Have read quite a few of his books and was impressed with his ability to tell an evocative story. Now I feel like a sucker, since it turns out he was bullsh!tting about nearly everything. And having sex with 14 year olds, jesus christ... Might be time to throw them out. Murray's links below.

jeers,
I

*****

https://www.oxfordmail.co.uk/news/9993611.another-knight-tarnished-reputation/

Another knight with a tarnished reputation

18th October 2012
Gray Matter

By Chris Gray

He was a knight of the realm, a friend of both Margaret Thatcher and the Prince of Wales, and a man known to have sexually abused a girl of 14. No, I am not referring to the late Sir Jimmy Savile, although he ticks all three boxes, but to Sir Laurens van der Post.

The reputation of this mendacious guru has miraculously survived the devastating exposé it received 11 years ago in an authorised biography written by J.D.F. Jones. Well, perhaps not so ‘miraculously’, given the sedulous attention his disciples have paid to burnishing his tarnished image.

Look him up on Wikipedia today and here is how the laudatory entry about him is headed: “Sir Laurens Jan van der Post, CBE (13 December 1906 – 16 December 1996) was a 20th-century Afrikaner author, farmer, war hero, political adviser to British heads of government, close friend of Prince Charles, godfather of Prince William, educator, journalist, humanitarian, philosopher, explorer and conservationist.”

Not a word there about the seamier side to his life which, most monstrously, featured his fathering a child with a girl who had been entrusted into his care on a trip from South Africa to England by her parents, only to be seduced at sea and then set up in London as his mistress in a bed-sitter in Sloane Square, conveniently handy for his marital home. He was in his mid-forties. The product of this union was disowned by her father. Her mother commented years later that Van der Post was “sick” and that “he knew how to pick his victims”. Sound familiar?

Only at the end of the Wikipedia entry under the heading ‘Posthumous Controversy’ does one read: “After his death a number of writers questioned the accuracy of Van der Post’s claims about his life. It was revealed that in 1952 he had fathered a child with a 14-year-old girl who had been under his care during a sea voyage to England from South Africa. His reputation as a ‘modern sage’ and ‘guru’ was questioned, and journalists opened a floodgate of examples of how Van der Post had sometimes embellished the truth in his memoirs and travel books. These and other facts were brought together in J.D.F. Jones’s Storyteller: The Many Lives of Laurens van der Post (2001), an authorised but for the most part hostile biography.”

The description ‘hostile biography’ is as carefully nuanced as ‘sometimes embellished’ (for which read ‘lied’). It would seem to suggest that Jones had set out deliberately to besmirch his subject. But it was not like that at all.

Jones, who died three years ago, was a distinguished writer and journalist, who was successively foreign editor, managing editor and southern Africa editor of the Financial Times. Asked by Van der Post’s family to write his biography, he began his task an ardent admirer of his subject.

I interviewed him some years after the book’s publication, when it was attacked by Christopher Booker in an entry on Van der Post he wrote for the Dictionary of National Biography. (As a dedicated disciple of Van der Post, he was not, you might think, the ideal person to supply a dispassionate assessment of his subject.) Jones told me: “When the book came out, the family were extremely upset. They insisted they were going to expose it as a malicious tissue of lies.

“They were shocked to discover they had a Hottentot ancestor — the first black woman to legally marry a white man in South Africa — who ended up an alcoholic prostitute. I lost friends because Laurens’s admirers and followers found it hard to accept the facts that I laid out. Booker writes that my book was ‘often inaccurate’ — a remark that is probably actionable. For all that he and the family have said, I am still waiting for a single error to be identified.

“I had three research assistants. After the first few weeks of work, we looked at each other and said: ‘There’s something wrong here.’.

“What we four had all discovered was that not a single word Laurens wrote or spoke could be believed. He was a total fantasist. I remember one researcher poring over military records and saying, ‘What is this about him being a Lieutenant Colonel? He was an acting captain.’.”

Among other of his spectacular lies was his career-moulding claim to have lived on intimate terms with the Kalahari Bushmen. “How long was he with them?” Jones asks. “From the inadequate diaries we have, it cannot have been longer than a fortnight. On this flimsy foundation, and an inevitably distant acquaintance with no more than 30 bushmen, Laurens would go on to build a substantial reputation.”

Then there were the friendships he boasted with, among others, Karen Blixen (of Out of Africa fame), D.H. Lawrence, Ernest Hemingway and Martin Luther King. Lies, all lies.

And that long-vaunted association with Carl Gustav Jung, deliciously suggestive of intellectual equality on both sides, turned out to have been a relationship whose intimacy was very largely of his invention.

