Another article...

The place to post published WS articles, interviews etc..

Postby John R » Wed Nov 23, 2005 4:08 pm

Found this interview with Smith, taken in April 2005. Gives some insight into his private life. Quite long so beware.

Stalking an old bull elephant
April 2nd, 2005
Wilbur Smith sells millions of his books so he doesn't give a damn if people don't like them or the way he lives his life, as Stephen Moss finds out.
Wilbur Smith is very big in Italy. His books have sold 15 million copies there and his latest, The Triumph of the Sun, immediately shot to No. 1, usurping no less an author than the Holy Father, whose memoir Memory and Identity had previously been top. "I've knocked the Pope off his perch," says Smith. "Please forgive me, God." Then he laughs, long and uproariously.
Laughing is something Smith does a great deal, the infectious laughter of the contented man. What are the sources of that contentment? Book sales of more than 100 million, certainly. They have given him a healthy bank balance, and he says he no longer needs to write to earn money; he does it because he enjoys it.
The "absolute freedom" of the life he leads: a book every other year, interspersed with hunting, skiing and travelling - he has a house in Cape Town, a cottage on a ranch deep in the South African bush, a chalet in Switzerland, an apartment in Moscow and an island (up for sale) in the Seychelles. And his marriage, in 2000, to a young woman called Mokhiniso Rakhimova (he calls her Niso) from Tajikistan. "This is the best period of my life," he insists.
Yet there are also shadows over the life of the beaming, balding 72-year-old sitting in front of me. Five years ago, his third wife Danielle died of a brain tumour after a seven-year illness. Soon afterwards, he featured in several of the more salacious British newspapers when a woman from an escort agency kissed and told.
Then in 2002, Smith was back in the news when he and his stepson Dieter Schmidt, Danielle's son, fought a bitter battle in a Cape Town court over rights to the assets from the marriage. The case has been settled but Smith says the damage to the relationship is irreparable, an echo of previous splits with his son and daughter by his first marriage. Smith's laughter comes in the face of considerable pain.
Why, I ask him, are his relationships so volatile? "What I do, and I know it's a mistake but I just can't help myself, is I get into a relationship and I just want to give that person everything," he says in his clipped southern African accent. "I'm overgenerous. Then if they turn on me, I cut them off, it's finished. I'm not the easiest guy in the world, I can tell you, but if you are onside with me you can have everything, I'll lay down my life for you, you can go and help yourself to the bank account virtually. But if you let me down, then bye-bye-blackbird."
Stepson Dieter has been bye-bye-blackbirded. But son Shaun is now, euphorically, back onside. "I've had to swallow my pride," says Smith. "I had to go to him hat in hand and say 'I want to talk to you, I think we've got some serious bridge building to do'."
The falling out occurred when Smith married Danielle: it was impossible to keep two families happy. Smith also resented his son's willfulness; he'd joined the Rhodesian SAS and then became a film director. But he made a success of it and Smith respects success. Father and son are now united. "I am going to enjoy his company," says Smith. His relationship with his daughter Christian, who has attacked Smith for neglecting her and her mother, is proving harder to mend. "One step at a time," he says. "I think we're going to have to do some work there. Women are always trickier."
Smith is either a consummate actor, or he really does have the hide of a buffalo. His reaction when I raise the subject of the woman from the escort agency is upfront.
"I was a naughty boy and I got caught out. But I'm a man. I stuck with Danielle to the end, she went into coma, I had not been able to be a man for many years. I had a ball and I paid the price. The lady in question gave me a very good press, though. She said I was like a pirate and leapt on her. All my mates said, 'We didn't realise you were like that'. I said, 'She didn't tell the half of it'."
Despite a gammy leg, the result of childhood polio, Smith does not appear to be slowing down. He moves quickly, though with a discernible limp. He also skis, swims, hunts. He adores women; his wife Niso, young, slim and beautiful, is a little over 30. They met by chance in a London bookshop; she was gambolling among the Grishams; he steered her towards the Smiths.
She has updated his wardrobe and he is casually dressed in jeans, blue sports jacket and stripey shirt, no tie. He would pass for 60. His mother is 94 and he has every intention of matching her.
As an author he is not fashionable, but he doesn't give a damn. "The snootiness of critics is so silly," he says. "They're judging Great Danes against Pekinese. I'm not writing that literature - I've never set out to write it. I'm writing stories."
And you're the Great Dane? I ask, just to confirm the breed. "Yes, I look upon myself as a Great Dane," he says, "crossed with a Rottweiler of course." Have you ever been tempted to produce a Pekinese?
"That would be a disaster," he says. "I'd make a laughing stock of myself. I've got millions of people who know the kind of book I write, and if I came up with something different . . ."
He pauses, horrified by this vision of confusion among his devoted fans. "When I wrote the Egyptian series, The River God," he continues, "my readers were used to African-based novels of a semi-historical nature, and a lot of them said they'd bought River God and thought 'This is not Wilbur Smith'. Even a mild change of style like that is a shock to my readers."
He has a brief but powerful answer to critics who find his characters two-dimensional, his plots formulaic, his books repetitive, and their frequent bouts of sex and violence cartoonish. "This is my 30th published novel and 100 million people can't be wrong!
I ask him whether he has ever encountered Doris Lessing, who had a similar twilight-of-imperialism upbringing to Smith's. He did run into her at a literary event once, but the relationship was cool. "She was a little bit snooty and dismissive," he says. "I said, 'I'm a great admirer of your work', which was a load of bullshit. She said. 'Thank you very much', but she said nothing about mine. I could have been the bus driver."
Smith doesn't just not write literature; he doesn't read it either. "It sounds like sour grapes, but I don't like literary books," he says. "I find it very tiresome when the writer goes round and round in circles like a dog chasing its tail and never seems to get anywhere. I picked up The Sea, The Sea again the other day, I read it a long time ago, and it's painfully slow going. Iris Murdoch is a towering she-giant of literature, but I battled to try and read it again."
