Cry, the Beloved Country Read online

  Although Paton volunteered for service in World War II, he was not permitted to enlist. When the war ended he decided to equip himself better professionally, and to this end he undertook a tour of penal institutions in Scandinavia, Britain, Canada, and the United States at his own expense. On arriving in England in July 1946, he attended an International Conference of the Society of Christians and Jews as a delegate of the South African branch. In September, he began his tour of penal institutions in Sweden. He read John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath while in Stockholm, and when he began writing his own novel he adopted Steinbeck’s method of representing dialogue by a preliminary dash. He also took a side to Norway to visit Trondheim, and to see the locale of a Norwegian novel that interested him, Knut Hamsun’s Growth of the Soil. Traversing the unfamiliar evergreen forests of the mountainous border landscape, Paton grew nostalgic for the hills of Natal. At the hotel desk in Trondheim an engineer named Jensen came to his aid and interpreted for him, and later showed him Trondheim cathedral, where they sat for a time in the fading light before the serene beauty of the great rose window. Jensen then brought Paton back to his hotel and promised to return in an hour to take him to dinner. In the course of that hour, moved, as he says, by powerful emotion, Paton wrote the lyric opening chapter beginning: There is a lovely road that runs from Ixopo into the hills. At that juncture he did not know what was to follow. He had sketched no scenario for a novel.

  But no formal scenario was necessary. The problem of the decay of tribal culture, the poverty of the reserves, and the flight of the people to already overcrowded urban centers all themes of Cry, the Beloved Country had occupied his mind for a long time. A few months earlier he had written urgent articles on the causes of crime and delinquency among urban Africans for the Johannesburg journal Forum. In these, he warned against the tendency to ignore the underlying causes of African crime, which he traced to the disintegration of tribal life and traditional family bonds under the impact of Western economy and culture. Paton continued to work on his novel, mostly at night, while following a demanding schedule of travel and of professional meetings and visits. He wrote it in hotels and on trains in Scandinavia and England, during an Atlantic crossing on the liner Queen Elizabeth, and again while traveling from city to city in America. He finished it on Christmas Eve in San Francisco, California. There, at a meeting in the offices of the Society of Christians and Jews, he met Aubrey and Marigold Burns, who befriended him, read his manuscript, and determined to find him a publisher.

  III

  PATON HAS SAID that he wrote Cry, the Beloved Country in the grip of powerful, conflicting emotions. On the one hand, he felt compelled to turn it into a cry against injustice in South Africa. On the other, he felt drawn to imbue it with a yearning for justice. The first emotion is most evident in Book One, the story of the old priest, Stephen Kumalo, who journeys from his remote tribal village to search for his lost son in black townships like Newclare (called Claremont in the novel) and Orlando on the west side of Johannesburg near Diepkloof Reformatory. (Today, the vast segregated city that occupies the general area of these South West Townships is known by the acronym Soweto.) The contending emotion, the sense of a yearning for justice, pervades the Jarvis episodes of Book Two. Here, the spirit of Abraham Lincoln is palpably present. In particular, Lincoln’s companionable ghost haunts the study of the murdered man, Arthur Jarvis, whose father a man of little reading is astonished to find a whole bookcase full of books about Lincoln. Browsing in these, he reads the Gettysburg Address and, later, the Second Inaugural Address. Some of his subsequent actions are motivated by these readings something readers not familiar with Lincoln’s words at Gettysburg and at his second inaugural may miss, for Paton does not supply them.

  Paton had written these episodes while attending a conference on penal reform in Washington, D.C., in November 1946. There, the Lincoln Memorial impressed him as a temple erected to the spirit of man at its highest and purest. As he described his visit:

  I mounted the steps of the Lincoln Memorial with a feeling akin to awe, and stood for a long time before the seated figure of one of the greatest men of history, surely the greatest of all the rulers of nations, the man who would spend a sleepless night because he had been asked to order the execution of a young soldier. He certainly knew that in pardoning we are pardoned.

