At his birthday party in a small town of the southern Transvaal, the aged patriarch of a prominent family is given a book, The Birds of South Africa, by his adult son. It would be innocuous were we not aware of the risk the son is taking one hundred pages into Alan Paton’s Too Late the Phalarope. Who would dare to give a book to the austere and forbidding Jakob van Vlaanderen, who “read only the One, and the newspapers”? Still worse, the author of this book bears an English, not a Dutch, surname. And the son, Pieter, though himself a strong, imposing man, is also gentle and sensitive and has, since his boyhood, carried heart wounds from his father. He is taking a risk here, but it succeeds. A bird-lover, Jakob is entranced by the book. Later, he is additionally delighted to find in it a mistake, when the writer describes phalaropes as coastal birds; they can, Jakob claims, be found far from the ocean. He proposes the family make a day trip to the country so that he can prove “[t]hat Englishman of yours” wrong. They do so, and the tears well up in Pieter’s eyes as his father stands behind him, guiding his gaze toward the fleeting bird. Had the tender moment occurred a decade or even a year earlier, it might have been their salvation. But Pieter’s fall has already begun.
Almost four decades after his death, in 1988, Alan Paton is still remembered for his long-standing and tenacious opposition to apartheid and for his first novel, Cry, the Beloved Country. Published to immediate acclaim and commercial success in 1948, the year the newly elected Malan government passed apartheid into law, Cry, the Beloved Country has been adapted into two films and a musical. In 2003, it was graced with the imprimatur of Oprah’s Book Club. Paton was in his forties when he wrote it during an extended tour of European and North American penal institutions. In the years following its publication, the one-time reformatory principal became an internationally respected spokesman for the anti-apartheid movement and a founding president of the short-lived Liberal Party. In 1953, when Paton’s star was rising, and when the National Party’s hold on the country may well have seemed unbreakable, he wrote Too Late the Phalarope. Though a critical success at the time and still in print, it faded from the consciousness of the reading public. It is, in fact, a neglected masterpiece.
The novel’s sharp contrast with Cry, the Beloved Country surely accounts for much of that neglect. While both books explore the racial injustice in Paton’s country, the early novel does so with soaring lyricism. It tells the story of two grieving fathers but also indicates where they might find a measure of healing. In Too Late the Phalarope, Paton’s lyricism obtains, but the melody is subdued and sometimes severe—we are told, from the opening lines, that this will be the story of a family’s destruction. He has, moreover, set himself a harder task. Cry, the Beloved Country, narrated largely from the perspective of a Zulu Anglican priest, focuses on the victims of injustice. The latter book takes us inside the world of a provincial Afrikaner family, the sort of people whose blood-and-soil commitment to their heritage, language, and traditions gave birth to the apartheid system and, most potently for this story, the 1927 Immorality Act, which criminalized sexual relations between the races. For the downfall of the Van Vlaanderen family comes when Pieter—a police lieutenant and hero of both the Second World War and the rugby field—is discovered to have repeatedly slept with a young black woman named Stephanie, making him a criminal and the whole of his family outcasts to the Afrikaner world.
Born in what is now KwaZulu-Natal a year after the British Empire had defeated the Afrikaners in the Second Boer War (1899–1902), Alan Paton was no Afrikaner. His father was born in Glasgow, and his mother was of English descent. He was, then, one of those white South Africans whom Jakob would have viewed with icy suspicion, one of those on whom his ancestors had turned their backs as they trekked out of the Cape Colony and into the Highveld a century before. It would have been natural enough for Paton to depict these people as the enemy. They—or at least the party that governed in their name—certainly saw him that way. Although the literary critic Alfred Kazin, one of the few contemporary reviewers unmoved by the book, writes that “Mr. Paton, to put it mildly, is not a dangerous revolutionary,” the years Paton spent under government surveillance, his passport withheld, suggest that he was hardly a political milquetoast. But there is nothing in him of the Jacobin. He was simply a committed Christian with a strong social conscience and a hatred of violence. Paton loves the Afrikaners; he wants to share a country with them, as well as with those whom they so grievously demarcate as inferior. The book is powerful because Paton allows us, in the story of Pieter’s ruination, to watch them kill what is best in themselves.
Too Late the Phalarope paints a richly detailed picture of ordinary life in the grass country, of folkways and foodways, idiomatic phrases and habits of mind. But more powerful still is the evocation of what, in a 1973 interview, Paton explained as “one of the main interests throughout my whole life…the structure and mystery of personality.” The nature of Pieter’s obsession is never pathologized systematically. We are not offered full understanding, but we are made to feel the weight of the social and psychological pressures he experiences and recognize how they aggravate buried memories and present uncertainties.
