The Books: “The Story Of An African Farm” (Olive Schreiner)

Daily Book Excerpt: Adult fiction:

The Story of an African Farm, by Olive Schreiner

Published in 1883 to much acclaim and controversy, The Story of an African Farm has a bland title, but an absolutely radical outlook and structure. It’s hard to describe this book – it was quite ahead of its time in many ways, yet it also fits in perfectly with the “novels of ideas” that were so in vogue at the time. It’s a big book. It challenges your brain. Olive Schreiner was a South African, a feminist, a radical, influenced by Emerson, John Stuart Mill – their influences can be felt in the book. Her ideas on sexual equality, equal rights in general, religion, politics, economics – it’s all in the book. Yet it’s not a bore. It’s a fascinating read. It doesn’t have a typical format – we jump around in time. Years pass in between paragraphs. There are long sections of intellectual discussions (reminiscent of Joyce’s devices in some of his books – like the religious retreat in chapter 3 of Portrait of the Artist – excerpt here, with the sermon that goes on for 20 pages) – where Olive Schreiner sets forth her main concerns. It is not a realistic book. It is a book of ideas. People embody types and new ideas – so much so that feminists at the time, and political thinkers, took up Lyndall (for example) as either an ideal of the New Woman, or a warning of the downfall of society. Olive Schreiner was a true radical. Her vision of equality included a new type of man as well – the modern man, the open-minded New Man. The book was published in 2 volumes, and was a smash hit. It made her name.

I’m perhaps making the book sound rather dry – but it’s not that at all. It’s a juicy thought-provoking book – and it’s too bad it’s not taught in high schools, because the main characters are kids – and much of the book has to do with seeing the world through the eyes of a kid – There are class issues here as well, issues of work and God and family and parental expectations. A man shows up on the farm one day, from seemingly out of nowhere. His name is Bonaparte Blenkins. He’s Irish, if I am remembering correctly – and it’s been years since I’ve read it, but Blenkins is your basic conman, only very few people see through him. He is allowed to insinuate himself into the life of the farm, and he brings about ruin whereever he goes. The main characters in the story are Waldo and Lyndall. They are not brother and sister, but they are kindred spirits, two halves of the same coin. He’s the practical son of the hired man, she the intellectual young daughter of the main house, they complement one another, even as they argue out their differences. Lyndall is a young girl, but she already can sense what marriage will have in store for her, and she is totally not down with that. Marriage depends upon the submission of the woman, and she is not having any of that. Lyndall’s experiences throughout the book are quite shocking, seen in the tenor of the time, but she struck a huge chord in readers. Olive Schreiner was bombarded with letters. Lyndall feels trapped, already, in the role set out for her by society (much of what she says and feels comes from John Stuart Mill’s essay On the Subjection of Women – a huge influence on Schreiner’s thoughts).

I first picked up The Story of an African Farm after reading Lucy Maud Montgomery’s journals (quote here) – it was one of her favorite books. Not so much for its ideas, perhaps, but for its accurate and specific portrait of childhood. She, of course, went on to be a master at evoking childhood, through all of her books – and Olive Schreiner, in describing the games and conversations and concerns of Lyndall and Waldo, as young people, was showing Lucy Maud the way. To children, their questions about God or love or the future or death are not silly, or precocious … they are completely serious. Lucy Maud often included in her books sections where kids go off the deep end in terms of their passion – like Marigold (excerpt here) deciding she wanted to be a missionary, and basically fasting, and praying on her knees for hours on end, until she finally makes herself ill. Like Anne playing “The Lady of the Lake” with such commitment that she is stranded in the middle of the river, with no way to get out, ruining the neighbor’s boat. Or Anne (excerpt here) going on and on and on to Marilla about how she didn’t like to memorize prayers, it seemed totally wrong to her … she would prefer to walk out into the woods and just feel a prayer. Marilla is, of course, shocked – but Anne’s point is made (or Lucy Maud’s point is made, through the mouthpiece of her 11 year old heroine). Anne has a point. She actually has thought about God, and who he is, and what kind of relationship she wanted to have with him – not in any scholarly way, or intellectual – it’s more of a feeling, an intuition, and she speaks from her own (albeit limited) experience. You can really feel the influence of Olive Schreiner in Lucy Maud Montgomery’s books. Not so much the radical feminism, or the attempt at sexual equality (sex outside of marriage, all that) – but the view that childhood was a vast three-dimensional world, just as serious and interesting as the adult world. Perhaps even more so because children still question things, they ask “Why?”, they don’t blindly accept things – they have to find it out themselves.

