son Matthew was 14 – so in 1977 or 1978 – Arthur gave him this book too.169 Probably a decade after that, perhaps on my first visit to South Africa, he gave me a copy of The Plague as well. Something about Camus was important, it seems, to Arthur’s understanding of his life and his responsibilities in his life.
The Plague is, as its title suggests, the story of a plague epidemic, set in a fictional North African (and French colonial) town. It is in part the story of duty, and a metaphor for the fight against the Nazis that had ended just two years before its publication in 1947. The central figure is a doctor named Rieux, who throws himself into the town’s struggle against the plague. He sees himself as ‘on the right road – in fighting against creation as he found it’. ‘Creation as he found it’ is a phrase that fits well with Arthur’s experience in South Africa, where he found creation – apartheid – in place and chose to confront it. Why confront it, when an easier life might take a different path? Camus does not say that those who fight are heroic. Rather, he writes, ‘the question is that of knowing whether two and two do make four’. If they do, it is time to act. This is the perspective of the man who, as a first-year student at Wits, declared that the question the students should be discussing was not tradition but, simply, what is right. This question, moreover, would always be pertinent, and the story of the town’s fight against the plague
could not be one of a final victory. It could be only the record of what had had to be done, and what assuredly would have to be done again in the never ending fight against terror and its relentless onslaughts, despite their personal afflictions, by all who, while unable to be saints but refusing to bow down to pestilences, strive their utmost to be healers.170
Arthur’s older brother, as we have already seen, says that Arthur was always very dutiful. Yet the duty to struggle is not a duty to forsake everything but struggle. Stephen Clingman, who knew Arthur and Lorraine from the 1970s, has pointed out to me that there is pleasure in the life that an existentialist undertakes.171 For Camus, too, duty is not all. In The Plague, the character Rambert wants to slip out of the plague-infested city, in defiance of the quarantine rules, to rejoin his lover – and when Rambert wonders if he is ‘all wrong in putting love first’, Dr Rieux answers: ‘“No,” he said vehemently, “you are not wrong.”’172
Rieux’s words to Rambert seem to echo Arthur’s in a 1995 interview. There Arthur expresses his own uncertainty: ‘You know, not everybody is a freedom fighter. Some people take up arms, others don’t. You find different ways of identifying yourself with a cause.’ A moment later he says that he always opposed apartheid and that
I think, in fact, that I possibly achieved more against apartheid in my professional career than I could have done in any other field. Whether I consciously settled down and said, ‘Should I do this or should I do that?’ I don’t know. For me to say that the reason that I didn’t join a resistance movement was that I thought I could do more this way would be a bit of a rationalisation.173
And there was, indeed, a life to be lived as well as a struggle to be pressed. Later in The Plague Rieux agrees with another character, Taurou, who proposes that they go for a swim in the midst of the plague. Taurou says, and Rieux concurs, that ‘Of course, a man should fight for the victims, but if he ceases caring for anything outside that, what’s the use of his fighting?’174 So in these years Arthur did struggle against injustice, but he did not cease caring for anything outside that; he enjoyed the life he had shaped even as he resisted the injustice that surrounded him. The fight, moreover, had its own value: what Arthur certainly did not do was to embrace the disease around him; that was the response of von Aschenbach in Death in Venice, and represents a lack of balance that Arthur’s determination to fight against suffering helped him to resolve. Arthur was with Rieux in the end, and not with von Aschenbach.
Arthur found inspiration in at least one other of Camus’s works.175 In an obituary of Arthur written three days after Arthur’s death, Jeremy Gauntlett found ‘a clue’ in ‘a passage in Albert Camus’ Notebooks, which he (Arthur) marked up: “For thousands of years the world has been like those Italian paintings of the Renaissance where, on cold flagstones, men are tortured while other men look away in the most perfect unconcern. The number of the ‘uninterested’ was immense compared to the interested. What characterised history were the number of people who were not interested in other people’s misfortunes.”’176 Arthur could not look away. He praised Bram Fischer for refusing to do so, and made this a principle of his own life as well.177
While Arthur practised law, and his wife Lorraine taught at Wits, they were raising their two sons, Matthew and Jerome, at home. They made a home, balanced work and family as well as they could, helped their sons to grow up, entertained, took vacations and built friendships. The life they had was a life of privilege, but it was also a meaningful life, marked by warmth and love. As we look at the life they led – an inquiry that will start with the years between Rivonia in 1963–4 and the founding of the Legal Resources Centre in 1979, but will inevitably extend further forward in time as well – we will encounter aspects of Arthur that were often invisible in his professional work.
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Both Arthur and Lorraine were working full-time. By the end of her third year at university, Lorraine was pregnant, and she soon became the mother of a son, Matthew, who was born on 12 August 1963. In 1966 she began teaching at Wits, well before she had her PhD. Meanwhile, she and Arthur planned for the time when they would have another baby – Lorraine told Ilse Wilson that she waited till she was ready before having their next child – and Jerome was born on 1 August 1967.1 That she began teaching so quickly was a recognition of her talent, but it also meant she still had her dissertation to write, as well as two boys to care for.
She laboured over her thesis, perhaps somewhat daunted by how outstanding her undergraduate honours thesis had been.2 At one point her progress was interrupted when she entrusted the sole copy of the manuscript to Arthur’s typist, who was typing for Lorraine too and left the manuscript on a bus. That copy was never recovered, but fortunately Arthur had insisted that Lorraine keep the previous draft, so only the current draft’s changes were lost.3 Vanetta Joffe recalled that Lorraine also found herself in the familiar academic position of feeling that her knowledge of her subject – Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales – was steadily increasing, and so what she’d already written needed revision.4 She did finish, however, with the aid of a two-month stint in America in 1973 or 1974, and another stretch from December 1976 to January 1977, when she worked on the manuscript in Johannesburg while Arthur (and family friends) took care of the boys by taking them on vacation to Europe.5 She earned her PhD in 1979; her dissertation, ‘Or Telle His Tale Untrewe: An Enquiry into a Narrative Strategy in the Canterbury Tales’, is available today online.
Lorraine’s teaching was, by all accounts, outstanding. She was a magnetic professor, warm and accessible to her students, catching their interest with her incisive analyses of works of literature and her sometimes profane classroom discussions, such as her analysis of the name of Jane Austen’s character ‘Fanny Price,’ which Janet Kentridge recalled – that she had a fanny, and it had a price.6 Her students remember her love for them. Lynn Shakinovsky, a longtime friend, first got to know Lorraine as her student, and later joined her at Wits as a colleague; she remembers the two of them marking papers together in the Chaskalsons’ garden, and also that Lorraine was her first mentor as a cook.7 Lynn’s