This vivid but deliberately partial articulation of his internal disintegration is made possible by Paton’s remarkable narrator, Jakob’s sister Sophie. Sophie is unmarried—a fact which she attributes to a deformity, likely a cleft lip—and lives with Jakob and his sweet-natured wife. She is pious and intelligent, tempted to self-pity but mostly disposed to fight the temptation. Devoted to her family, Sophie admits to being fixated on Pieter, whom, she is abashed to confess, she wishes were her son. She knows something of his loneliness and the lifelong currents of shame that roil inside him. She is, she explains, attuned to see the secret things within others:
[B]ecause I am apart, being disfigured, and not like other women, yet because in my heart I am like any other woman, and because I am apart, so living apart and watching I have learned to know the meaning of unnoticed things, of a pulse that beats suddenly, and a glance that moves from here to there because it wishes to rest on some quite other place.
We can accept that such a narrator perceives more deeply than another would. However, that repeated word “apart” is a quiet reminder that other men and women in Sophie’s world endure “apart-ness,” thanks to the terrible system that her people established to segregate the races. Yet though she mentions being a United Party voter, unlike her brother, and therefore a relative moderate on the race issue, Sophie’s imagination never crosses that gulf of separation, or tries to. The native population here, in strong contrast to Paton’s first novel, is opaque to the reader, and this is because they are opaque to the narrator, as to the white community at large. Only in the case of Stephanie do we have more than passing remarks. There, we have seeing but not understanding.
Early in the novel, Sophie relates a harrowing story, a story she tells us has been constantly talked about, though “not before children or servants, not even before people in a room.” A white farmer named Smith impregnated his native housemaid. Abetted by his wife, he killed the girl, mutilated her body to prevent identification, and “sank [it] in the river with weights.” Under investigation, they confessed. The husband was sentenced to be hanged; the wife to a year’s imprisonment. Sophie agrees with the sentences—justifying the leniency of the latter with reference to St. Paul’s dictum that “the husband is the head of the wife”—but tells us, “I grieved for the man in my heart, that did such evil because he was in terror.” The episode clarifies the stakes of Pieter’s situation: The penalty and stigma for violating the Immorality Act are so great that a man might commit an abomination to hide the crime. Pity for the fear Smith endured can temper (not overthrow) Sophie’s urge for justice. But the even greater terror the black maidservant must have undergone is not mentioned.
This is not callousness; just a settled sense that it is none of Sophie’s business to imagine her way into black lives the way she does into white ones. Stephanie is sexually available to Pieter because, as a policeman, he is aware of her precarious situation. Caring for a child and an aged relative without a man to help her, she has repeatedly been imprisoned for making and selling bootleg liquor. Continue getting arrested, she knows, and the state will take away her child. The assignations with Pieter bring her money, not to mention leverage over an important man. Sophie, a member of the local welfare committee, knows the facts of her case (and suspects Pieter’s interest). She concedes Stephanie’s strong maternal instinct. Beyond that, we have only the repeated mentions of what Sophie calls her “strange and secret” smile. That smile may convey irony, sadness, deference, or a brave front. But Sophie never tries to solve the enigma.
As for Pieter, he does not seem really to desire this one woman or women of her ethnicity more generally. There is no hint of love and hardly any of lust. His trysts with her, in a scrubby lot on the edge of town, seem to signify, simultaneously, an assertion of power and an expression of self-hatred. He may be widely admired, but not in the eyes of the man whose approval he still craves, who never understood his “strange son, who had all his father’s will and strength…yet had all the gentleness of a girl, and strange unusual thoughts in his mind.” In spite of his many penitential prayers, Pieter seems to break his society’s most awful taboo because it proves his father right—yes, I am not like you, I am stranger than you dared imagine. Also, perhaps, because it proves him wrong—see how gentle I really am?
The Van Vlaanderens are a prosperous farming family, though Jakob and his wife have retired to the town of Venterspan and Pieter’s younger brother manages the farm. Its name is Buitenverwagting, which means, we are told, “Beyond Expectation,” a gorgeous phrase that captures the wonder of the trekkers who fled the British, fought the Zulu, and emerged “out of the harsh world of rock and stone…[into] the grass country, all green and smiling, and had given to it the names of peace and thankfulness.” It captures more than that, though. Pieter’s crime, and the forbidden desire that motivates it, are beyond the expectation of those fellow countrymen who admire him so sincerely. And the name speaks also to the weight that he has always carried, from the time when he was a boy whose bookishness frustrated his manly father and yet who was never allowed to lapse academically. The regimen seems to have succeeded: Pieter becomes the sort of man whom a nephew esteems above his own father, the sort of man whom other men regard with admiration or at least nervous attention. But it is an overwhelming strain. While his back may be ramrod straight, his spirit is crushed beneath it.