Here’s an excerpt – from the day Bonaparte Blenkins appears on the farm. It gives a sense of the early parts of the book – the later parts get much more philosophical, and intellectual … but here, Lyndall and Waldo are young kids, maybe in their early teens. Waldo, if I am remembering correctly, is the son of the long-time hired man on the farm. These kids also have grown up in a world of intense (and stifling) faith. Questioning it is not an option. But Waldo does. He has a horrible moment one night when he realizes that he loves Jesus but he hates God. These thoughts are beyond the pale, in his world. He’s tormented. There’s something of the visionary in Waldo, even though his imaginings are usually pretty awful. The physical world and objects comes across to him as sentient beings – the whole book opens with Waldo listening to a clock tick through the night, and seeing visions of ranks of people, throughout all of time, strolling off to their death. You can see here, in the excerpt below, his fascinating with the real, and what it might be trying to tell him. The answers of the little Christian girl (“God made it God did it, don’t ask why, He just did) are completely unsatisfactory.

Lyndall and Em sit outside at the farm, and Waldo approaches. He has the news that a man has arrived. On a rock behind them are paintings of the Bushmen.

Again, I feel like I’m making this book sound dry. As you can see from the prose below, it is not at all. I love the book.

More on Olive Schreiner, a fascinating woman (and a very good writer) here.

EXCERPT FROM The Story of an African Farm, by Olive Schreiner

‘What have you been doing to-day?’ asked Lyndal, lifting her eyes to his face.

‘Looking after ewes and lambs below the dam. Here!’ he said, holding out his hand awkwardly, ‘I brought them for you.’

There were a few green blades of tender grass.

‘Where did you get them?’

‘On the dam wall.’

She fastened them beside the leaf on her blue pinafore.

‘They look nice there,’ said the boy, awkwardly rubbing his great hands and watching her.

‘Yes, but the pinafore spoils it all; it is not pretty.’

He looked at it closely.

‘Yes, the squares are ugly; but it looks nice upon you – beautiful.’

He now stood silent before them, his great hands hanging loosely at either side.

‘Someone has come to-day,’ he mumbled out suddenly, when the idea struck him.

‘Who?’ asked both girls.

‘An Englishman on foot.’

‘What does he look like?’ asked Em.

‘I did not notice; but he has a very large nose,’ said the boy slowly. ‘He asked the way to the house.’

‘Didn’t he tell you his name?’

‘Yes – Bonaparte Blenkins.’

‘Bonaparte!’ said Em, ‘why that is like the reel Hottentot Hans plays on the violin —

‘ “Bonaparte, Bonaparte, my wife is sick;
In the middle of the week, but Sundays not,
I give her rice and beans for soup” —

It is a funny name.’

‘There was a living man called Bonaparte once,’ said she of the great eyes.

‘Ah, yes, I know,’ said Em – ‘the poor prophet whom the lions ate. I am always so sorry for him.’

Her companion cast a quiet glance upon her.

‘He was the greatest man who ever lived,’ she said, ‘the man I like best.’

‘And what did he do?’ asked Em, conscious that she had made a mistake, and that her prophet was not the man.

‘He was one man, only one,’ said her little companion slowly, ‘yet all the people in the world feared him. He was not born great, he was common as we are; yet he was master of the world at last. Once he was only a little child, then he was a lieutenant, then he was a general, then he was an emperor. When he said a thing to himself he never forgot it. He waited, and waited, and waited, and it came at last.’

‘He must have been very happy,’ said Em.

‘I do not know,’ said Lyndall; ‘but he had what he said he would have, and that is better than being happy. He was their master, and all the people were white with fear of him. They joined together to fight him. He was one and they were many, and they got him down at last. They were like the wild cats when their teeth are fast in a great dog, like cowardly wild cats,’ said the child, ‘they would not let him go. They were many; he was only one. They sent him to an island in the sea, a lonely island, and kept him there fast. He was one man, and they were many, and they were terrified of him. It was glorious!’ said the child.

