Alan Paton, RIP.

Alan Paton, RIP

'IN 1948 A BOOK was published with a bewildering title, by an unknown author, on a theme alien to American concerns. The book became the central cultural ducument of South Africa, where it sold more copies than any other volume save the Bible. Cry, the Beloved Country is free of bitterness, telling the story of a fracternal bond between a black minister tormented by the sins of his son and his sister, and a white man."

With these words, in May 1977, I began my introduction of Alan Paton, on Firing Line. It struck me, after the hour was done, that a great fatigue was on him: that he had grown old, as some of the prophets grew old, under the pressures of a noncomplaint world. Alan Paton stayed active in politics, as head of the Liberal Party (which favored the universal franchise). When he left the party, he also left politics, confining himself of criticism of his country's policies, as also criticism of nostrums favored by other foes of apartheid (Paton consistently opposed economic sanctions).

Last week's Time magazine published an incomplete essay by Paton, incomplete because he was taken to the hospital before finishing it. But Time gives us what he did write, and Paton began by saying, 'I have lost my surefootedness. . . . I do not now feel happy walking among the coarse hummocks of a grassy hill. . . . When I was a young student of 17 or 18, I remember crossing the Umsindusi River . . . on the stepping-stones. I didn't walk, I ran. Today I would fall into the river at the first stone. I have grown very lethargic." And then he quoted four lyrical sentences from one of his books, introducing them with the sigh, "I shall never again write such words as these,"

Twenty years ago Bennett Cerf, the founder and publisher of Random House, told me that he kept two young women busy reading fiction books sent to Random House over the transom. "In thirty years, we've only published two titles that came in that way." Why don't you cancel the operation, I asked? "Because one of those books was Cry, the Beloved Country." About the author of that book one could only say that he had reason to be fatigued, and that he had earned eternal rest. -- WFB