Next month Pietermaritzburg, hometown of Alan Paton, marks the 50th anniversary of the publication of Cry, the Beloved Country, writes Stephen Gray
This year’s Alan Paton celebrations in Pietermaritzburg include the kind of events rarely accorded a South African writer – but appropriately so, for it was he who put the city on the map. There is to be a reception in the city hall on Wednesday September 2, hosted by mayor Siphiwe Gwala and the transitional local council. On Thursday the fifth Alan Paton Lecture, open to the public, is to be given at the school of law by Helen Suzman. There has been a programme of his films and there is also an essay competition, like the one in which the Grand Old Man first entered the literary life.
Paton would jokingly call himself a mere Natalian, and wrote affectionately enough about Pietermaritzburg, his “lovely city”. At 19 Pine Street the modest colonial house where he was born is still intact, though it no longer abuts wild countryside. A well-polished plaque is next to the security door. The buildings of Maritzburg College and of Natal University College where he studied are still functioning, and the downtown area – this is a matter of civic pride – is the best preserved of any in South Africa.
But Cry, the Beloved Country was not really about gentle Pietermaritzburg. Its subject was the rural collapse surrounding it, as the vile city of Johannesburg reached out to tug it all askew. Although in those days Johannesburg had a population of a mere 700 000, Paton said: “No second Johannesburg is needed upon the earth. One is enough.”
Half a century ago Paton was not really an author, either. He was a teacher gone into penological studies, with a manuscript in which he dramatised his panic, trying to roll back our greedy, godless Mammon. The book was meant to give comfort in post-war desolation, to which Father Trevor Huddleston added the naughts. From there the whole “things fall apart” strain developed and African literature took off.
Had Paton not been in the United States in late 1947, a country charged with Steinbeckian fervour, probably he would have received nothing but rejections. When DF Malan’s wife attended the premiere of the wonderful Alexander Korda movie with its famous Shanty Town sequence, she simply could not believe her fellow citizens were being so reduced.
For Americans, however, the novel raised issues about race relations which their authors were not yet prepared to handle. At the New York Public Library recently, sure enough, there I saw the first edition of Cry, the Beloved Country in their Books of the Century exhibition – the only South African item deemed to have “influenced the course of modern events”. The British bookshop chain Waterstone’s rates it as one of their top 100 sellers ever, along with Nelson Mandela’s autobiography.
At home, ever since Jonathan Cape in September 1948 rushed out the British edition to catch up with the American press fervour, it has always been around. Time and again readers, like Paton’s fine biographer Peter Alexander, give testimony that Cry, the Beloved Country was “the first novel set in my own country that I had ever read”.
When at last it was prescribed by the old Transvaal Education Department as an official setwork in 1984 – occasioning the comment from Paton that he “hoped this was a small sign that we were emerging from the Dark Ages” – a survey done by the Human Sciences Research Council found it was the sole literary work to have sold here, second only to the Bible.
Penguin had paperbacked it for three decades and packaged it as a Modern Classic when, in 1986, they celebrated their 50th anniversary with an award to a delighted Paton. His sales with them had topped 10-million. This special year it appears from them with the honour of a red sash.
The acceptance of Cry, the Beloved Country by Scribner in New York was the main (good) event of Paton’s life, followed only by the (bad) one of the National Party victory a few months later. And so the book, which was really about Dominion misrule, inevitably became the classic about an apartheid still to be invented. Probably it was the single most important force to bring that system into international disrepute.
But if its famous editor, Maxwell Perkins, discoverer of F Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway, had not drunkenly died on the proofs, perhaps it might have been in better shape. Certainly loose ends of plot should have been tucked in. Did Father Kumalo’s sister Gertrude, saved from shebeening, revert to prostitution or become an Anglican nun? Why was that addled Outa praying up on the mountain, while he should have been shriving his son’s soul before the noose took his body?
Today the questions mount up even more. Why was Paton so down on what he saw as bull-necked hotheads selling dreams of an African renaissance? Why were black women best kept singing and clapping over their daily chores? Is that how the dear country was to be redeemed – with a regime of love instead of fear, and planting wattles and digging dams against erosion? Did such a liberal really believe that Sir Ernest Oppenheimer was likely to have a change of heart? That capital punishment would buttonhole crime?
One remembers Oliver Walker dismissing the whole farrago as South Africa seen through a stained-glass window. Anyway, Paton never recaptured his Russian fury. He turned to seeing his deteriorating land through the bottom of a bottle. His later stories were sentimental; his poems – as Douglas Livingstone put it – were written with a passion often exceeding his grasp; his autobiographies came out falsely modest and stolidly banal. So he was a one-book man, and lived off it ever after. But what a book, so help me Tixo!
On account of his great fame, by his death in 1988 Paton’s papers were voluminous. Currently they are housed on the campus of the University of Natal in Pietermaritzburg, in the Alan Paton Centre for the Study of the Literature and Politics of Conflict and Conciliation. There is a touching replica of his rather sparse study, memorabilia on the walls. His library resembles that of the reformer in Cry, the Beloved Country, whose murder sets off the whole raging tragedy.
Paton’s windjacket is over the back of his chair. A marker is in his copy of Roberts’ Birds. I checked to see if it was at the titihoya, the black-winged plover that chee-chee-chees through all his output. Stand still in the garden outside: you can hear them, crying forlornly even now.
For further information, phone Debora Matthews, the librarian at the Alan Paton Centre, on (0331) 260-5926