Talking Heads featuring Bryce Courtenay
PETER THOMPSON: Bryce Courtenay had an upbringing like the stuff of novels - illegitimacy, an orphanage in South Africa, learning to box to fend off the bullies. After a brilliant career in advertising he did turn to writing novels. In one of his books he tells the painful story of the death of his son from medically induced AIDS. Tonight's Talking Head is Bryce Courtenay.
PETER THOMPSON: Bryce, welcome to Talking Heads. It's lovely to see you.
BRYCE COURTENAY: Thank you for having me.
PETER THOMPSON: Now, this Christmas your readers are going to be delving into the story of the Crusades.
BRYCE COURTENAY: Oh, I hope so! (Laughs)
PETER THOMPSON: What fascinates you about them?
BRYCE COURTENAY: Well, Peter, until I knew how hard it was going to be, almost everything, and now I'm beginning to wonder, I,I felt that we were actually in a crusade right now in that there might be similarities between the reasons why we had a crusade in the first place and crusading of today.
PETER THOMPSON: Sorry, the religious tensions of today, are you talking about?
BRYCE COURTENAY: Well, if you look at Middle America there's a block of, say, 45 million or 50 million charismatic Christians urging on a president, call him a pope if you like. And here we are in Iraq and a lot of the things that happened 900 years ago are happening again. And so I thought, "I'm gonna have a look at that and see if there's anything in this - whether this is just a Bryce Courtenay theory that's gonna fall apart in a million pieces or whether there is actually something to it." I've never tackled anything quite as complex and I'm beginning to panic.
PETER THOMPSON: Your life had truly extraordinary beginnings. Let's see how.
BRYCE COURTENAY: I was born illegitimately and almost immediately, as I understand it, placed in an orphanage. So my very earliest memories were in an orphanage. It was the tag end of the Great Depression when I was born. People were desperately poor. My mother was,I've heard her referred to as a seamstress, but I think, in fairness, she was a fairly skilled dressmaker. My father, of course, I only got to know who he was very much later in life and led to believe he was a commercial traveller. I was the smallest kid in the orphanage and used to get beaten a lot by the other kids. And I had an English name and therefore was considered to be the enemy. I learned to box so I could defend myself. When I was in the orphanage the only people who were really kind to me were the African people. So you seek out those people who at least are kind to you. So I was educated largely in Afrikaans, but always as the English child in an Afrikaans school. And then, enormously fortuitously, a temporary teacher came down to this small town from Johannesburg. And she recognised that there was a possibility in this small boy and sent me books and coached me.
It's very interesting, you know, people read my first book 'The Power of One' and they think it's all about the individual character discovering this wonderful mantra 'the power of one'. But when I named it, it was named after this teacher, the power of one teacher to lift a small child out of an impossible environment and allow him to have an education. And therefore escape and become whatever he was capable of becoming. And at the age of 11 I won a scholarship to go to a very posh private school in Johannesburg. But here I found myself in an entirely different environment. These were rich kids with parents and backgrounds and everything else. So I had to find a new way of hiding my very low sense of self-esteem. So I became very good at everything and I was, generally speaking, one of those kids who all the other kids looked up to.
But all it was was sort of camouflage because I never wanted anybody to know that I had no background, that there was this just darkness, a vacuum in the back of me that I came from nothing and no-one. My decision to go to London to study journalism was, it seemed to me the most practical thing to do. If I was going to be a writer then I ought to be writing. And I had an encouragement from the London School of Journalism who said they'd help me if I could get myself over. London was both, for me, enchanting and difficult. I am now 17 years old or nearly 18. Remember, I'd come from a high African sky, I was a kid from the boondocks, so to speak. And suddenly I found myself in this huge cosmopolitan city where the sky sat on my shoulders and everything was always damp. Well, the bright spot of London, of course, was that I met Benita, who was to be my future wife. Gorgeous, gorgeous creature.
PETER THOMPSON: Well, coming to Australia, of course, was a return to a country with very big skies.
