Owen Williams – Any Given Sunday

ANY GIVEN SUNDAY: An Anthology. By Owen Williams. Southern Cross Books, Cape Town. 2003. 330pp.

Reviewed by Sydney Duval

South African newspapers have been served by journalists who have been masters at using the English language to describe the contemporary human condition to reach deep into it and to engage the reader in the experience.

The first journalist to hold me in this way was Laurence Gandar, the courageous and inspiring editor of the Rand Daily Mail in the 1960s and 1970s. I was working on The Pretoria News in 1961 when I read his compelling piece entitled “The Nation That Lost Its Way”. He dared you to think beyond the rim, beyond comfort and appeasement.

There were others who wrote with skill and insight, who wrote things for the heart and mind that would stick, who could draw brilliant pictures and images with words. I think of the humorists AB Hughes and Ken Smith; the political commentator Allister Sparks, Ken Owen, Jack Patten, Stanley Uys and Anthony Delius; Louis Duffus on cricket and Barry Glasspool on rugby; Lin Menge who could scrape the whitewash off a public icon and make a shrub shine in the sunlight; Marshall Lee on anything that lived and breathed; Percy Baneshik for sheer cleverness; Phyllis Konya aglow with her thoughts on a Russian or French film; Dora Sowden wrapping her typewriter round a ballet. And who, having read it, could forgetRaeford Daniel’s review of Ingmar Bergman’s Cries and Whispers?

The anthology of writings which The Southern Cross has published as Any Given Sunday places the author Owen Williams on the palette I have given some colour to  a palette that is by no means complete.

Reading Owen Williams is like finding yourself in the heart of his Villeveyrac with a cellar of wines to explore and taste, from crimson cabernet sauvignon to golden chablis. Some are sprightly, some mellow, some taste of the interior life, others of gaiety and celebration. Some are robust, others sensitive and fragile. There are saints and intellectuals and artists and captivating spirits in the cellar  and ruffians and crooks and droll characters. Their stories depend on the mood of the raconteur and the landscape he is traversing.

There is something Proustian in reading Owen Williams when he speaks of the dogs in his life and the influence of Charles P’guy, the French poet and thinker who began his life as a journalist and lost it on the battlefields of World War I at the age of 41.

The author took me back to the moment some 30 years before when I stood in front of a tiny chapel in Villefranche, a small village port near Nice. On the wall was a simple blue and white enamel plaque with a quote in French from P’guy which translated loosely as: “Mankind will make no progress until it learns to treat animals with kindness.”

The reference to P’guy is contained in the piece entitled “Flowers in Unlikely Fields” which Owen Williams wrote on November 12, 1989. I enjoyed this epistle because of the context and the memory and associations it stirred, beginning with a reference to a French priest writing in the daily Catholic newspaper, La Croix.

Two women journalists working on La Croix arrived in Cape Town in the late 1980s to report on the political and socio-economic situation facing the local church. We spent hours in a car, on a hot, windy and dusty day, driving through Mitchell’ Plain, Nyanga and Khayelitsha.

The journalists, whom I will call Julie and Jeanne, interviewed several people, including Fr Desmond Curran who was busy despatching several coffins to the Transkei. They took many photographs. They also got terribly hungry and we stopped at a local spaza for refreshments. They bit into their meat pies and grimaced. But their hunger prevailed and they quickly finished them off, followed by gulps of sweet cool drink the most unlikely cuisine imaginable for two Frenchwomen.

Later in the passage, Owen Williams relates that P’guy finds himself becoming less drawn to edifying stories and more and more attracted to writers, singers and artists whose work, sometimes scandalous, he would call Karstisque, but because it also connects to “the artists of Karst”  a calcareous region of Yugoslavia where the hidden action of water “has created an astonishing underground world from which arise unexpected springs.”

Theologian Fr Albert Nolan OP once told a group of Dominican sisters that ”memory and remembering are an important part of Christian faith and practice”.

Owen Williams in his writing of memory and remembering gives us something of lasting value. He, too, could be claimed as one of the refreshing springs of Karst.