Parts were written in Stockholm, Trondheim, Oslo, London, and the United States. He had no idea what the rest of the story would be, but it formed itself while he traveled. Paton, no doubt inspired, sat down in his hotel room and wrote the whole first chapter. It was in Norway that he began it, after a friendly stranger had taken him to see the rose window in the cathedral of Trondheim by torchlight. It was during this time that he unexpectedly wrote his first published novel, Cry, the Beloved Country. He worked at Diepkloof for ten years, and though it was certainly a fertile period, at the end of it Paton felt so strongly that he needed a change, that he sold his life insurance policies to finance a prison-study trip that took him to Scandinavia, England, and the United States. Geraniums replaced the barbed wire, the bars were torn down, and soon the feeling in the place changed. It was a penitentiary, with barbed wire and barred cells, and under Hofmeyr's inspiring leadership, Paton transformed it. To his surprise, he was offered a job as principal of Diepkloof Reformatory, a huge prison school for delinquent black boys, on the edge of Johannesburg.
Paton was a great admirer of Hofmeyr, a man who dared to tell his fellow Afrikaners that they must give up "thinking with the blood," and "maintain the essential value of human personality as something independent of race or color." Paton wrote to Hofmeyr and asked him for a job. Paton's initial career was spent teaching in schools for the sons of rich white South Africans, But at 30, when he was teaching in Pietermaritzburg, he suffered a severe attack of enteric fever, and in the time he had to reflect upon his life, he decided that he did not want to spend his life teaching the sons of the rich. He devoted himself to writing poetry once again, and later, in his middle years, he wrote serious essays for liberal South African magazines, much the same way his character, Arthur Jarvis, does in Cry, the Beloved Country.
After graduating, he wrote two novels and then promptly destroyed them. Paton attended college in Pietermaritzburg, where he studied science and wrote poetry in his off-hours. While his mother was a third-generation South African, his father was a Scots Presbyterian who arrived in South Africa just before the Boer War. Education-Maritzburg College B.S., Natal UniversityĪlan Paton, a native son of South Africa, was born in Pietermaritzburg, in the province of Natal, in 1903.Where-Pietermaritzburg, Natal, South Africa.
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