Medicine and letters | 8 April 2006

The most beautiful book to come out of South Africa, at least that is known to me, is Pauline Smith’s The Little Karoo. It was published in 1925, when the racial question (as it was then called) concerned the relations of Boer to Briton. The blacks in those days were considered to have mere walk-on parts in the drama of history.

Pauline Smith was a timid soul who became a protégée of Arnold Bennett. Self-advertisement had not yet become the greatest literary virtue, and her collection of eight tragic stories about the inhabitants of the Little Karoo, a sparsely populated arid area of Cape Province inhabited by simple Boers with Old Testament ways, was widely praised. The emotions of her characters were, of course, all the deeper for not being openly expressed.

She herself grew up in the Little Karoo, where her father was a (or perhaps I should say the) doctor. It is not surprising, then, that fatal illness plays a large part in her stories. For example, in ‘The Pastor’s Daughter’ the mother tries to persuade her daughter (the narrator) not to leave the parental home to marry her loved one. ‘My mother undid her slip and pulled down her chemise. And I knew then what it was she hid there. My mother said, “Look, Niccoline!” But I could not look, and she said again, “Niccoline, in six months I shall be dead.”’

How finely judged this is, how much better the restraint conveys the horror and the pity of it than a literal-minded description of a fungating carcinoma would! In a few years, maybe, when ideological vulgarity has transformed all men’s souls, no one will be left who understands the value of the implicit.