The Cross of Race
Mendelsohn, Jack
The Cross of Race The Brothers M, by Tom Stacey. Pantheon. 512 pp. $5.95. The Coral Barrier, by Pierre Gas-car. Atlantic-Little Brown. 172 pp. $3.75. Tales from A Troubled Land, by Alan Paton....
...With straight face and obvious respect, the article quoted the golfer's explanation of how he approached the Master's Golf Tournament (which he won): "The Lord wants me to win...
...The book is done in two distinct sections...
...The same issue also contained a laudatory piece about a white South African golfer...
...The journey becomes incredibly complicated and perilous...
...Stacey wisely traces no primrose path to atonement...
...This book can be read in an hour or two, but its sensitive telling of how one white man and one black woman tried to reach across the gulf will linger a long time...
...Tom Stacey is a young English writer for the London Sunday Times and an African specialist with many years of residence below the Sahara...
...In one of its steaming cities, Mogadiscio, a seamy group of aging Italian bureaucrats try to live out their lives in preference to repatriation to an Italy they no longer know...
...Day by day the friendship erodes and the blood brothers grow apart and hostile...
...This is the common theme running through these three widely diverse books...
...3.50...
...It demands much of the reader...
...Gascar's genius is the utter simplicity with which he confronts the massive themes of colonial disintegration, Somali resurgence, and the barriers between the races...
...They become, in a quiet, private ritual, blood brothers...
...It breaks a great deal of new ground in its complex and frequently profound exploration of what happens when white and black confront one another on equal terms...
...It seems not to have occurred to the editors of Life that one man's "sorcery" is another man's "reverence...
...Readers were told, again with no sign of a quizzical demur, that the golfer in question was "certain that he had heard a message from above...
...Thus by barriers, higher and thicker than we know, are we kept from entering truly into one another's lives...
...The consistent theme of all his previous books, and of this one as well, is summarized in the agonized words with which Paton ends one of the stories, "Death of a Tsotsi": "And this death would go on too, for nothing less than the reform of a society would bring it to an end...
...In the books second stage, the scene shifts to Uganda, where McNair joins his blood brother, Mukasa, in a search for Daudi's lost relatives among the primitive Mukonjo of the Ruwenzori mountains...
...His voice is another matter, dependent upon how far a steadily-sickening Afrikaner government is prepared to go in gagging a world figure...
...The black man of Africa, and the white man of Africa and the West, are strangers to one another, defenseless in their spirtual isolation from one another...
...Luigi's love for Jilal, and the frustration of that love because of one of the most bizarre reasons to be found in literature, is the thin but fascinating thread upon which the plot hangs...
...Alan Paton needs no introduction, nor, for that matter, does the theme of his latest book, Tales from A Troubled Land...
...In the first, the brothers M of the title meet and build their friendship as graduate students at Oxford...
...128 pp...
...Proper credit should be given to the translator, Merloyd Lawrence, for effectively transmitting Gascar's disciplined, lyrical prose...
...At least we have these ten tales in all their finely-honed horror and compassion: "Yet I knew that the boy who wrote the letter would, so far as men knew, always be defeated, till one day he would give up both hope and ghost, and leave to his enemy the sole tenancy of the divided house...
...There was much pontificating about African "superstition" and "sorcery...
...Obviously he pondered his novel, The Brothers M, a long time and wrote it with monumental care...
...It is a collection of ten gripping short stories with a common setting: a reformatory for young Africans in Paton's "beloved" and tortured country, the Union of South Africa...
...Pierre Gascar is one of a crop of brilliant postwar French novelists...
...He leaves us to wrestle with the tragic dilemmas of isolation, as we must if neither the hope nor the peril of Africa and the West are to be hidden from our consciousness...
...Because there are no European women left in Mogadiscio, each of the Italians has solved his problem of loneliness in his own way with the beautiful Somali women...
...yet each is a visit to the Golgotha of our century: the crucifixion of man on the cross of race...
...Their friendship ripens and deepens...
...One is an eager, powerful Ugandan, Daudi Mukasa...
...The other is an idealistic Canadian "egghead," Bob McNair...
...It was the menace of the socially frustrated, strangers to mercy, striking like adders for the dark reasons of ancient minds, at any who crossed their path...
...They are utterly different in style, in execution, in setting...
...Into their spiritless midst comes a dreamy young liberal, Luigi Peretti...
...Reviewed by Jack Mendelsohn Afew weeks ago Life magazine carried a lengthy, patronizing article about African religion...
...If anyone wishes to seek redemption from this isolation—through vicarious suffering—he could do no better than to read these three books...
...Scribner's...
...It is in this process of disintegration that Stacey performs a brilliant analysis of the awesome psychological and spiritual barriers between Mukasa and McNair—barriers untouched, merely concealed, by the years of easy intimacy at Oxford...
...Paton's conscience will be stilled only by death...
...The Africa of which he writes in The Coral Barrier is Somr.liland in the two-year period after the war, when the Italians were preparing to relinquish sovereignty...
Vol. 25 • July 1961 • No. 7
