Books: Is Love a Bridge?

THE SEED AND THE SOWER by Laurens van der Post. 256 pages. William Morrow. $4.50.

South Africa-born Author Laurens van der Post has spent half a lifetime trying to prove to himself that what Conrad took to be the heart of darkness contains, in reality, the roots of heaven.

His most notable books—The Heart of the Hunter and The Lost World of the Kalahari—were eloquent nonfiction accounts of the African Bushmen who, like other primitive peoples, Van der Post believes, are subconsciously in tune with a healing universal human memory. Now, in an episodic novel (really three linked short stories) Van der Post tries to descry signs of an ancient cosmic harmony at work in the lives of three modern men in wartime.

Prison Torments. The incidents are powerfully compressed. In one, a British colonel encounters a Japanese sergeant who had tormented him in prison camp and now is about to be put to death by a war crimes tribunal. Understanding the sergeant, and sympathizing with him the colonel can yet not break with his own tradition to offer a physical gesture of forgiveness. Brooding on the failure, he sees it as a betrayal not only of his own deepest human urge but of life’s universal aim. In another story, Van der Post explores the betrayal of a humpbacked boy by his handsome brother, not dramatically but in a subtle and outwardly justifiable withdrawal from him that only the betrayer perceives.

Describing such things as Japanese prison camps, boyhood in South Africa, the last-ditch efforts of Commonwealth forces to delay the fall of the Netherlands East Indies, Author Van der Post writes with the taciturn authority of someone who has lived it all himself. But neither the events themselves nor the author’s occasionally overwrought eloquence will bear the weight of cosmic significance he tries to attach to them. Violent storms, for example, are always fraught with high meaning—the most absurd occurring during a brief love affair. When the thunder breaks at the climactic moment, Van der Post writes, “Never, Lawrence said, had he heard so commanding and holy a sound, as if it were the authentic voice of life itself exhorting them to obey.”

Haunting Fragments. Freudian critics would die laughing (not a bad thing, perhaps) at Van der Post’s private symbolism (the sword, for example, he feels, represents man’s will to strive toward knowledge). Nevertheless, Van der Post’s haunting fragments of life ring with the passionate inquiry of a man desperately trying to make sense out of what has happened to him. Below the cloudy rhetoric lies a romantic moral, obvious but hard won for anyone who, as Van der Post explains, has been “trained in a school of life which regarded all natural emotion with suspicion.” The urge of the heart to kindness must be heeded at all costs.