Andrew Worsdale
JONATHAN PATON, son of the writer Alan Paton, is unhappy with aspects of a television series about his father. The Principal, the story of the author’s years as a warden at Diepkloof Reformatory, is currently airing on SABC.
And Paton junior has also received retractions from the Mail & Guardian and the Sunday Times for unfounded rumours in these newspapers in reviews of the programme.
“My father’s history,” he says, “is like public property. I’m around, my brother’s around but no one seems to bother consulting us.”
He is fairly impressed by the outward qualities of the TV show: “I think it’s very well mounted.” But his quarrel is the portrayal of his parents: “The characters are fanciful creatures, not the parents I recognise.”
It is a common qualm about biographies of the writer’s life. When Australian Peter Alexander penned his warts-and-all Paton biography, the publishers, Oxford University Press, selected the most salacious parts of the book for their press release.
“I remember seeing a British tabloid that had picked up on the press release with the headlines `Sex, Adultery and Violence in a haunted liberal soul’,” says Paton, who is a Wits University English lecturer.
He believes The Principal’s problem is that writer/director Roy Sargeant integrated several of Paton’s short stories with elements of Alexander’s biography – based on third-hand accounts of Paton’s wife, Dorrie. “She comes across as frigid, which she never was. She was very outgoing.”
Other inaccuracies, he says, include scenes where his father is seen swearing, drinking whisky and smoking. “My father came from a very restricted family and he took a long time to rebel against it. He never swore. In the series he says `bastard’ and `bullshit’ … the most he would drink in his early days was a ginger square yet they have him swigging down scotch … they also have him smoking a cigarette like it’s a Gunston ad.”
Another moment that irks is a scene where the mother of an inmate is invited to dinner at the Paton’s home, notices a serviette ring with the initial B on it, and discovers it stands for Dorrie’s late first husband.
Paton junior says he actually discovered the serviette ring when he was 32 – the first time he knew that his mother had married before. “The important thing is that my parents suppressed the whole thing. To have it exposed so early in the story is to take things completely out of context. The artistic licence they’ve taken is personally very irritating.”
An incident where Paton allegedly tried to pick up a black prostitute remains shrouded in speculation. (Paton was mugged late at night by a hitchhiker who alleged that he had been asked to procure the services of a woman.) The Sunday Times magazine recently reported that Paton had “a penchant for black prostitutes” – a claim the paper has since retracted.
“Maybe the incident was true, we’ll never know. But to say `penchant’ implies he was out looking for black women every other week,” Paton says. “I’m really rather tired of the Paton industry.”