The Missing Life

On the dust-jacket of this book, Laurens van der Post is introduced as a kind of Proteus, a man who had "won renown in an astounding range of roles: as war hero, writer, explorer, mystic, environmentalist, Jungian, behind-the-scenes diplomat, and friend and confidant of the great". To some, he was a life-saving counsellor and sage. To others, he was Private Eye's van der Pump. To me, he was my grandfather.

Sir Laurens van der Post, as he became, was born in 1906 in the Orange Free State, South Africa, into a family of Dutch descent. His ancestors were pioneer farmers (though, if you look far back enough, there was an originating Hottentot princess), and his own family were lawyers and school teachers. From this obscure middle-class Afrikaner background came a writer whose books have inspired millions worldwide; a symbol to many of courage and forgiveness, through his experiences in a Japanese prisoner of war camp; a champion of the Kalahari Bushman people and promoter of the ideas of Carl Gustav Jung; and, perhaps most publicly, friend to Prince Charles and godfather to Prince William.

But under whichever guise he appeared, everyone who met him knew him as a storyteller. It was through stories that van der Post charmed statesmen, rallied despairing fellow-soldiers, communicated his thoughts and, ultimately, as this book makes clear, shaped a self for himself that he could bear to live with. The stories, whether about the bushmen or his own experiences or about the life of Jung or any other of his friends or acquaintances, were so eloquently and urgently communicated that you hardly stopped to think whether or not they were true.

AS JDF Jones acknowledges: "He would go on for an hour, or two hours, never for a moment losing the rapt attention of his audience. It was a spellbinding gift. He was a magician." Jones sets out to undo the spell. He takes on himself the unenviable task of dismantling the whole show, sifting every story for its truth to fact and scouring archives and interviewing every known living contact to fill in the missing pieces. In doing so, he hopes to find the man behind the many lives, to recount the one life lived.

An objective biography was needed. Everyone who knew van der Post knew that they had been given access to only a small part of who he was. There were mysteries, evasions and endless pungent gossip surrounding his personal and public life. Jones has done us all a service.

But this job - Jones is the authorised biographer - is only half done. He denounces the story-teller as a liar but fails to explain why so much of what this liar said and wrote rang true for his audience. He has finally done for Van der Posture (the title of his own demolishing review of van der Post's book Yet Being Someone Other in the London Review of Books for 1983), but in doing so failed to explain why so many thoughtful people testified to his qualities throughout his lifetime.

Jones covers the ground conscientiously, from the myths van der Post inherited and embroidered about his family history to the story of the meeting with Japanese journalists that led to the trip to Japan, when van der Post was only 19; from his account of his critical wartime experiences and the explorations in East Africa and among the bushmen in the Kalahari, to his relationship with Jung and his involvement in African politics. Besides challenging van der Post's own version of these core experiences, Jones brings to light other aspects of van der Post's life - the now notorious illegitimate child whom he conceived with a 14-yearold girl put into his charge, other romantic affairs, his neglect of his family, his sometimes ungenerous dealings with money - which he feels seriously damage van der Post's standing as a secular saint. It is sometimes comic and sometimes terrifying how compulsively van der Post seemed to need to embellish his life story. It was central to my picture of his life that he was, as he always declared, symbolically the 13th child of 15, born on the 13th day of December, very nearly the 13th month. It turns out that he was either the 11th or the 12th child, depending upon whether or not you include a half-brother. It seems that in reality there was no bushman nurse to play the role in his life van der Post so eloquently built up for her, and no mulberry tree in the garden of the family home for him to sit in to read the classics. All sorts of dramatic episodes, described so vividly that you imagine you have lived them - whaling expeditions off the Natal coast, trips to distant family farms, van der Post's call-up interview, several months fighting in Abyssinia - seem simply to have been made up. Does this matter? It does not really matter to me, who cared most for the man in front of me, evidence enough of both his wisdom and his weaknesses. And it is hardly news that writers, so good at creating convincing alternative lives for their characters, are pretty good too at making things up about themselves. No self-respecting literary biography is complete without its analysis of the compulsion to mythologise and fabricate. Jones himself offers Patrick O'Brian, Bruce Chatwin, Richard Llewellyn, Ernest Hemingway and Laurie Lee as writers who invented most of their autobiographies. Moreover, he quotes van der Post himself on his friend, the writer Roy Campbell: "People accused him of lying about himself. I do not think it could be called lying. I think he was so deeply absorbed in the images that kept pouring into him from his own dreaming unconscious, his own need of a personal mythology so kept him on the path of poetic meaning which was a constant hunger in him, that he could not help it."

Whether or not you accept this defence, which must surely have been a kind of self-defence, it is true that many of van der Post's own most moving and profound passages are born out of a poetic revisiting of his own life. He seemed to need to conjure a more heroic other self into being before he could express his own best self.

And this is why, for Jones, these constant fabrications do matter. He argues that van der Post was more than just a writer, that he took on the role of spiritual and moral guide, inviting respect as the embodiment of the values he brought to life in his books and talks, while betraying them. Moreover, he insists that the fabrications, which almost always work to place van der Post at the centre of events, serve the interest not of a higher truth but of mere vanity.

Unfortunately, in hitting out at the myth with such thoroughness, Jones loses his man. Van der Post so inhabited the twilight world between fact and mythology that to hunt him down in the world of fact alone is to miss him altogether. He is Proteus absconded.

Jones admits that, in playing the detective, he has had to abandon the roles of literary biographer and historian. But, in disputing tiny points of detail, he has missed out on exploring the really interesting questions that he himself raises surrounding van der Post's life and work.

There is no real attempt to explore the roots of van der Post's divided self and how it damaged or perhaps made possible the work that makes him worth writing about in the first place. Jones shows little sympathy for the confused young man that van der Post undoubtedly was, his ambitions, his thwarted talents, his guilt and sense of failure, and so misreads the significance of his war-time experience. It was there, in a POW camp in Java, that, whatever the minor inconsistencies about his rank or prison conditions, he came to know his own spirit, and found it to be such a powerful source of strength, authority and insight that he cherished and stood by it for the rest of his life. Determined to resist van der Post's charisma, Jones can do little to explain how it works either for good or ill. The result is a book that, bizarrely, is often quite dull.

You cannot expect a biographer to love his subject as a granddaughter might. But you can expect him to bring all his resources of imaginative empathy, together with his critical judgment, to bear on the subject to make it live. Otherwise all you are left with is tattered matters of fact.