BRYCE COURTENAY: Oh, indeed. And I can recall the first morning, Peter, coming through the Heads, and it was almost like a millpond. It was just wonderful, really. It was almost as though the world was contained in a huge crystal goblet. And I looked up and there the sky just rose and rose and rose and rose. And I said, "I'm never leaving." Never did.
PETER THOMPSON: What was it like being born illegitimate in South Africa in 1933?
BRYCE COURTENAY: Peter, you know, that concept of being an orphan, being born illegitimately, it's universal. It's not something that comes from a country or a propinquity. It comes from a state of mind. And in writing my latest book, 'Whitethorn', people think that it's, you know, strictly autobiographical, which, of course, it isn't. But it's an attempt to talk about that business of being born with no background.
PETER THOMPSON: Your mother, for instance, suffered nervous breakdowns.
BRYCE COURTENAY: Yeah, she was, I suppose in those days nervous breakdowns covered almost anything. But I think she was probably bipolar or certainly suffered from deep depressions. And so, I had a fairly peripatetic sort of a life. You know, she'd come in and out of it and I never quite knew when she'd be in or when she'd be out. And that was also difficult because it was a tenuous sort of a relationship.
PETER THOMPSON: Well, you had that relationship with your mother and, of course, your father was completely absent.
BRYCE COURTENAY: Absolutely, yes, yes.
PETER THOMPSON: Did you know he had another family and eight children in that other family?
BRYCE COURTENAY: No, not until much, much later when I hugely presumptuously ran an ad in all the South African newspapers, what - no more than 10 years ago. Saying, you'll forgive me for saying this, but "World famous author requires to know about," And my mother on her deathbed had given me his surname.
PETER THOMPSON: On her deathbed?
BRYCE COURTENAY: Yeah, on her deathbed. Well, the night before she died she called me in Australia and asked me for permission to die. And I said, "I can't give you permission." And she said, "Well, you've kept me alive now for the last 50 years. You might as well give me permission to die." And so I said, "Well, Mum, you've gotta do what you have to do." And she passed away that night in her sleep. But,
PETER THOMPSON: But she told you about your father?
BRYCE COURTENAY: I said, "Just, please, tell me my father's name." So I advertised and flushed out a half-sister. So at the age of, what - 65, probably, 64, was the first time I really understood, I could put together the various pieces that make me who I am.
PETER THOMPSON: One of the things that makes you who you are, clearly, has been that experience in the orphanage in Northern Transvaal.
BRYCE COURTENAY: When I think back on it I was always small, you know, and an Afrikaans kid by the time he's six is probably 6ft high, you know. And I was always a small little runt, anyway. I think the power to be able to say, "Ach, man, wait a minute. If you don't hit me I'll tell you a story." And they'd say, "Ach, man, it better be a good story because if it's not once you're done we'll hit you." And so I learnt never to tell them the end of a story. And when I,
PETER THOMPSON: They had to come back for more.
BRYCE COURTENAY: Well, if they hit me then the next day they didn't get the end. And so I protected myself with my mouth, which I guess I've done ever since.
PETER THOMPSON: Given that you had such a harsh upbringing, where did you get your humanitarian values from? Because you could have gone the other way.
BRYCE COURTENAY: Probably the ambitions for me in an orphanage would have been as a railway fettler or a road worker or a tractor driver. I mean, these were the dizzy heights of ambition for those kids.
PETER THOMPSON: Suddenly you get on to this escalator of having the scholarship.
BRYCE COURTENAY: This tiny crack opens for you and suddenly you see the world from a different perspective, and looking down you see that people aren't simply there because they were born like that. They were there because of circumstances and you were there because of circumstances. So your job is to point this out. And I guess you could call that humanitarianism.
PETER THOMPSON: If you'd stayed in South Africa was there a future for you?
