Nadine Gordimer: Conscience of South Africa

NEW YORK —  This interview was conducted when Nadine Gordimer visited New York City earlier this year for the annual conference of PEN, the international writers’ organization of which she is a vice president.

“Right from the beginning,” South African writer Nadine Gordimer said, “I used my own background. Everything that I wrote was related to what I knew.” For nearly half a century, since she began writing in childhood, Gordimer’s fiction has meticulously delineated the many different realities of her white-dominated, multi-ethnic land.

In nine novels and nearly as many collections of stories, she has made palpable the pernicious, all-pervasive result of her country’s race laws, which in her view not only deny basic rights to the majority of its inhabitants, but poison all human relationships and make it impossible for even basically decent members of the ruling white race to live decently. As South African political and social conditions have worsened, Gordimer’s writing has taken on an urgency approaching desperation; her most recent novel, “July’s People” (1981), presented a frightening picture of interracial war in the near future.

Fighting Apartheid

Despite the opportunity to emigrate, and to live and work under more secure conditions, Gordimer has chosen to remain in Johannesburg, where she continues “to oppose apartheid with might and main.”

Gordimer, a small, slim woman of 62 with a lean, expressive face, gave an interview in her hotel room at the end of what was clearly an exhausting week of appearing on panels, at meetings, giving readings and attending parties. In the months since, she traveled through Europe, and readied two books for publication: “Lifetimes: Under Apartheid,” a nonfiction work done in collaboration with photographer David Goldblatt, published last month (Knopf), and her 10th novel, “A Sport of Nature,” coming in April from the same publisher.

Nadine Gordimer was born on Nov. 20, 1923, in the small mining town of Springs in the Johannesburg area of the Transvaal. She was the second of two daughters born to Isidore and Nan Gordimer, both of whom had come to South Africa some years before, he as a 13-year-old watchmaker fleeing poverty and oppression as a Jew in Czarist Lithuania, she the descendant of a long line of London Jews, her father lured to this “open place for white people” by the diamond and gold rush (although he was to find neither diamonds nor gold). Gordimer’s father, who gradually built up a jewelry business, was detached from politics. “I think like many people who’ve had a tremendous struggle when they’re very young,” Gordimer said of him, “he had in a sense expended certain energies and was only concerned with his own survival.”

Her mother was “a generous-minded, generous-hearted woman with a genuine feeling for people,” but if her strong social conscience led her to perform various good works--such as helping start a nursery school for black children in a nearby ghetto--it did not make her question “the political order of the country. She didn’t see that you have to carry it to political action.”

Gordimer’s family was not a religious one and Nadine, as did her older sister, attended a convent school for its supposedly superior education. She was “a bolter,” however--”I kept running away,” she said. “I seem able to discipline myself, but from a very early age have been unable to be disciplined by other people.” Early on, she accepted her parents’ view of society, her only political awareness a vague consciousness of antagonism between English speakers, of which she was one, and Afrikaaners. It was in adolescence that she began to be aware of racial injustice.

“Then you begin to question and think about many things. And this became an enormous question, and also quite a shattering one, because you realize that your whole life, your whole inheritance, is based on something that is wrong. My father had come as a poor little boy from exactly the same kind of family situation that blacks were living under: his parents couldn’t afford to live with their own children, the children were restricted from schooling, and so on. And then he became the overlord and white master. He was acceding to, if not actively taking part, in the administration of repression of another people. I began to understand that.”

By this time, Gordimer had become the intellectual of the family, although, she said, “It wasn’t noticeable. When you do things that other people in your family are not doing, you become very secretive about it.” At 9 or 10, she had begun writing stories, which were published in the children’s corner of the local newspaper. “I’m sure they were extremely derivative of other children’s stories--I obviously took the same type of little plot--but using the elements of my surroundings. I wasn’t writing about primroses and robins in the snow, even though that’s what I was reading about. I had never read one word related to my own country.”

