Towards the Mountain:
Callan, Edward
Books: UTOPIA & A LAND OF PAIN
THIS first volume of Alan Paton's autobiography brings the story of his private and public life to 1948. That crucial year saw the publication of his first novel, Cry,...
...It gives proportionate weight to the endeavors that first brought him a measure of public interest: his work as a penal reformer, and his writing of Cry, the Beloved Country...
...Let him not be too moved when the birds of his land are singing, nor give too much of his heart to a mountain or a valley...
...They mean, "But why is it so full of pain...
...Books: UTOPIA & A LAND OF PAIN THIS first volume of Alan Paton's autobiography brings the story of his private and public life to 1948...
...And it also treats, in turn, of the discovery of the world of books, of sexuality, and of first love for a married woman whom he married when her husband died...
...Edward Callan time-bound collectives - the nations or races of the earthly city - cannot attain perfection...
...The task the new Government set itself, says Pa-ton, was "nothing less than to fashion not only the perfect society, but one which would endure into foreseeable time, one in which every race would be allotted its place and its function . . . So noble was the end . . . so sublime the goal, that almost any means became justifiable...
...his resignation from the Principalship of Diepkloof Reformatory, a prison farm for black youths, which he had successfully transformed into a training school...
...And he adds: "I am sometimes astonished when I remember 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 school children 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...
...for it tells how three separate Utopian visions - each marked by a measure of authoritarianism, undue constraint, or injustice - touched on his life...
...Both biographies show Paton's keen interest in the successive stages of spiritual growth that brought his subjects into conflict with the apartheid mentality...
...The Christian rulers of Af-rikanersdom began to observe the un-Christian precept that the end justifies the means...
...and later, as a teacher, he was active in YMCA,' TOC-H, and related religious movements...
...but they forbade marriage with outsiders, regarded themselves as an elect, and looked forward to an earthly millennium when the worthy would enter the Kingdom...
...Paton was constantly accompanied by the Security Police when he was President of the Liberal Party in the 1960s...
...Paton came to the writing of Towards the Mountain with a clear perception of the ways in which apartheid constitutes a challenge to Christian principles...
...He also continues to help edit Reality: A Journal of Liberal Opinion which is in some respects a successor - of equally limited circulation - to the often banned Liberal Party journal, Contact...
...and the accession to power in South Africa of the Afrikaner Nationalist Party on a platform of "Christian Nationalism" which identified the will of God with white supremacy...
...The first of these was A South African Tragedy: The Life and Times of Jan Hof meyr (1964) - the biography of the wartime Deputy Prime Minister whose earlier efforts to reform the South African penal system gave Paton the opportunity to use increasing freedoms as his reformatory instrument at Diepkloof...
...Towards the Mountain takes its title from Isaiah's vision of ineffable justice - when the lion will lie down with the lamb - "where they shall not hurt or destroy in all that holy mountain...
...The title, therefore, makes an implicit theological point: that whereas individual souls may aspire towards a beatific vision out of reach in time, TOWABRS TIE MOUNTA Alan Paton Scribner's, $6.95, 320 pp...
...Since there will be no writing on that holy mountain, readers of this volume may be prompted to urge: " Absent thee from felicity a while...
...It is to be called, Ah, But Your Country is Beautiful, and may form part of a trilogy dealing with those years...
...for this book is his third major essay in biography set against the historical background of the rise of Afrikaner nationalism...
...As for the rest of his autobiography, he says: "The second part of my life I hope to write before I die...
...That crucial year saw the publication of his first novel, Cry, the Beloved Country...
...I knew that if they did not catch me they would love me, but not much.'' He found a matching relentlessness in the South African Security Police: "They have the same inexorability of purpose, the same intensity of gaze...
...He was then sought only by the Oxford Group, a moral reform movement seeking to establish itself in South Africa...
...This passage suggests, says Paton, that if the child loves the earth too deeply he cannot ask immunity from pain:' "This is what the visitors from America and Britain and Germany and other countries mean when they say to me, "Ah, but your country is beautiful...
...The belief that they can is a Utopian delusion...
...His biographical method requires, therefore, simultaneous consideration of private and public life - a method he employs also in this autobiography...
...Let him not love the earth too deeply...
...Its members were law-abiding and uncompromisingly pacifist...
...But that is not part of the story of Towards the Mountain which traces the rise of Afrikaner Christian Nationalism only to the 1948 election victory, the prelude to an era in which "a new breed of Afrikaners were going to make fierce laws to achieve Utopian purposes...
...He has begun to write fiction again and is now completing a novel set in the early sixties...
...Now, as of January 11, 1981, Alan Paton is seventy-eight years old and no longer active in national politics since the Liberal Party was forced to disband by a law forbidding racially mixed politics...
...The first was that of the Christadel-phians, the fundamentalist sect in which he grew up...
...icity a while...
...Its aim," says "was Utopian, nothing less than the salvation of the human race...
...Its earliest chapters record an intense childhood delight in nature: "I cannot describe my early response to the beauty of hill and stream and tree as anything less than ecstasy" - a declaration that comes to mind in a closing chapter where Paton describes the passage from which - together with his California hosts - he derived the title for his first great novel, written in hotel rooms and on trains during a tour of panel institutions in Scandinavia, Canada, and the United States: "Cry, the beloved country, for the unborn child that is the inheritor of our fear...
...Published in November 1980, the month in which the Moral Majority rallied the elect among the electorate, Pa-ton's book may be timely for American readers...
...As a personal history, Towards the Mountain treats of conflict with an authoritarian father who lived by a narrow morality, led a disappointed life, and died tragically: his corpse half-submerged in a mountain stream, stripped of possessions, and undiscovered for several weeks...
...In his university days Paton separated himself from the Christadelphians and joined Methodist friends in the Students' Christian Association...
...For fear will rob him of all if he gives too much...
...Their relentless pursuit, which reminded him of Francis Thompson's "Hound of Heaven," deterred him from joining the Oxford Group: "I knew that if the hunters caught me they would love me...
...For this reason it selected key men and women for its targets, for if they were reconverted, their countries would turn to the ways of righteousness and peace...
...The second was Apartheid and the Archbishop (1973) - the life of Geoffrey Clayton, Anglican Archbishop of Cape Town, who was reluctantly but steadily drawn to act in the political sphere...
...They are hunting too, but if they catch you it will not be to love you...
Vol. 108 • February 1981 • No. 3