  There are characters in Cry, the Beloved Country who seek to emulate the spirit of man at its highest and purest; but ideal justice, however yearned for, is beyond direct human experience. Its reflection may be glimpsed in Lincoln’s guiding principles; or in the serenity of a perfected work of art like the rose window at Trondheim; or in such ineffable visions of peace as Isaiah s: Where the wolf lies down with the lamb and they do not hurt or destroy in all that holy mountain. In his Note to the 1987 edition of Cry, the Beloved Country, Paton quotes a passage from his memorial for his first wife, For You Departed (1969). In it he expands on his description of the novel as a yearning for ideal justice: It is informed with a longing for the land where they shall not hurt or destroy in all that holy mountain. And he concludes: It is a story of the beauty and terror of human life, and it cannot be written again because it cannot be felt again. It is not surprising that some episodes in Cry, the Beloved Country should reflect admiration for Lincoln. Indeed, there may have been almost as many books on Lincoln in Paton’s study in faraway South Africa as in the fictional study of Arthur Jarvis. Nor is it surprising that an aura of hope should pervade the novel as a whole. In 1946 there were hopeful signs that South Africans and particularly the returning war veterans were prepared to accept new departures in race relations. It also seemed likely that Parliament would accept and implement under Jan Hofmeyr’s leadership the liberal report of a commission investigating urban conditions. No one then not even the Nationalist Party itself anticipated the 1948 election victory of the Afrikaner Nationalist Party that ushered in an intensified policy of racial separation. In the novel, therefore, the voices of apartheid’s advocates are heard only with an undertone of satire: And some cry for the cutting up of South Africa without delay into separate areas, where white can live without black, and black without white, where black can farm their own land and mine their own minerals and administer their own laws. The obvious reason for the merely incidental presence of these voices in the novel is that Cry, the Beloved Country does not seek to present an overview of South Africa on a broad canvas in the manner of James Michener’s The Covenant . There is nothing in it, for example, of the spirit of Afrikanerdom that informs Paton’s second novel, Too Late the Phalarope . Instead, it brings into focus the migration of impoverished Africans from rural and tribal areas that grew during World War II, and it depicts with remarkable realism a slice of Johannesburg life as it was in 1946. In that year, public events that made newspaper headlines included the excitement caused by the discovery of new gold, the courageous black boycott of buses, and the building, and rebuilding, of a squatters shantytown.

  While the four intervening decades have brought great change, the circumstances of 1946 depicted in this novel have not lost their power to hold the imagination. This may derive from enduring qualities in the work. But it may also derive from an effect of history that affords present-day readers a perspective on the novel in some ways comparable to that of audiences in the Greek tragic theater who know the outcome of the fateful struggle unfolding before them. Such foreknowledge quickens the emotions of pity and terror that Aristotle thought proper to tragedy. For readers of this novel conversant with South Africa’s intractable social problems, what once seemed merely ominous may now appear to foreshadow tragedy.

  For example, the question raised about the eloquent but cautious agitator, John Kumalo, carries with it a sense of impending violence: What if this voice should say words that it speaks already in private, should rise and not fall again, should rise and rise and rise, and the people rise with it, should madden them with thoughts of rebellion and dominion, with thoughts of power and posse
ssion? And when the young black priest, Msimangu, reveals his fear of hardening racial attitudes, readers may feel themselves in the presence of events unfolding toward some inevitable denouement: I have one great fear in my heart, that one day when they are turned to loving, they will find we are turned to hating.

  IV

  CRY, THE BELOVED COUNTRY was published in New York in February 1948 with little advance publicity. But some eminent New York reviewers noticed it, readers recommended it to one another, and sales increased rapidly. Maxwell Anderson and Kurt Weill produced a musical version, Lost in the Stars, and Alexander Korda filmed it. During the four decades since it was written, the novel has sold millions of copies and has continued to hold reader interest worldwide, through translations into some twenty languages. These included the South African languages of Zulu and Afrikaans.

