Ninety years ago, a novella called Park: A Fantastic Story was printed by the Hague and Gill press. It was a beautiful book, printed on handmade grey paper in Eric Gill’s favourite Joanna italic type. But the story was more remarkable than the production.
In one sense, it is a fantasy, a kind of dream episode; in another it is an astonishing take on the relations between black people and white at the time it was written. It starts with the narrator, Mungo Park, walking in the Cotswolds when he hears a birdlike melody that accompanies his footsteps. He continues to walk and is felled by buckshot. He is brought to a hut by a man who seems to be a park keeper. He is black. He and Park communicate through Latin. The man asks him how he knows the language. “Sacra lingua est” (it is a sacred language), Park replies, for he is a priest.
Park is taken to the authorities, examined, and his normal clothes replaced with more beautiful Roman-style clothing. Gradually he finds that the society in which he finds himself is governed by a black aristocracy, with the men of note chiefly priests, archpriests and bishops. There is a black princess who resembles a lady of the ancien régime who regards Park as an interesting curiosity. The prince questions him about his background, and they find common ground when both of them minister as acolytes at Mass on Christmas Eve. The kingdom, Ia, is a cross between Tudor England and Ethiopia, a mixture of oligarchy and theocracy. The black ruling class is sophisticated theologically and highly cultured. Park communicates initially with them in Latin. But there are also interesting modern elements. People at a distance communicate by a form of Zoom, whereby the speakers can see as well as hear each other.
The descendants of the original white inhabitants of the country live a subterranean existence – voluntarily, Park is told. He encounters them, a hideous rodent-like, subhuman species, when he travels by train and they have to be cleared to make way for him and his companion. The parallels with the treatment of black people in, say, the US in Park’s day, are obvious. But whereas in the film Planet of the Apes, an allegory of slavery, the enslavers are apes, here the black ruling class is cultivated and aesthetic – there is an amusing episode where the Reading Room of the British Museum has become a bookshop with wonderful liturgical and theological works. It’s plain that the military maintain order but this isn’t made much of.
As a satire, it’s rather like HG Wells’ A Modern Utopia with more than a little of Gulliver’s Travels. Here it is white people who are the other, though in the Church equality is possible, for the archbishop is white; there is also a remote white farming tribe who are, Park is told, unconscious of their racial inferiority. In the report on Park drawn up by the authorities, they observe that “his knowledge of religion is wide and orthodox. Whatever other learning he possesses, he cannot, without injustice to the subject, be judged by comparison with Bapama standards; but he may safely be described as a cultured man.” The novel concludes enigmatically, with Park awaking to his old life, as if from a dream.
Park was one of John Gray’s two prose works; he was better known as a poet. He was a remarkable individual. He was the son of a carpenter who worked in the Woolwich Arsenal, who remade himself to become a member of the circle of aesthetes and poets of the 1890s, many of them homosexuals, who gravitated around Oscar Wilde. He was widely assumed to be the model for The Picture of Dorian Gray, for he was beautiful as a young man – and indeed he signed more than one letter to Wilde “Dorian” – but he hastily renounced any connection with the book when it became controversial. He was also a Catholic convert who spent the last decades of his life as a priest ministering in Edinburgh.
Park has been examined by Gray’s biographers as evidence of his psychological state but it is more obviously a reflection of his own on race. His sister, a nun, noted he was “deeply interested in the black man [he was a keen anthropologist] and used to say that although he was a white man he was black inside; and he foretold in a general way that the black man would rule.” In the novel, Park is described as black inside, a compliment.
The novel has a reputation as an enigmatic curiosity. Yet its pertinence is obvious for our time, given our preoccupation with questions of race and colonialism. Park now has a startling resonance. It is out of print; the only copy I could find was published by Carcanet in the 1980s. Its style, extensive use of Latin and theological preoccupations might put off some readers, but I’d say it deserves revisiting, re-examining and republishing.
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