The Individual, Auto/biography and History in South Africa

In addition to Shakespeare and the story of Tristan and Isolde, the art of Chaplin was an
undoubted source of inspiration. Taylor reflected upon their mutual regard for Chaplin
in her journal. While the medium of film may have been “debased by mass production”,
she wrote, Chaplin had an ability to “translate his personal experience in childhood into
a universal waifdom”. After having listened to a record at Taylor’s house, which made
him think of “a bird with a broken wing”, Tabata went to see the film, Limelight. Even
though Taylor could not have viewed it with him legally, Tabata knew that she “was
watching it ‘with’ him”. And when he called her afterwards to talk about it, he was “too
moved to say much” as his “heart was broken [to see] a great artist die”. 26 This shared
knowledge was the source of the phrase “broken wing”, 27 which Tabata used regularly
in his communication with Taylor. Alongside Shakespearean references, this also
represented a layer of shared meanings between them as they found common ways of
processing their vulnerabilities and insecurities in their authorial positions as creative
and political writers.
This cultural communion opened up layers of feeling, passion and mutual attachment
that made Taylor and Tabata sensitive to each other’s emotional temperament,
especially as this affected their writing. For Taylor, her own childhood had been
characterised by “rootlessness”, which was the cause of her “uncompromising attitude
to family relations”. Her experience of being abandoned and adopted in those first years
of her life had made her “stunted and warped through lack of a child’s first necessity,
security”. It also guided her “intuitively rather than by reason”. This “psychology of the
child” as “the human being who doesn’t belong” was also “the psychology of the whole
people in SA ‐ the Non‐Europeans”. This personal affinity should have enabled her “to
write truly” about the social conditions of the oppressed. Tabata’s early years, on the
other hand, had been “rooted … in a happy family life” and this, she felt, had given him
“a basic security in himself”. 28
26 Dora Taylor, Extended Diary, Entry for 20 August 1953, Dora Taylor Papers.
27 Dora Taylor, Extended Diary, Marginal Note added in 1976 to Entry for 20 August 1953, Dora Taylor
Papers.
28 Dora Taylor, Extended Diary, entries for 6 May & 6 August 1953, Dora Taylor Papers.
406