William Plomer

William Plomer born 10 December 1903 (d. 1973)

William Charles Franklyn Plomer was a South African author, known as a novelist, poet and literary editor.

Plomer was born in South Africa, in Pietersburg, Transvaal, where his father was a civil servant. Plomer entered an Anglican school, St John's College in Johannesburg, in 1912. Both parents were English. His mother, with no love for South Africa, took him to England, where he spent three miserable years at a small private school in Kent and one happier year at Rugby.

Back in South Africa, he chose not to continue his education. Instead, he used experience garnered during a farm apprenticeship and a period assisting his parents at a native trading station in his first novel, Turbott Wolfe, published by Leonard and Virginia Woolf's Hogarth Press in 1925.

As the book was going to press, Plomer got to know Roy Campbell and Laurens van der Post, two rebel white South Africans, and together they worked on a radical periodical, Voorslag (Whiplash). All three withdrew after publication of the second issue, angered by attempts to muzzle their writing.

This was the turning point in Plomer's career; he knew that the Woolfs would provide him entrance to London literary circles so, following three happy years teaching in Japan, he went to England to make his permanent home.

Although discreet about his homosexuality, Plomer accepted it. He always felt himself to be an outsider, and thereafter most of his short-term affairs were with other outsiders. He was attracted to black South African men, to students he taught in Japan from 1926 to 1929, and in England, to working-class boys and men in uniform.

Overt homosexuality is absent from his novels and poems, but he confided to the editor of his revised, posthumously published autobiography that he expected his biographer to take his sexual orientation seriously because it was important to his work.

In England, where he settled in 1929, Plomer moved in interconnected and influential literary circles energised by homosexual bonds. He mixed with Auden and Isherwood, E M Forster and Virginia Woolf, Harold Nicholson, John Lehmann, and J R Ackerley, among others.

Here he could count on warm support for his chosen lifestyle, as when he came close to public disgrace during World War II: a serviceman whom he solicited for sex turned him over to the police, but friends successfully intervened.

After the publication of The Invaders (1934) he produced little fiction but continued to publish short stories, essays, collections of poetry and literary reviews. He became an important literary editor, for Faber and Faber. He was active as a librettist, producing Gloriana, Curlew River, The Burning Fiery Furnace and The Prodigal Son for Benjamin Britten.

Plomer edited several of Ian Fleming's James Bond novels in the 1950s and 60s.

For the last thirty years of his life, as a respected 'person of letters', Plomer had an unassuming and devoted companion in Charles Erdmann.