  Not surprisingly, Cry, the Beloved Country had a mixed reception in South Africa. Many English speakers admired the beauty of its lyric passages, but not all may have responded sympathetically to its representation of social decay in overcrowded African townships, or to its counter-pointed theme of the need for compassion and restoration. With one exception Die Burger, Cape Town no Afrikaans language newspaper reviewed it. Many Afrikaners would, no doubt, have disliked it had they read it. As Mrs. D. F. Malan, wife of the Prime Minister, said to Paton at the South African premiere of the film: Surely, Mr. Paton, you don’t really think things are like that? The success of Cry, the Beloved Country beyond South Africa encouraged Paton to resign his post and devote himself to writing. He said in a broadcast talk: I have left the public service, but not with any intention of living in idleness or ease. I want to interpret South Africa honestly and without fear. I cannot think of any more important or exciting task. At first things went relatively well. He soon produced his second novel, Too Late the Phalarope, and a number of short stories, some of which were based on his Diepkloof experiences. But an unforeseen event had meanwhile intervened to change his life again. In May 1948, one month before his resignation from Diepkloof was to take effect, the Afrikaner Nationalist Party came to power and instituted their policies of apartheid. At this juncture liberal-minded South Africans looked to the leadership of Jan Hofmeyr. But before the end of 1948 Hofmeyr died, aged only fifty-three. And so, as Paton said, a great light went out in the land making men more conscious of its darkness. In 1953 Paton agreed to give up the privacy and detachment of a writer’s life and join with others in formally establishing a Liberal Party to present a nonracial alternative to the Nationalist government’s racial policies. In 1956 he was elected chairman and was later its president. The party’s long-term aim was to achieve without violence a democratic South Africa where all shared full rights and responsibilities. Initially, most of its members were white; but in time, blacks constituted the majority.

  The party soon drew the government’s wrath and repressive power. Dr. Verwoerd had foreshadowed its future when he told Parliament in 1958 that when South Africa became a republic (achieved in 1961) there would be no place for Liberal or similar parties which wish to place white and nonwhite on equality. And his minister for justice, Mr. J. B. Vorster, frequently told Parliament that liberals were more dangerous than communists, and were wittingly or unwittingly, the prime promoters of communism. When Paton appeared in court at the close of Nelson Mandela’s treason trial in June 1964, to plead in mitigation of the sentence because he feared that Mandela and those convicted with him would be sentenced to death, the prosecutor declared he would unmask Paton, and taunted him by demanding, Are you a communist? and Are you a fellow-traveler? Lacking a significant parliamentary role, the liberals opposed apartheid in whatever way they could. Paton, for example, turned essayist and pamphleteer and, among other things, he helped establish a fund to pay the legal costs of Chief Luthuli and others charged with treason in 1956. In the emergency following the Sharpeville shootings in 1960, this was broadened into the Defense and Aid Fund, subsequently banned. The Liberal Party itself was decimated by bannings and restrictions on its members in the 1960s, and it was dissolved in 1968 by legislation prohibiting racially mixed political gatherings. Not all of the party’s tribulations could be attributed to government ill-will. A few young members and former members turned secretly to violence and carried out a senseless series of bombings. Consequently, the general membership had to endure the knowledge that many of their sacrifices in the cause of nonviolent change had been largely nullified.

  The Liberal Party had few triumphs, but it had an occasional lifting of the spirit. This was the case in 1960 when Paton was honored by Freedom House, New York, with its Freedom Award. In presenting the award, the poet Archibald MacLeish said of him:

  To live at the center of the contemporary maelstrom; to see it for what it is and to challenge the passions of those who struggle in it beside him with the voice of reason with, if he will forgive me, the enduring reasons of love; to offer the quiet sanity of the heart in a city yammering with the crazy slogans of fear; to do all this at the cost of tranquility and the risk of harm, as a service to a government that does not know it needs it is to deserve far more of history than we can give our guest tonight.

