WHERE BLACK MEETS WHITE, GORDIMER TELLS WHAT SHE SEES AS
THE TRUTH

Author: By Christina Robb, Globe Staff

Date: Thursday, October 10, 1991
Page: 90
Section: LIVING

Gordimer is the first woman to win the Nobel Prize for Literature in 25 years and one of the few mothers who have achieved recognized greatness in writing. When Gordimer was 5 and first going to a segregated library in the little mining town of Springs, South Africa, in 1928, Virginia Woolf was delivering "A Room of One's Own" as a college lecture in Cambridge, England, and remarking that having children and being a writer seemed mutually exclusive for women, though of course not for men. Yesterday, Gordimer said that she always took care of her children herself but that like Virginia Woolf -- and Eudora Welty and Colette -- she always had domestic help while she was working as a writer. And she said she faced her choices about mothering and writing with a determination that was completely born of her passion to write.

For anyone, man or woman, "there are obstacles to writing because writing is not taken seriously as work. People resent the time that you need to yourself," Gordimer said. She grew up in an era when education was often saved for boys; and for girls, at the end of high school, "there was time to be filled in before you got married and had babies," she said.

Gordimer ended her brief first marriage when she was in her late 20s. ''There was a time in my life when I was divorced with a 10-month-old child and no money. And all my friends said to me, 'You've just got to forget about writing for a while. You can't live on the odd book review or story,' " she recalled. Her friends told her the obvious place to look for work was advertising, because she didn't have a college degree and wasn't trained for anything else, she said.

"I was very obstinate. I just had the feeling that if I got into writing advertising copy, I was probably never going to get out of it. It was probably the only sensible decision I made at that time," but everyone she knew thought it made her a bad mother, she said. "Everybody was saying, you know, 'You're crazy' -- or 'irresponsible. You've got a child,' " the new Nobel Laureate said.

Later, Gordimer and her second husband, Reinhold Cassirer, an art dealer, had a son. "Because our children need us when they're little and we don't have time to write," motherhood is a disadvantage for writers for a time, Gordimer said. "But it's also a tremendous experience that men don't have, so I think it's a plus."

Gordimer was on a lecture tour in the United States when her prize was announced last week, and her tour's culmination here was a triumph accompanied by standing ovations wherever she appeared. She said she has learned from phone calls home that both Nelson Mandela, president of the African National Congress, and F.W. de Klerk, president of South Africa, have sent her congratulatory messages.

"The one from Nelson I knew would come, but the other was a surprise," Gordimer said with a wry smile at a press conference yesterday.

The writer, who is 67 and has been publishing fiction in South Africa since she was 15, is a member of the African National Congress and a founder of the mostly black Congress of South African Writers. She took the occasion to say she thought the United States should continue to apply economic sanctions to South Africa until apartheid is truly ended in her country. And in a public dialogue at Amherst College, she spoke with the Kenyan writer Ngugi wa Thiong'o, who is teaching at Amherst and Smith colleges this fall, about the post-apartheid future of African culture and African writing in indigenous languages.

So small, at 5 feet, that the lectern and microphone almost completely obscured her as she delivered the annual Troy lecture to the packed UMass Student Union ballroom Tuesday night, Gordimer carried a powerful message. She spoke, in her clipped, slightly husky voice, as a woman who has fearlessly and yet also undogmatically allowed politics to crawl into bed with her fiction, to use her own metaphor, as it has crawled into bed with her nation's culture. Speaking from the experience of having three of her 22 books banned in South Africa, she observed that both overt and subtle political censorship generally outlast moral censorship.

And yet later in her lecture and also in an interview yesterday, she argued for the critical importance of giving politics a natural place in fiction rather than simply propagandizing in fiction.

"As a citizen, a South African actively opposed to racism all my life, in my conduct and my actions I have submitted myself, voluntarily, to the discipline of the liberation movement." She has gone where her political fellows asked her to go, and openly opposed apartheid on public platforms, she said.

But in her novels and short stories -- often set at the meeting points between black and white that apartheid has politicized so completely in South Africa -- she has instead simply told what she saw as the truth, on nobody's say-so but her own, because that's what freedom is.

''The transformation of reality should never belong to any establishment," as she put it Tuesday night, but should be the special care of individual
artists.

For Gordimer, an introvert who never tells or shows anybody, including her husband and her editor, what she's working on until it's finished, the hard part has been the political activism, she said. But without it, "I couldn't have retained my self-respect or been at peace with myself" in South Africa. The reward has been knowing the "extraordinary people" who are in the movement with her, she said.

On the other hand, making political speeches but keeping propaganda out of her fiction is "quite easy to balance," she said. She has fought for freedom in her civic life, and been free in her writing.

ROBB ;10/09 NKELLY;10/10,15:34 GORDIM10