academy of Southern Africa’s Thomas Pringle Award for his article on the South African writer and radical Olive Schreiner. Pechey remained an active member of the Anti-Apartheid Movement. During his regular trips to South Africa, he liked to turn up unannounced in the Pietermaritzburg English department staff room to surprise his friends and former colleagues.

After Clendinning died in 1993, Pechey found faith, was confirmed as an Anglican in 1995 and was a devoted member of congregations first of St Albans Cathedral, then in Cambridge of St Andrew’s Church, Girton, and St Bene’t’s Church. He later found love with Rosemary Sykes, herself an English graduate and craftswoman. In retirement Pechey returned to Cambridge, where he continued to teach for various colleges and publish, notably Mikhail Bakhtin: The Word in the World (2007). Pechey’s infectious love of South Africa and its literature is evident in Laura’s own undergraduate year studying English in Pietermaritzburg, and her doctoral thesis on animals in nineteenth- and twentieth-century South African writing. In later years, Pechey returned in many ways to where he had begun, that is, to English poetry, except that he was (re)reading it now through a newly theological lens. He was a founding member of the T S Eliot Society (UK), whose journal he edited.

Pechey was quoting Eliot in his last hours: ‘And to make an end is to make a beginning/The end is where we start from.’