BUTLER, (Frederick) Guy

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Nationality: South African. Born: Cradock, Cape Province, 21 January 1918. Education: Attended local high school; Rhodes University, Grahamstown, M.A. 1939; Brasenose College, Oxford, M.A.1947. Military Service: South African Army in the Middle East, Italy, and the United Kingdom, 1940–45. Family: Married Jean Murray Satchwell in 1940; three sons and one daughter. Career: Lecturer in English, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, 1948–50. Professor of English, 1952–86, and since 1987 honorary research fellow, Rhodes University. English editor, Standpunte, 1952–54; editor, New Coin, 1964–74. Since 1960 advisory editor, Contrast. First president, Shakespeare Society of South Africa, 1985. Awards: CNA award, 1976; English Academy of Southern Africa Gold Medal, 1989; Lady Usher prize for literature, 1992. D.Litt.: University of Natal, Durban, 1970; University of the Witwatersrand, 1984; University of South Africa, Pretoria, 1989; Rhodes University, Grahamstown, 1994. Honorary Life President, English Academy of South Africa, 1983, Shakespeare Society of South Africa, 1991; Honorary Life Vice-Chairman of National Arts Festival Committee, 1993; Freedom of City of Grahamstown, 1994. Address: "High Corner," 122 High Street, Grahamstown 6140, South Africa.

Publications

Poetry

Stranger to Europe: Poems 1939–1949. Cape Town, Balkema, 1952; augmented edition, 1960.

South of the Zambezi: Poems from South Africa. London, Abelard Schuman, 1966.

On First Seeing Florence. Grahamstown, South Africa, New Coin-Rhodes University, 1968.

Selected Poems. Johannesburg, Donker, 1975; revised edition, 1989.

Songs and Ballads. Cape Town, David Philip, 1978.

Pilgrimage to Dias Cross. Cape Town, David Philip, 1987.

Collected Poems. Cape Town, David Philip, 1999.

Plays

The Dam (produced Cape Town, 1953). Cape Town Balkema, 1953.

The Dove Returns (produced Glencoe, Natal 1955). Cape Town, Balkema, and London, Fortune Press, 1956.

Take Root or Die (produced Grahamstown, 1966). Cape Town, Balkema, 1970.

Cape Charade (produced Grahamstown, 1967). Cape Town, Balkema, 1968.

Richard Gush of Salem (produced Grahamstown, 1970). Cape Town, Maskew Miller, 1982.

Demea (produced Grahamstown, 1990). Cape Town, David Philip, 1990.

Novel

A Rackety Colt, or The Adventures of Thomas Stubbs. Cape Town, Tafelberg, 1989.

Short Stories

Tales of the Old Karoo. Johannesburg, Donker, 1989.

Other

An Aspect of Tragedy. Grahamstown, Rhodes University, 1953.

The Republic of the Arts. Johannesburg, Witwatersrand University Press, 1964.

Karoo Morning: An Autobiography 1918–35. Cape Town, David Philip, 1977.

Bursting World: An Autobiography 1936–45. Cape Town, David Philip, 1983.

A Local Habitation: An Autobiography (1945–90). Cape Town, David Philip, 1991.

Guy Butler: Essays and Lectures (1949–1991). Cape Town, David Philip, 1994.

The Prophetic Nun, Lovers of Paint, Sculpture and People. Johannesburg, Random House, 2000.

Editor, A Book of South African Verse. London, Oxford University Press, 1959.

Editor, When Boys Were Men. Cape Town, Oxford University Press, 1969.

Editor, with Tim Peacock, Plays from Near and Far: Twelve One-Act Plays. Cape Town, Maskew Miller, 1973(?).

Editor, The 1820 Settlers: An Illustrated Commentary. Cape Town, Human and Rousseau, 1974.

Editor, with Christopher Mann, A New Book of South African Verse in English. Cape Town, Oxford University Press, 1979; Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1980.

Editor, with N. Visser, The Re-Interment on Buffelskop: My Diary, 7–15 June 1921 and 8–29 August 1921 by S.C. Cronwright-Schreiner. Grahamstown, Rhodes University, 1983.

Editor, with David Butler, Out of the African Ark. Johannesburg, Donker, 1988.

Editor, with Jeff Opland, The Magic Tree. Cape Town, Longman, 1989.

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Bibliography: In Olive Schreiner and After: Essays on South African Literature in Honour of Guy Butler edited by Malvern van Wyk Smith and Don Maclennan, Cape Town, David Philip, 1983; Guy Butler: A Bibliography by John Read, Grahamstown, South Africa, National English Literary Museum, 1992.

