William Plomer was born in South Africa of English parents, but worked abroad for most of his life, first in Japan and then in England. The literary skills, emotional tendencies, and intellectual attitudes that he acquired in South Africa, however, remained the driving force of his career. In pronouncing his family name to rhyme with rumor or bloomer, he rejected his father's pronunciation, which rhymed with Homer. In this and other ways, Plomer signaled his distance from the colonizing epoch in which Charles Plomer, his father, had been involved. Discussing his pronunciation of the family name in his posthumously published The Autobiography of William Plomer (1975), Plomer offered a literary mask in which his name referred, in French, to a plumier or artist in feathers. If the plumes were borrowed, he sharpened their quills, history shows, to good effect. More cogently, he observed that his family name probably would...