Freddie Skinner, De Aar (1973)
The gods chose the victorious side, Cato the defeated one / Victrix causa deis placuit sed victa Catoni
—Lucan (Marcus Annaeus Lucanus), Pharsalia—On the Civil War (61–65 CE)
From South Africa and Greece a sometime refugee
metic, product of De Aar and Kimberley,
I sought a métier by the Bay.
A Beast in View—and a lightning
stroke of luck—won me a book column
in San Francisco magazine,
with its literary scene: lunching
at the Round Table or Vesuvio's
with the Jello King, if not with Evan
Connell (Son of the Morning Star),
until some over-funded millionaire,
who had no use for what I did, bought out
the magazine, and in the Chronicle,
Herb Caen noted my sudden sacking
with those notorious three dots of his . . .
“Publishing a poor third-rate piece of crap,”
spat the Times Literary Supplement
(though not, of course, in quite so rude a tone),
“University of California Press
might at least have corrected its English—see (a),
(b), (c) . . .” or irritable words to that effect
(memory no longer serves). Emboldened by this unklnd
TLS assassination, I mailed off a clipping
of it to a UCP editor for whose
book—Albie Sachs’ Justice in South Africa—
I'd not long before gone to bat in The Nation,
praised honestly—though Albie was an “enemy,”
he a dad-blasted commie cadre of the SACP,
and I a member of the Liberal Party
and of the Citizen Group, maverick offshoot
of the Non-European Unity Movement (NEUM),
which, rejecting its pseudo/neo-Trotskyite program
called instead for unadorned nonracialism—
a “Brazilian solution,” one might perhaps say
(though Brazil’s also got problems, naturally).
Denouncing Apartheid’s categories as crap,
all we had to offer the voters was stone soup
—much as they’d have been well advised to opt for it,
more nourishing than the borscht they swallowed later:
Cheka cuisine dished up as Mandela’s . . .
But these decrepit hors d’oeuvres are old hat;
I cite them here but to adorn the whilom scene.
“I can do better than this for you,” my note read,
and Bill gave me a shot—as later Stanford did,
Johns Hopkins, and Chicago, too. In forty-four
years, a thousand books, or more, I’d say, at least!
from, first, Brady and Wimsatt’s Samuel Johnson:
Selected Poetry and Prose to, finally,
Jessie Fillerup’s Magician of Sound: Ravel
and the Aesthetics of Illusion. En route, I
blow my trumpet, The Great Herbal of Leonhart Fuchs:
De historia stirpium, my chef d'œuvre
(as it was an age before of Fuchs’).
For North Point Press I edited
Dostoyevsky’s Brothers Karamazov,
launching the Pevear–Volokhonsky translations . . .
My friends at those publishers dead or retired now,
their young replacements don’t know me from Old Adam.
(Alas, they’ve lost their fancy premises, what’s more
shunted off to Oakland, if not Redwood City).
Publishers “outsource” editing to India
now, and replete with cut price flaws one could have fixed,
new books come. It makes an editor want to scream!
How very badly people write these days, it seems.
This path, moreover, I had never planned to take:
I stumbled onto it that Monday in Berkeley
when California gave me lunch, and took me on
no questions asked! (Bill’s dead, of course, like so many
of those others.) In my youth, this financed our modest
way, London University and NYU for J,
buying me, rusticated, finally, this house,
which the books I wrote on my own would never do.
An editor out to pasture, nothing to edit,
I’ve become a poet again—if such indeed
I am, or ever was, or yet one day might be.
(T. Stearns Eliot submits you never know!)
Select Bibliography:
Dreyer, Peter. Against Racial Status and Social Segregation: Towards the Liquidation of Multi-Racialism and Non-Europeanism. Claremont, Cape Town: Citizen Group, 1958.
———. The Death Agony of Non-Europeanism. Claremont, Cape Town: Citizen Group, 1958.
———. A Beast in View. London: André Deutsch, 1969.
———. The Future of Treason. New York: Ballantine Books, 1973.
———. “The Banned History of Suppression.” Review of Justice in South Africa by Albie Sachs (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973). The Nation, July 19, 1975, 56–57. Albie Sachs was Justice of the Constitutional Court of South Africa from 1994 to 2009.
———. Martyrs and Fanatics: South Africa and Human Destiny. London: Secker & Warburg; New York: Simon & Schuster, 1980.
Books copyedited by Peter Dreyer mentioned in this poem:
Frank Brady and W. K. Wimsatt, Samuel Johnson: Selected Poetry and Prose (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977)
Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (San Francisco: North Point Press, 1990)
The Great Herbal of Leonhart Fuchs: De historia stirpium commentarii insignes [“Notable Commentaries on the History of Plants”], 1542, 2 vols.(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997–99)
Jessie Fillerup, Magician of Sound: Ravel and the Aesthetics of Illusion (Oakland: University of California Press, 2021)
Notes: Latin stirps, from which the adjective stirpium derives, has multiple meanings, including roots, race, scion, source, origin, or cause, but the primary one is “the stock or stem of a tree, or other plant, with the roots”—Cassell’s Latin Dictionary, s.v. stirps (stirpes, stirpis).
Herb Caen’s column in the San Francisco Chronicle was famed in that era for its “three-dot journalism,” condensing the news into a series of suspension points . . .
A note on the epigraph:
In 65 CE, when he was 25, the Roman poet Lucan, born in Corduba, Hispania Baetica (now Córdoba, Spain), was either executed or compelled to commit suicide by the emperor Nero, as were the philosopher Seneca and the satirist Petronius.
January–March 2025
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