With whom can such a man share his burdens? Pieter longs for someone to talk to. He loves his wife, but she is sexually inhibited and so afraid of the wider world that she will neither read nor speak of the Smith case. He rebuffs Sophie when she presses him. Then a chance comes when he hears the sermon of a young minister newly installed at their church. Pieter listens, transfixed, as the preacher describes how our secret shames have been answered by the gospel of love. But when the young man meets the Van Vlaanderens after the service, he undoes his good work, rhapsodizing over the hero known to rugby-lovers as “the Lion of the North.” Writing afterward, Pieter explains, “[W]hen he came to me outside the church, as a boy comes to a man, calling me the Lion of the North, I knew I could not tell him.”
To tell another person would be to set the thing outside of himself where it can be seen in full and not merely felt. And it would perhaps mean hearing that another, even if only by analogy or through the power of his empathy, could understand how Pieter might feel these things and still be a man worth knowing. But then again, it might not. It might rather mean revealing himself as the profaner, the one who would topple that idol that stands at the center of their lives, the false god of purity—racial purity in particular—erected according to what Sophie calls “the iron law.” To the watching world, Pieter and Jakob alike seem preternaturally able to fulfil the dictates of this harsh god, however we come to recognize that the one is undermined by crippling self-doubt and the other damages the people in his life—his son in particular—by believing he does so. Pieter recalls a time in his younger days when Jakob, amid a group of coarse-talking men, stopped the conversation cold by stating “naturally and simply” that “he had never touched a woman, as a man touches a woman, other than his wife, nor had he ever desired to do so.” Why am I different, Pieter wonders, especially as others treat me with much the same reverence?
Jakob is straightforwardly convinced that such purity is only a matter of will. Later, when formal charges are made against his son and he hears of Pieter’s admission of guilt, his response has the pitiless immediacy of a guillotine. He formally curses Pieter, crosses his name out of the family Bible, and forbids his family to see him. Eight days later, he will be dead, “bowed over the Book of Job.” “He had no answer,” Sophie says, “and sought hungrily in the Book.” Earlier in the novel, he read aloud to his family from Job: “I uttered what I understood not; things too wonderful for me, which I know not.” The passage comes after Job has beheld God in the whirlwind, the point at which his questions are not answered but overwhelmed by a disclosure of sublime mystery. But life had held no mystery for Jakob, who had at one time proclaimed flatly, “[T]he point of living is to serve the Lord your God, and to uphold the honour of your church and language and people.” And Jakob cannot see that his son, too, might be a Job—struck down, cut off, forsaken. Pieter does not have Job’s innocence, but the culpability for his deeds is not solely his own. He suffers for them partly on behalf of those who made the iron law.
Pieter is not left altogether friendless at the end. One of those who stands by him is his police captain, who, though English, is the only man in the community Jakob treats as an equal, so great is his taciturn gravity. The captain’s own son died, in circumstances for which he seems to blame himself. Now he takes Sophie, who will not abandon Pieter, into his house after Jakob expels her. He recognizes what it means to act as the mouthpiece of divine justice:
[H]e stopped, and said to me in a strange and trembling voice, an offender must be punished…I don’t argue about that. But to punish and not to restore, that is the greatest of all offences.
—Is that the sin against the Holy Ghost, I said.
—I don’t know, he said, but I hope not, for I once committed it. But I am resolved never again to commit it.
And I dared to say to him, was that your son?
—Yes, he said. Yes, it was my son.
Jakob, willing to punish but not to restore, understands one side of the double burden. But Paton is more generous toward him than he is toward his son. The biographer Peter Alexander speculates that the “harshness” of Paton’s own father, James, “was to contribute to the portrait of Jakob.” Perhaps. But as Alexander recounts it, James was a petty tyrant, abusive, irascible, and selfish. He was also (like his son) a notably small man in contrast to the towering Jakob. The latter is an altogether larger figure than James in his vices and virtues, as well as his stature. When Jakob’s old head bows down in death over the Scriptures, there are many sins upon it, both as a father and as a leading citizen so dominant in his little corner of South Africa that he can scornfully refer to members of Parliament as his “span of oxen.” But Paton takes pains to show us that he is loved by his family, even by Pieter, that he is capable of warmth and humor. More importantly, the captain himself seems to embody the possibility that even a man like Jakob might, sometimes, be so restored as to become capable of restoration.