As I said when first writing about Jones’s biography: “As one reads on, bug-eyed at [the book’s] revelations, one quickly realises that a superfluous ‘v’ appears to have crept into its title: Storyteller: The Many Lives [sic] of Laurens van de Post.” Strangely, it was as late as page 359 that Jones actually bit the bullet and called his subject “a compulsive liar”.

That he was such was acknowledged by Victoria Glendinning, in her 2006 biography of Leonard Woolf, an early publisher of Van der Post’s work. She called him a “fantasist and mythomane” and referred to his private life as “coarse and lascivious to the point of criminality”.

Her verdict is a sound one. At a time when much is being said concerning the need to rescind Jimmy Savile’s knighthood, here surely is another man undeserving of so signal a mark of merit.

*****

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2001/feb/04/uk.vanessathorpe

Secret life of royal guru revealed
This article is more than 24 years old
Laurens van der Post, revered by Margaret Thatcher and Prince Charles, hid the fact he fathered a child with a girl of 14
Vanessa Thorpe, arts correspondent
Sun 4 Feb 2001 01.41 GMT

The official biography of Sir Laurens van der Post, the South African writer and late spiritual mentor of Prince Charles, is to reveal a life full of political intrigue, colourful fantasy - and the growing fear of scandal.

The book, due to be published this autumn, draws from the writer's personal archive for the first time, uncovering facts that he was determined not to see in print in his lifetime.

Documents found by the biographer J D F Jones, have confirmed allegations that Van der Post had a secret child after an illicit affair with a 14-year-old girl. After the author's death in 1996, Cari Mostert sensationally came forward to claim she was his illegitimate daughter and that her underage mother had been seduced during a boat trip to England.

'It was one of the great nightmares of his life that this would come out,' Jones told The Observer last week. 'But I cannot write a proper life story without examining it.'

His researches have also uncovered the fact that Van der Post spoke regularly to Margaret Thatcher during the Falklands conflict. 'He certainly called her up right throughout the war, the understanding being that he would rally her whenever he could. He was very close to her for a long period,' said Jones.

The news that Van der Post guided the Prime Minister through some of her most difficult decisions during the campaign is a surprise to the writer's legally recognised daughter, the executor of his estate, Lucia Van der Post.

'I knew they were good friends and that he had helped in the Lancaster House negotiations with Zimbabwe in 1981, but I had no idea that he had continued to talk to her so regularly,' she said.

A spokesman for Thatcher confirmed Jones's findings. 'They certainly spoke to each other a lot in private. He was a moral support to her, even though he did not know anything specifically about the South Atlantic. It was really all about their friendship. She had a lot of respect for a great many things he had to say.'

Jones was appointed biographer by Lucia Van der Post after consultation with her father's friends, but she stressed last week that she had no powers of censorship over the text, nor would she want them.

'I am sure the text will include many things I didn't know about,' she said. 'As to his affairs, well, I have no doubt, living to the age he did, that my father led an extraordinary life.'

Three days after he died at the age of 90, rumours surfaced of his affair with a 14-year-old girl, and his alleged rejection of their child.

Mostert claimed her mother had been seduced by Van der Post, who was more than three times her age, after she had been entrusted to his care. She described the explorer's tears when they first met, and alleged he had refused to answer her letters.

The affair took place five years after Van der Post's second marriage to Ingaret Giffard in 1949, when the girl, Bonnie, travelled to London to become a ballet dancer. Only a few weeks after her arrival in England she went back, pregnant, to South Africa. Jones's research has shown the writer did, however, make financial provision for the baby, arranging to support her until she was 18 by secret deed of covenant.

Van der Post was a fantasist who embellished the facts of his life. 'I don't really know why he did it,' said Jones. 'It was mainly on questions of his background. He was a great storyteller in every element of his life. He used to say that he was born 1,001 miles away from the sea, but in fact he was born 325 miles from the sea. Fabrication came naturally to him.'

'The Great White Bushman', as Van der Post came to be known, started out as a journalist in Durban and married his first wife, Marjorie Wendt, in 1928. He travelled between Africa and England before writing his first novel, In A Province, in 1934.

During the Second World War he served in Ethiopia, the Western Desert and Burma, before being captured in Java by the Japanese and held for three years. His writings on his captivity were the basis of the film Merry Christmas, Mr Lawrence .

After the war, Van der Post worked with Lord Mountbatten and left the Army as a colonel, with an OBE and a CBE.

In the 1950s his literary reputation was secured with the novels The Lost World of the Kalahari and The Heart of the Hunter. He became friends with statesmen, thinkers and business moguls, including Sir James Goldsmith and the founding father of psychotherapy, Carl Gustav Jung. He was asked to become godfather to Prince William.

'It is an extraordinary story,' says Jones. 'He did not have a drop of British blood in his veins and yet he grew up to become an adviser to the heir to the throne and a Prime Minister.'