Susie Levy that there was nothing wrong with competition157 – and he was competing, and very successfully.
It seems fair to add that he must have welcomed the income that his successful commercial practice generated. Arthur had enough wealth already that he would later say he never had to work, but when he left commercial practice to found the Legal Resources Centre he also warned his son Matthew that the family’s lifestyle might become more constrained.158 In the years before the LRC, he was earning the fees that an advocate in demand could earn. Those fees surely helped make the raising of Arthur and Lorraine’s two sons easier. They also enabled Arthur and Lorraine to enjoy what money could buy; as Lorraine told me, in those years Arthur was happy to see her fill their home with beauty in the form of art, from paintings to pottery to clothing and special items for their children – and all of this would have cost money.159
There is another possibility as well. Lawyers representing disadvantaged people sometimes burn out, and one reason for that burnout is the sense that the work they are doing changes nothing systemically, even if it can make a real – even dramatic – difference in individual clients’ lives. The political cases Arthur did handle were all worth taking, but in the 1960s and 1970s they did little to dislodge the system of apartheid.
Why then would Arthur have wanted to be involved in the NUSAS and Pretoria Twelve trials at the end of this period? Glenn Moss believes that Arthur took the NUSAS case because it would make a difference. The logic of the state’s case threatened to close down the limited space still available in South Africa for above-ground political opposition to apartheid, and protecting that space mattered. Moss also recalls that even early in the trial, Arthur and others were talking about the possibility of a broader legal approach, a practice that would go beyond the case-by-case defence of apartheid’s victims to shape a practice of public interest law.160 That was what the Legal Resources Centre would do; it was designed precisely to find and press cases that might make a systemic difference, and Arthur’s decision to join the LRC surely reflected the sense of possibility that this approach opened up.
Moss also suspects that Arthur began to see political possibilities that he hadn’t noticed before. In 1976, in the middle of the NUSAS trial, Soweto exploded in opposition to the government’s attempts to impose Afrikaans education on black students – and all of a sudden it was clear that Africans were not going to acquiesce in the continued rule of apartheid. Meanwhile, something else was happening in the NUSAS trial itself: just as the NUSAS leaders were encountering a master of using law to seek justice – an experience which would lead three of them to work at the Legal Resources Centre – so Arthur was encountering the new student leaders and their resourcefulness and hope.161 In all these ways, Arthur’s decision to take the NUSAS case, and his experience in the case, seem to have reflected and contributed to a change in his feelings.
But even as new political energies and legal options emerged, the frustration inherent in the political cases of the 1960s and 1970s remained just that: inherent. To fight against apartheid in its courts meant to take cases that would at most have incremental, if not invisible, effects on the system as a whole. Even in the late 1980s, as the end of apartheid neared, Arthur – and probably most of his friends and colleagues – had no expectation that the system was about to end.162 So why press on in the face of such profound resistance? Rather than asking why Arthur didn’t do more, perhaps the question to be asked is why he did as much as he did. Why did he stay in the country at all?
Perhaps surprisingly, the three books Arthur lent Lorraine on the evening that they first met turn out to offer some suggestions of answers to these questions. While these books were not the result of comprehensive reading on Arthur’s part, and certainly do not offer definitive answers for us, they were still striking choices which shed a good deal of light on who Arthur was. One was Kafka’s The Castle. Kafka stands out biographically as an insurance lawyer who hated his work though he did it well. Arthur too was an insurance lawyer, especially at the beginning of his career. Like Kafka, Arthur was also Jewish; not ardently so, and with less of an interest in Judaism than Kafka developed during his lifetime, but nevertheless self-consciously a Jew.163 Arthur was also an English-speaking white South African; that meant he was not an Afrikaner. He was a man of multiple identities and yet stood outside the mainstream of each of them.
In 1985, when Arthur came to New York City to receive a distinguished prize from the Association of the Bar of the City of New York, he said in a speech, ‘I think it is probably easier for someone who has grown up outside the [Afrikaner] establishment to look upon the structure which the [Afrikaners] have erected to gain power and protect their position far more critically than they would do themselves.’164 This sentiment was not entirely dispassionate; as his pride in the result in the Gelria case indicates, Arthur was acutely conscious of the injustice of the spread of Afrikaner power, in law as elsewhere, and pleased to oppose it. He also clearly had mixed feelings about the identity he could most easily have embraced, as a trial lawyer; he was dismayed by the prospect of a life marked only by forensic successes or failures.165 By the time he spoke in 1985, he had resolved this dilemma at least to his own satisfaction by turning from the individual practice of law as an advocate to the co-founding, and leadership, of the Legal Resources Centre.
But this professional resolution did not resolve everything, and perhaps the second of the two books he offered to Lorraine sheds further light on who Arthur was becoming. This was a book by Thomas Mann, apparently Death in Venice. The book did not grab Lorraine’s interest though she told Arthur she was determined to try The Magic Mountain. Death in Venice is a complex story, in which the hero, Gustav von Aschenbach, finds the clash between the unremitting discipline of his craft as a writer and his desire for passion and love difficult, really impossible, to resolve satisfactorily. Perhaps for Arthur this deep conflict in part reflected his desire for a religiously framed place in the world, a place that Arthur could not actually find. In a eulogy for his mentor Bram Fischer’s son Paul, who died in 1971 at the age of 23, Arthur would speak to this task, saying, ‘There is a contradiction in all of our lives, for we are born to die, and none of us knows with certainty why this is so.’166 Arthur ‘appreciate[d] that [belief in God] is very important to some people, and provides them with a tremendous strength. I don’t have that.’167
Or perhaps Arthur was searching for a balance between two modes of living, one warm and connected, the other reserved and on occasion even cold – a contrast that may help explain the disparity in the views that others had of what sort of person Arthur really was. It is difficult to come to grips with this division in Arthur’s character, and we will return to it again. Certainly he was known for his exceptional politeness to all; that might be a mannered choice but he was also notably generous, to such people as his brother Sydney, Joel Joffe, Anne Sassoon and Toni Shimoni. These moments appear to be genuine and giving acts of support for others.
It may be that Arthur truly felt no impulse of politeness toward those, such as Derek Brune or the brutal security officer Swanepoel, who had thrown themselves without ambivalence into the struggle to preserve apartheid. But I am inclined to think that Arthur retained this impulse even with the adversaries he found most disturbing. Perhaps, like Mann’s von Aschenbach, Arthur sincerely felt not only politeness but also stern disapproval towards those who supported apartheid, like Brune and Swanepoel.
That ambivalence is understandable – but Lorraine may not have been afflicted by this same internal division. Though she was deeply empathetic, she also had sharp, even fierce, moral views. She perhaps was fundamentally not polite, and it may be that von Aschenbach’s profound internal conflicts simply did not speak to her.168 The Arthur she would come to love was perhaps a man who embraced her convictions rather than her hesitations, and this was the man who would undertake a practice of law founded on protecting the rule of law and human rights in South Africa.
Matthew Chaskalson says that the third, and for Arthur perhaps the most important, of the three books he lent Lorraine
