Patrick Cullinan, RIP
Patrick Cullinan, the poet and educator who, like his colleague Stephen Watson, left an indelible mark on South African letters, passed away on Thursday 14 April, just four days after Watson’s death. He was 77 years old.
Born in Pretoria, Cullinan taught English literature at the Cape, where he eventually retired. The grandson of a diamond mining magnate (think “Cullinan Diamond“), he farmed and ran a sawmill before before becoming a publisher and academic.
As a poet, his awards included the Olive Schreiner Prize, three Thomas Pringle Awards, a South African Literary Award and a Slug Award from Carapace magazine – whose editor, Gus Ferguson, was his longtime publisher. In his lifetime, Cullinan saw three overlapping “selected works” published, including Selected Poems: 1961 – 1994 by Ferguson’s SnailPress in 1994 (which was introduced by Watson); and Escarpments: Poems 1973 – 2007 by Umuzi in 2008 (and launched in May of that year). In addition to his half-dozen collections of poems, Cullinan also published a novel, Matrix, in 2002.
Wikipedia provides details of a colorful ancestry and a biography that could hardly be more significant for South African literature:
He was born in Pretoria into a significant diamond-mining family (his grandfather, Sir Thomas Cullinan, a diamond mine owner, gave his name to the Cullinan Diamond) and attended Charterhouse School and Oxford University in England (where he read Italian and Russian). After his studies, he returned to South Africa, where he worked as a sawmill owner in the Eastern Transvaal. With Lionel Abrahams, he founded the Bateleur Press in 1974, and the literary journal The Bloody Horse: Writings and the Arts in 1980. Through the journal (the title taken from a poem by Roy Campbell) Cullinan sought to re-establish the standing of poetry in South Africa.
[...]
Cullinan accepted the fact that writers ought to have been involved in the fight against apartheid in South Africa, while acknowledging the fact that is it difficult to produce a satisfactory political poem. Criticism has been levelled at Cullinan – that his work, throughout the Apartheid years in South Africa, did not engage with “the struggle” against apartheid. In the first edition of The Bloody Horse, Cullinan wrote:
To talk of ‘literature’, of good writing, of art may be obscene or almost obscene in a society as self-destructing, engrossed in conflict as this one is. But the important word is almost. For however cluttered by violence and potential annihilation a society may find itself, it is the writers and the artists who portray the reality of this process… There are multiple ways of telling the truth.”
According to his Poetry International page, Cullinan was at work on a collection of letters, tentatively entitled Imaginative Trespasser: Letters from Bessie head to Patrick and Wendy Cullinan 1963-1977. Several of Cullinan’s poems are available at PI:
To Have Love
To have love and then lose it:
the white hail in the orchard
lying with leaves it has stripped
and the storm moving away.© 2003, Patrick Cullinan
From: Selected Poems, 1961-1994
Publisher: Snailpress, Plumstead
BOOK SA member Mike Nicol sends this appreciation:
In the early 1970s the poets a beginner could approach for help were thin on the ground in Johannesburg, but one writer who would offer to read your scribblings over a glass of wine was Patrick Cullinan. He was always insightful, always kind. You left his home thinking you could do it. At the time his own poetry showed a way into something different even as he became the poet of an anxious Johannesburg. I remember finding his first collection in the basement of a bookshop in Commissioner Street in 1973. It was a thin thirty-nine pages, stapled together with no cover image on the title: The Horizon Forty Miles Away – poems by Patrick Cullinan. Inside was a world you could inhabit: ‘Followed, Boss, your strict instructions.’ (Red Herrings). ‘Perfect? Almost. The roses blow/ On long green lawns; the marble steps/ Are guarded by glazed, heraldic dogs.’ (The Garden). A few weeks later Patrick gave a reading at Wits and I attended, clutching his book. Afterwards I asked him to sign it which he did. He was diffident and slightly embarrassed, and looking at the price said, ‘Did you pay R1.50? That’s preposterous.’ He dug out the money and gave it back to me. I tried to refuse but he was insistent. ‘Buy wine rather,’ he said. Although he wrote many poems that are now part of the South African canon, Patrick would often say that all you could hope for was to maybe write one good line. He succeeded time and again, and has left a rich legacy.
If you would like to add a reminiscence or appreciation, please send it to editor _at_ book _dot_ co _dot_ za and we’ll publish it here.
Cullinan is survived by his wife, Diane, and several children and grandchildren.
Further tributes:
I would like to add my heartfelt memories of this generous man. Patrick taught during the 80s at the University of the Western Cape with my mother Ruth Will, and became her friend and respected fellow mind. He had little time for the voguish nonsense of various theories then sweeping university campuses, and gave to his students a sense of a larger world of poetical beauty he had brought with him from Oxford, combined with a resonant love for the landscape of South Africa. I knew him from the time I can first remember as a man of impeccable manners, amazing wit, and intellectual sophistication. I had begun to scribble verse at school : Patrick became a mentor to me during a difficult time, took great care to read my poems and talk to me about them in his engaged way. He introduced me to readings and became a unique male figure in my life – kindly, generous, and worshipping beauty. I drank at the fountain of his writing (so deeply that I found it difficult to escape his tone in my own). I am left with deep sorrow at his death, and will always feel a great loss at being so far away when he gave his last book launch last year.
– Gerhardt Will
Book details
- Escarpment: Poems 1973 – 2007 by Patrick Cullinan
EAN: 9781415200483
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