Journey Continued:
Moore, Arthur J
LIFE OF THE SPELL-CASTER JOURNEY CONTINUED An Autobiography Alan Paton Scribner's, $22.55, 308 pp. Arthur J. Moore When Alan Paton died last year at the age of eighty- five, he seemed to many a...
...Indeed, Paton's novels have the ring of the King James version about them...
...Women & Fiction...
...REVIEWERS Susan CAHILL is the author of the novel, Earth Angels, and editor of the three-volume series...
...It remained a heterogeneous group during its fifteen-year existence, with some of its members drawn off into violence, but many considered it politically naive...
...was the nation thought likely to fail the racial test and South Africa the one likely to succeed...
...As a person, he was much more than that, as his autobiography makes clear...
...There is a certain irony here...
...Journey Continued, it should be noted...
...Francis, Instrument of Thy Peace (1967), are on specifically religious themes...
...Paton agrees with Malcolm Muggeridge that he is more of a poet than a novelist but the real tip-off is a remark that Barbara Ward made after Paton gave the Harvard commencement address in 1971...
...The two works should be read together...
...Alan Paton may perhaps be fated to be one of those people, like Harriet Beecher Stowe, who wrote a book so compelling that they were never able to get out from under its reputation...
...The multiracial, South African Liberal party, which he helped found and head, was his venture into politics until its demise in 1968, after which he retired into private life...
...Still, it was an honorable attempt to deal with an increasingly intractable situation...
...Formerly she directed the Case and Curriculum Development Program at the John F. Kennedy School of Government of Harvard University...
...That might well be Paton on South Africa...
...The first of these shaping forces was his religious perspective...
...It helps to explain his conviction that the Botha government knows that apartheid is untenable and is trying in a groping fashion to extricate the country from that policy...
...Arthur J. Moore When Alan Paton died last year at the age of eighty- five, he seemed to many a man who had outlived his time...
...This is a conviction far too optimistic for most people these days...
...Michael WYSCHOGROD, professor of phi-losophy at Baruch College, CUNY, and director of the Institute for Jewish-Christian Relations of the American Jewish Congress, is the author o/The Body of Faith: Judaism and Corporeal Election...
...And, too, which of us would resist going down in history as having cast the spell of that famous beginning: "There is a lovely road that runs from Ixopo into the hills...
...Neither Paton's theology nor his personality allowed him to make that journey...
...Rein-hold Niebuhr, who had a tremendous impact on Paton, called Cry, the Beloved Country a book with "a genuine religious Christian content...
...AUTHUR J. MOORE, a long-time contributor to CommonweaJ, was formerly editor of New World Outlook magazine...
...Again, a reference to Niebuhr is illuminating...
...He loved South Africa passionately...
...He remembers the time when the U.S...
...More saddening to some was Paton's increasing conservatism-his vocal opposition to economic sanctions and his willingness to accept the Botha government's assurance that it was working to eliminate apartheid...
...It was his "dedication of the will" that led Paton into politics with the founding of the Liberal party in 1953, an attempt to establish a political party with multiracial membership...
...The most self-righteous of the Americans are not better than we are...
...Many of his writings, such as a series of meditations on the prayer of St...
...In a 1955 speech at the Kent School, Niebuhr gave a somber assessment of American society, saying, "It's a mess...
...Stephanie G. gould is a free-lance writer and editorial consultant...
...This second volume of Paton's autobiography, published posthumously, offers an opportunity to test these perceptions...
...The strong anti-Communist feelings of a number of the party's leaders made any sort of cooperation with groups such as the African National Congress (and its white counterpart, the Congress of Democrats) almost impossible...
...Paton picked 1948 as the dividing point because in that year the two decisive events in his public life took place-the publication of the novel that made him an international celebrity and the coming to power in South Africa of the Afrikaner party, sworn to establish apartheid...
...I interviewed Paton at the World Council of Churches Assembly in Evanston in 1954 and remember his firm assertion that the real basis of apartheid was economic...
...He remembers the lesson of his mentor, Reinhold Niebuhr, "the wisest man I ever knew," that individuals may be saints but institutions or societies never can...
...It underlies, however, Paton's rejection of sanctions and disinvestment...
...New World Outlook magazine...
...JOHN L. palmer is the dean and professor of economics and public administration of the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs at Syracuse University...
...Alan Paton Journey Continued the existence of a written Constitution and Bill of Rights and an independent judiciary...
...This has cost Naude dearly in personal terms but has made him more able to identify with today's struggle...
...But as the world increasingly treated South Africa as a pariah and its white ruling class as monsters, Paton resented this ostracism, even though he had long predicted that it would happen...
...This break is a useful device but it tends to reinforce the stereotype of the rise and fall of Alan Paton...
...None of his writings had matched the great impact of his masterwork, Cry, the Beloved Country, published in 1948...
...There is a story instructive to Americans: In 1955 he was detained by the U.S...
...Immigration Service for his wartime membership in the Friends of the Soviet Union, whose patrons included Dwight Eisenhower (then president of the United States), and whose purpose was to send medical supplies to the USSR during World War II...
...There are interesting stories of why Paton thought Maxwell Anderson had imposed his own philosophy in "Lost in the Stars" and of the filming of Cry, the Beloved Country by the Korda brothers...
...it has been largely concerned with the dedication of my will," a very Anglican remark...
...Only by removing its economic benefits to the ruling whites, would there develop the political will to end apartheid...
...That mostly took the form of loving the countryside physically and hating the form that the society took...
...He was seen by many as an increasingly embittered old man...
...These hills are grass-covered and rolling, and they are lovely beyond any singing of it...
...It is instructive to compare Paton with Beyers Naude, the Afrikaner Dutch Reformed clergyman whose quest for justice has led him from a position of privilege in the ruling community to an identification with the South African blacks...
...But, he adds, "I like it...
...I repeat that they should go down em their knees and thank God for their Constitution,their all of Rights, and their Supreme court...
...The first part of his autobiography, Towards the Mountain (1980), covered his life up until 1948...
...It sounded like the Bible," she said...
...A Christian of the Anglican persuasion, Paton wrote that "my religion has never held a great place for dogma...
...Nonetheless, it was his religious perspective which shaped both his writing and his public career...
...Paton can devote as much time and attention to the story of a car ride with American friends whose young son was surreptitiously pinching him until he got a large adult pinch back as he does to the headline events...
...This insight helped Paton to avoid demonizing the South African government even when he profoundly disagreed with its policies...
...One cannot really understand the complexity of the man without knowing the forces which shaped him and the motives out of which he acted...
...is not a book devoted exclusively t6 large subjects...
...There is another reason, I believe, for Paton's political reactions in his old age...
...Paton's own pol itical view is indicated by his insistence that what saved the United States from the fate of South Africa was The events of the last forty years which I have described in this book could not have happened in the de-mocracies of the West That's not because the people of the West are better than we are...
Vol. 116 • April 1989 • No. 7
