Don Maclennan died this week, the best beloved of teachers and critically most neglected of playwrights and poets. No one who encountered Don during the more than three decades of his teaching career at Rhodes University is likely to forget the piercing appraisal of his blue eyes, the penetration of his questions, or the incisiveness of his opinions. No budding poet - or, for that matter, lover - who consulted him came away without startling insights.
Don was born in 1929, and grew up in London and the Transvaal. He studied philosophy at Edinburgh, married American-born Shirley, and taught at Wits before moving to Grahamstown. He will be well remembered in Grahamstown’s townships for promoting theatre; his own plays are fine but now almost forgotten. He claimed that he had written half a dozen novels but destroyed them “with a huge sense of relief and satisfaction”. Only one fiction piece, A Short History of Madness in the Eastern Cape, survives with any prominence. Though he published some critical material early in his academic career, he eventually largely eschewed the pretensions of academic publishing. His favoured medium became the short, pithy talk, rich with original aphorisms on the value of story and poem, and laden with quotations from his favourite writers.
And of course poetry. Don published or printed some twenty volumes of poetry, some of the finest this country has ever produced. That he is so critically neglected is astounding, perhaps partly because he studiously despised politics. Also, he increasingly self-published rather than pursue commercial publication.
His poems became increasingly spare and lapidary in his later life, increasingly concerned with his approaching death. Though sometimes disturbing, they above all celebrated the simple fact of being alive, being in love, being sensuous. He was the master of the marriage of the simple, resonant image with the philosophical statement. In this he often resembled some of his favourite poets, the Greeks, such as Seferis, Ritsos and Elytis. There is probably no poetry in the national oeuvre more thoughtfully authentic than his.
It is tragically ironic that this great walker and rock-climber first had the use of his legs robbed by motor-neuron disease, and finally that this profound communicator should in his last weeks lose his voice to a stroke. Yet after retirement he courageously continued to teach undergraduate tutorials, doing what he loved most, until the end of 2008. And just two days before he died he was still considering and polishing yet another slim collection of poems, entitled Dress Rehearsal, the last in an astonishing late flowering of productivity,
One of those poems considers, almost prophetically, the plight of his sister, bed-ridden and dying in a hospital. She wakes and whispers, “This is not a dress rehearsal”. Nothing in Don’s rich life was a dress rehearsal for anything else: every moment was lived for itself.
Don Maclennan’s passing leaves all of us who care about literature both enriched and, now, deeply bereft. He leaves his wife, four children, and several grandchildren, and more saddened students of all ages than one could count.
This piece was written by Dan Wylie for publication in Grahamstown's Grocotts Mail
newspaper. I shamelessly stole it electronically. Because I could. Thankyou Dan. You put it so well.
Somedays I walk into the hale and the air tingles. Things are slightly displaced, ruffled, ever so lightly disheveled. A warthog has been rooting through the landscape of my home. Snuffling for truffles of delight.