‘Nice Little Hobby’

Of this precocious activity, “Nobody took much notice. It was regarded as a nice little hobby, the same as my ballet dancing--I was mad about dancing, I think I loved it chiefly because I liked showing off, or my very bad piano-playing, or my mimicking of grown-ups.”

Her “great interest” was--”literature sounds a big word to put on a child’s plate--reading. I read widely in our local library, God bless it, what would I have done without it? I was like a pig in clover. I read an extraordinary mixture of things, without feeling there was any incongruity between reading at the age of 12 ‘Doctor Dolittle’ and Thucydides and Pepys’ ‘Diary.’ I think that’s an ideal way for a writer to grow up.”

As Gordimer entered her teens, she began to write more and more. At 14 or 15 she saved her pocket money to buy a typewriter. At 15, she published her first adult story, “Come Again Tomorrow,” in a Johannesburg weekly. Others followed, including one about a police raid on the backyard quarters of a black servant who had been brewing illegal liquor, which reflected her burgeoning social awareness. What she exposed was “not so much brutality, but the tremendous sense of authority of the police.

The Backyard Life

“I invented my characters on things I knew well. I’d been living among these policemen. I’d seen them arresting people in the street. I had been in and out of the backyard life of our little suburb--if you’re going to be a writer at all, it was there. I wasn’t saying, ‘I must do something about it.’ I was saying, ‘This is what’s happening. What does it mean in my life? And what does it mean in the life of the country that I’m born into?’ ”

Her mother, she pointed out, read the story and did not say, “What are you talking about?”

“She accepted it as a truthful imaginative picture of a kind of thing she knew was wrong. As it was turning out, I was turning into a writer, I was articulating what I saw.”

Gordimer lived at home until she went away to college in Johannesburg for a year when she was 21 or 22. “I didn’t have the guts or the confidence,” she said, “to just push off.” Moreover, she admitted, “I’d put up with anything else just to have that little corner with my little desk where I could do my own thing.” The University of the Witwatersrand, which she attended in 1946, together with a large class of army veterans, opened up to her a new world of readers, writers, and people involved with political ideas.

When she was 25, Gordimer published her first collection of stories, “Face to Face,” and embarked on a short-lived marriage, which produced a daughter. In 1950, thanks to a poet friend who sent her work to an American agent, she published several stories in America, in the Yale Review and other literary magazines; in 1951 she had her first piece in the New Yorker, and immediately received several query letters from publishers asking for a novel, which, as it turned out, she was working on.

Simon & Schuster agreed to publish a book of her stories first, and in 1952 came out with “The Soft Voice of the Serpent,” followed a year later by the novel, “The Lying Days.”

A Modest Living

Despite the pessimistic predictions of friends, Gordimer found that she was able to subsist on her writing alone, “living modestly, but doing what I wanted, which was a great luxury.” In the three and a half decades since her first book, she has published an average of one every other year. In addition, in 1954 she married businessman Rheinhold Cassirer. Their son, Hugo, lives in New York.

Nadine Gordimer has had three books banned by South African officialdom, but otherwise, seems to have been left surprisingly alone. “There is a slight difference with black writers, but even with black writers, it is not the writing (for which people are imprisoned). I saw in the (New York) Times only the other day that Breyten Breytenbach was put in prison for expressing opposition to apartheid or writing something. Breyten’s books are all available in South Africa, even the book about South African prisons. That’s how marginal we are. He went to prison because he became an active revolutionary. We must be fair--no writer has gone to prison in South Africa for what he has written. All honor to the writers who have put writing aside and had courage in one degree or another to do other things as well.”

Perhaps more unexpected, Gordimer is read, she says, not only by apartheid’s foes, but by its supporters as well. “ . . . in the Afrikaans newspapers, which are mostly pro-government or to the right of the government, they have serious pages on literature and a quite remarkable standard of reviewing--simply as literature. They’ll review anything that isn’t banned.”

