This November saw the launch of In These Mountains, a selection of writings about landscape, walking and the Cederberg mountain range by Stephen Watson, a much-missed colleague, poet and professor in English Literary Studies. 

Below is the 'Note from the Editors' by Tanya Wilson and Hugh Corder, which comes at the beginning of the collection. This is followed by a biographical profile of Stephen and his work by Associate Professor Peter Anderson.

Note from the Editors
by Tanya Wilson and Hugh Corder

Stephen Watson died on April 10th 2011, after a short but brutal illness. He was 56 years old. His death came just months after the publication of his remarkable book of essays, The Music in the Ice, and many have felt, keenly, the absence of his poetic and incisive voice these past 13 years. That loss remains, but this publication hopes to restore something of Watson’s literary voice to the present, particularly as so much of his published work is out of print and unavailable.

Watson had very little time or opportunity to discuss his wishes and ideas for what should be done with his considerable archive of both published and unpublished work, but he did type up some brief instructions and appoint his wife, Tanya Wilson, and a life-long friend, Hugh Corder, as his literary executors. Supported by many, they have initiated and steered through to publication this collection of his Cederberg writing which, although not expressly requested by Watson, is in line with his wishes.

This book is in one sense ‘new’ precisely because it has arisen from the minds and hearts of those left behind. The idea for a Cederberg volume sparked in several people at the same time, about a decade after Watson’s death. These included people who loved him, people who loved his writing, and people who loved the Cederberg. In keeping with that upwelling, this volume of Watson’s Cederberg writing is personalised by two accounts, a Foreword by Tanya Wilson and an Afterword by Hugh Corder, each of whom shared experiences with Watson in the Cederberg, over many years. The book is in another sense ‘new’, because the work assembled in it was completed and published over decades in different publications, and has not appeared all together before.

The Cederberg, as a range, runs in literary form throughout Watson’s writing, appearing in at least six of his books. Almost every single piece of writing linked to the Cederberg is republished here: two essays, 18 poems, and a section of his Writer’s Diary. Only one piece of writing is missing, an essay, ‘In These Mountains’, written in 1990. Watson was clear that he did not want it republished, for reasons not made plain, but he does quote several excerpts from that essay in ‘A Bitter Pastoral’, the closing piece in this volume. The phrase ‘in these mountains’ seemed impossible to discard entirely, hence the title of this book.

The Cederberg itself is an ancient range of mountains running broadly north to south, about 150 km to the north-west of Cape Town. Timeless, it carries the weight of history. For thousands of years it was home to some of the hunter-gatherer communities formally known as the San. During colonisation it was logged and farmed. Although several of the original farms remain, it is now a wilderness area and many landowners are proactive in the Cederberg Conservancy. Watson would have known it for five decades, during which time there have been changes in favour of wilderness, as well as in favour of commodification.

As the reader will see from several references to these mountains in his work, Watson knew it as the ‘Cedarberg’, whereas ‘Cederberg’ , its officiaspelling, has been used in much of the book. ‘Old-timers’ such as Watson used the (English) name ‘Cedarberg’ which was never in official use, but out of then Mountain Club habit. It was partly because the Clanwilliam Cedar for which the mountains are named used to be Widdringtonia cedarbergensis, although ironically that name is no longer botanically valid.

Watson held the Cederberg ‘cedars’ in high regard and his essay, ‘Voting With My Feet’, captures the experience of planting one on April 27th 1994, the same day that he cast his vote in South Africa’s first democratic elections at the Cederberg polling station. Like the ‘cedar’ trees this book has been slow-growing, partly due to the enormity of the void left by Watson. It has found its way to publication 30 years after Watson cast that vote in those mountains which he loved and to which he was compelled to return year after year to re-enter, ponder over and always write more about.
 

Stephen Watson
by Peter Anderson

Stephen Watson lived all his life in Cape Town and made a great poetry of that city. But it was to the Cederberg mountains that he returned in elation or doubt, and he made a great poetry of those too, and it is to them that he returns in this present volume. Watson was Professor of English at the University of Cape Town at the time of his death. He was intellectual, razor-sharp of mind and wit, and very clear-sighted. His poetry is as intellectually invigorating as it is evocative, and it is underwritten by prose considerations of great weight and foresight.

From his first book, the edgy Poems to the magisterial compass and cadence of his last essays in The Music in the Ice Watson concerned himself with the city and mountains he loved, as well as those authors, from Camus to Cohen, for whom he cared. He moved from a highly skilled Marist position to one diametrically opposed to that, and pivoted with such dexterity that one can still read the totality of his work as of one piece and voice.

Watson was a great poet, distinctive of voice and attitude, rigorously honest, unfailingly evocative. From the cryptic anguish of his first volume to the ever more ambitious and expansive poetry of his last years, he wrote above all about the condition of longing, from a viewpoint that edged into the metaphysical, an almost theological concern. In his prose, too, the concern for what he called the “presence of the earth” dominated the inspiration of his beloved mountains. Watson was early in anticipating what he called “the current ecocide” and had in his contemplations in, and of, the Cederberg a constant elegiac sense of the vision failing. In this his poetry withstood the accusation of transcendent Romanticism, though he was bathed in all that was radical in that movement too.

In poem after poem, essay upon essay, and in his ceaseless notebooking, Watson recorded the tragedy of South African landscape, its deep historicity, its future loss, as much as he looked to the earthly presence and the “echo” of the light in which he was vouchsafed a vision of something beyond the everyday business of the self’s being the self. He wrote with lyrical precision and a celebration of place and language simultaneously. It is timely to bring a volume of his Cederberg writing before the public again – even urgent.