Manuscript Collection: Thomas Pringle Collection for English in Africa, Rhodes University, Grahamstown; National English Literary Museum, Grahamstown, South Africa.

Critical Studies: Olive Schreiner and After: Essays on Southern African Literature in Honour of Guy Butler, edited by Malvern van Wyk Smith and Don Maclennan, Cape Town, David Philip, 1983; "Ghost at a Window Pane: The War Poetry of Guy Butler" by Geoffrey Hutchings, in English in Africa (Grahamstown, South Africa), 15(2), October 1988; "Soliciting the Other: Interpenetration of the Psychological and the Political in Some Poems by Guy Butler" by Dirk Klopper, in English in Africa (Grahamstown, South Africa), 21(1–2), July 1994; "The Drama of Country and City: Tribalization, Urbanization and Theatre under Apartheid" by Loren Kruger, in Journal of Southern African Studies, 23(4), 1997.

Guy Butler comments:

(1990) Much of my poetry, but by no means all, is generated by the European-African encounter as experienced by someone of European descent who feels himself to belong to Africa. I am, I think, a product of the old, almost forgotten Eastern Cape frontier tradition, with its strong liberal and missionary admixture. The nature of the frontier has changed and spread, until all articulate men, but particularly artists, are frontiersmen and/or interpreters. English, as the chosen language of literature of millions of blacks, has a great and exciting future in Africa, and I have made it my life's business to encourage its creative use in this corner of the world.

(1995) From its inception I have been involved in the design and use of the 1820 Settlers National Monument in Grahamstown as a cultural and educational center. I organized the first festivals (1970–74). The Arts Festival is now regarded by many as the premier event in the South African cultural calendar.

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Guy Butler's work is a sustained endeavor to distinguish and reconcile the two strains of Europe and Africa, chiefly, but not merely, in the southern part of the continent; to record and interpret the local scene; to find appropriate media in vocabulary, imagery, and forms through which to discover and express something of the African essence and primitive consciousness; to establish an African mythology and archetypes (Livingstone, Camoens, the last trekker); and to acclimatize as far as possible "the Grecian and Mediaeval dream." Orpheus has an "African incarnation" ("Myths"), and Apollo must come to "cross the tangled scrub, the uncouth ways" ("Home Thoughts") and join the Dionysian dance.

Africa almost becomes an image for a state of mind in which the poet's imagination tries to find dwelling and the human being strives to come to terms with himself, a testing ground for his beliefs and values. The inescapable preoccupation of the modern artist to find his place in his world is for the English poet in Africa, sensitive to European history, art, and thought, perhaps more dramatically evident than for his British counterpart. The struggle to articulate, clarify, harmonize, and balance contending forces and to be true to experience informs Butler's poetry with tension and some anguish and lifts it above trivialities. Circumstances tempt the South African writer to exploit rather than explore his material, to be self-conscious or self-pitying, to address too limited a home audience, or to slide into fashionable political or literary cant. Butler rarely succumbs.

T.S. Eliot observes of the genuine poet that "his strict duty is to his language, first to preserve, and second to extend and improve." Butler's responsible and experimental use of language is grounded in such an awareness of literary tradition. This leads him to genres other than the ubiquitous meditative lyric, to the ballad, song, sonnet, elegy, narrative, and metaphysical debate, in a variety of measures. He is particularly at home in the long poem, where he shows a not inconsiderable architectonic skill. Besides verse drama there is the seemingly casual free verse anecdote ("Sweet-Water") and the formal symphonic poem in fairly elaborate stanzas ("Bronze Heads"). With an understanding of neoclassic decorum, he uses a range of styles in prismatic or transparent language and in a speaking voice or singing roles. Sometimes regarded as an old-fashioned versifier playing safe, he is in fact often taking risks with rhyme, intricate verse and image patterns, colloquialisms, clichés, plain statements, or rhetorically splendid utterances. The long poem "On First Seeing Florence" is a complex structure of varied styles, rhythms, and images that eloquently presents a moment of vision.

Because of his readiness to undertake the hazardous and difficult, because of his range, breadth, and technical skill, and because he has something to say, Butler may be the most significant poet writing in South Africa. Others may reach greater heights in individual poems, but few can present a body of work that has such wholeness, complexity, variety, and approachability. Nor is his appeal merely local, though certain poems may have a particular poignancy for his countrymen. A lyric like "Stranger to Europe" or a meditation like "Myths" is read wherever poetry is recognized.

—Ruth Harnett