HE was a spellbinding storyteller, a figure of mesmerizing charm. The South African-born writer Sir Laurens van der Post, who died in 1996 at 90, sold millions of copies of his novels and nonfiction books, including ''The Lost World of the Kalahari,'' about the plight of the South African Bushmen, which became a popular BBC television series.
Van der Post was a Jungian mystic and a spiritual adviser to Prince Charles; according to British newspapers, he taught the prince to talk to his plants. In 1982 Charles made him godfather to his heir, Prince William. Van der Post was also a close friend of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, exerting an influence on her policy in South Africa.
He had a following in the United States as well. For several years, he gave the Advent sermon at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York. The year he died, he attended a celebration of his work in Boulder, Colo., and 4,000 people came.
And when it came to women, der Post was a bounder. In the early 1950's, when he was 46, he seduced the 14-year-old daughter of a wealthy South African winemaking family, who had been entrusted to his care during a sea voyage. She became pregnant, and although he sent her a small stipend, he never publicly acknowledged the daughter born of the relationship.Continue reading the main story
''I discovered to my astonishment that not a single word he ever wrote or ever said could necessarily be believed,'' Mr. Jones said in an interview from his home in Somerset, England. ''He was a compulsive fantasist.''
When ''Teller of Many Tales'' was published in Britain last year, under the title ''Storyteller: The Many Lives of Laurens van der Post,'' it created a mini-sensation. The book had a gleeful reception in many British newspapers. The reviewer for The Economist of London called the book ''hilarious.'' The Daily Telegraph said it was ''bold, brilliantly researched and fascinating,'' though a critic for The Spectator dissented, calling it ''an utterly ruthless hatchet job.'' Lucia Crichton-Miller, van der Post's daughter, also offered a passionate defense of her father. ''I think it a profoundly dishonest book,'' she said from London. ''The worst is the malign selection of evidence.''
Mr. Jones knew van der Post slightly, he said, and had been an admirer of his early work. ''You have never in your life met a man so charming,'' he said. ''It was staggering.'' When van der Post was in his late 80's, Mr. Jones proposed writing his biography, but van der Post didn't want one while he was still alive. After his death, Mr. Jones approached Ms. Crichton-Miller, who had been a colleague of his at The Financial Times of London, where he was an editor. Ms. Crichton-Miller agreed to cooperate with him and provided access to her father's archives.
The lies began with the stories of his childhood, Mr. Jones said, in books like ''Venture to the Interior,'' his 1951 best-selling account of his travels in Nyasaland (today Malawi), interwoven with Jungian mysticism. Van der Post claimed descent from minor Dutch aristocracy, and said that his father had been a senior statesman and a high-ranking barrister, a ''kind of prime minister.'' In fact, Mr. Jones says, his father came from a family of minor distinction and was a lower-status law agent who processed routine legal documents.
In ''The Lost World of the Kalahari'' and other writings, van der Post claimed to have had a Bushman, sometimes a half-Bushman, nanny, from whom he derived his special, instinctive knowledge of the group. In fact, Mr. Jones says, there is no record of such a person, and van der Post did not encounter the Bushmen, the indigenous people of South Africa, until he was an adult. He spent about two weeks with them despite assertions that he lived among them. In his writings, van der Post depicted the Bushmen as primitive, instinctual, childlike, whereas white men were logical, reasonable, intellectual. In ''The Lost World of the Kalahari,'' published in 1958, van der Post claimed he had discovered the Bushman paintings of the Tsodilo Hills, when in fact they had been well-known to Europeans for close to 50 years, Mr. Jones writes.
Van der Post also lied to the women in his life, Mr. Jones says. He juggled affairs with numerous women simultaneously, keeping them secret from one another. In 1934, he settled in England with his first wife, Marjorie, and his son, John, on a farm probably bought for him with money from the Queen Mother's cousin Lilian Bowes Lyon, with whom he was having a relationship.
In 1936, the same year his first daughter, Lucia, was born, van der Post met Ingaret Giffard on a boat to South Africa. In 1938 he sent Marjorie and his two children to South Africa with the argument that war was imminent. He didn't see his children for nearly 10 years. He and Marjorie eventually divorced, and he married Ingaret after the war. They lived together even after she became ill with dementia in later life, though for 30 years he also had a mistress, Frances Baruch.
