Out of Africa

By Pico Iyer

NOTEBOOKS 1960-1977 by Athol Fugard; Knopf 238 pages; $14.95

Shades of gray are hard to come by in South Africa. That beautiful, terrible land invariably tempts writers to reduce it to black-and-white terms, to find a moral in its every predicament, a sermon in its every scene. Playwright Athol Fugard, 51, has won international acclaim by resisting the impulse to moralize. Such dramas as "Master Harold" . . . and the Boys, Boesman and Lena and A Lesson from Aloes do not preach against the evils of apartheid; they give institutionalized racism a human face, sometimes stolid, sometimes collapsing in laughter, tears or rage.

Notebooks 1960-1977 records Fugard's private struggle to become a public artist and to grasp the paradoxes of his troubled land. "South Africa," he notes in 1963, "needs to be loved now, when it is at its ugliest, more than at any other time." Fugard expresses his own love by stubbornly remaining at home, and by using drama as a form of Gandhian nonviolent resistance. That commitment has inevitably entangled him in a series of controversies. When leading British dramatists persist in boycotting South Africa with their plays, Fugard vehemently contends in 1968 that it is better to confront the regime with its sins than to remain silent. When ideology beckons, he recoils, resolving at last that he would rather reveal inhumanity poetically than revile it politically. "Tell the human story," he says, "and the propaganda will take care of itself." And when the Serpent Players, his all-black troupe of actors, are invited to perform privately before a privileged all-white audience, Fugard surprisingly accepts. But instead of the scheduled comedy, the company presents The Coat, a jolting play about a black man unfairly sent to jail.

Though matters racial preoccupy the diarist, Notebooks also displays Fugard in relaxed moods: exalting the clean wind and open sea, excitedly reading Camus, Gogol and works of Zen. But the real strength of his personal record is its collection of stories overheard, incidents chanced upon, sorrows glimpsed by accident--the random scraps out of which Fugard fashioned his plays. As he listens to a vagrant's life story, accompanies a friend to court, watches two blacks carrying a wooden box through the night, Fugard registers and captures the keening images that are the very stuff of vibrant theater.

His choice of such details is by no means infallible. At one point he cannot resist beginning to sketch a simplistic, two-toned play about a milk truck and a coal truck. Often, too, he is so ready to find himself guilty of every kind of moral inattention and to punish himself unsparingly that his soul searching comes to resemble breast beating. Yet Fugard's relentless self-scrutiny guards him from the traps of self-indulgence. "Do I pose?" he asks himself. "I don't think so--but I'm very given to tears."

Tears, excesses and experimental poses are, in any case, the proper stuff of journals, and the raw diary form reinforces the reader's impression of Fugard's integrity and eloquence. Through the theater, Fugard found a way to forswear abstraction and root himself in the immediacy of flesh and blood, pain and sweat. Through his notebooks, he has managed to blend conscience with intelligence, leaving behind a trail of haunting questions. The darkness that pervades this book partakes not only of misery but of mystery as well: "The candle burns brighter because the night is dark."

--By Pico Iyer