Erroneous Instruction: Hally's Misrepresentations of Tolstoy and Joe Louis in Fugard's 'MASTER HAROLD' ... and the boys

Abstract

THE 2010 movie version of ‘MASTER HAROLD’ … and the boys gives new occasion to examine closely the original text of Athol Fugard’s celebrated play.1 One oft-noted aspect of the play is how seventeen-year-old Hally (a.k.a. ‘Master Harold’) ironically considers himself the middle-aged Sam’s educator when, in fact, Sam has educated Hally in the ways of life, playing a surrogate father amidst Hally’s dysfunctional family situation. Hally’s immature behaviour towards Sam and Willie has been thoroughly discussed by critics, but attention should also be paid to the incorrect information he disseminates to the two black employees of his parents’ Port Elizabeth, South Africa tea room. Most of Hally’s incorrect information concerns Leo Tolstoy, whom Hally discusses during the ‘men of magnitude’ discussion with Sam, in which each character puts forward several noteworthy individuals whom he admires. Hally argues for Tolstoy, about whom he says, ‘Not many intellectuals are prepared to shovel manure with the peasants and then go home and write a “little book” called War and Peace’.2 But this statement is problematic on two levels. First, there is no specific evidence either from prominent Tolstoy biographies3 or from Tolstoy’s daughter Alexandra—who reports that Tolstoy sowed, mowed, and harvested with peasants4—that Tolstoy ever shoveled manure with peasants. He may have done so, of course, but such a claim is unverifiable and Hally here embellishes details to strengthen his argument. More significantly, Alexandra reports that Tolstoy began to work alongside the peasants in the 1880s,5 over a decade after the 1869 publication of War and Peace. Hally’s glib claim is simply not in line with the facts of Tolstoy’s chronology.