Smith has talked effusively about reading H. Rider Haggard's King Solomon's Mines as a child. It inspired him to write and remains his model - heroism, danger, the proximity of death, the savagery of Africa. He also mentions Kipling's poem If: "My mother gave it to me and I had it at the head of my bed instead of a crucifix. He's totally out of fashion now, but I loved it."
Smith's father was part of the last generation of imperialists in Africa. He was a metal worker in northern Rhodesia (now Zambia), then opened a sheet-metal factory, did well, bought a cattle ranch, sent his son to South Africa's leading public school.
"My father was a tough man," he recalls. "He was used to working with his hands and had massively developed arms from cutting metal. He was a boxer, a hunter, very much a man's man. I don't think he ever read a book in his life, including mine. He died in the 1980s just before Mandela was released. He didn't like the changes that were taking place at all."
Smith snr was a conservative, a product of empire, sceptical that black Africans would be able to run their own affairs. Smith jnr's politics are more complicated.
"My dad was a Victorian son and I was born in that period of the waning influence of European culture in Africa," he says. "Obviously I took my first feelings directly from my father, listened to him talk, but when I was in my teens and 20s I started to think for myself and see what was happening. Then I realised which way it had to go."
He is, however, a staunch defender of British imperialism, and in The Triumph of the Sun he lionises the young men who were the driving force of empire. "Read Winston Churchill," he says. "These men had a very strong paternalistic instinct. They thought they were doing what was best. Colonialism under the British was an altruistic doctrine. I have had discussions with Indians and they say that the Raj, in its time, served a very useful purpose. They have no rancour or bitterness about the British domination of India. It was a process of maturing. It had its place, but now the time is passed. I'm writing about those type of men - Victorian explorers, hunters, traders."
Men that you would like to have been, I suggest. He laughs, pauses, doesn't quite answer the question. "It must have been great fun," he says. "But it would have had its drawbacks - you would have been riddled with malaria, for a start."
Smith writes adventure stories set mainly in colonial Africa. He avoids telling stories with a contemporary setting, in part because he feels so at home in the age of imperialism - "I've now perfected the art of believing in my characters and really worrying about them". His description of his new book is almost childlike. "It was great because I had three nubile lasses to lust after and three macho guys who could whup out a sword and chop off a head at the blink of an eye."
But he has a second, more sophisticated reason for staying firmly in the past - in this case the siege of Khartoum and the death of General Gordon. "A contemporary novel about Africa would have to be written through the eyes of the Africans," he says, "because it now belongs to them entirely. I wouldn't have the expertise to do that, so I leave it to the young, up-and-coming African writers."
Does he, then, consider himself African? "I'm a citizen, but a junior citizen," he says. "Political power is firmly in the hands of the black people, which is fair enough - they form the great majority. I was in Rhodesia during UDI (Unilateral Declaration of Independence) and I saw all sorts of things there which changed my attitude. I saw that those systems were OK in Victorian times but were now long past their sell-by date."
In the 1970s and '80s his books sold only moderately in the US because he was seen as a son of apartheid. The label, however, was misjudged: he opposed the system, but says he had to do so discreetly.
"I knew that apartheid was such an iniquitous doctrine that it couldn't persist," he says, "but I wasn't able to stand up and say so in public. I already had the Bureau of State Security (BOSS) on to me; I had a tap on my phone for years. I was walking down the beach in Cape Town once and a chap coming towards me stopped and said, in an Afrikaans accent, 'I know you'. I said, 'Have we met?' He said, 'Ach, no we haven't met, but I worked for BOSS and for a year I had to sit and listen to you on the telephone. Old Wilbur, you boring!' "
Don't, though, see Smith as too progressive. While admiring what Mandela has achieved in South Africa - he contrasts its progress with the collapse of Zimbabwe - Old Wilbur remains well to the right.
"In order for us to survive we have to have laws and morality. I'm not a great practising Christian, but religion had a very strong place in the formation of our society because people were taught ethics. We are spoiling whole generations of people now. You don't have to work, you can go on the dole; if you want to write obscenities on the walls and go on the football pitch and swear your head off, you're a hero. Human rights have gone mad: we slap terrorists on the wrist and turn them loose on the streets. Go out and buy some explosives and see if you can really blow up the Albert Hall full of people."
His love of guns and hunting will offend those of a delicate disposition. "I'm a gun buff. I spend a lot of time shooting them and gloating over them."
In May he will spend $US45,000 on a two-week safari in Botswana with the aim of shooting an elephant. I blanch at this but he makes a convincing case: the elephant will be an old, solitary bull; half of the money it costs will go to local people; the safari organiser has to build roads and schools for the surrounding villages; Botswana has 100,000 more elephants than the land can support; killing the elephant is an act of conservation; outsiders don't understand Africa.
If you can overcome your distaste for hunting, the contest will have a certain poignancy, because Smith is himself something of a bull elephant, proud, uncompromising, eager to stamp on anything he deems to be politically correct.
His description of the hunt is lyrical: "To be on foot in the African bush and get in close . . . There'll be (elephant) cows and calves around us, buffalo and kudu, and so much bird life. We'll walk all morning and stop at a waterhole and sit under a tree there and eat a sandwich. I'll have two weeks in the bush, and for two weeks that slice of Africa will belong to me. I'll be like some of the characters in my books - the first men in."
May the best beast win.
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John R
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