For some years Paton's literary reputation rested on two successful novels and a handful of short stories. But the judgment of the future may rank his biographies of Jan Hofmeyr and Archbishop Geoffrey Clayton as well as his own autobiographical writings as a comparable literary achievement. (p. 92)

Paton's Hofmeyr is, essentially, about the moral and intellectual development of a man whose lot was to become deputy prime minister for a time and afterwards to be rejected because of his liberal views on civil rights. Although Paton had been Hofmeyr's friend, and a great admirer of his moral courage, the biography was not persevered with through years of difficulties simply out of friendship or admiration. There were those who thought that "of all the lives waiting to be written, Hofmeyr's was the least promising—dull, virtuous, conventional, with no wine, women, or song." Paton, with a novelist's discernment, realized that on the contrary Hofmeyr's life had "an inner drama as exciting as anything to be found in South Africa." This inner drama might have proved reason enough to undertake the work, but Paton had a more compelling reason. He was convinced that the story of Hofmeyr's life could reveal the true spirit of South Africa in our times more clearly than the biography of any other public figure…. (pp. 95-6)

Judged as a work of scholarship, Paton's biography has deficiencies. He is not meticulous about supplying exact references for source material, and he is overcareful in avoiding references to himself. His own name does not even appear in the index—although this may be a simple oversight. As a literary biography, however, it merits comparison with the best works in this genre. (p. 102)

[Archbishop Clayton's] witness against apartheid is memorialized in Paton's second major biography, Apartheid and the Archbishop: The Life and Times of Geoffrey Clayton, Archbishop of Cape Town…. (p. 104)

It seems likely that many biographers working on a life like that of Archboship Clayton would highlight the church-state conflict and perhaps find parallels in T. S. Eliot's dramatic representation of Archbishop Thomas à Becket in Murder in the Cathedral. Paton deals with the theme of church-state conflict in some degree, but he also gives four additional themes their due emphasis: the strange personality of the archbishop; the spiritual and human affairs of the Church of the Province which he guided; the politics of the times in South Africa; and the incompatibility between the Calvinist Dutch Reformed Churches and other Christian churches in South Africa—particularly the Anglo-Catholic Church of the Province.

This broad historical approach immediately suggests that Paton regarded Apartheid and the Archbishop not as simply representing the drama of one life, but as a sequel in some sense to Hofmeyr, his biography of South Africa's leading liberal statesman of the era before apartheid. Paton's Hofmeyr was … the portrait of a public man striving to act politically in conformity with his Christian conscience. His Apartheid and the Archbishop is a portrait of a spiritual man reluctantly forced by his Christian perspective to act in the political sphere. The common quality that his subjects share, in Paton's representation, is their will to rise above personal limitations, prejudices, and parochial presuppositions and to move, however falteringly, toward the vision of a just multi-racial society. Clayton was installed as Archbishop of Cape Town three weeks before Hofmeyr's death in December 1948, and Paton is explicit in identifying him as the successor to Hofmeyr's moral leadership…. (pp. 105-06)

[Besides] its themes of Church, State, and Race, and the Archbishop's personal pilgrimage, Apartheid and the Archbishop is of interest for what it reveals of the mind of Alan Paton, by affording a fresh perspective on themes consistently present in his work from the beginning…. [One] characteristic of Paton's way of seeing the world is the pervasive allegory of the Pilgrim Way—the coming out from various forms of darkness and ignorance into the light by which the exemplary characters in his works of fiction attempt to become something they were not before. (p. 110)

Paton had earlier taken up the theme of the Pilgrim Way in For You Departed,… his memorial for his first wife, Dorrie Francis. This book was initially published in London as Kontakion for You Departed, a title drawn from the climactic passage: "And this book is done too, this Kontakion for you departed … it is a strange story and now it is done." A kontakion is an early Byzantine liturgical chant, elaborately composed of stanzas and linking refrains, performed (like a Te Deum in the Western church) to celebrate some public event or deliverance. (pp. 110-11)

For You Departed is composed of sixty-nine numbered passages varying in length from a few lines to several pages arranged antiphonally: passages set in the immediate present—at the time of his wife's death—alternate with passages that flash back in time to their earlier life. Dorrie Paton died in 1967, the year the Liberal party was dissolved in the face of the enactment of legislation making it illegal. Consequently Paton's literary method of moving backward and forward in time sets the events of their lives against a worsening climate of race relations in South Africa. (p. 111)

For You Departed was first made public when Paton read substantial portions of it in Rhodes University Theatre on 8 July 1969. Before beginning, he explained: "This document is a very intimate one; nevertheless I will read portions of it, because I think as you get older you don't wish to keep intimate things so close to yourself as you did when you were young."… Gradually, as the work's range of mood, humor, and movement emerged, there were stirrings of laughter at witty anecdotes followed by repeated wholehearted bursts of laughter during the reading of episode "Thirty"—a highly amusing narrative about a family card game at Diepkloof called Reformatory Bridge. The stillness returned as he read of detentions, house arrests, and searchings by the security police, but the sanity of humor pervaded even these somber recitals. (p. 112)

The problem of suffering and its acceptance is also the subject of other works Paton wrote about the same time as For You Departed—works that examine this profound subject in wider contexts than those of personal or South African experience. These works include "Why Suffering,"… ["The Challenge of Fear," and Instrument of Thy Peace, a book of Lenten meditations prompted by the prayer of St. Francis of Assisi: "Lord make me an instrument of Thy peace"]. (p. 113)

It may be said of Paton's writings taken as a whole that their characteristic theme is the giving of thanks for the courage of others. Although deeply touched by personal emotion, For You Departed is less a cry of grief on the occasion of his wife's death than a thanksgiving for her courage in the often painful journey out from a relatively comfortable life among white South Africans in Ixopo and Pietermaritzburg to the unfamiliar prison world of Diepkloof, the uncertain world of a teacher turned writer in middle age, and the fearful world of anti-apartheid politics in the Liberal party. Finally it gives thanks for her courage to endure her final painful illness. (pp. 114-15)

Many of Paton's "Long View" articles are also direct tributes to the courage of others…. Furthermore, his autobiography measures milestones in his journey "Towards the Mountain" by examples of the courage of others. Here again, in Towards the Mountain, we encounter the example of the courageous public lives of Jan Hofmeyr, Alfred Hoernlè, and Archbishop Clayton. But there are examples of courage from more private lives, too … [such as that of] Railton Dent, a college friend of whom Paton says in Towards the Mountain: "He taught me one thing, the theme of which will run right through this book, with undertones (or overtones, I never know which) of victories, defeats, resolutions, betrayals, that life must be used in the service of a cause greater than oneself."… (p. 115)

In Knocking on the Door [editor] Colin Gardner has assembled Alan Paton's shorter writings that were either previously unpublished or had limited local circulation…. Gardner's arrangement enables us to see Paton as a man of consistent vision and integrity who has sought by every available means—as a practical penal reformer; as a novelist, biographer, and poet; and as a public speaker denied conventional political platforms—to convince his fellow South Africans that society has more to gain from freedom freely offered than from freedom denied, with its attendant prohibitions, prison bars, and iron laws. (pp. 119-20)