NADINE GORDIMER'S NEXT CHAPTER
Author: By David Mehegan, Globe Staff
Date: Tuesday, November 29, 1994
Page: 69
Section: LIVING
CAMBRIDGE -- The scene suggested a dry lecture before a polite audience on
some arcane subject. A small, gray-haired woman approached the lectern in
Harvard's Sanders Theatre, a sheaf of papers in her hands. In the dignified
Victorian ambiance -- ornate stage ceiling, Harvard mottoes behind and aloof
statues at either hand -- she began to speak quietly.
But the words were electric, not dry; the topic was anything but arcane --
courageous fiction in times of injustice -- and when she finished, the
reaction in the crowded hall was more than polite, it was thunderous,
prolonged applause.
For decades a lonesome, marginalized voice in her troubled country, South
African novelist Nadine Gordimer, 71, is attracting rapt audiences wherever
she goes in America. In her current appearances at Harvard, where she is
giving the 1994 Charles Eliot Norton lectures "Writing and Being," at last
month's Boston Globe book festival, at readings in St. Louis, Indianapolis,
Bloomington, Minn., and New York, she has shown the sort of drawing power that
most writers envy.
After 11 novels, nine collections of short stories (more than 100 stories
in all), the Nobel Prize for literature and countless other honors, Gordimer
is at an important turning point in her career. The repression of apartheid
and
the delusions of the color bar, long the leitmotifs of her work, are dead. Yet
she plunges ahead. Her new novel, "None to Accompany Me," wades vigorously
into the turmoil of a new world aborning: exiles returning, old
relational patterns discarded, the world turned upside down.
Amid a busy reading schedule, Gordimer recently gave an interview at her
university-provided apartment near Harvard Square. It's an austere little
place, vaguely '60s-modern, with cement slab interior walls. Ever self-reliant
and practical, concerned that the bronze apartment number cannot be seen, she
has made and stuck on the gate a card with the apartment number marked in
black.
She has the face of a patient small-town librarian: lean and sharp with
intent listening eyes, a reserved fleeting smile that always has a thought
behind it. She is sylphlike -- about 5 feet tall and surely less than 100
pounds. Her manner is gracious, yet one senses she does not happily suffer
fools. She converses the way she moves and writes, with economy and
precision.
If there is a one theme to Gordimer's work -- and the interview -- it is
the way in which the truth insistently makes itself known, cannot be avoided
or denied. Yet in the world of South Africa that she knew, lies were the
foundation.
"You were being taught as a child that it's wrong to tell lies," she says,
"but the whole society was a lie, the life you were living was a lie. The
convent school I went to was for whites only. When I got my pocket money on
Saturday, and I went to the movies, only whites could go. Most important, the
local public library -- I would never have been a writer without it -- was
open only to white people.
"So wasn't this privilege a big lie? There was this enormous lie and all
the little lies that justified it: 'Blacks don't really need the things that
we need.' So the more you grew up in that society, the more you started to
question, the more you fell through one layer of lies to the next. And to
find the bits of truth that were there, you had to dig into yourself, pass
judgment on your parents, on everything that makes your life stable, the very
structure of your life."
A LAND OF LIES
A STORE'S STARK LESSONS
She wrote in a famous 1963 essay, "The Bolter and the Invincible Summer,"
that "learning to write sent me falling, falling through the surface of 'the
South African way of life.' " As she explains it now with a memory, it seems
the falling and the writing reinforced one another.
In Springs, Transvaal, the little mining town where she lived as a child,
there were separate shops for black miners, to keep them out of the town. "My
mother and I would go into them to shop sometimes, and I was curious that the
shopkeepers treated the miners so rudely. The miners would have to point to
what they wanted, and the shopkeepers would take it down and would grab the
money. I was disturbed at the way they were treated, it stuck in my mind. One
of the first of my stories came from that experience "The Defeated" . My way
of dealing with it was to explore it by writing."
She published her first story in a liberal newspaper at age 15. Impatient
with the conventional expectations of a middle-class white girl, however
clever, she left home at 21 and spent one year at the University of
Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, where she encountered the milieu of
intellectuals and artists that made her pursuit of a writing career
irreversible. The 1952 divorce that ended a youthful marriage left her alone
with a daughter, Oriane, who now lives in France. She married Reinhold
Cassirer, an art dealer, in 1954 (he is with her on her US visit) and they
have one son, Hugo, a filmmaker in New York.
'RACISM IS EVIL'
With the rise of the National Party in 1948 and the spreading evils of the
apartheid policy, Gordimer's fiction became more concerned with injustice and
its social underpinnings. Her rejection of apartheid and its lies and
excuses was total and radical. One of her absolutes, she wrote, "is that
racism is evil -- human damnation in the Old Testament sense." Eventually she
became a member of the African National Congress. Two of her novels were
banned for a time and others were subjected to various censorings and
sabotage.
In speaking out as she did, in essays and speeches as well as in her
fiction, she contrasted sharply with the self-satisfied whites who blindly
accepted their privileged position. She could not help herself. Like her
character Rosa Burger, in "Burger's Daughter," she had an illness in South
African terms: "A sickness not to be able to ignore that condition of a
healthy, ordinary life: other people's suffering."
Though marginalized and isolated, she never would leave as many white
intellectuals did, even though for a period in the 1970s the black
consciousness movement threatened her close connections with black writers and
intellectuals. Many of her books contain black characters, and in some books,
such as "July's People" and "None to Accompany Me," the story is partly seen
through black characters' eyes. This drew criticism from young black
intellectuals, which she met with characteristic vigor.