In books about his war experiences, and his autobiography, van der Post cast himself as a war hero. His trio of autobiographical novellas, ''The Seed and the Sower,'' about being a prisoner of war in a Japanese prison camp was the basis for the 1983 David Bowie movie ''Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence.''
In 1942 van der Post, then an acting captain, was captured by the Japanese in Java. In books and speeches, he claimed he volunteered for an extra beating to save his fellow prisoners, but that account was also disputed in written statements by some of his fellow prisoners, said Mr. Jones. Van der Post also said that after the Allied victory, he had been ''military governor of Batavia,'' in Java, now part of Indonesia, but he was not, Mr. Jones says.
Regarding Mr. Jones's assertions about her father's war record, Ms. Crichton-Miller said: ''All I can say is that throughout my life I have met people who were in the prisoner-of-war camp in Java who said they did not know how they would have lived without my father.''
And as far as the amount of time her father actually spent living with the Bushmen, said Ms. Crichton Miller, ''J. D. F. misses the point of my father. What my father did was give poetic force to the Bushmen.''
''He was not pretending to be an anthropologist or a scientist,'' Ms. Crichton Miller said. ''I think there is no doubt that he didn't want to spell it out that he had been there only a few weeks.''
She also disputed Mr. Jones's assertion that her father had not been an intimate of Jung's, pointing to the observation of a member of Jung's inner circle, Barbara Hannah, that van der Post and Jung had been very close friends. As for Mr. Jones's allegations about her father's relationship with a 14-year-old girl, ''I'm afraid I think that's true,'' Ms. Crichton-Miller said. ''He was not a saint. He hurt people. He hurt me. But by God, he was fascinating.''
Bonny Kohler-Baker, whom van der Post seduced and abandoned when she was 14, is the mother of van der Post's other daughter. She now lives outside New York City under a different name, and would not discuss the book. But her daughter, Cari Mostert, in a phone interview from the Eastern Transvaal in South Africa, said she had been brought up to believe that her maternal grandmother was her mother and that her mother was her sister. She said her grandmother had told her when she was 10 that van der Post was her father. Ms. Mostert described meeting her father for the first time when she was 12, when she and her mother had surprised him in Los Angeles, where he had a speaking engagement: ''I was crying, and he was crying.''
Ms. Mostert said she had confronted him once again, as he arrived in Johannesburg airport, and he had said that her grandmother had lied in saying that she was his daughter. She claimed that she had sent her father over 50 letters, but that he had never replied. ''I thought he is such an upright, a noble human being,'' Ms. Mostert said, ''if he would only understand . . . '' Her voice trailed off.
In the 1970's van der Post met Prince Charles through mutual friends. In 1987 he took Charles on a four-day trip to the Kalahari, telling the prince, ''This is the real Africa.'' Mr. Jones states that sometime in the mid-70's, Charles began having psychoanalytic treatment with Ingaret, who was a Jungian analyst, and then with van der Post's friend Dr. Alan McGlashan. Diana, Princess of Wales, was also treated by Dr. McGlashan during the troubles in her marriage, Mr. Jones writes.
Charles told van der Post his dreams, and van der Post drafted some of his speeches. When van der Post died, Charles set up an annual lecture in his honor.
But van der Post's most significant influence occurred during the South African struggle over apartheid, Mr. Jones says. Van der Post hated Nelson Mandela and championed the Zulu chief Mangosuthu Buthelezi, whom he saw as a foil for the African National Congress's Communist beliefs. He arranged meetings between Chief Buthelezi, Charles and Mrs. Thatcher. Mr. Jones argues that van der Post had helped convince Mrs. Thatcher to oppose sanctions against the South African government and not to embrace Mr. Mandela.
As van der Post lay dying, Mr. Jones says, Charles visited him. At his memorial service, Lady Thatcher read the lesson and Chief Buthelezi spoke. Nonetheless, Mr. Jones writes, there were apparently some who doubted van der Post even when he was alive.