Teller of Many Tales: The Lives of Laurens Van Der Post

by J.D.F. Jones

Book Overview

The celebrated Laurens van der Post made a life of lies. Those who know him as the advisor of Prince Charles and Margaret Thatcher, author of twenty-three popular, award-winning books, (several of which were made into films) and a speaker for the cause of African peoples will be startled by the revelations in this fascinating biography of a consummate fabricator. Among the romantic highlights in van der Post's version of his life were an Afrikaner...

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0786710314
• ISBN13: 9780786710317
• Release Date: May 2002
• Publisher: Da Capo Press
• Length: 528 Pages
• Weight: 1.95 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.6" x 6.3" x 9.4"

Customer Reviews

Larger-Than-Life Figure

This is painful for admirers but essential for clarifying Sir Laurens's legacy. He was born probably 70 years too late for the great age of adventure travel; this may explain fabrications designed to burnish the explorer's self-image he craved. His desire for celebrity with powerful connections was more predictable. Jones surely felt some distaste unearthing facts at odds with LVDP's tales, but the discrepancies exist and deserve scrutiny. Posing as a high-ranking POW is especially disturbing; it's understandable as self-preservation but others suffered as a result. What of his positive achievements? Even a well-founded book like "Venture to the Interior" (possibly his best) seems trivial because his Malawian mission was archaic and mostly pointless, further proof that he was a man out of his time. But Sir Laurens did write memorable books that inspire readers to live more adventurously and appreciate other cultures. This considerable legacy does not depend on his reliability, though many (myself included) prefer a clearer boundary between fact and fiction. In this respect LVDP's literary output resembles Alex Haley's "Roots," whose awesome positive impact endures despite later revelations about its origins. Jones has done well in fearlessly chasing the evidence wherever it leads.

DISILLUSIONING, YET COMPASSIONATE!

This is how the book leaves one. As a lifelong admirer of van der Post (I was even fortunate enough to briefly meet him once in New York and attend his lectures on the denigration of the feminine since the time of St. Paul, as well as the Bushman of the Kalahari myths), I have to admit I found his personal life to be quite shocking, especially his treatment of women close to him, and even more so, his total neglect of his illegitimate children, and that of his own son, John, who died prematurely in adulthood. I found the many lies surprising, but was relieved that not everything was a lie, and many of the the truths in his writing stand the test of veracity. Even if some of the Bushman myths which he claimed to have learned directly from them were myths that he read in the books of Bleek, they still are very beautiful. Most surprising is that the Mantis is not to be found in Bushman cosmology. Wherever did van der Post find this non-Bushman god whom he accredits to their culture?Oh well, he seemed to have a capacity to attract great and life-long love from others which one wonders if he could ever have returned in such proportion. His relationship with Jung was not so close that he should have called himself "Jung's messenger boy." Above all, I feel a deep sympathy for his extremely loyal wife, who was kept much in the dark about his goings on. Although she intuited there was another woman (though not that they had had a 30 years affair, or that there were many others as well), and knew of at least one of his illegitimate children, she said she was not jealous. If you read her autobiography, "The Way Things Happen," the last two chapters actually written by Laurens van der Post as she had fallen into her dementia by then), much is revealing. For instance, she notes that she was aware of her first husband's (Jimmy Young) affairs, and states in that book as well that she felt no jealousy, but believed that was in the area of his reckoning with himself and was his own business. Her book is a fine one, from her childhood in India, her great love of her second husband, her work as a playwright and then after six month's study at the Jungian Institute in Zurich, her work as a not fully trained psychoanalyst (she had some professional meetings with Prince Charles, while Diana, Princess of Wales, had several sessions with van der Post's close friend and analyst, Dr. Alan McGlashan), up to her old age.Unlike van der Post, Jung was honest with his wife about Toni Wolff. They all learned to live with it. But then, he was not a habitual liar. Ingaret thought of her husband as "a great man." I beg to disagree. Though I respect him for staying with her during her last years when she had sunk into dementia, instead of 'ducking out,' as he had a tendency to quickly do in sticky situations.Jung was perhaps a great man. In my opinion, van der Post excelled in his non-fiction works. I do not think he reached any great heights in his books of ficti