BRYCE COURTENAY: Yeah, I've often wondered about that. I think probably not. Apartheid was just gaining a grip on the country and anybody who spoke out about it was, Well, we're beginning to see a bit of it right now. I mean, there are certain politicians right now who are telling us stuff that I heard at the age of 11 or 12 in the mouths of policemen and police commissioners and politicians. I'm hearing a lot of familiar stuff coming out of Canberra right now. What we're talking about here is a police state. And I've heard it before and it worries the hell out of me.
PETER THOMPSON: You decide on journalism, you lean towards journalism, and you decide that London is the place you're going to do it. But to raise money to go there you worked in the copper mines of what was then Northern Rhodesia.
BRYCE COURTENAY: Absolutely, yes.
PETER THOMPSON: What did you learn from that?
BRYCE COURTENAY: I worked as a grizzly man. And a grizzly man was a high-explosives guy who, I'd probably detonate 50 or 60 blasts a night getting rock through what was known as a grizzly, which is a set of bars. And you realise that, for the first time I realised how cheap my life was and how precious it was that I should keep it. Because I could kill myself so easily. I was uninsurable, you couldn't get insurance. You went down every night and you didn't know whether you'd come up. Of the 11 under-20 kids who went, because you had to be that young to do this, by the time I left 14 months later six of them were permanently injured and three of them were dead. It was...and so I learnt fear. I learnt to value my life, not to throw it away.
PETER THOMPSON: After your stint in London where you met your Australian wife Benita, you headed our way, so let's see what happened.
BRYCE COURTENAY: We were married in 1957. Not only was I married to this gorgeous-looking lady but she gave me three wonderful sons and a family. And, of course, more than anything else in the world I wanted a family. I would have done anything to have a family, not having had one myself. Of course, I landed in Australia completely broke. Fortuitously, I'd done a course with the BBC in playwrighting, so I knew all the camera directions etc. This was the year television had arrived in Australia and I pretended to be an expert at television and with great good fortune somebody employed me.
Advertising seemed almost natural to me because it was a business where you had to inform, persuade and educate. And so from being a junior copywriter to being the creative director of one of the largest advertising agencies in the country took me 4.5 years, which is, well, a fairly spectacular rise. I am on the creative side of advertising. Particularly in advertising you lived a dangerously stupid life - hard-drinking, hard-smoking, hard-living sort of a career. And at the age of 45 I, you know, I was overweight and really going in all the wrong direction. And so I decided if I'm every gonna be a writer I was going quite the wrong way. So I gave up smoking and drinking for 10 years. I'm an 'A' personality, I overdo everything. So I became a fitness fanatic. Advertising was only meant to be a very small part of my life. I had intended that I would work extensively in journalism for about five or six years and then I'd become a writer.
But in that period of time Damon, my youngest son, was born. And he was a haemophiliac and at that stage it took a considerable amount of money to keep him, and we were just a young couple trying to make ends meet. So I couldn't possibly become a writer and take a chance on that with a chronically ill child. So I stayed in advertising until, of course, the year he died. And that was the year I wrote 'Power of One'. I think it takes a particular toll on the female, on the mother, and Benita and I never quite were the same again. And over, I think we were together another seven years but then it became inevitable that we needed to part. However, I have to say, the parting was one that has left us very fond of each other. I'd given myself permission at the age of 55, the year Damon was dying, to write, but I had no expectations of being published. I wrote 'Power of One' as a practice book. And I finished it, as I recall it, in a year and 17 minutes. And nobody had read it, not even Benita, my wife. And I tied it up with twine and used it as a doorstop in the kitchen. Eventually it was discovered and, of course, it has now sold 7-odd million copies in 11 languages worldwide.
PETER THOMPSON: Well, advertising, it was a big slice of your life.
BRYCE COURTENAY: Indeed, yes.
PETER THOMPSON: How did that experience help you later on in more recent years write novels?
BRYCE COURTENAY: Oh, dear, I think, ultimately, it helped with everything. I mean, once you understand people and, remember, I've always been with people, I've never had that fortunate situation of being nicely cushioned in the middle-class, spectrum. So that I came to advertising understanding people, and learnt a great deal about communication. I think I understand how people hurt, why they cry, why they laugh, why they do things. And so that enormously helped. Well, of course, it branded me a 'popular writer' and so I wasn't ever thought to be like the Peter Careys, amongst the literary writers.
