GRAY, Stephen

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Nationality: South African. Born: Cape Town, 30 November 1941. Education: Cambridge University, B.A. in English (honors) 1964,M.A. in English 1969; University of Iowa, M.F.A. in creative writing 1969; R.A.U., Johannesburg, D. Litt. et Phil. in English 1978. Family: Divorced. Career: Lecturer in English, Aix-Marseilles, France, 1965–66; graduate assistant, University of Iowa, 1966–68; junior lecturer, University of Cape Town, 1969; lecturer, 1970–74, senior lecturer, 1974–82, full professor, 1982–92, and head of department, 1982–84, 1988–89, 1991, Rand Afrikaans University, Johannesburg. Guest professor, University of Venice and of Trento, Italy, spring 1994. Councillor, National English Literary Museum, Grahamstown, 1980–93; board member, Federated Union of Black Arts, Johannesburg, 1992–94. Awards: Gold medal of the English Academy of Southern Africa, 1993. Fellow, Hawthornden Castle International Retreat for Writers, Edinburgh, 1992; fellow, Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Study and Conference Center, Italy, 1994. Address: P.O. Box 86, Crown Mines 2025, South Africa.

Publications

Poetry

It's About Time. Cape Town, David Philip, 1974.

Hottentot Venus. London, Rex Collings, and Cape Town, David Philip, 1979.

Love Poems, Hate Poems. London, Rex Collings, and Cape Town, David Philip, 1982.

Apollo Café. Cape Town, David Philip, 1990.

Season of Violence. Aarhus, Denmark, Dangaroo Press, 1992.

Selected Poems (1960–92). Cape Town, David Philip, 1994.

Gabriel's Exhibition. Cape Town, Mayibuye, 1998.

Plays

An Evening at the Vernes. Johannesburg, Ravan, 1977.

Herman Charles Bosman's 'Cold Stone Jug:' The Play. Cape Town, Human and Rousseau, 1982.

Schreiner: A One-Woman Play. Cape Town, Philip, 1983.

Accident of Birth. Johannesburg, Congress of South African Writers, 1993.

Novels

John Ross: The True Story. Johannesburg, Penguin, 1987.

Time of Our Darkness. London, Random-Century, 1988.

Born of Man. London, GMP, 1989.

War Child. Johannesburg, Justified, 1991; London, Serif, 1993.

Drakenstein. Johannesburg, Justified, 1994.

Short Stories

Human Interest. Johannesburg, Justified, 1993.

Other

Southern African Literature: An Introduction. Cape Town, David Philip, London, Collings, and New York, Barnes and Noble, 1979.

Douglas Blackburn. Boston, G.K. Hall, 1984.

Editor, Mhudi by Sol T. Plaatje. London, Heinemann African Writers Series, 1978.

Editor, Theatre One: New South African Drama. Johannesburg, Donker, 1979.

Editor, Tsotsi by Athol Fugard. New York, Random, 1980.

Editor Theatre Two: New South African Drama. Johannesburg, Donker, 1981.

Editor, The Penguin Book of Southern African Stories. London and New York, Penguin, 1985.

Editor, Market Plays. Johannesburg, Donker, 1986.

Editor, Makapan's Caves and Other Stories by Herman Charles. London, Penguin, 1987.

Editor, The Penguin Book of Southern African Verse. London, Penguin, 1989.

Editor, File on Fugard. London, Methuen, 1991.

Editor, The Penguin Book of Contemporary South African Short Stories. Johannesburg, Penguin, 1993.

Editor, South Africa Plays. London, Nick Hern, and Johannesburg, Heinemann, 1993.

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Manuscript Collection: National English Library Museum, Grahamstown, South Africa.

Critical Studies: "The National Neurosis: A Critical Study of Stephen Gray's Local Colour" by Michael Rice, in English in Africa (Grahamstown, South Africa), 4(1), 1977; "Reply to Stephen Gray" by Lloyd Spencer, in African Perspective (Johannesburg), 9, 1978; "The Theatre, the Artist and Soweto" by Anne Fuchs, in Commonwealth Essays and Studies (Dijon, France), 7(2), spring 1985; "Fictions of Anticipation: Perspectives on Some Recent South African Short Stories in English" by Andres Water Oliphant, in World Literature Today (Norman, Oklahoma), 70(1), winter 1996; "Under the Proteatree, at Daggaboersnek': Stephen Gray, Literary Historiography and the Limit Trope of the Local" by Louise Shabat Bethlehem, in English in Africa (Grahamstown, South Africa), 24(2), November 1997.

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Of all those active on the South African literary scene no one has done more to earn the title man of letters than has Stephen Gray. From a broad background in universities in South Africa, England, the United States, and France, he has directed his versatile talents and creative energies into every form of literary activity. A poet first and foremost but also a novelist, playwright, literary historian, newspaper critic, professor of English, and anthologist, his is an astonishing achievement. But to range as widely as this is to run risks, and what is significant in his work has to be searched for and identified in a wide field that is not always even in quality.

It is as a poet that Gray's voice is at its best, moving, as one critic has put it, over "the variegated landscapes of the past and present." The contemporary scene, the passing parade, is acutely, almost journalistically observed. What he sees is seldom seen with approval and is often mockingly described; he uses his talent for humor to entertain, and he sometimes gives the impression that he is taking himself for a ride. "Apollo Café," for example, a poem that gives its title to one of his collections of verse, strongly evokes urban South Africa, where the ubiquitous café has a place on every corner:

   Its yellow framed door is always open
   For pawpaws and lichees and watermelons
   For catfood and iced suckers and Marmite
   And drinking yoghurt and bubblegum and lard
   And cheddar cheese and mousetraps and brooms
   Tuna peas bacon butter carrots chops
   Matches candles fittings jelly Doom

One suspects that the often tough, no-nonsense quality in the language Gray uses may hide the deeper, more personal feeling revealed by his love poems. No longer in love, he records poignantly how "my feelings damaged and scarred":

   The wound now's a trench a gutter a wrinkle
   Being out of love it has healed and grown over

Though Gray has produced stimulating and disturbing writing about the South African scene of the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, he also has written about the past. "Because I am not personally courageous," he claims, "I prefer to retreat into the past but then merely as a strategy to use as a predictive device." On the contrary, he has never given any evidence of not being courageous and has never hesitated to adopt unfashionable or unpopular attitudes, even if doing so has aroused hostility among his contemporaries. His collection Season of Violence, published after the emergence of the new South Africa, is a strong antidote to the euphoria that marked this development. There was, among other things, no end to violence, and one is struck by the stark realism of "Letter," for instance:

   I go to make my complaint at Union Building
   Get mugged on the lawn left for dead
 
 
   Dead me do not speak so what can I say?
   This letter will have to do:
 
 
   I go out to post a letter get gunned down
   Get gunned down.

We too are gunned down by the short, sharp staccato lines.

In 1992, at the age of fifty, Gray gave up his university professorship to devote himself entirely to writing.

—Roy Macnab