Three of Gordimer’s books have, however, been banned. “They’re not obliged to give you a reason,” she said, but she supposes that “A World of Strangers” was banned in 1958, because “there was still at that time this fruitless attempt to discourage the idea that there could be absolutely human contact--that if you wanted to, you could defy the law, go in or out of the townships, have love affairs, have close friendships. There was no black-white love affair in the book, but it was a very close friendship. It showed up the cruelty and idiocy of apartheid, and the danger of daily life for blacks. It would never have been banned 10 years later, and indeed, it was banned for 10 years.” (The ban was lifted in 1968.)

“Then I wrote a book in the mid-’60s called “The Late Bourgeois World” and that had much more reason to be banned. It arose out of a time, after the big liberation movements were banned; the African National Congress, the Pan-Africanist Congress were banned and small underground movements had sprung up. There were young people in the universities, not just students but academic people who were of the left but not Communists, who tried to start a movement that would work in a loose way with blacks--not with Umkhonto we Sizwe (Spear of the Nation, the military wing of the African National Congress), but with other black movements--and would try, passive resistance seeming to have failed or been crushed, selective violence.

“So it was a story about people of that time, and it was perhaps a savage picture of their parents, because my feeling, meeting them, was that their parents’ ineffectualism had produced this desperation--they really felt the political and spiritual bankruptcy of their parents. That book was banned for 12 years.”

Banned Immediately

“Burger’s Daughter” was published in 1979. “I don’t think about whether a book’s going to be banned or not, but as soon as I knew what I was going to write about, I thought, ‘Impossible, this book will not be read here.’ It was banned immediately. But by then I had become pretty well-known in the outside world, and I did my only bit of vanity press publishing, with a little semi-underground publishing house--rebel Afrikaaners, God bless them. I wanted to publish a little pamphlet called, ‘What Happened to Burger’s Daughter.’ I had discovered that the writer had a right to get the opinions of the people on the board who had given reports saying it would be banned. I published these, which were staggering reading for most people--(because they showed) the intellectual level of people who were judging books--with some of the reviews the book had been getting abroad and objections from other writers, among them, Heinrich Boll.”

After four months, the novel was released from banning, along with several others by white writers. “Then we, the white writers, made a fuss, and said, ‘We’re not thanking you, you’re using us. Until you release A, B and C, the books banned by black writers, it’s not even a crack in the wall of censorship. And they did release an extraordinary book, an anthology by a black writer.”

“July’s People” (1981) is the story of a liberal white couple in a near-future time marked by inter-racial war who are suddenly dependent for the survival of themselves and their young children on a black former servant and the members of his village.

Is it meant to be predictive, intended as a warning: if we keep on this way, this may happen? “Yes,” Gordimer replied, “that’s more like it. I was looking at our present three or four years ago in terms of our near future, which has almost arrived--some of the things that were happening in that book have now happened in the streets of Johannesburg: we have bodies lying in the gutters. We haven’t had people fleeing to the homelands (as the black people did in ‘July’s People’), but we’ve got an awful lot of people fleeing (the country) by plane and any other way.”

Visibly Upset

Of what she predicts for South Africa’s future, she said, “It’s very difficult to say,” becoming visibly more upset as she spoke. “Now you’re seeing quite a lot of people like my couple Maureen and Bam, who are not ill-intentioned people, and who genuinely believed they were doing everything--and perhaps they were--to prepare their lives in a different way . . . and all the time were under a delusion about the things they were doing and the way they were being understood. And I think it is true, to a greater or lesser extent, of all of us living there. We are, unfortunately, terribly ill-prepared for the future that is coming. It’s awful to think that people do not know how to live even if they have the best intentions--they will not know how to live in a decent way when the opportunity is given them.

“Because change is going to come in South Africa. And there are many people who say, ‘It’s a shock to think of living under a black majority government,’ and are running around asking for minority guarantees and all the things they should be able to see only perpetuate racial differentiation, instead of people looking at their own country and looking for the best ways to run their country.”