  V

  ALTHOUGH CIRCUMSTANCES DREW Paton into political activity, it would be improper to regard this novel as a political document. While a primary concern of art is a formal beauty that may reflect justice, a primary concern of politics is the pursuit of power, and literature that serves it is propaganda, not art. Cry, the Beloved Country is not propaganda. It seeks no solace in utopian political schemes of left or right, but it does reveal a concern for nurturing the capacity for justice in individuals. Zealous revolutionaries would scorn the personal actions taken by its characters to restore the village church and the land. But Paton might respond by recalling the inscription on a tablet in an old Yorkshire church that he first heard from Jan Hofmeyr: In the year 1652 when through England all things sacred were either profaned or neglected, this church was built by Sir Robert Shirley, Bart., whose special praise it is to have done the best of things in the worst of times and to have hoped them in the most calamitous. Commenting in 1982 on the passage from which the novel takes its title: Cry, the beloved country, for the unborn child that is the inheritor of our fear. Let him not love the earth too deeply, Paton has said: I am sometimes astonished that these words were written in 1946 and that it took many of the white people of South Africa thirty years to acknowledge their truth, when black schoolchildren started rioting in the great black city of Soweto on June 16, 1976, on the day after which, of all the hundred thousand days of our written history, nothing would be the same again. Paton continues to hope that man’s capacity for good will prevail. In the course of his Hoernl Memorial Lecture, Federation or Desolation, delivered before the South African Institute of Race Relations in 1985, he remarked:

  In such times as these it is easy to lose hope. Nadezhda Mandelstam, whose husband, the poet Osip Mandelstam, died in 1938 in a transit camp at Vladivostok, wrote a book about their life of unspeakable suffering under Stalin. This book she called Hope Against Hope. After his death she wrote a second book, and wished it to be called in English Hope Abandoned. In South Africa we are still writing the first book. We trust that we shall never have to write the second.

  EDWARD CALLAN

  Distinguished University Professor

  Western Michigan University

  List of Words

  AFRIKÁANS The language of the Afrikaner, a much simplified and beautiful version of the language of Holland, though it is held in contempt by some ignorant English-speaking South Africans, and indeed by some Hollanders. Afrikaans and English are the two official languages of the Union of South Africa.

  AFRIKÁNER “A” as in “father”. The name now used for the descendants of the Boers. Some large-minded Afrikaners claim that it has a wider connotation, and means white South Africans, but many Afrikaans-speaking and English-speaking South Africans would object to this extension of meaning.
It is used here in its usually accepted meaning.

  INGÉLI The first “i” as in “pit”, the second as “ee”. The “e” is almost like “a” in “pane”.

  INKOSÁNA The “i” as in “pit”, the “o” midway between “o” in “pot” and “o” in “born”. The “a” as in “father”, but the second “a” is hardly sounded. Approximate pronunciation “inkosaan”. Means “little chief”, or “little master”.

  INKÓSI As above, but the final “i” is hardly sounded. Means “chief” or “master”.

  INKÓSIKAZI As above. The second “k” is like hard “g”. The final “i” is hardly sounded. Pronounced “inkosigaaz”. Means mistress.

  IXÓPO The name of a village. Its Zulu pronunciation is difficult, and would be considered affected in English speech. It is pronounced in English, “Ickopo”, with “o” as in “hole”.

  JOHÁNNESBURG An Afrikaans word, but pronounced in English as it is written. It is the centre of the gold-mining industry.

  KÁFFERBOETIE Pronounce “boetie” not as “booty” but to rhyme with sooty. A term of contempt originally used to describe those who fraternized with African natives, but now used to describe any who work for the welfare of the non-European. Means literally “little brother of the kaffir”. Afrikaans.