1949-2015
South Africa’s pre-eminent literary biographer, Peter Alexander has died in Sydney, Australia at the age of 65. Alexander was based at the University of New South Wales since 1978. He is the author of Alan Paton: a Biography published by Oxford University Press in 1994.
Alexander was born on 24 July 1949 in Grahamstown, where his father was an Anglican priest. He matriculated from Jeppe High School for Boys in Johannesburg. After studying literature at the University of Witwatersrand, where his lecturer was Paton’s son Jonathan, and Leeds University, he went to Cambridge, where he met his wife-to-be, Christine.
It was while researching a thesis for a PhD at Cambridge University on the poet Roy Campbell in 1974, Alexander met Alan Paton, the internationally acclaimed author of Cry, the Beloved Country.
According to Alan Paton, ‘The amount of effort and concentration required in writing a biography is many times greater than that required for an autobiography’ (Alexander, 395).A biographer being confined to fact must suppress his imagination, intuition and emotion and confine his creativity to expression and composition. And it requires great skill to turn fact into interesting narrative. So when a biography succeeds, it is indeed a remarkable piece of work as is Peter F. Alexander’s Alan Paton: a Biography.
Alexander gives a holistic picture of a human being in Alan Paton: a Biography with strengths and weaknesses who dedicated his life to bringing about transformation in South Africa. He was born into a racist society and remained ignorant of its ethos and his own conditioning until he became a young adult. It is still difficult for most people to understand that living in a racist society you become a racist. It does not matter whether you are black or white, your life is structured by the system in which you live because you abide by its norms and values whether you agree with them or not. Young Paton was fortunate to meet and work with many people who challenged his understanding of the South African situation and by the time he was in his thirties he was actively involved in denouncing its injustices. His book Cry, the Beloved Country, published in 1948, the year in which the Nationalist Party came into power, brought worldwide focus on racism in South Africa and helped to power the efforts of the liberation movements.
Alexander in his acknowledgements in Alan Paton: a Biography pays tribute to the motivation of the many friends and Paton family members who contributed to the making of this book. He writes ‘every individual was eager to throw a stone upon the grave of a departed Hero, and thus to share in the pious office of erecting an honourable monument to his [Alan Paton’s] memory’. Alexander’s greatest debt is to Paton’s widow, Mrs Anne Paton, who not only gave permission for Alexander to see and quote all of the Paton material of which she is the copyright-holder, but repeatedly welcomed him to her home, submitted to days of questioning, allowed Alexander to read the typescript of Mrs Paton’s then-unpublished book Some Sort of a Job: My Life with Alan Paton.
Alexander is survived by his wife Christine and their son Roland.