PETER THOMPSON: Did you see writing as just something that was postponed? Was it always going to be a phase in your life that you had this burning ambition to,?
BRYCE COURTENAY: Peter, it was always going to be my life. It's just that, you know, things just got out of hand, as they do in life. You know, things happen and I just couldn't do it. But every morning of my life I'd wake up and say there's another day I've gotta spend not being what I want to be.
PETER THOMPSON: When it came to writing about Damon's experience in 'April Fools Day', was that the most painful period of your life?
BRYCE COURTENAY: You just don't go through that kind of writing pain, if there is a category called 'writing pain'. I would never have written 'April Fools Day' had Damon not begged me to do it. And not for reasons that had anything to do with him. He was so appalled at the way the gay community was being treated at that time with AIDS. He said, "Dad, you're a writer. You have GOT to tell people that it's not a punishment from God, it's a virus." And I said, "I can't, Damon, my life is very private and I don't want the world to know about it and our family is very private and I've kept," He said, "Dad, it has nothing to do with us. It's got to do with something that's far more important." And the day he died I held him in my arms and just, Damon was about 5ft 11 inches and he weighed 47 pounds, a little simian creature. And I had him in my arms like this and he looked up at me, he said, "Dad, thank you for a wonderful life but, please, write the book." He died in my arms, there and then. So I had no choice, and it was without question, Peter, the single most difficult thing I have ever done. And if I ever had to do that again I wouldn't write another word, it was just too hard.
PETER THOMPSON: Do you still feel residual anger about the way the medical establishment treated the whole situation whereby your son could get medically induced AIDS?
BRYCE COURTENAY: I feel sad, but then the politics side of the business of what's practical and what's convenient and what'll keep them in power. And it is such a cynical process that in the end being angry is pointless. It's not gonna change anything. And so I accept that, you know, there were 147 haemophiliacs at that time in Australia, a tiny minority. They're all dead for the same reason. It wasn't just Damon. And it was a terrible waste because some of them were fine, fine people.
PETER THOMPSON: Well, Bryce, even today, now, can I say, at almost 73, you keep up this extraordinary discipline. Let's see how.
BRYCE COURTENAY: The reason I walk for 1.5 hours apart for the exercise, of course, is it's brain food. That's when you do your homework. That's when you process the day. That's when you think about where the writing is going and what might happen and what potentially could happen. And then I come back and I feed the chooks and the ducks. And I have breakfast and then I work in the garden all day if I'm not writing. If I'm writing then the day starts considerably earlier, it starts about 4:30am. And then I'll write from, probably, 6:00am, 6:30am till about 6:00pm, 6:30pm, and without, possibly, even getting up. It's a long day and I only do it because I'm, what - 72 years old.
I'd love to work three or four hours every day and then work in the garden and do bits and pieces, but I'm too old, I haven't got the time. If I'm gonna write the kind of books, the number of books that I want to write then so far it's been 15 in 15 years. And I'm gonna have to work like this. And unless your upper body is very strong you're never gonna do this. Christine, my partner of now, she is eclectic in her knowledge, she's been everywhere. But the most useful is that I can actually talk to her as a researcher and say, "Why don't we explore this? Why don't we do that?" With Christine on the scent you know you're gonna get the result. She'll find somebody who knows. And how she does that, I, constantly amazes me, but she always does. I don't want to do something possibly extraordinarily stupid.
I live in a very quiet valley. It's just sort of north of the Central Coast. In the 1830s it contained some of the world's largest and most beautiful cedar trees to the point that they were especially cut out and sent to Britain for fine furniture. What I'd like to do is to put those trees back. I'd love to leave something behind that we all took away. And this, of course, in world terms would be the tiniest of tiny gestures, but if I can get the government to agree that these trees can't be harvested for 100 years it just might be in 100 years time, this valley might be one of the beautiful places on earth. And that would, to my mind, be a nice third chapter of my life if I could do that. I tend to have less concern about happiness than I have with contentment. And a contentment is having done all those things you set out to do. But, of course, things are gonna go wrong, and if they didn't, what sort of a life would that be? Sadness is a season and it will pass, but so is happiness.