"There was the idea that if you write about someone of a different color,"
she says, "or a different level of society, 'you are stealing our lives.' But
you see, it can't be true of writers; you can't limit a writer like that.
There are things that blacks know about whites that we don't know about
ourselves, that we conceal and don't reveal in our relationships, and the
other way about. We were brushing against one another every day in many
situations, in work situations, in the street and everywhere. It's ignoring
the truth to pretend that I don't know enough about blacks to make a July the
main black character in "July's People", and the same thing applies to blacks.
I've had this discussion with my own comrades among black writers. And in the
last few years, they themselves have been rebelling against these strictures."
A CREATIVE TENSION
Outspoken as she was, still she resisted the kind of activism that would
tear her away from her writing. The tension over this -- manifestly a
creative tension -- is palpable and it emerges in several of the essays in the
nonfiction collection, "The Essential Gesture."
"There are things that I didn't do that I should have done," she says. ''I
should have gone further. There's that selfishness, that tension of saying
I'm a writer and I'm not going to make a really good revolutionary at the
barricades, there will be certain things I will do, there will be limits set
by the fact that I want to go on doing my own work. Of course these limits
got stretched and stretched as time went by, so I became more and more
involved in the process of struggle. I'm certainly glad that I did."
If those who went further, she points out, took a higher moral ground, they
also paid a price in terms of their own real work. "When a country is in
desperate straits, and a man like Vaclav Havel has been prominent, as Gunter
Grass was after the war in Germany, he becomes pushed into being a politician.
But Havel wasn't all that successful as a politician, so you have to do what
you know how to do, which is to write.
"But of course, you still have great admiration that Havel did what
Jean-Paul Sartre said you should do but never did, which was to stop writing
and to act. Jean-Paul Sartre, all he ever did was sell L'Humanite on the
street corner, but Havel went to prison, he did everything for his country."
SEEING BOTH SIDES
That "but of course," that way of seeing both sides of a question, shading
and qualifying her judgments, reflects a truth-seeking trait that runs
throughout Gordimer's fiction. She has a particularity in her way of
describing a person or scene, of closely planing emotional, moral or
relational facts, that is almost Jamesian. It takes the full length of "None
to Accompany Me" for her to craft Vera Stark, the main character, and on the
last page we are still learning about her.
Truth in Gordimer's world requires patient accretion of nuances. "I've
always thought, and I think you see it in my writing, that it is the
significance of detail wherein the truth lies," she says. "These are invisible
connections, invisible stitches, that really connect the narrative in a way
that chronology and any other method doesn't do."
Her characters are subtle and slippery, never tendentious mouthpieces for
high-minded principles. Evil is evil, but with real human beings there are
always mysteries of motivation and action. Even those nasty shopkeepers of
her childhood, she points out, "were immigrants themselves, mostly Jews from
Russia and Lithuania, who had suffered oppression, pogroms." For them, she
said, mistreating the black miners "was like kicking the cat."
TROUBLESOME TRUTHS
This too is a matter of facing the truth, any truth. She cites Chinua
Achebe, the subject of one of her Norton lectures, whose early books she calls
''a strong cry against colonialism." Yet he was not afraid in later work to
show how, after the colonial rulers left, some of their African successors
''became exploitive, how some became absolute rogues." She describes a scene
in Achebe's "Anthills of the Savannah," in which a crowd watching a public
hanging of a political victim jeers the condemned.
"This is a kind of judgment on the ordinary people," she says, "and that's
a very difficult thing for you to make, to say that the masses, the people,
have become brutal and that they enjoy this. But he does it so fearlessly that
he brings into it the other factor without being didactic: that there are
always dark tendencies in us, tendencies toward cruelty, and these can be
encouraged by the kind of leadership that you have. Think of what is happening
in Bosnia. Isn't it absolutely terrible? The mindless,
nightmarish cruelty. You ask yourself 'Why? Why?' " -- her eyes flash as she
says these words -- "and a writer musn't be afraid to do this."
REBIRTH OF WRITING
She has never been afraid, it seems, but in the new South Africa, her work
will not require the same kind of courage. She is emphatic that the end of
apartheid is not the end of literature for her. "I see a tremendous kind of
opening out of themes that will come to people to write about," she says.
''The end of apartheid was not the end of life, it was the beginning, the
freeing of all sorts of forms of life."
"In 'None to Accompany Me,' " says Stephen Clingman of the University of
Massachusetts at Amherst, "I was struck by the somber mood. It had to do with
old age, with the recognition that the death of an older society means a
rebirth but also the death of old identity. She is a writer in relation to
history. There is a consciousness of history in her work, not as a sense of
the past but of the present as it evolves in individuals."
Her public life is not over. She has been asked to join in a national
reconstruction program for literacy. "The reconstruction is the next stage of
the freedom struggle, and this is what is wonderful about it: It breaks that
gap between the end of apartheid and a new life. I can't say no; it's a duty,
almost like a military duty."
What about her private life as a writer? She answers that she has
maintained it through all the years of apartheid, and is not about to lose it
now. Her last Norton lecture is Dec. 5. What will she do when she returns
home? Candid as always, she says, "I don't know. I'm empty at the moment. I
am free, in a way, and waiting to see what I will do next."
SPOWER;11/28 CAWLEY;11/29,21:32 GORDRO29
|
