Tag: Stuart Cloete

Congo Song, by Stuart Cloete – 1952 (1943) [George Mayers]

My previous post for Congo Song, from November of 2016, shows the 1943 (first) edition of Stuart Cloete’s novel. 

Notably different is the cover of this – 1952 – edition of the work:  The cover art of the first edition is a simple, very colorful  and somewhat symbolic composition probably done using an airbrush.  However, the cover art of this Popular Giant edition is as suggestive as it is direct (albeit tame by today’s standards), while the blurb on the book’s back cover luridly describes the novel’s plot.   

As for the un-named gorilla, well, he does looks rather contemplative.

This is most unlike the book’s first edition, which features cover art that is simple, and appealing in that simplicity, while the back cover merely presents Cloete’s biography. 

Congo Song, by Stuart Cloete – 1943 [Unknown Artist]

Lovely art, which an unknown artist probably created with an airbrush, illustrates the cover of this first edition of Stuart Cloete’s Congo Song.  The art depicts three elements central to the novel: The face of Olga le Blanc, the silhouette of her “tame gorilla” (? – !), and, a tropical sunset.  All rather different from the cover of the 1952 edition, which leaves less to the imagination…

congo-song-stuart-cloete-1943-1_edited-2Channel went back over his life in his mind.
He thought of the things he had done…the things he had not done.
There were always regrets at the things that had ended before their time.
There was regret, too, at the loss of pain that was almost pleasure,
at the pleasure that was almost pain.
For many years these regrets had come back continually at the sight of a shop,
a restaurant,
a street,
the name of a certain dish on a menu,
a word found in a book, at hazard, as you turned the page;
at a song,
at a bar of music,
at the turn of some woman’s head in the street,
at the color of a dress or the sound of a voice.
All this because it was not done,
because it had never been finished one way or the other,
and your heart had been left dangling like a puppet on a string.

congo-song-stuart-cloete-1943-2He thought of his own father;
he remembered him singing him to sleep,
walking up and down,
holding him in his arms.
He remembered him swimming with him sitting on his back,
his legs about his neck, his hands in his hair.
He remembered riding in the front of his saddle.
His father must have had similar memories of his father;
and his father of his father, and so on,
an interminable chain;
each generation tending to repeat stories that they remembered
from their own childhood…
fairy tales, folklore,
superstitions that came down like this by word of mouth
from the ancient past, were absorbed in the mothers’ milk,
transmitted by nurses, grooms, servants.
His father had been born in 1844.
His grandfather had been a boy at the time of Waterloo.
And it went on like that, back into the past,
each life overlapping another life, as tiles overlapped each other on a roof.
The more you saw of life,
the stranger was its variety and differentiation.

– Stuart Cloete