‘For Who Can Stop the Heart from Breaking?’
PATON, Alan. Cry the Beloved Country: A Story of Comfort in Desolation. London: Jonathan Cape. 1948.
8vo. Publisher’s oatmeal cloth lettered in red to front board and spine, illustrated dust-jacket with the printed price of 9s. 6d to front flap, tail-edge untrimmed; pp. 296, [3 (blank)]; slight wear to extremities of jacket with short closed tear to rear fold (c. 15 mm) and to foot of spine (c. 25 mm), spine lightly sunned with a few small marks and slight fraying at head, minute burnhole to front flap touching a single character (also visible to front pastedown and free endpaper), two small pieces of cellotape to reverse of jacket, pushing to spine ends, top-edge slightly dusty; a very good copy in like jacket; contemporary ‘Shuter and Shooter’ of Pietermaritzburg bookseller’s label to pastedown (see below).
First UK edition, first impression of Alan Paton’s landmark novel, published in the same year apartheid became an official policy in South Africa. This copy has been signed and dated by the author, most likely in his hometown of Pietermaritzburg.
The UK edition was narrowly preceded by the US edition (New York, Charles Scribner’s Sons). Cry, the Beloved Country follows Reverend Stephen Kumalo who leaves rural Natal for Johannesburg in search of his sister and his son, Absalom. There, he discovers that Absalom has murdered the white farmer and advocate for racial equality Arthur Jarvis in a robbery gone wrong. Through this tragedy and those that follow, Paton examines the racial injustice and poverty that apartheid would intensify.
Paton worked as a director at a youth detention centre for Black South Africans in Diepkloof from 1935. The institution had previously been governed with armed guards and severe discipline, but he encouraged a culture of kindness and forgiveness, dramatically reducing the number of escapees. He began Cry, the Beloved Country in Norway, and he recalls in his autobiography that he opened by writing about ‘the hills and valleys and mountains’ of South Africa, but realised the ‘story was to be not so much about the beauties of the land, but about its men and women’ (Towards the Mountain, p. 268).
Although the novel is undoubtedly rooted in the political realities of the eve of apartheid, Paton maintained that ‘above all [he] tried to make a story’. (ibid., p. 273).
This signed copy bears the contemporary ticket of the booksellers and publishers Shuter & Shooter in Paton’s hometown of Pietermaritzburg. In 1957 Shuter & Shooter would publish a Zulu translation of Cry, the Beloved Country (Lafa Elihle Kakhulu: Ibhalwe), as well as a Tsonga translation (Rila, Tiko Ro Rhandzeka Swonghasi: Ntsheketo wa Mbuwetelo Exivundzeni) in 1998.
See Paton, Towards the Mountain: an Autobiography (1986).
SKU: 2124504