Hofmeyr by Alan Paton
Hofmeyr by Alan Paton
Hardcover
Publisher: Oxford University Press, 1964
Used - Very Good. Ex Library book with limited but expected stamps and pastings. The cover has some limited signs of edge and spine wear but the pages are clean, intact and the spine remains undamaged. This book is still in a very good condition and for an ex library book has clearly been well maintained thus far. The book is protected with a new Cellophane cover.
Paton, though he does not scorn historical accuracy or an historian's objectivity, has written what is essentially a novelist's biography. Because be shares with Hofmeyr a slow and sometimes painful growth out of 'white-South-Africanness' into what Smuts called 'racial indifference', he is able to make Hofmeyr's point of view his own. For long sections of the biography, one feels almost that one is inside Hofmeyr's own mind, undergoing his experiences only occasionally does Paton sit back from his subject, and look at his progress from an objective point of view. When be does so, it is not as a godlike Thackeray, but as a man recreating a character, anxious not so much to explain his relation to his age and events, or his influence, as to explain why he was what he was, or why he felt and acted as he did. What was Hofmeyr? First, he was a genius. He matriculated, first in his school, third in the Cape Colony, when be was twelve; a B.A. in Languages at fifteen; awarded a Rhodes Scholarship at fifteen; a B.A. in the Sciences at sixteen; an M.A. in the Classics at seventeen; a biography of his uncle, 'Onze Jan' Hofmeyr, at eighteen; Balliol and a double first in Greats in three years; professor of Classics at the South African School of Mines (later the University of the Witwatersrand) at twenty-two; professor of Greek at the University of Cape Town at twenty-four; Principal of the University College of the Witwatersrand at twenty-four; Administrator of the Transvaal at twenty-nine; and so on until he was Deputy Premier of the Union, second only to Smuts. But be was not a creative genius. He had a 'prodigious ability to make order of any material presented to him, to comprehend it, to analyse it, and to put it together again to remember both it and his own conclusions for future use .. . his powers of memory were so great as to constitute a quality of his genius worthy of independent mention ... he was an administrator of superlative ability. He knew every part of his machine . . . and when he was a Minister, was sometimes in charge of five portfolios besides his own.'
