Peter Dreyer

Peter Richard Dreyer (born November 15, 1939) is the author of A Beast in View (London: André Deutsch), The Future of Treason (New York: Ballantine), A Gardener Touched with Genius: The Life of Luther Burbank (New York: Coward, McCann & Geoghegan; rev. ed., Berkeley: University of California Press; new, expanded ed., Santa Rosa, CA: Luther Burbank Home & Gardens), and Martyrs and Fanatics: South Africa and Human Destiny (New York: Simon & Schuster; London: Secker & Warburg). He was born and brought up in South Africa, where he was involved in the anti-apartheid struggle, serving on the Cape Provincial Committee of the Liberal Party, founded and led by Alan Paton, and as secretary of the Western Province Press Association, which published the fortnightly The Citizen (not to be confused with the pro-apartheid tabloid of the same name launched in 1976), which introduced the concept of nonracial democracy in South Africa. At the time, the Liberal Party was the only unsegregated political party in South Africa. The African National Congress (ANC) restricted its membership to black Africans (excluding not only "whites" but "Coloured" and Indian South Africans too), and did not desegregate itself until many years later. Dreyer put forward the idea of nonracialism in a pamphlet titled Against Racial Status and Social Segregation (Claremont, Cape Town, 1958; now very rare, but to be found in the Bodleian Library at Oxford University and the Hoover Library at Stanford University). The Citizen Group also worked to establish nonracial trade unions, resistance to bus apartheid in Cape Town, and a nonracial theater project, which led to a production of Jean Genet's The Blacks. On February 8, 1958, Patrick Duncan launched the Liberal Party fortnightly Contact, with offices on Parliament Street in Cape Town. Dreyer worked closely with Duncan, and in Contact, 1, no. 15, dated August 23, 1958, he published an article about the newly formed nonracial South African Meat Workers Union under the by-line “Contact Special Correspondent.” On the cover of the magazine, Duncan placed the Citizen group slogan “Forward to a South African patriotism based on non-racial democracy”—the first prominent demand for a nonracial answer to apartheid.

Angela van Bengale

Dreyer’s earliest forebear in South Africa was a slave, Angela van Bengale ("of Bengal"; also known as Mooij [Beautiful/Pretty] Ansla), imported there in 1657 and bought by Commander Jan van Riebeeck. Manumitted, she married a German free burgher named Arnoldus Basson, and their great-granddaughter Catharina Maasdorp (1757–86) later married the frontiersman Daniel Ferdinand Immelman (1756–1800), the guide of the Swedish naturalists Carl Peter Thunberg and Anders Sparrman (Linnaeus's star pupils) in the Cape Interior in the late eighteenth century. Peter Dreyer is a direct descendant of Catharina and Daniel Ferdinand, who farmed at “Houd-den-beck” in the Koue Bokkeveld.^[1]

Subsequent career

Peter Dreyer left South Africa in 1962 and subsequently launched and edited Omphalos: A Mediterranean Review in Athens. In 1972, however, he was expelled from Greece by the military junta then in power there and moved to the United States. In New York he was a contributor to The Nation and to Coburn Britton's belletrist magazine Prose. During the 1970s, he was book columnist for San Francisco magazine and a frequent contributor to the San Francisco Review of Books. He has lived in Virginia since 1988 and is writing a novel tentatively titled Isacq Incognito, based on the life and adventures of his forefather Isacq d’Algué, alias Johannes Augustinus Dreyer (1689–1759; grandnephew of the Pietist leader August Hermann Francke), who arrived at the Cape in 1713 as a petty officer on a Dutch East India Company ship, becoming the progenitor in southern Africa of tens of thousands of Dreyers and others living there today. Dreyer is simultaneously at work on a memoir, Isacq d’Algué and His Ilk. The two books are expected to be published in 2016.

A Beast in View

Dreyer's novel A Beast in View (1969), which was banned by the apartheid government of South Africa immediately on publication, was undoubtedly the first work of fiction ever to deal with the controversial subject of fracking. Set in part in an apartheid Greater South Africa, in a hypothetical future, the novel features a scheme to extract oil from shale in the Karoo region by detonating nuclear bombs in the shale bed. This was not just science fiction: the idea was based on an actual proposal by the Continental Oil Company to the United States Atomic Energy Commission, "Project Dragon Trail: The Stimulation of a Natural Gas Reservoir by a Contained Nuclear Explosion," which envisioned setting off a 40-kiloton device in Rio Blanco County, Colorado, with the assistance of the CER Geonuclear Corporation (three 33-kiloton nuclear devices were eventually detonated as a test in 1973 under the rubric Project Rio Blanco). Continental Oil was not alone in the nuclear fracking field: the Standard Oil Company (Indiana) obtained a 1967 patent for the same purpose (U.S. Patent 3,342,257, "In Situ Retorting of Oil Shale Using Nuclear Energy"). In Dreyer's novel, this apocalyptic plan is foiled by guerrillas sent in by an internationally based "League of South African Democrats" (there is no mention in the book of the ANC). Proposals to extract oil and gas by fracking in the Karoo are currently under consideration.

Notes

Martyrs and Fanatics was reviewed in the New Republic by the late Nobelist Nadine Gordimer. Dreyer's exchange with the late Stephen Jay Gould in the New York Times Book Review on the subject of Luther Burbank can be found at nytimes.com. Gould reviewed the first edition of A Gardener Touched with Genius, in the New York Times and trashed it on grounds of Burbank's Lamarckism. When Dreyer responded with a letter to the editor, Gould counterpunched aggressively. Time seems, however, to be proving that Dreyer was right: the epigenetic inheritance of acquired characteristics is now increasingly accepted by scientists.^[2] Moreover, as Dreyer and others have pointed out, Charles Darwin himself was a Lamarckian. The debate still rages.^[3]

The revised and enlarged third edition of A Gardener Touched with Genius: The Life of Luther Burbank by Peter Dreyer is available from http://www.lutherburbank.org/gift-shop/gift-shop-books-booklets

References