Obituary: Karel Schoeman, solitary writer who shunned international fame

Karel Schoeman, who has died in Bloemfontein at the age of 77, was one of South Africa's greatest and most prolific authors.

He wrote 19 novels and at least 46 meticulously researched works of history, biography and travel, many of them while working as an archivist at the South African National Library in Cape Town.

He won multiple awards including the Recht Malan Prize for "excellence in the field of nonfiction books" four times; the Hertzog Prize, the most prestigious Afrikaans literary award, three times; and the CNA Award twice.

He was shortlisted in 2014 for the Sunday Times Alan Paton Award for nonfiction for Bailie's Party: The Old World, 1757-1819, about a large party of 1820 Settlers from Britain led by John Bailie, a member of an Anglo-Irish landowning family. In the book, Schoeman traces the background of the settlers and brings them to life in a way that was uniquely his.

He also did this to memorable effect in several books he wrote about slavery in the Cape, transforming impersonal archival material into flesh-and-blood individuals.

Schoeman was an intensely private, shy man who shunned the limelight and never attended award ceremonies if he could possibly help it.

One ceremony he did attend was when he received the Order of Ikhamanga from president Nelson Mandela in 1998, which he said was "a special honour for the Afrikaans language".

Although he wrote many of his nonfiction works in English, he wrote his novels in Afrikaans. Some of them were translated into English, often years later, but he believed only Afrikaans could do full justice to the themes, characters and landscapes he wrote about. And indeed no author has brought the country's harsh landscapes, most memorably the Karoo, Roggeveld and southern Free State that he loved so much, more profoundly, poetically and brilliantly to life than he did.

Unlike contemporaries such as JM Coetzee, André Brink and Nadine Gordimer, who wrote for international audiences, he almost deliberately did not. His target market was the Afrikaner and he made no concessions to international readers.

Schoeman avoided the very public association with the anti-apartheid struggle that writers like Breyten Breytenbach, Coetzee, Brink and Gordimer had. Thus while they were being internationally celebrated for their courage in opposing apartheid, he was largely ignored.

As a result, the sublime, spine-tingling quality of his writing went largely unnoticed by international readers and Booker and Nobel Prize committees.

A 1993 review in the New York Times of his novel, Take Leave and Go, about violence and decay in Cape Town, spelt it out.

The book "makes no effort to interpret or even portray contemporary South Africa to the foreign reader ... too much is assumed. Unbelievably, the colour of the vagrants and squatters pouring into Cape Town is never mentioned, nor the reason for their misery. Those readers who expect some token of protest or guilt will be disappointed; perhaps even protest and guilt are assumed."

This had less to do with his politics than the fact that his target audience were Afrikaners.

After all, Promised Land, published in 1972 as Na die Geliefde Land and hailed by Alan Paton as a "masterpiece", was the first and most powerful warning in South African literature of how white supremacy and apartheid would devastate the country.

Schoeman was privately resentful of the fact that the kind of readership he enjoyed among Afrikaners didn't equate to the massive effort he put into his books. Afrikaners were happy to praise him but not prepared to pay for his work in hard cash, he grumbled.

He had a self-deprecating explanation for his poor readership: Afrikaners wanted a story, he said. Nothing happened in his books and the main characters died anyway at the end.

Most of his novels concern a character who undertakes a kind of a journey which doesn't work out as planned. But then he discovers that the real journey is what Schoeman called "the journey inwards".

The metaphysical journeys of his characters gave readers an insight into their own journeys, which many found a painful experience they'd rather not have. Reading him demanded a spiritual and intellectual commitment that not many were willing to give, particularly if they weren't going to be rewarded with any obvious action or satisfying resolution.

Schoeman said that in the early days of his career he felt he had to give the Afrikaners a political message, but then dropped the idea because the reception of the message by the volk for whom he wrote wasn't very favourable.

His work was highly praised by serious literary critics who recognised it as the work of a master. But he wasn't writing for them.

He felt his message was falling on deaf ears and he was disillusioned by the way he was read by his target audience. And so he moved away from the explicitly political novels of his early career.

Schoeman was born in Trompsburg in the Free State on October 26 1939. His father left him and his mother when Schoeman was three. He had little if anything to do with him until he died while Schoeman was at school. The loss of his father was the most traumatic emotional experience of his life and this most reserved and controlled of men still wept about it 50 years later.

He was an only child and became the sole focus of his mother's life until he matriculated from Paarl Boys' High in 1956. Much as he loved her he unpacked the emotional consequences of their relationship years later in his autobiography.

He obtained a BA degree in English, Afrikaans and Nederlands at the University of the Free State and then joined the Franciscan Order in Ireland to become a monk.

Although born into Calvinism he was seduced by the colour, ceremony, ritual and mystique of Roman Catholicism after visiting a church in Paarl when he was 11.

It appealed to him in the same way the bioscope, theatre and books did.

Books were an early refuge for him and he gobbled them up.

Among his most lasting influences were Dickens, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Virginia Woolf, particularly To the Lighthouse (there are shades of her in his work), William Faulkner and Olive Schreiner, whose biography he wrote and whose The Story of an African Farm he regarded as a "South African masterpiece".

Apart from her, NP van Wyk Louw was one of the few local authors he ever bothered to read, and him he worshipped.

He abandoned his idea of being a monk but never his love of solitude. He lived the life of a hermit and became a profoundly lonely individual.

He could be sociable but was shy to an almost peculiar degree and not an easy man to get close to. He had an allusive, dry sense of humour. "Where two or more of you are gathered in my name, there I am not," he said.

He had a reputation for suddenly breaking off relationships, and terminating correspondences.

He helped historian Hermann Giliomee with the draft of his book The Afrikaners. At Schoeman's insistence the two of them would meet at the Mount Nelson Hotel in Cape Town (whether because he was born in a hotel or not, he always had a weakness for grand hotels) where he would make elaborate comments on the draft chapters over cups of tea on the stoep.

After 10 or 12 chapters he suddenly told Giliomee not to contact him any more about the book - he'd had enough.

Giliomee once managed, with great difficulty, to arrange a meeting between Schoeman and Coetzee, two of the least clubbable writers in the world. Eventually Schoeman agreed, on condition that they would speak only Afrikaans.

Schoeman told the twice Booker and Nobel Prize winner that the great South African novel could not be written in English. After considering this, Coetzee agreed, and they parted, never, as far as is known, to meet again.

Schoeman, who was single, took his life in an old-age home in Bloemfontein where he'd lived for 10 years.

He left a letter explaining his decision. He'd tried to end it at the age of 75 but had failed.

"I am 77 and it has become necessary now to tackle this task while I still have mobility, physical freedom and the mental clarity to make a meaningful decision in this regard and to execute it effectively."

He said he had grown acutely aware of his physical and spiritual decline and that the research and writing that had kept him occupied for so long had become a burden.

1939-2017