‘And what then?’ said Em.

‘Then he was alone there in that island, with men to watch him always,’ said her companion, slowly and quietly, ‘and in the long, lonely nights he used to lie awake and think of the things he had done in the old days, and the things he would do if they let him go again. In the day when he walked near the shore it seemed to him that the sea all around him was a cold chain about his body pressing him to death.’

‘And then?’ said Em, much interested.

‘He died there in that island; he never got away.’

‘It is rather a nice store,’ said Em; ‘but the end is sad.’

‘It is a terrible, hateful ending,’ said the little teller of the story, leaning forward on her folded arms; ‘and the worst is, it is true. I have noticed,’ added the child very deliberately, ‘that it is only the made-up stories that end nicely; the true ones all end so.’

As she spoke the boy’s dark, heavy eyes rested on her face.

‘You have read it, have you not?’

He nodded. ‘Yes; but the brown history tells only what he did, not what he thought.’

‘It was in the brown history that I read of him,’ said the girl; ‘but I know what he thought. Books do not tell everything.’

‘No,’ said the boy, slowly drawing nearer to her and sitting down at her feet. ‘What you want to know they never tell.’

Then the children fell into silence, till Doss, the dog, growing uneasy at its long continuance, sniffed at one and the other, and his master broke forth suddenly –

‘If they could talk, if they could tell us now!’ he said, moving his hand out over the surrounding objects – ‘then we would know something. This “kopje”, if it could tell us how it came here! The “Physical Geography” says,’ he went on most rapidly and confusedly, ‘that what are dry lands now were once lakes; and what I think is this – these low hills were once the shores of a lake; this “kopje” is some of the stones that were at the bottom, rolled together by the water. But there is this – how did the water come to make one heap here alone, in the centre of the plain?’ It was a ponderous question; no one volunteered an answer. ‘When I was little,’ said the boy, ‘I always looked at it and wondered, and I thought a great giant was buried under it. Now I know the water must have done it; but how? It is very wonderful. Did one little stone come first, and stopped the others as they rolled?’ said the boy, with earnestness, in a low voice, more as speaking to himself than to them.

‘Oh, Waldo, God put the little “kopje” here,’ said Em with solemnity.

‘But how did he put it here?’

‘By wanting.’

‘But how did the wanting bring it here?’

‘Because it did.’

The last words were uttered with the air of one who produces a clinching argument. What effect it had on the questioner was not evident, for he made no reply, and turned away from her.

Drawing closer to Lyndall’s feet, he said, after a while, in a low voice,

‘Lyndall, has it never seemed to you that the stones were talking to you? Sometimes,’ he added, in a yet lower tone, ‘I lie under there with my sheep, and it seems that the stones are really speaking – speaking of the old things, of the time when the strange fishes and animals lived that are turned into stone now, and the lakes were here; and then of the time when the little Bushmen lived here, so small and so ugly, and used to sleep in the wild dog holes, and in the “sloots”, and eat snakes, and shot the bucks with their poisoned arrows. It was one of them, one of these old wild Bushmen, that painted those,’ said the boy, nodding towards the pictures – ‘one who was different from the rest. He did not know why, but he wanted to make something, so he made these. He worked hard, very hard, to find the juice to make the paint; and then he fond this place where the rocks hang over, and he painted them. To us they are only strange things, that make us laugh, but to him they were very beautiful.’

The children had turned round and looked at the pictures.

‘He used to kneel here naked, painting, painting, painting, and he wondered at the things he made himself,’ said the boy, rising and moving his hand in deep excitement. ‘Now the Boers have shot them all, so that we never see a little yellow face peeping out among the stones.’ He paused, a dreamy look coming over his face. ‘And the wild bucks have gone, and those days, and we are here. But we will be gone soon, and only the stones will lie on here, looking at everything like they look now. I know that it is I who am thinking,’ the fellow added slowly, ‘but it seems as though it were they who are talking. Has it never seemed so to you, Lyndall?’

‘No, it never seems so to me,’ she answered.

The sun had dipped now below the hills, and the boy suddenly remembering the ewes and lambs, started to his feet.

‘Let us also go to the house and see who has come,’ said Em, as the boy shuffled away to rejoin his flock, while Doss ran at his heels, snapping at the ends of the torn trousers as they fluttered in the wind.