William Plomer Biography Quotes 2 Report mistakes

Early Life and Background
William Charles Franklyn Plomer was born on December 10, 1903, in Pietersburg (now Polokwane) in the northern Transvaal, in a South Africa tightening into the racial and cultural hierarchies that would later harden into apartheid. His upbringing straddled languages, loyalties, and landscapes: English-speaking and metropolitan in aspiration, yet formed on the margins of empire where the everyday facts of segregation, land, and labor could not be abstracted away. That early sense of living between worlds would become both a subject and a method in his writing - an eye trained on the ordinary hypocrisies of public virtue and private appetite.

His family life was unsettled by movement and by the pressures of colonial respectability. Plomer grew up alert to the dissonance between what was said in drawing rooms and what was practiced in streets and farms, an alertness that later sharpened into satire and an ethics of candor. Before he was famous, he was already practicing a kind of inner expatriation: observing, storing voices, and testing how far language could go in telling the truth without surrendering to slogan or sermon.

Education and Formative Influences
Educated in South Africa and later in England, Plomer absorbed the classical and Christian inheritance offered to a young colonial intellectual, but he was equally shaped by modernism's permission to fracture inherited forms. His formative friendships and readings oriented him toward the experimental energies of the interwar period, when London publishing, little magazines, and salon networks created a porous boundary between high art and social scandal. Returning to southern Africa as a young man, he found that the distance from Europe did not lessen modernity - it made its contradictions starker, and his sensibility, already tuned to doubleness, began to crystallize into a vocation.

Career, Major Works, and Turning Points
Plomer's breakthrough came with the South African novel Turbott Wolfe (1926), a provocative, formally modern work that confronted racial ideology, sexual undercurrents, and the brittle logic of settler identity; it quickly made him both celebrated and suspect. His years in Japan yielded the novel Sado (1931), and by the 1930s he was settled in England, moving within circles that included writers and artists of the period, while also making a durable career in publishing. A major turning point was his long association with Faber and Faber, where he became an influential editor and literary midwife, most famously shepherding and editing Ian Fleming's James Bond novels while sustaining his own poetry, fiction, and memoiristic work. Across decades, he wrote with the dual authority of maker and maker-of-makers: an author who also understood the machinery of taste, reputation, and print.

Philosophy, Style, and Themes
Plomer's inner life was governed by a discipline of attention rather than a program of belief. He distrusted pieties - colonial, nationalist, and sometimes even literary - because he had watched how easily fine principles could be recruited to excuse cruelty or denial. His central conviction was that imagination was not escapism but perception at a higher pitch: "Creativity is the power to connect the seemingly unconnected". In his work, that connection often joins incompatible registers - the pastoral with the bureaucratic, desire with doctrine, the intimate with the political - until the reader feels how private lives are drafted into public systems.

His style tends toward lucid surfaces with concealed barbs, a controlled, observant prose that lets irony do ethical work. He wrote as someone acquainted with secrecy, and with the costs of dissembling in societies that police bodies and speech. The same conviction returns in another formulation: "It is the function of creative man to perceive and to connect the seemingly unconnected". For Plomer, the writer's task was not to shout louder than the crowd but to notice what the crowd refuses to see - the way a phrase, a gesture, or a social rule reveals the whole structure of a time. That is why his colonial and expatriate themes never settle into simple condemnation or nostalgia; they are anatomies, animated by the belief that form - the way sentences touch - can expose how people touch, avoid, or betray one another.

Legacy and Influence
Plomer endures as a major South African-born modernist whose career illuminates the traffic between colony and metropole, art and institution. Turbott Wolfe remains a key early text for readers tracking how English-language fiction in southern Africa began confronting race and power with modernist tools rather than Victorian reassurance. In Britain, his editorial labor helped shape mid-century literary culture, proving that influence can be exercised quietly - in the margin notes, in the patient insistence on clarity, in the confidence granted to other voices. His own writing, poised between satire and sympathy, continues to reward readers who want literature that connects worlds without pretending they were ever easily reconciled.

Our collection contains 2 quotes who is written by William, under the main topics: Art.

• 1978 Electric Delights (Collection of short stories)
• 1965 I Speak of Africa (Collection of short stories)
• 1934 The Invaders (Novel)
• 1933 The Child of Queen Victoria and Other Stories (Collection of short stories)
• 1927 Sado (Play)
• 1925 Turbott Wolfe (Novel)

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