PETER THOMPSON: And you've obviously gone through all those seasons - all four seasons and more, maybe.
BRYCE COURTENAY: Well, have we not all, Peter? I mean, when I wrote 'April Fools Day', this was prior to emails becoming the popular way of communicating, we received over 35,000 letters. And almost every one of them contained a sadness from someone relating, trying to touch and say, "I also understand. We too have been through this." Everybody has it. Everybody. And yet if you listen to radio and to modern communications it's all about gaining happiness, it's all about love. Nobody talks about the incredible sadness that most of us go through at one stage or another in our life. It's probably the most common experience we have and so we have to learn to endure it and live with it and cherish it, in a way. And I think it was C.S. Lewis whose son asked him why he wrote. And he said, Oh, why people read, rather. And he said, "So they know they're not alone." In a sense, that's why I'm writing, so I know I'm not alone.
PETER THOMPSON: In the search for your mysterious family, you also had a meeting, didn't you, with a member of your family in a hotel?
BRYCE COURTENAY: Oh, dare I tell this story! I arrived in a large limo and got out, just having done a book launch. And there was a derelict standing in my way. And the hotel maitre d was trying to get rid of him and he was saying, "No, man! No, man! I'm here! I'm coming to you!" And he said, "I've come to see my cousin, Bryce Courtenay." And this guy stood there and his teeth were missing and yellowed and he was obviously alcoholic and he looked an absolute mess. And he's my cousin and I put my arms around him. And the first thing he said, he says, "I need a drink! I need a drink!" So I took him into the hotel, much to the chagrin of the hotel people. And he proceeded to get rather drunk and then I put him in a cab and took him home. And he had married a coloured lady who was very cruel to him. And I walked away from that, Peter, saying, "There but for the grace of God that's me." You know, "That was me. I was looking at me." And very sad and what can you say? I've since had a couple of dreams about him and they haven't been good.
PETER THOMPSON: What stories do you still want to tell?
BRYCE COURTENAY: The writer has no right to proselytise, has no right to give messages. But I hope at least to write a book or two to point out, albeit interestingly and hopefully covertly, that there are values in life that transcend money, transcend power and transcend control. And I don't think the world has ever been more controlled than it is at the moment.
PETER THOMPSON: Do you still feel as much in a hurry as you used to?
BRYCE COURTENAY: Yes, you know, I think of myself, well, if I'm really lucky I've got 10 years and that makes me 82, 83. And 10 years isn't very much and I've got so much to do in those 10 years that I'm appalled at the fact that I can't have 20 or 30 or 40 or 50. But I've probably only got 10 and so, yes, I am in a tearing hurry and can't waste time doing the wrong things, stupid things. For instance, I love a glass of wine, but I've given up wine for the simple reason that even two glasses the next morning I feel fuzzy and I only come right at about 11 o'clock in the morning. And I just did some quick mathematics and discovered that if I've only got 10 years to go and I only come right at 11:00am, 11:30am, I'm wasting 3.5 years! And I can't afford to waste them so I'm not giving up alcohol because I don't like it, but because I can't give up those 3.5 years. I have to be in top form for them.
PETER THOMPSON: Legacy is a hard thing to think about. Those trees are a legacy, obviously, that beauty that you've created.
BRYCE COURTENAY: Ah, Peter, you know, I think we have to be very careful of legacies and of fame and stuff like that. You know, I keep reminding myself that the tide comes in twice a day and wipes out all the footprints. You know, you just do the best you can and whatever's left is left.
PETER THOMPSON: You're an extraordinary person living an extraordinary life and it's been great talking to you.
BRYCE COURTENAY: (Laughs) I'm a very ordinary person!
PETER THOMPSON: Bryce, thank you very much.
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